"So do I," said the tall fair girl whose name was Eileen Cavendish. "I am developing an actual liver out of sheer jealousy of some of these women whose husbands are on leave. When Bill comes I shall hang on his arm in my best "clinging-ivy-and-the-oak" style, and walk him up and down outside the hateful creatures" windows! It"ll be _their_ turn to gnash their teeth then!"
Betty joined in the laughter. "Are there many of--of Us up here?" she asked.
"There are as many as the village will hold, and every farm and byre and cow-shed for about six miles round," replied Mrs. Gascoigne, the new-comer. "And, of course, the little town, about four miles from here, near where the ships anchor, simply couldn"t hold another wife if you tried to lever one in with a shoe-horn!"
"And then," continued their hostess, measuring out the tea into the pot, "of course, there are some selfish brutes who stay on all the time--I"m one of them," she added pathetically. "But it"s no use being a hypocrite about it. I"d stay on if they all put me in Coventry and I had to p.a.w.n my wedding ring to pay for my rooms. One feels nearer, somehow.... Do sit down all of you. There"s nothing to eat except scones and jam, but the tea is nice and hot, and considering I bought it at that little shop near the manse, it looks and smells very like real tea."
"I suppose, then, all the rooms are dreadfully expensive," said Betty.
"Expensive!" echoed the fair girl, consuming her b.u.t.tered scone with frank enjoyment. "You could live at the Ritz or Waldorf a good deal cheaper than in some of these crofter"s cottages. You see, until the War began they never let anything in their lives. No one ever wanted to come and live here. Of course, there are nice women--like your Miss McCallum, for example--who won"t take advantage of the enormous demand, and stick to reasonable prices. More honour to them! But if you could see some of the hovels for which they are demanding six and seven guineas a week--and, what"s more, getting it...."
"I"m afraid we are giving Mrs. Standish an altogether rather gloomy picture of the place," said Mrs. Gascoigne. She turned to Betty with a rea.s.suring smile. "You don"t have to pay anything to be out of doors,"
she said. "That much is free, even here; it"s perfectly delightful country, and when the weather improves a bit we have picnics and walks and even do a little fishing in an amateurish sort of way. It all helps to pa.s.s the time...."
"But it"s not only the prices that turn one"s hair grey up here,"
continued Mrs. Cavendish. "That little Mrs. Thatcher--her husband is in a Destroyer or something--told me that her landlady has false teeth...." The speaker extended a slender forefinger, to which she imparted a little wriggling motion. "They wobble ... like that--when she talks. She always talks when she brings in meals.... I suppose it"s funny, really----" She lapsed into her liquid giggle. "But poor Mrs. Thatcher nearly cried when she told me about it. Imagine! Week in, week out. Every meal.... and trying not to look...! She said it made her want to scream."
"I should certainly scream," said Mrs. Gascoigne, who had finished her tea and was preparing to take her departure. "Now I must be off. I"ve promised to go and sit with Mrs. Daubney. She"s laid up, poor thing, and it"s so dull for her all alone in those stuffy rooms." She held out her hand to Betty. "I hope we shall see a lot more of each other,"
she said prettily. "We"re going to show you some of the walks round here, and we"ll take our tea out to the woods.... I hope you"ll be happy up here."
The door closed behind her, and Eileen Cavendish explored the room in search of cigarettes. "Sybil Gascoigne is a dear," she observed.
"On the little table, there," said the hostess. "In that box. Do you smoke, Mrs. Standish?" Mrs. Standish, it appeared, did not. "Throw me one, Eileen." She caught and lit it with an almost masculine neatness.
"Yes," she continued, "she"s perfectly sweet. Her husband is a senior Post-captain, and there isn"t an atom of "side" or sn.o.bbishness in her composition. She is just as sweet to that hopelessly dull and dreary Daubney woman as she is to--well, to charming and well-bred attractions like ourselves!" The speaker laughingly blew a cloud of smoke and turned to Betty. "In a sense, this war has done us good. You"ve never lived in a Dockyard Port, though. You don"t know the insane sn.o.bberies and the ludicrous little castes that flourished in pre-war days."
