The Colonel was not deceived. It was not the patriot, not the old soldier, who had uttered that cry of distress: it was the human being, bruised and suffering, and anxious to vent his pain in violence on something or somebody, no matter much who.
"Yes, sir, I shall go, if it's only as cook in the Army Service Corps."
"If it comes," he said, "every fighting man'll be wanted in his right place. Would you like to rejoin the old battalion at Aldershot, if I can work it for you? Then you'd go out with the Expeditionary Force."
Just then there was a shout from the players. Ruth was out and retired. She came towards them, glowing, laughing, her fingers touching her hair to order. She was thirty now, but at that moment she did not look twenty-five. Then she saw the Colonel and deliberately turned away. Susie and Jenny pursued their mother.
The Colonel walked off through the groups of white-clad players towards Alf's garage in the Goffs. A tall man was standing at the gate on to Southfields Road, contemplating the English scene with austere gaze.
"You think it's going to be all right?" asked the Colonel so keen as to forget his antipathy.
"Heaven only knows with this Government," the other replied. "I've just been on the telephone. Haldane's going back to the War Office, they say."
"Henry Wilson's in touch with Maxse and the Conservative press," he said. "He's getting at the Opposition. There's to be a meeting at Lansdowne House to-night. H.W.'s going to ginger em."
"And what are you doing down here?" he asked.
"They sent me down to Newhaven last night--embarkation. I'm off in two minutes." He jerked his head towards a racing car standing outside the garage, white with dust. "Got to catch the 7 o'clock at Lewes, and be back at the War Office at 9 p.m. An all-night sitting, I expect." That austere gaze of his returned to the playing-fields. "Little they know what they're in for," he said, as though to himself.
For the first time the Colonel found something admirable, almost comforting, in the hardness of his old adjutant. He followed the other's gaze and then said quietly, almost tenderly, as one breathing a secret in the ear of a dying man.
"That's the child, Royal--that one in the white frock and black legs running over by the elms. And that's her mother in the brown dress--the one waving. And there's her husband under the trees--that shabby feller."
