Every now and then Eliot came down to see them. He had been sent home early in nineteen-seventeen with a shrapnel wound in his left leg, the bone shattered. He obtained his discharge at the price of a permanent limp, and went back to his research work.
For the last two years he had been investigating trench fever, with results that were to make him famous. But that was not for another year.
In February, nineteen-nineteen, Jerrold had come back. He and Maisie had been living in London ever since he had left the Army, filling in time till Wyck Manor would be no longer a Home for Convalescent Soldiers. He had tried to crowd into this interval all the amusement he hadn't had for four years. His way was to crush down the past with the present; to pile up engagements against the future, party on party, dances on suppers and suppers on plays; to dine every evening at some place where they hadn't dined before; to meet lots of nice amusing people with demobilised minds who wouldn't talk to him about the war; to let himself go in bursts of exquisitely imbecile laughter; never to be quiet for an hour, never to be alone with himself, never to be long alone with Maisie.
After the first week of it this sort of thing ceased to amuse him, but he went on with it because he thought it amused Maisie.
There was something he missed; something he wanted and hadn't got. At night, when he lay awake, alone with himself at last, he knew that it was Anne.
And he went on laughing and amusing Maisie; and Maisie, with a heart-breaking sweetness, laughed back at him and declared herself amused. She had never had such a jolly time in all her life, she said.
Then, very early in the spring, Maisie went down to her people in
Yorkshire to recover from the jolly time she had had. The convalescent
soldiers had all gone, and Wyck Manor, rather worn and shabby, was Wyck
Manor again.
Jerrold came back to it alone.