But although the twitch and set of Blueberry’s ears did not fail of
their significance--though the young horse was duly purchased by the
kindly Captain for Josh’s troop, and the good word of the officer was
not wanting in the interests of the clandestinely-married couple--the
day that was to confer upon Nelly the privileges of the barrack-room
and the right to revolve in the select if limited social circle where
Mrs. Geogehagan reigned in virtue of her rank as Corporal’s lady--did
not dawn for many, many months.
The sweet came before the bitter. Though the rose-colored glasses
through which couples wedded for love invariably view the scenery of
the honeymoon, could hardly disguise the fact that the lodgings--a
two-pair-back in a dingy street of rickety houses in the purlieus of
the Cavalry Barracks at Spurham--were squalid, dingy and dubiously
clean. Yet the neighborhood presented advantages. Regimental visitors
were frequent. Healths were pledged with these in foaming pots of ale
and stout from one or other of the prosperous taverns in which the
neighborhood abounded. And not infreqently the parting guest--counting
on the liberality of a man who was not only newly-married, but had
the price of a horse in his pocket--appealed to Josh for a loan, and
got it. Do you call the lender spendthrift and the borrowers shabby
spongers? They would have ministered to their comrade’s need--supposing
their pockets had been full, while his were empty. ’Twas a way they had
in the Army when Queen Victoria was young and pretty.... ’Tis a way
they have still, though her grandson reigns in her stead.
You are asked to imagine the palpitating wonder and delight
of Nelly’s first plunge into the giddy round of garrison-town
pleasures. The Circus presented charm but not novelty--because
every year when the plums were ripe, and the Fair was held at
Market Drowsing, Banger’s Royal Terpsichorean and Equestrian Grand
Gala Entertainment encamped upon a marshy patch of waste in the
town suburbs, and foreign-complexioned men with earrings, carrying
whips of abnormal length, came to The Upper Clays to bargain for
oats, hay, mangold-wurzel, and cabbages--the last-named commodities
constituting the elephant’s favorite bill-of-fare. Free admissions to
the sawdust-strewn, horsey land of enchantment within the big creaking
tent of patched canvas were granted upon these occasions--not to stern
Sarah, in whose gaunt eyes spangled females capering in pink tights
upon the backs of ambling piebalds, represented the peculiar progeny of
the Babylonish Whore--but to her maid and man. For Jason’s chapel-going
never cured him of the horseriders. In the secret estimation of the
piggy man the New Jerusalem was but an immensely-magnified, unspeakably
more glorious Banger’s. Not but what the lithe and supple gentleman
in a sheath of glittering scales--who doubled himself into snaky knots
while spewing fire--was hardly the sort of personage one might expect
to meet with up here....
You are asked to be present in imagination upon the gallery benches of
the Theater Royal, Spurham, upon the never-to-be-forgotten occasion
when Josh took his bride to the Play. The blood-curdling melodrama of
“The Ruffian Boy” constituted the principal item of the programme.
Miss Arabella Smallsopp of the Principal London Theaters having been
specially engaged to appear in the character of “Ethelinda,” the
Baron’s Bride.
To look down from the gallery--sitting perched up there so high--and
beside a husband so big, so manly, and so handsome in his uniform
that the old lady in the squashed bonnet and nose to match, who sold
you winkles, oranges and nuts, cried “God bless him!” as he rated
her for giving short measure in the latter commodity--was in itself
an experience thrilling enough to make you gasp even supposing the
extraordinary mixture of paint, varnish, gas, drains, damp clothes,
and heated humanity that was supplied to the patrons of the gallery in
place of air, had not tickled your nose and stung your throat and eyes,
making you cough and sneeze and blink....
Only two defacing smudges marred the shining page whereon Memory
recorded the history of that evening. Incident No. 1 occurred shortly
after a row of heads and shoulders, with musical instruments of various
kinds attached to them, which Josh explained to be the Orchestra, had
sprung up like mushrooms at the bottom of a big black ditch, below
the line of smoky tin-screened lights twinkling at the bottom edge of
a great Curtain--with a palace in an astonishing garden, and a lake
full of swans, and groups of dancing ladies painted on it; marvelously
beautiful, but wi’ so mortal few clothes on as to make a body ashamed
to look.
