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Last week I posted the first chapter of The Larks Still Bravely Singing, and I thought I might as well post the second one this week.
***
Chapter 2
Robert went to the library that night. He’d always liked to read, and anyway the library was a splendid place for assignations, easily accessible to the convalescents and possessed of two distinct curtained alcoves.
Comforting the men, Cyril Sibley had called it. Their relationship had not really ended when Cyril went up to Oxford. After the war started they had gotten together again; but the demands of the army kept them apart much of the time, and then Robert had lost his leg and been in hospital for ages, and finally come home to Montagu House.
On leave from the Somme, Cyril had come to visit. Robert, delighted to see him, trammeled with guilt, had confessed his sins; and Cyril, white as paper, said, “I wish I’d died on the Somme before I knew you’d been unfaithful.”
At the time, Robert could at least have totted up how many. But then Cyril had left him, walking three miles to Montagu St. Clair in the dead of the night rather than stay near Robert another moment. (“Poor dear,” Robert’s mother said, for of course he could not tell her exactly why Cyril left; “Probably he couldn’t face the wounded men, when he’s going back in battle any moment.”) He never answered Robert’s begging apologetic letters.
And then Cyril died after all, at Arras.
After that, Robert slept with any man who would have him—and there were a great many convalescents happy to cheer the tedium with a good fuck. Now he couldn’t begin to count them up.
Possibly he ought to find a new place to spend his evenings. It might be too easy, here, to return to old habits, like a dog to its vomit.
He had not made much progress in Thackeray when the library door creaked open. He did not look up—he did not feel quite up to facing anyone, just then; but then David said, “Oh, I say. Robert Montagu. It is you.”
His voice was a little deeper now than when they were boys, but unmistakably his, that very British phrase I say rather funny in his American accent. Robert closed Thackeray and looked up at him and smiled. David said, even more surprised, “You’re not the least bit surprised. You knew I was here?”
Robert saw that it must seem rather odd, hurtful even, that Robert had known an old school friend was in his house and not bothered to come see him. “I’ve been ill in bed with pneumonia,” he hastened to reassure David. “I only realized you were here this afternoon when my sister Enid—you’ve met Enid?”
“Jolly nice girl,” David said.
“Today was my first airing since I took ill. She was pointing all the new chaps out on the lawn. I suppose I should have called you over, but I hadn’t realized till then that you’d been hurt…”
He foundered slightly; this seemed like a weak excuse. But David nodded as if he understood. He came into the library now, and shut the door behind him. “I was wounded at Passchendaele,” he said. He paused, then, and fiddled at his cuff; and then he said, brightly, “Would you like to see the stump?”
“As you like.”
Robert had seen a fair number of stumps since Montagu House had become a convalescent home, and offered the experienced observation that the surgeon had done a neat job, and David himself a good job hardening it. “I suppose you’re still rubbing it with methylated spirits?”
“Yes; and Dr. Hartshorn has set the masseur on it.”
David looked disappointed, and Robert saw that he had hoped the stump might give Robert a start, as in the old days when David caught an allegedly fascinating spider and carried it up to Robert in cupped hands.
“Buck up,” Robert told David. “You’ve the rest of your life to delight and appall children with the stump.”
David’s face froze. Then he gave a wild bark of laughter, which rose sharply toward hysteria, and nearly collapsed to sit on the rung of a bookcase ladder, gasping between giggles as he pulled himself together.
Robert felt a pang. Clearly David was not quite used, yet, to the fact that his hand was gone forever. It took some time to sink in, like grieving a death. “I lost my leg at Loos,” Robert offered. He had told this often to the wounded men on the ward, and could tell it without pain now. “Machine gun fire.” There had been so many wounded the stretcher-bearers had to abandon the stretchers and carry them out piggyback.
David nodded. “We heard about your leg at the Abbey.”
Robert felt a peculiar jolt, although of course they must have done. It was odd to think about David dashing about the dear old cricket pitch at the Abbey while Robert was lying in the filth in Belgium.
He had never thought about what it must have been like for the younger boys, hearing about their seniors dead or dismembered in the meat grinder of war, and knowing all the time that they were growing up to be sent straight into the maw. “That must have been ghastly,” Robert said.
