Sergeant Nelson of the Guards (28 page)

W
HEN
B
EARSBREATH
is polite, time, for an instant, stands still, and men clear a space. The courtesy of Bearsbreath is as the hiss of an adder. His voice becomes sibilant; his legs grow tense and his hands hang loose. It will turn out better for you if Bearsbreath calls you a stinking dog than if he solicitously enquires after the state of your health. Now, he rises in a tired way and whispers: “I beg your pardon, old man, I’m afraid I didn’t quite get that.”

“I said Bill Nelson was a coward to the bone.”

And Oxley, also, rises.

He is a long, lean man with huge feet and hands; all bone, a giant skeleton bound to last for ever in a network of huge sinews. His face looks, somehow, transparent yet unbreakable, like rhinoceros born … it has the same greyish yellowness and dull shine. There is a white lock in his dry black hair. His nose looks as if God designed it for tearing things. It overshadows a strange jutting mouth with a thin upper lip and a thick lower lip, which protrudes beyond the sullen bony jaw. He has green eyes. He might have been a Quartermaster, by now, only somewhere in his soul there roams an unchained leopard. He never rose above the rank of Lance-Corporal. His patience could stretch up to a certain point; and then it would snap. And whenever Oxley’s patience gives way his right hand comes up like the heel of a wild ass. Once he hit a recruit. On another occasion he hit a Sergeant-Major. So he fell like Lucifer and will not rise again. He knows Bearsbreath, and Bearsbreath’s fighting whisper. As Bearsbreath strolls over to confront him, Oxley walks out to meet that terrifying corporal. Bearsbreath, also,
has a temper. You can smell trouble in the air like an escape of gas. One spark, and there will be a white light and a stunning explosion. But The Budgerigar, who weight eighteen stone, of which not more than seven pounds is superfluous; who, alone among the heavyweights of the Coldstream Guards, once knocked out the man they call Ack-Ack Ackerman—The Budgerigar puts himself between them and says: “Hold it.” There is a certain rasp of authority in the voice of this big simple-minded man. Bearsbreath pauses and says:

“You’re a Guardsman, Oxley, and I’m a corporal. But anybody can have my lousy tapes. I don’t mind being bust for chastising any lousebag that runs down Nelson after he’s dead. Coward? Why, if you are half the coward he was you’d be a hero.”

“Right,” says Oxley, between his teeth, pumping out his words in his violent way, “you say Nelson was a hero and I say he was yeller, get me? Yeller.”

Jack Cattle’s voice, thick and slow, drops like oil upon the menacing surface of the argument. “Everybody’s entitled to speak of people as he finds them. If he happens to be wrong, or right, doesn’t matter. But he’s entitled to expressing opinion. Now why, exactly, do you think Bill Nelson was a coward, Oxley?”

Oxley says: “He was dead scared of me. He avoided me. He run away from me. Isn’t that being yeller? If f’rinstance, you’re having a scrap with a man, and just when you’re beginning to get the better of it he picks up his hat and runs away, isn’t that being a coward? If it isn’t being a coward what is it being? I been wanting to run into Nelson for five years. Only I always missed him. I had a bone to pick with him. I had a fight to finish off. I wanted to finish giving him the coating I started giving him that time when he ran away like a dirty rotten coward.

“You make me sick, all of you, with your bull-and-boloney about poetry and tripe like that. Nelson was tripe. He might have kidded people he was this and that. But I knew him better and I’m telling you,
Nelson was dirty tripe. If you want me to tell you why, I’ll tell you why.”

Silence.

“I knew him ever since he first joined. I knew him at the Depot when he was a recruit. I didn’t like him then and I never did like him. I can tell when there’s something funny about a bloke. I could tell it about Nelson. He was too smarmy. He was too smooth. He talked too bloody much. Ah yes, Nelson was hot on talking, dead hot, but not so bloody hot when it came to doing. We never did hit it off. Mind you, he was always trying to suck up to me. But I wasn’t having any of it. He didn’t kid me, with all his fake good nature and all his smarmy, soppy bull.

