That night, for the only time Patricia could remember, she woke to hear her husband murmuring vaguely in his sleep. . . . Her father could have told her that it was the sub-conscious mind—wastepaper-basket of the brain—striving to eject its suppressed emotions.
§ 6
And P.J. went back to his work—a little dourer; a shade less patient; rather more inclined to drop over to the Mess for a cocktail at 11 o’clock; to stay there for lunch; and sit about in the ante-room, listening to Bromley’s grave surmises and the laughter from the billiard-room where the “Brat” and “Monkey-face” played perpetual fives on the dilapidated table, before going home to his dinner.
In his own way, as a pal, as a partner, Peter “loved” his wife; admired her; felt towards her the protective instinct of average male to average female. Had she been altogether away from him in those days, he would probably have missed her presence acutely. But knowing her waiting for him just round the corner; feeling that he had “let her down” (as he phrased the comparatively small allowance to which she agreed so cheerfully); anxious above all things to avoid the sentimentalities of departure; the man withdrew himself, confined their intercourse more and more to the commonplaces of matrimony.
All Patricia’s real love for her husband, all the yearning to take him in her arms, make him understand that in good luck or evil she was his, his mate against the world, suffered and suffered damnably. She grew to envy Alice. Alice with the easily suffused eyes and the child in her womb. She even grew to resent her own children, their perpetual, “Daddy’s going to France to kill Germans.” But neither the mate nor the mother in Patricia flinched: as pal or as play-mate, she did her duty, laughter on her lips, gold head held high.
And so they came to the last day.
§ 7
Four fifteen p. m.! A gray August afternoon. Peter, confirmed in his Adjutancy, cigar in mouth, stood on the steps of the office-hut. Behind him, gutted to the last paper, lay the Orderly Room. In front, the gun-park showed a serried mass of vehicles—the spidery Headquarters telephone-waggon, wires gleaming red on their drums, black and white poles poking out behind; fat mess-floats, loaded and over-loaded; A. S. C. waggons, piled high with fodder and biscuit-boxes, tarpaulin-topped; low limbered ammunition-waggons, mackintoshes strapped to their seats, heavy with fodder-bales, new saws in their leather cases, yellow against dark-green paint; guns, covers shrouding breech and muzzle, canvas water-buckets and grease-boxes dangling from hooked-in limbers. . . .
Peter heard the hoot of a horn from the roadway past the Mess; a car streaked up to the Orderly Room. Out of it, dashed an excited Staff Officer from Divisional Headquarters.
“Good afternoon, sir.” Peter saluted.