This right, fought for through the ascending ages, these girls have deliberately forgone, a every man in the Army has to forgo it also. Were they aware of this? Or did they, after all, like it, unthinkingly, without analysis?
I had wondered as I saw my previous convoys and camps, and I had wondered again as I saw over this convoy—saw the usual tiny cubicles, with gay chintz curtains and photographs from home, and the shelf of books, saw the great bare mess-rooms, the sitting-room, bright with cushions, cosy with screens and long chairs, saw the admirable bath-rooms, with big enamelled baths and an unlimited supply of hot water, saw the two parks where the great ambulances were ranged, shadowy and huge in the growing gloom and thick downpour of rain. Everywhere smiling faces, uplifted voices, quick steps—yet I wondered.
Was it possible this malaise of community life never weighed on their souls? And, if possible—was it good that it should be so?
I managed, stumblingly, to convey something of my thought, of the depression which had been eating at me—not, as I tried to explain, that I didn't admire them all, Heaven knew, rather that I must be, personally, such a weak-kneed, backboneless creature to feel I couldn't, for any cause on earth, have stood it. And I wanted—how I wanted—to know how it was they did ... whether they really and actually could like it...? "Of course, I know," I ended apologetically, "some people like a community life——"
"They must be in love with it to like community life carried to this extent, then," said one swiftly, and a small, fair creature, with a ribbon bound round her hair, agreed with her. She interested me, that fair girl, because she was one of those people who feel round for the right word until they have found it, however long it takes; impervious to cries of "Go on, get it off your chest," she still sat quietly and wrestled until the word came which exactly expressed the fine edge of her meaning. She knew so well what she wanted to say that she didn't want to say it any differently.
They all talked, each throwing in a sentence to the discussion now and again, but not one of them grumbled. Yet they all showed plainly that it was not a blind enjoyment—or, indeed, much enjoyment at all—that they found in the life. They were reasoning, critical, analytic, and extraordinarily dispassionate.
I can't put that conversation down for two reasons, the first being that one doesn't print the talk of one's hostesses, and the second that it would be too difficult to catch all those little half-uttered sentences, those little alleys of argument that led to understanding, but led elliptically, as is the way of either sex when it is unencumbered by the necessity of dotting its i's for the comprehension of the other. But out of that hour emerged, shining, several things which we in England ought to realise better, and which lifted for me that cloud of depression which had lowered over me all the days in France.
These are not bouncing school-girls, "good fellows" having the time of their lives, as vaguely those in England consider them, they are, thank goodness, finely-evolved human beings who no more enjoy "brightness" than you or I would. And it was the terrible feeling that everyone was so "bright" which had oppressed me more than anything else. The joy of finding that it wasn't so, that what I had feared I should be forced to take as the unreflecting school-girl humour of overgrown school-girls was only a protective aspect, that behind it the eyes of not only sane but subtle young women looked out with amusement and patience upon a world determined to see in them, first and last, "brightness"!
Perhaps five per cent.—such was the estimate flung out into the talk—of the girls really do enjoy it, the ghastly, prolonged, cold-blooded picnic of it, perhaps five per cent. really are having the "time of their lives," but the rest of them have moments when it hardly seems possible to stick it. Yet they stick it, and stick it in good comradeship, which is the greatest test of the lot. Their salvation lies in the separate rooms—small, cold, but a retreat from the octopus of community life....
