But he won't be able to put back the clock. He'll have to march to the new marching tune.
I foresee ructions in the household of Dan.
Meanwhile, she is having the time of her life!
It makes no appeal to me, because I have always been able to have the time of my life, as she understands it. I have gone in and out without let or hindrance, none daring to make me afraid. And now, I am just a lonely creature like a bit of drift on the shore.
There is another side to which George calls the supreme test—a horrible sordid side. Hear it now. When I went to France first in 1915, to talk to the boys, I was asked whether I would go to a small forage camp in a God-forsaken place away up near Abbeville, beyond the British Headquarters. It was a kind of No Man's Land which nobody ever visited. Lectures and concert parties passed it by. I said, "Of course I'll go, it is what I've come out for."
So Effie and I got up at four o'clock in the morning to catch the only available civilian train leaving Rouen for "up the line." The distance could not be far, according to the map, but it took us till three o'clock in the afternoon to get there. We were shunted into sidings to let troop trains and ammunition trains and hospital trains go by, and there were no passengers in ours except French officers and other people connected with the war.
No women, but we two. I was so thankful to have Effie. Her gay inconsequence, her complete disregard of everything but the great adventure, helped us over every stony bit of the ground. Gendarmes, sentries with fixed bayonets, grumpy passport and permit officials—she captured them all. Youth is quite invincible, and when its smile is sweet like hers obstacles melt like mist before the rising sun. If I had even attempted that wonderful journey through the war zone without her I should either have been shot as a spy, or interned for the duration. It is short shrift for the middle-aged and the ordinary beings who can't explain their business in the area where death and destiny walk side by side. Well, in course of time, through several minor adventures, we reached our destination.
A sturdy little divinity student from Aberdeen was holding the fort there for the Y.M.C.A. and holding it well. When he went first to give them a bit of humanizing Christian comradeship, he had to sleep with a revolver under his pillow, fully aware that any night he might get his throat cut. These men were not soldiers, though they wore khaki, but rough east-enders, dock laborers, most of them, with lawless anarchic blood in their veins. They had spent the major part of their lives rebelling against law and order. They were the husbands of some of the women whose faces broke your heart when I took you to my big mothers' meeting "down east" two years ago. The fortunes of war had cut them off from the grime and glory of the Barking Road, and those in authority found them a tough proposition in that sweet valley in the pleasant land of France.
We pottered about the camp till nightfall, when the men gathered into the tent to hear the woman who had brought them a message from home.
I knew when I stood up in front of them and saw their faces, looking grim and unrelenting through the haze of tobacco smoke and the reek of the oil lamp, that I was up against something, and would need not only all my art, but the grace of God to help me through.