“He was underhanded. He was an informer. It was him that got me bust, first time. He was always trying to make himself popular among the recruits. He used to brag about how he never punished anybody. He didn’t have the guts to punish anybody, not straight to anybody’s face. No, he’d go down on his bended knees to a squad of rookies, and say, ‘Do me a favour boys … be good boys … let me tuck you in at night and wipe your little snotty noses for you … oh please be good boys and do what I ask you.’ Is that the way for a Squad Instructor to be? And yet it goes down, it goes down like cream, that sort of dirty rotten, yellow, crawling around. And now nobody can say a bad word about Bill Nelson. Well I can, d’you hear?

“Call me regimental. Right. I
am
regimental. If there’s a recruit that’s got to be put into shape, by Christ he’s got to be put into shape. Say somebody give you a bit of iron to fit on to something, and said: ‘Your orders are, to fit that bit of iron.’ What would you do? You wouldn’t go down on your bended knees to that bit of iron. You wouldn’t stroke it. No. You’d show that bit of iron the shape it had to go to, and you’d knock it round.

“Right. Nobody could ever say I knocked any man about. I chased ’em. And rightly so. I chased ’em till they didn’t know their heads from their heels. Why not? You don’t make a soldier with coddling. You make a soldier, I can tell you, by letting him see he’ll be miserable if he isn’t a soldier, miserable. Right.

“Now. Bearsbreath here——”

“Address me as Corporal, you yellow-bellied son of a fat-faced dog!” says Bearsbreath.

“You? You, as Corporal? Why, I was a Corporal——”

“Okay, Regimental! I can be regimental if I want to be. You’re a Guardsman now. Address me as Corporal, or so help me God I run you inside for insubordination!”

Oxley says: “Corporal Bearsbreath here …”

“That’s better!”

“… Corporal Bearsbreath here says …”

A pause. Oxley is looking for words. Somebody says: “Yes?”

“I forgot what I was going to say,” says Oxley.

“Sure you did. I got regimental. I picked you up. I interrupted. I was hammering you round, Oxley,” says Bearsbreath. “I made you call me Corporal. Well? Go on!”

Oxley bites words off and swallows them, and regurgitates them:

“You can’t handle a rook proper and handle him with kid gloves. There was a bloody dirty-rotten raving idiot called Rivers. Anybody remember Recruit Rivers? He deliberately didn’t do what you told him to do. It was dirty-rotten spite and dirty-filthy-rotten malice. He wanted to make you look small. I stood that bastard for three weeks. If I said
Left,
he went right. If I said
Halt,
he went on. He was trying to get me. He was laying it down for me. I fluffed his game and kept my temper; but I took it out of him in other ways.

“One day Nelson says to me: ‘Leave that kid alone and he’ll do the same as the others do,’ he said. Now that is a lot of bull-and-boloney and dirty-filthy-rotten-lousy poppycock. Let him alone! I says to Nelson: ‘Keep your nose out o’ my squad.’ I says, ‘Arscrawl around your own dirty little squad, but leave mine alone.’ He just laughed, to annoy me. He was always trying to annoy me. I said nothing. I can hold my temper.

“Then it comes the Fourth Week Inspection.

“Now there’s Lieutenant in Number 25 Company called Lieutenant Leffnant. He was a Subaltern. This lousebag Rivers gets through his
foot drill. Then the officer comes round asking questions … how many battalions are there, and when was the Regiment founded? and all that. And he comes to Rivers, and he asks Rivers: ‘Who is the Colonel of the Regiment?’

“And what does this Rivers say? He says: ‘Lieutenant Leffnant.’ So help me God.”

(“Nerves,” says Sergeant Hands.)

