Merry-Garden and Other Stories Part 9

"We're in for a hard winter this season," went on Sergeant Pengelly lugubriously. "A touch o' frost so early in October you may take as one o' Natur's warnings."

"Ay," chimed in Gunner Tripconey, shaking his head. "What is man, when all's said an' done? One moment he's gallivantin' about in beauty and majesty, an' the next--_phut!_ as you might say."

Uncle Issy stared at him with neighbourly interest. "Been eatin' anything to disagree with you, Tripconey?" he asked.

"I have not," Mr. Tripconey answered; "and what's more, though born so recent as the very year his Majesty came to the throne, I've ordained to be extry careful over my diet this winter an' go slow over such delicacies as fried 'taties for breakfast. If these things happen in the green tree, Mr. Spettigew, what shall be done in the dry?"

Mr. Spettigew cheerfully ignored the hint. "Talkin' of frost and 'taties," he said, "have you ever tried storin' them in hard weather under your bed-tie? 'Tis a bit nubbly till the sleeper gets used to it, but it benefits the man if he's anyway given to lumbago, an' for the 'taties themselves 'tis salvation. I tried it through the hard winter of the year 'five by the advice o' Parson Buller, and a better Christian never missed the point of a joke. 'Well, Israel,' says he that January, 'how be the potatoes getting along?' 'Your honour,' says I, 'like the Apostles themselves, thirteen to the dozen; and likewise of whom it was said that many are cold but few are frozen'--hee-hee!"

n.o.body smiled. "If you go strainin' yourself over little witticisms like that," observed young Gunner Oke gloomily, "one of these days you'll be heving the Dead March played over you before you know what's happenin': and then, perhaps, you'll laugh on t'other side of your mouth."

Uncle Issy gazed around upon the company. They were eyeing him, one and all, in deadly earnest, and he crept away. Until that moment he had carried his years without feeling the burden. He went home, raked together the embers of the fire over which he had cooked his breakfast, drew his chair close to the hearth, and sat down to warm himself.

Yes: Sergeant Pengelly had spoken the truth. There _was_ an unnatural touch of frost in the air this morning.

By and by, when William Henry Phippin's son, Archelaus, bugler to the corps (aged fifteen), took the whooping-cough, public opinion blamed Captain Pond no less severely for having enlisted a recruit who was still an undergraduate in such infantile disorders: and although the poor child took it in the mildest form, his father (not hitherto remarkable for parental tenderness) ostentatiously practised the favourite local cure and conveyed him to and fro for three days and all day long in the ferry-boat which plied under Captain Pond's windows. The demonstration, which was conducted in mufti, could not be construed as mutiny; but the spirit which prompted it, and the public feeling it evoked, galled the worthy Captain more than he cared to confess.

Still, and when all was said and done, the sweets of notoriety outflavoured the sours. The Troy Artillery, down the coast, had betrayed its envy in a spiteful epigram; and this neighbourly acid, infused upon the pride of Looe, had crystallised it, so to speak, into the name now openly and defiantly given to the corps. They were the Die-hards henceforth, jealous of the t.i.tle and of all that it implied. The ladies of Looe, with whom Captain Pond (an unmarried man) had ever been a favourite, used during the next few weeks far severer language towards their neighbours of Troy than they had ever found for the distant but imminent Gaul and his lascivious advances.

All this was well enough; but Looe had a Thersites in its camp.

His name was Scantlebury; he kept a small general shop in the rear of the Town Quay, and he bore Captain Pond a grudge of five years' standing for having declined to enlist him on the pretext of his legs being so malformed that the children of the town drove their hoops between them.

In his nasty spite this Scantlebury sat down and indited a letter, addressed--

"To the Right Honble Person as looks after the artillery.

Horse Guards, London."

"Honble SIR,--This comes hoping to find you well as it leaves me at present and I beg leave to tell you there be some dam funny goings-on, down here to Looe. The E. & W. Looe Volunteer Artllry have took to calling themselves the Die-hards and the way they coddle is a public scandal, when I tell you that for six weeks there has been no drill in the fresh air and 16s 8d public money has been paid to T. Tripconey carpenter (a member of the corps) for fastening up the windows of the Town Hall against draughts. Likewise a number of sandbags have been taken from the upper battery and moved down to the said room (which they use for a drill hall) to stop out the wind from coming under the door. Likewise also to my knowledge for three months the company have not been allowed to move at the double because Gunner Spettigew (who owns to seventy-three) cant manage a step of thirty-six inches without his heart being effected.

