Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh Page A

down. All the young officers began to leap on the struggling bodies. Apthorpe leapt. Guy leapt. Others leapt on them. Guy was conscious of a wrench in the knee; then the wind was knocked out of him and he lay momentarily paralysed. Dusty, laughing, sweating, panting, they disentangled themselves and got to their feet. Guy felt a remote but serious pain in his knee.
    ‘I say, Uncle, are you hurt?’
    ‘No, no, it’s nothing.’
    Somewhere the order had been given to disperse. Tony gave Guy his arm across the gravel.
    ‘I hope you weren’t too bored, Tony?’
    ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. D’you think you ought to see a doctor?’
    ‘It’ll be all right in the morning. It’s just a twist.’
    But in the morning, when he awoke from deep sleep, his knee was swollen large and he could not walk with it.
    4
    TONY was driving home. He took Guy with him as they had arranged, and for four days Guy lay up at Box-Bender’s with his leg bandaged stiff. On Christmas Eve they bore him to midnight mass and then put him back on his bed in the library. There was anti-climax in Tony’s return., All the stage properties remained, the crates of Hittite tablets, the improvised beds, but there was no drama. After the spacious life of his barracks Guy felt himself penned and straightened so that when after Boxing-Day his brother-in-law returned to London, Guy went with him and spent the last days of his leave in an hotel.
    Those days of lameness, he realized much later, were his honeymoon, the full consummation of his love of the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. After them came domestic routine, much loyalty and affection, many good things shared, but intervening and overlaying them all the multitudinous, sad little discoveries of marriage, familiarity, annoyance, imperfections noted, discord. Meanwhile it was sweet to wake and to lie on in bed; the spirit of the Corps lay beside him: to ring the bell; it was in the service of his unseen bride.
    London had not yet lost its store of riches. It was the same city he had avoided all his life, whose history he had held to be mean, whose aspect drab. Here it was, all round him, as he had never seen it before, a royal capital. Guy was changed. He hobbled out into it with new eyes and a new heart.
    Bellamy’s, where last he had slunk in corners to write his begging letters, offered him now an easy place in the shifting population of the bar. He drank hard and happily, saying mechanically ‘Cheerioh’ and ‘Here’s how’, quite unconscious of the mild surprise these foreign salutations roused.
    One evening he went alone to the theatre and heard behind him a young voice say: ‘Oh my prophetic soul, my uncle.’
    He turned and saw immediately behind him Frank de Souza. He was dressed in what the Halberdiers called ‘plain clothes’ and civilians, more exotically, ‘mufti’. His clothes were not particularly plain – a brown suit, a green silk shirt, an orange tie. Beside him sat a girl. Guy knew Frank de Souza little. He was a dark, reserved, drily humorous, efficient young man. He remembered vaguely hearing that Frank had a girl in London whom he visited at week-ends.
    ‘Pat, this is my Uncle Crouchback.’
    The girl smiled, without humour or welcome.
    ‘Must you be facetious?’ she said.
    ‘Enjoying it?’ Guy asked. They were at what was known as an ‘intimate revue’.
    ‘Quite.’
    Guy had thought it very bright and pretty. ‘Have you been in London all the time?’
    ‘I’ve got a flat in Earls Court,’ said the girl. ‘He lives with me’
    ‘That must be nice,’ said Guy.
    ‘Quite,’ said the girl.
    Further conversation was stopped by the return of their neighbours from the bar and the rise of the curtain. The second half of the programme seemed less bright and pretty to Guy. He was conscious all the time of this cold odd couple behind him. At the end he said: ‘Won’t you come and have some supper with me?’
    ‘We’re going to the Café from here,’