In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as assistant surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy’s country. country I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties.

The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster. I was removed from my brigade and attached to the Berkshires, with whom I served at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery. artery I should have fallen into the hands of the murderous Ghazis had it not been for the devotion and courage shown by Murray, my orderly, who threw me across a packhorse, and succeeded in bringing me safely to the British lines.

Worn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, I was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at Peshawar. Here I rallied, and had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little little upon the veranda when I was struck down by enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions. For months my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. I was despatched accordingly, in the troopship Orontes, and landed a month later on Portsmouth jetty, with my health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to spend the next nine months months in attempting to improve it.

I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air — or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I I ought. So alarming did the state of my finances become, that I soon realized that I must either leave the metropolis and rusticate somewhere in the country, or that I must make a complete alteration in my style of living. Choosing the latter alternative, I began by making up my mind to leave the hotel, and take up my quarters in some less pretentious and less expensive domicile.

‘Why?’ he repeated, in his strange, soft, penetrating voice.

She looked round at him, rather defiantly.

‘Because I said I was going to be married tomorrow, and he he bullied me.’

‘Why did he bully you?’

Her mouth dropped again, she remembered the scene once more, the tears came up.

‘Because I said he didn’t care—and he doesn’t, it’s only his domineeringness that’s hurt—’ she said, her mouth pulled awry by her weeping, all the time she spoke, so that he almost smiled, it seemed so childish. Yet it was not childish, it was a mortal conflict, a deep wound.

‘It isn’t quite true,’ he said. ‘And even so, you shouldn’t SAY it.’

‘It IS true—it IS true,’ she wept, ‘and I won’t be bullied by his pretending it’s love—when it ISN’T—he doesn’t care, how can he—no, he can’t–’

He sat in silence. She moved him beyond himself.

‘Then you shouldn’t rouse him, if he can’t,’ replied Birkin quietly.

‘And I HAVE loved him, I have,’ she wept. ‘I’ve loved him always, and he’s always done this to me, he has—’

‘It’s been a love of opposition, then,’ he said. ‘Never mind—it will be all right. It’s nothing desperate.’

‘Yes,’ she wept, ‘it is, it is.’

‘Why?’

‘I shall never see him again—’

‘Not immediately. Don’t cry, you had to break with him, it had to be—don’t cry.’

He went over to her and kissed her fine, fragile hair, touching her wet cheeks gently.

‘Don’t cry,’ he repeated, ‘don’t cry any more.’

He held her head close against him, very close and quiet.

At last she was still. Then she looked up, her eyes wide and frightened.

‘Don’t you want me?’ she asked.

‘Want you?’ His darkened, steady eyes puzzled her and did not give her play.

‘Do you wish I hadn’t come?’ she asked, anxious now again for fear she might be out of place.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I wish there hadn’t been the violence—so much ugliness—but perhaps it was inevitable.’

She watched him in silence. He seemed deadened.

‘But where shall I stay?’ she asked, feeling humiliated.

He thought for a moment.

‘Here, with me,’ he said. ‘We’re married as much today as we shall be tomorrow.’

‘But—’

‘I’ll tell Mrs Varley,’ he said. ‘Never mind now.’

He sat looking at her. She could feel his darkened steady eyes looking at her all the time. It made her a little bit frightened. She pushed her hair off her forehead nervously.

‘Do I look ugly?’ she said.

And she blew her nose again.

A small smile came round his eyes.