“You wouldn’t have forgotten him if you had. He’s a hairdresser now, somewhere at the back of Ebury Street. ’Was Garrison Artillery. ’Blown up twice.”
“Does he show it?” I asked at the foot of the organ-loft stairs.
“No-o. Not much more than Lazarus did, I expect.” Brother Burges fled off to set some one else to a job.
Brother Anthony, small, dark, and hump-backed, was hissing groom-fashion while he treated the rich acacia-wood panels of the Lodge organ with some sacred, secret composition of his own. Under his guidance Humberstall, an enormous, flat-faced man, carrying the shoulders, ribs, and loins of the old Mark ’14 Royal Garrison Artillery, and the eyes of a bewildered retriever, rubbed the stuff in. I sat down to my task on the organ-bench, whose purple velvet cushion was being vacuum-cleaned on the floor below.
“Now,” said Anthony, after five minutes’ vigorous work on the part of Humberstall. “Now we’re gettin’ somethin’ worth lookin’ at! Take it easy, an’ go on with what you was tellin’ me about that Macklin man.”
“I—I ’adn’t anything against ’im,” said Humberstall, “excep’ he’d been a toff by birth; but that never showed till he was bosko absoluto. Mere bein’ drunk on’y made a common ’ound of ’im. But when bosko, it all came out. Otherwise, he showed me my duties as mess-waiter very well on the ’ole.”
“Yes, yes. But what in ’ell made you go back to your Circus? The Board gave you down-an’-out fair enough, you said, after the dump went up at Eatables?”
“Board or no Board, I ’adn’t the nerve to stay at ’ome—not with mother chuckin’ ’erself round all three rooms like a rabbit every time the Gothas tried to get Victoria; an’ sister writin’ me aunts four pages about it next day. Not for me, thank you! till the war was over. So I slid out with a draft—they wasn’t particular in ’17, so long as the tally was correct—and I joined up again with our Circus somewhere at the back of Lar Pug Noy, I think it was.” Humberstall paused for some seconds and his brow wrinkled. “Then I—I went sick, or somethin’ or other, they told me; but I know when I reported for duty, our Battery Sergeant Major says that I wasn’t expected back, an’—an’, one thing leadin’ to another—to cut a long story short—I went up before our Major—Major—I shall forget my own name next—Major——”
“Never mind,” Anthony interrupted. “Go on! It’ll come back in talk!”
“’Alf a mo’. ’Twas on the tip o’ my tongue then.”