Part 51 (1/2)

”Why not? It isn't going to last long. We'll rally. See if we don't.”

Dorothea's clear, hard mind had gone under for the time, given way before that inconceivable advance. She didn't believe in the retreat from Mons. It couldn't go on. Reinforcements had been sent.

Of course they had been sent. If Frank was ordered off at twelve hours'

notice that meant reinforcements, or there wouldn't be any sense in it.

They would stop the retreat. We were sitting here, safe; and the least we could do for _them_ was to trust them, and not believe any tales of their retreating.

And all the time she wondered how news of him would come. By wire? By letter? By telephone? She was glad that she hadn't got to wait at home, listening for the clanging of the garden gate, the knock, the ringing of the bell.

She waited five days. And on the evening of the sixth day the message came from his mother to her mother: ”Tell your dear child for me that my son was killed five days ago, in the retreat from Mons. And ask her to come and see me; but not just yet.”

She had enclosed copies of the official telegram; and the letter from his Colonel.

After Mons, the siege of Antwerp. The refugees poured into Cannon Street Station.

Dorothea tried hard to drown her grief in the grief of Belgium. But she could not drown it. She could only poison it with thoughts that turned it into something more terrible than grief. They came to her regularly, beginning after midnight, when she lay in bed and should have slept, worn out with her hard day's driving.

She thought: ”I could bear it if I hadn't wasted the time we might have had together. All those years--like a fool--over that silly suffrage.

”I could bear it if I hadn't been cruel to him. I talked to him like a brute and an idiot. I told him he didn't care for freedom. And he's died for it. He remembered that. It was one of the last things he remembered.

He said 'It's _your_ War--it's the biggest fight for freedom.' And he's killed in it.

”I could bear it if I'd given myself to him that night--even for one night.

”How do you know he'd have loathed it? I ought to have risked it. I was a coward. He got nothing.”

His persistent image in her memory tortured her. It was an illusion that prolonged her sense of his material presence, urging it towards a contact that was never reached. Death had no power over this illusion.

She could not see Drayton's face, dead among the dead.

Obsessed by her illusion she had lost her hold on the reality that they had seen and felt together. All sense of it was gone, as if she had dreamed it or made it up.

Presently she would not have her work to keep her from thinking. The Ambulance Corps was going out to Flanders at the end of September, and it would take her car with it and a new driver.

Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.

”If I could only help you.”

”You can't, Mummy ducky,” she would say. And she would get up and leave the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to Veronica; but more often she hid away somewhere by herself.

Frances thought: ”She is out of my reach. I can't get at her. She'll go to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now it's Veronica.”

But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, ”I could bear it if he'd been killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the retreat. He couldn't have had five hours' fighting.

”And to be killed--Retreating.