"Yes, I think you're right," he murmured.
"I am right—I know our Danny," said Klobucki ruefully. "But what I came to say was—well, I guess I wasn't all that polite by the bar back there, with the smart-alec quotations. I've come to make amends."
Butler looked at the young American in surprise.
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"My dear chap, I wasn't offended. It was an extremely apposite bit of verse. I'm only sorry that I lack the education to answer you in the same way."
Polly laughed. "Don't give him the chance, Colonel. Mike's got the quote for every occasion—it's the cross we have to bear for his obsession with English literature."
"You can giggle, Polly. I just happen to find other men's flowers more beautiful than my own. And that's my cross, not yours, Polly-Anna." There was no glint behind the spectacles now. "As it happens, there are a few lines for you, Colonel, to put people like me in my place. And I seem to remember they were written about an army of Britishers—
Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.
That's Housman, but I could give you plenty more—Kipling knew it too, and we Americans know how to value him even if you don't over here."
"I don't know whether Colonel Butler understood a word of what you're saying, Mike," said Polly. "But I certainly don't."
"You darned well ought to, honey—living where you do." Klobucki pointed out of the window, southwards towards the line of crags. "How many times do you think the fat guys down in Londinium—
or the Roman-Britishers in the nice centrally-heated villas—how many times do you think they spared a thought for these poor cats up on the Wall? Only when the tax-man came round, I guess—and then they'd curse the over-fed, over-paid, licentious soldiery. Maybe they were all that, too. But they were still all that stood between the central-heating and the barbarians—the barbari."
"Well!" Polly looked at Butler, her eyebrows raised. "Mike really is making amends."
"Not at all," Klobucki shook his head vigorously. "Truth doesn't make amends by itself. My amends are more—more edible." He turned, peering back into the room. "Sir! Dr Gracey, sir!"
"Why must you be so formal, Mike?" The voice that boomed in reply was startlingly deep, but with the quality of a bass pipe on a cathedral organ.
"In deference to your great age and seniority, sir," replied the American, straightfaced. "And your stature, of course."
Stature indeed, thought Butler. The man was even bigger than Audley, and yet without a hint of surplus flesh: simply a larger-than-life man.
"I'd like you to meet my guest for tomorrow night, sir," continued Klobucki. "Colonel Butler—Dr dummy2.htm
Gracey."
"Ah, Butler!" Gracey extended a huge, serviceable hand. "Charles Epton has been telling me about you—
and so has my godless god-daughter. And I gather you've met my old friend Geoffrey Hobson when you were up in Oxford."
"Hah!" Butler grunted, gripping the hand and meeting the shrewd eyes in the same moment. He felt the years stripping away from him, leaving him naked and unprotected: Second Lieutenant Butler, green and desperately worried about his Lancashire accent, reporting to battalion headquarters on the edge of the Reichswald, with the rumble of the distant German guns echoing in his empty stomach.
"And you are the authority on the Byzantine army, I gather, Butler?"
"Hardly the authority, sir. I've made a special study of their siege operations on the eastern front in the 6th century," said Butter ponderously. "From Belisarius to the Emperor Maurice, you know."
"Indeed." There was a reassuring lack of interest in Gracey's voice; it would have been altogether too gruesome if he had turned out to be himself an expert in the subject. "Well, the man you want to talk to is our Dr Audley, though he'd tend to take the Persian and the Arab side more than the Byzantine . . ."
Gracey looked around the room ". . . but he doesn't appear to be thirsty this afternoon. Where is David, Polly?"
"Oh, he phoned to say he'd got hung up somewhere. He probably won't be back until tomorrow some time—he said for me to apologise to you, but apparently there aren't any seminars tomorrow anyway."
"There aren't indeed. And there aren't many senior members either." Gracey frowned.
"And Dr Handforth-Jones sent his apologies too—"
"Ah, I know about Tony Handforth-Jones. He's in the middle of another of his fund-raising frauds,"
Gracey's gaze returned to Butler. "I trust you haven't any charitable funds in your gift, Butler. Because if you have, then you'll have Handforth-Jones after you for a contribution to his archaeological enterprises.
I never knew a man who was better at raising money from unlikely sources. And at spending it. He has a passion for hiring expensive machinery."
He smiled, shaking his head in mock disapproval, and it struck Butler that Audley's apparent hold over the archaeologist might well stem from a use of departmental funds never envisaged by the Defense Minister.
"On the other hand, if nobody's doing any work tomorrow, that may solve the problem of tomorrow night's dinner party —eh, Mike?"
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"Sir?" Klobucki cocked his head questioningly.
"My dear boy, if I'm to honour you with a dinner cooked with my own hand, then I must have something to cook— and something worth cooking. So you're going to have to work for your supper in the manner of your ancestors in the days when Pittsburg was Fort Pitt."
"Sir?"
Gracey considered the young American gravely for a moment, then shook his head. "On the other hand, I doubt very much whether you could hit a barn door. But as it happens you have anticipated me in your choice of guest. I assume you are a crack shot, Colonel Butler?"
Butler stared back at him utterly at a loss.
"I'm a—a tolerable shot," he spluttered finally.
"Better than tolerable, I hope! Could you hit a moving target. . ." Gracey paused dramatically ". . . if your dinner depended on it?"
Polly burst out laughing. "Uncle John—the poor man doesn't understand a word anyone's been saying to him this afternoon. First Terry and Mike—and now you!" She turned apologetically to Butler. "Colonel, you see Uncle John just fancies he's one of the world's great cooks—"
"My dear, I don't fancy anything of the sort. I am a very good cook—"
"And once in a while he has to prove it. And when this frightful American won the Newdigate Poetry Prize with a perfectly incomprehensible bit of doggerel—"
"Now hold on, Polly-Anna!"
"Perfectly incomprehensible—Uncle John promised him one of his dinners. And it seems you're going to be honoured too."
"If he can bag a brace of good Cumberland hares before lunch, that is," amended Gracey. "I know it is a bit late in the year, but we're far enough north here for them to be still in their prime. By rights I should jug them—hares always ought to be jugged—but that would take ten days, or seven at the very least, and we haven't time for that. So it must be a stew, a hare stew ..."
Butler gaped at him, but the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cumbria had passed beyond his immediate audience into a paradisal world of his own.
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". . . a cream of vegetable soup, the imported celery is very acceptable just now. And quenelles—we shouldn't have them at this time of year either, but I can't resist them even though you can't get pike . . .
haddock poached in a bouillon of good chicken stock with a drop of white wine. Loire—or a bottle of Charles's Vouvray-—we can start with that and end with it... And something sweet to go with it then—