"I mean jolly well what I say, if you want to know, or something precious like it. The blinking Army's got dry-rot and revolutionary fever, and we may all be murdered in our little beds unless I put a shoulder to the wheel. That's a bit mixed, but it'll stand. I shall be churning out this thing by the yard in a little."
"Any extra pay?" demanded Pennell anxiously. "I can lecture on engineering, and would do for an extra sixpence. Whisky's going up, and I haven't paid my last mess bill."
"You haven't, old son," said Arnold, coming in, "and you've jolly well got to. Here's a letter for you, Graham."
Peter glanced at the envelope and tore it open. Pennell knocked his pipe out with feigned dejection. "The fellow makes me sick, padre," he said. "He gets billets-doux every hour of the blessed day."
Peter jumped up excitedly. "This is better," he said. "It's a letter from Langton at Rouen, a chap I met there who writes occasionally. He's been hauled in for this stunt himself, and is to go to Abbeville as well. By Jove, I'll go up with him if I can. Give me some paper, somebody. I'll have to write to him at once, or we'll boss it."
"And make a will, and write to a dozen girls, I should think," said Pennell. "I don't know what the blooming Army's coming to. Might as well chuck it and have peace, I think. But meantime I've got to leave you blighted slackers to gad about the place, and go and do an honest day's work. I don't get Staff jobs and red tabs. No; I help win the ruddy war, that's all. See you before you go, Graham, I suppose? They'll likely run the show for a day or two more without you. There'll be time for you to stand a dinner on the strength of it yet."
A week later Peter met Langton by appointment in the Rouen club, the two of them being booked to travel that evening via Amiens to Abbeville. His tall friend was drinking a whisky-and-soda in the smoke-room and talking with a somewhat bored expression to no less a person than Jenks of the A.S.C.
Peter greeted them. "Hullo!" he said to the latter. "Fancy meeting you here again. Don't say you're going to lecture as well?"
"The good God preserve us!" exclaimed Jenks blasphemously. "But I am off in your train to Boulogne. Been transferred to our show there, and between ourselves, I'm not sorry to go. It's a decent hole in some ways, Boulogne, and it's time I got out of Rouen. You're a lucky man, padre, not to be led into temptation by every damned girl you meet. I don't know what they see in me," he continued mournfully, "and, at this hour of the afternoon, I don't know what I see in them."
"Nor do I," said Langton. "Have a drink, Graham? There'll be no getting anything on the ruddy train. We leave at six-thirty, and get in somewhere about four a.m. next morning, so far as I can make out."