“My squad gets through this inspection, but it was boiling in me. This dirty little rotten dog Rivers! And later on I gets him aside and I says: ‘What did you mean by saying Lieutenant Leffnant was Colonel of the Regiment? I’m your Squad Instructor. Were you trying to make a fool of me?’ And he starts to laugh. ‘Stop laughing,’ I says, and shakes him a bit, but he laughs louder still. And then … well, I got self-control, everybody knows I got enough self-control … I says: ‘What’s the joke?’ In my day I’d have been taken back of the latrines and beaten to death, pretty well. ‘What’s the joke?’ I says, and this Rivers swine laughs all the more. So I smacks him in the face. I lets him have a smack in the face. Not a punch: a smack, with my flat hand. And he shuts up this giggling, and he starts to shake again. Then he has hysterics like a woman. He pretends to go into hysterics. So I shakes him again and says, ‘Shut up!’ Then he laughs all the louder, and I lose my temper a bit and bop him in the stomach, and he falls down. He lies there laughing and crying, and just then Nelson comes by.

“He looks at me, and he goes and picks this kite up, and he strokes him like a dirty-rotten cat, and says, ‘There, there,’ and gives him a fag. Then he says to this Rivers: ‘You’ve got to report this, Rivers.’ He didn’t ask whether Rivers wanted to report it. He
ordered
him to report me for striking him. And Rivers did.

“Then Nelson said to me: ‘What you want is a team o’ mules, Oxley, not a squad o’ kids.’

“I said: ‘We’ll talk about this later, you rotten-lousy-stinking officers’ pet, you.’ He said: ‘Okay.’ And I was for Orders. Believe me when I tell
you? Nelson—so help me God Almighty—give evidence against me. And I was bust. And I got fourteen days.

“I looked for Nelson for a long time after that. I wanted to get him alone. I wanted to paralyse him. Who wouldn’t? Answer me that. And so it comes round to wintertime, November. I was at a point near Caterham. I remember the date. It was two days before Armistice Day, in 1937, November 9th. I was in Purley, on an evening off. I had a drink in the ‘Jolly Farmers,’ and I went to see a picture. I came out of this picture and went into the ‘Railway‚’ and who should I see there but Nelson.

“I said to Nelson: ‘I want to talk to you.’

“He said: ‘Go ahead.’

I said: ‘Not here.’

“‘Private?’ he said. I said it was private.

“And I said: ‘Will you have it here, or will you step a little way away?’ I said, ‘Cause I’m going to give you something I owe you.’

“He says: ‘Oh-oh’ … just like that. ‘Oh-oh.’ He’s drinking a pint, and he leaves it. He says: ‘Look here,’ he says. ‘Get this over. I don’t want to fight you. Especially tonight, I don’t. You done wrong, and it’s paid off. Forget it,’ he says. ‘But don’t drag me into a fight tonight,’ he says.

“I tell him: ‘There won’t be no tomorrow. We’re different places. And so help me God in Heaven, if you don’t come with me I’ll start on you now, and I don’t care if it means fifty-six days. I don’t care if it means fifty-six years,’ I says.

“He says: ‘Lay off of me.’

“I says: ‘I should think so. I been looking for you for ages. And we settle this now.’

“He says: ‘Settle what? What’ll a smack in the teeth settle?’

“‘Yellow,’ I says.

“‘No,’ he says. ‘But I can’t start anything now.’

“‘You’re a dirty coward,’ I says, ‘and if you don’t walk over the
common
with me, I’ll let you have it on this spot.’

“‘Right‚’ he says.

“We walk. We gets over the Common. I say: ‘Ready?’ He says: ‘Be quick‚’ and we starts.

“We goes on for five minutes. I put him down three times. He puts me down twice. We clinch, and he starts fighting dirty. He used his head. He used his knees. But I had him going. He tripped me up, and when I went down he lets me have one with his elbow on the chin. But I was mad, I was going good. After about another five minutes, we slow down. I got him again, and he got me. Then I went all out, and put him down twice more. The second time, he asks me to postpone the fight. ‘Make it another day, Oxley,’ he says. I says: ‘Now.’

