The Rough Road Part 19

"Why don't you talk to the poor body? She's a respectable girl enough.

Where's the harm?"

"Go 'square-pus.h.i.+ng'?" said Doggie contemptuously, using the soldiers'

slang for walking about with a young woman. "No, thank you."

"And why not? I'm not counselling you, laddie, to plunge into a course of sensual debauchery. But a wee bit gossip with a pretty innocent girl----"

"My dear good chap," Doggie interrupted, "what on earth should I have in common with her?"

"Youth."

"I feel as old as h.e.l.l," said Doggie bitterly.

"You'll be feeling older soon," replied Phineas, "and able to look down on h.e.l.l with feelings of superiority."

Doggie walked on in silence for a few paces. Then he said:

"A thing I can't understand is this mania for picking up girls--just to walk about the streets with them. It's so inane. It's a disease."

"Did you ever consider," said Phineas, "how in a station less exalted than that which you used to adorn, the young of opposite s.e.xes manage to meet, select and marry? Man, the British Army's going to be a grand education for you in sociology."

"Well, at any rate, you don't suppose I'm going to select and marry out of the street?"

"You might do worse," said Phineas. Then, after a slight pause, he asked: "Have you any news lately from Durdlebury?"

"Confound Durdlebury!" said Doggie.

Phineas checked him with one hand and waved the other towards a hostelry on the other side of the street. "If you will give me the money in advance, so as to evade the ungenerous spirit of the no-treating law, you can stand me a quart of ale at the Crown and Sceptre and join me in drinking to its confusion."

So they entered the saloon bar of the public-house. Doggie drank a gla.s.s of beer while Phineas swallowed a couple of pints. Two or three other soldiers were there, in whose artless talk McPhail joined l.u.s.tily. Doggie, un.o.btrusive at the end of the bar, maintained a desultory and uncomfortable conversation with the barmaid, who was of the florid and hearty type, about the weather.

Some days later, McPhail again made allusion to Durdlebury. Doggie again confounded it.

"I don't want to hear of it or think of it," he exclaimed, in his nervous way, "until this filthy horror is over. They want me to get leave and go down and stay. They're making my life miserable with kindness. I wish they'd let me alone. They don't understand a little bit. I want to get through this thing alone, all by myself."

"I'm sorry I persuaded you to join a regiment in which you were inflicted with the disadvantage of my society," said Phineas.

Doggie threw out an impatient arm. "Oh, you don't count," said he.

A few minutes afterwards, repenting his brusqueness, he tried to explain to Phineas why he did not count. The others knew nothing about him. Phineas knew everything.

"And you know everything about Phineas," said McPhail grimly. "Ay, ay, laddie," he sighed, "I ken it all. When you're in Tophet, a sympathetic Tophetuan with a wee drop of the milk of human kindness is more comfort than a radiant angel who showers down upon you, from the celestial Fortnum and Mason's, potted shrimps and caviare."

The sombreness cleared for a moment from Doggie's young brow.

"I never can make up my mind, Phineas," said he, "whether you're a very wise man or an awful fraud."

"Give me the benefit of the doubt, laddie," replied McPhail. "It's the grand theological principle of Christianity."

Time went on. The regiment was moved to the East Coast. On the journey a Zeppelin raid paralysed the railway service. Doggie spent the night under the lee of the bookstall at Waterloo Station. Men huddled up near him, their heads on their kit-bags, slept and snored. Doggie almost wept with pain and cold and hatred of the Kaiser. On the East Coast much the same life as on the South, save that the wind, as if Hun-sent, found its way more savagely to the skin.

Then suddenly came the news of a large draft for France, which included both McPhail and Shendish. They went away on leave. The gladness with which he welcomed their return showed Doggie how great a part they played in his new life. In a day or two they would depart G.o.d knew whither, and he would be left in dreadful loneliness. Through him the two men, the sentimental c.o.c.kney fishmonger and the wastrel Cambridge graduate, had become friends. He spent with them all his leisure time.

Then one of the silly tragi-comedies of life occurred. McPhail got drunk in the crowded bar of a little public-house in the village. It was the last possible drink together of the draft and their pals. The draft was to entrain before daybreak on the morrow. It was a foolish, singing, shouting khaki throng. McPhail, who had borrowed ten pounds from Doggie, in order to see him through the hards.h.i.+ps of the Front, established himself close by the bar and was drinking whisky. He was also distributing surrept.i.tious sixpences and s.h.i.+llings into eager hands, which would convert them into alcohol for eager throats.

Doggie, anxious, stood by his side. The spirit from which McPhail had for so long abstained, mounted to his unaccustomed brain. He began to hector, and, master of picturesque speech, he compelled an admiring audience. Doggie did not realize the extent of his drunkenness until, vaunting himself as a Scot and therefore the salt of the army, he picked a quarrel with a stolid Hamps.h.i.+re giant, who professed to have no use for Phineas's fellow-countrymen. The men closed. Suddenly some one shouted from the doorway:

"Be quiet, you fools! The A.P.M.'s coming down the road."

