Part 42

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.”

LXIX

But of course Josh knew Pink Bonnet--with the peculiarly intimate knowledge that is entertained by the soldier for the garrison prostitute. He pitied himself for the rough cross-chance that had brought her to the theater--with the man who had taken the place he had indifferently vacated--and set her down, blazing with gin and jealousy, on the bench, cheek-by-jowl with the man who had thrown her over to marry a cleanly maid.

Ah, poor young wives! How little they dream of the muddy secrets hiding behind the clear, candid eyes they gaze in so trustfully--how little they suspect what lips the beloved lips have kissed! If you told them: “This hand that strays in your hair has tangled in the tresses of the harlot,” they would laugh you to scorn, or scorch you with their burning indignation; so unshaken is their faith in the manly hearts of whose swept and garnished chambers none ever held the key before them--whose most hidden secrets they believe they have been told. Alas! the poor young wives!

As for the husbands of the wives, by a law immutable as the foundations of the world we tread on, Pink Bonnets must be paid for in the end. Find me a smart to outdo that of lying to the dearest who never dreams of doubting you! thought the trooper, in homelier phrase than this. Sickly heats coursed through his thick veins, and the taste in his mouth was bitter as Dead Sea waters. The big, tawdry theater, packed full with eager pleasure-seekers, gave a sense of emptiness that frightened him.... Nelly nestling by his solid side, seemed miles and miles away.... For the shadow of an old, wellnigh forgotten sin had come between them, and was pushing them apart. To counteract the mental conviction of guiltiness he repeated to himself all the trite clauses of the Code of Manhood, and employed, in imaginary defense of conduct denounced by an unspecified accuser--all the clinching arguments he knew.

“Ye wouldn’t have a man live aught but a man’s life would ye?”

Followed by:

“’Tis true I ha’ run wild a bit--drank a bit,--betted a bit--frequented loose women, and the rest of it!--but so have all the young chaps I ever knew or heard of. Why should I set up to be better than the rest?”

Then:

“Women ye see--they be made different from men! ’Tis easy for them to run straight--that is, for the good ones. They can resist temptation better than us--being so much weaker and less sensible than we!”

The Curtain went up as the unseen person with whom Josh argued--and who never answered any of his arguments,--was getting the best of it, to the trooper’s mind, Mrs. Joshua clutched the big blue cloth-covered arm with a little squeal, as the Interior of the Robber’s Cave amongst the Rocks was revealed by the combined light of a calcium moon and a brazier with rags dipped in spirits-of-wine blazing in it. Anon, to his band of cloaked, bearded and villainously slouch-hatted myrmidons, entered--to tremulous music from the fiddles, down the rocks, Giraldi Duval the Ruffian Boy.

Never was such an out-and-out scoundrel. For certain unspecified reasons it was comforting to Joshua Horrotian to have somebody to disapprove of just then. The light and trivial sins of a whole regiment of British soldiers, would, if piled into the balance against the crimes of the Ruffian, have certainly kicked the beam.

It was necessary to assure Mrs. Joshua, holding on to the stout blue arm and shivering deliciously, that the whole thing was make-believe. That the Ruffian--unloading pocket after pocket of stolen jewelry and bags of guineas--bragging of his enormities, and quaffing draught after draught from an immense gilt goblet painted red inside--was a respectable gentleman “off.” That he had not just drunk a stranger’s blood with his thirsty dagger in mistake for the beauteous Ethelinda’s; and that Innocence and Virtue as personified by that fair creature--whose scorn had driven the Ruffian to raving madness--though doomed to suffer hideous things in the course of the evening (unless the playbill deceived people who had paid their money for places) would certainly triumph in the long-run.

How enchanting Ethelinda was, when the Castle Hall, having hurried on from both sides and fallen down in the middle--and a brace of retainers in black wigs having brought on a table and two chairs--she appeared in pale blue satin, spangles, curls, and feathers, leading the Baron’s children--Ethelinda being the Baron’s lady, it was even more possible to cry out upon the Ruffian--and telling the faithful Catherine and her dearest prattlers all about her latest escape from Giraldi’s unhallowed hands.

