The Pool in the Desert | Page 6

John's wife in fact.
We went back to the frontier, and the regiment saw a lot of service.
That meant medals and fun for my husband, but economy and anxiety
for me, though I managed to be allowed as close to the firing line as
any woman.
Once the Colonel's wife and I, sitting in Fort Samila, actually heard the
rifles of a punitive expedition cracking on the other side of the
river--that was a bad moment. My man came in after fifteen hours'
fighting, and went sound asleep, sitting before his food with his knife
and fork in his hands. But service makes heavy demands besides those
on your wife's nerves. We had saved two thousand rupees, I remember,
against another run home, and it all went like powder, in the Mirzai
expedition; and the run home diminished to a month in a
boarding-house in the hills.

Meanwhile, however, we had begun to correspond with our daughter,
in large round words of one syllable, behind which, of course, was
plain the patient guiding hand of Aunt Emma. One could hear Aunt
Emma suggesting what would be nice to say, trying to instil a little pale
affection for the far-off papa and mamma. There was so little Cecily
and so much Emma--of course, it could not be otherwise--that I used to
take, I fear, but a perfunctory joy in these letters. When we went home
again I stipulated absolutely that she was to write to us without any sort
of supervision--the child was ten.
'But the spelling!' cried Aunt Emma, with lifted eyebrows.
'Her letters aren't exercises,' I was obliged to retort; 'she will do the best
she can.'
We found her a docile little girl, with nice manners, a thoroughly
unobjectionable child. I saw quite clearly that I could not have brought
her up so well; indeed, there were moments when I fancied that Cecily,
contrasting me with her aunts, wondered a little what my bringing up
could have been like. With this reserve of criticism on Cecily's part,
however, we got on very tolerably, largely because I found it
impossible to assume any responsibility towards her, and in moments
of doubt or discipline referred her to her aunts. We spent a pleasant
summer with a little girl in the house whose interest in us was amusing,
and whose outings it was gratifying to arrange; but when we went back,
I had no desire to take her with us. I thought her very much better
where she was.
Then came the period which is filled, in a subordinate degree, with
Cecily's letters. I do not wish to claim more than I ought; they were not
my only or even my principal interest in life. It was a long period; it
lasted till she was twenty-one. John had had promotion in the meantime,
and there was rather more money, but he had earned his second brevet
with a bullet through one lung, and the doctors ordered our leave to be
spent in South Africa. We had photographs, we knew she had grown
tall and athletic and comely, and the letters were always very creditable.
I had the unusual and qualified privilege of watching my daughter's
development from ten to twenty-one, at a distance of four thousand

miles, by means of the written word. I wrote myself as provocatively as
possible; I sought for every string, but the vibration that came back
across the seas to me was always other than the one I looked for, and
sometimes there was none. Nevertheless, Mrs. Farnham wrote me that
Cecily very much valued my communications. Once when I had
described an unusual excursion in a native state, I learned that she had
read my letter aloud to the sewing circle. After that I abandoned
description, and confined myself to such intimate personal details as no
sewing circle could find amusing. The child's own letters were simply a
mirror of the ideas of the Farnham ladies; that must have been so, it
was not altogether my jaundiced eye. Alice and Emma and
grandmamma paraded the pages in turn. I very early gave up hope of
discoveries in my daughter, though as much of the original as I could
detect was satisfactorily simple and sturdy. I found little things to
criticize, of course, tendencies to correct; and by return post I criticized
and corrected, but the distance and the deliberation seemed to touch my
maxims with a kind of arid frivolity, and sometimes I tore them up.
One quick, warm-blooded scolding would have been worth a sheaf of
them. My studied little phrases could only inoculate her with a dislike
for me without protecting her from anything under the sun.
However, I found she didn't dislike me, when John and I went home at
last to bring