“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 everyone.”
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 some one let two hundred-pound dumbbells 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, O Nine 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?”
The young man said:
“No… I don’t know that I do. I don’t know what to think.
. .The world’s rotten….”
“Oh, the world’s pretty rotten, all right,” Tietjens answered. And, in his fatigue of mind caused by having to attend to innumerable concrete facts like the providing of households for a thousand men every few days, arranging parade states for an extraordinarily mixed set of troops of all arms with very mixed drills, and fighting the Assistant Provost Marshal to keep his own men out of the clutches of the beastly Garrison Military Police who had got a down on all Canadians, he felt he had not any curiosity at all left… Yet he felt vaguely that, at the back of his mind, there was some reason for trying to cure this young member of the lower middle classes.
He repeated:
“Yes, the world’s certainly pretty rotten. But that’s not its particular line of rottenness as far as we are concerned…. We’re tangled up, not because we’ve got Huns in our orderly rooms, but just because we’ve got English. That’s the bat in our belfry…. That Hun plane is presumably coming back. Half a dozen of them….”
The young man, his mind eased by having got off his chest a confounded lot of semi-nonsensical ravings, considered the return of the Hun planes with gloomy indifference. His problem really was: could he stand the —— noise that would probably accompany their return? He had to get really into his head that this was an open space to all intents and purposes. There would not be splinters of stone flying about. He was ready to be hit by iron, steel, lead, copper, or brass shell rims, but not by beastly splinters of stone knocked off house fronts. That consideration had come to him during his beastly, his beastly, his infernal, damnable leave in London, when just such a filthy row had been going on…. Divorce leave!… Captain McKechnie, second attached ninth Glamorganshires, is granted leave from the 14/11 to the 29/11 for the purpose of obtaining a divorce…. The memory seemed to burst inside him with the noise of one of those beastly enormous tin-pot crashes — and it always came when guns made that particular kind of tin-pot crash: the two came together, the internal one and the crash outside. He felt that chimney-pots were going to crash on to his head. You protected yourself by shouting at damned infernal idiots; if you could out-shout the row you were safe…. That was not sensible, but you got ease that way!…
“In matters of Information they’re not a patch on us.” Tietjens tried the speech on cautiously, and concluded: “We know what the Enemy rules read in the, sealed envelopes beside their breakfast bacon-and-egg plates.”
It had occurred to him that it was a military duty to bother himself about the mental equilibrium of this member of the lower classes. So he talked… any old talk, wearisomely, to keep his mind employed! Captain Mackenzie was an officer of His Majesty the King: the property, body and soul, of His Majesty and His Majesty’s War Office. It was Tietjens’ duty to preserve this fellow as it was his duty to prevent deterioration in any other piece of the King’s property. That was implicit in the oath of allegiance. He went on talking: