The Undefeated

by J. C. Snaith

Without disturbing her he was able to carry out his plan. But twenty minutes later when he returned to the room with a cup of tea on a small tray, Melia was awake and wondering what the time was.

“Needn’t get up yet,” he said. “I’ve lit the fire. Happy Christmas to you!” Then he handed her the tea.

She seemed much surprised and just for a moment a little embarrassed. But she drank the tea gratefully, yet wondering all the time what had made him bring it to her. Then she announced her intention of getting up, but he bade her lie quiet as it was Christmas morning and he was well able to cook the breakfast.

Quite a pretty passage of arms developed between them on the subject, but in the end she prevailed in spite of his protests, and came downstairs to deal in person with the vital matter of the bacon and eggs.

Somehow their half playful contention made a good beginning to the day. And, take it altogether, it was quite the best they had ever known in that ill-starred house. There had been times when week had followed week of such hostility that they had hardly exchanged a look or a word, times in fact of soul-destroying antipathy in which they almost loathed the sight of one another. But there was nothing of that now. So much had happened in three short months of separation that there were a hundred things to talk about; both of them seemed to be living in a different world.

Their outlook on life had altered. Everything they did now had a purpose, a meaning; it was not merely a question of getting through a day that had neither reason nor rhyme. He was a soldier in a uniform, he felt and looked a man in it, he stood for something. She was proud, in a way she had never been proud, of having a husband in the army. It was her duty and her privilege to keep his home together against his return to civil life.

Soon after breakfast they were visited by a second inspiration, but this time it came to Melia. Suppose they attended the eleven o’clock service at Saint George’s Church? In their early married life they had gone there together once or twice, but for many years now when Melia went there on Sunday evenings she had invariably been alone.

It may have been a desire to let the neighbors see how well his khaki suited him, or life in the army had aroused an odd craving for religion, or perhaps it was simply a wish to give pleasure to Melia; at any rate Bill fell in with the idea. She had just time to arrange with the lady next door, Mrs. Griggs by name, who had once been a cook in good service, to give an eye to the turkey which was set cooking in the oven, then to put on her best dress, not much of a best, it was true, but to have gone to church in any other would have been unthinkable, to put on her only decent hat and a sorely mended pair of black cotton gloves, and to get there on the stroke of eleven, just as the bells ceased and the choir were moving down to their stalls. Melia, at any rate, had seldom enjoyed a service so much as this one, and her friend the Reverend Mr. Bontine, who called to see her regularly once a quarter, preached the finest sermon she had ever heard in the course of long years of worship.

For all that, it was not certain that Private Hollis was not bored a little by the Reverend Mr. Bontine. He could not help a yawn in the middle of the homily, but this may have been a concession to his length of days as a civilian when “he didn’t hold with persons,” but as Melia was too much absorbed to notice him, her sense of a manly and fruitful discourse was not marred; and she was able to enjoy the same happy oblivion of martial restiveness during the long prayer. Taking one consideration with another Private Hollis may be said to have borne extremely well an ordeal to which he had not submitted for many years; and at the end of the service as he came out of church he grew alive to the fact that in the sight of the congregation he was a person of far more consequence than he had ever been in his life.

More than one pair of eyes, once hostile or aloof, were upon him and also upon Melia. People looked at him as if they would have been only too proud to know him, substantial people like Wilmers, the insurance agent, and Jenkinson the tailor; but the climax came as he stepped on to the flags of Mulcaster Road and no less a man than Mr. Blades, the druggist of Waterloo Square, took off his tall hat to Melia and said, “Happy Christmas to you, Mr. Hollis.”