Blueberry’s purchase-money had long been spent--Josh’s hoarded pound or
so had melted, crown by crown, out of the green netted purse,--the last
shillings of Mrs. Joshua’s small store of savings had been swallowed up
by those three shrieking needs of Humanity--more particularly Humanity
reared under the inclement skies of Great Britain, for Food, Fire, and
Shelter--before capricious Fortune relented in some degree towards
the poor young lovers; permitting the missing certificate of their
marriage at the yellow iron church at the bottom of the Stoke Road
near Dullingstoke Junction, to be discovered within the covers of that
sacred volume, the trooper’s “small book,” tucked snugly away in a fold
of the parchment binding.
A copy of this talisman being forwarded by Josh’s friendly Captain
to Sarah Horrotian, with a request for a written testimony to the
respectability of the young woman who had married her son, elicited
from the widow an inky chart indicating vanity, light-mindedness, lack
of religious fervor, ingratitude to benefactors, and carelessness in
making-up the market-butter, as the principal rocks and shoals upon
which the esteem of an employer would be most likely to suffer wreck.
Beyond these categorized failings, in Christian justice (since the
young woman was proven virtuous and no to-yielding trollop) Sarah had
no more to add.
Perusing her epistle, Josh’s troop-Captain whistled plaintively.
For the crime of getting married “off the strength” was in those
days, as it is in these, the blackest sin upon the soldier’s list of
minor offenses. Confronted with a problem of no ordinary toughness,
the Captain betook himself and his difficulty to the Adjutant, an
elderly officer of astuteness and experience, who, while maintaining a
well-earned reputation as a rigid disciplinarian, had a heart in the
right place. Over cigars and brandy-and-water the case was thrashed
out....
“’Man is, as I understand you, in the very devil of a tight hole,” said
the Adjutant, knocking a two-inch ash off a long, dry, deadly-looking
Trichinopoly cheroot. “Only thing possible for you to do for him
under the circumstances would be _im_possible--for a conscientious
officer--you quite understand? So I take it you’ll simply wash your
hands of Horrotian and his love-affairs--instead of sending in the
mother’s letter as testimony of character--and applying to Headquarters
for permission for your beggar to get spliced. Having obtained that,
you would--supposing you to be the kind of man I quite understand
you not to be--put in the Certificate of Marriage--previously being
careful to upset the ink-bottle over the place where the parson
filled in the date!... Understand, I speak unofficially, when I
say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the mild deception
would pass muster. Specially in the present case--the C. O. being
uncommonly groggy about the eyesight; and objecting to spectacles on
the grounds of their giving away a man’s age. Officially speaking,
if such a course of conduct were brought to my knowledge, I should
instantly report it--do you understand me? And the consequences would
be serious--consumedly serious, my dear fellow! For Rule and Routine
are not skittles to be bowled over by privates who have kicked over
the Regulations and married without the permission of their Commanding
Officer. And Favoring is a thing to be avoided--I’m sure you’ll
understand!”
The Captain understood perfectly; and, though he rather overdid it
with the ink-bottle--causing not only the date, but the names of the
contracting parties to vanish under a sable lagoon of carefully dried
writing-fluid--the charitably-conceived plot was successful, from
beginning to end.
Those iron wheels of Administration--sorely hampered, even in these
modern days, with that entangling medium known as Red Tape--did at last
revolve without crushing the last hope of an ill-clad, hungry girl who
was soon to be a mother. The hand of Official Authority was extended
to Mrs. Joshua Horrotian with a weekly stipend of fifteen pence. By
grace of the Officer Commanding the Squadron, Nelly--no longer of the
depressed sisterhood of dowdy Paris yearning outside the sentried gate
of that grim Paradise, the Cavalry Barracks--was admitted; privileged
to bear her remunerated part in the getting-up of officers’ linen, the
lavation and mending of troopers’ undergarments, as in the sweeping and
scrubbing of passages and floors. Yet another day dawned that saw her
an inmate of the long, bare barrack-room, where Mrs. Geogehagan--in
virtue of her social status as Corporal’s lady--resided with her
husband and her young family, in a neat three-sided villa of patchwork
quilt, at the upper, fireplace end....
