CHAPTER VIII.
TROOPERS OF THE QUEEN.
GLIMPSES OF CERTAIN “POOR DEVILS” AND THE HELL THEY INHABITED.
The Queen’s Own (2nd) Regiment of Heavy Cavalry (The Queen’s Greys) were under orders for India and the influence of great joy. That some of its members were also under the influence of potent waters is perhaps a platitudinous corollary.
… “And phwat the Divvle’s begone of me ould pal Patsy Flannigan, at all, at all?” inquired Trooper Phelim O’Shaughnessy, entering the barrack-room of E Troop of the Queen’s Greys, lying at Shorncliffe Camp. “Divvle a shmell of the baste can I see, and me back from furlough-leaf for minnuts. Has the schamer done the two-shtep widout anny flure, as Oi’ve always foretould? Is ut atin’ his vegetables by the roots he now is in the bone-orchard, and me owing the poor bhoy foive shillin’? Where is he?”
“In ’orsepittle,” laconically replied Trooper Henry Hawker, late of Whitechapel, without looking up from the jack-boot he was polishing.
“Phwat wid?” anxiously inquired the bereaved Phelim.
“Wot wiv’? Wiv’ callin’ ‘Threes abaht’ after one o’ the Young Jocks,”[16] was the literal reply.
“Begob that same must be a good hand wid his fisties—or was it a shillaleigh?” mused the Irishman.
“’Eld the Helliot belt in Hinjer last year, they say,” continued the Cockney. “Good? Not’arf. I wouldn’t go an’ hinsult the bloke for the price of a pot. No. ’Erbert ’Awker would not. (Chuck us yore button-stick, young ’Enery Bone.) Good? ’E’s a ’Oly Terror—and I don’t know as there’s a man in the Queen’s Greys as could put ’im to sleep—not unless it’s Matthewson,” and here Trooper Herbert Hawker jerked his head in the direction of Trooper Damocles de Warrenne (alias D. Matthewson) who, seated on his truckle-bed, was engaged in breathing hard, and rubbing harder, upon a brass helmet from which he had unscrewed a black horse-hair plume.
Dam, arrayed in hob-nailed boots, turned-up overalls “authorized for grooming,” and a “grey-back” shirt, looked indefinably a gentleman.
Trooper Herbert Hawker, in unlaced gymnasium shoes, “leathers,” and a brown sweater (warranted not to show the dirt), looked quite definably what he was, a Commercial Road ruffian; and his foreheadless face, greasy cow-lick “quiff” (or fringe), and truculent expression, inspired more disgust than confidence in the beholder.
His reference to Dam as the only likely champion of the Heavy Cavalry against the Hussar was a tribute to the tremendous thrashing he had received from “Trooper D. Matthewson” when the same had become necessary after a long course of unresented petty annoyance. Hawker was that very rare creature, a boaster, who made good, a bully of great courage and determination, and a loud talker, who was a very active doer; and the battle had been a terrible one.
The weary old joke of having a heavy valise pulled down on to one’s upturned face from the shelf above, by means of a string, as one sleeps, Dam had taken in good part. Being sent to the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major for the “Key of the Half Passage” by this senior recruit, he did not mind in the least (though he could have kicked himself for his gullibility when he learned that the “Half Passage” is not a place, but a Riding-School manoeuvre, and escaped from the bitter tongue of the incensed autocrat—called untimely from his tea! How the man had bristled. Hair, eyebrows, moustache, buttons even—the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major had been rough indeed, and had done his riding rough-shod over the wretched lad).
Being instructed to “go and get measured for his hoof-picker” Dam had not resented, though he had considered it something of an insult to his intelligence that Hawker should expect to “have” him so easily as that. He had taken in good part the arrangement of his bed in such a way that it collapsed and brought a pannikin of water down with it, and on to it, in the middle of a cold night. He had received with good humour, and then with silent contempt, the names of “Gussie the Bank Clurk,” references to “broken-dahn torfs” and “tailor’s bleedn’ dummies,” queries as to the amount of “time” he had got for the offence that made him a “Queen’s Hard Bargain,” and various the other pleasantries whereby Herbert showed his distaste for people whose accent differed from his own, and whose tastes were unaccountable.
Dam had borne these things because he was certain he could thrash the silly animal when the time came, and because he had a wholesome dread of the all-too-inevitable military “crimes” (one of which fighting is—as subversive of good order and military discipline).
It had come, however, and for Dam this exotic of the Ratcliffe Highway had thereafter developed a vast admiration and an embarrassing affection. It was a most difficult matter to avoid his companionship when “walking-out” and also to avoid hurting his feelings.
It was a humiliating and chastening experience to the man, who had supported himself by boxing in booths at fairs and show-grounds, to find this “bloomin’ dook of a ‘Percy,’” this “lah-de-dar ‘Reggie’” who looked askance at good bread-and-dripping, this finnicky “Clarence” without a “bloody” to his conversation, this “blasted, up-the-pole[17] ‘Cecil’”—a man with a quicker guard, a harder punch, a smarter ring-craft, a better wind, and a tougher appetite for “gruel” than himself.
The occasion was furnished by a sad little experience.
Poor drunken Trooper Bear (once the Honourable MacMahon FitzUrse), kindliest, weakest, gentlest of gentlemen, had lurched one bitter soaking night (or early morning) into the barrack-room, singing in a beautiful tenor:—
“Menez-moi” dit la belle,
“A la rive fidèle
Où l’on aime toujours.”
…—“Cette rive ma chère
On ne la connait guère
Au pays des amours.”….
Trooper Herbert Hawker had no appreciation for Theophile Gautier—or perhaps none for being awakened from his warm slumbers.
“’Ere! stow that blarsted catawaulin’,” he roared, with a choice selection from the Whitechapel tongue, in which he requested the adjectived noun to be adverbially “quick about it, too”.
With a beatific smile upon his weak handsome face, Trooper Bear staggered toward the speaker, blew him a kiss, and, in a vain endeavour to seat himself upon the cot, collapsed upon the ground.
“You’re a….” (adverbially adjectived noun) shouted Hawker. “You ain’t a man, you’re a….” “ σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος” … “Man is the dream of a shadow,” suggested Bear dreamily with a hiccup….
“D’yer know where you are, you …” roared Hawker.
“Dear Heart, I am in hell,” replied the recumbent one, “but by the Mercy of God I’m splendidly drunk. Yes, hell. ‘Lasciate ogni speranza,’ sweet Amaryllis. I am Morag of the Misty Way. Mos’ misty. Milky Way. Yesh. Milk Punchy Way.” …
“I’ll give you all the punch you’ll want, in abaht two ticks if you don’t chuck it—you blarsted edjucated flea,” warned Hawker, half rising.
Dam got up and pulled on his cloak preparatory to helping the o’er-taken one to bed, as a well-aimed ammunition boot took the latter nearly on the ear.
Struggling to his feet with the announcement that he was “the King’s fair daughter, weighed in the balance and found—devilish heavy and very drunk,” the unhappy youth lurched and fell upon the outraged Hawker—who struck him a cruel blow in the face.
At the sound of the blow and heavy fall, Dam turned, saw the blood—and went Stukeley-mad. Springing like a tiger upon Hawker he dragged him from his cot and knocked him across it. In less than a minute he had twice sent him to the boards, and it took half-a-dozen men on either side to separate the combatants and get them to postpone the finish till the morning. That night Dam dreamed his dream and, on the morrow, behind the Riding-School, and in fifteen rounds, became, by common consent, champion bruiser of the Queen’s Greys—by no ambition of his own.
And so—as has been said—Trooper Henry Hawker ungrudgingly referred Trooper Phelim O’Shaughnessy to him in the matter of reducing the pride of the Young Jock who had dared to “desthroy” a dragoon.
Trooper Phelim O’Shaughnessy—in perfect-fitting glove-tight scarlet stable-jacket (that never went near a stable, being in fact the smart shell-jacket, shaped like an Eton coat, sacred to “walking-out” purposes), dark blue overalls with broad white stripe, strapped over half-wellington boots adorned with glittering swan-neck spurs, a pill-box cap with white band and button, perched jauntily on three hairs—also looked what he was, the ideal heavy-cavalry man, the swaggering, swashbuckling trooper, beau sabreur, good all round and all through….
The room in which these worthies and various others (varying also in dress, from shirt and shorts to full review-order for Guard) had their being, expressed the top note and last cry—or the lowest note and deepest groan—of bleak, stark utilitarianism. Nowhere was there hint or sign of grace and ornament. Bare deal-plank floor, bare white-washed walls, plank and iron truckle beds, rough plank and iron trestle tables, rough plank and iron benches, rough plank and iron boxes clamped to bedsteads, all bore the same uniform impression of useful ugliness, ugly utility. The apologist in search of a solitary encomium might have called it clean—save around the hideous closed stove where muddy boots, coal-dust, pipe-dottels, and the bitter-end of five-a-penny “gaspers”[18] rebuked his rashness.
A less inviting, less inspiring, less home-like room for human habitation could scarce be found outside a jail. Perhaps this was the less inappropriate in that a jail it was, to a small party of its occupants—born and bred to better things.
The eye was grateful even for the note of cheer supplied by the red cylindrical valise on the shelf above each cot, and by the occasional scarlet tunic and stable-jacket. But for these it had been, to the educated eye, an even more grim, grey, depressing, beauty-and-joy-forsaken place than it was….
Dam (alias Trooper D. Matthewson) placed the gleaming helmet upon his callous straw-stuffed pillow, carefully rubbed the place where his hand had last touched it, and then took from a peg his scarlet tunic with its white collar, shoulder-straps and facings. Having satisfied himself that to burnish further its glittering buttons would be to gild refined gold, he commenced a vigorous brushing—for it was now his high ambition to “get the stick”—in other words to be dismissed from guard-duty as reward for being the best-turned-out man on parade…. As he reached up to his shelf for his gauntlets and pipe-clay box, Trooper Phelim O’Shaughnessy swaggered over with much jingle of spur and playfully smote him, netherly, with his cutting whip.
“What-ho, me bhoy,” he roared, “and how’s me natty Matty—the natest foightin’ man in E Troop, which is sayin’ in all the Dhraghoons, which is sayin’ in all the Arrmy! How’s Matty?”
“Extant,” replied Dam. “How’s Shocky, the biggest liar in the same?”
As he extended his hand it was noticeable that it was much smaller than the hand of the smaller man to whom it was offered. “Ye’ll have to plug and desthroy the schamin’ divvle that strook poor Patsy Flannigan, Matty,” said the Irishman. “Ye must bate the sowl out of the baste before we go to furrin’ parts. Loife is uncertain an’ ye moight never come back to do ut, which the Holy Saints forbid—an’ the Hussars troiumphin’ upon our prosprit coorpses. For the hanner an’ glory av all Dhraghoons, of the Ould Seconds, and of me pore bed-ridden frind, Patsy Flannigan, ye must go an’ plug the wicked scutt, Matty darlint.”
“It was Flannigan’s fault,” replied Dam, daubing pipe-clay on the huge cuff of a gauntlet which he had drawn on to a weird-looking wooden hand, sacred to the purposes of glove-drying. “He got beastly drunk and insulted a better man than himself by insulting his Corps—or trying to. He called a silly lie after a total stranger and got what he deserved. He shouldn’t seek sorrow if he doesn’t want to find it, and he shouldn’t drink liquor he can’t carry.”
