A. said that shilly-shalliers never got anywhere, but I maintained with D. that it wasn't shilly-shallying, which is another sort of thing altogether, it was the passionate desire to get the most out of life, to discover what was most worth while. "I want to spend ten years in the heart of China more than to do any one thing," I pointed out, "but I sha'n't do it because when I came out I shouldn't be young any more. Therefore the ten years in China will have to go to a man, because it doesn't matter so much to a man." This life in the B.E.F. was D.'s ten years in China, not because—heaven forbid—it is going to last ten actual years, or even that, as far as I could see, it was ageing her at all, but simply because while she was doing it she couldn't be doing anything else. She had had to burn her boats.
Now that, to a certain temperament, means a great deal, and it is one of the things, if not the chief thing, that marks service in France off from equally hard work at home, and makes it, for reasons outside the work, so much harder.
All natures are not the same as D.'s, of course. To one girl a certain thing is the hardship, to another a different thing. But the point is that the hardship is there, not physical, but mental, and to me it was the most exquisite discovery I could have made in the whole of France. For the finer the instrument, the more fine it is of it to perform the work, and the more finely will that work, in the long run, be done.
CHAPTER X
NIGHT
Not being among the lucky creatures who can fall happily to sleep when they know they are to be called at one o'clock, I lay in my tiny bed and revelled in that wonderful story of "The Bridge Builders" out of "The Day's Work," till the sound of the storm without became the voice of Mother Gunga. Then I turned out the light and lay and listened to the truly fiendish train whistles which no reading could have transmuted, and wondered why it is that French engine drivers apparently pay no attention to signals, but just go on whistling till they are answered, like someone who goes on ringing a bell till at length the door is opened. The rain was turning to snow, so there was less of that steady tinkling from without with which running water fills the world. I lay and listened; and the whistles and the bellying of the chintz curtain and the occasional swish of a heavy gust against the side of the hut were at last beginning to blend in one blur in my mind when a girl came softly into my room and whispered that it was time to dress.
That utter quietness of the girls was a thing that had impressed me after staying in hotels full of the British Army, which goes to bed at midnight, bangs its doors, throws its boots outside, shouts from room to room, and begins the whole process, reversed, at about six o'clock the next morning. Here the girls wore soundless slippers, so that those who had to be about should not disturb those who slept, and doors were opened and shut with a cotton-wool care which appealed to me, or would have, if I hadn't had to get up.
When I was dressed I found my way down endless blowy corridors, for the doors at the ends are always kept open, to the room of the girl who had called me. She looked at my fur coat and said it would get spoilt. I replied with great truth that it was past spoiling, but she took it off me, whipped my cap from my head, and the girls proceeded to dress me. They pulled a leather cap with ear-pieces down on my head and stuffed me into woolly jackets and wound my neck up in a comforter and finished up with a huge leather coat and a pair of fur gloves like bear's paws, so that when all was done I couldn't bend and had to be hoisted quite stiff up to the front of the ambulance.