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All this went fairly well. “Want to go into the Army?” said the Lieutenant-Colonel. “Well I suppose we must expect a lot of people coming in from outside nowadays. Lot of new battalions being formed, even in the Brigade. I presume you’ll join the infantry. No point in going into the cavalry nowadays. All these machines. Might just as well be an engine driver and have done with it. There’s a lot of damn fool talk about this being a mechanized war and an air war and a commercial war. All wars are infantry wars. Always have been.”

“Yes, it was infantry I was thinking of.”

“Quite right. I hear some of the line regiments are very short of officers. I don’t imagine you want to go through the ranks, ha! ha! There’s been a lot of nonsense about that lately. Not that it would do any harm to some of the young gentlemen I’ve seen about the place. But for a fellow of your age the thing to do is to join the Supplementary Reserve, put down the regiment you want to join — there are a number of line regiments who do very useful work in their way — and get the commanding officer to apply for you.”

“Exactly, sir, that’s what I came to see you about. I was hoping that you —”

“That I…?” Slowly to that slow mind there came the realization that Basil, this dissolute-looking young man who had so grossly upset his lunch interval the day before, this radical who had impugned the efficiency of the officer-type, was actually proposing to join the Bombardier Guards.

“I’ve always felt,” said Basil, “that if I had to join the foot guards, I’d soonest join yours. You aren’t as stuffy as the Grenadiers and you haven’t got any of those bogus regional connections like the Scots and Irish and Welsh.”

Had there been no other cause of offence; had Basil come to him with the most prepossessing appearance, the most glittering sporting record, a manner in which deference to age was most perfectly allied with social equality, had he been lord of a thousand loyal tenants, had he been the nephew of the Colonel-in-chief, the use by a civilian of such words as “stuffy” and “bogus” about the Brigade of Guards would have damned him utterly.

“So what I suggest,” Basil continued, “is that I sign up for this Supplementary Reserve and put you down as my choice of regiment. Will that be O.K.?”

The Lieutenant-Colonel found his voice; it was not a voice of which he had full control; it might have been the voice of a man who had been suspended for a few seconds from a gibbet and then cut down. He fingered his collar as though, indeed, expecting to find the hangman’s noose there. He said: “That would not be O.K. We do not take our officers from the Supplementary Reserve.”

“Well how do I join you?”

“I’m afraid I must have misled you in some way. I have no vacancy for you in the regiment. I’m looking for platoon commanders. As it is I’ve got six or seven ensigns of over thirty. Can you imagine yourself leading a platoon in action?”

“Well, as a matter of fact I can, but that’s the last thing I want. In fact that’s why I want to keep away from the line regiments. After all there is always a number of interesting staff jobs going for anyone in the Guards, isn’t there? What I thought of doing was to sign up with you and then look round for something more interesting. I should be frightfully bored with regimental life you know, but everyone tells me it’s a great help to start in a decent regiment.”

The noose tightened about the Lieutenant-Colonel’s throat. He could not speak. It was with a scarcely human croak and an eloquent gesture of the hand that he indicated that the interview was over.

In the office it quickly became known that he was in one of his bad moods again.

Basil went back to Angela.

“How did it go, darling?”

“Not well. Not well at all.”

“Oh dear, and you looked so particularly presentable.”

“Yes; it can’t have been that. And I was tremendously polite. Said all the right things. I expect that old snake Jo Mainwaring has been making mischief again.”

“When we say that Parsnip can’t write in wartime Europe, surely we mean that he can’t write as he has written up till now. Mightn’t it be better for him to stay here, even if it meant holding up production for a year or so, so that he can develop?”

“Oh, I don’t think Parsnip and Pimpernell can develop. I mean an organ doesn’t develop; it just goes on playing different pieces of music but remains the same. I feel Parsnip and Pimpernell have perfected themselves as an instrument.”

“Then suppose Parsnip were to develop and Pimpernell didn’t. Or suppose they developed in different directions. What would happen then?”

“Yes, what would happen then?”

“Why does it take two to write a poem?” asked the redheaded girl.

“Now Julia, don’t short-circuit the argument.”

“I should have thought poetry was a one-man job. Part-time work at that.”

“But Julia, you’ll admit you don’t know very much about poetry, dear.”

“That’s exactly why I’m asking.”

“Don’t pay any attention, Tom. She doesn’t really want to know. She’s only being tiresome.”

They were lunching at a restaurant in Charlotte Street; there were too many of them for the table; when you put out your hand for your glass and your neighbour at the same time put out his knife for the butter, he gave you a greasy cuff; too many for the menu, a single sheet of purple handwriting that was passed from hand to hand with indifference and indecision; too many for the waiter, who forgot their various orders; there were only six of them but it was too many for Ambrose. The talk was a series of assertions and interjections. Ambrose lived in and for conversation; he rejoiced in the whole intricate art of it — the timing and striking, the proper juxtaposition of narrative and comment, the bursts of spontaneous parody, the allusion one would recognize and one would not, the changes of alliance, the betrayals, the diplomatic revolutions, the waxing and waning of dictatorships that could happen in an hour’s session about a table. But could it happen? Was that, too, most exquisite and exacting of the arts, part of the buried world of Diaghilev?

For months, now, he had seen no one except Poppet Green and her friends, and now, since Angela Lyne’s return, Basil had dropped out of the group as abruptly as he had entered it, leaving Ambrose strangely forlorn.

Why, he wondered, do real intellectuals always prefer the company of rakes to that of their fellows? Basil is a Philistine and a crook; on occasions he can be a monumental bore; on occasions a grave embarrassment; he is a man for whom there will be no place in the coming Workers’ State; and yet, thought Ambrose, I hunger for his company. It is a curious thing, he thought, that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste. Nanny told me of a Heaven that was full of angels playing harps; the Communists tell me of an earth full of leisured and contented factory hands. I don’t see Basil getting past the gate of either. Religion is acceptable in its destructive phase: the desert monks carving up that humbug Hypatia, the anarchist gangs roasting the monks in Spain. Hellfire sermons in the chapels; soap-box orators screaming their envy of the rich. Hell is all right. The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a heaven that it shows itself cloddish. But Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic. Am I baptized into this modern world? At least I haven’t taken a new name. All the rest of the Left Wing writers have adopted plebeian monosyllables