IN THE PRIDE OF HIS YOUTH.
"Stopped in the straight when the race was his own!
Look at him cutting it--cur to the bone!"
"Ask ere the youngster be rated and chidden,
What did he carry and how was he ridden?
Maybe they used him too much at the start;
Maybe Fate's weight-cloths are breaking his heart."
Life's Handicap.
When I was telling you of the joke that The Worm played off on the
Senior Subaltern, I promised a somewhat similar tale, but with all
the jest left out. This is that tale:
Dicky Hatt was kidnapped in his early, early youth--neither by
landlady's daughter, housemaid, barmaid, nor cook, but by a girl so
nearly of his own caste that only a woman could have said she was
just the least little bit in the world below it. This happened a
month before he came out to India, and five days after his one-and-
twentieth birthday. The girl was nineteen--six years older than
Dicky in the things of this world, that is to say--and, for the
time, twice as foolish as he.
Excepting, always, falling off a horse there is nothing more fatally
easy than marriage before the Registrar. The ceremony costs less
than fifty shillings, and is remarkably like walking into a pawn-
shop. After the declarations of residence have been put in, four
minutes will cover the rest of the proceedings--fees, attestation,
and all. Then the Registrar slides the blotting-pad over the names,
and says grimly, with his pen between his teeth:--"Now you're man
and wife;" and the couple walk out into the street, feeling as if
something were horribly illegal somewhere.
But that ceremony holds and can drag a man to his undoing just as
thoroughly as the "long as ye both shall live" curse from the altar-
rails, with the bridesmaids giggling behind, and "The Voice that
breathed o'er Eden" lifting the roof off. In this manner was Dicky
Hatt kidnapped, and he considered it vastly fine, for he had
received an appointment in India which carried a magnificent salary
from the Home point of view. The marriage was to be kept secret for
a year. Then Mrs. Dicky Hatt was to come out and the rest of life
was to be a glorious golden mist. That was how they sketched it
under the Addison Road Station lamps; and, after one short month,
came Gravesend and Dicky steaming out to his new life, and the girl
crying in a thirty-shillings a week bed-and-living room, in a back
street off Montpelier Square near the Knightsbridge Barracks.
But the country that Dicky came to was a hard land, where "men" of
twenty-one were reckoned very small boys indeed, and life was
expensive. The salary that loomed so large six thousand miles away
did not go far. Particularly when Dicky divided it by two, and
remitted more than the fair half, at 1-6, to Montpelier Square. One
hundred and thirty-five rupees out of three hundred and thirty is
not much to live on; but it was absurd to suppose that Mrs. Hatt
could exist forever on the 20 pounds held back by Dicky, from his
outfit allowance. Dicky saw this, and remitted at once; always
remembering that Rs. 700 were to be paid, twelve months later, for a
first-class passage out for a lady. When you add to these trifling
details the natural instincts of a boy beginning a new life in a new
country and longing to go about and enjoy himself, and the necessity
for grappling with strange work--which, properly speaking, should
take up a boy's undivided attention--you will see that Dicky started
handicapped. He saw it himself for a breath or two; but he did not
guess the full beauty of his future.
As the hot weather began, the shackles settled on him and ate into
his flesh. First would come letters--big, crossed, seven sheet
letters--from his wife, telling him how she longed to see him, and
what a Heaven upon earth would be their property when they met.
Then some boy of the chummery wherein Dicky lodged would pound on
the door of his bare little room, and tell him to come out and look
at a pony--the very thing to suit him. Dicky could not afford
ponies. He had to explain this. Dicky could not afford living in
the chummery, modest as it was. He had to explain this before he
moved to a single room next the office where he worked all day. He
kept house on a green oil-cloth table-cover, one chair, one charpoy,
one photograph, one tooth-glass, very strong and thick, a seven-
rupee eight-anna filter, and messing by contract at thirty-seven
rupees a month. Which last item was extortion. He had no punkah,
for a punkah costs fifteen rupees a month; but he slept on the roof
of the office with all his wife's letters under his pillow. Now and
again he was asked out to dinner where he got both a punkah and an
iced drink. But this was seldom, for people objected to recognizing
a boy who had evidently the instincts of a Scotch tallow-chandler,
and who lived in such a nasty fashion. Dicky could not subscribe to
any amusement, so he found no amusement except the pleasure of
turning over his Bank-book and reading what it said about "loans on
approved security." That cost nothing. He remitted through a
Bombay Bank, by the way, and the Station knew nothing of his private
affairs.
Every month he sent Home all he could possibly spare for his wife--
and for another reason which was expected to explain itself shortly
and would require more money.
About this time, Dicky was overtaken with the nervous, haunting fear
that besets married men when they are out of sorts. He had no
pension to look to. What if he should die suddenly, and leave his
wife unprovided for? The thought used to lay hold of him in the
still, hot nights on the roof, till the shaking of his heart made
him think that he was going to die then and there of heart-disease.
Now this is a frame of mind which no boy has a right to know. It is
a strong man's trouble; but, coming when it did, it nearly drove
poor punkah-less, perspiring Dicky Hatt mad. He could tell no one
about it.
