“I expect you’ll be reduced to subalterns, yet. And by the way, Lance-Corporal, you can call me ‘sir.’”
Susie giggled. “I believe you’re drunk,” she said.
“Drunk with chivalry,” said Basil.
That evening Cedric Lyne left to rejoin his regiment. The forty-eight hours of embarkation leave were over and although he had chosen to start an hour earlier rather than travel by the special train, it was only with difficulty that he found a carriage free from brother officers who had made the same choice. They were going to the North to embark at dawn next-day and sail straight into action.
The first-class carriage was quite full, four a side, and the racks piled high with baggage. Black funnel-shaped shields cast the light onto the passengers’ laps; their faces in the surrounding darkness were indistinguishable; a naval paymaster-commander slept peacefully in one corner; two civilians strained their eyes over the evening papers; the other four were soldiers. Cedric sat between two soldiers, stared at the shadowy luggage above the civilians’ heads, and ruminated, chewing the last, bitter essence from the events of the last two days.
Because he was thirty-five years of age, and spoke French and was built rather for grace than smartness, they had made Cedric battalion Intelligence officer. He kept the war diary and on wet days was often borrowed by the company commanders to lecture on map reading, security, and the order of battle of a German infantry division. These were Cedric’s three lectures. When they were exhausted he was sent on a gas course and after that on a course on interpretation of air photographs. On exercise he stuck pins in a map and kept a file of field messages.
“There really isn’t very much you can do until we get into action,” said his commanding officer. “You might ring up the photographers in Aldershot about taking that regimental group.”
They put him in charge of the Officers’ Mess and made his visits there hideous with complaints.
“We’re out of Kummel again, Cedric.”
“Surely there’s some perfectly simple way of keeping the soup hot, Lyne.”
“If officers will take the papers to their quarters, the only answer is to order more papers.”
“The Stilton has been allowed to go dry again.”
That had been his life; but Nigel did not know this. For Nigel, at eight years of age, his father was a man at arms and a hero. When they were given embarkation leave, Cedric telephoned to Nigel’s head-master and the child met him at their station in the country. Pride in his father and pleasure at an unforeseen holiday made their night at home an enthralling experience for Nigel. The home was given over to empty wards and an idle hospital staff. Cedric and his son stayed in the farm where, before she left, Angela had fitted up a few rooms with furniture from the house. Nigel was full of questions; why Cedric’s buttons were differently arranged from the fathers’ and brothers’ buttons of most of the fellows; what was the difference between a Bren and a Vickers; how much faster were our fighters than the Germans’; whether Hitler had fits, as one fellow said, and, if so, did he froth at the mouth and roll his eyes as the girl at the lodge had once done?
That evening, Cedric took a long farewell of his water garden. It was for the water principally that he and Angela had chosen the place, ten years ago, when they were first engaged. It rose in a clear and copious spring in the hillside above the house and fell in a series of natural cascades to join the considerable stream which flowed more solemnly through the park. He and Angela had eaten a picnic lunch by the spring and looked down on the symmetrical, rectangular building below.
“It’ll do,” said Angela. “I’ll offer them fifteen thousand.”
It never embarrassed Cedric to be married to a rich woman. He had not married for money in any gross sense, but he loved the rare and beautiful things which money could buy, and Angela’s great fortune made her trebly rare and beautiful in his eyes.
It was surprising that they should have met at all. Cedric had been for years in his regiment, kept there by his father, who gave him an allowance, which he could ill spare, on that condition alone. It was that or an office for Cedric, and despite the tedious company, there was just enough pageantry about peace-time soldiering to keep his imagination engaged. Cedric was accomplished; he was a beautiful horseman but hated the rigours of fox-hunting; he was a very fine shot and because that formed a single tenuous bond with his brother officers and because it was agreeable to do anything pre-eminently well, he, accepted invitations to pheasant-shooting in houses where, when they were not at the coverts, he felt lost and lonely. Angela’s father had a celebrated shoot in Norfolk; he had also, Cedric was told, a collection of French impressionists. Thither that autumn ten years ago Cedric had gone and had found the pictures too obvious and the birds too tame and the party tedious beyond description, except for Angela, past her debutante days, aloof now and living in a cool and mysterious solitude of her own creation. She had resisted at first every attempt on the defences she had built up against a noisy world and then, quite suddenly, she had accepted Cedric as being like herself a stranger in these parts, as being, unlike herself, full of understanding of another, more splendid, attainable world outside. Angela’s father thought Cedric a poor fellow, settled vast sums on them, and let them go their own way.
And this was the way they had gone. Cedric stood by the spring, enshrined, now, in a little temple. The architrave was covered with stalactites, the dome was set with real shells and the clear water bubbled out from the feet of a Triton. Cedric and Angela had bought this temple on their honeymoon at a deserted villa in the hills behind Naples.
Below in the hillside lay the cave which Cedric had bought the summer that Angela had refused to come with him to Salzburg; the summer when she met Basil. The lonely and humiliating years after that summer each had its monument.
“Daddy, what are you waiting for?”
“I’m just looking at the grottoes.”
“But you’ve seen them thousands of times. They’re always the same.”
Always the same; joys for ever; not like men and women with their loves and hates.
“Daddy, there’s an aeroplane. Is it a Hurricane?”
“No, Nigel, a Spitfire.”
“How d’you tell the difference?”
Then, on an impulse, he had said, “Nigel, shall we go to London and see Mummy?”
“We might see ‘The Lion Has Wings’ too. The fellows say it’s awfully decent.”