"I dare say you"re right," said Eileen Cavendish. She moved idly about the room examining photographs and puffing her cigarette. "But even the War isn"t going to make me fall on the neck of a woman I don"t like. But I"m talking like a cat. It"s not seeing Bill for so long...."
Mrs. Clavering smiled. "No," she said, "I agree there are limits. But up here, what does it matter if a woman"s husband is an Engineer or a Paymaster or a Commander or only an impecunious Lieutenant like mine--as long as she is nice? Yet if it weren"t for people like Sybil Gascoigne we should all be clinging to our ridiculous little pre-war sets, and talking of branches and seniority till we died of loneliness and boredom with our aristocratic noses in the air.... As it is, I don"t believe even Sybil Gascoigne could have done it if she hadn"t been the Honourable Mrs. Gascoigne. That carried her over some pretty rough ground, childish though it sounds."
"Bong Song!" interposed Mrs. Cavendish flippantly. "As----" She broke off abruptly. "There I go again! There"s no doubt about it: I have got a liver ... I think I"ll go home and write to Bill. That always does me good."
That tea-party was the first of many similar informal gatherings of gra.s.s-widows in poky rooms and cottage parlours. They were quite young for the most part, and many were pretty. They drank each other"s tea and talked about their husbands and the price of things, and occasionally of happenings in an incredibly remote past when one hunted and went to dances and bought pretty frocks.
It was Etta Clavering who conducted Betty round the village shops on the morning after her arrival, where she was introduced to the small Scottish shopkeeper getting rich quick, and the unedifying revelation of naked greed cringing behind every tiny counter.
Through Eileen Cavendish, moreover, she secured the goodwill of a washerwoman.
"My dear," said her benefactress, "money won"t tempt them. They"ve got beyond that. They"ve got to like you before they will wring out a stocking for you. But I"ll take you to the Widow Tw.a.n.key; I"m one of her protegees, and she shows her affection for me by feeling for my ribs with her first two fingers to punctuate her remarks with prods.
It always makes me hysterical. She has only got two teeth, and they don"t meet."
So the Widow Tw.a.n.key was sought out, and Betty stood and looked appealingly humble while Etta Cavendish suffered her ribs to be prodded in a good cause, and the Widow agreed to "wash for" Betty at rates that would have brought blushes to the cheeks of a Parisian _blanchisseuse de fin_.
With Mrs. Gascoigne, Betty explored the heathery moors where the distraught pee-wits were already nesting, and the cool, clean air blew down from the snowy Grampians, bracing the walkers like a draught of iced wine. They even climbed some of the nearer hills, forcing their way through the tangled spruce-branches and undergrowth to the summit, from where the distant North Sea itself was visible, lying like a grey menace to their peace.
They would return from these expeditions by the path down the glen that wound close to the brawling river; here, in the evenings, sometimes with an unexpectedness embarra.s.sing to both parties, they met some of the reunited couples whom Eileen Cavendish found it hard to contemplate unmoved; occasionally the fingers of such couples were interlaced, and they talked very earnestly as they walked.
On fine days the husbandless wives organised picnics and boiled the kettle over a fire of twigs. On these occasions the arrangements were generally in the hands of a fat, jolly woman everyone called "Mrs.
Pat." She it was who chose the site, built the fire with gipsy cunning, and cut the forked sticks on which the kettle hung. The meal over, Mrs. Pat would produce a blackened cigarette holder and sit and smoke with reflective enjoyment while she translated the rustling, furtive sounds of life in brake and hedge-row around them for the benefit of anyone who cared to listen. No one knew whence she had acquired such mysterious completeness of knowledge. It was as if an invisible side of her walked hand in hand with Nature; sap oozing from a bursting bud, laden bee or fallen feather, each was to Mrs. Pat the chapter of a vast romance: and if she bored anyone with her interpretation of it, they had only got to get up and go for a walk.
