Then there was the recreation of correspondence. Marjorie wrote to Roy every day, and Joe once a week. She had received no letter from Netherby in answer to her own; so she decided to make no present attempt to repair the rupture of diplomatic relations in that quarter. Joe was now a private in the Royal Engineers, undergoing intensive training in the north of England. She had not seen him since his enlistment, nor expected to, for leave was difficult. Moreover, Joe referred frequently and appreciatively in his letters to local hospitality. Marjorie scented a romance, but Joe gave nothing away.
And there were Roy's letters. They arrived with amazing regularity—the postal service of the British Expeditionary Force was one of the unadvertised marvels of the war—written in pencil upon the thin blue-squared sheets of a field dispatch-book, with the censor's triangular stamp in one corner of the envelope and Roy's own name scribbled on the other. They contained little military information, and a surprising amount of irrelevant foolishness. Roy told Marjorie about life in billets. He reported upon his progress with the French tongue. He told her of Madame la fermière, in whose loft he slept, and with whom he practised elegant conversation, but who was unfortunately only intelligible upon Sunday, that being the one day in the week when her false teeth were in actual use. For the rest of the week they reposed thriftily in a drawer. He told her how he visited a French Field Hospital, and had committed the solecism of addressing the nurse—an elderly Sister of Charity—as "Mademoiselle Nourrice." He wrote, as a schoolboy might, of some extra good "blow-out" at an estaminet; of his small amusements; of his small grievances. He wrote, as a lover does, of his lady, and how much he loved and missed her, and how greatly the thought of her inspired him. But of tactical operations, or the joy of battle—and there is such a thing—or the privations and horrors of war, there was nothing. The whole aim of the man in the trenches at this time appears to have been to maintain the morale of the people at home. It was during this very month that Forain, the French cartoonist, epitomised the psychology of the entire war in a single drawing—two gaunt, mud-caked poilus, crouching waist-deep in the water of a devastated trench during an intensive bombardment, gasping anxiously to one another: "Si les civils tiennent!"
Of Roy's whereabouts Marjorie knew little. He had come safely through the Battle of Loos—more fortunate than the majority of his colleagues. He had served in Belgium for a space; after that the Division had been transferred to France again. He was fond of indicating his position on the map by cryptograms insoluble by friend or foe, or codes which not even their author could decipher the day after their invention. But occasionally he succeeded:
Of course we are not permitted to say where we are, but it would be harmful to blub about it.
The latter half of this sentence sounded so more than usually idiotic that Marjorie felt sure it conveyed some subtle message. But though she applied every solution known to the amateur detective, she could make nothing of it. It was not for many weeks that it occurred to her, during the night watches, to cease probing for key-words or transposing vowels, and to try paraphrasing the sense of the text. By this means she reached the conclusion that there was "harm in tears"—and a "buried town" immediately sprang to view. But more often she was trapped in the pitfalls of ambiguity.
"This is a pleasant old-world spot," Roy had remarked in a recent letter. "You would love the Vicar."
"The Vicar! The Vicar? The Vicar of what?" Marjorie spent half an hour poring over the Daily Mail map of the Western Front which decorated the greater part of her bedroom wall, in a vain search for a place called Wakefield, or anything like it. She wrote back:
By the way, the Vicar you are so enthusiastic about is an entire stranger to me.
To-night another letter had come, conveying enlightenment:
Sorry you don't like the Vicar. He used to be a good chap. An up-river man, and some singer in his day.