I got even with him over Effie’s clothes. You know she wears only uniform in France, with one simple silk or crêpe-de-chine frock for the rare occasions when she goes out to dine, or to some informal hospital dance. So all her clothes were down in the wardrobe room, and they had been pulled out of the debris, and laid, a melancholy array, on the only bed left standing, which happened to be her own. You can imagine what last year’s frocks look like, especially when they have been a good deal worn, and finally come through an air raid. A torn and crumpled mass of satin and lace and chiffon, stained with lime and water. The sight seemed to affect the official mind profoundly; though my shattered treasures had left him cold. He asked their values, touching them rather pitifully; perhaps he visualised the radiant youth they had once enfolded, and I may have been misjudging him all along.
He then asked bluntly what they had cost. I replied vaguely about ten pounds each. He put down fifty pounds without a murmur, and hurried out of the room as if he had had enough.
It took the whole long, long day, Cornelia, and when he went out for his lunch I sat among the ruins, and ate the dry sandwich Florence had put up for me. I fear I watered it with my tears. I never knew there could be so many tears in the world. I had none to shed when the Boy went away; but somehow this has unsealed the fount. It is a different kind of grief; it tears you a thousand ways; sometimes you are shaken with an impotent rage. Of course it means that it will be more evanescent.
The heart can only stand a certain number of vital, staggering blows. After the assessing business was over I was free, so to speak, of what remained of my own possessions, and I have been going round every day immediately after breakfast and stopping until dusk drove me away. Lots of people wanted to help. I didn’t want them—I had to be alone with my ghosts. Florence would come round now and again when her work was done, or between whiles, and then we just stood together thinking unutterable things. She is not quite a servant, as you know, but a dear faithful, understanding friend who lives in the heart of us, and loves us every one. But mostly I was alone, my job to gather up the fragments—the little things, and try to gauge and co-ordinate the whole before the removal men came to take everything away. I found quite a lot of things and carried them one by one to one of the pantries where a shelf remained intact. My greatest find, in a place with which they had no connection whatever, was four cut crystal baskets belonging to the old Sheffield plate epergne, we used as a centrepiece in the days when table decoration was of the heavy ornate type.