"I wish you could see the place where they have been and moved the said upper Battery. It would make you laugh. They have put it round the corner to the eastward where it would have to blow away seven or eight hundred ton of Squire Trelawny's cliff before it could get a clear shot at a vessel entering the haven. Trusting you will excuse the length of this letter and come down and have a look for yourself, I remain yours truly. A Well-Wisher."

The clerk in Whitehall who opened this unconventional letter pa.s.sed it up to his chief, who in turn pa.s.sed it on to the Adjutant-General, who thrust it into a pigeon-hole reserved for such curiosities. Now, as it happened, a week later the Adjutant-General received a visit from a certain Colonel Taubmann of the Royal Artillery, who was just leaving London for Plymouth, to make a tour of inspection through the West, and report on the state of the coast-defences; and during the interview, as the Adjutant-General glanced down the Colonel's list of batteries, his eye fell on the name 'Looe'; whereby being reminded of the letter, he pulled it out and read it for his visitor's amus.e.m.e.nt.

You may say then that Colonel Taubmann had fair warning. Yet it was far from preparing him for the welcome he received, three weeks later, when he drove down to Plymouth to hold his inspection, due notice of which had been received by Captain Pond ten days before.

"What the devil's the meaning of this?" demanded Colonel Taubmann as his post-boy reined up on the knap of the hill above the town. By 'this' he meant a triumphal arch, packed with evergreens, and adorned with the motto '_Death to the Invader_' in white letters on a scarlet ground.

He repeated the question to Captain Pond, who appeared a minute later in full regimentals advancing up the hill with his Die-hards behind him and a large and excited crowd in the rear.

"Good-morning, sir!" Captain Pond halted beneath the archway and saluted, beaming with pride and satisfaction and hospitable goodwill. "I am addressing Colonel Taubmann, I believe? Permit me to bid you welcome to Looe, Colonel, and to congratulate you upon this perfect weather.

Nature, as one might say, has endued her gayest garb. You have enjoyed a pleasant drive, I hope?"

"What the devil is the meaning of this, sir?" repeated the Colonel.

Captain Pond looked up at the motto and smiled. "The reference is to Bonaparte. Dear me, I trust--I sincerely trust--you did not even for a moment mistake the application? You must pardon us, Colonel. We are awkward perhaps in our country way--awkward no doubt; but hearty, I a.s.sure you."

The Colonel, though choleric, was a good-natured man, and too much of a gentleman to let his temper loose, though sorely tried, when at the bottom of the hill the Die-hards halted his carriage that he might receive not only an address from the Doctor as Mayor, but a large bouquet from the hands of the Doctor's four-year-old daughter, little Miss Sophronia, whom her mother led forward amid the plaudits of the crowd. (The Doctor, I should explain, was a married man of but five years' standing, and his wife and he doted on one another and on little Miss Sophronia, their only child.) This item of the programme, carefully rehea.r.s.ed beforehand, and executed pat on the moment with the prettiest air of impromptu, took Colonel Taubmann so fairly aback that he found himself stammering thanks before he well knew what had happened: and from that moment he was at the town's mercy. Before he could drop back in the chaise, and almost before the Mayor, casting off his robe and throwing it upon the arm of the town-crier, had exchanged his civic for his military role, the horses were unharnessed and a dozen able-bodied men tugging at the traces: and so, desperately gripping a stout bunch of scarlet geraniums, Colonel Taubmann was rattled off amid a whirl of cheering through the narrow streets, over the cobbles, beneath arches and strings of flags and flag-bedecked windows, from which the women leaned and showered rice upon him, with a band playing ahead and a rabble shouting astern, up the hill to the battery, where willing hands had wreathed Looe's four eighteen-pounders with trusses of laurel. The very mark moored off for a target had been decorated with an enormous bunch of holly and a motto--decipherable, as Captain Pond, offering his field-gla.s.s, pointed out--

_Our compliments to Bonyparty: He'll find us well and likewise hearty!_

The moment for resistance, for effective protest, had pa.s.sed. There was really nothing for the Colonel to do but accept the situation with the best face he could muster. As the chaise drew up alongside the battery, he did indeed cast one wild look around and behind him, but only to catch a bewitching smile from the Mayoress--a young and extremely good-looking woman, with that soft brilliance of complexion which sometimes marks the early days of motherhood. And Captain Pond, with the Doctor and Second Lieutenant Clogg at his elbow, was standing hat in hand by the carriage-step; and the weather was perfect, and every face in the crowd and along the line of the Die-hards so unaffectedly happy, that--to be brief--the Colonel lost his head for the moment and walked through the inspection as in a dream, accepting--or at least seeming to accept--it in the genial holiday spirit in which it was so honestly presented.

Bang-Bang! went the eighteen-pounders, and through the smoke Colonel Taubmann saw the pretty Mayoress put up both hands to her ears.

"Damme!" said Gunner Spettigew that evening, "the practice, if a man can speak professionally, was a disgrace. Oke, there, at Number Two gun, must ha' lost his head altogether; for I marked the shot strike the water, and 'twas a good hundred yards short if an inch. 'Hullo!' says I, and glances toward the chap to apologise. If you'll believe me, I'd fairly opened my mouth to tell 'en that nine times out of ten you weren't such a blamed fool as you looked, when a glance at his eye told me he hadn' noticed.

The man looked so pleased with everythin', I felt like nudgin' him under the ribs with a rammer: but I dessay 'twas as well I thought better of it.

The regular forces be terrible on their dignity at times."

Colonel Taubmann had, however, made a note of the Die-hards' marksmans.h.i.+p, and attempted to tackle Captain Pond on the subject later in the afternoon--albeit gently--over a cup of tea provided by the Mayoress.

"There is a spirit about your men, Captain--" he began.

"You take sugar?" interposed Captain Pond.

"Thank you: three lumps."

"You find it agrees with you? Now in the Duchy, sir, you'll find it the rarest exception for anyone to take sugar."

"As I was saying, there is certainly a spirit about your men--"

"Health and spirits, sir! In my experience the two go together.

Health and spirits--the first requisites for success in the military calling, and both alike indispensable! If a soldier enjoy bad health, how can he march? If his liver be out of order, if his hand tremble, if he see black spots before his eyes, with what accuracy will he shoot?

Rheumatism, stone, gout in the system--"

Colonel Taubmann stared. Could he believe his eyes, or had he not, less than an hour ago, seen the Looe Artillery plumping shot into the barren sea a good fifty yards short of their target? Could he trust his ears, or was it in a dream he had listened, just now, to Captain Pond's reasons for marching his men home at a pace reserved, in other regiments, for funerals?--"In my judgment, sir, a step of twenty-four to thirty inches is as much as any man over sixty years of age can indulge in without risk of overstrain, and even so I should prescribe forty-eight steps a minute as the maximum. Some criticism has been levelled at me--not perhaps without excuse--for having enlisted men of that age. It is easy to be wise after the event, but at the time other considerations weighed with me--as for instance that the men were sober and steady-going, and that I knew their ways, which is a great help in commanding a company."

Colonel Taubmann stared and gasped, but held his tongue. There was indeed a breadth of simplicity about Captain Pond--a seriousness, innocent and absolute, which positively forbade retort.

"Nay!" went on the worthy man. "Carry the argument out to its logical conclusion. If a soldier's efficiency be reduced by ill-health, what shall we say of him when he is dead? A dead soldier--unless it be by the memory of his example--avails nothing. The active list knows him no more.

He is gone, were he Alexander the Great and the late Marquis of Granby rolled into one. No energy of his repels the invader; no flash of his eye rea.s.sures the trembling virgin or the perhaps equally apprehensive matron.

He lies in his place, and the mailed heel of Bellona--to borrow an expression of our Vicar's--pa.s.ses over him without a protest. I need not labour this point. The mere mention of it bears out my theory, and justifies the line I have taken in practice; that in these critical times, when Great Britain calls upon her sons to consolidate their ranks in the face of the Invader, it is of the first importance to keep as many as possible of them alive and in health."

"Captain Pond has mounted his hobby, I see," said the pretty Mayoress, coming forward at the conclusion of this harangue. "But you should hear my husband, sir, on the health-giving properties of Looe's climate."

Colonel Taubmann bowed gallantly. "Madam, I have no need. Your own cheeks bear a more eloquent testimony to it, I warrant, than any he could compose."

"Well, and so they do, my love," said the Doctor that evening, when she repeated this pretty speech to him. "But I don't understand why you should add that anyone could tell he belonged to the regular service."

"They _have_ a way with them," said the lady musingly, gazing out of window.

"Why, my dear, have I not paid you before now a score of compliments as neat?"

"Now don't be huffed, darling!--of course you have. But, you see, it came as pat with him as if he had known me all my life: and I'll engage that he has another as pat for the next woman he meets."

"I don't doubt it," agreed her spouse: "and if that's what you admire, perhaps you would like me to compliment and even kiss every pretty girl in the place. There's no saying what I can't do if I try."

"_Please_ don't be a goose, dear! I never said a Volunteer wasn't more comfortable _to live with_. Those professionals are here to-day and gone tomorrow--sometimes even sooner."