She had a niece staying with her, the fiancee of a Lieutenant in her husband"s ship, a slim thing with blue eyes and a hint of the Overseas in the lazy, unstudied grace of her movements. She spoke sparingly, and listened to the conversation of the others with her eyes always on the distant grey shadow that was the sea. Thus the days pa.s.sed.
In the evenings Betty read or knitted and inveigled her stout, kindly landlady into gossip on the threshold while she cleared away the evening meal, and so the morning of the ninth day found Betty staring out of her window, listening for the thrush to begin again its haunting, unfinished song.
An object moving rapidly along the top of the hedge that skirted the lane leading to the cottage caught her eye; she watched it until the hedge terminated, when it resolved itself into the top of Eileen Cavendish"s hat. Her pretty face was pink with exertion and excitement, and she moved at a gait suggestive of both running and walking.
Betty greeted her at the gateway of her little garden, and her heart quickened as she ran to meet the bearer of tidings.
"My dear," gasped Mrs. Cavendish, "they"re coming in this morning.
Mrs. Monro--that"s my landlady--has a brother in the town: I forget what he does there, but he always knows."
For an instant the colour ebbed from Betty"s cheeks, and then her beating heart sent it surging back again.
"But----" she said. "Does that mean that our squadron is coming in?"
"Of course it does, silly! Get your hat quick, and we"ll climb up to the top of the hill and see if we can get a glimpse of them coming in.
You"ll have plenty of time to get down again and powder your nose before your Bunje-man, or whatever you call him, can get ash.o.r.e.
Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!"
Together they toiled up the hill to the high stretch of moorland from which a view of the entrance to the Firth could be obtained.
"This is where I always come," said Eileen Cavendish. She stopped and panted for breath. "Ouf! I"m getting fat and short-winded. How long is it since you"ve seen your husband?"
Betty considered. "Three months and seventeen days," was the reply.
Her companion nodded.
"It"s rotten, isn"t it? But now--at times like this, I almost feel as if it"s--worth it, I was going to say; but I suppose it"s hardly that.
I always vowed I"d never marry a sailor, and ever since I did I"ve felt sorry for all the women with other kinds of husbands.... Bill is such a dear!"
They found seats in the lee of a stack of peat and sat down side by side to watch the distant entrance. A faint grey haze beyond the headlands on either side of the mouth of the harbour held the outer sea in mystery.
"There"s nothing in sight," said Betty.
"No," said the other, "but there will be, presently. You wait." She put her elbows on her knees and rested her face in the cup of her two hands. "You haven"t got used to waiting yet," she continued. "It seems to have made up half my life since I met Bill. I had a little daughter once, and it didn"t matter so much then.... But she died, the mite..."
No Battleships had emerged from the blue-grey curtain of the mist when lunch-time came; nothing moved across the surface of the empty harbour, and they descended the hill to share the meal in Betty"s room.
"Perhaps they won"t be in till after tea," suggested Betty. "Perhaps the fog has delayed them."
"Perhaps," said the other.
So they put tea in a Thermos flask, and bread-and-b.u.t.ter and a slice of cake apiece in a little basket, and climbed again to their vantage point in the lee of the peat stack. They read novels and talked in desultory s.n.a.t.c.hes through the afternoon. Then they had tea and told each other about the books they were reading. But as their shadows lengthened across the blaeberry and heather, the silences grew longer, and Betty, striving to concentrate her interest on her book, found the page grow suddenly blurred and incomprehensible....
"It"s getting chilly," said the elder girl at length. She rose to her feet with a little involuntary shiver, and stood for a moment staring out towards the sea. "I wonder..." she began, and her voice trailed off into silence. Betty began slowly to repack the basket. "Sometimes I pray," said Eileen Cavendish, "when I want things to happen very much. And sometimes I just hold my thumbs like a pagan. Sometimes I do both. Let"s do both now."
So they sat silent side by side; one held her breath and the other held her thumbs, but only the dusk crept in from the sea.