Now the a.s.sistant Provost Marshal, if he heard h.e.l.l's delight going on in a tavern, would naturally make an inquisitorial appearance. The combatants were separated. McPhail threw a s.h.i.+lling on the bar counter and demanded another whisky. He was about to lift the gla.s.s to his lips when Doggie, terrified as to what might happen, knocked the gla.s.s out of his hand.

"Don't be an a.s.s," he cried.

Phineas was very drunk. He gazed at his old pupil, took off his cap, and, stretching over the bar, hung it on the handle of a beer-pull.

Then, staggering back, he pointed an accusing finger.

"He has the audacity to call me an a.s.s. Little blinking Marmaduke Doggie Trevor. Little Doggie Trevor, whom I trained up from infancy in the way he shouldn't go----"

"Why Doggie Trevor?" some one shouted in inquiry.

"Never mind," replied Phineas with drunken impressiveness. "My old friend Marmaduke has spilled my whisky and called me an a.s.s. I call him Doggie, little Doggie Trevor. You all bear witness he knocked the drink out of my mouth. I'll never forgive him. He doesn't like being called Doggie--and I've no--no pred'lex'n to be called an a.s.s. I'll be thinking I'm going just to strangle him."

He struck out his bony claws towards the shrinking Doggie; but stout arms closed round him and a h.o.r.n.y hand was clamped over his mouth, and they got him through the bar and the back parlour into the yard, where they pumped water on his head. And when the A.P.M. and his satellites pa.s.sed by, the quiet of The Whip in Hand was the holy peace of a nunnery.

Doggie and Mo Shendish and a few other staunch souls got McPhail back to quarters without much trouble. On parting, the delinquent, semi-sobered, shook Doggie by the hand and smiled with an air of great affection.

"I've been verra drunk, laddie. And I've been angry with you for the first time in my life. But when you knocked the gla.s.s out of my hand I thought you were in danger of losing your good manners in the army.

We'll have many a pow-wow together when you join me out there."

The matter would have drifted out of Doggie's mind as one of no importance had not the detested appellation by which Phineas hailed him struck the imagination of his comrades. It filled a long-felt want, no nickname for Private J. M. Trevor having yet been invented.

Doggie Trevor he was and Doggie Trevor he remained for the rest of his period of service. He resigned himself to the inevitable. The sting had gone out of the name through his comrades' ignorance of its origin. But he loathed it as much as ever; it sounded in his ears an everlasting reproach.

In spite of the ill turn done in drunkenness, Doggie missed McPhail.

He missed Mo Shendish, his more constant companion, even more. Their place was in some degree taken, or rather usurped, for it was without Doggie's volition, by "Taffy" Jones, once clerk to a firm of outside bookmakers. As Doggie had never seen a racecourse, had never made a bet, and was entirely ignorant of the names even of famous Derby winners, Taffy regarded him as an astonis.h.i.+ng freak worth the attention of a student of human nature. He began to cultivate Doggie's virgin mind by aid of reminiscence, and of such racing news as was to be found in the _Sportsman_. He was a garrulous person and Doggie a good listener. To please him Doggie backed horses, through the old firm, for small sums. The fact of his being a man of large independent means both he and Phineas (to his credit) had kept a close secret, his clerkly origin divined and promulgated by Mo Shendish being unquestioningly accepted, so the bets proposed by Taffy were of a modest nature. Once he brought off a forty to one chance. Taffy rushed to him with the news, dancing with excitement. Doggie's stoical indifference to the winning of twenty pounds, a year's army pay, gave him cause for great wonder. As Doggie showed similar equanimity when he lost, Taffy put him down as a born sportsman. He began to admire him tremendously.

This friends.h.i.+p with Taffy is worth special record, for it was indirectly the cause of a little revolution in Doggie's regimental life. Taffy was an earnest though indifferent performer on the penny whistle. It was his constant companion, the solace of his leisure moments and one of the minor tortures of Doggie's existence. His version of the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_ was peculiarly excruciating.

One day, when Taffy was playing it with dreadful variations of his own to an admiring group in the Y.M.C.A. hut, Doggie, his nerves rasped to the raw by the false notes and maddening intervals, s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of his hand and began to play himself. Hitherto, shrinking morbidly from any form of notoriety, he had shown no sign of musical accomplishment.

But to-day the musician's impulse was irresistible. He played the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_ as no one there had heard it on penny whistle before.

The hut recognized a master's touch, for Doggie was a fine executant musician. When he stopped there was a roar: "Go on!" Doggie went on.

They kept him whistling till the hut was crowded.

Thenceforward he was penny-whistler, by excellence, to the battalion.

He whistled himself into quite a useful popularity.

CHAPTER XI