Phoenix and Ashes

Yes, and he's been spending all his time down at The Broom, and not at the Broom Hall Inn, hasn't he? she answered herself.

"Did you meet a lot of Americans?" she asked, seizing on his last statement as a way to draw him out a little more.

"More Canadians, which aren't quite the same thing." He ate the last few bites of his sandwich neatly, then uncorked a bottle of ginger beer and handed it to her, before taking one from his rucksack for himself. "The Canadians were—quieter. Didn't seem so intent on making a rowdy reputation for themselves. Mind you, the Australians are at least as loud as the Yanks. Only ever met a few of the Yanks, and they were all cut of the same cloth—right out of a Wild West show, tall, loud, rough. Good lads, but seemed determined that they were going to show all of us that they were larger than life."

She laughed a little at his quizzical expression. "Maybe they only thought they had to live up to what's written in their novels?" she suggested. "And the only novels I've ever heard of that had Canadians in them were all about the mounted police, not about cowboys and outlaws."

"Which came first, the novel or the stereotype?" He grinned and shook his head. "Well, if I could answer that, I'd be a wiser man than I am. All I can tell you is that the Yanks fly like they're trying to ride a wild horse, all seat and no science. It makes them either brilliant, or cracks them up, and nothing in between. The Huns are all science and no seat—"

"And the French?" she prompted.

"Ah, the French. Science with style, and a great deal of attitude." He nodded wisely. "They fly like their women dress. They take a little bit of nothing and make everything out of it, throw themselves at impossible targets and often as not, pull the trick off on the basis of sheer savoir faire. Then when you try and congratulate or commiserate with them, you get the same answer. 'C'est la vie, c'est la. guerre,' and then they beg a cigarette off you and make off with the whole pack, and you end up feeling privileged they took your last fag-end." He shook his head again, chuckling.

She smiled. He seemed easier talking about the war and flying today than he had been the last time she'd seen him. But she didn't want to press things too hard, so she asked him what he had been doing since they'd last met.

He sighed. "Oh, being horribly lord-of-the-manor. Meeting my tenant farmers. Looking at alternatives to some of what we've been raising—things that won't need as much labor. Going over the books with my estate manager. Mater didn't bother; mention the accounts to her and she flaps her hands and looks a bit faint."

"Poor thing," Eleanor said, feelingly. "I hate accounting. I keep thinking I've put numbers in all the wrong columns, even when I haven't."

"Well, she would do just that and never know it, and that's a fact." He set his empty ginger-beer bottle down, and rummaged in the basket inquisitively. "I say! Tea-cakes!"

"They're from a tin," she warned.

"That's the only kind we could get, over there," he replied. "Wouldn't remember what a proper one tasted like. We were always starved for sweets, on account of it being so plaguey cold and never really able to get properly warm except during summer. All tents do is keep off the rain—and sometimes not even that." "Well, have my share," she told him generously. The rest of the afternoon went by much as the first had; in inconsequential chatter. Any time he started to run dry of inconsequentials, she prompted him with something else light. Somehow she knew that this was what he needed. When he talked about the war, he shouldn't be talking about the war, itself, but about things on the periphery. And above all, she was not going to ask him about fighting.

Books, though—that was a safe enough topic. And he had read an astonishing variety. It seemed that once someone was done with whatever volume had been sent him by friends, lover, or relatives, if it didn't have sentimental value, it became common property. A surprising amount of poetry ended up making the rounds of the barracks—somehow he had ended up memorizing a great deal of it, and without too much coaxing she got him to recite quite a bit of it. It wasn't too much of a surprise that he found Kipling to his taste; when he recited "The Bridge-Guard at Karoo" she could almost see the scene played out in front of her, the sound and lights of the train coming out of the hot, dark silence of the desert night, the men on their solitary, isolated duty grasping desperately for the few moments of civilization they were allowed, and then the train moving on again, leaving them—"few, forgotten, and lonely"—to their thankless post.

She thought that he could see it, too. Perhaps that was why he recited it so feelingly.