Snake and Sword Part 22

What a life! What a.s.sociates (outside the tiny band of gentlemen-rankers). What cruel awful _publicity_ of existence--that was the worst of all. Oh, for a private room and a private coat, and a meal in solitude! Some place of one's own, where one could express one's own individuality in the choice and arrangement of property, and impress it upon one's environment.

One could not even think in private here.

And he was called a _private_ soldier! A grim joke indeed, when the crying need of one's soul was a little privacy.

A _private_ soldier!

Well--and what of the theory of Compensations, that all men get the same sum-total of good and bad, that position is really immaterial to happiness? What of the theory that more honour means also more responsibility and worry, that more pay also means more expenses and a more difficult position, that more seniority also means less youth and joy--that Fate only robs Peter to pay Paul, and, when bestowing a blessing with one hand, invariably bestows a curse with the other?

Too thin.

Excellent philosophy for the b.u.t.terfly upon the road, preaching contentment to the toad, who, beneath the harrow, knows exactly where each tooth-point goes. Let the b.u.t.terfly come and try it.

_What_ a life!

Not so bad at first, perhaps, for a stout-hearted, hefty sportsman, during recruit days when everything is novel, there is something to learn, time is fully occupied, and one is too busy to think, too busy evading strange pit-falls, and the just or (more often) unjust wrath of the Room Corporal, the Squadron Orderly Sergeant, the Rough-Riding Corporal, the Squadron Sergeant-Major, the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major, the Regimental Sergeant-Major, the Riding-Master.

But when, to the pa.s.sed "dismissed soldier," everything is familiar and easy, weary, flat, stale and unprofitable?

The (to one gently nurtured) ghastly food, companions, environment, monotony--the ghastly ambitions!

Fancy an educated gentleman's ambitions and horizon narrowed to a good-conduct "ring," a stripe in the far future (and to be a Lance-Corporal with far more duty and no more pay, in the hope of becoming a Corporal--that comfortable rank with the same duty and much more pay, and little of the costly gold-lace to mount, and heavy expenses to a.s.sume that, while putting the gilt on, takes it off, the position of Sergeant); and, for the present, to "keep off the peg,"

not to be "for it," to "get the stick," for smartest turn-out, to avoid the Red-Caps,[20] to achieve an early place in the scrimmage at the corn-bin and to get the correct amount of two-hundred pounds in the corn-sack when drawing forage and corn; to placate Troop Sergeants, the Troop Sergeant-Major and Squadron Sergeant-Major; to have a suit of mufti at some safe place outside and to escape from the branding searing scarlet occasionally; possibly even the terrible ambition to become an Officer's servant so as to have a suit of mufti as a right, and a chance of becoming Mess-Sergeant and then Quarter-Master, and perhaps of getting an Honorary Commission without doing a single parade or guard after leaving the troop!...

What a life for a man of breeding and refinement!... Fancy having to remember the sacred and immeasurable superiority of a foul-mouthed Lance-Corporal who might well have been your own stable-boy, a being who can show you a deeper depth of h.e.l.l in h.e.l.l, wreak his dislike of you in unfair "fatigues," and keep you at the detested job of coal-drawing on Wednesdays; who can achieve a "canter past the beak"[21] for you on a trumped-up charge and land you in the "digger,"[22] who can bring it home to you in a thousand ways that you are indeed the toad beneath the harrow. Fancy having to remember, night and day, that a Sergeant, who can perhaps just spell and cypher, is a monarch to be approached in respectful spirit; that the Regimental Sergeant-Major, perhaps coa.r.s.e, rough, and ignorant, is an emperor to be approached with fear and trembling; that a Subaltern, perhaps at school with you, is a G.o.d not to be approached at all.

Fancy looking forward to being "branded with a blasted worsted spur,"

and, as a Rough-Riding Corporal, receiving a forfeit tip from each young officer who knocks off his cap with his lance in Riding-School....

Well! One takes the rough with the smooth--but perceives with great clearness that the (very) rough predominates, and that one does not recommend a gentleman to enlist, save when a Distinguished Relative with Influence has an early Commission ready in his pocket for him.

Lacking the Relative, the gently-nurtured man, whether he win to a Commission eventually or not, can only do one thing more rash than enlist in the British Army, and that is enlist in the French Foreign Legion.

