“May Christ and the Four Evangels bless this mate!... Bad scran to that villain av’ a throop-cook! Sure, the praties is burraned agin!”
LXXI
The door was thrown open by an Orderly Sergeant during the progress of this, Mrs. Joshua’s first meal in Barracks, and a gruff bellow of “Attention!” caused a cessation of the clashing of knives, and a general uprising about the table heralded the entrance of the Officer for the Day. He was a blushing subaltern, fair-haired and nicely-mannered, who said a pleasant word of welcome to Mrs. Joshua, and, being preceded out of the room by the Sergeant, earned a favorable comment from Mrs. Geogehagan by not forgetting to shut the door.
After dinner the men adjourned to the Canteen for malt liquor, and the women strolled out, or gossiped among themselves. Tea-time meant for nearly all of them a snack of bread and cheese, washed down with beer—the fragrant leaf being eight shillings a pound in those days. Yet Moggy Geogehagan never failed to dhraw a raking pot upon the fire-cheek. She would as soon go without duds, she proclaimed, as widout her dhrop av’ tay. To porther, consumed in the pewter pots with a cauliflower head on, Moggy was, as was her Jems, exceedingly addicted. Sometimes under the influence of the beverage the worthy couple quarreled. And upon these occasions—probably feeling the need of maintaining herself in an upright position—the Corporal’s huge helpmeet would ask him for the loan of his ear.
Helping to undress, wash and tuck the children into their truckle beds, and washing-basket cradles, gave the young wife quite a homelike feeling. It was at Roll-Call—when every trooper not on duty stood to his bed and answered to his name—that the cheeks of Sarah’s ex-dairymaid began to tingle and burn.
She had screened off her bed and her husband’s with an old curtain and her shabbiest shawl, by the aid of clothes-line and corking-pins, nails and hammer.... Now, when the Sergeant had followed the officer out, and Josh—having been warned for First Relief of the Guard—had hurried on his greatcoat, belt, and pouches,—taken his lance, sword, sling-carbine, plumed cap and gloves from the iron shelf and the hooks in the wall immediately above the bed-head,—stuffed a hunk of bread into his pocket, kissed her and jingled out with another man detailed for duty—it dawned on Nelly—silent in the midst of all these women and their men—who laughed, quarreled, kissed, sang or cursed freely and unrestrainedly, and without the slightest regard for the convenience of their neighbors or the feelings of the diffident stranger—that she and Josh had got to go to bed to-night, and every night for years to come, in the midst of this deafening din; under all these curious, or indifferent or evil eyes....
You are to imagine the two great foul-smelling tubs brought in—and the imperative trumpet-call “Lights out!” turning the perpendicular crowd into a horizontal one—the smelly, noisy gaslit hell—for it seemed nothing less to Nelly—into another of stifled laughter and whispered words ... of blackness, and stench, and worse.... You may suppose the homely domestic Virtues ranged side by side with the fouler vices on the huckaback-sheeted, brown-blanketed, straw-stuffed palliasses. Be a little sorry for the country girl, accustomed to retire at curfew—rung even to this day in remote English villages—with her flat candle-stick to her clean and quiet chamber over the great farm kitchen; and sleep in lavender-smelling linen, lulled by the rush of the Drowse under its three bridge-arches, unawakened by the crying of the hunting owls as they moused along the rick-eaves and raided the sparrows’ nests....
The great tubs were not the only things that reeked in the long, stuffy, vile-smelling room. Things were said that scalded the ears of the young wife, things were done of which she had never dreamed....
If she had had her man’s strong arm about her, she would have hidden her face in his breast, and, with his hard hand covering her little ears, have sobbed herself to sleep. But she was alone—in a void of dreadful darkness, populous with goblins hideous and grim.... Realizing this, and being well advanced upon the road that ends in a full cradle or empty arms, an hysterical access seized the poor young thing.