"It appears that there are more Brigadier-Generals in the dissolving Army," said he, "than there are brigades. I can retire with my honorary rank, but if I care to stay on, I must do so with the rank and pay of a Major."
I flared up indignant. I presumed that he had consigned the War Office to flamboyant perdition. In his mild way he had. The War Office had looked pained. By offering a permanent Major's commission in the Regular Army, with chance of promotion and pension, it thought it had dealt very handsomely by Lackaday. It hinted that though he had led his brigade to victory, he might have employed a safer, a more Sunday school method. Oh! the hint was of the slightest, the subtlest, the most delicate. The War Office very pointedly addressed him as General, and, regarding his row of ribbons, implicitly declared him an ingrate. But for a certain stoniness of glance developed in places where Bureaucracy would have been very frightened, the War Office would have so proclaimed him in explicit speech.
"I would have stayed on as a Brigadier," said he. "But the Major's job's impossible. I should have thought any soldier would have appreciated the position--and it was a soldier, a colonel whom I saw--but it seems that if you stay long enough in that place you're at the mercy of the little girls who run you round, and eventually you arrive at their level of intelligence. However," he grinned and lit a cigarette, "it's all over. I can call myself General Lackaday till the day of my death, but not a sou does it put into my pocket. And, odd as it may appear, I've got to earn my living. Well, I suppose something will turn up."
Before I had time to question him as to his plans and prospects, he shifted the talk to our friends, the Verity-Stewarts. He had stayed with them two or three times. Once Lady Auriol had again been a fellow guest. He had met her in London, dined at her tiny house in Charles Street, Mayfair--a little dinner party, doubtless in his honour--and he had called once or twice. Evidently the Romance was in the full idyllic stage. I asked somewhat maliciously what Lady Auriol thought of it. He rose to my question like a simple fish.
"She's far more indignant than I am, I've had to stop her writing to the newspapers and sending the old Earl down to the House of Lords."
"Lady Auriol ought to be able to pull some strings," said I.
"There are not any strings going to be pulled for me in this business," said Lackaday. He rose, stalked about the room--it is a modest bachelor St. James's Street sitting-room, and he took up about as much of its space as a daddy-long-legs under a tumbler--and suddenly halted in front of me. "Do you know why?"
I made a polite gesture of enquiring ignorance.
"Because it's a damn sight too sacred."
I bowed. I understood.