P. C. Wren: Adventure Novels & Tales From the Foreign Legion. P. C. Wren
here's Lady Plonk, the Mayor's wife!"
"You shall introduce me, Lovely One—but no, we mustn't annoy ladies. You must not go trying to introduce your low companions—nay, relations—to Lady Plonkses. Step out—and look happy."
"Dam—for God's sake, let me go! I didn't know you, old chap. I swear I didn't. The disgrace will kill me. I'll give you—"
"Look here, wee Fish, you offer me money again and I'll—I'll undress you and run away with your clothes. I will, upon my soul."
"I shall call to this policeman," gasped the Haddock.
"And appear with your low-class relation in Court? Not you, Haddock. I'd swear you were my twin brother, and that you wouldn't pay me the four pence you borrowed of me last week."
And the cruel penance was inflicted to the last inch. Near the end the Haddock groaned: "Here's Amelia Harringport—Oh! my God," and Dam quickly turned his face unto the South and gazed at the fair land of France. He remembered that General Harringport dwelt in these parts.
At the toll-gate Dam released the perspiration-soaked wretch, who had suffered the torments of the damned, and who seemed to have met every man and woman whom he knew in the world as he paraded the promenade hanging lovingly to the arm of a common soldier! He thought of suicide and shuddered at the bare idea.
"Well, I'm awf'ly sorry to have to run away and leave you now, dear Haddock. I might have taken you to all the pubs in Folkestone if I'd had time. I might have come to your hotel and dined with you. You will excuse me, won't you? I must go now. I've got to wash up the tea things and clean the Sergeant's boots," said Dam, cruelly wringing the Haddock's agonized soft hand, and, with a complete and disconcerting change, added, "And if you breathe a word about having seen me, at Monksmead, or tell Lucille, I'll seek you out, my Haddock, and—we will hold converse with thee". Then he strode away, cursing himself for a fool, a cad, and a deteriorated, demoralized ruffian. Anyhow, the Haddock would not mention the appalling incident and give him away.
Nemesis followed him.
Seeking a quiet shop in a back street where he could have the long-desired meal in private, he came to a small taxidermist's, glanced in as he passed, and beheld the pride and joy of the taxidermist's heart—a magnificent and really well-mounted boa-constrictor, and fell shrieking, struggling, and screaming in the gutter.
That night Damocles de Warrenne, ill, incoherent, and delirious, passed in a cell, on a charge of drunk and disorderly and disgracing the Queen's uniform.
Mr. Levi Solomonson had not disgraced it, of course.
"If we were not eating this excellent bread-and-dripping and drinking this vile tea, what would you like to be eating and drinking, Matthewson?" asked Trooper Nemo (formerly Aubrey Roussac d'Aubigny of Harrow and Trinity).
"Oh, … a little real turtle," said Dam, "just a lamina of sole frite, a trifle of vol an vent à la financière, a breast of partridge, a mite of paté de fois gras, a peach à la Melba, the roe of a bloater, and a few fat grapes—"
"'Twould do. 'Twould pass," sighed Trooper Burke, and added, "I would suggest a certain Moselle I used to get at the Byculla Club in Bombay, and a wondrous fine claret that spread a ruby haze of charm o'er my lunch at the Yacht Club of the same fair city. A 'Mouton Rothschild something,' which was cheap at nine rupees a small bottle on the morrow of a good day on the Mahaluxmi Racecourse." (It was strongly suspected that Trooper Burke had worn a star on his shoulder-strap in those Indian days.)
"It's an awful shame we can't all emerge from the depths and run up to Town to breathe the sweet original atmosphere for just one night before we leave old England," put in Trooper Punch Peerson (son of a noble lord) who would at that moment have been in the Officers' Mess but for a congenital weakness in spelling and a dislike of mathematics. "Pity we can't get 'leaf,' and do ourselves glorious at the Carlton, and 'afterwards'. We could change at my Governor's place into borrowed, stolen, and hired evening-kit, paint the village as scarlet as Sin or a trooper's jacket, and then come home, like the Blackbird, to tea. I am going, and if I can't get 'leaf' I shall return under the bread in the rations-cart. Money's the root of all (successful) evil."
