Читать книгу Royal Regiment - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 9
Оглавление§ 1
“Driver I.C.”, grinned Noakes, wiping the beer drops from his waxed moustache with a brown silk handkerchief. “That’s all I’ve been promoted to. Stands for internal combustion, in case you don’t know it, Snowy.”
Bombardier Baker—an old acquaintance—with whom he was drinking, laughed:
“You always were a card. And a foxy one. No stripes for you. But you won’t find things so easy when you’re told to put your civvies on”.
“Won’t I? That’s all you know. Getting married then. Nice a bit of skirt as ever you saw. Youngish too. Not more’n thirty-five. Her dad runs a pub. Hoxton way. Be with her now by rights. I believe in keeping an eye on me own property, especially these times. But old Rusty, he kept me hanging about all day yesterday, and here we are still, with his kit packed and all. Have one with me?”
“Don’t mind if I do, being Saturday.”
In the meantime Noakes’ battery commander—after three more hours of work with his colleague at the Arsenal—was glad of a gin and It.
§ 2
Rusty Rockingham wore a plain blue suit, a stiff collar and a black necktie. He drank alone, standing by his great uncle’s picture; but his mind was still preoccupied with ballistic problems and he scarcely gave the picture a thought. It seemed unimportant too—though, on occasions, he could be pernickety about food—which meat dish, which vegetables he chose from the three heated steel serving tables before carrying them into the alcove room, and seating himself, again alone.
“Struck a snag with that shutter axis pin, now”, he brooded. “Damn.”
Presently a brace of young subalterns—they also carrying their own dishes according to the custom of the mess—joined him.
“Good morning, sir”, said one of them; and the other, who had not recognised him for a field officer in his mufti, repeated the formula.
He inquired their names, memorised them, and the two faces—one keen, a little gaunt, light of hair and blue of eye; the other, more intellectual perhaps, but slower of uptake, and bespectacled. Then he asked a few more questions, and smiled as he drew the pair into conversation. For he was always a good mixer—with men.
The desultory talk cleared his brain of mechanics. A waiter brought cheese and biscuits. He finished eating, and went back—altogether unaware of the favourable impression he had left behind him—to the anteroom, where he glanced through The Gunner while he drank his coffee.
Outside, a winter sun was shining. He remembered Mary Hawkins; frowned; looked at his wristwatch; decided, “Mother won’t expect me till half-past four at the earliest”, and went for his hat.
The brass mortars in the outer hall always intrigued his imagination. Staring at them, he thought, “We’ve lengthened the range a bit since those days”. But this thought—he knew—was only a temporary refuge. Confound Mary. Why remember her? He and she were through with each other. Unless ...
He strolled through the glass door into the open air. From under the great centre archway, over which the Union Jack flies and the Royal Arms are carved in browning stone, issued a knot of bandsmen. The sight of their pre-war red and blue pleased him. He stood to watch while the bandmaster posed them on a wooden platform for the photographer.
On the railed green, beyond the parade ground, a football match had just begun. He crossed the asphalt; and watched for a while, thinking, “It oughtn’t to be so difficult to get men for the army. They have a jolly good time nowadays, and their pay’s double what it used to be”.
Not that the Royal Regiment found it as difficult to secure recruits as the infantry. Still ...
Mixed with the cheers which had just greeted a fine save, a sentence of the Hawk’s recurred to him, “We were a handful against the continental armies when the last show started. We shan’t count as much as a pinch of snuff next time”.
“But there won’t be a next time”, he tried to reassure himself.
There might be though.
It took only one lunatic to put a match to a powder magazine.
And suddenly, on that last thought, Rusty Rockingham experienced the need for prayer.
Years now, since one had experienced that need with such urgence! One still prayed, of course. But only on Sundays, in the correct place, in church. And latterly one had not been quite so regular in one’s attendance at church, because most of one’s Sundays had been spent with Mary.
Well—he would have plenty of time for churchgoing now!
§ 3
Frowning once more, and in an unwonted confusion of mind, Rockingham turned his back on the game. The sun still shone, illuminating this familiar building—beautiful to a man who loved symmetry, with its long many-windowed façade only pierced, in the exact centre, by the great archway; and its two triangular cornices—this one holding the black and gold clock, that one holding the black and gold wind-indicator—to relieve the parallel lines of its roof.
At ground level, too, the architect of this building had designed for symmetry. The same number of low white pillars supported the various entrances, all set at regular intervals each from each.
