“You said you were very busy?” I remarked.

He flicked off his cigarette ash and nodded.

“What at?”

“War poetry,” he replied.  “I am trying to supply the real note.  It is badly wanted.  There are all kinds of stuff being written, but all indifferent and valueless.  If it has a swing, it’s merely vulgar, and what isn’t vulgar is academic, commonplace.  There’s a crying need for the high level poetry that shall interpret with dignity and nobility the meaning of the war.”

“Have you written much?”

“I have an ode every week in the Albemarle Review.  I also write the political article.  Didn’t you know?  Haven’t you seen them?”

“I don’t take in that periodical,” said I.  “The omniscience of the last copy I saw dismayed me.  I couldn’t understand why the Government were such insensate fools as not to move from Downing Street to their Editorial offices.”

Randall, with a humouring smile, defended the Albemarle Review.

“It is run,” said he, “by a little set of intellectuals—­some men up with me at Oxford—­who must naturally have a clearer vision than men who have been living for years in the yellow fog of party politics.”

He expounded the godlike wisdom of young Oxford at some length, replying vividly to here and there a Socratic interpolation on my part.  After a while I began to grow irritated.  His talk, like his verse, seemed to deal with unrealities.  It was a negation of everything, save the intellectual.  If he and his friends had been in power, there would never have been a war; there never would have been a German menace; the lamb would have lain down in peace, outside the lion.  He had an airy way of dismissing the ruder and more human aspects of the war.  Said I:—­

“Anyone can talk of what might have been.  But that’s all over and done with.  We’re up against the tough proposition of the present.  What are you doing for it?”

He waved a hand.  “That’s just the point.  The present doesn’t matter—­not in the wide conception of things.  It is the past and the future that count.  The present is mere fluidity.”

“The poor devils up to their waists in water in the trenches would agree with you,” said I.

“They would also agree with me,” he retorted, “if they had time to go into the reconstruction of the future that we are contemplating.”

At this juncture Marigold came in with the decanters and syphons.  I noticed his one eye harden on the velvet dinner-jacket.  He fidgeted about the room, threw a log on the fire, drew the curtains closer, always with an occasional malevolent glance at the jacket.  Then Randall, like a silly young ass, said, from the depths of his easy chair, a very silly thing.

“I see you’ve not managed to get into khaki yet, Sergeant.”

Marigold took a tactical pace or two to the door.

“Neither have you, sir,” he said in a respectful tone, and went out.