As a precautionary measure we now surrounded the gramophone with a barbed-wire entanglement, and so we carried on.
Next day we saw a score of kiltie officers grouped outside their Mess, heads together, apparently in earnest consultation. Every now and again they would turn and glare darkly in our direction.
"The white chiefs hold heap big palaver over yonder," Albert Edward remarked. "They're tossing up now to decide who shall come over and beard us. The braw bairn with the astrakhan knees has lost; he's cocking his bonnet and asking his pals if he's got his sporran on straight. Behold he approacheth, stepping delicately. I leave it to you, partner."
I lay in the grass and waited for the deputation. The gramophone, safe behind its sandbags and wire, was doing business as usual, Miss Birdie yowling away like a wild cat on hot cinders. The deputation picked his way round the horse lines, nodded to me and sat down on the oil-drum we keep for the accommodation of guests. He nervously opened the ball by remarking that the weather was fine.
I did not agree with him, but refused to argue. That baffled him for some seconds, but he recovered by maintaining that it was anyway finer than it had been in 1915. After that outburst he seemed at a loss for a topic of conversation, and sat scratching his ear as if he expected to get inspiration out of it as a conjurer gets rabbits.
"Ye seem verra pairtial to music?" he ventured presently.
"Passionately," said I.
"Ah—hem! Ye seem verra pairtial to that one selection," he continued.
"Passionately devoted to it," said I. "Lovely little thing; I adore its sentiment, tempo, tremolo and timbre, its fortissimo and allegro. Just listen to the part that's coming now—
'When the humming birds are singing
And the old church bells are ringing
We'll canoodle, we'll canoodle 'neath the moon.
Down in Alabama
You'll be my starry-eyed charmer;
On my white-haired kitten's grave we'll sit and spoon, spoon,
spoo-oo-oon.'