“What scuffle?” I asked.
“Why, the box got upset, sir, the night of the raid when we all stood to in a bit of a hurry, sir.”
I remembered there had been some confusion and noise behind the arras that night when the Germans raided on the left; apparently all the knives and forks had fallen to the ground and several had snapped under the martial trampling of feet when our retainers stood to arms. For many days afterwards when anything was lost, one’s anger was appeased by “Lost in the scuffle, sir.” At last it got too much of a good thing.
“Why this new teapot, Davies?” I said a few days later.
“The old one was lost in the scuffle, sir.”
“Look here,” I said. “We had the old one yesterday, and this morning I saw it broken on Madame’s manure heap. Here endeth ‘lost in the scuffle.’ See? Go back to rats.”
“Very good, sir.”
That night, about ten o’clock, when Clark, Nicolson, and Brownlow (who had been our guest) had gone back to their respective billets, Dixon and I were sitting in front of the stove, our feet up on the brass bar that ran along the top-front of it, on a comfortable red-plush settee. This settee made amends for very many things, such as: a tile floor; four doors, one of which scraped most excruciatingly over the tiles, and another being glass-panelled allowed in much cold air from the butcher’s shop; no entry for the servants save either through the butcher’s shop or through the bedroom viâ the open window; very little room to turn round in, when we were all there; a smell of stale lard that permeated the whole establishment; and finally, the necessity of moving the settee every time Madame or Mam’selle wanted to get to either the cellar or the stairs.
But now all these disabilities were removed, everyone else having gone off to bed, and Dixon and I were talking lazily before turning in also. I had a large pan of boiling water waiting on the top of the range, and my canvas bath was all ready in the next room.
“Ah! the discomfort of it!” ejaculated Dixon. “The terrible discomfort of it all!”