XXI
Between Dullingstoke Junction and the village town of Market Drowsing in Sloughshire, lay some ten miles of hard, level highway, engineered and made in the stark days of old by stalwart Romans who, ignorant of steamrollers and road-engines as they were, knew as little of the meaning of the word Impossibility.
One of those ancient road-making warriors might have approved the fine height and shapely form of a soldier who marched at ease along the highway, wearing, with a smart and gallant air, the blue, white-faced full-dress uniform of a trooper in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, without the sword, and the plumed head-dress of blue cloth and shiny black leather, which a forage-cap—of the muffin pattern more recently approved by Government—replaced.
He walked at a brisk marching pace, and, in spite of the tightness of his clothes, broke into a run at times to quicken his circulation. For, though greatcoats were supplied at the public expense to Great Britain’s martial sons; so many penalties, pains, and stoppages attended on the slightest damage to the sacred garment, that in nine cases out of ten the soldier of the era preferred to go without. Therefore the short tight coatee of blue cloth, with the white plastron and facings, being inadequate to keep out the piercing cold of the frosty February day, this soldier beat his elbows against his sides, as he ran, and thumped his arms upon a broad chest needing no padding. But even as he did this he whistled a cheery tune, and his bright eyes looked ahead as though something pleasant lay waiting at the end of the bleak, cold journey from the military depôt town of Spurham, thirty miles away; and the handsome mouth under the soldierly mustache, thatwas, like its owner’s abundant curly hair, of strong, dark red, and curled up on either side towards such a pair of side-whiskers as few women, at that hirsute period, could look upon unmoved—wore a smile that was very pleasant.
“It’s not a pretty view!” he said aloud, breaking off in the middle of “Vilikins and his Dinah” to criticise the landscape. “A man would need have queer taste to call it even cheerful, particularly in the winter-time! and yet I wouldn’t swop it for the Bay o’ Naples, with a volcano spurting fire, and dancing villagers a-banging tambourines—or anything else you could offer me out of a Panorama. For why, damme if I know!”
Perhaps the simple reason was that this homely spread of wood and field and fallow stretching away into the hazy distance, its trees still leafy in the sheltered hollows, bare where the fierce winds of winter had wreaked their bitter will, had been familiar to the soldier from his earliest years. Upon his left hand, uplands whereon the plow-teams were already moving, climbed to a cold sky of speed-well-blue; and couch-fires burned before the fanning wind, their slanting columns of pungent-smelling smoke clinging to the brown furrows before they rose and thinned and vanished in the upper atmosphere. Sparrows, starlings, jackdaws, finches and rooks followed the traveling plowshare, settled in flocks or rose in bevies, their shrill cries mingling with the jingle of the harness or the crack of the plowman’s whip. And upon the right hand of the man to whom these sights and sounds were dear and welcome, rolled the Drowse; often unseen; returning into vision through recurring gaps in hedges; glimpsed between breasting slopes of park-land, silently flowing through its deep muddy channel between immemorial woods where England’s Alfred hunted the boar, speared the wolf, and slew the red deer.... Silvery-blue in Summer, turbidly brown in Autumn, in Winter leaden-gray, in Spring jade-green, as now: when, although the floods of February had in some degree abated, wide, shallow, ice-bordered pools remained upon the low-lying river-meadows, and rows of knee-deep willows, marking the course of unseen banks, lifted bristling hands to the chilly skies, while cornricks on the upper levels were so honeycombed with holes of rats that had abandoned their submerged dwellings, that in contemplation of them the tramping soldier ceased to whistle,and pushed along in silence for at least a quarter of a mile before his whistle, “Vilikins and his Dinah,” got the upper hand, and broke out again.
The popular melody was in full blast when the piercing screech of a distant train, accompanied by a clatter that grew upon the ear, stopped short, began again after a pause, and thinned out into silence; told the wayfarer that the London down-train had entered the junction he had left behind him, disembarked its load of passengers, and gone upon its way.
