Читать книгу As Luck Would Have It - Edward Dyson - Страница 6

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THE late-comer, homing at 2 a.m., sat on the edge of his bed, and made crapulous noises, regardless of inarticulate complaints from the three sleepers. There were three other beds in the room, a bunk against each wall: in each bunk a tired man rolled in an amorphous bundle amongst miscellaneous bedding.

"'Oh, Lieutenant Holland,' says she, 'I'm sure you are a hero.'" The young man whooped, and taking his military cap from his head, with a fine flourish, adroitly tossed it on to the toe of his left foot. Jerking off his collar, he cleverly ringed the other toe, shouting hilarious appreciation of his skill. "'My dear Captain,' she says, 'there is nothing I admire in a man like courage. My dear Captain,' says she, 'you really must come and see me.' Whoop!" Holland tore off his coat, and whirled it from him. The coat fell over the Baron's face, and the Baron, stifling in its folds, dreamt of a monstrous growth assailing him, and fought feebly in his sleep, making the noises a man makes with a bone in his throat.

"'Major,' she says, 'you are a charming man.' Inglis, sit up and listen. Damn you, your poor 'ink-slinger,' where are your manners? 'Oh! here's the darling Colonel telling me such stories,' says she, and she a big buck-up with the deadliest dark eye you ever saw in a human woman, and 'Colonel,' says she—Colonel! So help me Abraham, if I'd stayed another ten minutes I'd have been a General! Rapid promotion—what?" The soldier threw his shirt aloft with a barracker's howl of rapture. The shirt settled on the battered and superannuated gas bracket in the centre of the room, and hung there like a poor, suicidal ghost in the dim light cast by the heavily smoked and intolerably smoking oil lamp.

"In the name of the ancient devil shut up, and go to bed!" Inglis was thrashing about among his welter of blanket, Wagga rug, and articles of daily wear. "What the hades do you mean by coming home at this ungodly hour, and hooting like a zoo, dragging respectable people from their sleep?"

Robert Holland took hold of himself, he became very cool, and remorselessly articulate. "Jimmie," he said—"little Jimmie Inglis, the small weekly sheet you now edit was always the dullest, and most stupid and illiterate of its awful sort, but I will say this of you, old man—under your able editorship it has not deteriorated." He uttered another unmeaning yell.

"Go to sleep, you besotted idiot!" from the third bed.

"Ello, ello! 'Sthat you, Fryer, my boy. Fryer, why will you draw lil' women who look like enraptured spooks? You ought to have been with me to-night. God love you, you all ought to have been with me to-night. 'A party in a parlor, all silent and all damned.' Not a bit like it. A real, rousin', rorty shivoo. And she says to me, 'Colonel, you're just the loveliest soldier ever. I'm sure you've got fifty medals,' she says. Fryer, you should see her—solid as a house, a pack of black hair, and an eye—phew! You'd never draw attenuated and beatific visions for women. Oh, she's the fruit—a real, ripe mango. Mangos for Bobbie. Whooroo!"

"Oud!" The Baron had awakened, subdued his monster, and was sitting up. "Oud heem."

Three scant shirts and three pairs of graceless legs descended upon Lieutenant Robert Holland. He was taken up bodily, and tumbled without ceremony through a door into the kitchen of their bachelor establishment, his tick and his blankets were thrown on top of him, the door was closed and locked, and three weary Bohemians dived back into their bunks, and slept again, quite regardless of the muffled eulogies of a certain overpowering dame with a billow of black hair, coming from the depths of the bedding in the back room.

Fryer was first up in the morning; Fryer always was first up. Temperamental defects and certain proficiency in the handling of foods, called cooking for the lack of a more accurate definition, had marked him out immediately after the organisation of their small fraternity as head housekeeper, cook, and comptroller. He found Holland sitting desolately among the ruins of his bed, his arms embracing his shins, his chin resting on his knees. No, you couldn't do it, but Lieutenant Holland was 26, and thin and limber, and the attitude was easy to him.

"What happened, Fod?" Fryer's Christian name was Hilary, and that was reason enough for calling him Fod, which, as I understand it is a corruption of Fred. Holland did not wait for explanations. "Is there a bottle?" he queried plaintively.

"There's the taste and the smell in one that was opened yesterday," answered Fryer, with grudging sympathy.

"Then for the love of heaven, old man!"

Fryer produced the bottle, and poured beer into a handleless cup. At the Hut all cups so crippled were promoted—they became tumblers. Holland drank with the air of a man taking his medicine, and groaned aloud.

"Why do I do it, Fod?" he asked miserably.

"That happening to be the peculiar kind of idiot you are."

"No, no, no!" the soldier rocked his head on its pedestal of knees, winced, and desisted. "After the first drink I hate it, but one goes on." He groaned again, and curling down on the tick dragged the blanket about him.

"Here, here!" cried Fryer, "you've got to get out of this. I can't have my kitchen all littered up. Hike!" He look Holland by one leg, and dragged him towards the door. Holland clutching his bedding, and submitting unconcernedly.

"How did I get here, anyhow?" moaned Bob, in transit.

