over the fire was the swan-song of Charlie Mears. But I thought it the
prelude to fuller revelation. At last and at last I should cheat the
Lords of Life and Death!
When next Charlie came to me I received him with rapture. He was
nervous and embarrassed, but his eyes were very full of light, and his
lips a little parted.
‘I’ve done a poem,’ he said; and then, quickly: ‘It’s the best I’ve
ever done. Read it.’ He thrust it into my hand and retreated to the
window.
I groaned inwardly. It would be the work of half an hour to
criticise--that is to say, praise--the poem sufficiently to please
Charlie. Then I had good reason to groan, for Charlie, discarding his
favourite centipede metres, had launched into shorter and choppier
verse, and verse with a motive at the back of it. This is what I read:--
‘The day is most fair, the cheery wind
Halloos behind the hill,
Where he bends the wood as seemeth good,
And the sapling to his will!
Riot, O wind; there is that in my blood
That would not have thee still!
‘She gave me herself, O Earth, O Sky;
Gray sea, she is mine alone!
Let the sullen boulders hear my cry,
And rejoice tho’ they be but stone!
‘Mine! I have won her, O good brown earth,
Make merry! ’Tis hard on Spring;
Make merry; my love is doubly worth
All worship your fields can bring!
Let the hind that tills you feel my mirth
At the early harrowing!’
‘Yes, it’s the early harrowing, past a doubt,’ I said, with a dread at
my heart. Charlie smiled, but did not answer.
‘Red cloud of the sunset, tell it abroad;
I am victor. Greet me, O Sun,
Dominant master and absolute lord
Over the soul of one!’
‘Well?’ said Charlie, looking over my shoulder.
I thought it far from well, and very evil indeed, when he silently laid
a photograph on the paper--the photograph of a girl with a curly head,
and a foolish slack mouth.
‘Isn’t it--isn’t it wonderful?’ he whispered, pink to the tips of his
ears, wrapped in the rosy mystery of first love. ‘I didn’t know; I
didn’t think--it came like a thunderclap.’
‘Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are you very happy, Charlie?’
‘My God--she--she loves me!’ He sat down repeating the last words to
himself. I looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders already
bowed by desk-work, and wondered when, where, and how he had loved in
his past lives.
‘What will your mother say?’ I asked cheerfully.
‘I don’t care a damn what she says!’
At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should,
properly, be many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I told
him this gently; and he described Her, even as Adam must have described
to the newly-named beasts the glory and tenderness and beauty of Eve.
Incidentally I learned that She was a tobacconist’s assistant with a
weakness for pretty dress, and had told him four or five times already
that She had never been kissed by a man before.
Charlie spoke on and on, and on; while I, separated from him by
thousands of years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now I
understood why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully
behind us. It is that we may not remember our first and most beautiful
wooings. Were this not so, our world would be without inhabitants in a
hundred years.
‘Now, about that galley-story,’ I said still more cheerfully, in a
pause in the rush of the speech.
Charlie looked up as though he had been hit. ‘The galley--what galley?
Good heavens, don’t joke, man! This is serious! You don’t know how
serious it is!’
Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had tasted the love of woman that
kills remembrance, and the finest story in the world would never be
written.
HIS PRIVATE HONOUR.
The autumn batch of recruits for the Old Regiment had just been
uncarted. As usual they were said to be the worst draft that had ever
come from the Depôt. Mulvaney looked them over, grunted scornfully, and
immediately reported himself very sick.
‘Is it the regular autumn fever?’ said the doctor, who knew something
of Terence’s ways. ‘Your temperature’s normal.’
‘’Tis wan hundred and thirty-seven rookies to the bad, sorr. I’m not
very sick now, but I will be dead if these boys are thrown at me in my
rejuced condition. Doctor, dear, supposin’ you was in charge of three
cholera camps an’----’
‘Go to hospital then, you old contriver,’ said the doctor, laughing.
Terence bundled himself into a blue bedgown,--Dinah Shadd was away
attending to a major’s lady, who preferred Dinah without a diploma to
anybody else with a hundred,--put a pipe in his teeth, and paraded the
hospital balcony, exhorting Ortheris to be a father to the new recruits.
‘They’re mostly your own sort, little man,’ he said, with a grin; ‘the
top-spit av Whitechapel. I’ll interogue them whin they’re more like
something they never will be,--an’ that’s a good honest soldier like
me.’
Ortheris yapped indignantly. He knew as well as Terence what the coming
work meant, and he thought Terence’s conduct mean. Then he strolled
off to look at the new cattle, who were staring at the unfamiliar
landscape with large eyes, and asking if the kites were eagles and the
pariah-dogs jackals.
‘Well, you are a holy set of bean-faced beggars, _you_ are,’ he said
genially to a knot in the barrack-square. Then, running his eye over
them,--‘Fried fish an’ whelks is about your sort. Blimy if they haven’t
sent some pink-eyed Jews too. You chap with the greasy ’ed, which o’
the Solomons was your father, Moses?’
‘My name’s Anderson,’ said a voice sullenly.
‘Oh, Samuelson! All right, Samuelson! An’ ’ow many o’ the likes o’ you
Sheenies are comin’ to spoil B Company?’
There is no scorn so complete as that of the old soldier for the new.
It is right that this should be so. A recruit must learn first that he
is not a man but a thing, which in time, and by the mercy of Heaven,
may develop into a soldier of the Queen if it takes care and attends
to good advice. Ortheris’s tunic was open, his cap overlopped one
eye, and his hands were behind his back as he walked round, growing
more contemptuous at each step. The recruits did not dare to answer,
for they were new boys in a strange school, who had called themselves
soldiers at the Depôt in comfortable England.
‘Not a single pair o’ shoulders in the whole lot. I’ve seen some bad
drafts in my time,--some bloomin’ bad drafts; but this ’ere draft
beats any draft I’ve ever known. Jock, come an’ look at these squidgy,
ham-shanked beggars.’
Learoyd was walking across the square. He arrived slowly, circled round
the knot as a whale circles round a shoal of small fry, said nothing,
and went away whistling.
‘Yes, you may well look sheepy,’ Ortheris squeaked to the boys. ‘It’s
the likes of you breaks the ’earts of the likes of us. We’ve got to
lick you into shape, and never a ha’penny extry do we get for so doin’,
and you ain’t never grateful neither. Don’t you go thinkin’ it’s the
Colonel nor yet the company orf’cer that makes you. It’s _us_, you
Johnnie Raws--you Johnnie _bloomin’_ Raws!’
A company officer had come up unperceived behind Ortheris at the end
of this oration. ‘You may be right, Ortheris,’ he said quietly, ‘but
I shouldn’t shout it.’ The recruits grinned as Ortheris saluted and
collapsed.
Some days afterwards I was privileged to look over the new batch,
and they were everything that Ortheris had said, and more. B Company
had been devastated by forty or fifty of them; and B Company’s drill
on parade was a sight to shudder at. Ortheris asked them lovingly
whether they had not been sent out by mistake, and whether they had not
better post themselves back to their friends. Learoyd thrashed them
methodically one by one, without haste but without slovenliness; and
the older soldiers took the remnants from Learoyd and went over them in
their own fashion. Mulvaney stayed in hospital, and grinned from the
balcony when Ortheris called him a shirker and other worse names.
‘By the grace av God we’ll brew men av them yet,’ Terence said one
day. ‘Be vartuous an’ parsevere, me son. There’s the makin’s av
colonels in that mob if we only go deep enough--wid a belt.’
‘We!’ Ortheris replied, dancing with rage. ‘I just love you and your
“we’s.” ’Ere’s B Company drillin’ like a drunk Militia reg’ment.’
‘So I’ve been officially acquent,’ was the answer from on high; ‘but
I’m too sick this tide to make certain.’
‘An’ you, you fat H’irishman, shiftin’ an’ shirkin’ up there among the
arrerroot an’ the sago!’
‘_An’_ the port wine,--you’ve forgot the port wine, Orth’ris: ’tis none
so bad.’ Terence smacked his lips provokingly.
‘And we’re wore off our feet with these ’ere--kangaroos. Come out o’
that, an’ earn your pay. Come on down outer that, an’ _do_ something
’stead o’ grinnin’ up there like a Jew monkey, you frowsy-’eaded
Fenian!’
‘When I’m better av my various complaints I’ll have a little private
talkin’ wid you. In the meanwhile,--duck!’
Terence flung an empty medicine bottle at Ortheris’s head and dropped
into a long chair, and Ortheris came to tell me his opinion of Mulvaney
three times over,--each time entirely varying all the words.
‘There’ll be a smash one o’ these days,’ he concluded. ‘Well, it’s none
o’ my fault, but it’s ’ard on B Company.’