“I stands back. I lets him get up, because I don’t fight dirty like Nelson. He would of got me if he could, on or off the ground. Not me. Me, I stand back, and he gets up on one knee.

“Then, you’ll never believe what he done. You think he’s a hero. Oh yes, a hero. Oh sure, a bloody hero. Not half a hero! He reaches out a hand, and grabs his cap, and picks up his belt, and he’s off. So help me God! He runs! He runs off in the dark, fast as his legs will carry him, in and out of the bushes, running like mad.

“Yes, he run.

“I followed him as well as I could. But he was quicker on his legs than me. He needed to be. He wanted to be a quicker runner than me! He got away.

“And he might be a hero here. Oh, yes, he might be a bloody V.C. round this place. But I know I fought him and he broke and run. I didn’t catch up with him again. But I waited my time. Well, all right, so he’s dead now. I wish nobody dead. But don’t make him out a hero. Don’t make out Nelson was a God or a Saint. No, because I know a thing or two about him. Run him down? I run him down when he was alive, didn’t I? Then why should I start crying over him for a hero when he’s dead?

“He run away from me. He run like a rabbit.

“Well?”

Butcher the Butcher turns away from the wall.

“You said Purley, Oxley?”

“You heard what I said. I said Purley.”

“You said 1937?”

“1937.”

“Two days before Armistice Day was what you said?”

“I did. Well?”

“That’d make it November 9th, 1937.”

“Well?”

“What time at night?”

“About nine.”

Butcher the Butcher sits up, and says: “November nine, 1937, nineish at night, eh? Oh. Then just you listen to me …”

B
UTCHER THE BUTCHER
becomes fluent again. He can drop words as an egg-boiler lets out sand. Now, there being something in his heart, he grows eloquent. The voice of Butcher is commensurate with his bulk. It is a great, deep, meaty, bloodshot voice. You are surprised to hear it dance so fast from word to word. His talk is strong and heavy, yet quick. He is a wrestler in language.

He says:

“Nine, eleven, thirty-seven, eh? And the time …” He pauses, like a prosecuting counsel. “The time was about nine.

“You sour-faced liar! You slanderer and perjurer and taker-away of men’s names! Bill Nelson could have smashed you and whopped you to tomato sauce, given time. You put him down. All right, you put Bill down. Okay! Okay! Dempsey’s been put down! Yes, Luis Firpo, the Wild Bull of the Pampas, put Jack Dempsey down and right out of the ring—but Jack Dempsey came roaring back like a wild tiger, and he killed Firpo stone stark dead, he did. And so would Nelson have done you, you grousing mug! Oh, don’t start giving me looks, Oxley! I know you’re tough. But I’m none so stinking soft! You was getting the better of Bill. Yes, maybe. I don’t deny it. Firpo was getting the better of Dempsey, but it took seventeen hundred doctors and fifty thousand priests to stick Firpo together agen when Dempsey had done with him. Do you think, you louse-bound twit, that you’re getting the better of a man if you put that man down for a second! Shullup and lemme talk! Lemme getta word in edgeways. Why, Jesus Almighty, you could of put Bill Nelson down with a twenty-eight pound sledge. You could of
put Bill down with a Numane Killer, with a dripping great pole-axe, you could of. But if it’d been a fight he wanted to win, he’d ’ve got up and wan it! I know. I saw Bill in the Milling Contest with Dusty Smith, Dagwood over there, and Sarnt Hands. I saw Bill Nelson fight many and many a time. You’re bigger. Oxley. You weigh three stone more. But Bill had a spirit you never saw in your life. You got temper. Bill had spirit.

“And you of all people are telling me of all people on this dirty-filthy earth, that Bill Nelson ran away from you on the ninth of November, in the year of all bleeding years 1937.

“You! Me!

“I never knew he met you that night. I never knew until this very moment that Bill met you that night. Strike me down dead into the earth. I never knew. But I do know somebody else Bill met on that very same night, on or about that very same time. And I have documents in my very pocket to prove the words I say, and all men can step forward and bear witness!

