Part 72 (2/2)
The thing was done, and the snipped-off paragraphs concealed, as a pair of brown boots, with steel jack-spurs attached, came neatly down the ladder.
The Chief gave her his cheery ”Good-morning,” and congratulated her on looking well. Her cheeks burned and her heart rat-tatted against the hidden paper, as he ran his keen eye down slip after slip, and initialled them for the press. She almost shrieked as he took up the ”Social Jottings.” The underground office whirled about her as the blue pencil steadily travelled down. Then--he was gone--and the initialled proof lay before her. She had nothing to do but neatly and delicately paste on the bit she had snipped off. This done, she gathered up her various small belongings, swept them into her bag, and went, leaving the pa.s.sed proof of the ”Social Jottings” column waiting for Young Evans with the rest.
In the middle of the night she realised what she had done. But even in a beleaguered town under the sway of Martial Law you cannot hang a lady, or order her out and shoot her for Mutiny and Treason combined. There would be a reprimand; what Bingo pleasantly termed ”an official wigging,” unless the Blue Pencil could, by any feminine art, be persuaded that it had pa.s.sed those pars.
But, of course, she would never stoop to such a deception. The ruse she had employed was culpable. The other thing would be infamous. And--he would be sure to see that the end of the proof-slip had been pasted on.
She slept jerkily, rose headachy, and set out for the Convalescent Hospital in that stage of penitence that immediately precedes hysterical breakdown. She experienced a crisis of the nerves upon meeting a man, who, regardless of quite a brisk bombardment that happened to be going on just then, was walking along reading the _Siege Gazette_. s.h.i.+rt-sleeved Young Evans had worked until daylight getting the Thursday's issue out. And there was a tremendous run upon copies. Every other person Lady Hannah encountered upon the street seemed to have got one, and to find it unusually interesting. The women especially. None of them were dull, or languid, or dim-eyed this morning. The siege crawl was no longer in evidence. They walked upon springs. Upon the stoep of the Hospital, where the long rows of convalescents were airing, every patient appeared plunged in perusal. Those who had not the paper were waiting, with watering mouths, until those who had would part. A reviving breath seemed to have pa.s.sed over them, and spots of colour showed in their yellow, haggard faces. They talked and laughed....
Lady Hannah pa.s.sed in, conscious of an agreeable tingling all down her spine. The hall-porter, a brawny, one-armed ex-Irregular, who had lost what he was wont to term his ”flapper” at the outset of hostilities, was too deeply absorbed in spelling out a paragraph of the ”Social Jottings”
column to salute her. Inside you heard little beyond the crackling of the flimsy sheet, mingled with the comments, exclamations, antic.i.p.ations, expectations that went off on all sides, met each other, and rebounded, exploding in coruscations of sparks. Something had happened, something was going to happen, after months and months of eventless monotony. It warmed the thin blood in their veins like comet champagne, and quickened their faded appet.i.tes like some salt breath from the far-distant sea.
The flavour of success upon the palate may, like Imperial Tokay, be sensed but once in a lifetime, but you can never forget that once. Out of her gold fountain-pen Lady Hannah had spurted a little ink upon the famished Gueldersdorpians, and their dry bones moved and lived. She knew a fine must be paid for this dizzying draught of popularity, even as she tied on a bibbed ap.r.o.n, and superintended the serving and distribution of the patients' one-o'clock dinner.
Horse-soup, with a few potato-sprouts, and one or two slivered carrots to the gallon, formed the menu to-day. There was no more white bread, and a villainous bannock of crushed oats had to be soaked in your porringer if you had no strength to chew it. Sweetened bran-jelly followed, and upon this the now apologetic but smiling porter, with the intelligence that her ladys.h.i.+p was wanted at the wall-jigger in the Matron's room.
The ring-up came from Hotchkiss Outpost North, where Captain Bingo was this day on duty, _via_ the Staff Headquarter office in Market Square, and the voice that filtered to the ear of Lady Hannah was unmistakably that of her spouse, and tinged with a gruffness as unusual as ominous.
”Hullo. Is that you?”
”Qu'il ne vous en deplaise!”
Bingo growled in a perfectly audible aside:
”And devil a doubt. What other woman would jabber French through a telephone?”
”A Frenchwoman would, possibly.”
”Don't catch what you're saying. Look here, what made you shove such a whacking bouncer into the _Siege Gazette_?”
”Please put that into English.” She underwent a quaking at the heart.
”I say, that announcement about Toby and the Mildare filly is all my eye.”
”It isn't all your eye. It's first-hand, fully-authorised fact.”
”Rot!”
”Paix et peu! Say rot, if it pleases you!”
”You'll have to withdraw and apologise.”
”I can't make out what you're saying.”
”It will end in your eating humble-pie. Can you hear that?”
”I can hear that you are in a bearish temper.”
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