Chapter X

1

The days of crisis passed. Dr. Harvey confided to Trevor that it was touch-and-go, but Ivor, in that occasional clarity of intense fever, had no thought of death. One morning, at last, he really did wake up. Weakly, he noticed the room. There was a nurse nearby, and she smiled at him cheerfully, making encouraging noises. He remembered the nurse quite well, she had been about his bed all the time, doing things, and he had asked her for things, too. Yes, she had been there all the time, that nice nurse. And he saw the hot-water bottle hanging from a bed-post at his feet.... He tried to link his memory of a vague face in that room to another memory. What did it remind him of? something so vague and dim, and so long ago.... He remembered Ann Marlay’s face--he never thought of her as his mother, she was Ann Marlay to him--bending over his childhood, and sad, gentle eyes. Of course, yes. And now this other face, so clouded and familiar, hovering about, wide eyes mocking him tenderly--oh, how divine she was, to mock so sadly and tenderly, so unlike every one else! And he spent a long time in trying to compare the two memories, Ann and Magdalen, wondering if they were at all alike, wondering if they would have liked one another....

But she didn’t come that day. He slept, but when he woke up he felt that he had been really watching the door all the time, and that she hadn’t come. He did not ask the nurse about her, he waited. But she did not come. Trevor came in later, and grinned happily to see him better, and said things. Ivor didn’t ask him either, he just waited. But Magdalen never came again.

2

All the time of his getting gradually better he never asked about Magdalen. It was an effort. Gerald Trevor came every day, but he said nothing about her. Gerald was gay of an idea that he and Ivor should go to South America as soon as he was better. Gerald, it seemed, knew a chap who had a ranch there. “Sun and open spaces and horses and _gauchos_, Señor Ivor,” Gerald cried to him, and Ivor said he would love to go. It was a divine idea, of course he would go, Ivor said.

And Rodney West came once or twice; he had heard he was ill, West cheerfully said, and so thought to have one more look at him before he died. He asked Ivor why he had never gone to see him, and he wondered if Ivor was thinking of selling his car, but Ivor said he was not. So calm and friendly and practical he was. What a good friend for any man, Ivor thought--and straightway made him one! Which was Ivor’s naïve way with the few people he liked, to claim them quickly--and then quietly wait for them to realise that he had claimed their friendship.

But Magdalen never came, nor news from her. Flowers came every other day or so, flowers that filled the room and exercised the ingenuity of nurses to provide vases, but there was no message in them, they were only flowers. He was indifferent to them, he grew to hate them....

He was convalescent now, well out of weakness, and would very soon be moving from the nursing-home. He had taken the air once or twice, gently. And Trevor came to see him one afternoon. Ivor took out the cards for the game of _picquet_ that they would play.

They cut for deal.

“You know,” Trevor casually said, “Magdalen has gone away.”

“Oh,” said Ivor.

“She’s gone,” Trevor said, “to Spain. For some time, I think. Magdalen is like that, as you know. When she is in London she stays for years, but once she is away she stays away for years.”

Ivor had nothing at all to say to that. Somehow he had known all the time that Magdalen had gone away. She hated a mess. She would make a wonderful playwright--if plays consisted only of exits! But she might just have written to him....

“I say, Ivor,” Trevor said quickly. “She wrote to me to tell you that she had gone away, as soon as you were better. Just that.... You knew, of course, that she was here all the time you were really ill?”

“Yes,” said Ivor. “Thanks so much, old man....”

“It’s your deal,” Trevor said.

“I’ve booked passages for Buenos Ayres,” he said, “for the tenth day from to-day. It will be nice for you, I thought, to be convalescent all over the boat. And I chose the best they had, a nice water-tight one----”

Ivor suddenly burst into laughter. Giggling, it was really. And he said:--

“Gerald, what fun we’ll have together in foreign parts!”

“In extremely foreign parts,” he added softly.

And they did. But they had to come back all too soon, hearing there was a war in Europe.

“I wonder what it’s all about, this war,” Ivor wondered on the boat coming home. “I don’t know much about war....”

“That,” said Trevor, “is exactly why people go to war. So it’s said....”

“War,” said Trevor dogmatically, “has got something to do with some one being frightened to death of some one else....”

“War,” he went on dogmatically, “is supposed to have something to do with the Dignity of People. But by substituting the less pleasing word Bowels for Dignity the same result of war will be obtained.” And he turned to Ivor with that jerky little grin of his. “We’ll inquire further into this here war, Ivor, when we land.”

But Trevor inquired no further; for one thing, he had too much sense to try to find the sense in any war; and for another, he didn’t have time. For Gerald Trevor, Colonel Trevor, was killed almost as soon as he set foot in France, in the slaughter of Neuve Chapelle in the spring of 1915. Dear, gay Gerald! There died a courtly gentleman. He had loved a few women and killed a few men. There died a gay and kind and courtly gentleman.... And in the winter of 1916, Ivor Marlay, by then deprived of almost every sense by the noisome dullness of war, was also deprived by a shell of his left arm, from the shoulder; whereupon there followed for Captain Marlay months of hideous and tearing pain.

His left arm, however, was not all he lost through the war.

“That dear old ‘Camelot’ car!” he reminded Magdalen, his first visitor at the London home to which he had finally been moved--Magdalen whom he had not seen since that “hot-water bottle” night! “That dear old ‘Camelot’ car, Magdalen! I refused to sell it to Rodney West, and now some ass has stolen it from the garage, thinking maybe I’d have less use for it now. Whereas----”

“Whereas, Ivor, you’d like to say, but daren’t, to lose only one’s left arm is really more of a decoration than a loss. But you can’t pull any of that ivory stuff on Magdalen....”

Her eyes were alight at seeing him again, she was intensely proud of him--has it not been said that Magdalen was very, very English? And to whom, in all this wide world, did Ivor belong, if not to her! And she could scarcely bear to see the pain that would every now and then twist the dark young face--and set those eyebrows scowling so sulkily! She pretended not to notice, he would like that best. Her old friend Ivor! “The best ever....” And, in the way of her sympathy, she mocked him, for she knew he loved her mockery, saying that the arm he had left was an excellent arm anyway, and that the bit of coloured ribbon for which he had exchanged the other one would look very decorative beneath the pile of handkerchiefs where it would live out its glorious life. “More than ever dark and dangerous Ivor!” she cried softly. Her old friend Ivor!...