‘What disgraceful folly!’ he thought. ‘Now she could do nothing whatever if Its head came off.’
Then the Thing coughed, and the ceiling shattered down in plaster on the mosquito-netting, and ‘They’ rushed in from all quarters. He dragged the child through the stifling garden,voices chanting behind them, and they rode the Thirty-Mile Ride under whip and spur along the sandy beach by the booming sea, till they came to the downs, the lamp-post, and the brushwood pile, which, Georgie shouted, was ‘in bounds.’ Very often dreams would break up about them in this fashion, and they would be separated, to endure awful adventures alone. But the most amusing times were when he and she had a clear understanding that it was all make-believe, and walked through mile-wide roaring rivers without even taking off their shoes, or set light to populous cities to see how they would burn, and were rude as any children to the vague shadows met in their rambles. Later in the night they were sure to suffer for this, either at the hands of the Railway People eating among the roses, or in the tropic uplands at the far end of the Thirty-Mile Ride. Together, this did not much affright them; but often Georgie would hear her shrill cry of ‘Boy! Boy!’ half a world away, and hurry to her rescue before ‘They’ maltreated her.
He and she explored the dark-purple downs as far inland from the brushwood pile as they dared, but that was always a dangerous matter. The interior was filled with ‘Them,’ and ‘They’ went about singing in the hollows, and Georgie and she felt safer on or near the seaboard. So thoroughly had he come to know the place of his dreams that even waking he accepted it as a real country, and made a rough sketch of it. A still rougher copy of the sketch is given in this place for the better understanding of geography. He kept his own counsel, of course; but the permanence of the land puzzled him. His ordinary dreams were as formless and as fleeting as any healthy dreams could be, but once at the brushwood pile he moved within known limits and could see where he was going. There were months at a time when nothing that he could remember crossed his sleep. Then the dreams would come in a batch of five or six, and next morning the map that he kept in his writing-case would be written up to date, for Georgie was a most methodical person. There was, indeed, a danger – his seniors said so – of his developing into a regular ‘Auntie Fuss’ of an adjutant, and when an officer once takes to old-maidism there is more hope for the virgin of seventy than for him.
But fate sent the change that was needed, in the shape of a little winter campaign on the border, which, after the manner of little campaigns, flashed out into a very ugly war; and Cottar’s regiment was chosen among the first.
‘Now,’ said a major, ‘this’ll shake the cobwebs out of us all – especially you, young Huron; and we can see what your hen-one-chick attitude has done for the regiment.’
There were four months in which to try the men, and Cottar nearly wept with joy as the campaign went forward. They were fit – physically fit beyond the other troops; they were good children in camp, wet or dry, fed or unfed; and they followed their officers with the quick suppleness and trained obedience of a first-class football fifteen. Once satisfied of this, their officers used them unsparingly, exactly as a man takes liberties with a tried horse. They were cut off from their apology for a base, and cheerfully cut their way back to it again; they crowned and cleaned out hills full of the enemy with the precision of well-broken dogs of chase; and in the hour of retreat, when, hampered with the sick and wounded of the column, they were persecuted down eleven miles of waterless valley, they, serving as rearguard, covered themselves with a great glory in the eyes of fellow-professionals. Any regiment can advance, but few know how to retreat with a sting in the tail. Then they turned to and made roads, most often under fire, and dismantled some inconvenient mud redoubts. They were the last corps to be withdrawn when the rubbish of the campaign was all swept up; and after a month in standing camp, which tries morals severely, they departed to their own place in column of fours, singing:
’E’s goin’ to do without ’em –
Don’t want ‘em any more;
’E’s going to do without ’em,
As ’e’s often done before.
’E’s goin’ to be a martyr
On a ’ighly novel plan,
An’ all the boys and girls will say,
‘Ow! what a nice young man–man–man!
Ow! what a nice young man!’
There came out a ‘Gazette’ in which Cottar found that he had been behaving with ‘courage and coolness and discretion’ in all his capacities; that he had assisted the wounded under fire, and blown in a gate, also under fire. Net result, his captaincy and a brevet majority, coupled with the Distinguished Service Order, which is vulgarly called the ‘Don’t Stay On,’ inasmuch as it is supposed to block the way permanently to the Victoria Cross.
As to his wounded, he explained that they were both heavy men, whom he could lift more easily than any one else. ‘Otherwise, of course, I should have sent out one of my men; and, of course, about that gate business, we were safe the minute we were well under the walls.’ But this did not prevent his men from cheering him furiously whenever they saw him, or the mess from giving him a dinner on the eve of his departure to England. (A year’s leave was among the things he had ‘snaffled out of the campaign,’ to use his own words.) The doctor, who had taken quite as much as was good for him, quoted poetry about ‘a good blade carving the casques of men,’ and so on, and everybody told Cottar that he was an excellent person; but when he rose to make his maiden speech they shouted so that he was understood to say, ‘It isn’t any use tryin’ to speak with you chaps rottin’ me like this. Let’s have some pool.’