“Well… rather. You had been best all-around batsman on the nine…”
“The eleven,” corrected Robert, in agony, and realized only when David grinned that this time he’d got it wrong purely to tease Robert. “You knew that all along, didn’t you? You kept saying the nine just because you liked to see us all writhe.”
“I got it wrong honestly the first time,” David protested. “We play baseball in nines, after all. Now baseball,” he said, “is a sensible sport. None of this nonsense about wickets, as if you were playing croquet.” His eyes lit with mischief. “It’s just as well no one ever combined the two. Just imagine cricketers running wild with croquet mallets.”
Robert snorted out a laugh. “Live flamingoes I suppose,” he said, “just like Alice in Wonderland?”
“I was imagining the cricketers bopping each other on the head like Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” David admitted, “but flamingoes would certainly enliven the game. Which,” he added, “certainly needs enlivening,” and ducked, laughing, when Robert tossed an embroidered pillow at his head, with some genuine annoyance.
Perhaps David felt that annoyance, because he added, more seriously, “I ought to let you get back to your reading.”
“Not at all,” Robert said quickly, waving him to sit. “It’s only Thackeray; he’ll be here in the morning. But I daresay you came here looking for a book,” he added. “Natural history, I suppose?”
David shook his head. “Kidnapped,” he said, with a deprecating smile. “I s’pose it’s kiddish, but I’ve read it a dozen times, so I thought it would help me sleep.”
“You’ve read it only a dozen times?” Robert cried. “I positively lived that book during the summer hols when I was ten. I kept it by my bedside and read bits of it over every night. I would have died,” he said, “to have a friend like Alan Breck Stewart. The only part I didn’t read to pieces was the ending; I couldn’t bear that they parted.”
Of course they were reunited in the sequel, Catriona, but Robert had only read it once because it crushed him when Catriona and Davie got married. And it seemed David hadn’t heard of the sequel at all, because he said, “Davie and Alanmust have met again. Don’t you think? Maybe Davie Balfour has to go to France on business, or Alan Breck Stewart sneaks back into Scotland.”
“Why, he’d do it just for the sport of the thing, to thumb his nose at the price on his head,” Robert replied.
David lit like a Roman candle. “He would, wouldn’t he? Used to be,” he said, rather shyly, “when I couldn’t sleep, I would make up further adventures for them. Not just in Scotland and France, but all sorts of silly impossible places: ancient Egypt, and the wine-dark seas of ancient Greece, and twenty thousand leagues under the sea…”
“Do you like Jules Verne?” Robert asked.
David cast himself down on the hearthrug, hugging his arm around his knees. There followed a lengthy and excited discussion about books that they liked in common: not just Stevenson and Verne, but Sir Walter Scott, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs. They disagreed vehemently about Burrough’s A Princess of Mars, which David insisted was delightful, and Robert called a bore with far too much emphasis on the love story; until at last David broke off with a laugh, and said, “I never knew before that you liked to read.”
“I kept it under my hat at school,” Robert said. “That sort of thing didn’t go very far in the Abbey.”
A little silence followed. The talk had buoyed Robert to full wakefulness, but the moment it flagged, so did his animal spirits. He yawned.
“Oh, sorry.” David scrambled up off the hearthrug. “I’ve been jawing on awfully, haven’t I?”
“Oh no,” Robert assured him. “It’s not the least bit that I’m bored. It’s just that I’ve had pneumonia, and this is really the first day I’ve been up. I ought to go to bed.” He hesitated just for a breath, but he might as well ask: “Will you come to the library again tomorrow? Earlier in the evening perhaps. I don’t think they really want you knocking about this late at night.”
“Rather! As long as I won’t be tiring you?”
“Not a bit,” Robert assured him. “I shall look forward to hearing more about Alan Breck Stewart’s triumphant return to Scotland.”
***
The meeting brightened Robert’s spirits so perceptibly that both Enid and Dr. Hartshorn noticed his improvement. “Fresh air and sunshine,” Dr. Hartshorn said. “Worth ten times any of those quacky patent remedies”; and on this favorite theme he expounded at length, while Robert nodded and murmured assent without really listening, for his thoughts were fully occupied with the coming evening, when he should see David again.
