her shoulder. The
woman stared open-mouthed and said nothing. Marigold came forward to
relieve Betty of her burden, but she waved him imperiously away, passed
him and, opening the car-door, threw the bag at my feet. Not one of the
rough crowd moved a foot or uttered a sound, save a baby in arms two
doors off, who cut the silence with a sickly wail and was immediately
hushed by its mother. Betty turned to the attendant Marigold.
"You can drive me home."
She sat by my side. Marigold took the wheel in front and drove on. She
sought for my hand, held it in an iron grip, and said not a word. It
was but a five minutes' run at the pace to which Marigold, time-worn
master of crises of life and death, put the car. Betty held herself
rigid, staring straight in front of her, and striving in vain to stifle
horrible little sounds that would break through her tightly closed lips.
When we pulled up at her door she said queerly: "Forgive me. I'm a
damned little coward."
And she bolted from the car into the house.
CHAPTER XIII
Thus over the sequestered vale of Wellingsford, far away from the sound
of shells, even off the track of marauding Zeppelins, rode the fiery
planet. Mars. There is not a homestead in Great Britain that in one
form or another has not caught a reflection of its blood-red ray. No
matter how we may seek distraction in work or amusement, the angry glow
is ever before our eyes, colouring our vision, colouring our thoughts,
colouring our emotions for good or for ill. We cannot escape it. Our
personal destinies are inextricably interwoven with the fate directing
the death grapple of the thousand miles or so of battle line, and
arbitrating on the doom of colossal battleships.
Our local newspaper prints week by week its ever-lengthening Roll of
Honour. The shells that burst and slew these brave fellows spread their
devastation into our little sheltered town; in a thundering crash
tearing off from the very trunk of life here a friend, there a son,
there a father, there a husband. And I repeat, at the risk of wearisome
insistence, that our sheltered homeland shares the calm, awful fatalism
of the battlefield; we have to share it because every rood of our
country is, spiritually, as much a battlefield as the narrow,
blood-sodden wastes of Flanders and France.
Willie Connor, fine brave gentleman, was dead. My beloved Betty was a
widow. No Victoria Cross for Betty. Even if there had been one, no
childr
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