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Page 90
"Say the word and I'll throw them down," she cried. "It looks like
dirty work to me. And you're thin. Honest, dearie, I mean it."
Her loyalty soothed the girl's sore spirit.
"I don't know what's come over me," she said. "I've tried hard
enough. But I'm always tired. I--I think it's being so close to the
war."
Mabel stared at her. There was a war. She knew that. The theatrical
news was being crowded to a back page to make space for disagreeable
diagrams and strange, throaty names.
"I know. It's fierce, isn't it?" she said.
Edith took her home, and they talked far into the night. She had
slipped Cecil's picture into the wardrobe before she turned on the
light. Then she explained the situation.
"It's pep they want, is it?" said Mabel at last. "Well, believe me,
honey, I'll give it to them. And as long as I've got a cent it's
yours."
They slept together in Edith's narrow bed, two slim young figures
delicately flushed with sleep. As pathetic, had they known it, as
those other sleepers in their untidy billets across the channel.
Almost as hopeless too. Dwellers in the neutral ground.
V
Now war, after all, is to each fighting man an affair of small
numbers, an affair of the men to his right and his left, of the
A.M.S.C. in the rear and of a handful of men across. On his days of
rest the horizon is somewhat expanded. It becomes then a thing of
crowded and muddy village streets, of food and drink and tobacco and
a place to sleep.
Always, of course, it is a thing of noises.
This is not a narrative of war. It matters very little, for
instance, how Cecil's regiment left Salisbury and went to Soissons,
in France. What really matters is that at last the Canadian-made
motor lorries moved up their equipment, and that, after digging
practice trenches in the yellow clay of old battlefields, they were
moved up to the front.
Once there, there seemed to be a great deal of time. It was the lull
before Neuve Chapelle. Cecil's spirit grew heavy with waiting. Once,
back on rest at his billet, he took a long walk over the half-frozen
side roads and came without warning on a main artery. Three traction
engines were taking to the front the first of the great British
guns, so long awaited. He took the news back to his mess. The
general verdict was that there would be something doing now.
Cecil wrote a letter to Edith that day. He had written before, of
course, but this was different. He wrote first to his mother, just
in case anything happened, a long, boyish letter with a misspelled
word here and there. He said he was very happy and very comfortable,
and that if he did get his he wanted her to know that it was all
perfectly cheerful and not anything like the war correspondents said
it was. He'd had a bully time all his life, thanks to her. He hadn't
let her know often enough how he felt about her, and she knew he was
a dub at writing. There were a great many things worse than "going
out" in a good fight. "It isn't at all as if you could see the
blooming thing coming," he wrote. "You never know it's after you
until you've got it, and then you don't."
The letter was not to be sent unless he was killed. So he put in a
few anecdotes to let her know exactly how happy and contented he
was. Then he dropped the whole thing in the ten inches of mud and
water he was standing in, and had to copy it all over.
To Edith he wrote a different sort of letter. He told her that he
loved her. "It's almost more adoration than love," he wrote, while
two men next to him were roaring over a filthy story. "I mean by
that, that I feel every hour of every day how far above me you are.
It's like one of these _fus�es_ the Germans are always throwing up
over us at night. It's perfectly dark, and then something bright and
clear and like a star, only nearer, is overhead. Everything looks
different while it floats there. And so, my dear, my dear,
everything has been different to me since I knew you."
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