And presently, with a rattle and clatter of iron-shod hoofs, and a jingle of silver-mounted harness, a scarlet mail-phaeton of the most expensive and showy description, attached to a pair of high-stepping showy blacks, overtook the military pedestrian, bowled past; and suddenly pulled up at the roadside, at an order from a burly, red-faced, turn-up-nosed, gray-haired and whiskered elderly man, topped with a low-crowned, curly-brimmed, shiny beaver, and enveloped in a vast and shaggy greatcoat, who sat beside the smug-faced, liveried groom who drove, and whom you are to recognize as Thompson Jowell.
“Now then, Josh Horrotian, my fine fellow!” The great Contractor, being in a genial mood, was pleased to bend from his high pedestal and condescend, with this mere being of common clay, even to jesting. “How goes the world with you? And how far have you got, young man, on the road that ends in a crimson silk sash and a pair o’ gold-lace epaulettes?”
“Why, not yet so far,Mr.Jowell, sir,” returned the cavalryman with cheerful equanimity, “that I can show you even a Corporal’s stripe upon my sleeve.”
“And damme! young Josh, you take it uncommonly coolly!” said Thompson Jowell, puffing out his large cheeks over the upturned collar of the shaggy coat, and frowning magisterially. “Where’s your proper pride, hey? Where’s your ambition? What’s become of your enthusiasm, and eagerness, and ardor for a British soldier’s glorious career? I’m ashamed of you, Horrotian! What the devil do you mean?”
“You ask me three questions,Mr.Jowell, sir, that I can but answer in one way; and a fourth,” returned the red-haired trooper, looking frankly up out of a pair of very clear blue eyes at the large face of disapproval bent upon him from the lofty altitude of the mail-phaeton’sfront seat, “that I can’t answer in any way at all.”
“I hope I don’t understand you, Joshua Horrotian,” said Thompson Jowell loftily. “But go on, go on! Damn you, don’t fidget!” He addressed this exhortation to the more restive of the champing blacks, who had switched his flowing tail over the reins, and was snorting with his scarlet nostrils spread, and his wild eye cocked at the hedgerow, as though to be detained upon the road to the home-stable for the purpose of conversing with a common soldier was a thing past bearing by a high-bred horse.
“Whoa!” said the driving groom.
“Whoa, then, my beauty! That curb be a link too tight,Mr.Jowell,” said Joshua Horrotian, betraying for the first time, by a lingering smack and twang of the broad local accent, that the county of Sloughshire might claim him as its son. “Shall I let it out a mite? He’ll stand like a rock then.”
Thompson Jowell nodded in answer, and the thing was done in a moment, and Horrotian back in his old place by the side-step, saying:
“You wanted to know just now,Mr.Jowell, where I’d left my proper pride, and my enthusiasm and eagerness and ardor for a soldier’s career? I’ve left ’em yonder, sir.” He lifted his riding-whip and pointed across country. “Over to the Cavalry Barracks at Spurham, where Ours have been quartered best part o’ three years. With your leave, sir!”
He spat in a soldierly, leisurely way upon the sandy road, and hitched his pipeclayed pouch-belt, and shoved a finger of a white-gloved hand within the edge of his sword-belt of gilt lace with a white stripe, and went on speaking:
“It seems to me, sir, when I’ve casted round to think a bit—having done a bit o’ gardening for mother in old days when I wasn’t busy on the farm—that pride and enthusiasm and ardor and eagerness for a soldier’s career are like hardy plants that will grow and put out leaf and bloom even in a soil that’s as poor as ours at Upper Clays, if they’re but wedd a bit and the snails and slugs picked off of ’em, and a drop o’ water given in drought, and hobnailed boots, and wheelbarrows, turned aside from crushing of ’em down!”
“Well, well, my man! Where does this bring us to?” demanded the autocrat of the cocked inquisitive nose, andpuffy cheeks, and goggling, greedy eyes, from his lofty perch upon the front seat of the scarlet mail-phaeton.
