Corporal Hollis could not be expected to display the entrain of a sergeant of the Black Watch. Besides he had yet to cross the water whereas Caledonia’s son was a hero of Mons and the Marne. But the gallant corporal did his regiment no discredit in that great moment, likewise his wife Melia, nor famed Blackhampton, his fair natal city.
XXIV
WHEN about twenty minutes later William and Melia, haloed with history, emerged from the precincts of the Canteen, and as they did so treading, in a manner of speaking, the circumambient air, they were at once confronted by the spectacle of Bus 49 next the adjacent curb. And Bus 49, according to its own account of the matter, was going amongst other places to Piccadilly Circus.
It was the first visit of the Corporal to the metropolis, but in his mind was lurking the sure knowledge that Piccadilly Circus was the exact and indubitable center thereof; and by an association of ideas, he also seemed to remember that Piccadilly Circus was where the King lived. Such being the case, the apparition at that moment of Bus 49 was about as providential as anything could have been.
It was the work of an instant to get aboard the gracious engine, so swift the workings of the human mind in those dynamic moments when Fate itself appears, as the sailors say, to stand by to go about. Moreover the conductor had politely informed the Corporal that there was room for two on the top.
That was a golden journey, a kind of voyage to silken Samarcand and cedared Lebanon, allowing of course for reduction according to scale. So miraculously were their hearts attuned to venturing, that for one rapt hour they drank deep of poetry and romance this glorious midday of July.
Bus 49 knew its business thoroughly, no bus better. Instead of turning pretty sharp to the left into that complacent purlieu Portland Place, as a bus of less experience might have done in order to follow the line of flight of some mythical crow or other, it chose to go on and on, past Madame Tussaud’s, the Hotel Great Central, and then by a series of minor but hardly less historic landmarks along Edgware Road to the Marble Arch, thence via Park Lane to Hyde Park Corner.
No doubt Bus 49 had ideas. The ordinary machine of commerce would have got from Euston to Piccadilly Circus in two shakes of a duck’s tail. Not so this accomplished metropolitan, this gorgeous midday of July. From Hyde Park Corner it proceeded to Victoria, thence via the Army and Navy Stores to the Houses of Parliament, down Whitehall, past the lions and Horatio, Viscount Nelson, past the Crédit Lyonnais, up the Haymarket and so at last to Swan and Edgar’s corner, where William and Melia dismounted, thrilled as never before in all their lives.