“Are you sure you won’t be killed?” asked Jay suddenly.

“I can’t be,” said Kew.  “How could I be?  I’m me.  I’m not brave, and I don’t go to France with one eye on duty and the other on the possibility of never coming back.  I go because the crowd goes, and the crowd—­a rather shrunken crowd—­will come back safe.  I’m too average a man to get killed.”

“Don’t you think all those million ghosts are thinking, ’What business had Death to choose me?’” suggested Jay.

“No,” said Kew.  “I’m sure they know.”

After a few seconds’ pause he said, “By Jove, are you in fancy dress?”

“No.  Why?”

“Why indeed.  Why a kilt and yards of gaiters?  Why a hat like a Colonial horse marine?”

“Oh, this is the uniform of a bus-conductor,” replied Jay.

Kew scanned it with distaste.  Presently he said, “Don’t you think you’d better give it up?  Buy a new hat with a day’s earnings, and get the sack.”

“I can’t quarrel with my bread and butter,” said Jay.

“Surely this is only jam,” said Kew.  “You’ve got plenty of money of your own for bread and butter.”

“I haven’t now,” answered Jay.  “I gave up having money when the War started.  Perhaps I chucked it into the Serpentine.  Perhaps not.  I forget.”

Kew got up slowly.  “Well,” he said, “sure you’re all right?  I must be going.  I don’t know when the last train goes.”

In London it is impossible to ignore the fact that you are late.  The self-righteous hands of clocks point out your guilt whichever way you look.  Your eye and your ear are accused on every side.  You long for the courteous clocklessness of the country; there, mercifully, the sun neither ticks nor strikes, nor cavils at the minutes.

There was a crowd of home-goers at Brown Borough Church, and each ’bus as it arrived was like the angel troubling the waters of Bethesda.  There was no hope for the old or timid.  Kew was an expert in the small sciences of London.  He knew not only how to mount a ’bus, while others of his like were trying four abreast to do the same, but also how to stand on a space exactly half the size of his boot soles, without holding on. (This is done, as you probably know too, by not looking out of the window.)

Kew had given up taxis and cigars in war-time.  It was his pretence never to do anything on principle, so he would have blushed if anybody had commented on this ingenuous economy.  The fact that he had joined the Army the first day of the War was also, I think, a tender spot in the conscience of Kew.  A Victoria Cross would have been practically unbearable, and even to be mentioned in despatches would have been a most upsetting contradiction of that commonplace and unprincipled past of which he boasted.  He thought he was such a simple soul that he had no motives or principles in anything that he did, but really he was simpler than that.  He was so simple that he did his best without thinking about it.  It certainly sounds rather a curious way to live in the twentieth century.