LXX
Blueberry’s purchase-money had long been spent—Josh’s hoarded pound or so had melted, crown by crown, out of the green netted purse,—the last shillings of Mrs. Joshua’s small store of savings had been swallowed up by those three shrieking needs of Humanity—more particularly Humanity reared under the inclement skies of Great Britain, for Food, Fire, and Shelter—before capricious Fortune relented in some degree towards the poor young lovers; permitting the missing certificate of their marriage at the yellow iron church at the bottom of the Stoke Road near Dullingstoke Junction, to be discovered within the covers of that sacred volume, the trooper’s “small book,” tucked snugly away in a fold of the parchment binding.
A copy of this talisman being forwarded by Josh’s friendly Captain to Sarah Horrotian, with a request for a written testimony to the respectability of the young woman who had married her son, elicited from the widow an inky chart indicating vanity, light-mindedness, lack of religious fervor, ingratitude to benefactors, and carelessness in making-up the market-butter, as the principal rocks and shoals upon which the esteem of an employer would be most likely to suffer wreck. Beyond these categorized failings, in Christian justice (since the young woman was proven virtuous and no to-yielding trollop) Sarah had no more to add.
Perusing her epistle, Josh’s troop-Captain whistled plaintively. For the crime of getting married “off the strength” was in those days, as it is in these, the blackest sin upon the soldier’s list of minor offenses. Confronted with a problem of no ordinary toughness, the Captain betook himself and his difficulty to the Adjutant, an elderly officer of astuteness and experience, who, while maintaining a well-earned reputation as a rigid disciplinarian, had a heart in the right place. Over cigars and brandy-and-water the case was thrashed out....
“’Man is, as I understand you, in the very devil of a tight hole,” said the Adjutant, knocking a two-inch ash off a long, dry, deadly-looking Trichinopoly cheroot. “Only thing possible for you to do for him under thecircumstances would beimpossible—for a conscientious officer—you quite understand? So I take it you’ll simply wash your hands of Horrotian and his love-affairs—instead of sending in the mother’s letter as testimony of character—and applying to Headquarters for permission for your beggar to get spliced. Having obtained that, you would—supposing you to be the kind of man I quite understand you not to be—put in the Certificate of Marriage—previously being careful to upset the ink-bottle over the place where the parson filled in the date!... Understand, I speak unofficially, when I say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the mild deception would pass muster. Specially in the present case—the C. O. being uncommonly groggy about the eyesight; and objecting to spectacles on the grounds of their giving away a man’s age. Officially speaking, if such a course of conduct were brought to my knowledge, I should instantly report it—do you understand me? And the consequences would be serious—consumedly serious, my dear fellow! For Rule and Routine are not skittles to be bowled over by privates who have kicked over the Regulations and married without the permission of their Commanding Officer. And Favoring is a thing to be avoided—I’m sure you’ll understand!”
The Captain understood perfectly; and, though he rather overdid it with the ink-bottle—causing not only the date, but the names of the contracting parties to vanish under a sable lagoon of carefully dried writing-fluid—the charitably-conceived plot was successful, from beginning to end.
Those iron wheels of Administration—sorely hampered, even in these modern days, with that entangling medium known as Red Tape—did at last revolve without crushing the last hope of an ill-clad, hungry girl who was soon to be a mother. The hand of Official Authority was extended to Mrs. Joshua Horrotian with a weekly stipend of fifteen pence. By grace of the Officer Commanding the Squadron, Nelly—no longer of the depressed sisterhood of dowdy Paris yearning outside the sentried gate of that grim Paradise, the Cavalry Barracks—was admitted; privileged to bear her remunerated part in the getting-up of officers’ linen, the lavation and mending of troopers’ undergarments, as in the sweeping and scrubbing of passages and floors. Yet another day dawned that saw her an inmate of the long, bare barrack-room,where Mrs. Geogehagan—in virtue of her social status as Corporal’s lady—resided with her husband and her young family, in a neat three-sided villa of patchwork quilt, at the upper, fireplace end....
