The Dark Tower

“If we’d had half the money spent on us, Sir, that you keep guzzling over,” Winn cheerfully threw out, “we could knock spots out of Europe. The trouble with England is — she treats her sailors as if they were the proud sisters — and we are shoved out like Cinderella into the scullery to do all the dirty work.”

“Pooh!” said Sir Peter, “work! Is that what you call it — takin’ a horse out for an hour or two, and shoutin’ at a few men on a parade ground. What’s an army good for — even when it’s big enough to be seen with the naked eye and capable of attacking a few black savages with their antiquated weapons. Why you’re safe, that’s what you are — dead safe! Land’s beneath you — immovable — you can get anywhere you want to as easy as sliding down banisters! Targets keep still too! It’s nothing to hit a thing you can stand to fire at while it stands still to be fired at! Child’s play, that’s what it is. Look at us, something up all the time, peace or war. We’ve got the sea to fight — wind too — and thick weather. We’ve got our pace to mind and if we ever did clinch up we’d have to do our fighting at a rate that’d make an express train giddy — and running after a target goin’ as hard as we do! That’s what I call something of a service. No! No! The Army’s played out. You’re for ornament now, meant to go round Buckingham Palace and talk to nurse-maids in the Park.”

“Not many nurse-maids in the Kyber Pass,” his son observed.

“Frontiers — yes, I dare say,” snorted Sir Peter. “A few black rag dolls behind trees popping at you to keep your circulation going, and you with Maxims and all, going picnics in the hills and burning down villages as easy as pulling fire-crackers — and half the time you want help from us! Look at South Africa!”

They looked at South Africa for some time till the dessert came and the Plymouth Brother thankfully withdrew. After that Winn allowed himself some margin and Lady Staines leaned back in her chair, ate grapes and enjoyed her coffee.

The conversation became pungent, savage and enlivened on Sir Peter’s part by strange oaths.

Winn kept to sudden thrusts of irony impossible to foresee and difficult to parry.

They drank velvety ripe old port. Sir Peter was for the moment out of pain and anxious to assert his freedom from doctors. The conversation shifted to submarines. Sir Peter thought them an underhand and decadent development suited to James, who was in command of one of them.

As to aëroplanes he said that as we’d now succeeded in imitating infernal birds and fishes — he supposed we’d soon bring off reptiles the kind of creature the modern young would be likely to represent best.

“We shall soon have the police crawling on their bellies up and down the Strand hiding behind lamp-posts,” finished Sir Peter. “Call that kind of thing science! It’s an inverted Noah’s Ark! That’s what it is! And when you get it all going to suit yourself, there’ll be another flood, and serve you all damned well right. I shall enjoy seeing you drown!”

Winn replied that you had to fight with your head now and that people who fought with their fists were about as dangerous as stuffed rabbits.

Sir Peter replied that in the end everything came down to blood, how much you’d got yourself and how much you could get out of the enemy.

Lady Staines was slightly afraid of leaving them in this atmosphere, but at last she reluctantly withdrew to the hall, where she listened to the varying shades of Sir Peter’s voice and decided they were on the whole loud enough to be normal.

At eleven o’clock she and Winn between them assisted Sir Peter to bed.

This was a sharp and fiery passage usually undertaken by the toughest of the gardeners.

Winn however managed extraordinarily well. He insisted on occasional pauses and by a home truth of an appallingly personal nature actually silenced his father for the last half flight.

Sir Peter breakfasted in his room.

He had had a bad night. He wouldn’t, as he explained to his wife, have minded if Winn had been a puny chap; but there he was, sound and strong, with clear hard eyes, broad, straight shoulders and a grip of iron, and yet Taylor, that little village hound of an apothecary, said once you had microbes it didn’t matter how strong you were — they were just as likely to be fatal as if you were a narrow-chested epileptic.