Sergeant-Major Cowley was standing beside the table. He said:
‘Wouldn’t it be a good thing, sir, to send a runner to the depot sergeant cook and tell him we’re going to indent for suppers for the draft? We could send the other with the 128’s to Quarter. They’re neither wanted here for the moment.’
The other captain went on incessantly talking—but about his fabulous uncle, not about Sylvia. It was difficult for Tietjens to get what he wanted said. He wanted the second runner sent to the depot quartermaster with a message to the effect that if G.S. candles for hooded lamps were not provided for the use of his orderly room by return of bearer he, Captain Tietjens, commanding Number XVI Casual Battalion, would bring the whole matter of supplies for his battalion that same night before Base Headquarters. They were all three talking at once: heavy fatalism overwhelmed Tietjens at the thought of the stubbornness showed by the depot quartermaster. The big unit beside his camp was a weary obstinacy of obstruction. You would have thought they would have displayed some eagerness to get his men up into the line. Let alone that the men were urgently needed, the more of his men went the more of them stayed behind. Yet they tried to stop his meat, his groceries, his braces, his identification discs, his soldiers’ small books . . . Every imaginable hindrance, and not even self-interested common sense! . . . He managed also to convey to Sergeant-Major Cowley that, as everything seemed to have quieted down, the Canadian sergeant-major had better go and see if everything was ready for falling his draft in . . . If things remained quiet for another ten minutes, the ‘All Clear’ might then be expected . . . He knew that Sergeant-Major Cowley wanted to get the Other Ranks out of the hut with that captain carrying on like that, and he did not see why the old N.C.O. should not have what he wanted.
It was as if a tender and masculine butler withdrew himself. Cowley’s grey walrus moustache and scarlet cheeks showed for a moment beside the brazier, whispering at the ears of the runners, a hand kindly on each of their shoulders. The runners went; the Canadian went. Sergeant-Major Cowley, his form blocking the doorway, surveyed the stars. He found it difficult to realize that the same pinpricks of light through black manifolding paper as he looked at, looked down also on his villa and his elderly wife at Isleworth beside the Thames above London. He knew it to be the fact, yet it was difficult to realize. He imagined the trams going along the High Street, his missus in one of them with her supper in a string bag on her stout knees. The trams lit up and shining. He imagined her having kippers for supper: ten to one it would be kippers. Her favourites. His daughter was in the W.A.A.C.’s by now. She had been cashier to Parks’s, the big butchers in Brent-ford, and pretty she had used to look in the glass case. Like as if it might have been the British Museum where they had Pharaohs and others in glass cases . . . There were threshing machines droning away all over the night. He always said they were like threshing machines . . . Crikey, if only they were! . . . But they might be our own planes, of course. A good welsh rarebit he had had for tea.
In the hut, the light from the brazier having fewer limbs on which to fall, a sort of intimacy seemed to descend, and Tietjens felt himself gain in ability to deal with his mad friend. Captain Mackenzie—Tietjens was not sure that the name was Mackenzie: it had looked something like it in the general’s hand—Captain Mackenzie was going on about the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of some fabulous uncle. Apparently at some important juncture the uncle had refused to acknowledge acquaintanceship with the nephew. From that all the misfortunes of the nephew had arisen . . . Suddenly Tietjens said:
‘Look here, pull yourself together. Are you mad? Stark, staring? . . . Or only just play-acting?’
The man suddenly sank down on to the bully-beef case that served for a chair. He stammered a question as to what—what—what Tietjens meant.
‘If you let yourself go,’ Tietjens said, ‘you may let yourself go a tidy sight farther than you want to.’
‘You’re not a mad doctor,’ the other said. ‘It’s no good your trying to come it over me. I know all about you. I’ve got an uncle who’s done the dirty on me—the dirtiest dirty ever was done on a man. If it hadn’t been for him I shouldn’t be here now.’
‘You talk as if the fellow had sold you into slavery,’ Tietjens said.
‘He’s your closest friend,’ Mackenzie seemed to advance as a motive for revenge on Tietjens. ‘He’s a friend of the general’s, too. Of your wife’s as well. He’s in with every one.’
A few desultory, pleasurable ‘pop-op-ops’ sounded from far overhead to the left.
‘They imagine they’ve found the Hun again,’ Tietjens said. ‘That’s all right; you concentrate on your uncle. Only don’t exaggerate his importance to the world. I assure you you are mistaken if you call him a friend of mine. I have not got a friend in the world.’ He added: ‘Are you going to mind the noise? If it is going to get on your nerves you can walk in a dignified manner to a dugout, now, before it gets bad . . . ’ He called out to Cowley to go and tell the Canadian sergeant-major to get his men back into their shelters if they had come out. Until the ‘All Clear’ went.
Captain Mackenzie sat himself gloomily down at table.
‘Damn it all,’ he said, ‘don’t think I’m afraid of a little shrapnel. I’ve had two periods solid of fourteen and nine months in the line. I could have got out on to the rotten staff . . . It’s damn it: it’s the beastly row . . . Why isn’t one a beastly girl and privileged to shriek? By God, I’ll get even with some of them one of these days . . . ’
‘Why not shriek?’ Tietjens asked. ‘You can, for me. No one’s going to doubt your courage here.’
Loud drops of rain spattered down all round the hut; there was a familiar thud on the ground a yard or so away, a sharp tearing sound above, a sharper knock on the table between them. Mackenzie took the shrapnel bullet that had fallen and turned it round and round between finger and thumb.
‘You think you caught me on the hop just now,’ he said injuriously. ‘You’re damn clever.’
Two stories down below someone let two hundred-pound dumb-bells drop on the drawing-room carpet; all the windows of the house slammed in a race to get it over; the ‘pop-op-ops’ of the shrapnel went in wafts all over the air. There was again sudden silence that was painful, after you had braced yourself up to bear noise. The runner from the Rhondda came in with a light step bearing two fat candles. He took the hooded lamps from Tietjens and began to press the candles up against the inner springs, snorting sedulously through his nostrils . . .
‘Nearly got me, one of those candlesticks did,’ he said. ‘Touched my foot as it fell, it did. I did run. Surely to goodness I did run, cahptn.’
Inside the shrapnel shell was an iron bar with a flattened, broad nose. When the shell burst in the air this iron object fell to the ground and, since it came often from a great height, its fall was dangerous. The men called these candlesticks, which they much resembled.
A little ring of light now existed on the puce colour of the blanket-covered table. Tietjens showed, silver-headed, fresh-coloured, and bulky; Mackenzie, dark, revengeful eyes above a prognathous jaw. A very thin man, thirtyish.
‘You can go into the shelter with the Colonial troops, if you like,’ Tietjens said to the runner. The man answered after a pause, being very slow thinking, that he preferred to wait for his mate, O9 Morgan whatever.
‘They ought to let my orderly room have tin hats,’ Tietjens said to Mackenzie. ‘I’m damned if they didn’t take these fellows’ tin hats into store again when they attached to me for service, and I’m equally damned if they did not tell me that, if I wanted tin hats for my own headquarters, I had to write to H.Q. Canadians, Aldershot, or some such place in order to get the issue sanctioned.’
‘Our headquarters are full of Huns doing the Huns’ work,’ Mackenzie said hatefully. ‘I’d like to get among them one of these days.’
Tietjens looked with some attention at that young man with the Rembrandt shadows over his dark face. He said: ‘Do you believe that tripe?’