if I could help him. I'll see what I
can do. Certainly I will. Mind you, I'm doubtful. Are you fit?"

"I think I am. I'm supposed to have a bit of a heart. But it's absolute
rot. It never affects me in the slightest degree. I can do anything."

"Well, that's the first thing, you know. Look here, I'm wanted. Come up
to the Mess in the morning and I'll get our doctor to have a look at
you. Then we'll see what can be done. All right, eh?"

V

He rode home much relieved from the stresses he had suffered in that
awful business of watching the regiment march out. He felt that if only
he could be "in it" he could equably endure any of these things that
were happening and that would get worse; if he had just to stand by and
watch them his portion would be insupportable. England! Other people
whom he knew could not possibly feel it in the way he felt it. His
history with its opening sentence, "This England you live in is
_yours_", had arisen out of his passionate love for all that England
meant to him. In all Shakespeare there was no passage that moved him in
quite the same way whenever he recalled it as Richard the Second's

Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand....
Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords,
This earth shall have a feeling....

Stooping and touching the soil of England as one might bend and touch a
beloved face. That was what England for years had meant to him. And
now.... It was upon these emotions, vaguely, "in case", that he had gone
to Doctor Anderson on the morning of the frightful news. Anderson had
told him he couldn't possibly be passed for the Army, but at the moment
the idea of ever wanting to go into the Army had only been an almost
ridiculously remote contingency, and what did Anderson know about the
Army standard, anyway?

VI

He said nothing to Mabel of his intention. It was just precisely the
sort of thing he could not possibly discuss with Mabel. Mabel would say,
"Whyever should you?" and of all imaginable ordeals the idea of exposing
before Mabel his feeling about England ... he would tell her when it was
done, if it came off. He could say then, in what he knew to be the
clumsy way in which he had learnt to hide his ideas from her, he could
say, "Well, I _had_ to."

And his thought was, when a few hours later he was walking slowly away
from his interview with Major Earnshaw, the doctor at the barracks,
"Thank God, I never said anything to Mabel about it."

The ve