And if you hadn’t jolly well distinguished yourself there she’d have let you alone, too.  The real trouble began that day you were at Dixmude.  It wasn’t a bit because she was afraid you’d be killed.  Queenie doesn’t want you about when the War medals are handed round.  Everybody sees that but old Cutler.  He’s too much gone on her to see anything.  She can twist him round and round and tie him up in knots.

    But Cutler isn’t in it now.  Queenie’s turned him down for that
    young Noel Fenwick who’s got your job.  Cutler’s nose was a
    sight, I can tell you.

    Well, I’m not surprised that Queenie’s husband funks her.  She’s
    a terror.  Worse than war.

    Good-bye and Good Luck, Old Thing, till we meet again.

    Yours ever,

    Dicky Cartwright.

VII

ADELINE

i

They would never know what it cost her to come back and look after Colin.  That knowledge was beyond Adeline Fielding.  She congratulated Anne and expected Anne to congratulate herself on being “well out of it.”  Her safety was revolting and humiliating to Anne when she thought of Queenie and Cutler and Dicky, and Eliot and Jerrold and all the allied armies in the thick of it.  She had left a world where life was lived at its highest pitch of intensity for a world where people were only half-alive.  To be safe from the chance of sudden violent death was to be only half-alive.

Her one consolation had been that now she would see Jerrold.  But she did not see him.  Jerrold had given up his appointment in the Punjaub three weeks before the outbreak of the war.  His return coincided with the retreat from Mons. He had not been in England a week before he was in training on Salisbury Plain.  Anne had left Wyck when he arrived; and before he got leave she was in Belgium with her Field Ambulance.  And now, in October of nineteen fifteen, when she came back to Wyck, Jerrold was fighting in France.

At least they knew what had happened to Colin; but about Eliot and Jerrold they knew nothing.  Anything might have happened to them since they had written the letters that let them off from week to week, telling them that they were safe.  Anything might happen and they might never know.

Anne’s fear was dumb and secret.  She couldn’t talk about Jerrold.  She lived every minute in terror of Adeline’s talking, of the cries that came from her at queer unexpected moments:  between two cups of tea, two glances at the mirror, two careful gestures of her hands pinning up her hair.

“I cannot bear it if anything happens to Jerrold, Anne.”

“Oh Anne, I wonder what’s happening to Jerrold.”

“If only I knew what was happening to Jerrold.”

“If only I knew where Jerrold was.  Nothing’s so awful as not knowing.”

And at breakfast, over toast and marmalade:  “Anne, I’ve got such an awful feeling that something’s happened to Jerrold.  I’m sure these feelings aren’t given you for nothing...  You aren’t eating anything, darling.  You must eat.”