A little mounting cheer ran around the group in the square. The Irish nurse, waving at the voided sky, looked as if someone had given her a present. Laurie was cheering too, his pent-up emotions escaping thankfully in the general release. Then on the outskirts of the group he saw Dave. At first his face seemed almost expressionless, till one looked at his eyes.
“Here,” said Reg in the ward, “whassup with you, Spud? You look properly cheesed. Have done for days. Trouble at home?”
“No. Oh, I don’t know, Reg. One thing and another.”
“Leg’s been a long time. Playing up and that. Bound to lose patience, stands to reason.” He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.
“It’ll never be up to much: I heard Ferguson say so.”
“Ah,” said Reg. He had evidently tried to strike a note of surprise, but without much success. He rubbed the back of his head. Laurie realized that Reg had been anticipating this moment, trying to prepare consolation in advance, worrying about it. “Well, Spud, what our mum used to say, you never know if them things is meant. What I mean, say that one missed you. Advance ten paces, stop another one; might have been your head. See, you never know.”
“No,” said Laurie. “That’s right. You never know.”
“Cheeses you off, though. You know, Spud, what I reckon, do you more good than anything? Start to go steady. Meeting all the girls you must have, college and all, bound to have one marked down, don’t tell me. Eh?”
Laurie bent quickly to hunt for something in his locker. “Well—sort of, I suppose.”
“Ah. Well, Spud, only way to look at it, if she loves you, won’t make no difference. If not, better off without her. Can’t get away from that, can you?”
“No. That’s right—I’ve never said anything to her, matter of fact. I don’t think it would work. I’m going to forget all about it.”
“Ah. One thing you got to remember: let it run on too long and it’s got you, see? That’s where the trouble starts. Well, it’s nice your mum coming up today. Takes you out of yourself. Getting the news from home, and that.”
“Yes. I’ve been bloody awful company lately, Reg. I’m sorry.”
“Ah, nark it. Here, you get used to that stick soon as you can, we can pop over on the bus to the pictures.”
Laurie found himself counting the hours till his mother arrived. He thought of her coming with inexpressible comfort although, if challenged, he could not have told anyone what he trusted in. She loved him; but she was apt to offer or withhold her love in a system of rewards and punishments, as she had during his childhood. He scarcely concealed from himself the fact that what she called looking on the bright side was what he would have called wishful thinking in anyone else. But among his own uncertainties, all these settled attitudes of hers gave him a sense of stability and rest. In the deep places below his thinking, she had kept the old power to make Providence seem a projection of herself; if she approved, it too would approve and reward him. Now he had committed himself to courses which only lunacy could have supposed her to sanction; yet instinctively he still transposed into this different medium the basic lessons he had learned at her knee: own up to what you do, never break your word, never hurt anyone’s feelings unless there is something or somebody to be defended; always kick a banana-skin off the pavement, someone might slip on it and fall.
Even now, as he waited for her at the outer gate, he dreamed of a land of undefined, tacit understanding, misty at the edges, like an old-fashioned photograph.
She always picked him up in the car that brought her; they drove back to the nearest small town, had tea, and talked till it was time for her to catch her train. Waiting in the usual place, he saw the old blue-and-gray bus arrive, the visitors struggle up with their parcels. In the gangway Madge Barker moved slowly along, wedged in the crowd; impatient it seemed for reunion, she began making arch little signals to Reg through the window. But after all, Laurie never knew how Reg received his prodigal; for, just behind her, his mother was standing on the step of the bus.
Laurie limped forward to meet her. He was using a stick for the first time out of doors; the shortening of the leg, without the crutch to swing on, now made itself felt with brutal insistence. She would know, this time, that it wasn’t going to alter.
She hadn’t noticed him yet, however. A fellow passenger, a clergyman, was helping her down, and she was thanking him. She had on a travelling coat of soft gray wool, which made her look a little plump, and a new little pale blue hat. Her auburn hair, fading while Laurie’s had darkened, was turning sandy-and-silver; but it would be exquisite when it was white, silky and pure. The hat was younger than those she usually wore, but it suited her.
“Well, my dear.” She kissed him, smelling of fresh face powder and eau de cologne. She always gave him the illusion that he was tall, from the way she put her hands up to his shoulders. “How nice this is, dear, to see you really walking again, and so much better than last time.”
For a moment he was hurt, as sometimes before when she had retreated into optimism leaving him to face reality alone; but he had worked through all that long ago. “Yes,” he said. “What happened, couldn’t you get a car?”
She had made a little warning face. Then he saw that the clergyman who had handed her off the bus was standing almost at her elbow. He was carrying something. It was Laurie’s portable gramophone, which he had asked her to send by train.
Somewhat to his surprise, the clergyman returned his glance promptly with a smile. It was the kind which insists on the adjectives “frank” and “manly,” even from those by whom they are not much employed. He was big-boned and tall, over six feet; the gramophone dangled like a light parcel from his big red hand.
Mrs. Odell turned from one to the other of them; Laurie saw her go a little pink before she smiled.
“Laurie, dear, you did meet Mr. Straike, didn’t you, just before the war?” Laurie remembered that if he had been to church he would have been greeted in the porch after the service. Mr. Straike was smiling in what Laurie felt to be a professionally tactful way.
“I don’t think we’ve actually met to speak, have we, sir?” He was full of the bewildered courtesy one extends, as compensation, to people for whom one is wholly unable to account.
Mr. Straike held out his hand in a big, sincere gesture; Laurie, balancing awkwardly, had to change his stick to his other side in order to respond.
“I’ve heard so much about you that, like your mother, I felt the introduction to be almost superfluous.” He turned the frank smile on Mrs. Odell.
Planning instant escape, Laurie remembered with helpless embarrassment the gramophone. By no possible effort could he manage it himself. Unless he were to watch his mother carrying it, this inexplicable person would have to walk up to the hospital with them.
“Which of the men have you come to see?”
“Only this one.” The difference of height seemed to give Mr. Straike’s smile an avuncular quality. A five-shilling tip would hardly have taken Laurie by surprise. He felt faintly sick; but nothing would happen, he was getting stronger every day.
Mrs. Odell spoke quickly, as if to forestall awkwardness even before it had time to exist in her own mind. “Wasn’t it good of Mr. Straike? I was telling him the other day how worried I was in case the railway people broke your gramophone, you know with all these temporary porters, and he insisted on coming all this way with me to help carry it.”
She smiled at him. It was a special smile, which had been Laurie’s exclusive property ever since he could remember. To see it used, so easily and as if already by habit, upon a stranger, gave him the emotional counterpart of a violent kick in the stomach. At almost the same moment a trailing end of the smile rested on him, in a delicately admonishing way. A scrap of her last letter came back to him. One must be nice to this man, he had been recently bereaved. A new, dreadful thought ran through Laurie like cold steel. He felt that he must get away, if only for seconds, to collect himself. But common good manners, and his lame leg which made an elaborate business of everything he did, held him to the spot like a ball-and-chain. He looked at Mr. Straike, to whom it seemed his feelings must by now have been delivered in stark nakedness: but Mr. Straike was looking manly, modest, and deprecating, and murmuring something about its being a privilege.