"I think I am. I'm supposed to have a bit of a heart. But it's absolute rot. It never affects me in the slightest degree. I can do anything."
"Well, that's the first thing, you know. Look here, I'm wanted. Come up to the Mess in the morning and I'll get our doctor to have a look at you. Then we'll see what can be done. All right, eh?"
He rode home much relieved from the stresses he had suffered in that awful business of watching the regiment march out. He felt that if only he could be "in it" he could equably endure any of these things that were happening and that would get worse; if he had just to stand by and watch them his portion would be insupportable. England! Other people whom he knew could not possibly feel it in the way he felt it. His history with its opening sentence, "This England you live in is _yours_", had arisen out of his passionate love for all that England meant to him. In all Shakespeare there was no passage that moved him in quite the same way whenever he recalled it as Richard the Second's
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand.... Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords, This earth shall have a feeling....
Stooping and touching the soil of England as one might bend and touch a beloved face. That was what England for years had meant to him. And now.... It was upon these emotions, vaguely, "in case", that he had gone to Doctor Anderson on the morning of the frightful news. Anderson had told him he couldn't possibly be passed for the Army, but at the moment the idea of ever wanting to go into the Army had only been an almost ridiculously remote contingency, and what did Anderson know about the Army standard, anyway?
He said nothing to Mabel of his intention. It was just precisely the sort of thing he could not possibly discuss with Mabel. Mabel would say, "Whyever should you?" and of all imaginable ordeals the idea of exposing before Mabel his feeling about England ... he would tell her when it was done, if it came off. He could say then, in what he knew to be the clumsy way in which he had learnt to hide his ideas from her, he could say, "Well, I _had_ to."
And his thought was, when a few hours later he was walking slowly away from his interview with Major Earnshaw, the doctor at the barracks, "Thank God, I never said anything to Mabel about it."