Between Dullingstoke Junction and the village town of Market Drowsing
in Sloughshire, lay some ten miles of hard, level highway, engineered
and made in the stark days of old by stalwart Romans who, ignorant
of steamrollers and road-engines as they were, knew as little of the
meaning of the word Impossibility.
One of those ancient road-making warriors might have approved the fine
height and shapely form of a soldier who marched at ease along the
highway, wearing, with a smart and gallant air, the blue, white-faced
full-dress uniform of a trooper in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of
Lancers, without the sword, and the plumed head-dress of blue cloth and
shiny black leather, which a forage-cap--of the muffin pattern more
recently approved by Government--replaced.
He walked at a brisk marching pace, and, in spite of the tightness of
his clothes, broke into a run at times to quicken his circulation.
For, though greatcoats were supplied at the public expense to Great
Britain’s martial sons; so many penalties, pains, and stoppages
attended on the slightest damage to the sacred garment, that in nine
cases out of ten the soldier of the era preferred to go without.
Therefore the short tight coatee of blue cloth, with the white plastron
and facings, being inadequate to keep out the piercing cold of the
frosty February day, this soldier beat his elbows against his sides,
as he ran, and thumped his arms upon a broad chest needing no padding.
But even as he did this he whistled a cheery tune, and his bright eyes
looked ahead as though something pleasant lay waiting at the end of the
bleak, cold journey from the military depôt town of Spurham, thirty
miles away; and the handsome mouth under the soldierly mustache, that
was, like its owner’s abundant curly hair, of strong, dark red, and
curled up on either side towards such a pair of side-whiskers as few
women, at that hirsute period, could look upon unmoved--wore a smile
that was very pleasant.
“It’s not a pretty view!” he said aloud, breaking off in the middle
of “Vilikins and his Dinah” to criticise the landscape. “A man would
need have queer taste to call it even cheerful, particularly in the
winter-time! and yet I wouldn’t swop it for the Bay o’ Naples, with a
volcano spurting fire, and dancing villagers a-banging tambourines--or
anything else you could offer me out of a Panorama. For why, damme if I
know!”
Perhaps the simple reason was that this homely spread of wood and field
and fallow stretching away into the hazy distance, its trees still
leafy in the sheltered hollows, bare where the fierce winds of winter
had wreaked their bitter will, had been familiar to the soldier from
his earliest years. Upon his left hand, uplands whereon the plow-teams
were already moving, climbed to a cold sky of speed-well-blue; and
couch-fires burned before the fanning wind, their slanting columns of
pungent-smelling smoke clinging to the brown furrows before they rose
and thinned and vanished in the upper atmosphere. Sparrows, starlings,
jackdaws, finches and rooks followed the traveling plowshare, settled
in flocks or rose in bevies, their shrill cries mingling with the
jingle of the harness or the crack of the plowman’s whip. And upon
the right hand of the man to whom these sights and sounds were dear
and welcome, rolled the Drowse; often unseen; returning into vision
through recurring gaps in hedges; glimpsed between breasting slopes
of park-land, silently flowing through its deep muddy channel between
immemorial woods where England’s Alfred hunted the boar, speared the
wolf, and slew the red deer.... Silvery-blue in Summer, turbidly brown
in Autumn, in Winter leaden-gray, in Spring jade-green, as now: when,
although the floods of February had in some degree abated, wide,
shallow, ice-bordered pools remained upon the low-lying river-meadows,
and rows of knee-deep willows, marking the course of unseen banks,
lifted bristling hands to the chilly skies, while cornricks on the
upper levels were so honeycombed with holes of rats that had abandoned
their submerged dwellings, that in contemplation of them the tramping
soldier ceased to whistle, and pushed along in silence for at least a
quarter of a mile before his whistle, “Vilikins and his Dinah,” got the
upper hand, and broke out again.
The popular melody was in full blast when the piercing screech of a
distant train, accompanied by a clatter that grew upon the ear, stopped
short, began again after a pause, and thinned out into silence; told
the wayfarer that the London down-train had entered the junction he had
left behind him, disembarked its load of passengers, and gone upon its
way.
