After this the relationship between Willie and Felicity grew less happy. He would still try to see her whenever he came to London, but their evenings together were not as they once had been. The subjects of conversation were no longer the same. Felicity had taken an interest in the regiment, about which Willie had loved to talk. She had come to know intimately the lives and characters of men whom she had never seen, and would often surprise Willie by the accuracy with which she remembered details. She would enquire with real interest about the major’s growing family or the subaltern’s love affairs. But Willie did not care to talk about the men he was serving with now, or if he did, it was only to recount some remark by one of them, which he had interpreted as a hidden insult. His stories about his brother officers had in the past been full of fun and affection. Now they were laden with malice and dislike.
‘Do you know who I met in the street this morning?’ he said one evening to Felicity – ‘that dirty cad Hamilton.’
‘I know you don’t like him,’ she answered, ‘but isn’t “dirty cad” a bit strong?’
‘It’s the luck some fellows have that maddens me. I heard he’d been wounded in Africa. It seems to have been pretty bad – his shoulder shattered to pieces, only a few months ago – and here I meet him swanking down Bond Street with his arm in a sling, quite the wounded hero, having just been appointed Military Attaché to one of the few neutral countries where life would be interesting in these days. Why can’t they make me a Military Attaché?’
‘Perhaps the fact that you can’t speak a single word of any foreign language may have something to do with it.’
‘I’m told that that doesn’t matter a bit. Foreigners respect you all the more if you can’t speak their beastly language. I agree with the chap who said that anybody can understand English if spoken loud enough.’
‘Really, Willie, you do talk the most terrible nonsense at times.’
Their evenings together seldom ended happily now. Felicity would gently loosen his arms when he threw them around her, and would turn away her face when he wanted to kiss her.
Because he was not happy in his work he was not good at it. He had no gift for teaching and no genuine interest in the progress of those he taught. One autumn evening when the talk had turned on to the fattening of turkeys for the Christmas market, he said, ‘That’s what our work here is – grooming a lot of silly boys until we think they’re fit to be sent out and get killed.’ It pleased him to watch the disapproval on the faces of the others, and he did not mind the silence that followed his remark.
He was not surprised therefore when, at the end of the year, his appointment was not renewed, and he found himself once more on the list of elderly officers awaiting employment.
It was now that Willie’s friends began to notice a change in him. They found him less good company than he used to be. He had never been a wit or a brilliant conversationalist, but his good manners, his interest in whatever was being said and his happy smile, which came so easily, had made him someone who was welcome wherever he went. His manners were no longer so good, for the fountain from which they sprang, a kind heart, was drying up. He was losing his interest in his fellow beings and finding greater difficulty in smiling. Some thought it was due to an unhappy love affair, others that he was ill, or that he was drinking too much. In fact he was suffering from despair.
He went back to living with Garnet. It saved him the trouble of looking for something else. He disliked taking trouble about anything, and he argued that he might get a new appointment at any moment, so that it was wiser to incur no liabilities. Every morning he would wander to the club and spend most of the day there, doing nothing in particular. Sometimes he would go to a race meeting. More often he would follow the racing results on the tape. Garnet, who watched him with a professional eye, was unhappy about him. He detected symptoms that escaped the eyes of laymen.
‘I’m worried about Willie,’ he said to Felicity. ‘He’s letting himself go to pieces.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘It is hard to explain, and still harder to understand, unless you have lived in the Far East, as I have. There they say it is the climate which has got you down. There, you know, the retiring age is fifty, and many a man is finished before he reaches it. A moment comes when something happens like the mainspring of a watch breaking. The façade remains the same, perhaps for a long time, and most people can see no difference. I used rather to fancy myself at being able to diagnose this particular disease, and Willie shows symptoms recently that have made me think of it.’
‘Oh, Garnet, what can we do to help him?’
‘His state may of course be partly due to physical causes. I wanted him to go into hospital for a few days to be overhauled, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He said the hospitals were now for fighting soldiers, and he would be ashamed to occupy one minute of a doctor’s or a nurse’s time.’
‘But what can we do to help him?’ she repeated.
‘A new job that would really interest him, or anything that would take him out of himself would be the best thing.’
‘Yes’, she said; ‘but he is so hard to place. He isn’t very clever, bless his heart, and he has no experience of anything except soldiering.’
‘We must think about it,’ said Garnet, as he left her. He was, as usual, in a hurry.
There is a district in London, near the heart of it, which has acquired, perhaps undeservedly, a bad reputation. Willie was walking through it one evening. He was returning from the club before dinner, because he had no appetite, and was thinking of going to bed. To his surprise he saw Felicity come out from a block of flats, to which is attached particular notoriety. He thought she looked taken aback when she saw him, but she only laughed when he asked her if that was where she was working now. Two evenings later he was there again, designedly, at about the same hour. Again she came out of the same building, but this time she was not taken aback. She walked up to him and, standing still, said:
‘You came here on purpose to spy on me.’
He answered, ‘I came here to see if you were really working in that house.’
‘Have you nothing better than that to do?’ she asked.
‘No, by God, I haven’t,’ he answered passionately, and all her wrath gave way to pity, for she felt as though she had torn the bandage off a festering wound.
She laid a hand on his arm.
‘Come into this pub with me, Willie, and have a glass of beer.’
He followed her meekly, and looking round at the unfamiliar precincts he said:
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been in an ordinary public-house in London before.’
There was so much of the old, childish Willie in his naïve wonder that she was touched.
‘I brought you in here,’ she said, ‘to give you a lecture, but you’re really so touching that I don’t think I can.’
‘Thank you, Felicity,’ he said.
‘But listen to me, all the same. You know you are not as nice as you used to be.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘Do you really think that I’m running a brothel or working in one?’
‘How could I think such a thing?’
‘Then why did you come here this evening?’
‘Perhaps it was just in the hope that I should see you.’
‘No, Willie, you know it wasn’t. You suspected me. Perhaps you didn’t define to yourself what it was that you suspected, but your mind is full of suspicion, hatred and darkness, and it is destroying your heart.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘You look ill.’
‘I feel it. I’ve felt rotten for days.’
‘You ought to be in bed.’
‘I stayed there yesterday, but it’s so lonely in that grim little room. Garnet’s out all day.’
‘Well, I’m going to take you there now, and put you to bed, and give you a hot drink and some aspirin. Old Garnet must have a look at you when he comes in. I think you’ve some fever,’ she said, holding his wrist.
She did as she had said, helping him to undress and to get into bed. He was very docile. Before she left him she bent over him and kissed his hot lips with her cool ones, and whispered to him that she loved him still, and that as soon as he was well all should be between them as it had been in the happiest days of the past. His arms held her close to him for a moment, but all he said was ‘Alas, alas!’
She scribbled a note to Garnet before she left the flat. He telephoned to her early next morning.
Willie had passed a bad night. He was suffering from pneumonia and had a high fever. But his constitution was good, his heart was sound, there were no complications, no cause for anxiety. Garnet had arranged for a good nurse to look after him. When Felicity went to see him that evening the nurse dissuaded her from going into his room. He was sleeping, and he needed all the sleep he could get. All efforts to bring down his temperature had failed. His condition was grave. He was no better on the following day. In the evening he fell into a torpor, and early the next morning he died.