Читать книгу Men, Women and Guns - Sapper - Страница 14

* * * * *

Оглавление

Table of Contents

Now, before I go on to the day when the subject of all this trouble and talk was called on to make good, and how he did it, a few words on the man himself might not be amiss. War, the great forcing house of character, admits no lies. Sooner or later it finds out a man, and he stands in the pitiless glare of truth for what he is. And it is not by any means the cheery hail-fellow-well-met type, or the thruster, or the sportsman, who always pool the most votes when the judging starts...

John Meyrick, before he began to train for the great adventure, had been something in a warehouse down near Tilbury. And "something" is about the best description of what he was that you could give. Moreover there wasn't a dog's chance of his ever being "anything." He used to help the young man—I should say young gentleman—who checked weigh bills at one of the dock entrances. More than that I cannot say, and incidentally the subject is not of surpassing importance. His chief interests in life were contemplating the young gentleman, listening open-mouthed to his views on life, and, dreaming. Especially the latter. Sometimes he would go after the day's work, and, sitting down on a bollard, his eyes would wander over the lines of some dirty tramp, with her dark-skinned crew. Visions of wonderful seas and tropic islands, of leafy palms with the blue-green surf thundering in towards them, of coral reefs and glorious-coloured flowers, would run riot in his brain. Not that he particularly wanted to go and see these figments of his imagination for himself; it was enough for him to dream of them—to conjure them up for a space in his mind by the help of an actual concrete ship—and then to go back to his work of assisting his loquacious companion. He did not find the work uncongenial; he had no hankerings after other modes of life—in fact the thought of any change never even entered into his calculations. What the future might hold he neither knew nor cared; the expressions of his companion on the rottenness of life in general and their firm in particular awoke no answering chord in his breast He had enough to live on in his little room at the top of a tenement house—he had enough over for an occasional picture show—and he had his dreams. He was content.

Then came the war. For a long while it passed him by; it was no concern of his, and it didn't enter his head that it was ever likely to be until one night, as he was going in to see "Jumping Jess, or the Champion Girl Cowpuncher" at the local movies, a recruiting sergeant touched him on the arm.

He was not a promising specimen for a would-be soldier, but that recruiting sergeant was not new to the game, and he'd seen worse.

"Why aren't you in khaki, young fellow me lad?" he remarked genially.

The idea, as I say, was quite new to our friend. Even though that very morning his colleague in the weigh-bill pastime had chucked it and joined, even though he'd heard a foreman discussing who they were to put in his place as "that young Meyrick was habsolutely 'opeless," it still hadn't dawned on him that he might go too. But the recruiting sergeant was a man of some knowledge; in his daily round he encountered many and varied types. In two minutes he had fired the boy's imagination with a glowing and partially true description of the glories of war and the army, and supplied him with another set of dreams to fill his brain. Wasting no time, he struck while the iron was hot, and in a few minutes John Meyrick, sometime checker of weigh-bills, died, and No. 8469, Private John Meyrick, came into being...

But though you change a man's vocation with the stroke of a pen, you do not change his character. A dreamer he was in the beginning, and a dreamer he remained to the end. And dreaming, as I have already pointed out, was not a thing which commended itself to Company-Sergeant-Major Hayton, who in due course became one of the chief arbiters of our friend's destinies. True it was no longer coral islands—but such details availed not with cook's mates and other busy movers in the regimental hive. Where he'd got them from, Heaven knows, those tattered volumes of Kipling; but their matchless spirit had caught his brain and fired his soul, with the result—well, the first of them has been given.

There were more results to follow. Not three days after he was again upon the mat for the same offence, only to say much the same as before.

"I do try, sir—I do try; but some'ow——"

And though in the bottom of his heart the officer believed him, though in a very strange way he felt interested in him, there are limits and there are rules. There comes a time, as he had said, when one can't judge by motives, when one can only judge by results.

"You mustn't only try; you must succeed. Three days to barracks."

Men, Women and Guns

Подняться наверх