Berta Ruck

“ I could imagine his sidewards tilt of the head as he told the tale to Elizabeth, the boyishly-sincere.
She, blurting out "I don't hate you!" hurried into the scullery for a couple of those tall glass jars of fruit for bottling. He followed her, carrying more fruit and murmuring that no girl could be got to care for him; not really care!
Elizabeth said he looked more than ever like that picture "The Falconer" on her chocolate-box lid. I can imagine her adoring glance up at him!
This was in the kitchen, again in front of the oven. ”

“ Good-bye, too, to the life in camp; good-bye to Vic, the irresistible Cockney, to Sybil, and little Peggy with her "I'm astonished at you!"—to Curley, to the red-haired Aggie with her rich Welsh voice, and to the young forewoman who had mothered the whole mixed lot of us!
We had been one big family; I had found sisters of every class and kind. Now I had to leave them all, after sharing their life and their hearts, for six unforgettable weeks. To part—with the chance that we should never meet again! It's the fate that breaks up so many a cheery mess, both in the Army and the Land Army! ”

“ Here the sun rose again upon Elizabeth's world. Her eyes had fallen at once upon her fiancé, Colonel Fielding. He was sitting there, near his friend, Captain Holiday.
What a merry tea-fight that was in the hospitable and happy-go-lucky Welsh country-house!
To sit in a dainty drawing-room amidst a cluster of strangers wearing "real" summer frocks. To see a winking bright silver spirit-kettle and a snowy cobweb cloth. To drink tea from fragile cups and to spread, with crystal-handled knives, honey upon wafer bread-and-butter! ”

“ Care for me? Of course, he couldn't care for me. Men don't go away without a single word of good-bye from girls of whom they care at all. I had an example of that in Harry. He and Captain Holiday cared for me about equally! That is, not two straws!
I had been a lunatic to delude myself into the belief that I was the girl of whom Dick Holiday had held forth to me—"Just the girl I want!"
Not Joan Matthews! No, no, Muriel Elvey was the girl he'd meant all that time. Yes! I was now once more miserably certain of that, in spite of all that Colonel Fielding had said. ”

“ The fields, the farm; any girl might envy Elizabeth the scenes that set first love for her, without hurry, without artificiality or fatigue! But I expect Elizabeth only flushed deeper and deeper pink, half with emotion, half with the heat of that oven. Little bright beads of moisture had gathered about her forehead and neck; annoyed, she brushed them away with the sleeve of her overall, hoping that he did not see. ”

“ Indulgent laughter came from all the men. I remembered one of Elizabeth's contemptuous axioms about the sex—"a pretty girl can't be too helpless or too afraid of mice to please a man, even now!"
Elizabeth, at this moment sitting beside the cow, Blodwen, wore her most man-hating looks upon her small, set face. As for me, I felt that now, on this occasion of all others, when, as a Land-worker, I ought to have been at my best, I was absolutely at my worst, nervous, flurried and awkward.
I had a hideous presentiment that I should overturn my milking-pail, or some fiasco of that sort! ”

“ Elizabeth is the most loyal pal who ever barked out home-truths at a chum, waiting on her hand and foot the while ... Oh, girl-friends! What would life be without them when men forsake us by desertion and death, when other men overwork us and harry us, and when all men (as it sometimes seems) misunderstand us! Men don't believe in loyal and lasting friendships between women. Elizabeth, in return, never believed much in men. ”

“ I was taking the second love-fiasco very differently from my first.
In London, over Harry's desertion, I had let go all ropes, and had fretted and wept myself into a nervous wreck.
Here on the Land, I never thought of behaving like that. I set my teeth to "stick" unhappy Love, which is a girl's equivalent for a soldier's "sticking" his most painful wound. I found I could still enjoy myself among the other girls, I could still be sympathetic over my chum's engagement. I could throw myself body and soul into the work on the farm, where the hay-harvest was now in full swing. ”

