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How I longed to turn on my side, but that was a luxury denied me for weeks. My friend Eva had heard the cheerful news when she returned from Boulogne, where she had been all day, and she and Lowson were allowed to come and see me for a few minutes. "I've broken both legs," I stated. "Isn't it the limit? They don't half hurt."
As we were never free to use it in the morning we lent it to some friends, and one day a fearful catastrophe happened. Fresh water was as hard to get as in a desert, and the only way to procure any was to bribe French urchins to carry it in large tin jugs from a spring near the Casino. That afternoon Lowson happened to be giving a rather swell and diplomatic tea party.
When he first made his fortune he had gone to the Heralds to discover his family, and these obliging gentlemen had provided a pedigree. It appeared that he was a scion of the house of Lowson or Lowieson, an ancient and rather disreputable clan on the Scottish side of the Border. He took a shooting in Teviotdale on the strength of it, and used to commit lengthy Border ballads to memory.
To our great disappointment an order came up to the Convoy that all cameras were to be sent back to England, and everyone rushed round frantically finishing off their rolls of films. Lowson appeared and took one of the cook-house "staff" armed with kettles and more or less covered with smuts. It was rightly entitled, "The abomination of desolation" when it came to be gummed into my War Album!
MacBryde, in describing it to me afterwards, swayed his hands about with the fingers twiddling in a weird kind of way, and said the board went like that. The game was fierce but brief. It was presently discovered that both kings had been taken. Lowson was hard to convince, but this came home to him. "Man," he is reported to have said to MacBryde, "I'm just drunk. There's no doubt in the matter.
Lowson, who had had her turn before Eva, appropriately christened it "Little Willie," and I can affirm that that car had a Hun soul. You were up and dressed at 5 a.m. and waited about camp till the telephone bell rang to say the train had arrived.
"How," asked the Colonel, who was conducting the Enquiry, "can you declare with so much certainty the space was 3 feet 8 inches?" "I measured it," replied Lowson promptly. "May I ask with what?" he rasped. The Court of Enquiry went down like a pack of cards before that tape measure.
Incidentally it became quite an Angelus for us. Considering the way she hunted all the meat shops for tit bits, that cat ought to have been a show animal but it wasn't. One day as our fairy Lowson was lightly jumping from a window-sill she inadvertently "came in contact" with Dip's tail, the extreme tip of which was severed in consequence!
I met Lowson and Lean at Victoria on January 3, 1916, and between us we smuggled "Tuppence" into the boat train without anyone seeing him; likewise through the customs at Folkestone. Arrived there we found that mines were loose owing to the recent storms, and the boat was not sailing till the next day. Then followed a hunt for rooms, which we duly found but in doing so lost "Tuppence."
The true sweetness of chess, if it ever can be sweet, is to see a victory snatched, by some happy impertinence, out of the shadow of apparently irrevocable disaster. And talking of cheerfulness reminds me of Lowson's historical game of chess. Lowson said he had been cheerful sometimes but, drunk! Perish the thought!
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