The Soldier's Art - Anthony Powell [64]
THREE
The first meal eaten in Mess after return from leave is always dispiriting. Room, smell, food, company, at first seemed unchanged; as ever, unenchanting. On taking a seat at table I remembered with suddenly renewed sense of internal discomfort that Stringham would be on duty. In the pressure of other things that had been happening, I had forgotten about him. However, when the beef appeared, it was handed round by a red-haired gangling young soldier with a hare-lip and stutter. There was no sign of Stringham. The new waiter could be permanent, or just a replacement imported to F Mess while Stringham himself was sick, firing a musketry course, temporarily absent for some other routine reason. Opportunity to enquire why he was gone, at the same time to betray no exceptional interest in him personally, arose when Soper complained of the red-haired boy’s inability to remember which side of the plate, as a matter of common practice, were laid knife, fork and spoon.
“Like animals, some of them,” Soper said. “As for getting a message delivered, you’re covered with spit before he’s half-way through.”
“What happened to the other one?”
If asked a direct question of that sort, Soper always looked suspicious. Finding, after a second or two, no grounds for imputing more than idle curiosity to this one, he returned a factual, though reluctant, reply.
“Went to the Mobile Laundrv.”
“For the second time of asking, Soper,” said Macfie, “will you pass the water jug?”
“Here you are, Doc. Those tablets come in yet?”
Macfie was gruff about the tablets, Soper persuasive. The Cipher Officer remarked on the amount of flu about. There was general agreement, followed by some discussion of prevalent symptoms. The subject of Stringham had to be started up again from scratch.
“Did you sack him?”
“Sack who?”
“The other Mess waiter.”
“What’s he got to do with you?”
“Just wondered.”
“He was transferred to the Laundry from one day to the next. Bloody inconvenient for this Mess. He’d have done the job all right if Biggy hadn’t been on at him all the time. I complained to the D.A.A.G. about losing a waiter like that, but he said it had got to go through.”
Biggs, present at table, but in one of his morose moods that day, neither denied nor confirmed his own part in the process of Stringham’s dislodgement. He chewed away at a particularly tough piece of meat, looking straight in front of him. Soper, as if Biggs himself were not sitting there, continued to muse on the aversion felt by Biggs for Stringham.
“That chap drove Biggy crackers for some reason,” he said. “Something about him. Wasn’t only the way he talked. Certainly was a dopey type. Don’t know how he got where he was. Had some education. I could see that. You’d think he’d have found better employment than a Mess waiter. Got a bad record, I expect. Trouble back in Civvy Street.”
That Stringham had himself engineered an exchange from F Mess to avoid relative persecution at the hands of Biggs was, I thought unlikely. In his relationship with Biggs, even a grim sort of satisfaction to Stringham might be suspected, one of those perverse involutions of feeling that had brought him into the army in the first instance. Such sentiments were hard to unravel. They were perhaps no more tangled than the rest of the elements that made up Stringham’s life – or anybody else’s life when closely examined. Not only had he disregarded loopholes which invited avoidance of the Services – health, and, at that period, age too – but, in face of much apparent discouragement from the recruiting authorities, had shown uncharacteristic persistence to get where he was. One aspect of this determination to carry through the project of joining the army was no doubt an attempt to rescue a self-respect badly battered during the years with Miss Weedon; however much she might also have accomplished in setting Stringham on his feet. An innate restlessness certainly played a part too; taste for change, even for adventure of a sort; all perhaps shading off into a vague romantic patriotism that especially allured by its own ironic connotations, its very lack, so to speak, of what might be called contemporary intellectual prestige.