Since Hullah had come to live in the end house, Private Hey, eyes-right when he turned at the South Bar, and eyes-left when he turned again at the Sowgate Steps, had counted the days when Mollie had appeared at the windows or shaken the table-cloth in the narrow garden. His amusement was no longer with chimney-pots and bath-rooms; it was, to tell over to himself the dissolute life he had led since Mollie had turned her back on him. Somehow, it seemed to exalt her.
It was not that he had ever lied, or stolen, or left a friend in trouble. To the pink-faced private these things were not merely wicked; they were “dead off”—a much worse thing. He drew the line at things that were “off.” But he had committed a monotonous routine of other sins, beginning usually at the canteen, continuing at the “regulation” inns or at the Cobourg Music-hall, and ending on the defaulter-sheet with a C.B. And one day his colonel had said to him: “Hey, you remind me of a cherub who kicks about in the mud and glories to think himself an imp.” That had puzzled and troubled Hey, for he liked the fine old colonel.
“He forgot everything except little Mollie Westwood” (page 35).
For he had ranked himself with the magnificently wicked. In amours, short of anything that was “off,” was he not a Juan? In the matter of inebriety, and for brawling in the streets, why, his officers might make war with ceremony and all that, but (the cherub flattered himself) he was an item of the reckless, heroic, glorious stuff they had to do it with. And since Mollie, by refusing him, had driven him to all this, the sight of her ought surely to have inspired him in his courses; it troubled him that it did not do so. On the contrary, he never felt less inclination to fuddle himself or to click his heels over the gallery-rail of the Cobourg than when he had seen her. When he did not see her, these things were less difficult, and that again was wrong. To regulate his conduct at all by the sight of another man’s wife was, of all dead-off things, the deadest.
Now Hullah, as the sentry knew, had no family; but when, the following spring, the apple trees put forth their pink, and the white clouds sailed high over Maychester, and the note of the cuckoo floated on the air, the cherub became moody and bashful and changed colour ten times in an hour. Thrushes and blackbirds flew back and forth from their nests; and Mollie, too, her figure dwarfed by his point of vantage, sunned herself in the garden. Sometimes the cherub blushed red as his tunic. He ought to have gone to the Cobourg and played the very deuce; instead, off duty, he wandered unhappily alone. Then one day he missed her, and his eyes scanned the house and her windows timorously.
Six weeks passed. Then one morning he saw that the white blinds were drawn. His face became white as wax.
The next day he saw the tail of a coach beyond the end of the house. He exceeded his beat, descended the Sowgate Steps, and stood, trembling and watching. Then he gave a great sob of relief. The coach had turned; the horse wore white conical peaks of linen on its ears—the mark of a child’s funeral. The small procession passed, and the cherub resumed his beat.
That evening the colonel stopped him as he crossed the barrack yard.
“Ah, Hey!... I’m glad you’ve given us so little trouble lately. I’d try to keep it up if I were you.”