“’You quick at gettin’ things off by ’eart?” Anthony demanded.
“Not as a rule. I was then, though, or else Macklin knew ’ow to deliver the Charges properly. ’E said ’e’d been some sort o’ schoolmaster once, and he’d make my mind resume work or break ’imself. That was just before the Battery Sergeant Major ’ad it in for him on account o’ what he’d been sayin’ about the Chinese wife an’ the dolly-shop.”
“What did Macklin really say?” Anthony and I asked together. Humberstall gave us a fragment. It was hardly the stuff to let loose on a pious post-war world without revision.
“And what had your B. S. M. been in civil life?” I asked at the end.
“’Ead-embalmer to an ’olesale undertaker in the Midlands,” said Humberstall; “but, o’ course, when he thought ’e saw his chance he naturally took it. He came along one mornin’ lickin’ ’is lips. ‘You don’t get past me this time,’ ’e says to Macklin. ‘You’re for it, Professor.’
“‘’Ow so, me gallant Major,’ says Macklin; ’an’ what for?’
“‘For writin’ obese words on the breech o’ the ten-inch,’ says the B. S. M. She was our old Skoda that I’ve been tellin’ you about. We called ’er ‘Bloody Eliza.’ She ’ad a badly wore obturator an’ blew through a fair treat. I knew by Macklin’s face the B. S. M. ’ad dropped it somewhere, but all he vow’saifed was, ‘Very good, Major. We will consider it in Common Room.’ The B. S. M. couldn’t ever stand Macklin’s toff’s way o’ puttin’ things; so he goes off rumblin’ like ’ell’s bells in an ’urricane, as the Marines say. Macklin put it to me at once, what had I been doin’? Some’ow he could read me like a book.
“Well, all I’d done—an’ I told ’im he was responsible for it—was to chalk the guns. ’Ammick never minded what the men wrote up on ’em. ’E said it gave ’em an interest in their job. You’d see all sorts of remarks chalked on the side-plates or the gear-casin’s.”
“What sort of remarks?” said Anthony, keenly.
“Oh! ’Ow Bloody Eliza, or Spittin’ Jim—that was our old Mark Five Nine-point-two—felt that morning, an’ such things. But it ’ad come over me—more to please Macklin than anythin’ else—that it was time we Janeites ’ad a look in. So, as I was tellin’ you, I’d taken an’ rechristened all three of ’em, on my own, early that mornin’. Spittin’ Jim I ’ad chalked ‘The Reverend Collins’—that Curate I was tellin’ you about; an’ our cut-down Navy Twelve, ‘General Tilney,’ because it was worse wore in the groovin’ than anything I’d ever seen. The Skoda (an’ that was where I dropped it) I ’ad chalked up ‘The Lady Catherine De Bugg.’ I made a clean breast of it all to Macklin. He reached up an’ patted me on the shoulder. ‘You done nobly,’ he says. ‘You’re bringin’ forth abundant fruit, like a good Janeite. But I’m afraid your spellin’ has misled our worthy B. S. M. That’s what it is,’ ’e says, slappin’ ’is little leg. ‘’Ow might you ’ave spelt De Burgh, for example?’