“It brings us to this,Mr.Jowell,” said the trooper, with a fold coming between his thick broad smear of dark red eyebrows, and an angered narrowing of the blue eyes that were so clear, “that if you want a dog to respect himself, let alone his superiors, you’ll give him a clean kennel to sleep in, and decent food to eat; and if he’s to do a dog’s work for you, you’ll not curse and bully him so as to break and cow his spirit. Nay! and if you respect yourself, you’ll give him, whether he’s been a good dog or only a tolerable sort o’ one—some sort o’ nursing and care when he lies sick, if it’s only the roughest kind, before he kicks his last on his straw bed. Then throw him out on the dung-heap if it’s your liking; he can’t feel it, poor brute! He be past all that. But where’s the use of a Soldier’s Funeral with a Firing Party and a Bugler, if,—when the man was living, you branded his soul with as many lines of anger and resentment and rage as there are stripes in the Union Jack, God bless it! that, him being dead, you lay as a pall of honor on his coffin? That’s what I want to know!”
“You want to know too much for your rank and station, Josh Horrotian—that’s what you do!” said Thompson Jowell, frowning displeasure upon him. “You’re one of the Malcontents, that’s what you are. If you were to tell me on your oath you weren’t, I wouldn’t believe you. I’ve met your breed before!”
“If you have,Mr.Jowell, my answer is that it’s not a bad breed,” retorted the trooper, with a hot flush and a bright direct look of anger. “Without trying to use finer language than my little education warrants, it’s a breed that will fight to the death for Queen and Country, and hold that man a damned and despicable cur that hangs back in the hour of England’s need. But when the same bad usage is meted out by the Authorities in Office to the willing and the unwilling, the worthless and the worthy, let me tell you, sir, a man loses heart. For Drill and Discipline and Confinement to Cells for defaulters, and Flogging for the obstropulous; with Ration Beef and cabbage, and suet-balls, tight clothes and tight belts, and a leather stock that saws your ears off, can’t make a machine of a human being all through. There’s got to be a living spot of flesh left in him somewhere that feels and tingles andsmarts.... And the sooner the great gentlemen in authority find that out, the better for England and her Army,” said Joshua Horrotian, with a straightforward, manly energy of voice and look and gesture that would have gone far to convince, if the right man had been there to hear him.
“Now, look you here, Trooper Joshua Horrotian,” said the wrong man, “it’s confounded lucky for you that these opinions of yours—and the private soldier with opinions is a man we don’t want in the Army and would a great deal rather be without!—have been blown off to a person who—having a regard for that decent woman your mother—who I’m not above acknowledging, in a distant sort of way, as a relation of my own—isn’t likely to report them in quarters where they would breed trouble for you, and maybe a taste of the Black Hole.” The speaker held up a large fur-gloved hand as the trooper seemed about to speak. “Don’t you try my patience, though! I’ve listened to you long enough.... Discontented, that’s what you are! And Discontent leads to Murmuring, and Murmuring to Mutiny. And Mutiny to the Gallows—in your case I hope it won’t!—but I shouldn’t be at all surprised if it did. So beware of being discontented, Joshua!”
“I may be what you say, a grumbling soldier, though I don’t recognize myself in the picture you draw of me,” returned the trooper; “but if the time came to prove whether I’d be willing to lay down my life for the Old Shop, I’d be found as ready as any other man. And I have cause for discontent outside the Army,Mr.Jowell.” And the speaker squared his broad shoulders and drew himself to his full height, looking boldly in the bullying eyes of the great man. “While I have been a-sogering my mother’s farm has been going to rack and ruin. Some little-knowing or ill-meaning person has advised her,Mr.Jowell, for these three years past, to turn down the low-lying gore meadow-lands of hers beside the Drowse in clover and beans and vetch. Grazing cows is all they’re good for, being flooded regularly in November and February, and Aprils extra-wet. And what with the cold, rainy summers we’ve had, and the rainy, cold summer we may look to, sure my mother has suffered in pocket, and worse she will suffer yet! For if her having borrowed money on mortgage to throw after what has already beenlost beyond recall is going to bring her any good of—I’m a Dutchman!”