And presently, with a rattle and clatter of iron-shod hoofs, and a
jingle of silver-mounted harness, a scarlet mail-phaeton of the most
expensive and showy description, attached to a pair of high-stepping
showy blacks, overtook the military pedestrian, bowled past; and
suddenly pulled up at the roadside, at an order from a burly,
red-faced, turn-up-nosed, gray-haired and whiskered elderly man, topped
with a low-crowned, curly-brimmed, shiny beaver, and enveloped in a
vast and shaggy greatcoat, who sat beside the smug-faced, liveried
groom who drove, and whom you are to recognize as Thompson Jowell.
“Now then, Josh Horrotian, my fine fellow!” The great Contractor,
being in a genial mood, was pleased to bend from his high pedestal
and condescend, with this mere being of common clay, even to jesting.
“How goes the world with you? And how far have you got, young man,
on the road that ends in a crimson silk sash and a pair o’ gold-lace
epaulettes?”
“Why, not yet so far, Mr. Jowell, sir,” returned the cavalryman with
cheerful equanimity, “that I can show you even a Corporal’s stripe upon
my sleeve.”
“And damme! young Josh, you take it uncommonly coolly!” said Thompson
Jowell, puffing out his large cheeks over the upturned collar of the
shaggy coat, and frowning magisterially. “Where’s your proper pride,
hey? Where’s your ambition? What’s become of your enthusiasm, and
eagerness, and ardor for a British soldier’s glorious career? I’m
ashamed of you, Horrotian! What the devil do you mean?”
“You ask me three questions, Mr. Jowell, sir, that I can but answer
in one way; and a fourth,” returned the red-haired trooper, looking
frankly up out of a pair of very clear blue eyes at the large
face of disapproval bent upon him from the lofty altitude of the
mail-phaeton’s front seat, “that I can’t answer in any way at all.”
“I hope I don’t understand you, Joshua Horrotian,” said Thompson Jowell
loftily. “But go on, go on! Damn you, don’t fidget!” He addressed
this exhortation to the more restive of the champing blacks, who had
switched his flowing tail over the reins, and was snorting with his
scarlet nostrils spread, and his wild eye cocked at the hedgerow, as
though to be detained upon the road to the home-stable for the purpose
of conversing with a common soldier was a thing past bearing by a
high-bred horse.
“Whoa!” said the driving groom.
“Whoa, then, my beauty! That curb be a link too tight, Mr. Jowell,”
said Joshua Horrotian, betraying for the first time, by a lingering
smack and twang of the broad local accent, that the county of
Sloughshire might claim him as its son. “Shall I let it out a mite?
He’ll stand like a rock then.”
Thompson Jowell nodded in answer, and the thing was done in a moment,
and Horrotian back in his old place by the side-step, saying:
“You wanted to know just now, Mr. Jowell, where I’d left my proper
pride, and my enthusiasm and eagerness and ardor for a soldier’s
career? I’ve left ’em yonder, sir.” He lifted his riding-whip and
pointed across country. “Over to the Cavalry Barracks at Spurham, where
Ours have been quartered best part o’ three years. With your leave,
sir!”
He spat in a soldierly, leisurely way upon the sandy road, and hitched
his pipeclayed pouch-belt, and shoved a finger of a white-gloved hand
within the edge of his sword-belt of gilt lace with a white stripe, and
went on speaking:
“It seems to me, sir, when I’ve casted round to think a bit--having
done a bit o’ gardening for mother in old days when I wasn’t busy
on the farm--that pride and enthusiasm and ardor and eagerness for
a soldier’s career are like hardy plants that will grow and put out
leaf and bloom even in a soil that’s as poor as ours at Upper Clays,
if they’re but wedd a bit and the snails and slugs picked off of
’em, and a drop o’ water given in drought, and hobnailed boots, and
wheelbarrows, turned aside from crushing of ’em down!”
“Well, well, my man! Where does this bring us to?” demanded the
autocrat of the cocked inquisitive nose, and puffy cheeks, and
goggling, greedy eyes, from his lofty perch upon the front seat of the
scarlet mail-phaeton.
