The Soldier's Art - Anthony Powell [59]
“For instance, I wrote something about my first unit when I was with them,” he said.
“Recite it to us.”
Stevens laughed, a merely formal gesture of modesty. He turned to me*
“Nicholas,” he said, “were you ever junior subaltern in your battalion?”
“For what seemed a lifetime.”
“And proposed the King’s health in the Mess on guest nights?”
“Certainly.”
“Mr. Vice, the Loyal Toast – then you rose to your feet and said: Gentlemen, the King.”
“Followed by The Allied Regiments – such-and-such a regiment of Canada and such-and-such a regiment of Australia.”
“Do you mean to say this actually happened to you yourself, Nick?” asked Moreland. “You stood up and said Gentlemen, the King?”
He showed total incredulity.
“I used to love it,” said Stevens. “Put everything I had into the words. It was the only thing I liked about the dump. I only asked all this because I wrote some lines called Guest Night.”
Stevens cleared his throat, then, without the least self-consciousness, began his recitation in a low, dramatic voice:
“On Thursday it’s a parade to dine,
The Allied Regiments and the King
Are pledged in dregs of tawny wine,
But now the Colonel’s taken wing.
Yet subalterns still talk and tease
(Wide float the clouds of Craven A
Stubbed out in orange peel and cheese)
Of girls and Other Ranks and pay.
If – on last night-scheme – B Coy, broke
The bipod of the borrowed bren:
The Sergeants’ Mess is out of coke:
And Gordon nearly made that Wren.
Along the tables of the Mess
The artificial tulips blow,
Tired as a prostitute’s caress
Their crimson casts no gladdening glow.
Why do those phallic petals fret
The heart, till coils – like Dannert wire –
Concentrically expand regret
For lost true love and found desire?
While Haw-Haw, from the radio,
Aggrieved, insistent, down the stair,
With distant bugles, sweet and low,
Commingles on the winter air.”
Stevens ceased to declaim. He smiled and sat back in his seat. He was certainly unaware of the entirely new conception of himself his own spoken verses had opened up for me. Their melancholy revealed quite another side of his nature, one concealed as a rule by aggressive cheerfulness. This melancholy was no doubt a logical counterpart, the reverse surface of the coin, one to be expected from high spirits of his own particular sort, bound up as they were with a perpetual discharge of personality. All the same, one never learns to expect the obvious. This contrast of feeling in him might have been an element that attracted Priscilla, something she recognised when they first met at Frederica’s; something more fundamentally melodramatic, even, than Lovell himself could achieve. We all expressed appreciation. Moreland was, I think, almost as surprised as myself.
“Not much like Max’s stuff though,” he said.
“All the same, Max Pilgrim was the source.”
“Nor very cheerful,” said Mrs. Maclintick. “I do believe you’re as morbid as Moreland is himself.”
Although she spoke in her accustomed spirit of depreciation, Stevens must have achieved his aim in making more or less of a conquest, because she smiled quite kindly at him after saying that. Moved by her complaisance, or, more likely, by the repetition of his own lines, his face registered self-pity.
“I wasn’t feeling very cheerful at the time,” he said. “That unit I went to as a one-pipper fairly got me down.”
Then, immediately, one of those instantaneous changes of mood, that were so much a part of him, took place.
“Would you like to hear one of the bawdy ones?” he asked.
Before anyone could reply, another officer, a big captain with a red face and cropped hair, like Stevens also wearing battle-dress, passed our table. Catching sight of Stevens, this man began to roar with laughter and point.
“Odo, my son,” he yelled. “Fancy seeing your ugly mug here.”
“God, Brian, you old swine.”
“I suppose you’ve been painting the town red, and, like me, have got to catch the night train back to the bloody grind again. I’ve been having a pretty wet weekend, I can