Discipline for soul and body? The finest thing in all the world--in reason. But the discipline of the tram-horse, of the blinded bullock at the wheel, of the well-camel, of the galley-slave--meticulous, puerile, unending, unchanging, impossible ...? Necessary perhaps, once upon a time--but hard on the man of brains, sensibility, heart, and individuality.

Soul and body? Deadly for the soul--and fairly dangerous for the body in the Cavalry Regiment whose riding-master prefers the abominable stripped-saddle training to the bare-backed....

Dam yawned and looked at the tin clock on the shelf above the cot of the Room Corporal. Half an hour yet.... Did time drag more heavily anywhere in the world?...

His mind roamed back over his brief, age-long life in the Queen's Greys and pa.s.sed it in review.

The interview with the Doctor, the Regimental Sergeant-Major, the Adjutant, the Colonel--the Oath on the Bible before that dread Superman.... How well he remembered his brief exordium--"Obey your Superiors blindly; serve your Queen, Country, and Regiment to the best of your ability; keep clean, don't drink, fear G.o.d, and--most important of all--take care of your horse. _Take care of your horse_, d'ye hear?"

Also the drawled remark of the Adjutant afterwards, "Ah--what--ah--University?"--his own prompt reply of "Whitechapel, sir," and the Adjutant's approving "Exactly.... You'll get on here by good conduct, good riding, and good drill--not by--ah--good accent or anything else."

How well he remembered the strange depolarized feeling consequent upon realizing that his whole worldly possessions consisted in three "grey-back" s.h.i.+rts, two pairs of cotton pants, two pairs of woollen socks, a towel; a hold-all containing razor, shaving-brush, spoon, knife and fork, and a b.u.t.ton-stick; a cylindrical valise with hair-brush, clothes-brush, bra.s.s-brush, and boot-brushes; a whip, burnisher, and dandy-brush (all three, for some reason, to be paid for as part of a "free" kit); jack-boots and jack-spurs, wellington-boots and swan-neck box-spurs, ammunition boots; a tin of blacking and another of plate powder; blue, white-striped riding-breeches, blue, white-striped overalls, drill-suit of blue serge, scarlet tunic, scarlet stable-jacket, scarlet drill "frock," a pair of trousers of lamentable cut "authorized for grooming," bra.s.s helmet with black horse-hair plume, blue pill-box cap with white stripe and b.u.t.ton, gauntlets and gloves, sword-belt and pouch-belt, a carbine and a sword. Also of a daily income of one loaf, b.u.t.ter, tea, and a pound of meat (often uneatable), and the sum of one s.h.i.+lling and twopence subject to a deduction of threepence a day "mess-fund," fourpence a month for delft, and divers others for library, was.h.i.+ng, hair-cutting, barrack-damages, etc.

Yes, it had given one a strange feeling of nakedness, and yet of a freedom from the tyranny of things, to find oneself so meagrely and yet so sufficiently endowed.

Then, the strange, lost, homeless feeling that Home is nothing but a cot and a box in a big bare barrack-room, that the whole of G.o.d's wide Universe contains no private and enclosed spot that is one's own peculiar place wherein to be alone--at first a truly terrible feeling.

How one envied the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major his Staff Quarters--without going so far as to envy the great Riding-Master his real separate and detached house!

No privacy--and a scarlet coat that encarnadined the world and made its wearer feel, as he so often thought, like a live coal glowing bright in h.e.l.l.

Surely the greatest of all an officer's privileges was his right of mufti, his daily escape from the burning cloth.

"Why does not the British officer wear his uniform always?" writes the perennial gratuitous a.s.s to the Press, periodically in the Silly Season.... Dam could tell him.

Memories ...!

Being jerked violently from uneasy slumber and broken, vivid dreams at 5 a.m., by the thunderous banging of the Troop Sergeant's whip on the table, and his raucous roar of "Tumble out, you lazy swine, before you get sunstroke! Rise and s.h.i.+ne! Rise and s.h.i.+ne, you tripe-hounds!" ...

Broken dreams on a smelly, straw-stuffed pillow and lumpy straw-stuffed pallet, dreams of "_Circle and cha-a-a-a-a-a-a-nge" "On the Fore-hand, Right About" "Right Pa.s.s, Shoulder Out" "Serpentine"

"Order Lance" "Trail Lance" "Right Front Thrust"_ (for the front rank of the Queen's Greys carry lances); dreams of riding wild mad horses to unfathomable precipices and at unsurmountable barriers....