"You were chucked out for being a common nuisance. There was something about a piratical dame with wild eyes and a tussock of black hair. Fryer had dragged the sufferer and his bedding half into the adjoining room. He left him there in the doorway, an impediment to traffic, and resumed his domestic duties, lighting a fire on top of the colonial oven in the Hut's large, battered kitchen fireplace.

"A woman?" said Holland. He had jerked himself on to his hands, and looked reproachfully at Fryer, as if he suspected that young man of letting him in for this. "Not a woman, Fod?"

Fryer nodded. He was filling the kettle at the kitchen sink. "Oh, yes, and all very fine and large, I gather. You were full of her—her and other things."

"Lord, yes, I remember—I remember. She called me 'Colonel.' Great Gohannas! I asked her to go to the theatre, and I haven't a bean." He was staring wildly at Fryer, in his eyes a piteous appeal.

"No," said Fod determinedly—"not if your tongue was hanging out a yard."

"But I asked the woman to go. I even mentioned supper. Fod?"

Fryer banged the kettle on the smoking pile of wood. "See here," said he, "there's just five and ninepence between the household and defalcation and dishonor, and not haporth of credit for us in a whole cityful."

"But I've got to get the money."

"And a durned good thing, too. You'll have to work."

"Work! Work with a head like seventy leagues of flaming desert, and ten thousand policemen doing a route march through it, every man Jack with spiked boots on. Work!" Bob howled at the thought of it, fell face downward in his tick again, and murmured faint evil words.

"Yes, work," continued Fryer relentlessly. "There's that war story for Macalpin. I wonder he gives you even a look in after the way you've treated him. You promised that yarn faithfully for last issue. You swore on your honor as an officer and a gent it would be in the office in good time for this issue, and there's ten lousy slips of it fluttering about in the front room grate at this moment, and my drawings hopelessly damned under the couch, where I chucked 'em yesterday week. If you'd finish that story I could collect on the illustrations, and you could lift the three quid promised to you. Get to work, you lazy cow."

Holland moaned. "A head like ninety miles of bush fire!" said he.

"Serve you gaudy well right, too. Because he's a little gimp hero in a pretty uniform, stuck all over with bits of tin, he must get blithered every time he is asked to be toy lion at a wild tea fight in South Yarra."

"You know, Fod, I can't get to you in my present delicate state of health," said Bob feebly. "You know perfectly well I cannot rise and grind your skull on the hearth stone, and you presume upon it."

"What is it the matter is?" The Baron had come through from the sleeping apartment. He stood in the small of Holland's back, leaning on the door jamb, yawning. "Someone is hurt der feelinks of der bolt soltcher boy, der hero of all Africa, der loof of all der laties."

The Baron was a simple Pole by birth and inclination, the title was purely complimentary. He was a short, tubby man of thirty, and played a deafening brass instrument in a theatre orchestra for a bare living. The piano in the front room was his, he was the responsible man in the presence of the landlord. By reason of his steady billet and the financial stability a regular wage conferred he carried more weight in the Hut than his frivolous character, his limited inches, and his Dago-like indifference to Anglo-Saxon conventions could be held to support.

"Come down," groaned the lieutenant—"come down, you despicable Pole, you poor stick, or—or——" Bob made a threatening movement.

The Baron stepped down, one large, splay foot in the lieutenant's hair. "All ride, all ride," he said. "Eeef you weel mislay your bed all oafer der house like a sauccpicious cat, what iss it you expect but to get der tail trod on to?" The Baron stood grinning at Bob, an elfin figure, like a podgy Thor minus the whiskers, in copious pyjamas that had seen long service, and were patterned like a hotel wallpaper, the nether section of which he held on with a deft twist of the left hand. The grin faded, and a touching sympathy settled on his singularly mobile visage. "Dit you giff der poor boy some pier, Fryer?" he asked. He seized the bottle, drained its remaining gill into the crippled cup, and administered the dose, raising Bob's head after the manner of a fond mother with her child. Bob mourned in profound self-commiseration.

"That's right, make a mummy's boy of it. Pet it instead of putting in the boot. I didn't get a wink of sleep through his amorous howlings. Who's going to hold my hand, and comfort me with strong drink?" It was Inglis, feather-headed, bedraggled, bitter with his bed, but reluctant to leave it.

"Ah, well," pleaded the Baron, "we wass all young once or twice." He raised Bob. "Der was hydropathic cures for der ill dot man endures. I treat you mit der Melbourne water supply." He helped Bob out, seated him in the large, sunken sink under the tap by the kitchen door, and turned the tap on his head.

Bob took his bath like a Briton. "Soap us, won't you, old man?" he pleaded, looking out through the curtain of spray. The faithful Pole produced a half bar of yellow soap, and setting to work on Bob converted him into a snow-white, saponaceous mass on to which the Yan Yean played again, and washed out a new man. Fryer made shrill, house-wifely complaint about the splash, and a rude little boy thrust his head in at the back gate, and passed familiar and derisive remarks, but Bob arose, a warrior refreshed, and already the prospect of having to entertain the comely widow, and the necessity of earning the wherewithal by cumbersome literary effort had lost half their terrors. Jan Strikowski supplied a vigorous massage with a rough towel, and then washed his own visible parts gingerly in half a pint in a tin.

"Dot iss 'ow eet iss," explained Jan Strikowski, "virtuous men who dreenk water oscape de necessidy of unpleasant external excess."