“ I noticed the way Ivor and Colonel Fielding turned their faces, as they threw the water, away from the burning walls of the shed, now hot as a furnace; I noticed Mrs. Price's little flying feet under her grey overall; I noticed the frightened twitter of the birds who had been scared out of their usual roosting places in the hedge near by, and the angry calling of the rooks whose nests were in those elms. And on Dick Holiday's forehead, under a hank of his short, brown hair, I even noticed a great smudge of black from the charred wood. ”

“ I saw him again as I'd seen him at that concert, dressed up in that successful imitation of a Spanish beauty, singing in a contralto that would have lured the bird from the tree, taking in half the audience by his mock "glad eye" at Captain Holiday, and finally tossing that red flower into the little brown paw of the Land Girl whom he most admired. Not too milk-and-watery, all that! And as Elizabeth herself defended him later, "It's not by being namby-pamby that a man gets the D.S.O." In spite of his distressingly—to me—pretty-pretty appearance, there were depths in this idol of Elizabeth's. ”

“ I stared at Elizabeth.
"Join the Land Army! Me!"
"Yes, you. Do your bit. They say England wants feeding. It looks like it"—she glanced at the comfortless tray—"so go and help, Joan."
"Would you like to, yourself?" I retorted.
"Me?" cried Elizabeth in turn. "Nothing would induce me, thanks. I should loathe it!"
"Yet you think I ought to join up!"
"Best thing for you," declared my chum briskly. "Help your country, work in the open, get fit, and forget there are such things as men!" ”

“ If it weren't true, why on earth should I ask you to marry me now, Joan?"
"For a reason that I have guessed," I said steadily. I moved on to the end of the hedge, turned up the path towards the garden gate.
Harry followed. I felt that he was fuming and bewildered. He muttered: "What do you mean?"
Without looking at him I replied: "I think you're asking me to accept you because another girl has refused you too often. You want to show another girl that you don't care; that other people have jumped at you! I know that some men have married for no better reason. ”

“ Some of the hens with their brood clucked about that midden in the yard to which I'd added by several barrow-loads; the rest were in a field that sloped quite steeply up the hill. I had fed the first lot in the yard; I had ascended the hill to the field with the coops dotted about it, and I had shut a brood of restless, fluffy, "peep"-ing chicks into the coop for them to feed undisturbed by their marauding grown-ups, when suddenly there brushed against my leggings the fluffy white-and-golden coat of Captain Holiday's collie. ”

“ Days of sitting curled up like a squirrel in the school-room armchair while the rain lashed the panes and all the world of Every-day was blotted out as I pored over Shakespere, or "Called Back" or "The Last Days of Pompeii" or "Three Men in a Boat"—ah, the omnivorous and profoundly satisfying reading of the early teens! Meals that to a growing girl were banquets of Welsh mutton and jam roly-poly ... tea-parties that were events ... jokes that brought laughter that brought tears to stream down the cheeks convulsed ... quick fierce likes and dislikes ... shames ... ”

“ And I was glad—that is, as glad as I could allow myself to feel in the circumstances—that, to take up my new venture, Fate had sent me back to the Land of my Fathers.
"There!" exclaimed Vic presently. "There's the farm!"
She pointed to a square building of apricot red, backed by trees and a gently-sloping green hill. It had a flat slate roof, and its many windows glittered in the sun.
With interested curiosity I gazed upon it as we came nearer—the farm where my chum and I were to receive our training for this new life which we'd chosen for ourselves—on a toss-up! ”

“ I insisted: "You don't want to marry anybody but the girl I introduced you to myself—Muriel Elvey!"
Slowly the scarlet flush deepened on the young man's face; his eyes wavered, left mine. Utterly abashed he looked, shamefaced, miserably embarrassed; and how much younger in his awkwardness! He was a schoolboy again, caught out in some wrong-doing that put him not only in the wrong, but made him ridiculous—a thing no man can stand.
And no woman who is a woman can stand the sight of any man suffering thus! ”