When the pale-faced, shabbily-dressed, shy young woman was brought in with her light box and her meager bundles, by her husband, the room seemed already full of soldiers and their wives and children. The din of voices beggared description. Moggy Geogehagan was crying herrings at the top of all.
It is not to be supposed that the herrings were actually in evidence; but the raucous shriek with which Moggy—ere wooed and won by her Corporal—had vaunted these marine delicacies—fresh and saline—was justly famed throughout her native city of Dublin. It leaped three streets, to waken shattering echoes in the alleys beyant them—the suburbs knew it—you heard Moggy coming, leaving a trail of fish and headache behind her all the way from Donnybrook to Irishtown....
The troop-room was entered from the upper end of a long, slate-flagged, ground-floor passage, smelling of potato-peels and boiled cabbage, and with coal-bunkers at the more distant end, under the iron-shod, iron-railed staircase. The walls were whitewashed, with patterns of damp bricks showing through; and had no other ornament than iron shelves and hooks, from which depended shining arms and various soldierly accouterments and trappings; the floor was of bare boards, clean-scraped and well-scrubbed. Long rows of cot-bedsteads, made in telescopic fashion so as to occupy half the space during the day that they took up when expanded by night, were ranged along the walls, with rolled and strapped up mattresses upon them; and not all the beds were screened off by rope-suspended counterpanes, or cast-off horse-rugs, from the rake of the public eye. Down the middle of the room ran heavy wooden tables on iron trestles, affording accommodation—on the backless benches that appertained to them—for eight married men with their wives and children; and the two bachelors who occupied opposing couches at the draughty end nearest the door.
Three or four men, and perhaps half-a-dozen womenwere sitting on the benches. Moggy Geogehagan herself, a short black pipe in her mouth, superintended the cooking of some pap for a regimental baby, in a small tin saucepan on the hob. Geogehagan—a stoutish, baldish trooper, with large red ears—Nelly could not but suspect the fundamental reason of the excessive development of these organs—was sitting on a three-legged stool, engaged, by the aid of a lighted candle, in dropping sealing-wax on the end of a new clay pipe.
There was a momentary lull in the deafening Babel. Then:
“Hooroo, Jude!” said Mrs. Geogehagan, with graceful brevity, rising up to the full extent of her six feet odd of stature, setting her vast elbows akimbo, and surveying the scared intruder with the eye that did not squint while the other swiveled round to make sure that her cookery was not burning. “Will any gintleman or lady presint condescind,” she pursued in a tone of raking irony, “to be afther inthrojuicing me to the bit av’ gintility that’s dhropped in to pay us a marning call?”
“With your good leave, ma’am,” put in Josh, with a more submissive tone and less confident air than Nelly would have ever expected of him, “this is my young wife, who—as I’ve explained to you already—has had the good fortune to be entered on the Regiment’s Married Roll, after nigh on two years of delay. And I take the liberty, among comrades, to hope she’s not unwelcome to any here present?—knowing of no reason why she should be!”
He looked about him, and there was an assenting murmur, and the seated men got up to shake hands, and the women, after a moment’s hesitation, did the same. All save one, more tawdrily dressed than her companions, and with a great many light yellow curls, who kept her face turned persistently away.
“Gi’ me your hand, Mrs. Horrotian, ma’am!” said Mrs. Geogehagan, advancing with great ceremony and stateliness. She added, as Nelly complied—in a soaring shriek that made Mrs. Joshua jump and flush nervously:
“Jems!”
“Is it me you’re wantin’, Moggy?” said bland James Geogehagan.
“It is!” said Mrs. Geogehagan severely, “an’ the Divilmend your manners. Rare up on the ould hind legs av’ you, and bid this dacent young wife av’ Horrotian’s welcome to the Rooms.” She added, as the Corporal complied: “For we may bless ourselves there’s men in the Rigiment that has more dacincy than to stand up for-ninst the clargyman or the priest wid a wagtail av’ the gutther! I say ut in the brazen face that’s lookin’ at me now!”