It was very hard on B Company, for twenty seasoned men cannot push
twice that number of fools into their places and keep their own
places at the same time. The recruits should have been more evenly
distributed through the regiment, but it seemed good to the Colonel
to mass them in a company where there was a fair proportion of old
soldiers. He found his reward early one morning when the battalion was
advancing by companies in echelon from the right. The order was given
to form company squares, which are compact little bricks of men very
unpleasant for a line of charging cavalry to deal with. B Company was
on the left flank, and had ample time to know what was going on. For
that reason presumably it gathered itself into a thing like a decayed
aloe-clump, the bayonets pointing anywhere in general and nowhere in
particular; and in that clump, roundel, or mob, it stayed till the dust
had gone down and the Colonel could see and speak. He did both, and
the speaking part was admitted by the regiment to be the finest thing
that the ‘old man’ had ever risen to since one delightful day at a
sham-fight, when a cavalry division had occasion to walk over his line
of skirmishers. He said, almost weeping, that he had given no order
for rallying groups, and that he preferred to see a little dressing
among the men occasionally. He then apologised for having mistaken B
Company for men. He said that they were but weak little children, and
that since he could not offer them each a perambulator and a nursemaid
(this may sound comic to read, but B Company heard it by word of mouth
and winced) perhaps the best thing for them to do would be to go back
to squad-drill. To that end he proposed sending them, out of their
turn, to garrison duty in Fort Amara, five miles away,--D Company were
next for this detestable duty and nearly cheered the Colonel. There he
devoutly hoped that their own subalterns would drill them to death, as
they were of no use in their present life.
It was an exceedingly painful scene, and I made haste to be near B
Company barracks when parade was dismissed and the men were free to
talk. There was no talking at first, because each old soldier took a
new draft and kicked him very severely. The non-commissioned officers
had neither eyes nor ears for these accidents. They left the barracks
to themselves, and Ortheris improved the occasion by a speech. I
did not hear that speech, but fragments of it were quoted for weeks
afterwards. It covered the birth, parentage, and education of every man
in the company by name: it gave a complete account of Fort Amara from
a sanitary and social point of view; and it wound up with an abstract
of the whole duty of a soldier, each recruit his use in life, and
Ortheris’s views on the use and fate of the recruits of B Company.
‘You can’t drill, you can’t walk, you can’t shoot,--you,--you awful
rookies! Wot’s the good of you? You eats and you sleeps, and you eats,
and you goes to the doctor for medicine when your innards is out o’
order for all the world as if you was bloomin’ generals. An’ now you’ve
topped it all, you bats’-eyed beggars, with getting us druv out to that
stinkin’ Fort ’Ammerer. We’ll fort you when we get out there; yes, an’
we’ll ’ammer you too. Don’t you think you’ve come into the H’army to
drink Heno, an’ club your comp’ny, an’ lie on your cots an’ scratch
your fat heads. You can do that at ’ome sellin’ matches, which is all
you’re fit for, you keb-huntin’, penny-toy, bootlace, baggage-tout,
’orse-’oldin’, sandwich-backed se-werss, you.[3] I’ve spoke you as
fair as I know ’ow, and you give good ’eed, ’cause if Mulvaney stops
skrimshanking--gets out o’ ’orspital--when we’re in the Fort, I lay
your lives will be trouble to you.’
That was Ortheris’s peroration, and it caused B Company to be
christened the Boot-black Brigade. With this disgrace on their slack
shoulders they went to garrison duty at Fort Amara with their officers,
who were under instructions to twist their little tails. The army,
unlike every other profession, cannot be taught through shilling
books. First a man must suffer, then he must learn his work, and the
self-respect that that knowledge brings. The learning is hard, in a
land where the army is not a red thing that walks down the street to
be looked at, but a living tramping reality that may be needed at the
shortest notice, when there is no time to say, ‘Hadn’t you better?’ and
‘Won’t you please?’
The company officers divided themselves into three. When Brander the
captain was wearied, he gave over to Maydew, and when Maydew was hoarse
he ordered the junior subaltern Ouless to bucket the men through squad
and company drill, till Brander could go on again. Out of parade hours
the old soldiers spoke to the recruits as old soldiers will, and
between the four forces at work on them, the new draft began to stand
on their feet and feel that they belonged to a good and honourable
service. This was proved by their once or twice resenting Ortheris’s
technical lectures.
‘Drop it now, lad,’ said Learoyd, coming to the rescue. ‘Th’ pups are
biting back. They’re none so rotten as we looked for.’
