Phoenix and Ashes

dress. They take a little bit of nothing and make everything out of it, throw themselves at impossible targets and often as not, pull the trick off on the basis of sheer savoir faire. Then when you try and congratulate or commiserate with them, you get the same answer. 'C'est la vie, c'est la. guerre,' and then they beg a cigarette off you and make off with the whole pack, and you end up feeling privileged they took your last fag-end.' He shook his head again, chuckling.

She smiled. He seemed easier talking about the war and flying today than he had been the last time she'd seen him. But she didn't want to press things too hard, so she asked him what he had been doing since they'd last met.

He sighed. 'Oh, being horribly lord-of-the-manor. Meeting my tenant farmers. Looking at alternatives to some of what we've been raising—things that won't need as much labor. Going over the books with my estate manager. Mater didn't bother; mention the accounts to her and she flaps her hands and looks a bit faint.'

'Poor thing,' Eleanor said, feelingly. 'I hate accounting. I keep thinking I've put numbers in all the wrong columns, even when I haven't.'

'Well, she would do just that and never know it, and that's a fact.' He set his empty ginger-beer bottle down, and rummaged in the basket inquisitively. 'I say! Tea-cakes!'

'They're from a tin,' she warned.

'That's the only kind we could get, over there,' he replied. 'Wouldn't remember what a proper one tasted like. We were always starved for sweets, on account of it being so plaguey cold and never really able to get properly warm except during summer. All tents do is keep off the rain—and sometimes not even that.' 'Well, have my share,' she told him generously. The rest of the afternoon went by much as the first had; in inconsequential chatter. Any time he started to run dry of inconsequentials, she prompted him with something else light. Somehow she knew that this was what he needed. When he talked about the war, he shouldn't be talking about the war, itself, but about things on the periphery. And above all, she was not going to ask him about fighting.

Books, though—that was a safe enough topic. And he had read an astonishing variety. It seemed that once someone was done with whatever volume had been sent him by friends, lover, or relatives, if it didn't have sentimental value, it became common property. A surprising amount of poetry ended up making the rounds of the barracks—somehow he had ended up memorizing a great deal of it, and without too much coaxing she got him to recite quite a bit of it. It wasn't too much of a surprise that he found Kipling to his taste; when he recited 'The Bridge-Guard at Karoo' she could almost see the scene played out in front of her, the sound and lights of the train coming out of the hot, dark silence of the desert night, the men on their solitary, isolated duty grasping desperately for the few moments of civilization they were allowed, and then the train moving on again, leaving them—'few, forgotten, and lonely'—to their thankless post.

She thought that he could see it, too. Perhaps that was why he recited it so feelingly.

Then he had her in stitches as he related the rather improbable tales found in some of the American dime novels that had been left with his air-wing.

'How can anyone take any of that seriously?' she gasped, after a particularly funny confrontation between the hero and an entire tribe of Red Indians, complicated by a buffalo stampede and a raid by the James Gang. It probably hadn't been intended to be funny, at least not by the original author, but it was so utterly impossible that it ended up being a parody of itself.

'I have had men swear solemnly to me that such things, if they hadn't happened to them, personally, had certainly happened to a friend of a friend, or a distant cousin, or some such connection,' Reggie replied, as she held her aching side. 'Great tellers of tall tales, are the Yanks. Even the ones who never got farther west than New York City in their lives seemed to think they should be cowboys.'

She looked down at her rosemary sprig, and saw with disappointment that it was starting to wilt. 'Oh, bother,' she said aloud. 'Reggie, I would so like to stay here until suppertime—'

'No, no—I quite understand. Stolen hours, and all that.' He said it with surface lightness, but she saw the quickly veiled disappointment, and it gave her a little thrill to realize that he had enjoyed being with her, and he wanted her to stay.

'I have to go,' she said, honestly. 'I don't have a choice. I can be here tomorrow, but after that—I can't tell you when the next time I'll be able to get away will be.'

She was packing up the basket as she spoke. They both reached for the same item as she finished the sentence; she flushed, and pulled back her hand. He placed the saucer in the basket, and said, 'If I had my way, you'd be a lady of leisure—but I haven't been getting my way very often lately.'

'I don't think any of us have been,' she replied, again truthfully. 'So we muddle through however we can. Tomorrow?'

'Tomorrow,' he pledged.

She couldn't help herself; she looked back twice as she trudged away, and each time he was watching her, and when he saw her looking, he lifted his hand to wave.

She carried that image with her all the way home.