General Boswell’s coachman was a Scot; a grim, taciturn,
brickdust-coloured fellow, who had been in his present service for a
quarter of a century. He had been bred amongst horses from his boyhood,
for his father had been a horsebreaker, and when he had run away from
home and enlisted, he had satisfied ambition by becoming a driver of
artillery. Then he had been wounded, and had turned batman for awhile.
He had gone to the General as valet, but his stable love had broken
out again, and he had gravitated by force of nature to the place of
coachman. Polson’s mind did not go back to a time when he did not
remember Duncan, and to Irene he was like a fixed part of the scheme of
nature. He had one defect which at this instant made him invaluable. He
resented any imputation of the fact angrily, but he had been deaf as an
adder for years.
There was no great privacy in a barrack square, to be sure, but it was
as safe to talk within arm’s length of Duncan as if he had been a stone
Sphinx. Duncan was a man of rare discretion, and, though it must have
been like an upheaval of the world to him to see the most constant
of visitors at the General’s modest little mansion, walking in shabby
raiment in a barrack square with a recruit’s ribbons fluttering from
his cap, he saluted imperturbably as the young man came up, and then sat
motionless.
Polson came to the side of the carriage, cap in hand.
‘Your father told me I might speak to you,’ he said wistfully. ‘I hope I
am not wrong in coming to you.’
‘You have enlisted?’ she asked him. ‘You are going to the war?’ Her
self-possession cost her an effort, but she maintained it She had a
soldier’s daughter’s pride, and though she had met this first great
trouble so brief a time ago she had already taught herself to face it.
Her father was a man conspicuously brave among the brave, and he had
told her of his very first experience of war--a period of prolonged
inaction under fire. ‘A trying thing at first,’ he had said, ‘but duty
will reconcile one to anything.’ This memory had been present with
her all the morning, and though the unexpected sight of her lost lover
almost broke her down, the thought had had power to nerve her.
‘Yes,’ he answered simply. ‘I have enlisted. I shall have to go through
a certain amount of drill, but that will soon be over, and then, I
suppose, I shall get my marching orders.’
‘Father approves of what you have done,’ she said.
‘He has told me so,’ he responded. ‘I am very glad of it. God is good
to me,’ he went on, turning half away from her and gazing across the
square. ‘I had not hoped to see you again for years, if ever, and there
is just one thing I wanted very much to say. It is of no use to have
reserves and disguises at a time like this. I shan’t distress you? Can
you let me speak?’
‘Put your cap on, Polson,’ she said composedly. ‘You will catch cold.’
The touch of womanly solicitude, small as it was, moved him. He obeyed
her, and stood, still looking across the square, until he had mastered a
suspicious clicking in the throat.
‘You need have no fear of me, Polson,’ Irene said. ‘Speak out all your
mind.’
‘Well, dear, it’s this. We’ve been comrades ever since I helped you
to learn to ride your first pony. We’ve always been the very best of
friends, and only last night I was going to ask for something more. You
don’t mind hearing me out, Irene?’
‘No. Let us speak plainly. Let us understand each other.’
‘Well, you see, everything went last night with a clean sweep by the
board. I thought I was safe for a commission. I’d been brought up to
expect a handsome fortune.’ He spoke in a level tone, as if he had
been reading uninteresting matter from a book. ‘All that is changed and
everything is changed with it. I’m a penniless private of dragoons, and
our ways in the world are wide apart. For old time’s sake I should
be very sorry to believe that you’d ever forgot me altogether, but if
you’ll try to bring yourself to think of me as trying to be cheerful in
a humble station, as remembering you always in my heart of hearts, and
never forgetting the distance that divides us--if you’ll try to think
of me as always honouring myself because I was once your friend’--He was
forced to pause, but he went on again, level-voiced and monotonous as
before--‘If you’ll try to think of me as learning to be cheerful for
your sake, not as a moaning, broken-hearted chap--which I don’t mean to
be at all--but just doing my work, you know, and thinking about you like
an affectionate poor relation might--why, then, in--in time you’ll get
to feel the parting less.’
‘Have you finished, Polson?’ ‘Yes, dear. That’s about all, I think.
You see, I know you, Irene. You’ll grizzle if you think I’m grizzling.
That’s your nature. You can’t bear to think of a canary bird in pain.’
‘And that is all?’
‘Yes, dear. That’s all.’
‘I shall never forget you, dear. I shall never forget you, and I shall
never change. If you had asked me to be your wife before these things
happened I should have said “Yes,” and I should have been proud and
happy. But, Polson, this is why I thank God for having brought us
together just this once. I want you to remember that in this war names
will be heard of that never were known before. Yours may be one of
them.’
