He smoked on silently for a space. “Oh, h—l!” he burst out, with a sudden incredulous bitterness that startled even the cynical Hopgood. “Why, that beggar’s always come to me before with his troubles. Guess I’m the only one he ever does confide in. Many’s the time I’ve acted as Father-confessor and mentor to him. Surely he’d never have passed me up in such a momentous business as this? What saith the poet:
“You may carve it on his tombstone,
You may cut it on his card
That a young man married is a young man marred.”
The Provost emitted a noisy, snorting laugh.
“Yes,” he remarked, with the jeering familiarity of old acquaintance, “and I must say you’re a nice blooming old Gamaliel to act as mentor to anybody, Charley, especially if you expect him to embrace your self-constituted creed of morality and philosophy. Oh, you’re some Father-confessor, all right, what? Besides, he ain’t young. That is, unless you call thirty-nine unsophisticated youth. ’Bout time he was making the break. There’s no fun in getting married when you’re old, all same Pope’s ‘January and May.’ He happened to mention it was his birthday to a bunch of us down town when he came in last month. I remember him saying it was his thirty-ninth, because I and Berkley, Mac, and Port stuck him for the drinks on the strength of it. We rushed him into the Alberta bar right away and—”
“How about the way he used to hand it out about non-coms and bucks getting married in your Force, too?” interrupted Musgrave, grinning. “‘Look at Beckstall,’ he would say. ‘Look at Corbett,’ and lots of others. ‘Big families—always broke—dragging out their miserable lives in rotten little line detachments—can never afford to send their poor wives away for a change anywhere—they don’t live—they just exist, from one year’s end to another. That’s all there’s to it! D’you think I’d let myself in for a purgatory like that?’ and so on. You’ve heard him, Hop, too—lots of times, what?”
Hopgood held up his hands appealingly.
“Don’t shoot, Colonel!” he said. “I’ll come down! I’m not holding any particular brief for him. Guess he’s pretty well able to conduct his own defense. Ish ga bibble!—it ain’t our funeral.”
It was worse than useless to argue with Musgrave. All his opponent’s best hits were turned aside by the target of his cynicism and unbelief, while his repartee and sarcasms often came home.
“Funny chap!” he resumed musingly. “I think he is just about the most interesting and complex character I’ve ever come across. He’s very much of a man, but at the same time—he’s as simple as a kid in some things. Beggar reads a lot, and he’s as rum in his tastes in that as he is in everything else. Fond of all this old-fashioned stuff. The heighth of his imagination in humor he finds in Balzac’s and Rabelais’ yarns, or Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron,’ and his ideals of pathos in George Eliot’s or Dickens’s tales. Whatever can you do with a man like that?”
“Oh, what’s the use of talking?” broke out Hopgood testily: