“Please God bless my mother, and make her buy me that new engine I saw in So-and-So’s shop-window”—was naturally followed by fulfillment.... Faith is the first of the theological virtues.... What Christian mother would have her boy grow up an atheist? Arguing thus, the poor lady would purchase the engine; and Morty’s prayers would be without addenda for a night, or maybe two. But before a week was over the maternal head, this infant Samuel would be praying for a new gun or a new puppy—and the thing would begin all over again....
To do Morty justice, he loved the meek, sad woman, despised by Jowell as being devoid of “spirit” and “go.” She never dreamed—when her darling went to Rugby—how many pugilistic encounters his promise of never forgetting his daily prayers was to cost a boy whose dogged obstinacy of nature led him to shun the concealment offered by blankets, and persist in saying them out of bed.... It is on record that the boys Morty pounded presently followed his example; while the boys who pounded him had suffered so many contusions in the course of the contest, that they had no urgent desire to provoke a renewal of war.
Do you hear the embarrassed, clumsy accents of the large young Ensign, mumbling that simplest, noblest, and most Divine of all petitions? Do you see that sorrowful, plain, dowdy woman, sitting in the shadow of his sumptuous brocade bed-curtains, cherishing the big, powerful, hot young hand?
“‘But deliver us from evil.’... And make me a good boy—no! hang it!—I mean a good man and a good officer.... And make me well quick, and let me get to our fellows Out There—before all the fun of the fighting’s over!—And don’t let my mother fret and worry herself—and bring me back safe home to her again. For Christ’s sake, Amen!”
That brought the tears, hard as the mother tried to stop them—pattering, hot, and quick, and heavy, on her brown silk lap. She held the big hand until his tea came—fed him with strips of toast soaked in the blameless infusion—ere she crept away to compose herself in the solitude of her own huge palatial bedroom, before going down to preside over her silver teapot—set at the end of a vast expanse of dining-table spread with the customary complements of the distinctive British meal. The redness of her poor eyelids could not be concealed by any innocent application of cold water and Johann-Maria-Farina, and, at the sight of them Thompson Jowell—who came home early from the City in these days of his son’s sickness—dropped upon the hearthrug the newspaper he had been perusing, and—nimbly as the Zoological Society’s Rhinoceros might have quitted his private pond in the Regent’s Park Gardens—floundered out of his armchair.
“What the devil’s this, ma’am?” he blustered, staring at his wife with eyes rendered even more froggishly prominent than usual by apprehension. “You’re not going to tell me the boy’s taken a turn for the worse, and is in danger?” He added, as she reassured him on this point: “If you had, I wouldn’t have believed you! Tom Tough, my name is—when it comes to a question of constitution—and my son takes after his old Governor! But, Lord!—you’ve given me a start.”
He broke off to swab his face, and the hand that wielded the silk bandanna handkerchief, shook quite as though the great Contractor had been a being of common flesh and blood. It was to shake more, erelong. For, as though that curse of Trooper Joshua Horrotian had had real power to bring Misfortune down—strange ill-chances and cross-happenings, eventuating from the dubious business-methods of the parent Jowell, were to place in very frequent jeopardy the one person, of all living beings—whom the man desired should go scot-free. For all the gold that War would pour into his coffers, Jowell would not have risked a hair of the head of this beloved son....
He had always thriven upon disaster. Mildewed harvests brought him golden ones, even as the murrain among cattle and the rot among sheep glutted the storehouses of Cowell with barrels of Prime Salted Beef, and tins of First Class Preserved Mutton, for the nourishment of the British Army. And the skins of the diseased beasts above-named, being sold to Shoell, at a friendly lowness of price, were converted into Boots and Saddlery and so on....
Towell and Sewell, buying whole cargoes of Damaged Cotton—salvage from the spinning-mills that were always being set on fire and flooded with water—and the waste of countless Woolen Manufactories—the first to be woven into soldiers’ shirting, the second to be manufactured into shoddy cloth of gray or blue or brick-dust-red to upholster martial bodies withal—flourished on the same principle of Give as little as you may and Take all you can get.