“And the Young Jock beat Patsy when drunk, did he?” murmured O’Shaughnessy, in tones of awed wonder. “I riverince the man, for there’s few can beat him sober. Knocked Patsy into hospital an’ him foightin’ dhrunk! Faith, he must be another Oirish gintleman himself, indade.”
“He’s a Scotchman and was middle-weight champion of India last year,” rejoined Dam, and moistened his block of pipe-clay again in the most obvious, if least genteel, way.
“Annyhow he’s a mere Hussar and must be rimonsthrated wid for darin’ to assault and batther a Dhraghoon—an’ him dhrunk, poor bhoy. Say the wurrud, Matty. We’ll lay for the spalpeen, the whole of E Troop, at the Ring o’ Bells, an’ whin he shwaggers in like he was a Dhraghoon an’ a sodger, ye’ll up an’ say ‘Threes about’ an’ act accordin’ subsequint, an’ learn the baste not to desthroy an’ insult his betthers of the Ould Second. Thread on the tail of his coat, Matty….”
“If I had anything to do with it at all I’d tread on Flannigan’s coat, and you can tell him so, for disgracing the Corps…. Take off your jacket and help with my boots, Shocky. I’m for Guard.”
“Oi’d clane the boots of no man that ud demane himself to ax it,” was the haughty reply of the disappointed warrior. “Not for less than a quart at laste,” he amended.
“A quart it is,” answered Dam, and O’Shaughnessy speedily divested himself of his stable-jacket, incidentally revealing the fact that he had pawned his shirt.
“You have got your teeth ready, then?” observed Dam, noting the underlying bareness—and thereby alluded to O’Shaughnessy’s habit of pawning his false teeth after medical inspection and redeeming them in time for the next, at the cost of his underclothing—itself redeemed in turn by means of the teeth. Having been compelled to provide himself with a “plate” he invariably removed the detested contrivance and placed it beside him when sitting down to meals (on those rare occasions when he and not his “uncle” was the arbiter of its destinies)….
A young and important Lance-Corporal, a shocking tyrant and bully, strode into the room, his sword clanking. O’Shaughnessy arose and respectfully drew him aside, offering him a “gasper”. They were joined by a lean hawk-faced individual answering to the name of Fish, who said he had been in the American navy until buried alive at sea for smiling within sight of the quarter-deck.
“Yep,” he was heard to say to some statement of O’Shaughnessy’s. “We’ll hatch a five-bunch frame-up to put the eternal kibosh on the tuberous spotty—souled skunklet. Some. We’ll make him wise to whether a tippy, chew-the-mop, bandy-legged, moke-monkey can come square-pushing, and with his legs out, down this side-walk, before we ante out. Some.”
“Ah, Yus,” agreed the Lance-Corporal. “Damned if I wouldn’t chawnce me arm[19] and go fer ’im meself before we leave—on’y I’m expectin’ furver permotion afore long. But fer that I’d take it up meself”—and he glanced at Dam.
“Ketch the little swine at it,” remarked Trooper Herbert Hawker, as loudly as he dared, to his “towny,” Trooper Henry Bone. “’Chawnst ’is arm!’ It’s ’is bloomin’ life ’e’d chawnce if that Young Jock got settin’ abaht ’im. Not ’arf!” and the exotic of the Ratcliffe Highway added most luridly expressed improprieties anent the origins of the Lance-Corporal, his erstwhile enemy and, now, superior officer, in addition.
“That’s enough,” said Dam shortly.
“Yep. Quit those low-browed sounds, guttermut, or I’ll get mad all over,” agreed Fish, whose marvellous vocabulary included no foul words. There was no need for them.
“Hi halso was abaht ter request you not to talk beastial, Mr. ’Erbert ’Awker,” chimed in Trooper “Henery” Bone, anxious to be on the side of the saints. “Oo’d taike you to be the Missin’ Hair of a noble ’ouse when you do such—‘Missin’ Hair!’ Missin’ Link more like,” he added with spurious indignation.