“It brings us to this, Mr. Jowell,” said the trooper, with a fold
coming between his thick broad smear of dark red eyebrows, and an
angered narrowing of the blue eyes that were so clear, “that if you
want a dog to respect himself, let alone his superiors, you’ll give
him a clean kennel to sleep in, and decent food to eat; and if he’s to
do a dog’s work for you, you’ll not curse and bully him so as to break
and cow his spirit. Nay! and if you respect yourself, you’ll give him,
whether he’s been a good dog or only a tolerable sort o’ one--some
sort o’ nursing and care when he lies sick, if it’s only the roughest
kind, before he kicks his last on his straw bed. Then throw him out on
the dung-heap if it’s your liking; he can’t feel it, poor brute! He be
past all that. But where’s the use of a Soldier’s Funeral with a Firing
Party and a Bugler, if,--when the man was living, you branded his
soul with as many lines of anger and resentment and rage as there are
stripes in the Union Jack, God bless it! that, him being dead, you lay
as a pall of honor on his coffin? That’s what I want to know!”
“You want to know too much for your rank and station, Josh
Horrotian--that’s what you do!” said Thompson Jowell, frowning
displeasure upon him. “You’re one of the Malcontents, that’s what
you are. If you were to tell me on your oath you weren’t, I wouldn’t
believe you. I’ve met your breed before!”
“If you have, Mr. Jowell, my answer is that it’s not a bad breed,”
retorted the trooper, with a hot flush and a bright direct look of
anger. “Without trying to use finer language than my little education
warrants, it’s a breed that will fight to the death for Queen and
Country, and hold that man a damned and despicable cur that hangs back
in the hour of England’s need. But when the same bad usage is meted
out by the Authorities in Office to the willing and the unwilling, the
worthless and the worthy, let me tell you, sir, a man loses heart.
For Drill and Discipline and Confinement to Cells for defaulters,
and Flogging for the obstropulous; with Ration Beef and cabbage, and
suet-balls, tight clothes and tight belts, and a leather stock that
saws your ears off, can’t make a machine of a human being all through.
There’s got to be a living spot of flesh left in him somewhere that
feels and tingles and smarts.... And the sooner the great gentlemen
in authority find that out, the better for England and her Army,” said
Joshua Horrotian, with a straightforward, manly energy of voice and
look and gesture that would have gone far to convince, if the right man
had been there to hear him.
“Now, look you here, Trooper Joshua Horrotian,” said the wrong man,
“it’s confounded lucky for you that these opinions of yours--and the
private soldier with opinions is a man we don’t want in the Army and
would a great deal rather be without!--have been blown off to a person
who--having a regard for that decent woman your mother--who I’m not
above acknowledging, in a distant sort of way, as a relation of my
own--isn’t likely to report them in quarters where they would breed
trouble for you, and maybe a taste of the Black Hole.” The speaker held
up a large fur-gloved hand as the trooper seemed about to speak. “Don’t
you try my patience, though! I’ve listened to you long enough....
Discontented, that’s what you are! And Discontent leads to Murmuring,
and Murmuring to Mutiny. And Mutiny to the Gallows--in your case I hope
it won’t!--but I shouldn’t be at all surprised if it did. So beware of
being discontented, Joshua!”
“I may be what you say, a grumbling soldier, though I don’t recognize
myself in the picture you draw of me,” returned the trooper; “but if
the time came to prove whether I’d be willing to lay down my life for
the Old Shop, I’d be found as ready as any other man. And I have cause
for discontent outside the Army, Mr. Jowell.” And the speaker squared
his broad shoulders and drew himself to his full height, looking boldly
in the bullying eyes of the great man. “While I have been a-sogering
my mother’s farm has been going to rack and ruin. Some little-knowing
or ill-meaning person has advised her, Mr. Jowell, for these three
years past, to turn down the low-lying gore meadow-lands of hers beside
the Drowse in clover and beans and vetch. Grazing cows is all they’re
good for, being flooded regularly in November and February, and Aprils
extra-wet. And what with the cold, rainy summers we’ve had, and the
rainy, cold summer we may look to, sure my mother has suffered in
pocket, and worse she will suffer yet! For if her having borrowed money
on mortgage to throw after what has already been lost beyond recall is
going to bring her any good of--I’m a Dutchman!”