‘You mustn’t waste your life thinking of me, Irene. I shall remember
every word you have spoken. I shall treasure every word. I hope I shall
do my duty.’
‘I am sure of that,’ she answered. And then for a long time not a word
was spoken, and when at length they broke silence, they spoke of things
which were indifferent by comparison. They discussed the probable hour
of the arrival of the route, the probable destination of the regiment,
the time at which Polson might expect to escape his drill.
At last the General appeared walking side by side with Colonel Stacey.
Irene was facing that way, and was naturally the first to see him.
‘Here is good-bye, dear,’ she said. ‘Papa is coming.’
‘Good-bye,’ he said softly. ‘Good-bye. God bless you.’
‘God bless you, too,’ said Irene. She held out her little gloved hand
to him, and he took it in his own. She looked bravely into his eyes, and
they spoke their last farewell without a sign of tremor.
‘This,’ said the General, advancing as Polson turned away, ‘is the young
fellow of whom I have been speaking. Polson, this is your commanding
officer, Colonel Stacey.’ Polson raised his cap and bowed civilian
fashion.
‘Ah!’ said the jolly colonel, turning his red face and twinkling eyes on
the recruit.
‘You are Polson Jervase? Joined this morning, eh? I hear an excellent
account of you. Try to deserve it. I shall remember you. Good morning.’
But as Polson saluted again, and turned to go, the General seized him by
the hand and shook it warmly.
‘We must all face the fortune of war, my lad,’ he said. ‘The best of
good luck go with you. If you hear of me out yonder, as you may, don’t
forget to report yourself. Good-bye.’
There were a good many eyes at the barrack windows, and the minds of
many dragoons were inspired with wonder. For a General and a Waterloo
veteran was a personage, and the daughter of the same was a personage,
and it was out of the common for a newly-joined recruity to engage in
intimate talk with the like of them for half an hour together, and to be
shaken hands with by the veteran, and saluted as if he were an officer
by the veteran’s coachman, and personally introduced to ‘Old Stayce’
into the bargain.
And amazement sat on many foreheads when the carriage rolled away, and
the General stood up to wave his hat to the recruity, and the lady stood
up to wave her hand, and the recruity, unconscious of the interest he
excited, waved the shabby old sealskin cap in answer until the equipage
was ringingly saluted at the gate, and swung swiftly out of sight.
And then, it was over. Oh, it was all over, and one manly heart was sore
and cold. The new recruity stood there planted in the barrack square, as
innocent of his surroundings as if he had been asleep, and mechanically
filled and lit his pipe, and stood on with his chin sunk upon his
breast, scarcely aware of his own thoughts, and as yet realising little
but solitude and an ache in the doleful middle of it. But a warmth stole
into the cold. When everything was said and done, there was one thing
left. Irene loved him. Loved him! How sweet and sacred a wonder. Yet her
own dear lips had told him that she would have been proud and happy to
be his wife, and that nothing should change her. And she had given him
an ambition. The lofty and inspiring words were not yet written, but
their purport thrilled him, as it thrilled many who went out to fight
and bleed for a cause which may not have been wholly worthy of their
devotion, and yet in a sense was worthy because they believed in it with
all their hearts and souls. For, after all, what is it but the purpose
which ennobles action? If the greatest Englishman since Shakespeare had
not yet given Polson Jervase the words in which to speak his thought, it
lightened his breast all the same.
I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,
Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d,
Tho’ many a light shall darken, and many shall weep
For those that are crush’d in the clash of jarring claims,
Yet God’s just wrath shall be wreak’d on a giant liar;
And many a darkness into the light shall leap,
And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,
And noble thought be freer under the sun.
And the heart of a people beat with one desire;
For the peace, that I deem’d no peace, is over and done,
And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.
So thought Polson Jervase, and so thought hundreds of valiant men who
were ready to lay down their lives in a quarrel which the years have
proved unprofitable.
But a voice awoke the recruity from his reverie--a voice of authority
which asked with a most unnecessary emphasis what the blank, blank he
meant by skulking there, when he knew conventionally well that he had
been conventionally well ordered to the quartermaster’s stores to get
his conventional kit. The recruit was not accustomed to hear himself
addressed in this manner, and his earliest impulse was to hit the pug
nose of the person who accosted him, but he remembered himself in time,
and bethinking him of the wise man’s saying, that a soft answer turneth
away wrath, he asked meekly where he should go. Then the Sergeant, who
was so straitly trousered and jacketted that he pranced in his going,
ordered him to follow his nose, adding that if he conventionally well
supposed that because a conventional General in a conventional carriage
came to see him off, he was entitled to shirk his conventional duties,
he was conventionally well in error.