The allusion was to the oft-expressed belief of Trooper Herbert Hawker, a belief that became a certainty and subject for bloodshed and battle after the third quart or so, that there was a mystery about his birth.
There was, according to his reputed papa….
The plotters plotted, and Dam completed the burnishing of his arms, spurs, buckles, and other glittering metal impedimenta (the quantity of which earned the Corps its barrack-room soubriquet of “the Polish Its”), finished the flicking of spots of pipe-clay from his uniform, and dressed for Guard.
Being ready some time before he had to parade, he sat musing on his truckle-bed.
What a life! What associates (outside the tiny band of gentlemen-rankers). What cruel awful publicity of existence—that was the worst of all. Oh, for a private room and a private coat, and a meal in solitude! Some place of one’s own, where one could express one’s own individuality in the choice and arrangement of property, and impress it upon one’s environment.
One could not even think in private here.
And he was called a private soldier! A grim joke indeed, when the crying need of one’s soul was a little privacy.
A private soldier!
Well—and what of the theory of Compensations, that all men get the same sum-total of good and bad, that position is really immaterial to happiness? What of the theory that more honour means also more responsibility and worry, that more pay also means more expenses and a more difficult position, that more seniority also means less youth and joy—that Fate only robs Peter to pay Paul, and, when bestowing a blessing with one hand, invariably bestows a curse with the other?
Too thin.
Excellent philosophy for the butterfly upon the road, preaching contentment to the toad, who, beneath the harrow, knows exactly where each tooth-point goes. Let the butterfly come and try it.
What a life!
Not so bad at first, perhaps, for a stout-hearted, hefty sportsman, during recruit days when everything is novel, there is something to learn, time is fully occupied, and one is too busy to think, too busy evading strange pit-falls, and the just or (more often) unjust wrath of the Room Corporal, the Squadron Orderly Sergeant, the Rough-Riding Corporal, the Squadron Sergeant-Major, the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major, the Regimental Sergeant-Major, the Riding-Master.
But when, to the passed “dismissed soldier,” everything is familiar and easy, weary, flat, stale and unprofitable?
The (to one gently nurtured) ghastly food, companions, environment, monotony—the ghastly ambitions!
Fancy an educated gentleman’s ambitions and horizon narrowed to a good-conduct “ring,” a stripe in the far future (and to be a Lance-Corporal with far more duty and no more pay, in the hope of becoming a Corporal—that comfortable rank with the same duty and much more pay, and little of the costly gold-lace to mount, and heavy expenses to assume that, while putting the gilt on, takes it off, the position of Sergeant); and, for the present, to “keep off the peg,” not to be “for it,” to “get the stick,” for smartest turn-out, to avoid the Red-Caps,[20] to achieve an early place in the scrimmage at the corn-bin and to get the correct amount of two-hundred pounds in the corn-sack when drawing forage and corn; to placate Troop Sergeants, the Troop Sergeant-Major and Squadron Sergeant-Major; to have a suit of mufti at some safe place outside and to escape from the branding searing scarlet occasionally; possibly even the terrible ambition to become an Officer’s servant so as to have a suit of mufti as a right, and a chance of becoming Mess-Sergeant and then Quarter-Master, and perhaps of getting an Honorary Commission without doing a single parade or guard after leaving the troop!…
What a life for a man of breeding and refinement!… Fancy having to remember the sacred and immeasurable superiority of a foul-mouthed Lance-Corporal who might well have been your own stable-boy, a being who can show you a deeper depth of hell in Hell, wreak his dislike of you in unfair “fatigues,” and keep you at the detested job of coal-drawing on Wednesdays; who can achieve a “canter past the beak”[21] for you on a trumped-up charge and land you in the “digger,”[22] who can bring it home to you in a thousand ways that you are indeed the toad beneath the harrow. Fancy having to remember, night and day, that a Sergeant, who can perhaps just spell and cypher, is a monarch to be approached in respectful spirit; that the Regimental Sergeant-Major, perhaps coarse, rough, and ignorant, is an emperor to be approached with fear and trembling; that a Subaltern, perhaps at school with you, is a god not to be approached at all. Fancy looking forward to being “branded with a blasted worsted spur,” and, as a Rough-Riding Corporal, receiving a forfeit tip from each young officer who knocks off his cap with his lance in Riding-School….