“It’s a thing I wouldn’t have talked about, because it’s a private thing, do you see? It’s a thing that’s nobody’s business but mine, because it concerns me and my private life. On this very earth and no other, only Bill Nelson knew about it. He was my pal in the old days, and my pal always. I wish to God I’d died with Bill Nelson, but that wasn’t the way it had to be.

“Listen to me. Everybody listen to me. Oxley here says Bill Nelson was yeller. It’s a lie. It’s a dirty lie and I’ll say so to Oxley’s face, or in the face of the C.O. himself now or before the throne of God.

“Listen. I was in the butchery business, and I had a very nice job. I was a manager. I was in a nice position, and knocked up a decent screw. I was going to get a business of my own. I knew Bill Nelson in those days, when he was just sort of drifting into the Army, and I was working my way up in business. Then, God forgimme, I used to jeer at Bill and say he ought to go steady and try and get into something proper.

“I had a nice few quid saved up, do you hear? A very nice few quid.
I was engaged to a young girl I was crazy about. I worshipped the ground she trod on, and I don’t know how it was, but somehow or other I was jealous of her. She never looked at any other man, not once. But the less she sort of looked at anybody else, the more jealous I got. In the end I married her. Go on, talk about your Greta gorblimey Garbos and your Joan Crawfords and your blonds and your
glamourettes
. My wife was the most beautiful woman in the world, and I loved her like God Almighty. Yes, I did. Only I was jealous, I was crazy jealous.

“We’d been married about six months when one day I came home and found her with some geezer’s arms round her. So I give this other geezer a dressing-down, and I give my poor little woman a smack in the face, may God forgimme, and I rushed out of the place, and I drew out of the bank the dough I was going to use for the business, and I went on the Cousin Sis, and after about six weeks I got through three hundred pounds, and I was flat on the ribs.

“I didn’t think of going back and talking it over. I’m that sort of bloody fool. That’s me, fool right through to the bones. I went and joined the Army. I remembered something I’d seen in a book, and I went to join this mob. That’s how I come to join the Brigade of Guards.

“My wife sort of traced me. I never knew how. I know, now, that she traced me through poor old Bill Nelson. He had a heart too big for his poor body, my china Bill. She kept on writing to me, and writing, and I recognized her fist, and I never answered her letters. I never even opened ’em. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hear from my little woman; only I was sort of mad, proud. I was afraid if I read anything she wrote, I’d go and reply by return, and make it up with her … and I thought she was making a mug of me, and I couldn’t bear it. So I put her out of my head.

“Get me? That’s how it was.

“Yes, you’d better listen carefully. You Oxley, listen to me. You can be as tough as God Almighty, but you won’t chuck a scare into me. No.

“Comes round some time in November, and Bill Nelson, that was
squad-instructing then, and a Corporal, says to me like this: ‘Butcher. I want to talk to you about something very particular indeed.’

“‘What’s that?’

“‘Never mind what’s that,’ he says. ‘I want to talk to you. I want you to be in the “Farmers” at no later than eight-thirty pip-emma to-night. Get it? Eight-thirty, in the “Farmers.” I know it’s your night out‚’ he says, ‘so don’t fail me, because this is important.’

“I was his pal, and I’d meet him anywhere and at any time, and so I says okey-doke, I’ll be there.

“There’s nothing much to this. But listen, because I’m telling you.

“For the love of God listen to me, Oxley!

“I turn up at the ‘Farmers,’ and Bill isn’t there. I knock back a pint, and then another pint, and still Bill doesn’t turn up. I watch the clock, and I wonder what it can all be about. Eight-thirty. Eight-forty. No Bill, and this is a bit queer, because Bill turns up on time, usually. You can set your clock to Bill, as a rule. Ten to nine. Then all of a sudden a bloke comes in looking shocking and disgraceful, a disgraceful sight. It’s Bill. He’s got a black eye. He’s got a swelled nose. He’s got a puffed lip. He’s got a lump on his jawbone. He’s got an inflamed earhole. He’s got a torn tunic and mud on his back.

