The Hour of the Donkey

Mr Bastable looked down at his congealing brown Windsor soup and could take no more of the droning.

'I saw a dog run over in the High Street this morning, Mr Plumb, as I was corning to work—by a bus.'

'A dog? Tut-tut! Very nasty, I'm sure . . . But with the increasing number of motor vehicles there are on the roads these days, and the number of dogs allowed to run wild, snapping at cyclists and fouling the footpaths ... we shall just have to get used to seeing them run over, my boy. You mustn't let a little thing like that put you off your lunch, otherwise you'll waste away.' Sugar Plumb spooned up the last of his soup with relish, quite unmoved.

Young Mr Bastable was surprised at such cold-bloodedness, even a little shocked by it. For apart from being dull and dummy4

having a weak stomach, Sugar Plumb was generally a gentle and considerate man.

'There was blood and—and bits of dog everywhere, Mr Plumb.'

Sugar Plumb wiped his mouth carefully with his serviette. 'So there would be,' he agreed. 'The entire contents of the wretched animal, no doubt. But we must still get used to such mishaps.'

'I don't think I'll ever get used to seeing entrails, Mr Plumb—

outside a butcher's shop, anyway.'

Plumb looked at him over his spectacles. 'Nonsense, my boy!

When I first went into the line opposite Spanbroekmolen . . .'

'Span—?'

'Spanbroekmolen—on the right flank of the Ypres Salient, under Messines Ridge .. . that was with the Londonderries, in the 36th Ulster Division—which was curious really, because I had never visited any part of Ireland—before the Third Ypres...' He paused as the waitress removed his soup plate.

'. . . let me see now . . . that would have been early June in 1917—June the third, I believe it was ... or perhaps it was the fourth ... no, the third, I'm almost certain, because my mother's birthday was on the eighth, and I recall feeling very badly about having forgotten to write to her early enough to be sure that she received my birthday congratulations —

because the letters sometimes took some time to reach their destination in those days . . . and I was quite right to feel dummy4

badly, because she received the telegram from the War Office about me—or not about me, as it happened—the day before she received my letter, which was after her brithday of course, and that letter gave her a very nasty turn, she told me afterwards—almost worse than the telegram, because she'd been half-expecting that... 'Like receiving a message from beyond the grave, Edwin,' she always used to say.' Mr Plumb smiled. 'And I always used to reply 'But it was slightly exaggerated, Mother'—the telegram, I mean, not the letter.'

'The telegram?'

' 'Killed in action',' Mr Plumb nodded. 'It was an administrative error, of course—they had probably confused two E. B. Plumbs, I expect.' The surviving E. B. Plumb wagged his finger at the young Mr Bastable. 'And that's why I always emphasize the importance of administrative efficiency, Henry. The customer is always right, so however good we may be at selling, we must back that up with the same care and efficiency in administration—we must not shock the customer with bad administration. That is a very important lesson which I cannot over-emphasize. Because, in this instance, we took the ridge—and with all those huge mines going up, that isn't surprising—but my mother was nevertheless a dissatisfied customer, you might say—eh?'

It must have been young Mr Bastable's look of frozen incredulity which recalled Mr Plumb to the original direction of his sermon.

'What I mean, Henry, is that God in His Wisdom has so dummy4

constituted the human being that he can speedily become accustomed to anything.'

The waitress was hovering with Mr Plumb's lamb cutlets, but obviously didn't know what to do with young Mr Bastable's brown Windsor soup.

'Now —' Mr Plumb ignored the waitress,'—the things I saw around Spanbroekmolen that morning, and when we went on up the ridge too, would make a—would make a butcher's shop like a—like a—like a florist's on a spring morning.' He paused in triumphant appreciation of his own simile. 'But I soon got used to it—and I had never seen a dead man before I went into the line. So eat up your soup before it gets cold, now.'

Harry Bastable turned Sergeant Hobday over. He wasn't so very terrible, really—he might almost have been sleeping, except that his eyes were open. He was just very dusty and somehow taller, though quite surprisingly heavy and difficult to turn.

But he had no map with him.

Bastable looked around for Darkie, but couldn't find any trace of him. So... while Sergeant Hobday had been thrown clear—though 'clear' wasn't the right word to go with 'dead'—

Darkie must still be under the carrier.

With the map.

He went back to where Sergeant Hobday lay at the roadside, dummy4

with the vague idea of closing those open eyes; and also because Sergeant Hobday hadn't frightened him as much as he had expected, and returning to what he knew, and what wasn't as awful as he had imagined, might somehow help the process of Mr Plumb's advice and God's infinite mercy and wisdom.

But when he got there he didn't see the point of touching the Sergeant's face (there would be other faces, plenty of them; and it wouldn't make any difference to them, closing their eyes, they couldn't see anything: or if they could—any golden bridges and silver rivers—they might just as well go on looking; and he had other things to do, anyway, than to go around closing eyes). He merely robbed Sergeant Hobday of his Webley revolver.

He did this in the first place because the Sergeant's revolver would have a full cylinder, and he had fired two