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.
They carefully avoided any appearance of exclusiveness, but sought every legitimate opportunity of united companionship, and formed a “mess” of eight at a table which just held that number, and on a couple of benches each of which exactly fulfilled the slang expression “room for four Dragoons on a form”.
It was their great ambition to avoid the reproach of earning the soubriquet “gentleman-ranker,” a term that too often, and too justly, stinks in the nostrils of officer, non-commissioned officer, and man (for, as a rule, the “gentleman-ranker” is a complete failure as a gentleman and a completer one as a ranker).
To prove a rule by a remarkably fine exception, these eight were among the very smartest and best troopers of one of the smartest and best Corps in the world—and to Damocles de Warrenne, their “Society of the Knights of the dirty Square Table” was a Rock and a Salvation in the midst of a howling sea of misery—a cool pool in a searing branding Hell.
Trooper Bear’s brief nap appeared to have revived him wonderfully.
“Let us, like the Hosts of Midian, prowl around this happy Sabbeth eve, my dear,” quoth he to Dam, “and, like wise virgins, up and smite them, when we meet the Red-Caps…. No, I’m getting confused. It’s they up and smite us, when we’ve nothing to tip them…. I feel I could be virtuous in your company—since you never offer beer to the (more or less) fatherless and widowed—and since I’m stony. How did you work that colossal drunk, Matty, when you came home on a stretcher and the Red-Caps said you ‘was the first-classest delirious-trimmings as ever was, aseein’ snakes somethink ’orrible,’ and in no wise to be persuaded ‘as ’ow there wasn’t one underyer bloomin’ foot the ’ole time’. Oh you teetotallers!”
Dam shuddered and paled. “Yes, let’s go for as long a walk as we can manage, and get as far from this cursed place as time allows,” he replied.
His hair was still short and horribly hacked from the prison-crop he had had as a preliminary to “168 hours cells,” for “drunk and disorderly”.
“I’ll come too,” announced the Honourable Bertie.
“Yes,” chimed in Trooper Adam Goate, “let’s go and gladden the eyes, if not the hearts of the nurse-maids of Folkestone.”