FullReads

G. (Uneasily.) We were little more than boys then. Can’t you see, Jack, how things stand? ‘Tisn’t as if we were serving for our bread. We’ve all of us, more or less, got the filthy lucre. I’m luckier than some, perhaps. There’s no call for me to serve on.

M. None in the world for you or for us, except the Regimental. If you don’t choose to answer to that, of course–

G. Don’t be too hard on a man. You know that a lot of us only take up the thing for a few years and then go back to Town and catch on with the rest.

M. Not lots, and they aren’t some of Us.

G. And then there are one’s affairs at Home to be considered–my place and the rents, and all that. I don’t suppose my father can last much longer, and that means the title, and so on.

M. ‘Fraid you won’t be entered in the Stud Book correctly unless you go Home? Take six months, then, and come out in October. If I could slay off a brother or two, I s’pose I should be a Marquis of sorts. Any fool can be that; but it needs men, Gaddy–men like you–to lead flanking squadrons properly. Don’t you delude yourself into the belief that you’re going Home to take your place and prance about among pink-nosed Kabuli dowagers. You aren’t built that way. I know better.

G. A man has a right to live his life as happily as he can. You aren’t married.

M. No–praise be to Providence and the one or two women who have had the good sense to jawab me.

G. Then you don’t know what it is to go into your own room and see your wife’s head on the pillow, and when everything else is safe and the house shut up for the night, to wonder whether the roof-beams won’t give and kill her.

M. (Aside.) Revelations first and second! (Aloud.) So-o! I knew a man who got squiffy at our Mess once and confided to me that he never helped his wife on to her horse without praying that she’d break her neck before she came back. All husbands aren’t alike, you see.

G. What on earth has that to do with my case? The man must ha’ been mad, or his wife as bad as they make ’em.

M. (Aside.) ‘No fault of yours if either weren’t all you say. You’ve forgotten the tune when you were insane about the Herriott woman. You always were a good hand at forgetting. (Aloud.) Not more mad than men who go to the other extreme. Be reasonable, Gaddy. Your roof-beams are sound enough.

G. That was only a way of speaking. I’ve been uneasy and worried about the Wife ever since that awful business three years ago–when–I nearly lost her. Can you wonder?

M. Oh, a shell never falls twice in the same place. You’ve paid your toll to misfortune–why should your wife be picked out more than anybody else’s?

G. I can talk just as reasonably as you can, but you don’t understand–you don’t understand. And then there’s The Butcha. Deuce knows where the Ayah takes him to sit in the evening! He has a bit of a cough. Haven’t you noticed it?

M. Bosh! The Brigadier’s jumping out of his skin with pure condition. He’s got a muzzle like a rose-leaf and the chest of a two-year-old. What’s demoralised you?

G. Funk. That’s the long and the short of it. Funk!

M. But what is there to funk?

G. Everything. It’s ghastly.

M. Ah! I see.

You don’t want to fight,
And by Jingo when we do,
You’ve got the kid, you’ve got the Wife,
You’ve got the money, too.

That’s about the case, eh?

G. I suppose that’s it. But it’s not for myself. It’s because of them. At least I think it is.

M. Are you sure? Looking at the matter in a cold-blooded light, the Wife is provided for even if you were wiped out to-night. She has an ancestral home to go to, money, and the Brigadier to carry on the illustrious name.