No, they had not asked Madame.
Then followed a blaze of vituperation, and Richards was sent at the double into the kitchen. Soon Madame appeared, with sticks and coal, and lit the fire. We watched the crackles, too cold to do anything else. The adjoining room, where Dixon and I slept, was an ice-house, also tiled. It was too cold to talk even.
“C’est froid dans les tranchés,” said I in execrable French.
“Mais oui, m’sieur l’officier,” said Madame, deeply sympathising.
I thought of the blazing fire in 71 North, but it was too cold to say anything more. What matter if Madame imagined us standing in a foot of snow? So we should have been for the most part had we been in the line the last two days, instead of in reserve.
Soon it began to get less icy, and the stove looked a little less of the blacklead order. It was a kitchen-range really, with a boiler and oven; but the boiler was rather leaky. Now, as the coal blazed up, life began to ebb back again.
Confound it! The stove was smoking like fury. Pah! The flues were all full of soot. Dixon was rather an expert on stoves, and said that all that was needed was a brush. Where had all the servants disappeared to? Why wasn’t someone there? I opened the door into our bedroom—a cold blast struck me in the face. In the middle of the room, unopened, sat our two valises, like desert islands in a sea of red tiles.
“Hang it all, this is the limit,” I said, and ran out into the street, and into the next house, where the servants’ quarters were. And there, in the middle of a pile of half-packed boxes, stood Gray, eating a piece of bread. Now I discovered afterwards that the boxes had just been brought in by Cody and Lewis, that Davies and Richards had gone after the coal, and were at that moment staggering under the weight of it on their way from the stores, and that Gray could not do anything more, having unpacked the boxes, until the coal came. But I did not grasp these subtle details of the interior economy of the servants’ hall, and I broke out into a real hot strafe. Why should Gray be standing there eating, while the officers shivered and starved?
I returned to Dixon, and found Clark and Nicolson there; and together we all fumed. Then in came the post-corporal with an accumulation of parcels, and we stopped fuming.
“By Jove,” I exclaimed, a few minutes later. “The hare. I had forgotten le—what is it, lièvre, lèvre? I forget. Never mind. Lewis, bring the hare along, and ask Madame in your best manner if she would do us the honour of cooking it for us. To-night, now.”