“Young man,” Tish said quietly, pouring oil on a rag, “I was arrested before you were born. Aggie, will you order some tea? And make mine very weak.”
“Weak tea!” he repeated with a sort of groan. “Weak tea! And yet you start for the Front, picking out any trench that takes your fancy, and—weak tea! And I am going to St.-Nazaire! I, a man, with a man’s stomach and a mad affection for a girl who thinks I prefer serving doughnuts to fighting! I do that, while you——”
“Why do you go to St.-Nazaire?” Tish inquired. “You can sit with Aggie inside the ambulance, and I’m sure you could be useful, changing tires, and so on. You could simply disappear, you know. That is what we intend to do.”
“I’ll have a cup of tea,” he said in a strange voice. “Very strong, please; I seem rather dazed.”
“I figure this way,” Tish went on, putting down her revolver and taking up her knitting: “I don’t believe an ambulance loaded with cigarettes and stick candy and chocolate, with perhaps lemons for lemonade, is going to be stopped anywhere as long as it’s headed for the Front. I understand they don’t stop ambulances anyhow. If they do you can stretch out and pretend to be wounded. This is one way in which you can be very useful—being wounded.”
He took all his tea at a gulp, and then looked round in an almost distracted manner.
“Certainly,” he said. “Of course. It’s all perfectly simple. You—you don’t mind, I suppose, if I take a moment to arrange my mind? It seems to be all mussed up. Apparently I think clearly, but somehow or other——”
“We are actuated by several motives,” Tish went on, beginning to turn the heel of the sock. “First of all, my nephew is at the Front. I want to be near him. I am a childless woman, and he is all I have. Second, I fancy the more cigarettes and so on our boys have the better for them, though I disapprove of cigarettes generally. And finally, I do not intend to let the biggest thing in my lifetime go by without having been a part of it, even in the most humble manner.”
“Entirely reasonable too,” he said.
But he still had a strange expression on his face, and soon after that he said he’d walk round a little in the air and then come back and tell us his decision.