FullReads

PART I

I sat down in the club smoking-room to fill a pipe.

* * * * *

It was entirely natural that I should be talking to “Boy” Bayley. We had met first, twenty odd years ago, at the Indian mess of the Tyneside Tail-twisters. Our last meeting, I remembered, had been at the Mount Nelson Hotel, which was by no means India, and there we had talked half the night. Boy Bayley had gone up that week to the front, where I think he stayed a long, long time.

But now he had come back.

“Are you still a Tynesider?” I asked.

“I command the Imperial Guard Battalion of the old regiment, my son,” he replied.

“Guard which? They’ve been Fusiliers since Fontenoy. Don’t pull my leg, Boy.”

“I said Guard, not Guard-s. The I. G. Battalion of the Tail-twisters. Does that make it any clearer?”

“Not in the least.”

“Then come over to the mess and see for yourself. We aren’t a step from barracks. Keep on my right side. I’m–I’m a bit deaf on the near.”

We left the club together and crossed the street to a vast four-storied pile, which more resembled a Rowton lodging-house than a barrack. I could see no sentry at the gates.

“There ain’t any,” said the Boy lightly. He led me into a many-tabled restaurant full of civilians and grey-green uniforms. At one end of the room, on a slightly raised dais, stood a big table.

“Here we are! We usually lunch here and dine in mess by ourselves. These are our chaps–but what am I thinking of? You must know most of ’em. Devine’s my second in command now. There’s old Luttrell–remember him at Cherat?–Burgard, Verschoyle (you were at school with him), Harrison, Pigeon, and Kyd.”

With the exception of this last I knew them all, but I could not remember that they had all been Tynesiders.

“I’ve never seen this sort of place,” I said, looking round. “Half the men here are in plain clothes, and what are those women and children doing?”

“Eating, I hope,” Boy Bayley answered. “Our canteens would never pay if it wasn’t for the Line and Militia trade. When they were first started people looked on ’em rather as catsmeat-shops; but we got a duchess or two to lunch in ’em, and they’ve been grossly fashionable since.”

“So I see,” I answered. A woman of the type that shops at the Stores came up the room looking about her. A man in the dull-grey uniform of the corps rose up to meet her, piloted her to a place between three other uniforms, and there began a very merry little meal.

“I give it up,” I said. “This is guilty splendour that I don’t understand.”

“Quite simple,” said Burgard across the table. “The barrack supplies breakfast, dinner, and tea on the Army scale to the Imperial Guard (which we call I. G.) when it’s in barracks as well as to the Line and Militia. They can all invite their friends if they choose to pay for them. That’s where we make our profits. Look!”

Near one of the doors were four or five tables crowded with workmen in the raiment of their callings. They ate steadily, but found time to jest with the uniforms about them; and when one o’clock clanged from a big half-built block of flats across the street, filed out.

“Those,” Devine explained, “are either our Line or Militiamen, as such entitled to the regulation whack at regulation cost. It’s cheaper than they could buy it; an’ they meet their friends too. A man’ll walk a mile in his dinner hour to mess with his own lot.”

“Wait a minute,” I pleaded. “Will you tell me what those plumbers and plasterers and bricklayers that I saw go out just now have to do with what I was taught to call the Line?”

“Tell him,” said the Boy over his shoulder to Burgard. He was busy talking with the large Verschoyle, my old schoolmate.