* * * * *
When the pale-faced, shabbily-dressed, shy young woman was brought in
with her light box and her meager bundles, by her husband, the room
seemed already full of soldiers and their wives and children. The din
of voices beggared description. Moggy Geogehagan was crying herrings at
the top of all.
It is not to be supposed that the herrings were actually in evidence;
but the raucous shriek with which Moggy--ere wooed and won by her
Corporal--had vaunted these marine delicacies--fresh and saline--was
justly famed throughout her native city of Dublin. It leaped three
streets, to waken shattering echoes in the alleys beyant them--the
suburbs knew it--you heard Moggy coming, leaving a trail of fish and
headache behind her all the way from Donnybrook to Irishtown....
* * * * *
The troop-room was entered from the upper end of a long, slate-flagged,
ground-floor passage, smelling of potato-peels and boiled cabbage,
and with coal-bunkers at the more distant end, under the iron-shod,
iron-railed staircase. The walls were whitewashed, with patterns of
damp bricks showing through; and had no other ornament than iron
shelves and hooks, from which depended shining arms and various
soldierly accouterments and trappings; the floor was of bare boards,
clean-scraped and well-scrubbed. Long rows of cot-bedsteads, made in
telescopic fashion so as to occupy half the space during the day that
they took up when expanded by night, were ranged along the walls, with
rolled and strapped up mattresses upon them; and not all the beds were
screened off by rope-suspended counterpanes, or cast-off horse-rugs,
from the rake of the public eye. Down the middle of the room ran
heavy wooden tables on iron trestles, affording accommodation--on the
backless benches that appertained to them--for eight married men with
their wives and children; and the two bachelors who occupied opposing
couches at the draughty end nearest the door.
Three or four men, and perhaps half-a-dozen women were sitting on the
benches. Moggy Geogehagan herself, a short black pipe in her mouth,
superintended the cooking of some pap for a regimental baby, in a small
tin saucepan on the hob. Geogehagan--a stoutish, baldish trooper,
with large red ears--Nelly could not but suspect the fundamental
reason of the excessive development of these organs--was sitting on
a three-legged stool, engaged, by the aid of a lighted candle, in
dropping sealing-wax on the end of a new clay pipe.
There was a momentary lull in the deafening Babel. Then:
“Hooroo, Jude!” said Mrs. Geogehagan, with graceful brevity, rising up
to the full extent of her six feet odd of stature, setting her vast
elbows akimbo, and surveying the scared intruder with the eye that did
not squint while the other swiveled round to make sure that her cookery
was not burning. “Will any gintleman or lady presint condescind,” she
pursued in a tone of raking irony, “to be afther inthrojuicing me to
the bit av’ gintility that’s dhropped in to pay us a marning call?”
“With your good leave, ma’am,” put in Josh, with a more submissive tone
and less confident air than Nelly would have ever expected of him,
“this is my young wife, who--as I’ve explained to you already--has had
the good fortune to be entered on the Regiment’s Married Roll, after
nigh on two years of delay. And I take the liberty, among comrades, to
hope she’s not unwelcome to any here present?--knowing of no reason why
she should be!”
* * * * *
He looked about him, and there was an assenting murmur, and the seated
men got up to shake hands, and the women, after a moment’s hesitation,
did the same. All save one, more tawdrily dressed than her companions,
and with a great many light yellow curls, who kept her face turned
persistently away.
“Gi’ me your hand, Mrs. Horrotian, ma’am!” said Mrs. Geogehagan,
advancing with great ceremony and stateliness. She added, as Nelly
complied--in a soaring shriek that made Mrs. Joshua jump and flush
nervously:
“Jems!”
“Is it me you’re wantin’, Moggy?” said bland James Geogehagan.
“It is!” said Mrs. Geogehagan severely, “an’ the Divil mend your
manners. Rare up on the ould hind legs av’ you, and bid this dacent
young wife av’ Horrotian’s welcome to the Rooms.” She added, as the
Corporal complied: “For we may bless ourselves there’s men in the
Rigiment that has more dacincy than to stand up for-ninst the clargyman
or the priest wid a wagtail av’ the gutther! I say ut in the brazen
face that’s lookin’ at me now!”