“Now, I’ll tell you what, Trooper Horrotian,” said Thompson Jowell, purple to the rim of his sporting parson’s hat with something more stinging than the bitter February wind, “I don’t pretend not to know what you’re driving at, because Aboveboard is my name. If my distant relation, Mrs. Sarah Horrotian, is pleased to drive over from Market Drowsing sometimes on her egg-and-butter days, for the purpose of asking advice from a man who, like myself, is accustomed to be looked up to and consulted, supposing I happen to be at home at my little place”—which was a huge, ornate and showy country mansion, with a great deal of avenue, shrubbery, glass, and experimental garden-ground about it—“I am not the man to gainsay her, to gratify her long-legged puppy of a son.”
“I’m obliged to you, I’m sure!” said Josh, reddening to his red hair, and angrily gnawing, in his desire to restrain himself from incautious speech, the shiny black strap by which the idiotic little muffin-shaped forage-cap of German pattern approved by Government, was sustained in a perilously slanting position on the side of his head.
“My name being Plump and Plain,” said Thompson Jowell, once more extracting the large fur-gloved hand from under the leather apron of the phaeton, “I’m damned if I care this snap of my fingers”—he clumsily snapped them—“whether you are obliged to me or whether you ain’t! Is that clear to you?”
The groom who occupied the driving seat beside his master laughing dutifully at this, Thompson Jowell’s righteous indignation was somewhat appeased, as he proceeded:
“If the river flooded those gore-lands of your mother’s, and the rainy season finished what the river began, I’m not the Clerk of the Weather Office, I suppose? Call Providence to account for the bad season, if you must blame somebody.... Though, if you do, and should happen to be struck dead by lightning as a punishment for your wickedness, don’t expect Me to pity you, that’s all! Granted I gave a pound or so for Sarah Horrotian’s mildewed clover and stinking beans, and barley that had sprouted green in the ear, to burn for top-dressing; and let her have a bit of money at easy interest on her freeholdof Upper Clays;—I suppose, as it’s her property, having been left her for her sole use and benefit by her father (who was an uncle of my own, and don’t my admitting that prove to you how little proud I am?), she’s free to borrow on it if it pleases her. You are not the master yet, my good fellow!”
“And won’t be, please God!—for many a year to come!” saidMr.Jowell’s good fellow, with unaffected sincerity. “Nor will be ever,Mr.Jowell, supposing my mother not able to pay off your interest. You’ve foreclosed on too many of the small freeholders in this neighborhood, for me to believe that you’ll be more generous and mercifuller with your poor relation, than you’ve been with them you’ve called your good friends!”
The groom who drove, forgetting himself so far as to chuckle at this, Thompson Jowell damned his impertinence with less of dignity and more of flustered bumptiousness than an admirer of the great man’s would have expected.
“And poor as my mother is, and hard as she has been put to it,” went on the trooper, pursuing his sore subject, “if she had dreamed that the spoiled fodder she sold you for the price such unwholesome rubbish was worth, was not to be burned for top-dressing, but dried in them kilns that are worked in another name than yours at Little Milding—and mixed with decent stuff, and sold as first-class fare for Army horses, poor beasts!—she’d have seen you at Jerusalem beyond the Jordan before she’d ha’ parted with a barrow-load of the rot-gut stuff, or she’s not the woman I take her for!”
“You insolent blackguard!” said Thompson Jowell, blowing at the speaker, and swelling over the apron of the phaeton until the soundness of its leather straps must have been severely tested. “You’ve heard of the Lock-up and Treadmill for proved defamers and slanderers, haven’t you, in default of the damages such vermin are too poor to pay?”
“I’ve heard of lots o’ things since I joined the Army,Mr.Thompson Jowell,” retorted Joshua Horrotian, who had regained his coolness as the other had lost self-command, “and I’ve seen a few more! I’ve seen such things come out of the middle of Government hay-and-straw trusses as nobody, except the Contractor who sold and the Forage Department Agents who took ’em over, and theQuartermaster-Sergeant who served ’em out, and the soldiers who got ’em, would expect to find there. Not only cabbage-stumps and waste newspapers,” said Josh forcibly, “which in moderation may be good for Cavalry troop-horses. But ragged flannel petticoats, empty jam-tins, and an old hat with a litter o’ dead kittens inside of it, form too variegated and stimulating a diet to agree with anything under an ostrich; and I’m none too sure that such wouldn’t be too much for the bird’s digestion in the long-run.”