When the evening finally came, Robert repaired to the library rather earlier than he expected David to be there. But in fact he had only waded through a few weary pages of Thackeray before the heavy library door swung open just a few inches, and Robert looked up to see David peeking through the opening.
David’s face brightened to a dazzling smile. “Come in,” Robert told him, and David slipped into the room.
“I’ve been looking forward to seeing you all day,” David said. “After all these months wandering from pillar to post, hospital after hospital… Well, you’ve been through it yourself; you know what it’s like, there’s no need to talk about it. It’s such a wonderful stroke of luck to find an old friend, I’ve been pinching myself to be sure it was real.”
Robert was at first too pleased to speak. But his face spoke for him; he was smiling so hard that his cheeks hurt. At last he said, “Don’t just stand there, old boy, come sit down.”
Robert hoped that David would sit on the hassock; would have liked it, in fact, if David had sat down in his lap.
But David cast himself on the hearthrug, as he had the day before. “Anubis won’t like that one bit,” Robert told him. “He believes that spot is his by right.”
“Is Anubis a dog? Then we can share,” David said, when Robert confirmed it with a nod; and indeed, when the aged Gordon setter limped in later that evening, interrupting a spirited discussion about the further adventures of Alan Breck Stewart, the dog put his head on David’s lap and let David fondle his soft floppy ears. “Where were you yesterday?” David asked the dog.
“Wilkins probably put him out for the night.”
“Wilkins ought to bring him down to the ward for the night,” David responded. “He’d be a jolly good night nurse.”
“I’m sure Dr. Hartshorn would have something to say about the hygienic angle of the question.”
“Oh, well, it’s not like any of us have open wounds anymore.” A line grew between David’s eyes. “No; Anselm’s hips are still draining.” Anubis lifted his head to look up at David’s face. David tugged one of Anubis’s ears gently, then looked up and said to Robert, “So once Davie and Alan have gone to the playhouse in London, what next? I really think they ought to end up on stage somehow, fighting their way out, with the actors’ swords if they have to.”
“That seems extremely careless,” Robert said. “They’ll have just announced their whereabouts to everyone who wants to know.”
“Well, exactly! It’s ever so much more exciting if they have to go on the run, and put on disguises, and sneak about in the night, and end up hiding in a hayloft while the searchers mill about in the inn yard below, their torches sputtering in the rain, and the captain shouting to ask the innkeeper whether he’s seen any Scotsmen. Don’t look like that!” David added, laughing. “You always complain my ideas are too unlikely. No one cares if an adventure is unlikely as long as it’s exciting!”
If Robert had looked odd, it was because he had generally imagined Alan and Davie in a haymow for rather different purposes.
Over the next couple of weeks, as the fire crackled in the grate, and the April rains pattered against the windows, the story grew in wild and even more implausible directions. Alan and Davie ended up on a schooner, and then kidnapped by pirates, and so forth and so on. Robert had the queer sense that he and David had somehow telescoped backwards through time to their schooldays, and were repeating over and over some long-ago evening when David lay on the hearthrug and they talked till the fire burnt down to embers.
In reality, there had been no such evenings to repeat. David had never visited Robert’s house before the war.
In any case, they rarely made it till the fire burnt down. Robert had not fully recovered from his pneumonia yet, and tired easily. One day Dr. Hartshorn pronounced him well enough to attend a small dinner party (an interminable affair with the vicar and his wife), and afterward in the library Robert more or less fell asleep in mid-sentence.
He jerked awake a little while later (a few seconds? A few minutes?) to find David gazing at him anxiously. “If you’re so tired you needn’t come, you know,” David assured him. “I shall be quite all right on my own. I might finally make some headway on those Wodehouse books you keep telling me to read.”
Robert summoned a smile. “I might have to leave you to the Psmith books tonight,” he admitted. “I feel like I could sleep for a thousand years and wake up tired.”
“Then go up to bed, do,” David urged, and smiled at Robert with such surpassing sweetness that Robert wanted to take David in his arms, just to hold him and soak in his warmth.
They did not always have the library to themselves. David grew shy when someone else came in (he had always been like that, Robert remembered: a perfect puzzle box of oddities on his own, but very quiet in company), and often busied himself in studying the bookshelves until the interloper left.
It was for this reason that Robert eventually informed him of the existence of Catriona: David had repaired to the Stevenson shelf, and Robert thought it better to tell him than wait for David to find out himself. “There’s a sequel?” David said, rather boggled. He took it off the shelf and cast himself in the loveseat to read, but the moment the interloper left, he shut the book over his thumb and looked at Robert reproachfully and said, “There’s been a sequel all this time, and you didn’t tell me?”
There was a spark of amusement in that reproach, so Robert answered with mock-haughtiness, “And deprive you of the pleasure of inventing a sequel of our own? Stevenson’s doesn’t even have a dungeon scene. Davie doesn’t once cradle Alan Breck Stewart’s battered head in his lap after the guards beat Alan for cheek.”
They spent a spirited hour embroidering on the dungeon scene. But David took Catriona with him when he left, and didn’t bring it back with him for a week, at which point he said, “You didn’t tell me about Catriona because you were trying to protect me, weren’t you?” Robert laughed and nodded, and David marveled, “I wouldn’t have believed any book by Robert Louis Stevenson could be so boring. Davie Balfour traipsing around Edinburgh visiting lawyers all day, and no adventures at all and barely any Alan Breck Stewart either. Even Catriona’s not a patch on Stevenson’s other girls, and usually Stevenson writes wonderful girls, doesn’t he? I always thought The Black Arrow was just exactly the best sort of love story, with Dick and Joanna having an adventure together before they got married.”
“Right,” said Robert, utterly without enthusiasm, although it was stupid he should be bothered by David’s appreciation for a fictional girl.
“Sequels often aren’t half as good as the first book,” David said, with a sigh. “Why do you think that is?”
“I s’pose the authors use up all their good ideas in the first book,” Robert said. “There’s meant to be a sequel to David Blaize this year, and I’m rather dreading it on that account.”
“David Blaize?” David said, with mild interest.
Robert had to pause to collect himself, so that he could speak of David Blaize like someone who liked the book a normal amount, rather than someone who loved it with a sick hurt love.
Robert had never dared send the book to Cyril Sibley. But he had recommended the book to the skies to his friend Pickett, who wrote back, baffled, “You’re not going pi, are you? Otherwise how can you stand this tripe? Frank Maddox jawing on for pages and pages about how Blaize’s purity saved him from his beastly urges.”
Of course that was right there in the book; it was very hard to argue. “But they’re such idiots about each other,” Robert had written; and did not write, the way Cyril and I used to be.
It had seemed to Robert that after Robert lost his leg, Cyril was easing himself away from him, though nothing had been said.
Robert meant, and a few times really tried, to write Cyril a letter releasing him. That was the thing to do after a serious injury: the convalescents were always writing to their fiancees to release them from the engagement, and Robert took a few such letters in dictation, from men who had lost their writing hands.
But when he tried to write to Cyril, the page became a mess of cross-outs and bitterness and sometimes tear stains, and he never wrote one he could send.
He really ought to have released Cyril earlier, anyway—as soon as he had started sleeping with other chaps in the trenches. Cyril had seemed so far away, his love like the flame of a distant lighthouse, so obscured by the storm that it might not even be alight; and you could not warm yourself on that when you were freezing to death.
Of course this was just an excuse. Cyril had rightly scoffed at it when Robert tried to explain.
Now, to David, Robert said, “David Blaize is a boarding school book.” He wanted desperately for David to read the book—wanted desperately to hear what he thought of it—but he could not think how to explain what made David Blaize special without saying right out that the leads were so in love with each other. “It’s—well, it’s the only book I’ve ever read that really feels like boarding school,” he floundered. “I like it a great deal,” he said, rather helplessly. “I hope you’ll read it.”
“Yes, certainly. You’ve got a copy, I suppose? Which shelf?”
“On the wall over there. The author’s Benson. It’s up near the top; you’ll have to climb the ladder.”
This was clearly the first time David had tackled a ladder since losing his hand, and he approached it with great determination. There was one awkward moment after he’d gotten the book from the shelf, and perched on the rung with his one hand full of book; but then he tucked the book under his chin to bring it down.
When he reached the floor again he cast himself on the rug, flushed and pleased with himself and painfully fetching; and Robert realized, with a pang, that he had once again fallen a little bit in love with David.
***
Chapter 2
Robert went to the library that night. He’d always liked to read, and anyway the library was a splendid place for assignations, easily accessible to the convalescents and possessed of two distinct curtained alcoves.
Comforting the men, Cyril Sibley had called it. Their relationship had not really ended when Cyril went up to Oxford. After the war started they had gotten together again; but the demands of the army kept them apart much of the time, and then Robert had lost his leg and been in hospital for ages, and finally come home to Montagu House.
On leave from the Somme, Cyril had come to visit. Robert, delighted to see him, trammeled with guilt, had confessed his sins; and Cyril, white as paper, said, “I wish I’d died on the Somme before I knew you’d been unfaithful.”
At the time, Robert could at least have totted up how many. But then Cyril had left him, walking three miles to Montagu St. Clair in the dead of the night rather than stay near Robert another moment. (“Poor dear,” Robert’s mother said, for of course he could not tell her exactly why Cyril left; “Probably he couldn’t face the wounded men, when he’s going back in battle any moment.”) He never answered Robert’s begging apologetic letters.
And then Cyril died after all, at Arras.
After that, Robert slept with any man who would have him—and there were a great many convalescents happy to cheer the tedium with a good fuck. Now he couldn’t begin to count them up.
Possibly he ought to find a new place to spend his evenings. It might be too easy, here, to return to old habits, like a dog to its vomit.
He had not made much progress in Thackeray when the library door creaked open. He did not look up—he did not feel quite up to facing anyone, just then; but then David said, “Oh, I say. Robert Montagu. It is you.”
His voice was a little deeper now than when they were boys, but unmistakably his, that very British phrase I say rather funny in his American accent. Robert closed Thackeray and looked up at him and smiled. David said, even more surprised, “You’re not the least bit surprised. You knew I was here?”
Robert saw that it must seem rather odd, hurtful even, that Robert had known an old school friend was in his house and not bothered to come see him. “I’ve been ill in bed with pneumonia,” he hastened to reassure David. “I only realized you were here this afternoon when my sister Enid—you’ve met Enid?”
“Jolly nice girl,” David said.
“Today was my first airing since I took ill. She was pointing all the new chaps out on the lawn. I suppose I should have called you over, but I hadn’t realized till then that you’d been hurt…”
He foundered slightly; this seemed like a weak excuse. But David nodded as if he understood. He came into the library now, and shut the door behind him. “I was wounded at Passchendaele,” he said. He paused, then, and fiddled at his cuff; and then he said, brightly, “Would you like to see the stump?”
“As you like.”
Robert had seen a fair number of stumps since Montagu House had become a convalescent home, and offered the experienced observation that the surgeon had done a neat job, and David himself a good job hardening it. “I suppose you’re still rubbing it with methylated spirits?”
“Yes; and Dr. Hartshorn has set the masseur on it.”
David looked disappointed, and Robert saw that he had hoped the stump might give Robert a start, as in the old days when David caught an allegedly fascinating spider and carried it up to Robert in cupped hands.
“Buck up,” Robert told David. “You’ve the rest of your life to delight and appall children with the stump.”
David’s face froze. Then he gave a wild bark of laughter, which rose sharply toward hysteria, and nearly collapsed to sit on the rung of a bookcase ladder, gasping between giggles as he pulled himself together.
Robert felt a pang. Clearly David was not quite used, yet, to the fact that his hand was gone forever. It took some time to sink in, like grieving a death. “I lost my leg at Loos,” Robert offered. He had told this often to the wounded men on the ward, and could tell it without pain now. “Machine gun fire.” There had been so many wounded the stretcher-bearers had to abandon the stretchers and carry them out piggyback.
David nodded. “We heard about your leg at the Abbey.”
Robert felt a peculiar jolt, although of course they must have done. It was odd to think about David dashing about the dear old cricket pitch at the Abbey while Robert was lying in the filth in Belgium.
He had never thought about what it must have been like for the younger boys, hearing about their seniors dead or dismembered in the meat grinder of war, and knowing all the time that they were growing up to be sent straight into the maw. “That must have been ghastly,” Robert said.
“Well… rather. You had been best all-around batsman on the nine…”
“The eleven,” corrected Robert, in agony, and realized only when David grinned that this time he’d got it wrong purely to tease Robert. “You knew that all along, didn’t you? You kept saying the nine just because you liked to see us all writhe.”
“I got it wrong honestly the first time,” David protested. “We play baseball in nines, after all. Now baseball,” he said, “is a sensible sport. None of this nonsense about wickets, as if you were playing croquet.” His eyes lit with mischief. “It’s just as well no one ever combined the two. Just imagine cricketers running wild with croquet mallets.”
Robert snorted out a laugh. “Live flamingoes I suppose,” he said, “just like Alice in Wonderland?”
“I was imagining the cricketers bopping each other on the head like Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” David admitted, “but flamingoes would certainly enliven the game. Which,” he added, “certainly needs enlivening,” and ducked, laughing, when Robert tossed an embroidered pillow at his head, with some genuine annoyance.
Perhaps David felt that annoyance, because he added, more seriously, “I ought to let you get back to your reading.”
“Not at all,” Robert said quickly, waving him to sit. “It’s only Thackeray; he’ll be here in the morning. But I daresay you came here looking for a book,” he added. “Natural history, I suppose?”
David shook his head. “Kidnapped,” he said, with a deprecating smile. “I s’pose it’s kiddish, but I’ve read it a dozen times, so I thought it would help me sleep.”
“You’ve read it only a dozen times?” Robert cried. “I positively lived that book during the summer hols when I was ten. I kept it by my bedside and read bits of it over every night. I would have died,” he said, “to have a friend like Alan Breck Stewart. The only part I didn’t read to pieces was the ending; I couldn’t bear that they parted.”
Of course they were reunited in the sequel, Catriona, but Robert had only read it once because it crushed him when Catriona and Davie got married. And it seemed David hadn’t heard of the sequel at all, because he said, “Davie and Alanmust have met again. Don’t you think? Maybe Davie Balfour has to go to France on business, or Alan Breck Stewart sneaks back into Scotland.”
“Why, he’d do it just for the sport of the thing, to thumb his nose at the price on his head,” Robert replied.
David lit like a Roman candle. “He would, wouldn’t he? Used to be,” he said, rather shyly, “when I couldn’t sleep, I would make up further adventures for them. Not just in Scotland and France, but all sorts of silly impossible places: ancient Egypt, and the wine-dark seas of ancient Greece, and twenty thousand leagues under the sea…”
“Do you like Jules Verne?” Robert asked.
David cast himself down on the hearthrug, hugging his arm around his knees. There followed a lengthy and excited discussion about books that they liked in common: not just Stevenson and Verne, but Sir Walter Scott, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs. They disagreed vehemently about Burrough’s A Princess of Mars, which David insisted was delightful, and Robert called a bore with far too much emphasis on the love story; until at last David broke off with a laugh, and said, “I never knew before that you liked to read.”
“I kept it under my hat at school,” Robert said. “That sort of thing didn’t go very far in the Abbey.”
A little silence followed. The talk had buoyed Robert to full wakefulness, but the moment it flagged, so did his animal spirits. He yawned.
“Oh, sorry.” David scrambled up off the hearthrug. “I’ve been jawing on awfully, haven’t I?”
“Oh no,” Robert assured him. “It’s not the least bit that I’m bored. It’s just that I’ve had pneumonia, and this is really the first day I’ve been up. I ought to go to bed.” He hesitated just for a breath, but he might as well ask: “Will you come to the library again tomorrow? Earlier in the evening perhaps. I don’t think they really want you knocking about this late at night.”
“Rather! As long as I won’t be tiring you?”
“Not a bit,” Robert assured him. “I shall look forward to hearing more about Alan Breck Stewart’s triumphant return to Scotland.”
***
The meeting brightened Robert’s spirits so perceptibly that both Enid and Dr. Hartshorn noticed his improvement. “Fresh air and sunshine,” Dr. Hartshorn said. “Worth ten times any of those quacky patent remedies”; and on this favorite theme he expounded at length, while Robert nodded and murmured assent without really listening, for his thoughts were fully occupied with the coming evening, when he should see David again.
