Free R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield by To Serve Them All My Days Page A

the singing began, they chose numbers that the troops had sung so repetitiously down all the roads of Picardy and Artois, 'Tipperary', 'Who's Your Lady Friend?', 'Long, Long Trail' and the like. To someone who had heard these choruses sung in that setting it was unbearable and soon, but inconspicuously, he escaped, slipping out through the sculleries to the cinder path leading to the piggeries. And here, unashamedly, he wept, blundering through trailers of mist until he found the path to Herries's thinking post, and pausing there, gulping down the dank, night air but still with earshot of the uproar in the Hall. He thought, desperately, 'For Christ's sake… what is there to sing about…? Why does it have to be a celebration when it ought to be a wake?'
    He lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply, and he was still there when he saw a match flare down by the fives court. Feeling the need to communicate, he made his way down, certain that he would discover that Algy Herries had excused himself under similar pressures.
    It was not Algy, however, but that dry old stick Howarth, the English master who had once advised him to ignore Carter's appeal to join the O.T.C., still the basis of a feud between them. Howarth's pince-nez flashed in the glow of his Gold Flake. He smoked, they said, forty to fifty a day and this was not his only vice. Rumour had it that he also accounted for three bottles of gin each week in his cosy rooms at Nicolson's, where he was housemaster.
    He said, greeting David, 'Saw you slink off and decided to take the same route. Obliged to you for the hint.' And then, in the friendliest tone he had so far employed, 'I imagine you've even less stomach for it than a slacker like me, P.J. But I'm human, after all. Bristow Senior was one of the brightest boys I've ever taught. He wrote to me several times from France. Said he was going into publishing with his step-father and would have made a success of it, I daresay. But he had to die, at eighteen. For what? Can you tell me?'
    'Not yet. I might, in a decade or so.'
    'You're another of the millennium boys, then?'
    'Not necessarily. But something hopeful must emerge from it. If it doesn't it'll be our fault – yours, mine and Algy's. Even the fault of the old stagers, so long as they stay on the job!'
    'The devil of it is,' Howarth said, 'I never did go along with all this hang-the-Kaiser balderdash. I've never been able to hate the Germans. Have you discovered Heine yet?'
    'I'm afraid not.'
    'Try him, sometime. He's got a trick of suiting all kinds of moods. Tonight's for instance – ' Enfant Perdu ', Houghton's translation –
     
    But war and justice have far different laws,
And worthless acts are often done quite well;
The rascal's shots were better than his cause,
And I was hit – and hit again, and fell
     
    – appropriate, wouldn't you say?'
    'It's appropriate to the whole generation.'
    Howarth said nothing and, more from a need to divert his own gloomy thoughts than his companion's, David added, 'Didn't Heine write a lot about love?'
    'Yes, he did.
     
    The old dream comes again to me;
With May-night stars above,
We two sat under the Linden tree
And swore eternal love.
Again and again we plighted troth…
     
    Here, what the devil has got into me?' and Howarth hurled his cigarette across the gravel, as though its trail of sparks would purge him of sentimentality.
    'Has Heine personal significance for you?'
    'He did have, a long time ago.'
    'Were you ever married?'
    'No.' There was a pause. In the darkness David could sense Howarth doing battle with himself, trying to break through the home-baked crust of reserve that he wore like a breastplate wherever he went. Finally he said, 'I was tohave been, when I was about your age. But she made the right decision. She married a stockbroker. It wasn't the financial aspect,' – he said this almost defensively – 'she just couldn't see herself as a schoolmaster's wife, and I don't blame her when I look at some of the old