It is not unpleasant to spend eight and twenty days in an easygoing steamer on warm waters, in the company of a woman who lets you see that you are head and shoulders superior to the rest of the world, even though that woman may be, and most often is, ten counted years your senior. P.O. boats are not lighted with the disgustful particularity of Atlantic liners. There is more phosphorescence at the bows, and greater silence and darkness by the hand-steering-gear aft.
Awful things might have happened to Georgie but for the little fact that he had never studied the first principles of the game he was expected to play. So when Mrs Zuleika, at Aden, told him how motherly an interest she felt in his welfare, medals, brevet, and all, Georgie took her at the foot of theletter, and promptly talked of his own mother, three hundred miles nearer each day her dearness and general sweetness, of his home, and so forth, all the way up the Red Sea. It was much easier than he had supposed to converse with a woman for an hour at a time. Then Mrs Zuleika, turning from parental affection, spoke of love in the abstract as a thing not unworthy of study, and in a discreet twilight after dinner demanded confidences. Georgie would have been delighted to supply them, but he had none, and did not know it was his duty to manufacture them. Mrs Zuleika expressed surprise and unbelief, and asked those questions which deep asks of deep. She learned all that was necessary to conviction, and, being very much a woman, resumed (Georgie never knew that she had abandoned) the motherly attitude.
‘Do you know,’ she said, somewhere in the Mediterranean, ‘I think you’re the very dearest boy I have ever met in my life, and I’d like you to remember me a little. You will when you are older, but I want you to remember me now. You’ll make some girl very happy.’
‘Oh! Hope so,’ said Georgie, gravely; ‘but there’s heaps of time for marryin’ an’ all that sort of thing, ain’t there?’
‘That depends. Here are your bean-bags for the Ladies’ Competition. I think I’m growing too old to care for these tamashas.’
They were getting up sports, and Georgie was on the committee. He never noticed how perfectly the bags were sewn, but another woman did, and smiled once. He liked Mrs Zuleika greatly. She was a bit old, of course, but uncommonly nice. There was no nonsense about her.
A few nights after they passed Gibraltar his dream returned to him. She who waited by the brushwood pile was no long
er a little girl, but a woman with black hair that grew into a ‘widow’s peak,’ combed back from her forehead. He knew her for the child in black, the companion of the last six years, and, as it had been in the time of the meetings on the Lost Continent, he was filled with delight unspeakable. ‘They,’ for some dreamland reason, were friendly or had gone away that night, and the two flitted together over all their country, fromthe brushwood pile up the Thirty-Mile Ride, till they saw the House of the Sick Thing, a pin-point in the distance to the left; stamped through the Railway Waiting-room where the roses lay on the spread breakfast-tables; and returned, by the ford and the city they had once burned for sport, to the great swells of the downs under the lamp-post. Wherever they moved a strong singing followed them underground, but this night there was no panic. All the land was empty except for themselves, and at the last (they were sitting by the lamp hand in hand) she turned and kissed him. He woke with a start, staring at waving curtain of the cabin door; and he could have sworn that the kiss was real.
Next morning the ship was rolling in a Biscay sea, and people were not happy; but as Georgie came out to breakfast, shaven, tubbed, and smelling of soap, several turned to look at him because of the light in his eyes and the splendour of his countenance.
‘Well, you look beastly fit,’ snapped a neighbour. ‘Any one left you a legacy in the middle of the Bay?’
Georgie reached for the curry, with a seraphic grin. ‘I suppose it’s the gettin’ so near home, and all that. I do feel rather festive this mornin’. Rolls a bit, doesn’t she?’
Mrs Zuleika stayed in her cabin till the end of the voyage, when she left without bidding him farewell, and wept passionately on the dock-head for pure joy of meeting her children, who, she had often said, were so like their father.
Georgie headed for his own country, wild with delight of the first long furlough after the lean seasons. Nothing was changed in that orderly life, from the coachman who met him at the station to the white peacock that stormed at the carriage from the stone wall above the shaven lawns. The house took toll of him with due regard to precedence – first the mother; then the father;then the housekeeper, who wept and praised God;then the butler; and so on down to the under-keeper, who had been dog-boy in Georgie’s youth, and called him ‘Master Georgie,’ and was reproved by the groom who had taught Georgie to ride.
‘Not a thing changed,’ he sighed contentedly, when thethree of them sat down to dinner in the late sunlight, while the rabbits crept out upon the lawn below the cedars, and the big trout in the ponds by the home paddock rose for their evening meal.
‘Our changes are all over, dear,’ cooed the mother; ‘and now I am getting used to your size and your tan (you’re very brown,Georgie), I see you haven’t changed in the least. You’re exactly like the pater.’
The father beamed on this man after his own heart, –‘youngest major in the army, and should have had the VC, sir,’ – and the butler listened with his professional mask off when Master Georgie spoke of war as it is waged to-day, and his father cross-questioned. The pater had retired when the Martini-Henry was a new thing and the Maxim unborn.
They went out on the terrace to smoke among the roses, and the shadow of the old house lay long across the wonderful English foliage, which is the only living green in the world.
‘Perfect! By Jove, it’s perfect!’ Georgie was looking at the round-bosomed woods beyond the home paddock, where the white pheasant-boxes were ranged; and the golden air was full of a hundred sacred scents and sounds. Georgie felt his father’s arm tighten in his.
‘It’s not half bad – but hodie mihi,cras tibi,isn’t it? I suppose you’ll be turning up some fine day with a girl under your arm, if you haven’t one now, eh?’
‘You can make your mind easy, sir. I haven’t one.’
‘Not in all these years?’ said the mother.
‘I hadn’t time, mummy. They keep a man pretty busy, these days, in the service, and most of our mess are unmarried, too.’
‘But you must have met hundreds in society – at balls, and so on?’
‘I’m like the Tenth, mummy: I don’t dance.’
‘Don’t dance! What have you been doing with yourself, then – backing other men’s bills?’ said the father.
‘Oh, yes; I’ve done a little of that too; but you see, as things are now, a man has all his work cut out for him to keep abreast of his profession, and my days were always too full to let me lark about half the night.’
‘Hmm!’ – suspiciously.
‘It’s never too late to learn. We ought to give some kind of housewarming for the people about, now you’ve come back. Unless you want to go straight up to town, dear?’
‘No. I don’t want anything better than this. Let’s sit still and enjoy ourselves. I suppose there will be something for me to ride if I look for it?’
‘Seeing I’ve been kept down to the old brown pair for the last six weeks because all the others were being got ready for Master Georgie, I should say there might be,’ the father chuckled. ‘They’re reminding me in a hundred ways that I must take the second place now.’
‘Brutes!’
‘The pater doesn’t mean it, dear; but every one has been trying to make your home-coming a success; and you do like it, don’t you?’
‘Perfect! Perfect! There’s no place like England – when you’ve done your work.’
‘That’s the proper way to look at it, my son.’
And so up and down the flagged walk till their shadows grew long in the moonlight, and the mother went indoors and played such songs as a small boy once clamoured for, and the squat silver candlesticks were brought in, and Georgie climbed to the two rooms in the west wing that had been his day and night nursery and his playroom in the beginning. Then who should come to tuck him up for the night but the mother? And she sat down on the bed, and they talked for a long hour, as mother and son should, if there is to be any future for the empire. With a simple woman’s deep guile she asked questions and suggested answers that should have waked some sign in the face on the pillow, and there was neither quiver of eyelid nor quickening of breath, neither evasion nor delay in reply. So she blessed him and kissed him on the mouth, which is not always a mother’s property, and said something to her husband later, at which he laughed profane and incredulous laughs.
All the establishment waited on Georgie next morning, from the tallest, sixyear-old, ‘with a mouth like a kid glove,Master Georgie,’ to the under-keeper strolling carelessly along the horizon, Georgie’s pet rod in his hand, and ‘There’s a four-pounder risin’ below the lasher. You don’t ’ave ’em in Injia, Mast— Major Georgie.’ It was all beautiful beyond telling, even though the mother insisted on taking him out in the landau (the leather had the hot Sunday smell of his youth) and showing him off to her friends at all the houses for six miles round; and the pater bore him up to town and a lunch at the club, where he introduced him, quite carelessly, to not less than thirty ancient warriors whose sons were not the youngest majors in the army and had not been mentioned in recent gazettes. After that it was Georgie’s turn; and remembering his friends, he filled up the house with that kind of officer who lives in cheap lodgings at Southsea or Montpelier Square, Brompton – good men all, but not well off. The mother perceived that they needed girls to play with; and as there was no scarcity of girls, the house hummed like a dovecote in spring. They tore up the place for amateur theatricals; they disappeared into the gardens when they ought to have been rehearsing; they swept off every available horse and vehicle, especially the governess-cart and the fat pony (Georgie could not see where the fun came in here); they fell into the trout-ponds; they picnicked and they tennised; and they sat on gates in the twilight, two by two, and Georgie found that he was not in the least necessary to their entertainment.
The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales Page 44