When the evening finally came, Robert repaired to the library rather earlier than he expected David to be there. But in fact he had only waded through a few weary pages of Thackeray before the heavy library door swung open just a few inches, and Robert looked up to see David peeking through the opening.
David’s face brightened to a dazzling smile. “Come in,” Robert told him, and David slipped into the room.
“I’ve been looking forward to seeing you all day,” David said. “After all these months wandering from pillar to post, hospital after hospital… Well, you’ve been through it yourself; you know what it’s like, there’s no need to talk about it. It’s such a wonderful stroke of luck to find an old friend, I’ve been pinching myself to be sure it was real.”
Robert was at first too pleased to speak. But his face spoke for him; he was smiling so hard that his cheeks hurt. At last he said, “Don’t just stand there, old boy, come sit down.”
Robert hoped that David would sit on the hassock; would have liked it, in fact, if David had sat down in his lap.
But David cast himself on the hearthrug, as he had the day before. “Anubis won’t like that one bit,” Robert told him. “He believes that spot is his by right.”
“Is Anubis a dog? Then we can share,” David said, when Robert confirmed it with a nod; and indeed, when the aged Gordon setter limped in later that evening, interrupting a spirited discussion about the further adventures of Alan Breck Stewart, the dog put his head on David’s lap and let David fondle his soft floppy ears. “Where were you yesterday?” David asked the dog.
“Wilkins probably put him out for the night.”
“Wilkins ought to bring him down to the ward for the night,” David responded. “He’d be a jolly good night nurse.”
“I’m sure Dr. Hartshorn would have something to say about the hygienic angle of the question.”
“Oh, well, it’s not like any of us have open wounds anymore.” A line grew between David’s eyes. “No; Anselm’s hips are still draining.” Anubis lifted his head to look up at David’s face. David tugged one of Anubis’s ears gently, then looked up and said to Robert, “So once Davie and Alan have gone to the playhouse in London, what next? I really think they ought to end up on stage somehow, fighting their way out, with the actors’ swords if they have to.”
“That seems extremely careless,” Robert said. “They’ll have just announced their whereabouts to everyone who wants to know.”
“Well, exactly! It’s ever so much more exciting if they have to go on the run, and put on disguises, and sneak about in the night, and end up hiding in a hayloft while the searchers mill about in the inn yard below, their torches sputtering in the rain, and the captain shouting to ask the innkeeper whether he’s seen any Scotsmen. Don’t look like that!” David added, laughing. “You always complain my ideas are too unlikely. No one cares if an adventure is unlikely as long as it’s exciting!”
If Robert had looked odd, it was because he had generally imagined Alan and Davie in a haymow for rather different purposes.
Over the next couple of weeks, as the fire crackled in the grate, and the April rains pattered against the windows, the story grew in wild and even more implausible directions. Alan and Davie ended up on a schooner, and then kidnapped by pirates, and so forth and so on. Robert had the queer sense that he and David had somehow telescoped backwards through time to their schooldays, and were repeating over and over some long-ago evening when David lay on the hearthrug and they talked till the fire burnt down to embers.
In reality, there had been no such evenings to repeat. David had never visited Robert’s house before the war.
In any case, they rarely made it till the fire burnt down. Robert had not fully recovered from his pneumonia yet, and tired easily. One day Dr. Hartshorn pronounced him well enough to attend a small dinner party (an interminable affair with the vicar and his wife), and afterward in the library Robert more or less fell asleep in mid-sentence.
He jerked awake a little while later (a few seconds? A few minutes?) to find David gazing at him anxiously. “If you’re so tired you needn’t come, you know,” David assured him. “I shall be quite all right on my own. I might finally make some headway on those Wodehouse books you keep telling me to read.”
Robert summoned a smile. “I might have to leave you to the Psmith books tonight,” he admitted. “I feel like I could sleep for a thousand years and wake up tired.”
“Then go up to bed, do,” David urged, and smiled at Robert with such surpassing sweetness that Robert wanted to take David in his arms, just to hold him and soak in his warmth.
They did not always have the library to themselves. David grew shy when someone else came in (he had always been like that, Robert remembered: a perfect puzzle box of oddities on his own, but very quiet in company), and often busied himself in studying the bookshelves until the interloper left.
