People who read their Dickens, as all men who are privileged to speak the English language ought to do, will remember a striking little passage in ‘Oliver Twist,’ in which the author moralises upon the first dressing of a new-born pauper baby. Until the faded yellow garments which have done service for many predecessors are wrapped about it, the baby might be anybody’s child—a Duke’s, or a ploughman’s. But the livery of its unfortunate estate marks and stamps it at once and gives it the social caste and cachet it is doomed to wear. But it is not so when time has developed character, and a change of garb does not work an actual transformation in the grown man. Polson had purposely chosen the shabbiest outfit he could find in his whole kit; but he was recognisably a gentleman at a glance, and as he strode into the guard-room the Sergeant in charge, who was sitting on the edge of a sloping wooden bedstead, stood up and saluted him, a fact for which the recruit had to pay later on.
‘You want recruits here?’ said Polson, and the Sergeant, finding that he had been betrayed into a sign of respect for one who was willing to become his own inferior, answered him with a scowling ill-temper.
‘Yes!’ he snapped. ‘Wait there till the orderly room is opened.’
The young man was too full of his own concerns to take offence at a tone. He sat down quietly and waited. Uniformed men came and went, and nobody took heed of him until some two hours had gone by, when the Sergeant awoke him from his reverie.
‘Come this way.’
He followed the Sergeant across the square, and through an open doorway on the far side of it. The Sergeant turned on him. ‘Take your cap off, and walk into that room.’ Polson obeyed again, and found himself in the presence of a young officer who was bending over a sheaf of papers on a rough table, pen in hand.
‘Man wishes to join, sir,’ said the Sergeant.
The officer looked up and rose to his feet with an exclamation.
‘Good God, Jervase! What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come to take the Queen’s shilling, Volnay,’ Polson answered.