Never for a moment did the conversation flag. The two chums unbosomed themselves to one another, except that Dastral would not talk about his adventures since he became a pilot in the Flying Corps, for the members of this Corps never seek advertisement, preferring that the record of their Homeric deeds should all go down to the credit of the Corps, rather than to any particular individual.
"But, Dastral," Tim would urge, as the plates and dishes disappeared and another course was laid, "you must have had a hundred amazing adventures since I saw you last. Just tell me about one of them, say your fight with Himmelman!"
"Bah! It was nothing, Tim--nothing, I mean to make a song about. If I could write and speak like you, now, I might be able to make a tale about it. But nature hasn't gifted me that way," replied the pilot.
"But don't you feel the romance and glory of it all, fighting a battle in the air at ten thousand feet?"
"Romance, glory?" laughed Dastral. "There is no romance or glory about war, when you are in it. It is horrid and brutal then. You must be miles away to see the romance of it. It is all an ugly business."
Tim couldn't understand him. He just couldn't, but he had one more shot. "Don't you feel like singing sometimes, when you are up in the azure, mounting in circles like a lark to meet the sun, and the heavens are calling you?" he asked.
"Ah, when I am ten thousand feet up, and the engines are running smoothly, it is heavenly. I feel like music and romance then. The song of the propellors is beautiful, and the beating of the engine makes me imagine all sorts of weird things, but when I come down to the earth again I forget all the things I would say. It is wonderful though, that call of the heavens; the call of the wild, as the gipsies say, isn't in it. But I cannot describe it."
And so they talked on for an hour--two hours, long after the table had been cleared, making rings of smoke into which Tim Burkitt at least, with his rich imagination, saw wonderful things, when suddenly something happened which made them both spring to their feet--the electric lights went out, leaving them in utter darkness for a couple of minutes.
"What is the matter?" cried half a dozen voices, as soon as the waiter appeared with a lamp in his hand, which he immediately placed upon the centre table.
"There is a rumour, sir, that the Zeppelins are to make an attack upon London to-night, and the electric current has been turned off at the main," replied the jovial, beefy-faced waiter, adding with a smile, as he returned for another lamp, "What are we a-coming to?"