Memories ...!

His first experience of "mucking out" stables at five-thirty on a chilly morning--doing horrible work, horribly clad, feeling horribly sick. Wheeling away intentionally and maliciously over-piled barrows to the muck-pits, upsetting them, and being cursed.

Being set to water a notoriously wild and vicious horse, and being pulled about like a little dog at the end of the chain, burning into frozen fingers.

Not much of the glamour and glow and glory left!

Better were the interesting and amusing experiences of the Riding-School where his trained and perfected hands and seat gave him a tremendous advantage, an early dismissal, and some amelioration of the roughness of one of the very roughest experiences in a very rough life.

Even he, though, knew what it was to have serge breeches sticking to abraided bleeding knees, to grip a stripped saddle with twin suppurating sores, and to burrow face-first in filthy tan _via_ the back of a stripped-saddled buck-jumper. How he had pitied some of the other recruits, making their first acquaintance with the Trooper's "long-faced chum" under the auspices of a pitiless, bitter-tongued Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major! _Rough!_ What a character the fellow was!

Never an oath, never a foul word, but what a vocabulary and gift of invective, sarcasm and cruel stinging reproof! A well-educated man if not a gentleman. "Don't dismount again, Muggins--or is it Juggins?--without permission" when some poor fellow comes on his head as his horse (bare of saddle and bridle) refuses at a jump. "Get up (and SIT BACK) you--you--hen, you pierrot, you _Aard Vark,_ you after-thought, you refined entertainer, you pimple, you performing water-rat, you mistake, you _byle_, you drip, you worm-powder....

What? You think your leg's broken? Well--_you've got another_, haven't you? Get up and break that. Keep your neck till you get a stripped saddle and no reins.... Don't embrace the horse like that, you p.a.w.n-shop, I can hear it blus.h.i.+ng.... Send for the key and get inside it.... Keep those fine feet forward. Keep them _forward_ (and SIT BACK), Juggins or Muggins, or else take them into the Infantry--what they were meant for by the look of them. Now then--over you go without falling if I have to keep you here all night.... Look at _that_" (as the poor fellow is thrown across the jump by the cunning brute that knows its rider has neither whip, spurs, saddle nor reins). "What? The _horse_ refuse? One of _my_ horses _refuse? If the man'll jump, the horse'll jump._ (All of you repeat that after me and don't forget it.) No. It's the _man_ refuses, not the poor horse. Don't you know the ancient proverb 'Faint heart ne'er took fair jump'....? What's the good of coming here if your heart's the size of your eye-ball instead of being the size of your fist? _Refuse?_ Put him over it, man. _Put_ him over--SIT BACK and lift him, and _put_ him over. I'll give you a thousand pounds if he refuses _me_...."

Then the day when poor bullied, baited, nervous Muggins had reached his limit and come to the end of his tether--or thought he had.

b.u.mped, banged, bucketed, thrown, sore from head to foot, raw-kneed, laughed at, lashed by the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major's cruel tongue, blind and sick with dust and pain and rage, he had at last turned his horse inward from his place in the ride to the centre of the School, and dismounted.

How quaintly the tyrant's jaw had dropped in sheer astonishment, and how his face had purpled with rage when he realized that his eyes had not deceived him and that the worm had literally turned--without orders.

Indian, African, and Egyptian service, disappointment, and a bad wife had left Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major Blount with a dangerous temper.

Poor silly Muggins. He had been Juggins indeed on that occasion, and, as the "ride" halted of its own accord in awed amazement, Dam had longed to tell him so and beg him to return to his place ere worse befell....

"I've 'ad enough, you bull-'eaded brute," shouted poor Muggins, leaving his horse and advancing menacingly upon his (incalculably) superior officer, "an' fer two d.a.m.ns I'd break yer b---- jaw, I would.

You ..."

Even as the Rough-Riding Corporal and two other men were dragging the struggling, raving recruit to the door, _en route_ for the Guard-room, entered the great remote, dread Riding-Master himself.

"What's this?" inquired Hon. Captain Style, Riding-Master of the Queen's Greys, strict, kind-hearted martinet.

Salute, and explanations from the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major.

Torrent of accusation and incoherent complaint and threat from the baited Muggins.

"Mount that horse," says the Riding-Master.