‘Ho! Yes. You think yourself soldiers now, ’cause you don’t fall over
each other on p’rade, don’t you? You think ’cause the dirt don’t cake
off you week’s end to week’s end that you’re clean men. You think
’cause you can fire your rifle without more nor shuttin’ both eyes,
you’re something to fight, don’t you? You’ll know later on,’ said
Ortheris to the barrack-room generally. ‘Not but what you’re a little
better than you was,’ he added, with a gracious wave of his cutty.
It was in this transition-stage that I came across the new draft once
more. Their officers, in the zeal of youth forgetting that the old
soldiers who stiffened the sections must suffer equally with the raw
material under hammering, had made all a little stale and unhandy
with continuous drill in the square, instead of marching the men into
the open and supplying them with skirmishing drill. The month of
garrison-duty in the Fort was nearly at an end, and B Company were
quite fit for a self-respecting regiment to drill with. They had
no style or spring,--that would come in time,--but so far as they
went they were passable. I met Maydew one day and inquired after
their health. He told me that young Ouless was putting a polish on a
half-company of them in the great square by the east bastion of the
Fort that afternoon. Because the day was Saturday I went off to taste
the full beauty of leisure in watching another man hard at work.
The fat forty-pound muzzle-loaders on the east bastion made a very
comfortable resting-place. You could sprawl full length on the iron
warmed by the afternoon sun to blood heat, and command an easy view of
the parade-ground which lay between the powder-magazine and the curtain
of the bastion.
I saw a half-company called over and told off for drill, saw Ouless
come from his quarters, tugging at his gloves, and heard the first
_’Shun!_ that locks the ranks and shows that work has begun. Then I
went off on my own thoughts; the squeaking of the boots and the rattle
of the rifles making a good accompaniment, and the line of red coats
and black trousers a suitable background to them all. They concerned
the formation of a territorial army for India,--an army of specially
paid men enlisted for twelve years’ service in Her Majesty’s Indian
possessions, with the option of extending on medical certificates for
another five and the certainty of a pension at the end. They would
be such an army as the world had never seen,--one hundred thousand
trained men drawing annually five, no, fifteen thousand men from
England, making India their home, and allowed to marry in reason. Yes,
I thought, watching the line shift to and fro, break and re-form, we
would buy back Cashmere from the drunken imbecile who was turning it
into a hell, and there we would plant our much-married regiments,--the
men who had served ten years of their time,--and there they should
breed us white soldiers, and perhaps a second fighting-line of
Eurasians. At all events Cashmere was the only place in India that the
Englishman could colonise, and if we had foot-hold there we could....
Oh, it was a beautiful dream! I left that territorial army swelled
to a quarter of a million men far behind, swept on as far as an
independent India, hiring war-ships from the mother-country, guarding
Aden on the one side and Singapore on the other, paying interest on
her loans with beautiful regularity, but borrowing no men from beyond
her own borders--a colonised, manufacturing India with a permanent
surplus and her own flag. I had just installed myself as Viceroy,
and by virtue of my office had shipped four million sturdy thrifty
natives to the Malayan Archipelago, where labour is always wanted and
the Chinese pour in too quickly, when I became aware that things were
not going smoothly with the half-company. There was a great deal too
much shuffling and shifting and ‘as you were-ing.’ The non-commissioned
officers were snapping at the men, and I fancied Ouless backed one of
his orders with an oath. He was in no position to do this, because he
was a junior who had not yet learned to pitch his word of command in
the same key twice running. Sometimes he squeaked, and sometimes he
grunted; and a clear full voice with a ring in it has more to do with
drill than people think. He was nervous both on parade and in mess,
because he was unproven and knew it. One of his majors had said in
his hearing, ‘Ouless has a skin or two to slough yet, and he hasn’t
the sense to be aware of it.’ That remark had stayed in Ouless’s mind
and caused him to think about himself in little things, which is not
the best training for a young man. He tried to be cordial at mess,
and became over-effusive. Then he tried to stand on his dignity, and
appeared sulky and boorish. He was only hunting for the just medium
and the proper note, and had found neither because he had never faced
himself in a big thing. With his men he was as ill at ease as he was
with his mess, and his voice betrayed him. I heard two orders and
then:--‘Sergeant, what _is_ that rear-rank man doing, damn him?’ That
was sufficiently bad. A company officer ought not to ask sergeants for
information. He commands, and commands are not held by syndicates.