“Pity we glassed the mess ones in”, he mused. “Pity they must have that electric sign over the entrance to the theatre.”
But again the musing was only a temporary refuge. Pray, he must.
He walked on, by the high square-topped stone which commemorates the two Dicksons (father who served in the Peninsular, son who won his Victoria Cross in the Crimea) and that bronze figure of a woman above whose head is written, “Honor to the Dutiful and Brave”.
There he stopped, wondering—as always—at the queer spelling of that word, “Honor”.
“Looks a bit American”, he caught himself thinking; and once more the name “Camilla” flashed itself across the screenboard of his brain.
Automatically, to this flash, ideas began to associate themselves. Long ago he had memorised a poem about a girl with that name.
“For some exam or other”, memory suggested. But by then he was approaching that old piece of artillery on whose muzzle his father had straddled him years before he went to the Shop, laughing:
“Never mind if he does make his clothes in a mess, Mabelle, my dear. Uncle Marmaduke’s orders are that he’s to be photographed on the Great Gun of Bhurtpoor”.
The eldest of Brigadier-General Humphrey Rockingham’s four sons, of whom the youngest lies near his father in the cemetery at Abbeville, could have drawn that age-greened gun blindfold. He knew every sinuous line of the tiger which forms its trail, of the elephant’s head which forms part of its cradle.
He knew the history of its capture, too; and better than any man living. Because his great-uncle Marmaduke had been one of those who marched with Lord Combermere from Agra, eleven years before Queen Victoria came to the throne.
“Marvellous old chap”, he fell to brooding. “Seventeen then—and he didn’t die till the Boer War was over. Ninety-four not out.”
He came right up to the gun. As his fingers touched the metal, he seemed to see his great-uncle’s very face, red rimmed of eye and enormous of moustache; to hear that sonorous voice, with never a crack in it, telling him:
“You should have seen the Sixteenth and Skinner’s Horse charge the Jats, my boy. War was something like war in my time ... Brave fellows, those Jats. They didn’t hide behind a kopje and pot at one from a thousand yards. These Boers! I’d show ’em what’s what if I had the old battery out in South Africa. Maybe you’ll command the old battery one day, my boy. They still call us the Turbans, after that major of ours—be shot if I can remember his right name now—we always called him ‘Thunderbox’—who ran out and picked up one of the Jat turbans after the Sixteenth came back. Swore he’d wear it till we’d taken the place, too, did Thunderbox. Awful language that man used. Not fit for a young lad’s ears”.
And now that “young lad” was actually commanding the Turban battery.
Queer!
§ 4
“Not like me to sentimentalise”, thought Rockingham, still fingering the green metal. “Bloodthirsty old devil, Uncle Marmaduke. Only left me his money on condition I got my commission in the Regiment. ‘War was something like war’ indeed! All very well for his generation. But nowadays ... My God, supposing the Hawk’s right. Supposing they jump on us before we’re ready.”
And once again that extraordinary need for prayer gripped him, turning his eyes to the Garrison Church.
“Don’t expect they keep it open all day”, he caught himself thinking. “Never troubled to find out. Ugly kind of edifice anyway. No spire. And that belfry looks like an afterthought.”
But already his feet were moving him across the road.
He came, walking more slowly than his habit, to the brown stone porch under the centre oriel. The first door he tried resisted him; but the rusted ring of the next one turned easily. Doffing his soft hat, he passed in.
The whole place seemed deserted. He knew it well enough for the curious effect it makes on a newcomer—who might imagine himself in a converted mosque—not to affect him. His eyes went first to the flags and the banners that hang from the arched triforium, backed with red brick, railed in front with thin ironwork; then to the gold mosaic memorials which edge that open gallery.
At once, he read his father’s name.
His need for prayer was overwhelming now. But for a little longer he resisted it, staring up at the regularly painted patterns of the fretted wooden roof, and down from them, along the aisle, at the altarpiece of St. George spearing the dragon.
It was just then that he became aware of the woman, her back towards him, her head bowed in her hands.
The sight of that kneeling figure made him self conscious. He felt as though he were trespassing on this woman’s privacy. But in a moment or so she rose and came by him. He saw that she was of middle age and that her eyes were still wet.
Presently he found himself standing in the pew she had occupied, looking down on the flat stone, on the words, “Mons—Aisne—Marne—Ypres. In sacred memory of our Fallen”.
In another moment or so, he too was on his knees.
