4 Books by Coningsby Dawson. Coningsby Dawson

In the years that had followed he had taken no step to make that girlish promise binding, yet increasingly its fulfillment had been the goal towards which he had struggled.

      After she had joined Lady Dawn's Nursing Unit and had gone to France he had missed her on his leaves; by some fatality they had been always missing. She had existed for him only in their correspondence and in his vivid imagination. And now, after so much hoping, she had become again a reality. He had been prepared for strangeness, but not for---- Was it her youth, which was to have flung wide all doors, that formed the barricade? Her youth which, if shared, would have put back the hands on the face of Time! Her relentless, flaunting youth! Youth which is forever hostile to age!

      Her growing and puzzled expression of impatience forced him to narrow his answer to the requirements of the moment. "What are my plans, you asked? I haven't any. I'm a man at a loose end and at a beginning--like all the world, as you yourself just stated."

      "Yes, but----"

      "I know what you're going to say--that every one has to live somewhere. I have a place all right--my old place."

      "Shall I tell Prentys to drive you there?"

      He shook his head and thrust out his long legs, throwing his weight more heavily against the cushions. "Not unless you didn't read my letter."

      Her habitual sunniness clouded. "Tabs, you're trying to be beastly. If I hadn't read it, I shouldn't have known to have met you, or when, or where."

      "Then you remember that it reminded you of----"

      She cut him short, glancing furtively at the girl at the wheel to see whether she had been listening. "I don't forget easily. Where do you want to go? Would a run into the country suit you?"

      "Excellently."

      "In what direction?"

      "Makes no difference."

      She whispered something to the girl; the car semi-circled and gathered speed, shooting through the traffic which was lumbering towards the Fulham Road and Surrey.

      Now that he had gained his point, he didn't seem inclined for conversation. He lolled back with his eyes half-shut; she sat bolt upright, ignoring his presence.

      He recalled to-day as he had pictured it. Terry was to have been still the girl-woman who had wanted him so badly that she had been brave enough to ask for him. She was to have been precisely and in every detail the girl from whom he had parted. She was to have been on the platform waiting for him, and he....

      Pshaw! What a sentimentalist and how easily disappointed! The old fight was still on in another form. It was never ended. Life was a fight from start to finish, calling for new and yet newer courage. He refused to be defeated. He would not be embittered. He would win his kingdom round the corner, even though it proved to be a different kingdom from the one he had expected. Terry couldn't have stayed seventeen always, which was the miracle he had demanded. She was a woman. He would have to teach her to love him afresh. There was no time to be lost. For all he knew there might be a rival--perhaps the mysterious some one at the War Office who had lent her this car. He leant forward good-humoredly, touching her hand to attract her attention, "Terry."

      IV

      She turned slowly, almost reluctantly. What new and disturbing question was he going to ask? She hadn't been prepared for this altered man with his limp and his gauntness and his strained intensity. She couldn't bring herself to believe that this grave, spent, unlaughing person at her side was Tabs, the gallant, care-free comrade she had asked to marry her. She was shocked both at him and at herself. And she had wanted to be so glad--to make him feel that every one was so happy at having him back----

      "Terry."

      At the sound of her name, spoken like that, a little thrill of his old-time power stirred her; it traveled up to her eyes, so that she had to press back the tears before she turned.

      "Terry, it was sentimental blackmail. I'm sorry."

      "What was? I don't understand."

      "That last letter. I oughtn't to have reminded you. What one promises at seventeen doesn't hold good. It was sporting of you to keep the promise by meeting me this morning, but---- What I'm trying to say is this; I'm forgetting everything that you would like me to forget."

      "But I'm not sure that I want you to forget anything." She widened her lips into a smile from which the trouble was only half dispelled. "It sounds horrid and unfriendly, this talk of forgetting, as though---- It sounds so much worse when it's put into words, as though we had something of which to be ashamed."

      "No, it's not like that. May I be terrifically honest--just as we used?"

      She eyed him doubtfully. It was evident that she was still timid of the truth. Then she nodded.

      "Well, you know how it was between us before I went away. You were of an age when most people still thought of you as a child. You _were_ outwardly, but inside you were almost a woman. The little girl did things and promised things that the woman wouldn't approve to-day. And then take my side of it. I went out to a place where life seemed at an end and where, because of that, one became selfish in the demands he made on the people whom he had left behind--especially on the women. It was impossible to be normal; probably I'm not quite normal now. But the point is this: every man in khaki thought intensely of some one girl. It didn't matter whether he had the right to think of her; he just thought of her, and wrote to her, and carried her photo with him up to an attack, as if he had the right. He wasn't even much disturbed as to whether, in allowing him to love her, she loved him in return or was merely being patriotic; he didn't expect to live to put things to a test. All he wanted was the belief that one woman loved him. You understand, she was very often only a makeshift--a symbol for the woman he would have married if death hadn't been in such a hurry. Well, for some of us Death has had time to spare and we've come back--come back starved, emotional, tyrannic--passionate to possess all the things for which our hearts have hungered and of which they have been deprived so long. It was easy to strip ourselves of everything when we thought we were going to die. But now that we know we're going to live we're tempted to recover some of our lost years by violence. You must be patient with us, Terry; we're sick children, querulous, eager to take offense and over-exacting. I was like that when I blackmailed you into meeting me this morning. It was unworthy of me to have treated that child's promise as binding."

      "But I was seventeen; I wasn't a child. And I wanted to meet you--I did truly."

      "Letting me down lightly?" he smiled.

      "No, an honest fact."

      When he gazed at her with kindly incredulity, she edged herself closer and bent forward in a generous effort to persuade him.

      "Don't you see that what you've said of yourself was true of me as well?"

      "I wasn't talking in particular of myself," he parried; "I was including all the other men."

      "Yes, but especially of yourself. It was of yourself that you were talking. What you've said of yourself is true of me and--oh, of almost all women. We saw you men march away; you seemed lost to us forever. Everything seemed at an end. So we did what you did--chose one man who would embody all our dreams and become especially ours. We wrote to him, shopped for him, placed his portrait on our dressing-tables, were anxious for him and, oh, so proud of him. We didn't stop to ask whether he was the man with whom we could live for always. There wasn't any _always_. It didn't look as though there was ever again going to be any _always_. And then the horror stopped and we found ourselves with a man on our hands--a man who, though we had known him so well, would come back to us different. We hadn't meant to cheat him when we made all those promises; but now that he's really ours, we're not sure that we---- All the ecstasies and tears that we wrote to him on paper----" She made a helpless gesture with her hands. "They don't seem real. It's not our fault. They belonged to the part of nurses and soldiers that