"I'm determined to be able to say, Rupert, whatever happens: 'Never mind, I had a good time while it lasted!'"
"I'm with you," said I, who was now nearly as flushed as he. "Let's be in everything up to the neck."
"Surely," Doe endorsed. "C'est la guerre!"
So with the meat and sweets went the wines of France; with the nuts the sparkling "bubbly"; and in the ante-room Martinis, Benedictines, and Whisky-Macdonalds. Soon the night became noisy, and Doe, encouraged by riotous subalterns, jumped on a table and declaimed a little thickly his prize Horatian Ode:
"Bring out the mellow wine, the best,
The sweet, convivial wine, and test
Its four-year-old maturity;
To Jove commit the rest:
Nor question his divine intents,
For, when he stays the battling elements
The wind shall brood o'er prostrate sea
And fail to move the ash's crest
Or stir the stilly cypress trees.
Be no forecaster of the dawn;
Deem it an asset, and be gay—
Come, merge to-morrow's misty morn
In the resplendence of to-day."
And, after all this, it was an easy step, lightly taken, to the things of night. We set out for the strange streets; and there, in the night air, the precocious young pedant, Edgar Doe, became, despite all the new theories, the shy, simple boy he really was. We would both become shy—shy of each other, and shy of the shameful doorway.
And then the misery of the morning, to be quickly forgotten in the joy of life!
§5
It was now that the Battle of Neuve Chapelle quenched Pennybet. Archibald Pennybet, the boy who left school, determined to conquer the world, and coolly confident of his power to mould circumstances to his own ends, was crushed like an insect beneath the heavy foot of war. He was just put out by a high-explosive shell. It didn't kill him outright, but whipped forty jagged splinters into his body. He was taken to an Advanced Dressing Station, where a chaplain, who told us about his last minutes, found him, swathed in bandages from his head to his heel. On a stretcher that rested on trestles he was lying, conscious, though a little confused by morphia. He saw the chaplain approaching him, and murmured, "Hallo, padre." So numerous were his bandages that the chaplain saw nothing of the boy who was speaking save the lazy Arab eyes and the mouth that had framed impudence for twenty years.
"Hallo, what have you been doing to yourself?" asked the chaplain.