Well! One takes the rough with the smooth—but perceives with great clearness that the (very) rough predominates, and that one does not recommend a gentleman to enlist, save when a Distinguished Relative with Influence has an early Commission ready in his pocket for him.
Lacking the Relative, the gently-nurtured man, whether he win to a Commission eventually or not, can only do one thing more rash than enlist in the British Army, and that is enlist in the French Foreign Legion.
Discipline for soul and body? The finest thing in all the world—in reason. But the discipline of the tram-horse, of the blinded bullock at the wheel, of the well-camel, of the galley-slave—meticulous, puerile, unending, unchanging, impossible …? Necessary perhaps, once upon a time—but hard on the man of brains, sensibility, heart, and individuality.
Soul and body? Deadly for the soul—and fairly dangerous for the body in the Cavalry Regiment whose riding-master prefers the abominable stripped-saddle training to the bare-backed….
Dam yawned and looked at the tin clock on the shelf above the cot of the Room Corporal. Half an hour yet…. Did time drag more heavily anywhere in the world?…
His mind roamed back over his brief, age-long life in the Queen’s Greys and passed it in review.
The interview with the Doctor, the Regimental Sergeant-Major, the Adjutant, the Colonel—the Oath on the Bible before that dread Superman…. How well he remembered his brief exordium—“Obey your Superiors blindly; serve your Queen, Country, and Regiment to the best of your ability; keep clean, don’t drink, fear God, and—most important of all—take care of your horse. Take care of your horse, d’ye hear?”
Also the drawled remark of the Adjutant afterwards, “Ah—what—ah—University?”—his own prompt reply of “Whitechapel, sir,” and the Adjutant’s approving “Exactly…. You’ll get on here by good conduct, good riding, and good drill—not by—ah—good accent or anything else.”
How well he remembered the strange depolarized feeling consequent upon realizing that his whole worldly possessions consisted in three “grey-back” shirts, two pairs of cotton pants, two pairs of woollen socks, a towel; a hold-all containing razor, shaving-brush, spoon, knife and fork, and a button-stick; a cylindrical valise with hair-brush, clothes-brush, brass-brush, and boot-brushes; a whip, burnisher, and dandy-brush (all three, for some reason, to be paid for as part of a “free” kit); jack-boots and jack-spurs, wellington-boots and swan-neck box-spurs, ammunition boots; a tin of blacking and another of plate powder; blue, white-striped riding-breeches, blue, white-striped overalls, drill-suit of blue serge, scarlet tunic, scarlet stable-jacket, scarlet drill “frock,” a pair of trousers of lamentable cut “authorized for grooming,” brass helmet with black horse-hair plume, blue pill-box cap with white stripe and button, gauntlets and gloves, sword-belt and pouch-belt, a carbine and a sword. Also of a daily income of one loaf, butter, tea, and a pound of meat (often uneatable), and the sum of one shilling and twopence subject to a deduction of threepence a day “mess-fund,” fourpence a month for delft, and divers others for library, washing, hair-cutting, barrack-damages, etc.
Yes, it had given one a strange feeling of nakedness, and yet of a freedom from the tyranny of things, to find oneself so meagrely and yet so sufficiently endowed.
Then, the strange, lost, homeless feeling that Home is nothing but a cot and a box in a big bare barrack-room, that the whole of God’s wide Universe contains no private and enclosed spot that is one’s own peculiar place wherein to be alone—at first a truly terrible feeling.
How one envied the Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major his Staff Quarters—without going so far as to envy the great Riding-Master his real separate and detached house!
No privacy—and a scarlet coat that encarnadined the world and made its wearer feel, as he so often thought, like a live coal glowing bright in Hell.
