When he was dressed he didn’t seem to want the long-delayed tea, even though there was a beautiful brown egg and lovely buttered toast. In spite of the hot bath and a bright fire in the schoolroom he felt horrid, cold trickles running down his back all the time. He was extremely tired, too, yet only conscious of one overwhelming want—to be taken on his mother’s knee and comforted. Miss Radley took him on hers and sat with him right in front of the fire. She was very kind and told him how sorry mummy had been to go off in such a hurry without saying good-bye, but there was just one train that would reach London that night if she caught it at the junction; and the squire, Easter’s father, had driven her himself in his motor, and they just managed; and she was crossing to France that night in charge of a brother officer of dad’s—she had her passport long ago.
Every now and then Miss Radley lightly touched his face, which was very hot, and then she would hold his hand, which was very cold. Half-asleep, Chris would murmur from time to time, “dangerously wounded,” but somehow he couldn’t feel about it as he knew he ought to feel. Though he adored his daddy, all he felt was this overpowering ache of longing for his mother.
Easter’s scornful refusal to have any boys in her family had hurt him very much. He felt lonely and pushed out, somehow; and he badly wanted the one person who never failed in her appreciation of little boys, even if they were thin and small and not particularly good looking, and could not run so fast as ... certain little girls. He was conscious of being all these undesirable things, and yet he was convinced it was a great and glorious thing to be a boy, even if Easter didn’t think so. Once, after a long and acrimonious discussion with her on this very subject, he had said to his mother: “I choosed to come as a boy, didn’t I?”
“God chose,” said his mother gravely.
“Me and God settled it together,” Chris announced complacently, and his mother got up suddenly and looked in a cupboard for something she never found.
In Chris’s mind God and Father Christmas were inextricably mixed up. He had no fear of either one or the other. Both were beneficent and considerate and ready to give people their choice both as to presents or other things.
Yet when he was put to bed that night he couldn’t dream of pleasant, soothing things, but was pursued by eight strong daughters in embroidered ninon frocks and pink sashes, who formed themselves into a solid phalanx and drove him to the edge of an awful precipice, and were just pushing him over ... when he would wake to find Miss Radley standing beside his bed, looking anxious and troubled, shading a candle with her hand.
The war had not touched Easter very nearly. Her mother had forbidden nurse to talk about it to her; and her father (judging her sensitiveness wholly from her gentle, Early-Victorian appearance) was careful to keep all frightening or depressing news from her as far as was possible. All her life she had been sheltered and adored and spared and spoiled. Her brothers, being so much older, had “given in” to her from the very first, and although the two eldest were fighting—one in the navy, the other in the army—their doings did not seem to affect her particularly. And of the three still at school she had, of late, seen very little, for in the holidays they were always doing O.T.C. training, or making munitions somewhere.
Yet one thing had impressed her during the last two years. She was always hearing that some of their acquaintances had “lost” a son, a brother, or a husband. They did not talk of “killed” or “missing” to Easter; but they did speak of this continual and mysterious “loss,” and with the queer secretive puzzledom of childhood she never asked people outright what they meant by the phrase.