“’Got two hours to wait for my train,” he explained. “I remembered your night, though. My God, this is good!”
“What is your train and from what station?” said the Clergyman precisely. “Very well. What will you have to eat?”
“Anything. Everything. I’ve thrown up a month’s rations in the Channel.”
He stoked himself for ten minutes without a word. Then, without a word, his face fell forward. The Clergyman had him by one already limp arm and steered him to a couch, where he dropped and snored. No one took the trouble to turn around.
“Is that usual too?” I asked.
“Why not?” said the Clergyman. “I’m on duty to-night to wake them for their trains. They do not respect the Cloth on those occasions.” He turned his broad back on me and continued his discussion with a Brother from Aberdeen by way of Mitylene where, in the intervals of mine-sweeping, he had evolved a complete theory of the Revelations of St. John the Divine in the Island of Patmos.
I fell into the hands of a Sergeant-Instructor of Machine Guns—by profession a designer of ladies’ dresses. He told me that Englishwomen as a class “lose on their corsets what they make on their clothes,” and that “Satan himself can’t save a woman who wears thirty-shilling corsets under a thirty-guinea costume.” Here, to my grief, he was buttonholed by a zealous Lieutenant of his own branch, and became a Sergeant again all in one click.
I drifted back and forth, studying the prints on the walls and the Masonic collection in the cases, while I listened to the inconceivable talk all round me. Little by little the company thinned, till at last there were only a dozen or so of us left. We gathered at the end of a table near the fire, the night-bird from Flanders trumpeting lustily into the hollow of his helmet, which some one had tipped over his face.
“And how did it go with you?” said the Doctor.
“It was like a new world,” I answered.