The Europe That Was by Geoffrey Household Page A

to his head. So had the brandy which he and his chosen friend had been drinking, tapering off from the night before. Both those uniformed owls were sure that Rob had chosen sabres as a shrewd way of avoiding any fight at all. They called the bluff. Sabres would do.
    Rob turned up at my flat the next morning. He was half angry, half pleased with himself. The hotel porter had seen him to the door with a deeper bow than he had ever given. His driver had attached a red, white and blue ribbon to his whip. The speed at which rumour travelled was amazing.
    I gave him the time and place—on a river sandbank about six miles out of town at 12.30 the following day. The more usual hour was before breakfast, but the captain and his second wanted to avoid it on the grounds that the police would then be watching their movements.
    â€˜I suppose the captain is quite happy about sabres?’ Rob asked. He sounded as if he felt he might be taking an unfair advantage, bless him! I put his mind at rest on that score. The captain was no master, but he had got through two rounds of the army championship.
    We set to. Five minutes were enough to show me that nobody could possibly be less experienced than Rob. Somehow he had got German student duelling into his head and thought that sabre fighting was all cut and slash. His bucolic singlestick gave him the guards for that stuff. But I tell you he didn’t even realize that the point of a sabre was meant for business.
    â€˜Your opponent can touch you wherever he likes,’ I said, ‘and I take it that will be painful but not vital. What terrifies me is that if one of those swipes of yours ever did by accident connect, you’d cut him clean in two.’
    â€˜Look here, I don’t want to go to gaol,’ Rob began, taking off his mask in despair.
    It was going to be that or hospital, but I didn’t say so.
    â€˜One of our foundry foremen was champion of Yorkshire at singlestick,’ he went on. ‘He told me that if you jump back and whack the ground you can get in again while the other fellow is wondering what you are up to.’
    â€˜He’d certainly wonder—especially meeting a lunatic for the first time.’
    The trick was better than nothing. There was just a chance that,with his reach and a twist of the wrist, he might get the point under the captain’s sword arm. I refused to let him try it on me—I didn’t want to spoil his confidence—but I made him practise the footwork and learn to lunge. Out! Whack the ground! And in like lightning! The slightest scratch was enough for the seconds to call it a day.
    But the longer he practised it, the more I saw it could be suicide. I promised that if he would drop his damned British obstinacy I would tell Magda the whole truth, and that she would be thankful he had shown some common sense. That was as near as I had ever come to admitting she was all ready for orange blossom and London. He blushed slightly and asked me what I had told her.
    Well, I had let her believe it was to be the usual pistols; and she was still chuckling at the thought of her Rob trying to keep a solemn face while he went through the absurd ceremony of loosing off a shot into the sky.
    Rob at last left, still determined to educate the foreigner. I suppose he was conditioned by his long war service to taking useless risks with a sort of sulky anger. As for me, I was as near hysteria as a young man brought up to decent self-control can get. There was no power on earth which could now stop this folly but the police. And to let the police know the time and place of the meeting was the act of a coward, a man without honour, a really unscrupulous, unsporting scoundrel. It was far worse than cheating at cards or bribing a jockey to pull a horse.
    I considered all possible friends who could help with advice; every one of them would assume that it was too late. At last I thought of Marguliesh. As he had said to Rob, he was