The groom covered himself with disgrace at this juncture by exploding in a guffaw, which Thompson Jowell, mentally registering as to be expiated next pay-day by a lowering of wages, loftily ignored. He realized his own over-condescension in arguing with the worm that dared to lift up its head from the ground beneath his chariot-wheels, and argue with and denounce him. He changed his tone, now, and, instead of bullying, pitied the crawling thing.
“You don’t understand what you’re talking about, Horrotian,” he said patronizingly, “and being a poor uneducated, common soldier, who’s to be astonished at it? The British Government is too great and powerful and glorious and grand a Power to trouble itself about rags and jam-tins, or a hatful of dead kittens, shoved for a joke inside a truss of Army forage by some drunken trooper. Possibly next time you’re in liquor, my man, you’ll remember that you put them there yourself? As for any person being unprincipled enough to sell sprouted grain and mildewed hay, mixed up with sound stuff, as you suggest some persons do; what I say to you is that such people don’t exist, such wickedness couldn’t be possible; and if you undertook to prove to me that it is—I shouldn’t be convinced! And, further, understand this; and what I say to you is what I said to an impudent, meddlesome whelp of a young foreigner I met in the train t’other day betwixt Dullingstoke and Waterloo—the British Government will BE the British Government, in spite of all the fault-finding and grumbling of mutinous and impudent upstart Rankers or their betters! And the iron wheels of Administration will keep on a-rolling, and so sure as heads are lifted too high out of the dust that is their proper element, those iron wheels I speak of willroll over ’em and mash ’em. Mash ’em, by Gosh! D’ye understand me?”
“Quite well,Mr.Jowell,” returned the other composedly. “But I’ve good hopes of being able to roll or crawl or wriggle out of reach before those iron wheels you speak of roll my way. Mother having come round at last, I’m to be bought out of the Army come next Michaelmas, having served with the Colors—I humbly hope without a single act that might be calculated to dishonor them, or soil the reputation of an honest man and a loyal soldier!—rising five years out of the twelve I ’listed for; and, once being free, I mean to put my shoulder to the wheel in the farming-line in good earnest; and leave the officer’s sash, and the pair o’ gold-lace epaulets you spoke of, hanging at the top of the tree for some other fellow fortunater than I have been, to reach down.”
“Go your way, ungrateful and obstinate young man,” said Thompson Jowell, sternly, expanding his cheeks to the rotundity of a tombstone cherub’s, and snorting reprehension. “I hope for your respectable mother’s sake it mayn’t end in ruin and disgrace, but—my name being Candid—I shouldn’t wonder if it did!” He shook his pear-shaped head until he shook his hat over his goggle eyes, and so took it off, and blew his large cocked nose sonorously upon a vast silk handkerchief he whisked out of the crown, adding: “I suppose you are on furlough, and were bound for the Upper Clays when I overtook you marching along the Queen’s Highway with your riding-whip in your hand?”
“Why, a cane might be better, for a man on leave to carry,” returned Joshua Horrotian, meditatively running his eye from the stout handle of the riding-whip to the strong lash at its tip. “But though I came by the railway, I mean to go back by road. My Captain, being a rich gentleman, and having a good opinion of my judgment in horseflesh”—he said this with a flush and sparkle of honest pride—“has bought my young horse—‘Blueberry’—for the troop. And I’m to ride him. He won’t look so fat and shiny on the Government forage as he does on what he gets at home, but he’ll do credit to the Regiment yet, or I’m no judge. Good-afternoon, sir!”
He saluted and wheeled, setting his handsome face ahead, and Thompson Jowell, in surly accents, bade thegroom drive on. And as the spirited blacks broke at once into a trot, carrying their owner from the scene so rapidly that the spick-and-span mail-phaeton became behind their lively heels a mere flying streak of scarlet, he directed towards Blueberry and his owner the fervent aspiration: “And I hope your brute may come a downer when you’re charging in close order, and break your infernal neck for you!” But he did not utter the words aloud.