“Not yet,” Traherne told him. “You shall, when I get back, with something to eat——”
“Don’t!” the sick man groaned. “Give me a smoke then, before you go, and for God’s sake don’t be long.”
Traherne found him the cigarettes, and took him the matches.
“Smoke if you like,” he said, “but I wouldn’t smoke yet, if I were you.”
Crespin put his hand out for a cigarette, but even his hand was sick, and fell back from the effort.
Doctor Traherne put a cigarette in his hand, and struck a match and held it. But Major Crespin couldn’t smoke.
Traherne left him then, closing the door of the darkened room with careful quiet.
And Antony Crespin was alone with his creditor.
CHAPTER VIII
Doctor Traherne was persona grata at Colonel Agnew’s bungalow, if any one was; and several were. Their people at home in England were neighbors and friends, and for that Agnew would have welcomed him, if there had been nothing else. But there was a great deal else. It was not often that Agnew liked a civilian, or saw anything in one to like. He didn’t see what use they were anyway. The world was made for warfare, scientific, deliberated warfare, he had no doubt whatever of that. Most especially was it made for the British Army, and above all for his regiment. He was a staunch old Tory, of course—there are some still, and more than a few of them are in India—but he never troubled to read the speeches in the House, not even those of the Lords, unless they directly bore on His Majesty’s Forces. He had no respect for any calling but his own—and almost as little intelligent knowledge as respect. He had gone in for fisticuffs in his cradle, and though his schoolmasters had not, among themselves, pronounced him startlingly brainy, none of them denied him considerable place as a tactician. He was an emphatic churchman—far more emphatic than devout—but he respected the church rather than its officers: he had no respect for any profession but his own. And this fact he rarely concealed. He reverenced his King—but most, it may be suspected, because His Majesty was the Head of the Army. Even the somewhat civilian adjuncts of the Service, doctors and padres and such, he held rather coldly. He liked most women, and reverenced them all. But he had no doubt that God had made them to bear soldiers, and to be loved by the soldier-fathers of soldiers, and he pitied acutely any woman who had to make do with the caresses of less than a soldier-man or who brought forth any men children who failed to crawl through Sandhurst or Woolwich exams, and bolt enthusiastically into the fighting forces. He thought more of a private than he did of a Viceroy—and said so. And he’d gladly have given Kathleen to that blithering young jackass Bob Grant rather than to the Archbishop of Canterbury, or to a royal bridegroom who was not in the Service. No German warlord ever thought more of himself than Colonel Agnew thought of the British Army.