For a moment both Jim and Robin grew stiff and wooden-faced, for a very mountainous female dressed in Union Jacks sang something quite unspeakable about the heroes and the “boys” in khaki. Robin said “Good God!” under his breath once or twice, and the house, which contained a large number of soldiers, received her compliments in chilling silence, so that she was not encouraged to proceed with some encore verses.
“But do tell me why you like it so enormously?” said Helen, to distract Jim from this embarrassing lady.
“Oh, it’s the tunes a good deal, and then Arthur Angus is so awfully funny, and it’s all so muddled up and silly. It’s gay, you know, and when you’ve been superintending a lot of fellows digging trenches for practice all day in the rain, you want something that will take your mind off that devastating job.... Now there’s the dance.”
If Lady Grote had by some incalculable chance found herself alone at this preposterous revue nothing would have kept her in her seat for five minutes. But the infection of the two boys’ enjoyment took hold of her, and she found herself laughing because they laughed, and enjoying because they enjoyed. She even at Robin’s instigation tried to think the great Diana Coombe was an alluring and beautiful creature. Robin was clearly known to her, for she threw him discreet little smiles and glances (which quite accounted for his insistence that they should have seats in the front row). Presently she appeared to retire from the army and came on again as a French marquise, which she resembled about as much as she resembled a soldier, with Arthur Angus as her marquis, receiving guests at the door of an outrageous drawing-room, and saying: “How do you portez-vous?”
But really the stage occupied her less than the two boys between whom she sat, both in khaki, both enjoying themselves enormously, both soon to face the peril in Flanders, and both completely normal. For them no chasm had opened, or, at any rate, it had been negotiated by that divine elasticity of youth which had made them spring from the peak of the old life, alighting unruffled and unamazed on the new. Until the beckoning finger signalled to them, they went on in their leisure hours with the old amusements and diversions, while for their employment they superintended the digging of trenches instead of attending lectures.
Till yesterday they had been high-spirited, unthinking, undisciplined boys, absorbed in games, tolerant of a small amount of work, and perhaps absorbed in each other more than in anything else; to-morrow, if need be, either or both of them would go out into that grim storm that raged from end to end of Europe with the same tranquillity as they would presently go out to find the motor that was to take all three of them to supper at the Ritz. It was true that she had noted an immense change in Robin, or thought she had done so; now she wondered whether she had not been completely wrong about that: whether it was not precisely the same Robin as she had always known, merely facing with precisely the same spirit as he had faced all his previous experiences this new adventure.
It was a man’s part he had to play now, but he played it with boyishness and with all his might, refusing point-blank to consider any scheme that might shield him from the full deadliness of the blast. But now, at this absurd revue, he was exactly what he had always been. And though she had met Jim but a couple of times before, she divined that in him, too, there had been no radical change. They both just “took on” the new tremendous adventure with the same light-hearted seriousness as they had brought to their cricket....
She tried to imagine what either of them would have been like if, instead of volunteering for active service, they had preferred, as it was in their power to do, remaining up at Cambridge. But it was a perfectly useless attempt, for it was clear that neither of them would have borne the slightest resemblance to them as they actually now were; they would have been utterly different boys altogether. Robin would never have been Robin at all if he had done that, or if, indeed, as she saw more fully now, he had accepted instead of declining the staff appointment she had obtained for him. All his life he would have been an altogether different fellow, he would have been some slouching, timid, furtive-eyed boy ... she could not imagine Robin like that. If he had shirked now, he would have been a shirker for all the nineteen years of his rampageous existence.
They drove off when the revue was over and they had been fortunate enough to secure a few very special smiles from Miss Coombe, in the brougham that really only held two, but was triumphantly demonstrated by Robin to hold three, by process of his sitting on Jim’s knees and protruding other parts of himself out of the window. He seemed to occupy most of the rest of the brougham as well, and, as in a sort of cave made by Robin, the two others conversed, or were silent.
How well Helen remembered a drive back alone through the illuminated and crowded streets two months ago, on a night when she expected not to be alone! To-night the streets were much darker; it was impossible to see with any distinctness the walkers and the loiterers. They were still there, some peering, others peered at, but in this era of darkened lamps they were but shadows against the blacker shades of the houses. Some department had lately taken the question of the lighting of streets in hand; they had adopted a system of camouflage, as if to make London look as unlike London as possible, so that air-craft of the hostile kind should not recognize it and drop bombs on it. Certainly they had succeeded in completely changing its aspect, for now instead of the brilliance of arclights and incandescent gas, that used to make Piccadilly far brighter by night than it had ordinarily been on the average London day, it had become a sort of dim-lit polychromatic pantomime. Some lights were quenched altogether; others had coats of blue, red or green paint applied to their panes. Little fairy lamps bedecked the parks, in long double lines and clusters, simulating, so it must be supposed, streets and squares of the city, in the hope that Zeppelins and other intruders would mistake some empty or depopulated area for a busy thoroughfare, and drop their bombs on it to the great discomfort of plane-trees and sparrows.