LXVIII
But although the twitch and set of Blueberry’s ears did not fail of their significance—though the young horse was duly purchased by the kindly Captain for Josh’s troop, and the good word of the officer was not wanting in the interests of the clandestinely-married couple—the day that was to confer upon Nelly the privileges of the barrack-room and the right to revolve in the select if limited social circlewhere Mrs. Geogehagan reigned in virtue of her rank as Corporal’s lady—did not dawn for many, many months.
The sweet came before the bitter. Though the rose-colored glasses through which couples wedded for love invariably view the scenery of the honeymoon, could hardly disguise the fact that the lodgings—a two-pair-back in a dingy street of rickety houses in the purlieus of the Cavalry Barracks at Spurham—were squalid, dingy and dubiously clean. Yet the neighborhood presented advantages. Regimental visitors were frequent. Healths were pledged with these in foaming pots of ale and stout from one or other of the prosperous taverns in which the neighborhood abounded. And not infreqently the parting guest—counting on the liberality of a man who was not only newly-married, but had the price of a horse in his pocket—appealed to Josh for a loan, and got it. Do you call the lender spendthrift and the borrowers shabby spongers? They would have ministered to their comrade’s need—supposing their pockets had been full, while his were empty. ’Twas a way they had in the Army when Queen Victoria was young and pretty.... ’Tis a way they have still, though her grandson reigns in her stead.
You are asked to imagine the palpitating wonder and delight of Nelly’s first plunge into the giddy round of garrison-town pleasures. The Circus presented charm but not novelty—because every year when the plums were ripe, and the Fair was held at Market Drowsing, Banger’s Royal Terpsichorean and Equestrian Grand Gala Entertainment encamped upon a marshy patch of waste in the town suburbs, and foreign-complexioned men with earrings, carrying whips of abnormal length, came to The Upper Clays to bargain for oats, hay, mangold-wurzel, and cabbages—the last-named commodities constituting the elephant’s favorite bill-of-fare. Free admissions to the sawdust-strewn, horsey land of enchantment within the big creaking tent of patched canvas were granted upon these occasions—not to stern Sarah, in whose gaunt eyes spangled females capering in pink tights upon the backs of ambling piebalds, represented the peculiar progeny of the Babylonish Whore—but to her maid and man. For Jason’s chapel-going never cured him of the horseriders. In the secret estimation of the piggy man the New Jerusalem was but an immensely-magnified, unspeakably more gloriousBanger’s. Not but what the lithe and supple gentleman in a sheath of glittering scales—who doubled himself into snaky knots while spewing fire—was hardly the sort of personage one might expect to meet with up here....
You are asked to be present in imagination upon the gallery benches of the Theater Royal, Spurham, upon the never-to-be-forgotten occasion when Josh took his bride to the Play. The blood-curdling melodrama of “The Ruffian Boy” constituted the principal item of the programme. Miss Arabella Smallsopp of the Principal London Theaters having been specially engaged to appear in the character of “Ethelinda,” the Baron’s Bride.
To look down from the gallery—sitting perched up there so high—and beside a husband so big, so manly, and so handsome in his uniform that the old lady in the squashed bonnet and nose to match, who sold you winkles, oranges and nuts, cried “God bless him!” as he rated her for giving short measure in the latter commodity—was in itself an experience thrilling enough to make you gasp even supposing the extraordinary mixture of paint, varnish, gas, drains, damp clothes, and heated humanity that was supplied to the patrons of the gallery in place of air, had not tickled your nose and stung your throat and eyes, making you cough and sneeze and blink....
Only two defacing smudges marred the shining page whereon Memory recorded the history of that evening. Incident No. 1 occurred shortly after a row of heads and shoulders, with musical instruments of various kinds attached to them, which Josh explained to be the Orchestra, had sprung up like mushrooms at the bottom of a big black ditch, below the line of smoky tin-screened lights twinkling at the bottom edge of a great Curtain—with a palace in an astonishing garden, and a lake full of swans, and groups of dancing ladies painted on it; marvelously beautiful, but wi’ so mortal few clothes on as to make a body ashamed to look.
