“I rattle along at a terrible rate when I’m lucky enough to find a listener,” he said. “And lately I’ve been horribly sick of my own society. You see, they wouldn’t have me in any capacity at the Front; I offered to do anything, and I did think they might have let me drive an ambulance; but an ambulance driver over there really has to be a hefty chap, able to put his shoulder literally to the wheel when a road goes to pieces in front of him, owing to a shell lobbing on it; and of course they said I wouldn’t do, so soon as they looked at me. So I went to London and did Red Cross work and recruiting—and overdid it, like a silly ass. Broke down, and had to crawl home and be ill.”
“Hard luck!” said Wally, sympathetically.
“Stupidity, you mean,” remarked his host. “A man ought to know when he has had enough, whether it’s work or beer. But it’s not easy to stand aside when all the lucky people—like you—are playing the real game. At best, mine was only an imitation.”
“I don’t agree with you,” Wally said, warmly. “We can’t all fight—the rest of the country has to carry on.”
“Oh, well, there are enough slackers and shirkers to do that,” O’Neill said. “And anyhow, I couldn’t even carry on at what I did attempt to do. Never mind—tell me your own adventures.”
Wally’s story of war did not take long in the telling; but he spun it out as much as possible, switching from war to Australia in response to the eager questions of the man in the big leather chair. John O’Neill was a curious blending: at one moment almost savagely cynical and despondent, as his own physical handicap weighed upon him: at the next, laughing like a boy, and full of a boy’s keen interest in what he had not seen. Australian talk held him closely attentive: it was almost the only corner of the world that he had not visited, but he meant to go there, he said, after the war. Travelling by sea was unpleasant enough at any time without the added chance of an impromptu ducking if a submarine or a mine came across you.
“Do they all buck—your horses?” he asked. “I can ride a bit, but a buckjumper would be beyond me.”
Wally reassured him as to the manners of Australian steeds.
“There’s a general impression in England that we all live in red shirts, in the bush, and ride fiery, untamed steeds,” said he, laughing. “It goes with the universal belief that all Australia is tropical. I’ve tried to tell fellows in England that there are parts of Australia where we have a pretty decent imitation of Swiss winter sports—skiing, skating, and all the rest of it; but they look on me with polite disbelief. They can’t—or won’t—understand that Australia stretches over enough of the map to have a dozen different kinds of climate. Not that it matters, anyhow; I don’t think we expect people to be wildly interested in us.”
“We’ll know more about you by the time the war is over,” his host suggested.