Panoplied for battle, in shoddy--misnamed khaki--of a deadly
stale-mustard hue, bound with braid of whitey-yellow, garnished with
the customary brass badges, buttons and buckles, and completed with
the brown leather belt, bayonet-sling and bandolier; Private John
Hazel--with a wire stiffener in the crown of his cap, and his
pampered flesh wincing from the contact of the single Army rasper
supplied him (for which, in the first flush of patriotism he had
discarded his customary underwear)--presented himself before Beryl,
his betrothed.
"Oh, come now, Bur'l!" expostulated Muriel, Beryl's younger sister,
compassionate of John's immense discomfiture, as Beryl subsided on
the Rossmore couch in tears; and her unlucky lover, standing huge and
awkward in the middle of the Wilton carpet, opposing his own
full-length reflection in a wall-mirror, realised that the collar of
his tunic was strangling, that his hands were bigger than he could
have believed them; and that the boots supplied by a grateful country
would have comfortably fitted a Brontosaur.
"Tell him," moaned Beryl, "to leave me to my misery!"
"She never used to mind poor Beechy in kharks," the chagrined lover
somewhat heatedly protested, on being banished from the drawing-room.
"Beauchamp was so handsome," said Beryl's sister Muriel, with her
dancing dark eyes suddenly softening in tears, "and then you
know,--he was an Officer of Regular Cavalry--and you're only a Common
Tommy. Of course at the bottom of her heart Bur'l loves and respects
you--but that's what's the matter, John, old thing! Wangle a
Commission as soon as you can manage it"--the term "wangle" was
coming into use just then--"do something Frightfully
Distinguished--and she'll be as right as rain with you, really she
will!"
"Think so? ..." said John, with obviously artificial lightness.
"Well, say good-bye to her for me for now, will you! And--my crowd
were guarding the line of the South Western until a day or so
back--and if I'd screwed myself up to the point of joining up
before,--I might have wangled a D.C.M. by dropping on a German in the
act of laying a time-fuse bomb in a tunnel. Now they've sent 'em out
to Malta to train, and yours truly and a band of other Brave
Hearts--late washouts!--are being sent after 'em! So by-by, little
girlie--for I've got to buy a Cardigan jacket and a few other things
I want. You might tell me Beryl's full Christian name--it's got to
go down in my Will, naturally!--and be entered for reference with the
Nearest of Kin, at the War Office--so that they can let the old thing
know if I get wiped out!"
John felt in a baggy front-pocket for a pigskin note-book, a parting
gift from Maurice, and produced it, with a gold-mounted fountain-pen.
Muriel dimpled again roguishly, and said with her bright eyes
daringly challenging his own:
"We've only one first name apiece--but they're not 'Beryl' and
'Muriel'; nor are they particularly Christian, that I'm aware...."
Then the consciousness of their recent loss, and her new black lisse,
displaying a generous amount of slender black silk-stockinged leg,
failed to subdue her girlish sense of humour. She clapped her hands
and broke into a fit of laughter while John stared at her
uncomprehendingly, the fountain-pen suspended over the
memorandum-book. "Oh, don't goggle at me like that!" cried the girl.
"You're too killing for anything! And so is your mother, and so is
Maury--and so are Dad and Mater, and nearly every one in our set.
And yet I'm Miriam--and Beryl is Rebekah--and poor darling Beauchamp
was Benjamin--though they aren't going to have it on his memorial
card, or stone! Do we really forget we're Jews--or do we all pretend
until it's second nature? And why do we pretend--unless we're
ashamed!--and why on earth should we be ashamed, that's what I want
to know?"
Thus Muriel, confessedly Miriam; and John had found no better answer
than:
"Why you or any of us should be ashamed I'm hanged if I know myself!
But if ever I find out I'll write and tell you."
"Don't forget!" said Muriel-Miriam. "I'm coming to the door to see
you off. Good-bye for now, J. old Bean! Put one for Bur'l here;--"
the tip of a pretty, well-manicured finger indicated a particularly
peachy place on Muriel-Miriam's right cheek,--"and another of the
same on this side, for me. Ta-ta! I'll send you lots of cigs, when
I know where you're training--and parcels no end when you get out to
the Front! And tell me you'll go in for a Commission, and get a V.C.
or something,--just to brisk old Bur'l up!"
"Oh! Tell her," said John with somewhat forced and clumsy humour,
masking the slowly-kindling resentment in his heart, "that I mean to
finish up my service in this War a private in the ranks--where I
began it. And that when I--if I come back, she'll hear me singing:
'They've All Got a Sam Browne But Me,'--long before I come in sight."
"I shall listen for you!" said Muriel-Miriam, bursting with laughter,
"but you don't think I'm going to give that message, I hope!"
She did not pass it on; but her younger sister Ida, a sharp child
aged thirteen, who happened to be lingering in the neighbourhood of
the umbrella-stand, communicated to Beryl her lover's parting
message; to which,--or to the superior attractions of a certain
Captain Hawtin-Billson (back from the Front with a shattered left arm
and a Mention in Despatches) may be attributed Beryl's subsequent
breakage of the engagement between herself and John Hazel, and the
return of his ruby and diamond ring....
During the strenuous period of training that followed on John Hazel's
joining up, his large reserve-fund of conceit was lowered by the
merciless chaff of the ranks, and the vigorous language of his
platoon-Sergeant, whose little red-veined eyes, glaring into his own,
reflected in their muddiness his puny insignificance.
He learned to put on his puttees properly, clean his accoutrements,
make his bed and condense his pack to regulation limits, under the
instruction of one Lance Corporal Harris,--an ex-Boy Scout of
appalling efficiency--as well as to gulp down his morning mug of tea,
in defiance of the probability of the fluid containing in solution an
ounce of Epsom salts. And by the time the Fourth Battalion of the
Fenchurch Street Fusiliers quitted their training-quarters at Malta,
replaced there by a Fifth Battalion created in the interval--and were
transferred to the fighting-line in Flanders; he had acquired the
soldier's much-prized gift of summoning sleep at will. Also, he had
learned to dispense with sleep, were the sacrifice required....
After months of bitter fighting at the Front he had learned to go
unshaven, unwashed, and with unchanged linen,--endure the plagues of
vermin in a crowded, unventilated dugout--share a fag with a man who
had none; smoke the Army gasper in lieu of anything better,--and
consume biscuit and bully mingled with dirt, and washed down with
burnt-bread coffee; or Pimmington's Perfect Soup Substitute, boiled
in a rusty jam-tin over a Tommy's Cooker,--with a gastronomic rapture
that a dinner at the Carlton, the Ritz or the Savoy had previously
failed to evoke.
Also, John Hazel had learned to hold the Battalion in limitless
esteem; to regard the Regiment he had once despised as a mob of
clerks, shop-boys and warehousemen--as the pick and pride of the
Territorial Forces, and to graft on the slang of the modern Londoner,
the polyglottic argot of the War.
Finally, and subsequently to Beryl's defection, he had reconstituted
his standard of the Ideal in Woman, after what fashion and under what
circumstances may now be set forth.