A certain amount of "screw" is as necessary for a man as for a
billiard-ball. It makes them both do wonderful things. Dicky
needed money badly, and he worked for it like a horse. But,
naturally, the men who owned him knew that a boy can live very
comfortably on a certain income--pay in India is a matter of age,
not merit, you see, and if their particular boy wished to work like
two boys, Business forbid that they should stop him! But Business
forbid that they should give him an increase of pay at his present
ridiculously immature age! So Dicky won certain rises of salary--
ample for a boy--not enough for a wife and child--certainly too
little for the seven-hundred-rupee passage that he and Mrs. Hatt had
discussed so lightly once upon a time. And with this he was forced
to be content.
Somehow, all his money seemed to fade away in Home drafts and the
crushing Exchange, and the tone of the Home letters changed and grew
querulous. "Why wouldn't Dicky have his wife and the baby out?
Surely he had a salary--a fine salary--and it was too bad of him to
enjoy himself in India. But would he--could he--make the next draft
a little more elastic?" Here followed a list of baby's kit, as long
as a Parsee's bill. Then Dicky, whose heart yearned to his wife and
the little son he had never seen--which, again, is a feeling no boy
is entitled to--enlarged the draft and wrote queer half-boy, half-
man letters, saying that life was not so enjoyable after all and
would the little wife wait yet a little longer? But the little
wife, however much she approved of money, objected to waiting, and
there was a strange, hard sort of ring in her letters that Dicky
didn't understand. How could he, poor boy?
Later on still--just as Dicky had been told--apropos of another
youngster who had "made a fool of himself," as the saying is--that
matrimony would not only ruin his further chances of advancement,
but would lose him his present appointment--came the news that the
baby, his own little, little son, had died, and, behind this, forty
lines of an angry woman's scrawl, saying that death might have been
averted if certain things, all costing money, had been done, or if
the mother and the baby had been with Dicky. The letter struck at
Dicky's naked heart; but, not being officially entitled to a baby,
he could show no sign of trouble.
How Dicky won through the next four months, and what hope he kept
alight to force him into his work, no one dare say. He pounded on,
the seven-hundred-rupee passage as far away as ever, and his style
of living unchanged, except when he launched into a new filter.
There was the strain of his office-work, and the strain of his
remittances, and the knowledge of his boy's death, which touched the
boy more, perhaps, than it would have touched a man; and, beyond
all, the enduring strain of his daily life. Gray-headed seniors,
who approved of his thrift and his fashion of denying himself
everything pleasant, reminded him of the old saw that says:
"If a youth would be distinguished in his art, art, art,
He must keep the girls away from his heart, heart, heart."
And Dicky, who fancied he had been through every trouble that a man
is permitted to know, had to laugh and agree; with the last line of
his balanced Bank-book jingling in his head day and night.
But he had one more sorrow to digest before the end. There arrived
a letter from the little wife--the natural sequence of the others if
Dicky had only known it--and the burden of that letter was "gone
with a handsomer man than you." It was a rather curious production,
without stops, something like this:--"She was not going to wait
forever and the baby was dead and Dicky was only a boy and he would
never set eyes on her again and why hadn't he waved his handkerchief
to her when he left Gravesend and God was her judge she was a wicked
woman but Dicky was worse enjoying himself in India and this other
man loved the ground she trod on and would Dicky ever forgive her
for she would never forgive Dicky; and there was no address to write
to."
Instead of thanking his lucky stars that he was free, Dicky
discovered exactly how an injured husband feels--again, not at all
the knowledge to which a boy is entitled--for his mind went back to
his wife as he remembered her in the thirty-shilling "suite" in
Montpelier Square, when the dawn of his last morning in England was
breaking, and she was crying in the bed. Whereat he rolled about on
his bed and bit his fingers. He never stopped to think whether, if
he had met Mrs. Hatt after those two years, he would have discovered
that he and she had grown quite different and new persons. This,
theoretically, he ought to have done. He spent the night after the
English Mail came in rather severe pain.
Next morning, Dicky Hatt felt disinclined to work. He argued that
he had missed the pleasure of youth. He was tired, and he had
tasted all the sorrow in life before three-and-twenty. His Honor
was gone--that was the man; and now he, too, would go to the Devil--
that was the boy in him. So he put his head down on the green oil-
cloth table-cover, and wept before resigning his post, and all it
offered.
But the reward of his services came. He was given three days to
reconsider himself, and the Head of the establishment, after some
telegraphings, said that it was a most unusual step, but, in view of
the ability that Mr. Hatt had displayed at such and such a time, at
such and such junctures, he was in a position to offer him an
infinitely superior post--first on probation, and later, in the
natural course of things, on confirmation. "And how much does the
post carry?" said Dicky. "Six hundred and fifty rupees," said the
Head slowly, expecting to see the young man sink with gratitude and
joy.
And it came then! The seven hundred rupee passage, and enough to
have saved the wife, and the little son, and to have allowed of
assured and open marriage, came then. Dicky burst into a roar of
laughter--laughter he could not check--nasty, jangling merriment
that seemed as if it would go on forever. When he had recovered
himself he said, quite seriously:--"I'm tired of work. I'm an old
man now. It's about time I retired. And I will."
"The boy's mad!" said the Head.
I think he was right; but Dicky Hatt never reappeared to settle the
question.
