Baylebridge — An Anzac Muster: Captain Bill
Chapter Four of Baylebridge's 'An Anzac Muster' — Captain Bill
This is chapter four of An Anzac Muster. Chapter three may be found here:
CAPTAIN BILL
AMONG those officers that carried arms with our forces, not a few there were who set little store by those nice tricks of taste affected by some. They were just as much unspoilt as they were men good at need. They would walk in where they would, and sit down there, like free men, at home. Some came out of the bush; they were right splinters of ironbark. Because of all this, it may be, it fell sometimes that privates too, up in Cairo upon leave, would put up stars, and go in, for the joke, and push well about, among the larger sorts there, from generals down. Nor did these jesters always sing soft: one gave himself out a colonel, and carried it with a hand so high, he got credit in the town for nigh upon a thousand pounds.
There was a man named Palmer; he went over to Egypt with the Queenslanders; he go up to this joke. Thinking to do as well as he might, he put up three stars. He was a rough man, and had seen little of the inside of towns.
Now, having made a long day of it, he thought to finish up with a dinner the best he had ever come by. So he went into the Golden Fleece, the largest hotel in that city, and was shown in to a table, and sat down to it just as the cooks there were serving up those things he had so great a mind for.
Not far from this man’s table, and well within earshot, sat three subalterns; and beside them again, at another table, a major had sat down. These subalterns belonged to some English regiment; they looked a poor sort of man — they were, it may be, from Suvla. When this man Palmer walked in these three officers picked him out at once. He had a white linen collar on, stiff with starch; it looked out of place, and drew all eyes there upon him. As far as they could make out, he had never till then sat down to a meal in a place of that kind.
Listen, now, and you will hear how Palmer got on. First, then, he sits down; but, whether or not it as done with the grace rather of a dancing master than a bull with a close-stool, who shall doubt? He sat there hard, out of ease, as if he were stuck clean through with a stake. In between courses, gaps that he would have cared little to be rid of, he would twirl up his moustache, smooth his hair down upon his head, and glare about him fierce as a hurt lion. It may be he thought this a thing needful to get and keep some dignity upon him. But, above all, he cursed his hands. He had, it seemed then, not a dozen hands, not a hundred hands, but a thousand hands — hands without end. He was hard put to it to keep all those hands busy.
Now, as he sat thus, those subalterns made many a sour jest about it. They would look over his way, crack their joke, and grin softly among themselves. This soldier took it much to heart; he would right gladly then have put himself out of mind.
As the courses came on, he would look privily to make out how the others there shaped at them; but, for all that, he not seldom lost his labour. He would take the food from the dishes wrong, then eat it wrong. He took great helpings of tart dishes and stuff to egg on the stomach, and then, to make out he had known what he was about, he would push on bravely till all was done with; his sweet spoon went plump into his soup; he bit first upon the hard end of his asparagus. He had no skill at small helpings; taking more of the first than he could well settle for, the best dishes, that came on last, he must leave. In short, there was hardly one right thing, so reckoned, but he must do it wrong. This, indeed, was his own guess; and at last, right tired of it, he wanted for nothing so much as to get it all done with, so that he might praised God and clear off.
Now, when this had gone on for some time, the major, seeing those subalterns at such pains to make out a bad case for this captain, could put up with it no longer. His face went hot with rage. Throwing down his napkin, he got up, went over, and sat down quietly beside them. He then said these words:
‘Is not this an ill jest — to think a man less than his clothes? to see virtue and its converse in the way he takes his food? If you would see with a right eye, keep it fixed first upon the man himself, and not upon his use in trifles. Men will say, as the eye looks, so looks the mind. Moreover, let me remind you, those who live by keeping countenance in small matters do not commonly have force in great ones. Nay, it were better that a man knew too little about mean forms than too much; for, to repeat it, if he have a genius for these, he is, for the most part, too light for affairs of any pith and weight.’
This major paused a moment. Then, when those subalterns had had time to digest his words, he went on:
‘Hear, now, another truth. Who comes fresh to honour at his own hand had need of parts, none more so: not for noting is this man a captain. Against that, you, it may be, as not seldom shows, sitting soft in a seat made for you, have lost (if, indeed, you ever had much) the first edge of your resolution; and thus it falls out that envy squints his way in the guise of contempt. Honour, being, in the nature of things, exposed, is ever a butt for the bad attention of fools. Forget not, too, that to tilt at trifles is but a trick by which the small would keep themselves in face.
‘Leave, then,’ he continued, looking sternly at them, ‘to comfort yourselves with the vanity of this contrast. Think not this man comes worst from it; he does not, and the less so in that, if he had not already reached up to honour, you would have given him leave, both in his person and in his acts, to be his own man.’
This major got more red because of the heat there. He drew a great handkerchief from his sleeve, and mopped, as hard as he might, at his face. He then went on in these words:
‘Ill gains by going; but good parts are enough at their first setting out. And if this captain has come into this habit of life late, and sits out of ease in it, his first habit, it may well be, if one could but know it, was not because of this less good. Moreover, if there lie a fault here, does it not belong rather to inexpedience than to anything by nature bad? And a fault in that kind is as easy to put right as one in this kind is hard. Give him but time, then, to put a meet form upon his place. Be, each of you, that well-bred person which you, by your too-nice regard, pretend he is not.’
This major then went off. Those subalterns had little to say to those shrewd words of his.
As for that soldier, he took this for a great jest. He had sharp ears on him, and missed little of what passed. On his telling the joke over later on to a mate in camp, this mate said, grinning:
‘That major, Bill, was good stuff.’
‘Ay,’ said Bill, ‘whatever he meant was well meant; but, as for those other cows, God strike them! they gave me the fair squirts!’
***
AS Hoppy Joe brought his tale to an end, there was none there but laughed freely. Even the Colonel found it too much for his habitual reserve. As for the Squatter, he made no scruple about laughing with the best.
‘By the Lord,’ he exclaimed, ‘that, too, was well told!’
‘And yet,’ said the Colonel, who had hardly expected this from Hoppy, ‘might not some swear that Joe, in letting us down thus — the rogue! — had ended the run on his wrong foot?’
But the Squatter would have none of that.
‘Many,’ he replied, ‘would vow that our friend knew very well how to salt his meat. That bit of bathos, to me at least, was delicious.’
More followed in a like vein; nor, though his good-will had been so grossly misdirected, did they forget to extol that major for his pithy speech to those subalterns.
‘And now,’ said the Colonel, as the talk died off, ‘we shall have something from an artist. For you must know,’ he went on, turning to the Squatter, ‘that the Sergeant has attained print many times, and is read from York down to Wilson’s.’
The Squatter, having heard the unpolished tales of these rough fellows, and remembering, too, the tales he had seen in print, had his own thoughts about the hall-mark conferred by the Press. He had been curious in what made the difference between the two kinds of narrative, the printed and the spoken, and of this hoped now to gather some further hint.
‘We shall hear it gladly,’ he answered; and the Sergeant, needing no more encouragement, told his tale thus.