“Now, I’ll tell you what, Trooper Horrotian,” said Thompson Jowell,
purple to the rim of his sporting parson’s hat with something more
stinging than the bitter February wind, “I don’t pretend not to know
what you’re driving at, because Aboveboard is my name. If my distant
relation, Mrs. Sarah Horrotian, is pleased to drive over from Market
Drowsing sometimes on her egg-and-butter days, for the purpose of
asking advice from a man who, like myself, is accustomed to be looked
up to and consulted, supposing I happen to be at home at my little
place”--which was a huge, ornate and showy country mansion, with a
great deal of avenue, shrubbery, glass, and experimental garden-ground
about it--“I am not the man to gainsay her, to gratify her long-legged
puppy of a son.”
“I’m obliged to you, I’m sure!” said Josh, reddening to his red hair,
and angrily gnawing, in his desire to restrain himself from incautious
speech, the shiny black strap by which the idiotic little muffin-shaped
forage-cap of German pattern approved by Government, was sustained in a
perilously slanting position on the side of his head.
“My name being Plump and Plain,” said Thompson Jowell, once more
extracting the large fur-gloved hand from under the leather apron
of the phaeton, “I’m damned if I care this snap of my fingers”--he
clumsily snapped them--“whether you are obliged to me or whether you
ain’t! Is that clear to you?”
The groom who occupied the driving seat beside his master laughing
dutifully at this, Thompson Jowell’s righteous indignation was somewhat
appeased, as he proceeded:
“If the river flooded those gore-lands of your mother’s, and the rainy
season finished what the river began, I’m not the Clerk of the Weather
Office, I suppose? Call Providence to account for the bad season,
if you must blame somebody.... Though, if you do, and should happen
to be struck dead by lightning as a punishment for your wickedness,
don’t expect Me to pity you, that’s all! Granted I gave a pound or so
for Sarah Horrotian’s mildewed clover and stinking beans, and barley
that had sprouted green in the ear, to burn for top-dressing; and let
her have a bit of money at easy interest on her freehold of Upper
Clays;--I suppose, as it’s her property, having been left her for her
sole use and benefit by her father (who was an uncle of my own, and
don’t my admitting that prove to you how little proud I am?), she’s
free to borrow on it if it pleases her. You are not the master yet, my
good fellow!”
“And won’t be, please God!--for many a year to come!” said Mr. Jowell’s
good fellow, with unaffected sincerity. “Nor will be ever, Mr.
Jowell, supposing my mother not able to pay off your interest. You’ve
foreclosed on too many of the small freeholders in this neighborhood,
for me to believe that you’ll be more generous and mercifuller with
your poor relation, than you’ve been with them you’ve called your good
friends!”
The groom who drove, forgetting himself so far as to chuckle at this,
Thompson Jowell damned his impertinence with less of dignity and more
of flustered bumptiousness than an admirer of the great man’s would
have expected.
“And poor as my mother is, and hard as she has been put to it,” went on
the trooper, pursuing his sore subject, “if she had dreamed that the
spoiled fodder she sold you for the price such unwholesome rubbish was
worth, was not to be burned for top-dressing, but dried in them kilns
that are worked in another name than yours at Little Milding--and mixed
with decent stuff, and sold as first-class fare for Army horses, poor
beasts!--she’d have seen you at Jerusalem beyond the Jordan before
she’d ha’ parted with a barrow-load of the rot-gut stuff, or she’s not
the woman I take her for!”
“You insolent blackguard!” said Thompson Jowell, blowing at the
speaker, and swelling over the apron of the phaeton until the soundness
of its leather straps must have been severely tested. “You’ve heard of
the Lock-up and Treadmill for proved defamers and slanderers, haven’t
you, in default of the damages such vermin are too poor to pay?”
“I’ve heard of lots o’ things since I joined the Army, Mr. Thompson
Jowell,” retorted Joshua Horrotian, who had regained his coolness as
the other had lost self-command, “and I’ve seen a few more! I’ve seen
such things come out of the middle of Government hay-and-straw trusses
as nobody, except the Contractor who sold and the Forage Department
Agents who took ’em over, and the Quartermaster-Sergeant who served
’em out, and the soldiers who got ’em, would expect to find there. Not
only cabbage-stumps and waste newspapers,” said Josh forcibly, “which
in moderation may be good for Cavalry troop-horses. But ragged flannel
petticoats, empty jam-tins, and an old hat with a litter o’ dead
kittens inside of it, form too variegated and stimulating a diet to
agree with anything under an ostrich; and I’m none too sure that such
wouldn’t be too much for the bird’s digestion in the long-run.”
