Melia, however, was one of those precise but rather immobile intellects with which her tight little native island is full to overflowing. “You don’t mean to say, Bill, it was Stanning, R.A., himself?”
“You bet your life it was.” Private Hollis handed a peeled walnut, his masterpiece so far, across an expanse of red tablecloth. “One of the youngest R.A.’s on record, but a bit long in the tooth for the Army. And we’re pals, I tell you. One of these days I’m going to take him barbel fishing at Gawsey’s Pool. And he’s given me a couple of lessons in drawing already. If only I’d begun sooner I think I might have done something.”
It was such an incredible story that Melia was fain to smile, but Private William Hollis, inspired by port wine and enthusiasm, lingered lovingly over his portrait of one who stood forth in his mind as the greatest man the city of Blackhampton had yet produced.
XXII
FORTY-EIGHT hours is not a long time even as time is reckoned in a world war, when the infinitely much can happen in a little space. Only one-fourth of that term, a meager twelve hours, was permitted to Russia by Germany in which to decide whether she should yield unconditionally to an unheard of demand, on pain of provoking that conflict, the end of which even some of the most penetrating minds in Blackhampton were hardly able to predict with certainty. So much may happen in a little while. Yet Private Hollis had just four times as long to re-establish terms of conjugal felicity with his wife Melia. In that period he kissed her twice.
Whether that Christian practice would have continued as a regular thing is difficult to say. This was a special occasion and these were not demonstrative natures. Even in the heyday of their romance, when Love not being quite strong enough to turn the door handle, peered once or twice through the keyhole, yet without ever proving quite bold enough to come in and make himself at home on that childless hearth, they were too practical to acquire a permanent taste for that particular kind of nonsense.
Still, it hardly does to dogmatize in time of war. For as the forty-eight hours went on, Melia seemed to grow more and more impressed by Private Hollis, his martial bearing. Or it may have been the uniform. Why is it that any kind of uniform has such a fatal attraction for the ladies?