There was no mistake about the face that confronted the indomitable Mrs. Geogehagan, ambushed in a forest of egregiously-curled light ringlets, with blazing eyes set in it, and flying the scarlet flag of battle in cheeks that wore the brownish stains of ingrained rouge. Nelly’s hazel glance went to it timidly; and then—even if the pink bonnet—sadly the worse for wear—had not hung on a peg driven into the whitewashed wall behind, she would have recognized it with the same sinking of her heart. For it belonged to the flaunting woman who had accosted Josh upon that unforgettable evening at the theater; the patchouli-reeking, gin-perfumed creature who had thrust a red, ringed hand under the trooper’s stiff, reluctant elbow, and had called him ducky, had asked him to stand drink.... Oh! how glad was Mrs. Joshua that hand had not been offered like the rest!... Never could she have demeaned herself to touch it, not for diamonds and gold....
Meanwhile it had been dawning in the slow brain of the tall, thin, pimply young trooper who had been Pink Bonnet’s companion upon that memorable night, and was now sitting affectionately in her pocket, that the utterances of Mrs. Geogehagan were leveled at his wife. He had applied for permission to marry, and the inquiries of the Commanding Officer had been satisfactorily answered. There were persons who made quite a capital living—in those days as in these—out of whitewashing the feathers of the grimiest of soiled garrison doves.
You saw Trooper Toomey, yellow in the face and scowling, lumbering up at the nudge of an imperative elbow, from the form he had bestridden, with the air of a man nerving himself for a fight.
“Look a’ here, I’m blasted if I’ll stand this!”—he was beginning, when Mrs. Geogehagan cut him short.
“Toomey, me fine man,” she said almost mellifluously,“av ye show them dirty teeth av yours at me, ’tis taking lave of your mouth they’ll be with the dhrive in the gub I’ll land you,—so shut ut—an’ sit ye down!”
Thus cautioned, Toomey snapped his lank jaws together, threw his long leg across the form, and sat down sullenly, leaving Pink Bonnet to enter the arena alone.
In high, shrill accents she demanded to be informed without reserve whether she, the speaker, was or was not the lawful married wife of a low-bred white-livered ’ound what was afeared of standing up for her against them that for all their back-talk and sauce—was nothing but Irish Scum—and would, if all was knowed that might be knowed!—be held unworthy to sweep up the dust of her feet, or to eat off of the same table with her!...
“Hooroo, Jude!—an’ is that the talk you have?” retorted Mrs. Geogehagan, with overwhelming irony. “Married you are, bedad!—an’ proud av it as a mangy bitch wid a new tin collar. As for Toomey there!—sure, pay-cocks wid their tails spread is less consayted, I’ll go bail!” She broke off as the Dinner Call sounded; plunged at the hanging tray above the long table, and began—as did several of the other women—to rattle down the plates and basins, crockery mugs and wooden-handled knives, in an orderly jumble upon the upper end of the board, while the sulky Toomey, seizing upon two very large, very bright, and very deep tin dishes, and hanging a tin pail over his arm, hurried out to the cook-house to get the mess for the Room. And in his absence, such men as had been taking it easy without their belts, coats and stocks, put them on again, and the women tidied their hair.
You subsequently beheld Mrs. Geogehagan in her glory, serving broth, boiled meat, cabbage and potatoes, in strictly equal helpings, into the various bowls and platters assembled on the board. This onerous task being completed to the general satisfaction, the men chose their portions first, and were succeeded—according to the husband’s seniority of rank—by their wives. Then Mrs. Geogehagan, standing beside her Jems in front of the short form that stood at the upper end of the table—pronounced a pithy grace, which ran—unless my memory trips—something after this fashion:
“May Christ and the Four Evangels bless this mate!...Bad scran to that villain av’ a throop-cook! Sure, the praties is burraned agin!”