The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [82]
‘Coming to sit with the Regiment tonight, Captain Gwatkin,’ Bithel would say when he joined us; then add in his muttered, confidential tone: ‘Between you and me, there’re not much of a crowd on this course. Pretty second-rate.’
Bithel always found difficulty in addressing Gwatkin as ‘Rowland’. In early days, Gwatkin had protested once or twice at this formality, but I think he secretly rather enjoyed the respect implied by its use. Bithel, like everyone else, possessed one or more initial, but no one ever knew, or at least seemed to have forgotten, the name or names for which they stood. He was always called ‘Bith’ or ‘Bithy’, in some ways a more intimate form of address, which Gwatkin, on his side, could never bring himself to employ. The relaxation Bithel styled ‘sitting with the Regiment’ took place in an alcove, unofficially reserved by Gwatkin, Kedward and myself for our use as part of the permanent establishment of Castlemallock, as opposed to its shifting population of Anti-Gas students. The window seat where I used to read Esmond was in this alcove, and we would occasionally have a drink there. Since the night when he had first joined the Battalion, Bithel’s drinking, though steady when drink was available, had not been excessive, except on such occasions as Christmas or the New Year, when no great exception could be taken. He would get rather fuddled, but no more. Bithel himself sometimes referred to his own moderation in this respect.
‘Got to keep an eye on the old Mess bill,’ he would say. ‘The odd gin-and-orange adds up. I have had the CO after me once already about my wine bill. Got to mind my p’s and q’s in that direction.’
As things turned out at Castlemallock, encouragement to overstep the mark came, unexpectedly, from the army authorities themselves. At least that was the way Bithel himself afterwards explained matters.
‘It was all the fault of that silly old instruction,’ he said. ‘I was tired out and got absolutely misled by it.’
Part of the training on the particular Castlemallock course Bithel was attending consisted in passing without a mask through the gas-chamber. Sooner or later, every rank in the army had to comply with this routine, but students of an Anti-Gas course naturally experienced a somewhat more elaborate ritual in that respect than others who merely took their turn with a unit. A subsequent aspect of the test was first-aid treatment, which recommended, among other restoratives, for one poisonous gas sampled, ‘alcohol in moderate quantities’. On the day of Bithel’s misadventure, the gas-chamber was the last item on the day’s programme for those on the course. When Bithel’s class was dismissed after this test, some took the advice of the text-book and had a drink; others, because they did not like alcohol, or from motives of economy, confined themselves to hot sweet tea. Among those who took alcohol, no one but Bithel neglected the manual’s admonition to be moderate in this remedial treatment.
‘Old Bith’s having a drink or two this evening, isn’t he,’ Kedward remarked, even before dinner.
Bithel always talked thickly, and, like most people who habitually put an unusually large amount of drink away, there was in general no great difference between him drunk or sober. The stage of intoxication he had reached made itself known only on such rare occasions as his dance round the dummy. At Castlemallock that night, he merely pottered about the ante-room, talking first to one group of anti-gas students, then to another, when, bored with him, people moved away. He did not join us in the alcove until