Trooper Punch Peerson was a born leader of men, a splendid horseman and soldier, and he had the Army in his ardent, gallant blood and bones; but how shall a man head a cavalry charge or win the love and enthusiastic obedience of men and horses when he is weak in spelling and has a dislike of mathematics?
However, he was determined to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors, to serve his country in spite of her, and his Commission was certain and near. Meanwhile he endeavoured to be a first-class trooper, had his uniform made of officers' materials in Bond Street by his father's famous tailor, and "got the stick" with ease and frequency.
"We're not all gilded popinjays (nor poppin' bottles)," observed a young giant who called himself Adam Goate, and had certainly been one in the days when he was Eugene Featherstonthwaite. "All very well for you to come to the surface and breathe, seeing that you'll be out of it soon. You're having nothing but a valuable experience and a hardening. You're going through the mill. We've got to live in it. What's the good of our stirring everything up again? Dam-silly of a skinned eel to grow another skin, to be skinned again…. No, 'my co-mates and brothers in exile,' what I say is—you can get just as drunk on 'four-'arf' as on champagne, and a lot cheaper. Ask my honourable friend, Bear."
(Trooper Bear gave a realistic, but musical hiccup.)
"Also, to the Philosopher, bread-and-dripping is as interesting and desirable prog as the voluble-varied heterogeny of the menu at the Carlton or the Ritz—'specially when you've no choice."
"Hear, hear," put in Dam.
"Goatey ol' Goate!" said Trooper Bear with impressive solemnity. "Give me your hand, Philossiler. I adore dripping. I'ss a (hic) mystery. (No, I don' want both hands," as Goate offered his right to Bear's warm embrace.) I'm a colliseur of Dripping. I understan' it. I write odes to it. Yesh. A basin of dripping is like a Woman. 'Strornarillily. You never know what's beneath fair surface…. Below a placid, level, unrevealing surface there may be—nothing … and there may be a rich deposit of glorious, stimulating, piquant essence."
"Oh, shut up, Bear, and don't be an Ass," implored Trooper Burke (formerly Desmond Villiers FitzGerald) … "but I admit, all the same, there's lots of worse prog in the Officers' Mess than a crisp crust generously bedaubed with the rich jellified gravy that (occasionally) lurks like rubies beneath the fatty soil of dripping."
"Sound plan to think so, anyway," agreed Trooper Little (ci devant Man About Town and the Honourable Bertie Le Grand). "Reminds me of a proverb I used to hear in Alt Heidelberg, 'What I have in my hand is best'."
"Qui' sho," murmured Trooper Bear with a seraphic smile, "an' wha' I have in my 'place of departed spirits,' my tummy, is better. Glor'us mixshure. Earned an honest penny sheven sheparate times cleaning the 'coutrements of better men … 'an look at me for shevenpence' …" and he slept happily on Dam's shoulder.
In liquor, Trooper Bear was, if possible, gentler, kinder, and of sweeter disposition than when sober; wittier, more hopelessly lovable and disarming. These eight men—the "gentlemen-rankers" of the Queen's Greys, made it a point of honour to out-Tommy "Tommy" as troopers, and, when in his company, to show a heavier cavalry-swagger, a broader accent, a quiffier "quiff," a cuttier cutty-pipe, a smarter smartness; to groom a horse better, to muck out a stall better, to scrub a floor better, to spring more smartly to attention or to a disagreeable "fatigue," and to set an example of Tomminess from turning out on an Inspection Parade to waxing a moustache.
Trooper Bear professed to specialize as a model in the carrying of liquor "like a man and a soldier". When by themselves, they made it a point of honour to behave and speak as though in the clubs to which they once belonged, to eat with washen hands and ordered attire, to behave at table and elsewhere with that truest of consideration that offends no man willingly by mannerism, appearance, word or act, and which is the whole Art of Gentility.