Two days later he started, very high of spirit, for England. As he was leaving the village where the battalion was resting--his immediate programme the adventure of "lorry-jumping" to the railhead--the mail came in and brought him a letter from Mabel. It had crossed his own and a paragraph in it somehow damped the tide of his spirits.
"I was very much annoyed with Miss Bright yesterday. I had been kept rather late at our Red Cross Supply Depot owing to an urgent call for accessories and when I came home I found that Miss Bright had actually taken what I consider the great liberty of ordering up tea without waiting for me. I considered it great presumption on her part and told her so. I find her taking liberties in many ways. It's always the way with that class,--once you treat them kindly they turn on you. However, I have, I think, made it quite clear to her that she is not here for the purpose of giving her own orders and being treated like a princess."
It clouded his excitement. His thought was, "Damn it, I hope she isn't bullying Effie."
He had the luck almost at once to jump a lorry that would lift him a long bit on his road, and the driver felicitated him with envious cheerfulness on being off for "leaf." He would have responded with immense heartiness before reading that letter. With Mabel's tart sentences in his mind a certain gloom, a rather vexed gloom, bestrode him. Her words presented her aspect and her attitude and her atmosphere with a reminiscent flavour that took the edge off his eagerness for home. On the road when the lorry had dropped him, on the interminable journey in the train, on the boat, the feeling remained with him. England--England!--merged into view across the water, and he was astonished, as his heart bounded for joy at Folkestone coming into sight, to realise from what depression of mind it bounded away. He was ashamed of himself and perturbed with himself that he had not more relished the journey: the journey that was the most glorious thing in the dreams of every man in France. He thought, "Well, what am I coming home to?"
The train went speeding through the English fields,--dear, familiar, English lands, sodden and bare and unspeakably exquisite to him in their December mood. He gazed upon them, flooding all his heart out to them. He thought, "Why should there be anything to make me feel depressed? Why should things be the same as they used to be? But dash that letter.... Dash it, I hope she's not been bullying that girl."