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....
'Come here, Jenny. I'm going to dry my hair.'
And when I looked again I saw that her golden hair was all about her
shoulders and that she wore over her frock a little silken jacket
trimmed with rosebuds. She looked so like a girl on a magazine
cover that one expected to find a large '7d' somewhere attached to her
person. She had taken Nanny's big basket-chair from its place by
the high chair and was pushing it over to the middle window.
'I always come in here when Emery has washed my hair; it's the
sunniest room in the house. I wish Chris wouldn't have it kept as
a nursery when there's no chance - '
She sat down, swept her hair over the back of the chair into the
sunlight, and held out to me her tortoise-shell hairbrush.
'Give it a brush now and then like a good soul. But be
careful. Tortoise snaps so.'
I took the brush and turned to the window, leaning my forehead
against the glass and staring unobservantly at the view. You
probably know the beauty of that view, for when Chris rebuilt Baldry
Court after his marriage, he handed it over to architects who had not so
much the wild eye of the artist as the knowing wink of the manicurist, and
between them they massaged the dear old place into matter for
innumerable photographs in the illustrated papers.
The house lies on the crest of Harrow Weald, and from its windows
the eye drops to miles of emerald pastureland lying wet and brilliant
under a westward line of sleek hills blue with distance and distant
woods, while nearer it ranges the suave decorum of the lawn and the
Lebanon cedar whose branches are like darkness made palpable, and the
minatory gauntness of the topmost pines in the wood that breaks
downward, its bare boughs a close texture of browns and purples, from
the pond on the hill's edge.
That day its beauty was an affront to me, because like most
Englishwomen of my time I was wishing for the return of a soldier.
Disregarding the national interest and everything except the keen
prehensile gesture of our hearts towards him, I wanted to snatch my
cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness
his wife and I now looked upon. Of late I had had bad dreams about
him. By night I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of
No Man's Land, starting back here because of the awfulness of an
unburied head, and not till my dream was packed full of horror did I see
him pitch forward on his knees as he reached safety - if it was
that. For on the war-films I have seen men slip down as softly
from the trench parapet, and none but the grimmer philosophers would say
that they had reached safety by their fall. And when I escaped
into wakefulness it was only to lie stiff and think of stories I had
heard in the boyish voice, that rings indomitable yet has most of
its gay notes flattened, of the modern subaltern.
'We were all of us in a barn one night and a shell came
along. My pal sang out, "Help me, old man, I've got no
legs!" and I had to answer, "I can't, old man,
I've got no hands!"
So I said: 'I wish we could hear from Chris. It is a
fortnight since he wrote.'
And then it was that Kitty wailed, 'Ah, don't begin to fuss,' and
bent over her image in her hand-mirror as one might bend for refreshment
over scented flowers.
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