‘brooches and toys for my delight
Of birds’ song at morning and starshine at night.’
I almost think that little ‘Stevenson’ is my favourite poem; so you see, in spite of my homing tendency, I must have a streak of the wanderer in me. Dad, by the way, has a great feeling for Nature, likes beasts and birds and trees. I think most soldiers do – it’s rather odd. But, of course, their love is on the precise and knowledgeable rather than the aesthetic side. Any dreaminess they incline to look on as ‘a bit barmy’. I have been wondering whether to put my copies of your poems under their noses. On the whole I don’t think; they might take you too seriously. There is always something about a person more ingratiating than his writings. I don’t expect to sleep much tonight, for this is the first day that I haven’t seen you since the world began. Goodnight, my dear, be blessed and take my kiss.
Your
DINNY.
P.S.—I have looked you out the photo where I approximate most to the angels, or rather where my nose turns up least – to send tomorrow. In the meantime here are two snaps. And when, sir, do I get some of you?
D.
And that was the end of this to her far from perfect day.
Chapter Nine
SIR LAWRENCE MONT, recently elected to Burton’s Club whereon he had resigned from the Aeroplane, retaining besides only ‘Snooks’ (so-called), The Coffee House and the Parthenaeum, was accustomed to remark that, allowing himself another ten years of life, it would cost him twelve shillings and sixpence every time he went into any of them.
He entered Burton’s, however, on the afternoon after Dinny had told him of her engagement, took up a list of the members, and turned to D. ‘Hon. Wilfrid Desert.’ Quite natural, seeing the Club’s pretension to the monopoly of travellers. ‘Does Mr Desert ever come in here?’ he said to the porter.
‘Yes, Sir Lawrence, he’s been in this last week; before that I don’t remember him for years.’
‘Usually abroad. When does he come in as a rule?’
‘For dinner, mostly, Sir Lawrence.’
‘I see. Is Mr Muskham in?’
The porter shook his head. ‘Newmarket today, Sir Lawrence.’
‘Oh! Ah! How on earth you remember everything!’
‘Matter of ’abit, Sir Lawrence.’
‘Wish I had it.’ Hanging up his hat, he stood for a moment before the tape in the hall. Unemployment and taxation going up all the time, and more money to spend on cars and sports than ever. A pretty little problem! He then sought the Library as the room where he was least likely to see anybody; and the first body he saw was that of Jack Muskham, who was talking, in a voice hushed to the level of the locality, to a thin dark little man in a corner.
‘That,’ thought Sir Lawrence, cryptically, ‘explains to me why I never find a lost collar-stud. My friend the porter was so certain Jack would be at Newmarket, and not under that chest of drawers, that he took him for someone else when he came in.’
Reaching down a volume of Burton’s Arabian Nights, he rang for tea. He was attending to neither when the two in the corner rose and came up to him.
‘Don’t get up, Lawrence,’ said Jack Muskham with some languor; ‘Telfourd Yule, my cousin Sir Lawrence Mont.’
‘I’ve read thrillers of yours, Mr Yule,’ said Sir Lawrence, and thought: ‘Queer-looking little cuss!’
The thin, dark, smallish man, with a face rather like a monkey’s, grinned. ‘Truth whips fiction out of the field,’ he said.
‘Yule,’ said Jack Muskham, with his air of superiority to space and time, ‘has been out in Arabia, going into the question of how to corkscrew a really pure-strain Arab mare or two out of them for use here. It’s always baffled us, you know. Stallions, yes; mares never. It’s much the same now in Nejd as when Palgrave wrote. Still, we think we’ve got a rise. The owner of the best strain wants an aeroplane, and if we throw in a billiard table we believe he’ll part with at least one daughter of the sun.’
‘Good God!’ said Sir Lawrence. ‘By what base means? We’re all Jesuits, Jack!’
‘Yule has seen some queer things out there. By the way, there’s one I want to talk about. May we sit down?’
He stretched his long body out in a long chair, and the dark little man perched himself on another, with his black twinkling eyes fixed on Sir Lawrence, who had come to uneasy attention without knowing why.
‘When,’ said Jack Muskham, ‘Yule here was in the Arabian desert, he heard a vague yarn among some Bedouins about an Englishman having been held up somewhere by Arabs and forced to become a Moslem. He had rather a row with them, saying no Englishman would do that. But when he was back in Egypt he went flying into the Libyan desert, met another lot of Bedouins coming from the south, and came on precisely the same yarn, only more detailed, because they said it happened in Darfur, and they even had the man’s name – Desert. Then, when he was up in Khartoum, Yule found it was common talk that young Desert had changed his religion. Naturally he put two and two together. But there’s all the difference in the world, of course, between voluntarily swapping religions and doing it at the pistol’s point. An Englishman who does that lets down the lot of us.’