Surely the greatest of all an officer’s privileges was his right of mufti, his daily escape from the burning cloth.
“Why does not the British officer wear his uniform always?” writes the perennial gratuitous ass to the Press, periodically in the Silly Season…. Dam could tell him.
Memories …!
Being jerked violently from uneasy slumber and broken, vivid dreams at 5 a.m., by the thunderous banging of the Troop Sergeant’s whip on the table, and his raucous roar of “Tumble out, you lazy swine, before you get sunstroke! Rise and shine! Rise and shine, you tripe-hounds!” … Broken dreams on a smelly, straw-stuffed pillow and lumpy straw-stuffed pallet, dreams of “Circle and cha-a-a-a-a-a-a-nge” “On the Fore-hand, Right About” “Right Pass, Shoulder Out” “Serpentine” “Order Lance” “Trail Lance” “Right Front Thrust” (for the front rank of the Queen’s Greys carry lances); dreams of riding wild mad horses to unfathomable precipices and at unsurmountable barriers….
Memories …!
His first experience of “mucking out” stables at five-thirty on a chilly morning—doing horrible work, horribly clad, feeling horribly sick. Wheeling away intentionally and maliciously over-piled barrows to the muck-pits, upsetting them, and being cursed.
Being set to water a notoriously wild and vicious horse, and being pulled about like a little dog at the end of the chain, burning into frozen fingers.
Not much of the glamour and glow and glory left!
Better were the interesting and amusing experiences of the Riding-School where his trained and perfected hands and seat gave him a tremendous advantage, an early dismissal, and some amelioration of the roughness of one of the very roughest experiences in a very rough life.
Even he, though, knew what it was to have serge breeches sticking to abraided bleeding knees, to grip a stripped saddle with twin suppurating sores, and to burrow face-first in filthy tan via the back of a stripped-saddled buck-jumper. How he had pitied some of the other recruits, making their first acquaintance with the Trooper’s “long-faced chum” under the auspices of a pitiless, bitter-tongued Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major! Rough! What a character the fellow was! Never an oath, never a foul word, but what a vocabulary and gift of invective, sarcasm and cruel stinging reproof! A well-educated man if not a gentleman. “Don’t dismount again, Muggins—or is it Juggins?—without permission” when some poor fellow comes on his head as his horse (bare of saddle and bridle) refuses at a jump. “Get up (and SIT BACK) you—you—hen, you pierrot, you Aard Vark, you after-thought, you refined entertainer, you pimple, you performing water-rat, you mistake, you byle, you drip, you worm-powder…. What? You think your leg’s broken? Well—you’ve got another, haven’t you? Get up and break that. Keep your neck till you get a stripped saddle and no reins…. Don’t embrace the horse like that, you pawn-shop, I can hear it blushing…. Send for the key and get inside it…. Keep those fine feet forward. Keep them forward (and SIT BACK), Juggins or Muggins, or else take them into the Infantry—what they were meant for by the look of them. Now then—over you go without falling if I have to keep you here all night…. Look at that” (as the poor fellow is thrown across the jump by the cunning brute that knows its rider has neither whip, spurs, saddle nor reins). “What? The horse refuse? One of my horses refuse? If the man’ll jump, the horse’ll jump. (All of you repeat that after me and don’t forget it.) No. It’s the man refuses, not the poor horse. Don’t you know the ancient proverb ‘Faint heart ne’er took fair jump’….? What’s the good of coming here if your heart’s the size of your eye-ball instead of being the size of your fist? Refuse? Put him over it, man. Put him over—SIT BACK and lift him, and put him over. I’ll give you a thousand pounds if he refuses me….”
Then the day when poor bullied, baited, nervous Muggins had reached his limit and come to the end of his tether—or thought he had. Bumped, banged, bucketed, thrown, sore from head to foot, raw-kneed, laughed at, lashed by the Rough-Ri