Elizabeth's Campaign Part 34

The Captain looked much concerned.

'It's a pity Pamela takes that line--don't you think? I really don't see the conspirator in Miss Bremerton. I hoped when I saw her first she would make just all the difference to Pamela.'

'Yes, it's puzzling. I ran down to see my father, who was in a rabid state of mind, not knowing what to do with all the schemes and business this clever woman started--perfectly lost without her.'

'Ah, that's the worst of your Indispensable!' laughed Chicksands.

Mannering threw him a quick, scrutinizing look. Various items of information picked up at Mannering, mostly from his sister Alice, had made him wonder whether some jealousy of a more vital and intimate kind than appeared might not be at the root of Pamela's behaviour. He was not observant at this period of his life, except of things relating to his engagement to Beryl, his work, or those inner pre-occupations which held him. But it had once or twice crossed his mind that Pamela might be interested in Arthur; and there had been certain hints from Beryl, who was, however, he was certain, scarcely better informed than he was. Pamela was a most secretive and independent young woman. He doubted whether even Desmond, whom she adored, knew much about her.

Well, supposing she was jealous--jealous of her father's secretary, and on account of Arthur, was there the smallest cause for it? He understood that Arthur and Miss Bremerton had met occasionally, and he had himself heard Chicksands express the warmest admiration for her as the right sort of new woman, 'as straight as you make 'em'--and with 'a brain like a man'--which, from one who was always rather a critical spectator than a courtier of women, was high praise. But as for any spark of s.e.x in it--Mannering laughed at the notion. No. If that really was Pamela's delusion, something must be done to rid his little sister of it if possible. He would talk to Beryl.

But--as always when any new responsibility presented itself to him--a deep inner weariness rebelled. In small things as in great, he was mentally like a man walking and working with a broken limb.

Arthur Chicksands stood some time that evening waiting on the doorstep of Mrs. Strang's small house, in one of the old streets of Westminster. 'No servants, I suppose,' he said to himself with resignation. But it was bitterly cold, and he was relieved to hear at last the sound of a voice and a girl's laugh inside. Pamela opened the door to him, pulling down the sleeves of a thin black dress over her shapely arms.

'Oh, come in. Margaret's cooking the dinner, and I've laid the table. Bernard's just bringing up some coals, and then we're ready.'

Mr. Bernard Strang, a distinguished Home Office official, appeared at that moment in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves at the head of the kitchen stairs, bearing a scuttle of coal in each hand.

'Gracious! Give me one of them!' said the Captain, hurrying to the rescue.

But Mr. Strang, putting down the right-hand scuttle, to take breath, warned him off.

'Thank you, Chicksands--but no bra.s.s hats need apply! Many thanks--but you're too smart!' He pointed, panting, to the red tabs and to the bit of variegated ribbon on Chicksands' broad chest. 'Go and help Pamela bring in the dinner.'

The Captain obeyed with alacrity.

'All the servants left on Monday,' said Pamela. 'We had a charwoman this morning, but she's gone to-night, because there's a new moon.'

'What--raids?'

Pamela nodded as she gave him the soup, with instructions to carry it carefully and put it by the fire. She seemed to be in her gayest mood, and Chicksands' eyes followed her perpetually as she went backwards and forwards on her household tasks. Presently Mrs. Strang appeared, crimson from the fire, bearing the fishpie and vegetables that were to provide the rationed meal.

'To think,' said Mr. Strang, when they were at last at table, 'that there was a time when we were proud of our "little dinners," and that I never made myself unpleasant unless Margaret spent more than five pounds on the food alone. Shall I ever eat a good dinner again?'

He looked wistfully at the bare table.

'Will you ever want to?' said Arthur, quietly.

A momentary silence fell upon the little party. Bernard Strang had lost two brothers in the war, and Chicksands had no sooner spoken than he reproached himself for a tactless brute. But, suddenly, the bells of the Abbey rang: out above their heads, playing with every stroke on the nerves of the listeners. For the voice of England was in them, speaking to that under-consciousness which the war has developed in us all.

'Any news?' said Strang, looking at Arthur.

'No. The Eastern business gets a little worse every day.'

'And the "Offensive"?

'Let them! Our men want nothing better.'

On which the dinner resolved itself into a device for making the Captain talk. The War Office crisis, the men gathered in conclave at Versailles, and that perpetual friction between the politician and the soldier, which every war, big or little, brings to the front, and which will only end when war ends--those were the topics of it, with other talk such as women like to listen to of men about individual men, shrewd, careless, critical, strangely d.a.m.ning here, strangely indulgent there, constant only in one quality--that it is the talk of men and even if one heard it behind a curtain and strained through distance, could never by any chance be mistaken for the talk of women.

At intervals Pamela got up to change the plates and the dishes, quieting with a peremptory gesture the two males, who would spring to their feet. 'Haven't I done parlour-work for six months?--no amateurs, please!' And again, even while he talked on, Arthur's eyes would stray after the young full figure, the white neck and throat, the head with the soft hair folded close around it in wavy bands that followed all its lines--as it might have been the head of one of those terra-cottas that her father had stolen from the Greek tombs in his youth.

But unfortunately, after dinner, in a corner of the dark drawing-room, he must needs try and play the schoolmaster a little, for her good of course; and then all went to pieces.

'I hear you ran away!'

The voice that threw out this sudden challenge was half ironical, half affectionate; the grey eyes under their strong black brows looked at her with amus.e.m.e.nt.

Pamela flushed at once.

'Aubrey told you, I suppose? What was the good of staying? I couldn't do anything right. I was only making things worse.'

'I can hardly believe that! Couldn't you just have kept Miss Bremerton's work going till she came back?'

'I tried,' said Pamela stiffly, 'and it didn't do.'

'Perhaps she attempts too much. But she seemed to me to be very sensible and human. And--did you hear about the ash trees?'

'No,' said Pamela shortly, her foot nervously beating the ground.

'It doesn't matter. Of course I know she's the cleverest person going. But I can't get on with her--that's all! I'm going to take up nursing--properly. I'm making enquiries about the London Hospital. I want to be a real Army nurse.'

'Will your father consent?'

'Fathers can't stop their daughters from doing things--as they used to do!' said Pamela, with her chin in the air.

She had moved away from him; her soft gaiety had disappeared; he felt her all thorns. Yet some perversity made him try to argue with her. The war--pray the Lord!--might be over before her training as an Army nurse was half done. Meanwhile, her V.A.D. work at Mannering was just what was wanted at the moment from girls of her age--hadn't she seen the appeals for V.A.D.'s? And also, if by anything she did at home--or set others free for doing--she could help Captain Dell and Miss Bremerton to pull the estate round, and get the maximum amount of food out of it, she would be serving the country in the best way possible.

'The last ounce of food, mind!--that's what it depends on,' he said, smiling at her, 'which can stick it longest--they or we. You belong to the land--ought you desert it?'

Pamela sat unmoved. She knew nothing about the land. Her father had the new agent--and Miss Bremerton.

'Your sister there,' said Chicksands, nodding towards the front drawing-room, where Strang and his wife were sitting Darby and Joan over the fire discussing rations and food prices, 'thinks Miss Bremerton already overdone.'

'I never saw the least sign of it!'

'But think!--your father never slackens his Greek work--and there is all the rest.'

'I suppose if it's too much for her she'll give it up,' said Pamela in her most obstinate voice.

But even then a normally tactful man still held on.

Never was anything more maladroit. It was the stupidity of a clever fellow, deluding himself with the notion that having refused the role of lover, he could at least play that of guardian and adviser; whose conscience, moreover, was so absolutely clear on the subject of Elizabeth Bremerton that he did not even begin to suspect what was rankling In the girl's morbid sense.

The relation between them accordingly went from bad to worse; and when Pamela rose and sharply put an end to their private conversation, the evening would have practically ended in a quarrel but for some final saving instinct on Chicksands' part, which made him mention Desmond as he bade her good-night.

'I could tell you where he is,' he said gravely. 'Only I mustn't. I had a note from him yesterday--the dear old boy! He wrote in the highest spirits. His colonel was "ripping," and his men, of course, the best in the whole battery.'