Beauvayse agreed. "He looks like a chap I saw once get into a coffin at the Cabaret de l'Enfer—that shady restaurant place in the Boulevard de Clichy. When they turned on the lights ..." He shrugged. "The women of the party thought it simply ripping. I wanted to be sick."
Captain Bingo had also known the sensation of nausea during a similar experience. "But women'll stand anything," he said, "particularly if they've been told it's chic. My own part, I can stand any amount of dead men—healthy dead men, don't you know? But—give you my word—a cadaverous spectacle like that poor chap, bones stickin' out of his hide, and breathin' as if he was stuffed with dry shavin's, or husks like the Prodigal Son, gives me the downright horrors!"
Thus they conferred, supporting opposite door-posts with solid shoulders, until the C.M.O., turning his head, addressed them brusquely, curtly:
"Wrynche, if you'd transfer yourself with Lord Beauvayse to the passage, myself and my colleagues here would be the better obliged to ye."
"Pleasure!" They removed, with a simultaneous clink of scabbards and a ring of spurred heels on the tiled pavement.
The Colonel remained, making those about the bed a group of five. The chart-nurse stayed, pending the nod of dismissal, a rigid statue of capped and aproned discipline, upright in the corner.
"Phew!" Captain Bingo blew a vast sigh of relief, and produced a cigar-case. "Well out of that, my boy. All jumps this morning; wouldn't take the odds you're not as bad?"
"Rather!" Beauvayse nodded, and drew the elder man's attention, with a look, to the strong young hand that held a choice Havana just accepted from the offered case. "Shaky, isn't it? and yet I didn't punish the champagne much last night. It's sheer excitement, just what one feels before riding a steeplechase, or going into Action early on a raw morning. Not that I've been in anything but a couple of Punitive Expeditions—from Peshawar, under Wilks-Dayrell, splitting up some North-West Frontier tribes that had lumped themselves together against British Authority—up to now. But I'm looking out for the chance of something better worth having, like you and all the rest of us. Trouble you for a light!"
"By the Living Tinker, and that's the fourth! Where d'you think I'd give a cool fifty to be this minute? Not cooling my heels in a brick-paved passage while a pack of doctors are swoppin' dog-Latin over the body of a moribund young parson, but on the roof of the Staff Quarters, lookin' North, with my eyes glued to the binoculars and my ears pricked for—you know what!"
Beauvayse groaned. "Isn't that what I'm suffering for? And the Chief must be ten times worse. How he keeps his countenance—demure as my grandmother's cat lappin' cream.... I say, the Transvaal Dutch; they call themselves the true Children of Israel, don't they? Well, which did Moses and his little gang come across first in the Desert, the Pillar of Cloud, or the Pillar of Fire, or a couple of railway-trucks containin' the raw material for a sky-journey, only waitin' till Brer' Boer plugs a bullet in among the dynamite? It makes me feel good all over, as the American women say, when I think of it." He smiled like a mischievous young archangel, masquerading in Service kit.