It was just before a lank gentleman with upright hair had popped into a seat raised above the level of the previously-described heads and shoulders, and briskly rapping with a little black stick upon a desk, had caused the Orchestra to burst into a jumble of Popular Airs, described by a waggish young man on the back benches as a “musical bluemange,” beginning with “My Heart’s in theHighland,” continuing with “The Marseillaise”—for some reason or other vociferously applauded—and ending with “Rule, Britannia” and “Britons Strike Home.”
A young female—not so very young neither—Mrs. Joshua Horrotian couldn’t help but notice!—in spite of her vividly red-and-white complexion, and a profusion of light ringlets, tumbling out of a smart bonnet of pink satin trimmed with green ostrich feathers—a gaudy, tawdry young woman of the class we were then, as we are now—content to call unfortunate—closely followed by a tall, lean, pimply-faced young trooper in the beloved blue, white-faced uniform of the Hundredth Lancers—came squeezing her way between the row of knees on one side and the row of shoulders on the other—and plumped herself down in the vacant place by Joshua Horrotian’s side.
To the stolid vice of the country-side Sarah’s late milkmaid was no stranger. Abey Absalom’s too-yielding girl, Betsy Twitch the weeding-woman, were not the only specimens of female frailty to be found in the neighborhood of The Upper Clays. Fairs and public holidays, stirring up the muddy dregs of Market Drowsing, showed, while the naphtha-lights still flared amongst the booths—while unsteady revelers staggered homewards between the hedgerows—spectacles sordid, brutal, and obscene enough to have been worthy of the brush of some bygone Flemish painter of revels and kermesses....
Nelly had known from childhood that certain men and women habitually committed sin together; sin for which the women were locally denounced as “right down bad uns,” or “demmyrips,” or purely as whores—while the men reaped no blame whatever. She was too simple to dream of injustice—she sometimes wondered why, that was all.
The first glance had told Nelly that Pink Bonnet was a “bad un.” The whiff of cheap musk that emanated from the tawdry garments—the smell of spirits that breathed from the leering painted lips, had sprung the rattle of warning, before—in a voice brazen and hoarse with drink, excess, and midnight brawling, Pink Bonnet addressed Joshua Horrotian as “her ducky,” and asked him to “stand a drain.”
Never, never! would Nelly forget the turn that creature gave her—not if she lived to be ever so old....
With Josh, as red as fire, or the coat of the infantryman sitting in front of him, saying in a sheepish, bashful voice, not at all like his usual robust one:
“Excuse me, Miss!—I’m a married man!”....
Why Pink Bonnet, on the receipt of this intelligence, should become vociferous and abusive, calling Josh a low, imperent soger, and a great many worse names, Mrs. Joshua could only wonder. Indeed, so forcible and lurid became her language, that cries of “Order!—Or-der!” rose up about them; and the row of backs of heads in front became a row of faces, full of round, staring eyes and grinning mouths. And then a huge man in a Scotch cap and shirt-sleeves looked over a wooden partition at the back of the gallery, and presently came striding down the narrow gangway, followed by a chimney-pot-hatted policeman. And Scotch Cap said, beckoning with one immense finger: “Come! Out o’ this, Polly, since you dunno’ how to behave yourself!” Upon Polly’s launching into a torrent of sulphurous invective, the policeman added, warningly: “You ought to know by this time, my gal, that cussing makes it worse!” And as Polly—still fulminating threats of ultimate vengeance, wreaked upon somebody’s eyes, heart, and liver, was hustled out and vanished, followed by her tall, pimply-faced companion, Nelly whispered to Josh, as a vast breath of relief heaved the big ribs that pressed against her side:
“Her were quite a stranger to ’e—weren’t her, Josh, love?”
And heard him answer, as he wiped the standing sweat-drops from his high, tanned forehead, with a big hand that shook a little:
“I never saw her before in all my born days.”