"I've never yet been allowed to explain my side of that confounded affair of the revetments. I'll tell it all to Cuthbert. He'll sympathise with me. I'll tell him all that the C.O. said and all that I should have liked to say to the C.O. To pour out one's troubles into a travelled literary bosom—what a relief!"
"That's rather an idea," said the Senior Captain. "I nurse a private grief of my own beneath a camouflage of—of persiflage. I think I shall ask Cuthbert's opinion, as an artist, of a brother artist who himself does perfectly unrecognisable sketches of farm-yards"—he waved a golden-syrup spoon towards the Colonel and the manure-heap—"and yet demands a finnicking and altogether contemptible realism in the matter of trench maps. Pass the honey, please."
"It seems to me," said the Major reflectively as he rose from table, "that 'Artist, 33, literary, travelled, mentally isolated' (one) is going to be buried beneath the weight of the world's grievances—or the grievances of this battalion, at any rate."
"It's the same thing," observed the Senior Captain gloomily. "Isn't there any preserved ginger? Lord, what a Mess!"
Weary Williams, a time-expired Second Lieutenant—a ticket-of-leave man, as it were, without a ticket-of-leave—who had once commanded the remnants of two companies with honour but not with acknowledgment, poised a fountain-pen, inquiring casually, "What was it the C.O. said about the destruction of Ypres? Ah, yes" (and he began to write), "a Brobdingnagian act of brachycephalic brutality...."
At breakfast about a week later the Colonel seemed to be enjoying his immense pile of correspondence so heartily that many of the Mess, comparatively letterless as they were, directed glances of injured interest towards him—of rather deeper interest than was warranted by military discipline or civilian breeding (which are, of course, the same virtue in different forms).
Then, presently, as he put down one letter and opened another, the Major was seen to stiffen and the Junior Sub. to wilt. The attention of the table became as fixed and frigid as that of the midnight sentry at a loophole. The Colonel toyed happily with another letter (while the Senior Captain made a careful census of the grounds at the bottom of his coffee-cup), took the range of the manure-heap outside the window from the angles of the table-legs, rose, and departed with his correspondence, summoning Williams to follow him.
Outside the Weary One waited respectfully for the Colonel to speak.
"So you saw through my camouflage?" said the latter thoughtfully.