Stephen and Puddle said good-bye to the sisters, then went on to Buisson’s Academy of Fencing, where they found him engaged upon greasing his foils.
He looked up, ‘Ah, it’s you. I must go on greasing. God knows when I shall use these again, to-morrow I join my regiment.’ But he wiped his hands on a stained overall and sat down, after clearing a chair for Puddle. ‘An ungentlemanly war it will be,’ he grumbled. ‘Will I lead my men with a sword? Ah, but no! I will lead my men with a dirty revolver in my hand. Parbleu! Such is modern warfare! A machine could do the whole cursèd thing better—we shall all be nothing but machines in this war. However, I pray that we may kill many Germans.’
Stephen lit a cigarette while the master glared, he was evidently in a very vile temper: ‘Go on, go on, smoke your heart to the devil, then come here and ask me to teach you fencing! You smoke in lighting one from the other, you remind me of your horrible Birmingham chimneys—but of course a woman exaggerates always,’ he concluded, with an evident wish to annoy her.
Then he made a few really enlightening remarks about Germans in general, their appearance, their morals, above all their personal habits—which remarks were more seemly in French than they would be in English. For, like Valérie Seymour, this man was filled with a loathing for the ugliness of his epoch, an ugliness to which he felt the Germans were just now doing their best to contribute. Buisson’s heart was not buried in Mitylene, but rather in the glories of a bygone Paris, where a gentleman lived by the skill of his rapier and the graceful courage that lay behind it.
‘In the old days we killed very beautifully,’ sighed Buisson, ‘now we merely slaughter or else do not kill at all, no matter how gross the insult.’
However, when they got up to go, he relented: ‘War is surely a very necessary evil, it thins down the imbecile populations who have murdered their most efficacious microbes. People will not die, very well, here comes war to mow them down in their tens of thousands. At least for those of us who survive, there will be more breathing space, thanks to the Germans—perhaps they too are a necessary evil.’
Arrived at the door Stephen turned to look back. Buisson was once more greasing his foils, and his fingers moved slowly yet with great precision—he might almost have been a beauty doctor engaged upon massaging ladies’ faces.
Preparations for departure did not take very long, and in less than a week’s time Stephen and Puddle had shaken hands with their Breton servants, and were driving at top speed en route for Havre, from whence they would cross to England.
4
Puddle’s prophecy proved to have been correct, work was very soon forthcoming for Stephen. She joined The London Ambulance Column, which was well under way by that autumn; and presently Puddle herself got a job in one of the Government departments. She and Stephen had taken a small service flat in Victoria, and here they would meet when released from their hours of duty. But Stephen was obsessed by her one idea, which was, willy-nilly, to get out to the front, and many and varied were the plans and discussions that were listened to by the sympathetic Puddle. An ambulance had managed to slip over to Belgium for a while and had done some very fine service. Stephen had hit on a similar idea, but in her case the influence required had been lacking. In vain did she offer to form a Unit at her own expense; the reply was polite but always the same, a monotonous reply: England did not send women to the front line trenches. She disliked the idea of joining the throng who tormented the patient passport officials with demands to be sent out to France at once, on no matter how insufficient a pretext. What was the use of her going to France unless she could find there the work that she wanted? She preferred to stick to her job in England.