Colonel Butler's Wolf

Butler eyed the croquet game. 'I'll try and catch his eye, I think.'

'Whose eye do you want?' said Klobucki, at his elbow.

'The Colonel doesn't want anyone's eye,' said Polly hastily. 'But I want that hound McLachlan.'

'He won't thank you for disturbing his game just now, Polly-Anna.' Klobucki turned back to Butler.

'You know, sir, when I came to this country I thought croquet was a limey game for old English ladies—

tea and muffins and croquet. But I've played it and it isn't like that at all. It's the most goddam ruthless, cut- throat business you ever saw—'

'Yes, I've heard it's a—ah—a demanding game,' replied Butler politely, still watching for McLachlan to look up.

'That isn't the half of it. It's a game for managing directors and Obergruppenfuhrers!' Klobucki shook his head. 'Say—but if you're waiting for Dan to spot you, you've got a long wait. He's our only hope, and he plays a real mean game—and when he does something like this he really concentrates on it.'

Butler sensed that the American was right. That early swipe of McLachlan's must have been a limbering up stroke, designed to unnerve his opponents; now he was holding his mallet in a different way, swinging it between his legs, as absorbed and watchful as a billiard player in a championship match.

'Yes, I think you're right,' he murmured.

'I am right—I know our Danny,' said Klobucki ruefully. 'But what I came to say was—well, I guess I wasn't all that polite by the bar back there, with the smart-alec quotations. I've come to make amends.'

Butler looked at the young American in surprise.

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'My dear chap, I wasn't offended. It was an extremely apposite bit of verse. I'm only sorry that I lack the education to answer you in the same way.'

Polly laughed. 'Don't give him the chance, Colonel. Mike's got the quote for every occasion—it's the cross we have to bear for his obsession with English literature.'

'You can giggle, Polly. I just happen to find other men's flowers more beautiful than my own. And that's my cross, not yours, Polly-Anna.' There was no glint behind the spectacles now. 'As it happens, there are a few lines for you, Colonel, to put people like me in my place. And I seem to remember they were written about an army of Britishers—

Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.

That's Housman, but I could give you plenty more—Kipling knew it too, and we Americans know how to value him even if you don't over here.'

'I don't know whether Colonel Butler understood a word of what you're saying, Mike,' said Polly. 'But I certainly don't.'

'You darned well ought to, honey—living where you do.' Klobucki pointed out of the window, southwards towards the line of crags. 'How many times do you think the fat guys down in Londinium—

or the Roman-Britishers in the nice centrally-heated villas—how many times do you think they spared a thought for these poor cats up on the Wall? Only when the tax-man came round, I guess—and then they'd curse the over- fed, over-paid, licentious soldiery. Maybe they were all that, too. But they were still all that stood between the central-heating and the barbarians—the barbari.'

'Well!' Polly looked at Butler, her eyebrows raised. 'Mike really is making amends.'

'Not at all,' Klobucki shook his head vigorously. 'Truth doesn't make amends by itself. My amends are more— more edible.' He turned, peering back into the room. 'Sir! Dr Gracey, sir!'

'Why must you be so formal, Mike?' The voice that boomed in reply was startlingly deep, but with the quality of a bass pipe on a cathedral organ.

'In deference to your great age and seniority, sir,' replied the American, straightfaced. 'And your stature, of course.'

Stature indeed, thought Butler. The man was even bigger than Audley, and yet without a hint of surplus flesh: simply a larger-than-life man.

'I'd like you to meet my guest for tomorrow night, sir,' continued Klobucki. 'Colonel Butler—Dr dummy2.htm

Gracey.'

'Ah, Butler!' Gracey extended a huge, serviceable hand. 'Charles Epton has been telling me about you—

and so has my godless god-daughter. And I gather you've met my old friend Geoffrey Hobson when you were up in Oxford.'

'Hah!' Butler grunted, gripping the hand and meeting the shrewd eyes in the same moment. He felt the years stripping away from him, leaving him naked and unprotected: Second Lieutenant Butler, green and desperately worried about his Lancashire accent, reporting to battalion headquarters on the edge of the Reichswald, with the rumble of the distant German guns echoing in his empty stomach.

'And you are the authority on the Byzantine army, I gather, Butler?'

'Hardly the authority, sir. I've made a special study of their siege operations on the eastern front in the 6th century,' said Butter ponderously. 'From Belisarius to the Emperor Maurice, you know.'

'Indeed.' There was a reassuring lack of interest in Gracey's voice; it would have been altogether too gruesome if he had turned out to be himself an expert in the subject. 'Well, the man you want to talk to is our Dr Audley, though he'd tend to take the Persian and the Arab side more than the Byzantine . . .'

Gracey looked around the room '. . . but he doesn't appear to be thirsty this afternoon. Where is David, Polly?'