“I don’t want him to run the risk of running into the Gestapo in his condition, and so I leaves half my pint and goes to head him off. I meets him in the doorway and says, ‘Come and get a wash, you Burke.’

“He says: ‘Never mind washing. I want to tell you something. I never had a chance till now. I’d have been earlier, only I had a bit of an accident. Listen,’ he says. ‘That about your old woman was a big
mistake
. Your good lady is as respectable as your mother or mine,’ he says, ‘and I’ll lay my life on it. She’s off her head in love with you, Butch,’ he says. ‘She wasn’t carrying on with nobody.’ He says this breathless, gasping, as if he’d been running hard and fast. ‘She never carried on with nobody. The bloke you see her with was drunk. He burst in. It came out after. She never see him before, Butch. There was other complaints. It was all cleared up. Butch, what you got to do is, make
friends again. Don’t be a fool, Butcher; don’t be a silly horrible idiot. Come with me and have a cup of tea, and let me tell you …’

“We goes to a tea-and-wad-shop round the corner, and as we go in Bill Nelson grips my arm and holds me. I feel myself going round and round, because there at a table, with a cup of tea in front of her (she was never the woman to sit in a place without ordering anything), there she was, sitting with her heart in her mouth.

“She had come down on Nelson’s responsibility, do you see? He’d paid her fare and found her a room. He knew that if I see her again I’d stay and apologize. He sort of
knew
it. More especially as she was about three months off having a kid, do you see? And he’d made a date with her for that night, that time, and swore he’d bring me. He knew I’d turn up for
him,
just as he knew that my rotten silly pride would stop me coming along to see
her.
Get me? He understood all that, and banked on it; banked on what he sort of had a feeling on in the matter.

“And when I saw her I just went like dried-up boot polish when you fan it with a lit match … I ran, I went liquid, I melted away, I got moist.

“I said: ‘Hiya, duck.’ She said: ‘Hiya, Joe.’

“Bill had taken a room for us and paid the first week’s rent in advance. I saw how right he was. But I’d signed on for twenty-one years. I didn’t have the money to buy myself out.

“The kid was born nine weeks later.

“It died. It was a he. She died too. They both died. That last few weeks was all right, though. We got together and understood each other, like. She knew all about me, I mean … but I sort of understood her, and we kind of linked up, sort of style. She was the only one, always. Never mind all that bull-and-boloney, though. Do you think I’m going to forget nine, eleven, thirty-seven? The ninth of November, two days before Armistice Day, at nineish at night? If I live to be ten thousand million billion years old, do you think I’ll ever forget?

“And you dare to tell me that Bill Nelson ran away from you, Oxley? You bloody dare to tell me that? As I reckon it, he felt pretty sure he could finish you off in time to get back and fix her and me up again.
And when time passed he just run. He run away, yes. But
from
you,
Oxley? Never in your life. Not if you was an army of dirty lousy Oxleys with a Bren in each hand. A louse bag like you would of stayed and fought it out—which it was Bill’s nature to do—and you would have let everything else go to pot. That’s you. But Bill ran away. Not
from
you.
To
her, for her sake and my sake…. He only stood to lose. Bill always did stand to lose. But say he’s yeller again. Say it now. Say it and I’ll do yer, if it takes me ten years. If I swing fifty foot high. Now say it!”

Oxley shrugs his great bony shoulders.

“You don’t scare me,” he says. “But it don’t matter one way or another.
I
shan’t say it. I said it. If it was like that, all right, forget it.”

“Take it back,” says Butcher the Butcher.

“Well,” says Oxley. “He might not have been yeller. But he didn’t ought to have run off like that.”

“You, what do you understand about anything?” asks Butcher.

“I’d rather he knifed me,” says Oxley, “or kicked me in the guts. I don’t like seeing a man running away. But taking it all in all, I’m prepared to overlook it.”