Behind the Lines by W. F.; Morris Read Free Book Online

little flattered by this tribute from a man older and more worldly wise than himself. They went riding together in the afternoon, following, perhaps not entirely by accident, the route Rawley had taken two days previously when he had met Berney Travers on the road to Doullens. Rumbald was in a confidential mood and spoke of his wife.
    â€œWrites to me every other day, Pete,” he said. “Sends me lashings of cigarettes, marching chocolate, and any damn thing the shop people can kid her we want out here. That’s the sort of wife to have, Pete, my lad, one that looks after the bed and the board. That’s a wife’s job—a wife that is a wife.”
    He took a photograph from his breast pocket and handed it to Rawley. “Not a high stepper, mind you, but a nice little armful all the same.”
    Rawley made some suitable comment and handed back the photograph. Rumbald gazed at it sentimentally for a moment before returning it to his pocket.
    â€œThat’s the sort we shall have to find for you one of these days,” he continued. “How would you like a nice little girl of your own?” and he made a stab at Rawley’s ribs with his crop. “Half the trouble in this life is caused by fellows who want a woman and don’t know it, or by females who get a kink on religion or uplift or some damnnonsense, when all they really want is a few babies. God never intended a man or a woman to live alone, and He ought to know.”
    Swaying gently to the motion of his mare, Rawley silently agreed. He tilted his cap over his eyes to look at an aeroplane droning overhead, but his mind’s eyes was occupied with the picture Rumbald’s words had conjured up—the picture of a little woman of one’s own, someone so much a part of oneself that one was never alone, even when separated from her. Someone with whom one could share all the extraordinary thoughts and ideas and emotions that made up life—particularly life in this baffling time of war. Someone who would welcome one even though one came muddy and sweaty and unshaven straight from a gun-pit. And he recalled the daintily dressed girl he had seen at Victoria station, who when the leave train came in had flung her arms round the neck of her muddy husband and had been lifted off her feet and hugged before the world.
    His mare half-stumbled in a rabbit hole and curveted affectedly. He soothed her with a little clucking noise while his thoughts ran on.
    Of course it was not often that a cultured English girl showed her feelings like that; but it did give one a glimpse into hidden heavens so to speak. Her eyes shining like stars and seeing only one muddy man among all the khaki crowd. There was no mistaking that look—or forgetting it. Lucky devil that infanteer, whoever he was.
    Clean, healthy English girls seemed very pally and unemotional, but after that revelation at Victoria one knewthat behind their calm eyes that radiant look lay waiting for some man.
    He glanced covertly at Rumbald riding beside him and eyed his plump profile with new interest. He had not merely surprised such a look as a slightly envious onlooker; he must know what it felt like to be that muddy infanteer. When he went on leave a girl would be waiting for him with that look in her eyes.
    He turned his eyes away and patted his mare’s neck. How little one really knew about the lives of others; less than the half. Here was this fellow Rumbald, ordinary looking chap, nothing heroic or—or Hamlet-like about him to give a clue, and yet he had been through all that. And that infanteer no doubt seemed just as ordinary to his fellow officers who had not seen his wife meet him at Victoria.
    On the way back Rumbald asked, “Ever been to Amiens?”
    â€œNo,” answered Rawley. “Have you?”
    Rumbald shook his head. “Good spot, I’m told—like Havre, only better.” He tapped Rawley’s knee with his crop and asked