‘I say, Sergeant,’ said Polson, turning to face his conductor, ‘that’s a
filthy bad habit. If you want to be respected, drop it.’
The Sergeant went as scarlet as his stable-jacket, and said that any
conventional recruit had conventionally well _got_ to respect _him_ any
conventional how.
‘My dear sir, no,’ said Polson. ‘It’s quite impossible to respect a man
who talks like a foul-mouthed parrot.’
The Sergeant walked like a man astounded and said no more, and Polson
likewise held his peace. They were both quietly businesslike whilst
Polson got his kit served out to him, and by the time this work was
over, the dinner hour had arrived. He was told off to a mess in a long
barrack-room, in which his brother recruits were quartered, under the
charge of an old soldier. Some of these new comrades were fresh from the
plough, and some were the rowdy refuse of the town; one wore a miner’s
flannels, and another was a weedy youth from a shop-counter, who had a
higher opinion of himself than others were likely to form.
The speech of every man jack of them was like the exhalation of a
cesspool, and the newest of Her Majesty’s hired servants sat in a
grim wrath and loathing, seeing that he had chosen these for his life
companions. The meal was plentiful, and not bad of its kind, but it was
dirtily served, and asked for long custom or an appetite of more than
average keenness. Our recruit had neither the one nor the other, but
he remembered his promise to Irene. He had undertaken to meet his
fate cheerfully, and the fare was part of his fate. He would have no
re-pinings. The food was honest and wholesome, and he would probably
learn to be eager for worse before the war was over. So he, as it were,
squared his shoulders at his trencher, and was just ready to fall to,
when one of the plough-tail gentry sitting just opposite let fall a
speech which would have turned the stomach of a decent hog, if he had
happened to understand it. Polson’s heart maddened within him, and he
smote his fist upon the unclothed table so that the plates of chipped
enamel iron danced from end to end on it.
‘You filthy clodpole!’ he said, rising from his place and thrusting a
prognathous jaw and blazing eyes half-way across the table. ‘Speak like
that again in my hearing, and I’ll give you such a hiding as you never
had since you were born.’
‘And sarve him right, begorra,’ said the man at the head of the table.
‘It’s sick I am of all the dirty stuff I’ve to listen to--An’ dese boys
is ‘listed for de war, and dere’s not wan of ‘em knows he mayn’t be
stiff on de field in tree or four monts’ time. An’ be way of makin’
ready for a soldier’s end an’ a sudden meetin’ wid his God, dey’re
chewin’ blasphaymious conversation from _reveille_ to lights out, so dey
are.’
‘Thank you,’ said Polson, and so sat down and tried to go on with his
dinner.
The meal was finished in silence. The scene had its effect, and it had
all the more surely for two or three things which happened later on.
Example. The whole rough squad was turned into the riding school
that afternoon dressed as they might happen to be. The accustomed old
drill-horses, saddled and bridled, were ranged on the tan at the wall,
with stirrups crossed over the shoulders, and when the word ‘Mount’ was
given, Polson was the only one of the newly recruited crowd who did not
make a painful climb in trying to obey the order. He was in the saddle
in a flash, and sat there like a centaur.
‘We’ve got one man amongst us, seemin’ly,’ said the old rough-riding
Sergeant.
‘You’ve seen a horse before to-day, my lad.’
‘One or two,’ said Polson.
‘Come out,’ said the red-nosed drill.
‘Let’s see what you’re good for. Put her at that.’
‘That’ was a furze-covered revolving pole mounted on swivelled trestles,
and about three feet high. It was a leap for a child, and Polson went
over it, turned and came nimbly back again. The instructor approached
him and took him by the foot and ankle.
‘That’s the shape for the cavalry leg,’ he said. ‘Keep that and don’t
lose it. Now put her at it again.’
As the recruit turned to obey the order, the Sergeant mischievously
slashed the mare across the quarters, and the venerable she-trooper
skipped; but this was hardly a thing to scare the best cross-country
man of his shire, and Polson nipped over the bar and back again. At that
moment entered Captain Volnay, to whom the drill, saluting, said:
‘It’s no use wasting this man’s time here, sir. Colonel’s orders are
to get ‘em through as fast as possible. He’d be better engaged at foot
drill.’
‘Very good,’ said Volnay. ‘You can dismount, my man. Come with me.’