It was just before a lank gentleman with upright hair had popped into
a seat raised above the level of the previously-described heads and
shoulders, and briskly rapping with a little black stick upon a desk,
had caused the Orchestra to burst into a jumble of Popular Airs,
described by a waggish young man on the back benches as a “musical
bluemange,” beginning with “My Heart’s in the Highland,” continuing
with “The Marseillaise”--for some reason or other vociferously
applauded--and ending with “Rule, Britannia” and “Britons Strike Home.”
A young female--not so very young neither--Mrs. Joshua Horrotian
couldn’t help but notice!--in spite of her vividly red-and-white
complexion, and a profusion of light ringlets, tumbling out of a smart
bonnet of pink satin trimmed with green ostrich feathers--a gaudy,
tawdry young woman of the class we were then, as we are now--content
to call unfortunate--closely followed by a tall, lean, pimply-faced
young trooper in the beloved blue, white-faced uniform of the Hundredth
Lancers--came squeezing her way between the row of knees on one side
and the row of shoulders on the other--and plumped herself down in the
vacant place by Joshua Horrotian’s side.
To the stolid vice of the country-side Sarah’s late milkmaid was
no stranger. Abey Absalom’s too-yielding girl, Betsy Twitch the
weeding-woman, were not the only specimens of female frailty to
be found in the neighborhood of The Upper Clays. Fairs and public
holidays, stirring up the muddy dregs of Market Drowsing, showed, while
the naphtha-lights still flared amongst the booths--while unsteady
revelers staggered homewards between the hedgerows--spectacles sordid,
brutal, and obscene enough to have been worthy of the brush of some
bygone Flemish painter of revels and kermesses....
Nelly had known from childhood that certain men and women habitually
committed sin together; sin for which the women were locally denounced
as “right down bad uns,” or “demmyrips,” or purely as whores--while
the men reaped no blame whatever. She was too simple to dream of
injustice--she sometimes wondered why, that was all.
The first glance had told Nelly that Pink Bonnet was a “bad un.” The
whiff of cheap musk that emanated from the tawdry garments--the smell
of spirits that breathed from the leering painted lips, had sprung the
rattle of warning, before--in a voice brazen and hoarse with drink,
excess, and midnight brawling, Pink Bonnet addressed Joshua Horrotian
as “her ducky,” and asked him to “stand a drain.”
Never, never! would Nelly forget the turn that creature gave her--not
if she lived to be ever so old....
With Josh, as red as fire, or the coat of the infantryman sitting in
front of him, saying in a sheepish, bashful voice, not at all like his
usual robust one:
“Excuse me, Miss!--I’m a married man!”....
Why Pink Bonnet, on the receipt of this intelligence, should become
vociferous and abusive, calling Josh a low, imperent soger, and a great
many worse names, Mrs. Joshua could only wonder. Indeed, so forcible
and lurid became her language, that cries of “Order!--Or-_der_!” rose
up about them; and the row of backs of heads in front became a row of
faces, full of round, staring eyes and grinning mouths. And then a huge
man in a Scotch cap and shirt-sleeves looked over a wooden partition at
the back of the gallery, and presently came striding down the narrow
gangway, followed by a chimney-pot-hatted policeman. And Scotch Cap
said, beckoning with one immense finger: “Come! Out o’ this, Polly,
since you dunno’ how to behave yourself!” Upon Polly’s launching into
a torrent of sulphurous invective, the policeman added, warningly:
“You ought to know by this time, my gal, that cussing makes it worse!”
And as Polly--still fulminating threats of ultimate vengeance, wreaked
upon somebody’s eyes, heart, and liver, was hustled out and vanished,
followed by her tall, pimply-faced companion, Nelly whispered to Josh,
as a vast breath of relief heaved the big ribs that pressed against her
side:
“Her were quite a stranger to ’e--weren’t her, Josh, love?”
And heard him answer, as he wiped the standing sweat-drops from his
high, tanned forehead, with a big hand that shook a little:
“I never saw her before in all my born days.”