The groom covered himself with disgrace at this juncture by exploding
in a guffaw, which Thompson Jowell, mentally registering as to be
expiated next pay-day by a lowering of wages, loftily ignored. He
realized his own over-condescension in arguing with the worm that dared
to lift up its head from the ground beneath his chariot-wheels, and
argue with and denounce him. He changed his tone, now, and, instead of
bullying, pitied the crawling thing.
“You don’t understand what you’re talking about, Horrotian,” he said
patronizingly, “and being a poor uneducated, common soldier, who’s to
be astonished at it? The British Government is too great and powerful
and glorious and grand a Power to trouble itself about rags and
jam-tins, or a hatful of dead kittens, shoved for a joke inside a truss
of Army forage by some drunken trooper. Possibly next time you’re in
liquor, my man, you’ll remember that you put them there yourself? As
for any person being unprincipled enough to sell sprouted grain and
mildewed hay, mixed up with sound stuff, as you suggest some persons
do; what I say to you is that such people don’t exist, such wickedness
couldn’t be possible; and if you undertook to prove to me that it is--I
shouldn’t be convinced! And, further, understand this; and what I say
to you is what I said to an impudent, meddlesome whelp of a young
foreigner I met in the train t’other day betwixt Dullingstoke and
Waterloo--the British Government will BE the British Government, in
spite of all the fault-finding and grumbling of mutinous and impudent
upstart Rankers or their betters! And the iron wheels of Administration
will keep on a-rolling, and so sure as heads are lifted too high out
of the dust that is their proper element, those iron wheels I speak of
will roll over ’em and mash ’em. Mash ’em, by Gosh! D’ye understand
me?”
“Quite well, Mr. Jowell,” returned the other composedly. “But I’ve good
hopes of being able to roll or crawl or wriggle out of reach before
those iron wheels you speak of roll my way. Mother having come round
at last, I’m to be bought out of the Army come next Michaelmas, having
served with the Colors--I humbly hope without a single act that might
be calculated to dishonor them, or soil the reputation of an honest man
and a loyal soldier!--rising five years out of the twelve I ’listed
for; and, once being free, I mean to put my shoulder to the wheel in
the farming-line in good earnest; and leave the officer’s sash, and the
pair o’ gold-lace epaulets you spoke of, hanging at the top of the tree
for some other fellow fortunater than I have been, to reach down.”
“Go your way, ungrateful and obstinate young man,” said Thompson
Jowell, sternly, expanding his cheeks to the rotundity of a tombstone
cherub’s, and snorting reprehension. “I hope for your respectable
mother’s sake it mayn’t end in ruin and disgrace, but--my name being
Candid--I shouldn’t wonder if it did!” He shook his pear-shaped head
until he shook his hat over his goggle eyes, and so took it off, and
blew his large cocked nose sonorously upon a vast silk handkerchief he
whisked out of the crown, adding: “I suppose you are on furlough, and
were bound for the Upper Clays when I overtook you marching along the
Queen’s Highway with your riding-whip in your hand?”
“Why, a cane might be better, for a man on leave to carry,” returned
Joshua Horrotian, meditatively running his eye from the stout handle
of the riding-whip to the strong lash at its tip. “But though I came
by the railway, I mean to go back by road. My Captain, being a rich
gentleman, and having a good opinion of my judgment in horseflesh”--he
said this with a flush and sparkle of honest pride--“has bought my
young horse--‘Blueberry’--for the troop. And I’m to ride him. He won’t
look so fat and shiny on the Government forage as he does on what he
gets at home, but he’ll do credit to the Regiment yet, or I’m no judge.
Good-afternoon, sir!”
He saluted and wheeled, setting his handsome face ahead, and Thompson
Jowell, in surly accents, bade the groom drive on. And as the spirited
blacks broke at once into a trot, carrying their owner from the scene
so rapidly that the spick-and-span mail-phaeton became behind their
lively heels a mere flying streak of scarlet, he directed towards
Blueberry and his owner the fervent aspiration: “_And I hope your brute
may come a downer when you’re charging in close order, and break your
infernal neck for you!_” But he did not utter the words aloud.