There was no mistake about the face that confronted the indomitable
Mrs. Geogehagan, ambushed in a forest of egregiously-curled light
ringlets, with blazing eyes set in it, and flying the scarlet flag of
battle in cheeks that wore the brownish stains of ingrained rouge.
Nelly’s hazel glance went to it timidly; and then--even if the pink
bonnet--sadly the worse for wear--had not hung on a peg driven into
the whitewashed wall behind, she would have recognized it with the
same sinking of her heart. For it belonged to the flaunting woman who
had accosted Josh upon that unforgettable evening at the theater; the
patchouli-reeking, gin-perfumed creature who had thrust a red, ringed
hand under the trooper’s stiff, reluctant elbow, and had called him
ducky, had asked him to stand drink.... Oh! how glad was Mrs. Joshua
that hand had not been offered like the rest!... Never could she have
demeaned herself to touch it, not for diamonds and gold....
Meanwhile it had been dawning in the slow brain of the tall, thin,
pimply young trooper who had been Pink Bonnet’s companion upon that
memorable night, and was now sitting affectionately in her pocket, that
the utterances of Mrs. Geogehagan were leveled at his wife. He had
applied for permission to marry, and the inquiries of the Commanding
Officer had been satisfactorily answered. There were persons who made
quite a capital living--in those days as in these--out of whitewashing
the feathers of the grimiest of soiled garrison doves.
You saw Trooper Toomey, yellow in the face and scowling, lumbering up
at the nudge of an imperative elbow, from the form he had bestridden,
with the air of a man nerving himself for a fight.
“Look a’ here, I’m blasted if I’ll stand this!”--he was beginning, when
Mrs. Geogehagan cut him short.
“Toomey, me fine man,” she said almost mellifluously, “av ye show them
dirty teeth av yours at me, ’tis taking lave of your mouth they’ll be
with the dhrive in the gub I’ll land you,--so shut ut--an’ sit ye down!”
Thus cautioned, Toomey snapped his lank jaws together, threw his long
leg across the form, and sat down sullenly, leaving Pink Bonnet to
enter the arena alone.
In high, shrill accents she demanded to be informed without reserve
whether she, the speaker, was or was not the lawful married wife of a
low-bred white-livered ’ound what was afeared of standing up for her
against them that for all their back-talk and sauce--was nothing but
Irish Scum--and would, if all was knowed that might be knowed!--be held
unworthy to sweep up the dust of her feet, or to eat off of the same
table with her!...
“Hooroo, Jude!--an’ is that the talk you have?” retorted Mrs.
Geogehagan, with overwhelming irony. “Married you are, bedad!--an’
proud av it as a mangy bitch wid a new tin collar. As for Toomey
there!--sure, pay-cocks wid their tails spread is less consayted,
I’ll go bail!” She broke off as the Dinner Call sounded; plunged at
the hanging tray above the long table, and began--as did several of
the other women--to rattle down the plates and basins, crockery mugs
and wooden-handled knives, in an orderly jumble upon the upper end of
the board, while the sulky Toomey, seizing upon two very large, very
bright, and very deep tin dishes, and hanging a tin pail over his arm,
hurried out to the cook-house to get the mess for the Room. And in his
absence, such men as had been taking it easy without their belts, coats
and stocks, put them on again, and the women tidied their hair.
* * * * *
You subsequently beheld Mrs. Geogehagan in her glory, serving broth,
boiled meat, cabbage and potatoes, in strictly equal helpings, into
the various bowls and platters assembled on the board. This onerous
task being completed to the general satisfaction, the men chose
their portions first, and were succeeded--according to the husband’s
seniority of rank--by their wives. Then Mrs. Geogehagan, standing
beside her Jems in front of the short form that stood at the upper end
of the table--pronounced a pithy grace, which ran--unless my memory
trips--something after this fashion:
“May Christ and the Four Evangels bless this mate!... Bad scran to
that villain av’ a throop-cook! Sure, the praties is burraned agin!”