It was for this reason that Robert eventually informed him of the existence of Catriona: David had repaired to the Stevenson shelf, and Robert thought it better to tell him than wait for David to find out himself. “There’s a sequel?” David said, rather boggled. He took it off the shelf and cast himself in the loveseat to read, but the moment the interloper left, he shut the book over his thumb and looked at Robert reproachfully and said, “There’s been a sequel all this time, and you didn’t tell me?”
There was a spark of amusement in that reproach, so Robert answered with mock-haughtiness, “And deprive you of the pleasure of inventing a sequel of our own? Stevenson’s doesn’t even have a dungeon scene. Davie doesn’t once cradle Alan Breck Stewart’s battered head in his lap after the guards beat Alan for cheek.”
They spent a spirited hour embroidering on the dungeon scene. But David took Catriona with him when he left, and didn’t bring it back with him for a week, at which point he said, “You didn’t tell me about Catriona because you were trying to protect me, weren’t you?” Robert laughed and nodded, and David marveled, “I wouldn’t have believed any book by Robert Louis Stevenson could be so boring. Davie Balfour traipsing around Edinburgh visiting lawyers all day, and no adventures at all and barely any Alan Breck Stewart either. Even Catriona’s not a patch on Stevenson’s other girls, and usually Stevenson writes wonderful girls, doesn’t he? I always thought The Black Arrow was just exactly the best sort of love story, with Dick and Joanna having an adventure together before they got married.”
“Right,” said Robert, utterly without enthusiasm, although it was stupid he should be bothered by David’s appreciation for a fictional girl.
“Sequels often aren’t half as good as the first book,” David said, with a sigh. “Why do you think that is?”
“I s’pose the authors use up all their good ideas in the first book,” Robert said. “There’s meant to be a sequel to David Blaize this year, and I’m rather dreading it on that account.”
“David Blaize?” David said, with mild interest.
Robert had to pause to collect himself, so that he could speak of David Blaize like someone who liked the book a normal amount, rather than someone who loved it with a sick hurt love.
Robert had never dared send the book to Cyril Sibley. But he had recommended the book to the skies to his friend Pickett, who wrote back, baffled, “You’re not going pi, are you? Otherwise how can you stand this tripe? Frank Maddox jawing on for pages and pages about how Blaize’s purity saved him from his beastly urges.”
Of course that was right there in the book; it was very hard to argue. “But they’re such idiots about each other,” Robert had written; and did not write, the way Cyril and I used to be.
It had seemed to Robert that after Robert lost his leg, Cyril was easing himself away from him, though nothing had been said.
Robert meant, and a few times really tried, to write Cyril a letter releasing him. That was the thing to do after a serious injury: the convalescents were always writing to their fiancees to release them from the engagement, and Robert took a few such letters in dictation, from men who had lost their writing hands.
But when he tried to write to Cyril, the page became a mess of cross-outs and bitterness and sometimes tear stains, and he never wrote one he could send.
He really ought to have released Cyril earlier, anyway—as soon as he had started sleeping with other chaps in the trenches. Cyril had seemed so far away, his love like the flame of a distant lighthouse, so obscured by the storm that it might not even be alight; and you could not warm yourself on that when you were freezing to death.
Of course this was just an excuse. Cyril had rightly scoffed at it when Robert tried to explain.
Now, to David, Robert said, “David Blaize is a boarding school book.” He wanted desperately for David to read the book—wanted desperately to hear what he thought of it—but he could not think how to explain what made David Blaize special without saying right out that the leads were so in love with each other. “It’s—well, it’s the only book I’ve ever read that really feels like boarding school,” he floundered. “I like it a great deal,” he said, rather helplessly. “I hope you’ll read it.”
“Yes, certainly. You’ve got a copy, I suppose? Which shelf?”
“On the wall over there. The author’s Benson. It’s up near the top; you’ll have to climb the ladder.”
This was clearly the first time David had tackled a ladder since losing his hand, and he approached it with great determination. There was one awkward moment after he’d gotten the book from the shelf, and perched on the rung with his one hand full of book; but then he tucked the book under his chin to bring it down.
When he reached the floor again he cast himself on the rug, flushed and pleased with himself and painfully fetching; and Robert realized, with a pang, that he had once again fallen a little bit in love with David.