The Baron was sure that in spite of the valor of a husband’s arm, the Ruffian would have another shy at running off with the lady; and so he did, in the very next scene, dressing up in old Margaretta’s cloak and hiding in her cottage; and terrifying Ethelinda into vowing never to quit her Baron’s castle again, even though myriad summers decked the land with flowers and feathered songsters upon every tree tempted the ear with joyous songs of love--until the Ruffian should have yielded up his ghost upon the gallows.

* * * * *

Depend upon it, our forerunners of the forties were not half so ignorant and unsophisticated in matters dealing with Dramatic Art as we suppose them to have been. They knew, as well as we do, that Life, as represented on the stage in that era, was impossible, unreal, and absurd.... But just because it was so unlike Life they loved it. They preferred Action to Art--and got it.... They reveled in impossible, absurd sentiment, and high-flown hyperboles. Impromptu love-matches, extravagant, gaudy crimes, and greased-lightning repentances gave them the purest joy. When you went to the theater you left Reality behind you. You expected the combined smells of paint, glue, and varnish to be wafted over the footlights. The last thing you wanted was the odor of new-mown hay.

The Gothic Chamber in the Baronial Castle was another thrill--the evening was a succession of them--with more of the tremolo passages from the fiddles in the Orchestra, heralding the advent of the Mad Lady--whose daughter--you have of course forgotten--had been immolated by the Ruffian in mistake for Ethelinda. To see the poor thing trailing about looking ghastly in white draperies, staring glassily at nothing in particular, and blowing lamps out with deep sighs, drew pitying tears from Mrs. Joshua, and even caused Josh to sniff and gulp and surreptitiously wipe his eyes. Both were certain she would be seen more of presently; and so she was--coming on in the very nick of time--just as the Ruffian, armed with a drawn sword, had burst from behind the tapestry in Ethelinda’s bedchamber--to terrify him into rushing off, just in time to meet the Baron, with _his_ drawn sword, in the Gothic Gallery.

Clish--clash! went the broadswords in the dark--stage darkness at that era being but a shade or two less obscure than a November afternoon.... Chains, repentance, vengeance for the Ruffian, union, joy, felicity for the Baron and Ethelinda. And the Drop came down upon a general picture, to rise again and sink once more, and rise--ere the tidy semicircle of legs of both sexes had quite disappeared from view--amidst round upon round of clapping; piercing whistles---the pounding of approving sticks, enthusiastic umbrellas, and urgent boot-heels, and reiterated shouts of “Bravo!” and “’Core!”

The interlude of “The Lancers” followed, and then the great queen curtain fell amidst the strains of “God save the Queen,” and then the sensations of the evening were over. All save that last one at the very end.

It happened when the packed gallery-audience, howling like Siberian wolves from sheer high spirits and good temper--swept down the long steep flight of stone stairs and out into a muddy side-street, and filling this mean alley from wall to wall, crushed out at the upper end of it, to encounter the turbid flood of humanity roaring from the gullet of the Pit Entrance that gaped just beyond the gilded portals by which the gentlefolks who came in carriages and wore Evening Dress, and didn’t seem to enjoy themselves half as much as folks who sat in cheaper places--were admitted to the Grand Tier.

There was a good deal of joking, laughter, squeezing, and jostling, and some pocket-picking beyond a doubt.... The shiny chimney-pot hats, smug whiskered faces, and bright brass collar-numbers of policemen bobbed up and down amongst the crowd--there were several ugly rushes, accompanied by oaths and screaming; and Josh and Nelly, carried off their feet by one of these, were swept up some steps leading from the gilt-pillared portico previously referred to, as some well-dressed Circle and Box people were coming down them, headed by a tall and handsome young gentleman, who, with a gallant air of being in charge of something particularly precious and breakable, was bending down to whisper to the young lady who leaned upon his arm....