On the far side of the square a squad was at work at the sword exercise,
and the instructor’s voice was bawling: ‘Thrust, return, thrust--return.
Carry--so! Slope--so! Shun! Stand at ease!’
‘Well,’ said Volnay. ‘How do you like it?’
‘I shall like it well enough, I dare say. I haven’t shaken into the
saddle yet.’
‘I’m going to hand you over to this lot,’ said Volnay, indicating the
squad with a motion of the hand. ‘D’you know anything about it?’
‘A bit,’ the recruit answered. ‘You see, it’s been the dream of my life
to join, and I’ve been taking lessons.’
‘Good old enthusiast!’ said Volnay. ‘I saw you meeting old Stayce. He’s
a grand old sort. No finer soldier in the army. Regiment adores him. And
he has an eye for a man who does his duty. A nod’s as good as a wink to
a blind horse, old Pol, eh?’
‘I’ll try,’ said Polson.
‘You’ll try right enough. You’re a good old pebble. I’ve got to
be professional, you understand. No end of a devil of a lot of
unpleasantness if these chaps suspected favouritism.’
‘Oh,’ said Polson, ‘I’m at work. No playing _en amateur_.’
‘That’s the style. There are some of our fellows saying there’ll be no
fighting. That’s rubbish. There’s glory in front of some of us, Polly.’
They went on in silence until they reached the guard.
‘Shun!’ roared the Sergeant, and the men clicked their heels together
and straightened their backs and tucked their chins in and assumed that
ramrod posture which the authorised drill-book of the day described as
‘the free and unconstrained attitude of a soldier.’
‘Sergeant,’ said Volnay, ‘this man has just joined, but Sergeant Gill
finds that he can ride and has dismissed him from the riding school. He
tells me that he’s been taking lessons in sabre practice. Just put him
through his paces, will you?’
So the Sergeant set his squad to stand at ease again, and Polson, being
provided with a belt and sabre, was stuck up in front of it, feeling
absurdly like a trick ape on show.
‘Draw--so! Slope--so! Prep--air! Prove distance!’ and so on.
‘Pursuin’ practice. One. Cut--thrust--parry. Two. Cut--thrust--parry.
Shunt Now from the word of command, right through. Sword exercise.
Prep--air! Prove distance--go! Shun! Pursuin’ practice I Prep--_air!_
Go! Shun! That’s all right, sir. Ever been in the service before, young
feller?’
‘No,’ said Polson. ‘I always meant to join, and I thought I’d get ready
as far as I could.’
‘Now look here, my lad,’ said the Sergeant. ‘You’ve been through the
mill before, you have. You’re a deserter, you know, that’s what you
are.’
Polson laughed. He had thought never to laugh again, but the accusation
tickled him.
‘I beg your pardon, Captain Volnay,’ he said, saluting in officer’s
fashion--the only way he had been taught; ‘but perhaps you will speak up
for me.’
‘Deserter?’ said Volnay. ‘Rubbish! Known the man for years. Always keen
on the service, and got ready for it. Jervase.’ ‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’re a pretty good shot, I gather?’ ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Any instruction in musketry?’ ‘Pretty fair, sir.’
‘Put him through his facings, Sergeant, in the riding school at four
o’clock this afternoon. I’ll be there. You hear, Jervase?’
‘Yes, sir.’
At this juncture the Sergeant surprised a wink from Volnay, which that
young gentleman supposed to have been unseen, and he fell a-thinking.
The result of his cogitation was rapid and conclusive. The young man who
knew the minutiae of his trade of soldier, and had an officer’s trick
of salute, and was on winking terms with the wealthiest man in the
regiment, was a person to be made up to, and to be made up to in the
least transparent way.
‘We’re awfully short-handed, sir,’ said the Sergeant, touching his
forage cap to Volnay. ‘We might utilise this man as a drill, sir, if
you’ll permit me to suggest such a thing. I could get on twice as fast,
sir, if I’d half the squad to deal with.’
‘Very well,’ said Volnay. ‘I’ll see the adjutant about that.’
And the raw recruit was drilling his barrack-room comrades before he
or they had fitted on a uniform, and his ringing ‘Carry--so!’ or
‘Ground--oh!’ sounded through the square as imperiously as any in those
first busy days.
‘You’re a (conventional) wonder, you are,’ said the drill instructor at
the close of the second day. ‘You’ve got the powers that be behind you,
and you’ll be one of _us_ in a month or two. Promotion’s quick when the
word comes for blood and rust and mud and oil.’