“You don’t care!” she said, with a sudden blank feeling upon her. “You are much more interested in playing school-boy tricks!”
“I beg your pardon, really! But I’m so sick of Gregory’s importation and emigration schemes.” Ally’s eyes were affectionate and apologetic too. He looked like a big dog accustomed to petting, and very unaccustomed to being chidden. “I say, Chum, do look at this fellow though! The other night at mess we got a lot,—every one of us had a beetle, and laid odds as to whose would fly off first. You know if you turn them on their backs, ten to one they can’t get up, and if you even touch them——”
But now it was Chum’s attention which had wandered, nor was she very concerned with the intellectual pursuits of the Wessex mess. She felt that the racing of hard-backed beetles was the limit of their capacity: and then reproached herself for self-conscious superiority. The question of Key Island and its possible improvements dropped to pieces, nor was it revived successfully on other occasions. But Captain Alaric Lewin escaped from work early that day, and rode out to Maitso with his wife, where from four o’clock to six they played at Go-one-better, which is a very instructive game needing nothing but five handkerchiefs and a Panama hat, and affords some amusement if you cannot play tennis. The grass was wet, but they laughed themselves thirsty over Go-one-better, and then sat on the stoep of the mess and drank cého, and when the Administrator’s A.D.C. and Mrs. Lewin left, Ally was conscious of no flaw in his domestic bliss. Key Island was a beastly hole, and he must really look up all the influence he could to get a decent Station—for Chum’s sake, of course—but in the meantime one could have a very pleasant time if there were people like the Churtons and old Bristles round. To-morrow they would play Polo of sorts—Gurney must learn not to cross, though!—and Wednesday was gymkana. If only he had been more of an A.D.C. and less of a secretary, even work would not have been so irksome. But the Administrator chafed at entertainments, and when he was forced into some formality at Government House he usually managed to be summoned away, and left Halton to represent him and Mrs. White to entertain. It was a saying in Key Island that he paid the Town Wardens of Port Albert and China Town an extra stipend to telephone for him on such occasions, and only when a Government House dinner was unavoidable did Mr. Gregory appear as a host. Since Ally had been out there had been no entertainment at Government House, and his social gifts were wasted. It would have been dull enough, no doubt, but still something to do, he thought, and better than all clerical work, and he yawned over the morrow’s monotony as he laid his handsome, empty head on the pillow that night.
What Mrs. Lewin thought of the last twenty-four hours’ experiences she no longer tried to make him understand.
CHAPTER VII
“In vino veritas.”—Latin Proverb.
The way of the Army woman is hard. She starts as a nice girl, with a weakness for red cloth and jingles; but then she marries, and discovers, amongst other shocks, what lies beneath the red cloth. Her husband may still be her ideal hero to her, or he may be merely the figure-head of a position in which she gets plenty of attention and some amusement; but his profession will inevitably take her into desert places of the earth where she samples discomfort until the iron enters into her domestic soul. If it be in India she will do pretty well, until he gets a bad Station, though even the horrors of loneliness and fever may be mitigated by obtainable service. But by the time she is suddenly transferred with him to another Colony there will be a nursery in progress, and then the tragedy—the ugly, sordid tragedy of a married life stripped of its decencies and privacies—will very possibly begin. She will leave her comfortable staff behind her, because of the Emigration Act, and on the troop-ship she will begin to taste the joys of being her own nurses and maid. Then her temper wears, and she has not quite so much time to spend over her appearance, but instinct holding good she adopts the harder and more masculine style as being easier to compass under all trials of circumstance. Foreign Stations batter the daintiness of life out of her, the narrow limits of the Army world distort her mental vision, the drawbacks she struggles to overcome leave their mark on her. Finally there comes the day when even the hateful little compensations to which she has become used have to be given up—the snobbish sense of position, and the dangling after her of men other than her husband, who find in her a passée fashion,—for the soldier’s service is over, and then comes Ealing and a dress allowance to be saved up for the sales.
Diana Churton had reached the ominous point in her career when she saw half-pay darkening the horizon. It was unlikely that Major Churton would ever be given the regiment, and, as he said, twenty years of foreign service had made the solid dullness of England a home to his weary eyes. Diana had no children to plot and plan for, and marry into the same life that she had found a dubious success; their one little girl had died at Agra, and the dumb tragedy of their lives was in the moment when they turned away from the little grave, in a city for ever sacred to the dead by that grand white memory called the Taj, and went their separate ways. The child as she grew older might have drawn them closer together again; her grave somehow thrust them apart.
“If he thinks I neglected her, or that it was my fault, I could kill him!” thought the woman fiercely, jealous of her motherhood.
“If she hints that I do care, I shall lose my control—better let the very subject alone,” thought the man, for he was afraid of his own temper.