Josh hadn’t the faintest intention of bumping into the lady, a slender, pretty young creature in a white velvet mantle--trimmed beautifully with swansdown--and who was wearing a garland of pale blush roses on the loveliest fair hair you ever did see. But as the trooper ruthfully stammered his apologies, the gentleman--becoming aware of the blue, white-faced uniform, brusquely interposed, saying in a tone by no means pleasant to hear:

“You infernal scoundrel! how dared you jostle the young lady? What do you mean by it, you blackguard, hey?”

Josh answered with a sullen frown:

“I’ve said a-ready, sir, as I didn’t go to do it, and that I’m as sorry as man can be!”

The gentleman retorted, in a cold savage way, speaking between his set teeth:

“If you had meant it, you dog, you would have been soundly thrashed for your insolence. As it is--take that!”

_That_ was a sharp blow across the trooper’s mouth from the lady’s fan, carried in the white-gloved hand of her gallant. The ivory sticks broke, and the blood sprang, and Nelly cried out; and then, as the gentleman hurried the young lady down the steps--at the bottom of which a brougham waited--with a liveried servant holding open the door:

“You didn’t hurt the man, Arthur, did you?...” Nelly heard the young lady ask, and the answer came brusquely:

“No! though the blackguard deserved it.... Broken your fan though! Pity!... Never mind!... You shall have a prettier from Bond Street, when I get back from Town....”

Then the carriage door banged, the crowd seemed to melt away, and Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Horrotian were hurrying through the muddy ill-paved gas-lit streets, home to their lodgings. From whose dinginess the rosy glamour of the honeymoon had quite, quite fallen away....

As Josh, by special permit, was not due in Barracks before next day’s Revally, the newly-wedded couple supped on cold scraps put by from dinner,--or pretended to, for the trooper’s cut lip hurt him, and Mrs. Joshua couldn’t have eaten a mouthful, seeing him so cast down--not if you had tempted her with Turkey Soup--as understood to be consumed by the Lord Mayor of London out of a gold spoon--and Roast Venison--and betook themselves to rest. Nelly had comforted the swollen lip with old linen rags and hot water; but the swollen heart of its owner was not to be eased, even by her gentle touch.... Long after her soft even breathing had convinced him that his young wife slept, the man lay open-eyed and wakeful; staring at the narrow line of watery moonlight that outlined the edges of the square of dirty blind....

And presently he knew that Nelly had not been sleeping; for he heard her sob out in the darkness the question that could not be kept back.

“Oh, Josh, dear love! Why ever did he do it? Why should even a grand, rich gentleman have the right to treat my husband so?”

She hardly knew the hard, stern voice that answered:

“You ask why he called me dog,--and struck me? Being th’ dog’s wife, med-be ye have a right to know! ’Twas because the gaslight showed my soldier’s cloth and buttons.... We’re housed like dogs, and fed like ’em--and take our pleasures come-by-chance as dogs do--and are sometimes whipped as dogs are.... Why shouldn’t he call me dog? He was in his right--I was in my wrong! There’s little else to say!...”

She sobbed out some indignant, incoherent words of protest. He filled his vast chest with a long, deep quivering breath, and sent it slowly out again, and said, still sternly, but less bitterly:

“In th’ old days, dear lass, when, as I’ve heard tell, Leprosy were common in England, smitten folks went about th’ roads and byways, sounding bell and clapper to warn wholesome people out of their tainted way. In some such manner--as I have no learning to word as should be--my uniform, that ought to be my honor, is my shame, in the eyes of my superiors and even many o’ my equals. And gentlefolks like _him_ and his, shrink from the rub o’ the soldier’s sleeve as if it carried th’ pest. Now you and me’ll speak no more of this, my Pretty. Let it be buried deep--and covered up--and hid away.”

She promised amidst tears and wifely kisses, and thenceforwards the sore subject was touched upon no more. But Nelly was to learn that there are some things that, however deep their grave be dug, and though whole tons of figurative earth be heaped above them, cannot be kept buried. Long after the trooper’s wounded lip had healed and the small scar left by the ivory fan had paled and vanished, she saw the bleeding scar.

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 the circumstances would be _im_possible--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 women were 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: