“Whoa!” said the driving groom.
“Whoa, then, my beauty! That curb be a link too tight, Mr. Jowell,” said Joshua Horrotian, betraying for the first time, by a lingering smack and twang of the broad local accent, that the county of Sloughshire might claim him as its son. “Shall I let it out a mite? He’ll stand like a rock then.”
Thompson Jowell nodded in answer, and the thing was done in a moment, and Horrotian back in his old place by the side-step, saying:
“You wanted to know just now, Mr. Jowell, where I’d left my proper pride, and my enthusiasm and eagerness and ardor for a soldier’s career? I’ve left ’em yonder, sir.” He lifted his riding-whip and pointed across country. “Over to the Cavalry Barracks at Spurham, where Ours have been quartered best part o’ three years. With your leave, sir!”
He spat in a soldierly, leisurely way upon the sandy road, and hitched his pipeclayed pouch-belt, and shoved a finger of a white-gloved hand within the edge of his sword-belt of gilt lace with a white stripe, and went on speaking:
“It seems to me, sir, when I’ve casted round to think a bit—having done a bit o’ gardening for mother in old days when I wasn’t busy on the farm—that pride and enthusiasm and ardor and eagerness for a soldier’s career are like hardy plants that will grow and put out leaf and bloom even in a soil that’s as poor as ours at Upper Clays, if they’re but wedd a bit and the snails and slugs picked off of ’em, and a drop o’ water given in drought, and hobnailed boots, and wheelbarrows, turned aside from crushing of ’em down!”
“Well, well, my man! Where does this bring us to?” demanded the autocrat of the cocked inquisitive nose, and puffy cheeks, and goggling, greedy eyes, from his lofty perch upon the front seat of the scarlet mail-phaeton.
“It brings us to this, Mr. Jowell,” said the trooper, with a fold coming between his thick broad smear of dark red eyebrows, and an angered narrowing of the blue eyes that were so clear, “that if you want a dog to respect himself, let alone his superiors, you’ll give him a clean kennel to sleep in, and decent food to eat; and if he’s to do a dog’s work for you, you’ll not curse and bully him so as to break and cow his spirit. Nay! and if you respect yourself, you’ll give him, whether he’s been a good dog or only a tolerable sort o’ one—some sort o’ nursing and care when he lies sick, if it’s only the roughest kind, before he kicks his last on his straw bed. Then throw him out on the dung-heap if it’s your liking; he can’t feel it, poor brute! He be past all that. But where’s the use of a Soldier’s Funeral with a Firing Party and a Bugler, if,—when the man was living, you branded his soul with as many lines of anger and resentment and rage as there are stripes in the Union Jack, God bless it! that, him being dead, you lay as a pall of honor on his coffin? That’s what I want to know!”
“You want to know too much for your rank and station, Josh Horrotian—that’s what you do!” said Thompson Jowell, frowning displeasure upon him. “You’re one of the Malcontents, that’s what you are. If you were to tell me on your oath you weren’t, I wouldn’t believe you. I’ve met your breed before!”
“If you have, Mr. Jowell, my answer is that it’s not a bad breed,” retorted the trooper, with a hot flush and a bright direct look of anger. “Without trying to use finer language than my little education warrants, it’s a breed that will fight to the death for Queen and Country, and hold that man a damned and despicable cur that hangs back in the hour of England’s need. But when the same bad usage is meted out by the Authorities in Office to the willing and the unwilling, the worthless and the worthy, let me tell you, sir, a man loses heart. For Drill and Discipline and Confinement to Cells for defaulters, and Flogging for the obstropulous; with Ration Beef and cabbage, and suet-balls, tight clothes and tight belts, and a leather stock that saws your ears off, can’t make a machine of a human being all through. There’s got to be a living spot of flesh left in him somewhere that feels and tingles and smarts.... And the sooner the great gentlemen in authority find that out, the better for England and her Army,” said Joshua Horrotian, with a straightforward, manly energy of voice and look and gesture that would have gone far to convince, if the right man had been there to hear him.