Snake and Sword Part 21

Dam had borne these things because he was certain he could thrash the silly animal when the time came, and because he had a wholesome dread of the all-too-inevitable military "crimes" (one of which fighting is--as subversive of good order and military discipline).

It had come, however, and for Dam this exotic of the Ratcliffe Highway had thereafter developed a vast admiration and an embarra.s.sing affection. It was a most difficult matter to avoid his companions.h.i.+p when "walking-out" and also to avoid hurting his feelings.

It was a humiliating and chastening experience to the man, who had supported himself by boxing in booths at fairs and show-grounds, to find this "bloomin' dook of a 'Percy,'" this "lah-de-dar 'Reggie'" who looked askance at good bread-and-dripping, this finnicky "Clarence"

without a "b.l.o.o.d.y" to his conversation, this "blasted, up-the-pole[17]

'Cecil'"--a man with a quicker guard, a harder punch, a smarter ring-craft, a better wind, and a tougher appet.i.te for "gruel"

than himself.

The occasion was furnished by a sad little experience.

Poor drunken Trooper Bear (once the Honourable MacMahon FitzUrse), kindliest, weakest, gentlest of gentlemen, had lurched one bitter soaking night (or early morning) into the barrack-room, singing in a beautiful tenor:--

"Menez-moi" dit la belle, "A la rive fidele Ou l'on aime toujours."

...--"Cette rive ma chere On ne la connait guere Au pays des amours."....

Trooper Herbert Hawker had no appreciation for Theophile Gautier--or perhaps none for being awakened from his warm slumbers.

"'Ere! stow that blarsted catawaulin'," he roared, with a choice selection from the Whitechapel tongue, in which he requested the adjectived noun to be adverbially "quick about it, too".

With a beatific smile upon his weak handsome face, Trooper Bear staggered toward the speaker, blew him a kiss, and, in a vain endeavour to seat himself upon the cot, collapsed upon the ground.

"You're a...." (adverbially adjectived noun) shouted Hawker. "You ain't a man, you're a...." "[Greek: skias hovar havthropos]" ... "Man is the dream of a shadow," suggested Bear dreamily with a hiccup....

"D'yer know where you _are_, you ..." roared Hawker.

"Dear Heart, I am in h.e.l.l," replied the rec.u.mbent one, "but by the Mercy of G.o.d I'm splendidly drunk. Yes, h.e.l.l. '_Lasciate ogni speranza,_' sweet Amaryllis. I am Morag of the Misty Way. _Mos'_ misty. Milky Way. Yesh. Milk Punchy Way." ...

"I'll give you all the _punch_ you'll want, in abaht two ticks if you don't chuck it--you blarsted edjucated flea," warned Hawker, half rising.

Dam got up and pulled on his cloak preparatory to helping the o'er-taken one to bed, as a well-aimed ammunition boot took the latter nearly on the ear.

Struggling to his feet with the announcement that he was "the King's fair daughter, weighed in the balance and found--devilish heavy and very drunk," the unhappy youth lurched and fell upon the outraged Hawker--who struck him a cruel blow in the face.

At the sound of the blow and heavy fall, Dam turned, saw the blood--and went Stukeley-mad. Springing like a tiger upon Hawker he dragged him from his cot and knocked him across it. In less than a minute he had twice sent him to the boards, and it took half-a-dozen men on either side to separate the combatants and get them to postpone the finish till the morning. That night Dam dreamed his dream and, on the morrow, behind the Riding-School, and in fifteen rounds, became, by common consent, champion bruiser of the Queen's Greys--by no ambition of his own.

And so--as has been said--Trooper Henry Hawker ungrudgingly referred Trooper Phelim O'Shaughnessy to him in the matter of reducing the pride of the Young Jock who had dared to "desthroy" a dragoon.

Trooper Phelim O'Shaughnessy--in perfect-fitting glove-tight scarlet stable-jacket (that never went near a stable, being in fact the smart sh.e.l.l-jacket, shaped like an Eton coat, sacred to "walking-out"

purposes), dark blue overalls with broad white stripe, strapped over half-wellington boots adorned with glittering swan-neck spurs, a pill-box cap with white band and b.u.t.ton, perched jauntily on three hairs--also looked what he was, the ideal heavy-cavalry man, the swaggering, swashbuckling trooper, _beau sabreur_, good all round and all through....

The room in which these worthies and various others (varying also in dress, from s.h.i.+rt and shorts to full review-order for Guard) had their being, expressed the top note and last cry--or the lowest note and deepest groan--of bleak, stark utilitarianism. Nowhere was there hint or sign of grace and ornament. Bare deal-plank floor, bare white-washed walls, plank and iron truckle beds, rough plank and iron trestle tables, rough plank and iron benches, rough plank and iron boxes clamped to bedsteads, all bore the same uniform impression of useful ugliness, ugly utility. The apologist in search of a solitary encomium might have called it clean--save around the hideous closed stove where muddy boots, coal-dust, pipe-dottels, and the bitter-end of five-a-penny "gaspers"[18] rebuked his rashness.

A less inviting, less inspiring, less home-like room for human habitation could scarce be found outside a jail. Perhaps this was the less inappropriate in that a jail it was, to a small party of its occupants--born and bred to better things.

The eye was grateful even for the note of cheer supplied by the red cylindrical valise on the shelf above each cot, and by the occasional scarlet tunic and stable-jacket. But for these it had been, to the educated eye, an even more grim, grey, depressing, beauty-and-joy-forsaken place than it was....

Dam (_alias_ Trooper D. Matthewson) placed the gleaming helmet upon his callous straw-stuffed pillow, carefully rubbed the place where his hand had last touched it, and then took from a peg his scarlet tunic with its white collar, shoulder-straps and facings. Having satisfied himself that to burnish further its glittering b.u.t.tons would be to gild refined gold, he commenced a vigorous brus.h.i.+ng--for it was now his high ambition to "get the stick"--in other words to be dismissed from guard-duty as reward for being the best-turned-out man on parade.... As he reached up to his shelf for his gauntlets and pipe-clay box, Trooper Phelim O'Shaughnessy swaggered over with much jingle of spur and playfully smote him, netherly, with his cutting whip.

"What-ho, me bhoy," he roared, "and how's me natty Matty--the natest foightin' man in E Troop, which is sayin' in all the Dhraghoons, which is sayin' in all the Arrmy! How's Matty?"

"Extant," replied Dam. "How's Shocky, the biggest liar in the same?"

As he extended his hand it was noticeable that it was much smaller than the hand of the smaller man to whom it was offered. "Ye'll have to plug and desthroy the schamin' divvle that strook poor Patsy Flannigan, Matty," said the Irishman. "Ye must bate the sowl out of the baste before we go to furrin' parts. Loife is uncertain an' ye moight never come back to do ut, which the Holy Saints forbid--an' the Hussars troiumphin' upon our prosprit coorpses. For the hanner an'

glory av all Dhraghoons, of the Ould Seconds, and of me pore bed-ridden frind, Patsy Flannigan, ye must go an' plug the wicked scutt, Matty darlint."

"It was Flannigan's fault," replied Dam, daubing pipe-clay on the huge cuff of a gauntlet which he had drawn on to a weird-looking wooden hand, sacred to the purposes of glove-drying. "He got beastly drunk and insulted a better man than himself by insulting his Corps--or trying to. He called a silly lie after a total stranger and got what he deserved. He shouldn't seek sorrow if he doesn't want to find it, and he shouldn't drink liquor he can't carry."

"And the Young Jock beat Patsy when drunk, did he?" murmured O'Shaughnessy, in tones of awed wonder. "I riverince the man, for there's few can beat him sober. Knocked Patsy into hospital an' him foightin' dhrunk! Faith, he must be another Oirish gintleman himself, indade."

"He's a Scotchman and was middle-weight champion of India last year,"

rejoined Dam, and moistened his block of pipe-clay again in the most obvious, if least genteel, way.

"Annyhow he's a mere Hussar and must be rimonsthrated wid for darin'

to a.s.sault and batther a Dhraghoon--an' him dhrunk, poor bhoy. Say the wurrud, Matty. We'll lay for the spalpeen, the whole of E Troop, at the _Ring o' Bells_, an' whin he shwaggers in like he was a Dhraghoon an' a sodger, ye'll up an' say _'Threes about'_ an' act accordin'

subsequint, an' learn the baste not to desthroy an' insult his betthers of the Ould Second. Thread on the tail of his coat, Matty...."

"If I had anything to do with it at all I'd tread on Flannigan's coat, and you can tell him so, for disgracing the Corps.... Take off your jacket and help with my boots, Shocky. I'm for Guard."

"Oi'd clane the boots of no man that ud demane himself to ax it," was the haughty reply of the disappointed warrior. "Not for less than a quart at laste," he amended.

"A quart it is," answered Dam, and O'Shaughnessy speedily divested himself of his stable-jacket, incidentally revealing the fact that he had p.a.w.ned his s.h.i.+rt.

"You have got your teeth ready, then?" observed Dam, noting the underlying bareness--and thereby alluded to O'Shaughnessy's habit of p.a.w.ning his false teeth after medical inspection and redeeming them in time for the next, at the cost of his underclothing--itself redeemed in turn by means of the teeth. Having been compelled to provide himself with a "plate" he invariably removed the detested contrivance and placed it beside him when sitting down to meals (on those rare occasions when he and not his "uncle" was the arbiter of its destinies)....

A young and important Lance-Corporal, a shocking tyrant and bully, strode into the room, his sword clanking. O'Shaughnessy arose and respectfully drew him aside, offering him a "gasper". They were joined by a lean hawk-faced individual answering to the name of Fish, who said he had been in the American navy until buried alive at sea for smiling within sight of the quarter-deck.

"Yep," he was heard to say to some statement of O'Shaughnessy's.

"We'll hatch a five-bunch frame-up to put the eternal kibosh on the tuberous spotty--souled skunklet. Some. We'll make him wise to whether a tippy, chew-the-mop, bandy-legged, moke-monkey can come square-pus.h.i.+ng, and with his legs out, down _this_ side-walk, before we ante out. Some."

"Ah, Yus," agreed the Lance-Corporal. "d.a.m.ned if I wouldn't chawnce me arm[19] and go fer 'im meself before we leave--on'y I'm expectin'

furver permotion afore long. But fer that I'd take it up meself"--and he glanced at Dam.

"Ketch the little swine at it," remarked Trooper Herbert Hawker, as loudly as he dared, to his "towny," Trooper Henry Bone. "'Chawnst 'is arm!' It's 'is bloomin' life 'e'd chawnce if that Young Jock got settin' abaht 'im. Not 'arf!" and the exotic of the Ratcliffe Highway added most luridly expressed improprieties anent the origins of the Lance-Corporal, his erstwhile enemy and, now, superior officer, in addition.

"That's enough," said Dam shortly.

"Yep. Quit those low-browed sounds, guttermut, or I'll get mad all over," agreed Fish, whose marvellous vocabulary included no foul words. There was no need for them.

"Hi halso was abaht ter request you not to talk b.e.a.s.t.i.a.l, Mr. 'Erbert 'Awker," chimed in Trooper "Henery" Bone, anxious to be on the side of the saints. "Oo'd taike you to be the Missin' Hair of a n.o.ble 'ouse when you do such--'Missin' Hair!' _Missin' Link_ more like," he added with spurious indignation.

The allusion was to the oft-expressed belief of Trooper Herbert Hawker, a belief that became a certainty and subject for bloodshed and battle after the third quart or so, that there was a mystery about his birth.

There was, according to his reputed papa....

The plotters plotted, and Dam completed the burnis.h.i.+ng of his arms, spurs, buckles, and other glittering metal impedimenta (the quant.i.ty of which earned the Corps its barrack-room soubriquet of "the Polish Its"), finished the flicking of spots of pipe-clay from his uniform, and dressed for Guard.

Being ready some time before he had to parade, he sat musing on his truckle-bed.