“I’m going to take a taxi home; these parcels are too much for me. You go quite a different way, don’t you?”
“Yes. G’bye.”
Richard turned quickly and walked away in the direction of Hyde Park Corner. He was suddenly aware of David as a very complete element in his life; and David was now withdrawn, perhaps for ever, in all his lithe embodiments of radiance and melancholy, of profound thought and mischievous ragging; David suffering in front of the camera because he understood how his mother fretted for a likeness of Con; David reeling out names off the map of Palestine in drunken ecstasy at their associations; David savagely ironic over his father’s Jingo attitude; David playing the fool over twopence in the middle of Piccadilly.... Richard wished he could have been called up at the same time as David, and thus have slurred over the present acute sense of loneliness.... “I’m glad we’re both for the thick of it now, Richard”—and David would understand why he had not lingered over leave-taking. David could be relied upon to understand—always.
He found a letter from his brother-in-law, Samson Phillips, awaiting him at Montagu Hall. It related briefly that Sir Ephraim Phillips had done his utmost in the matter of exemption from internment in Richard’s case; but in view of the fact that he was German-born, with father not at that period naturalized, could do no more than procure the alternative that he should be called up to serve in the Labour Battalion——
“No, by God!”
Richard crumpled up the sheet in his hands, and flung it violently against the wall. The Labour Battalion! Soldiers who were not allowed to carry weapons? Soldiers who were sent to the Front and not permitted to fight? The compromise was ignominious.... And David had said: “I’m glad we’re both for the thick of it, now, Richard....”
It was all right for David, wholly a Jew. “I’m not going to be half a soldier,” muttered Richard. Rather internment than be tantalized by the wear of khaki, maddened by audible gun-thunder. Rather internment than that—and in a fortnight he would be eighteen.