It was too dusty to see the drill accurately, but I could hear the
excited little voice pitching from octave to octave, and the uneasy
ripple of badgered or bad-tempered files running down the ranks. Ouless
had come on parade as sick of his duty as were the men of theirs. The
hot sun had told on everybody’s temper, but most of all on the youngest
man’s. He had evidently lost his self-control, and not possessing the
nerve or the knowledge to break off till he had recovered it again, was
making bad worse by ill-language.
The men shifted their ground and came close under the gun I was lying
on. They were wheeling quarter-right and they did it very badly,
in the natural hope of hearing Ouless swear again. He could have
taught them nothing new, but they enjoyed the exhibition. Instead of
swearing Ouless lost his head completely, and struck out nervously
at the wheeling flank-man with a little Malacca riding-cane that he
held in his hand for a pointer. The cane was topped with thin silver
over lacquer, and the silver had worn through in one place, leaving a
triangular flap sticking up. I had just time to see that Ouless had
thrown away his commission by striking a soldier, when I heard the rip
of cloth and a piece of gray shirt showed under the torn scarlet on the
man’s shoulder. It had been the merest nervous flick of an exasperated
boy, but quite enough to forfeit his commission, since it had been
dealt in anger to a volunteer and no pressed man, who could not under
the rules of the service reply. The effect of it, thanks to the natural
depravity of things, was as though Ouless had cut the man’s coat off
his back. Knowing the new draft by reputation, I was fairly certain
that every one of them would swear with many oaths that Ouless had
actually thrashed the man. In that case Ouless would do well to pack
his trunk. His career as a servant of the Queen in any capacity was
ended. The wheel continued, and the men halted and dressed immediately
opposite my resting-place. Ouless’s face was perfectly bloodless. The
flanking man was a dark red, and I could see his lips moving in wicked
words. He was Ortheris! After seven years’ service and three medals,
he had been struck by a boy younger than himself! Further, he was my
friend and a good man, a proved man, and an Englishman. The shame of
the thing made me as hot as it made Ouless cold, and if Ortheris had
slipped in a cartridge and cleared the account at once I should have
rejoiced. The fact that Ortheris, of all men, had been struck, proved
that the boy could not have known whom he was hitting; but he should
have remembered that he was no longer a boy. And then I was sorry for
him, and then I was angry again, and Ortheris stared in front of him
and grew redder and redder.
The drill halted for a moment. No one knew why, for not three men could
have seen the insult, the wheel being end-on to Ouless at the time.
Then, led, I conceived, by the hand of Fate, Brander, the captain,
crossed the drill-ground, and his eye was caught by not more than a
square foot of gray shirt over a shoulder-blade that should have been
covered by well-fitting tunic.
‘Heavens and earth!’ he said, crossing in three strides. ‘Do you let
your men come on parade in rags, sir? What’s that scare-crow doing
here? Fall out, that flank-man. What do you mean by----_You_, Ortheris!
of all men. What the deuce do you mean?’
‘Beg y’ pardon, sir,’ said Ortheris. ‘I scratched it against the
guard-gate running up to parade.’
‘Scratched it! Ripped it up, you mean. It’s half off your back.’
‘It was a little tear at first, sir, but in portin’ arms it got
stretched, sir, an’--an’ I can’t look be’ind me. I felt it givin’, sir.’
‘Hm!’ said Brander. ‘I should think you did feel it give. I thought it
was one of the new draft. You’ve a good pair of shoulders. Go on!’
He turned to go. Ouless stepped after him, very white, and said
something in a low voice.
‘Hey, what? What? Ortheris,’ the voice dropped. I saw Ortheris salute,
say something, and stand at attention.
‘Dismiss,’ said Brander curtly. The men were dismissed. ‘I can’t make
this out. You say----?’ he nodded at Ouless, who said something again.
Ortheris stood still, the torn flap of his tunic falling nearly to his
waist-belt. He had, as Brander said, a good pair of shoulders, and
prided himself on the fit of his tunic.
‘Beg y’ pardon, sir,’ I heard him say, ‘but I think Lieutenant Ouless
has been in the sun too long. He don’t quite remember things, sir. I
come on p’rade with a bit of a rip, and it spread, sir, through portin’
arms, as I ’ave said, sir.’
Brander looked from one face to the other and I suppose drew his own
conclusions, for he told Ortheris to go with the other men who were
flocking back to barracks. Then he spoke to Ouless and went away,
leaving the boy in the middle of the parade-ground fumbling with his
sword-knot.