Traffics and Discoveries

He turned to me with a wink as he hung up.

"Bayley's playing up for you. Now you'll see some fun."

"Who's going to catch it?" I demanded.

"Only our local Foreign Service Corps. Its C.O. has been boasting that it's en état de partir, and Bayley's going to take him at his word and have a kit-inspection this afternoon in the Park. I must tell their drill-hall. Look over yonder between that brewery chimney and the mansard roof!"

He readdressed himself to the telephone, and I kept my eye on the building to the southward. A Blue Peter climbed up to the top of the flagstaff that crowned it and blew out in the summer breeze. A black storm-cone followed.

"Inspection for F.S. corps acknowledged, Sir," said Burgard down the telephone. "Now we'd better go to the riding-school. The battalion falls in there. I have to change, but you're free of the corps. Go anywhere. Ask anything. In another ten minutes we're off."

I lingered for a little looking over the great city, its huddle of houses and the great fringe of the Park, all framed between the open windows of this dial-dotted eyrie.

When I descended the halls and corridors were as hushed as they had been noisy, and my feet echoed down the broad tiled staircases. On the third floor, Matthews, gaitered and armed, overtook me smiling.

"I thought you might want a guide," said he. "We've five minutes yet," and piloted me to the sunsplashed gloom of the riding-school. Three companies were in close order on the tan. They moved out at a whistle, and as I followed in their rear I was overtaken by Pigeon on a rough black mare.

"Wait a bit," he said, "till the horses are all out of stables, and come with us. D Company is the only one mounted just now. We do it to amuse the taxpayer," he explained, above the noise of horses on the tan.

"Where are the guns?" I asked, as the mare lipped my coat-collar.

"Gone ahead long ago. They come out of their own door at the back of barracks. We don't haul guns through traffic more than we can help… If Belinda breathes down your neck smack her. She'll be quiet in the streets.

She loves lookin' into the shop-windows."

The mounted company clattered through vaulted concrete corridors in the wake of the main body, and filed out into the crowded streets.

When I looked at the townsfolk on the pavement, or in the double-decked trams, I saw that the bulk of them saluted, not grudgingly or of necessity, but in a light-hearted, even flippant fashion.

"Those are Line and Militia men," said Pigeon. "That old chap in the top-hat by the lamp-post is an ex-Guardee. That's why he's saluting in slow-time. No, there's no regulation governing these things, but we've all fallen into the way of it somehow. Steady, mare!"

"I don't know whether I care about this aggressive militarism," I began, when the company halted, and Belinda almost knocked me down. Looking forward I saw the badged cuff of a policeman upraised at a crossing, his back towards us.

"Horrid aggressive, ain't we?" said Pigeon with a chuckle when we moved on again and overtook the main body. Here I caught the strains of the band, which Pigeon told me did not accompany the battalion on 'heef,' but lived in barracks and made much money by playing at parties in town.

"If we want anything more than drums and fifes on 'heef' we sing," said Pigeon. "Singin' helps the wind."

I rejoiced to the marrow of my bones thus to be borne along on billows of surging music among magnificent men, in sunlight, through a crowded town whose people, I could feel, regarded us with comradeship, affection – and more.

"By Jove," I said at last, watching the eyes about us, "these people are looking us over as if we were horses."

"Why not? They know the game."

The eyes on the pavement, in the trams, the cabs, at the upper windows, swept our lines back and forth with a weighed intensity of regard which at first seemed altogether new to me, till I recalled just such eyes, a thousand of them, at manoeuvres in the Channel when one crowded battleship drew past its sister at biscuit-toss range. Then I stared at the ground, overborne by those considering eyes.

Suddenly the music changed to the wail of the Dead March in "Saul," and once more – we were crossing a large square – the regiment halted.

"Damn!" said Pigeon, glancing behind him at the mounted company. "I believe they save up their Saturday corpses on purpose."

"What is it?" I asked.

"A dead Volunteer. We must play him through." Again I looked forward and saw the top of a hearse, followed by two mourning-coaches, boring directly up the halted regiment, which opened out company by company to let it through.

"But they've got the whole blessed square to funeralise in!" I exclaimed.

"Why don't they go round?"

"Not so!" Pigeon replied. "In this city it's the Volunteer's perquisite to be played through by any corps he happens to meet on his way to the cemetery. And they make the most of it. You'll see."

I heard the order, "Rest on your arms," run before the poor little procession as the men opened out. The driver pulled the black Flanders beasts into a more than funeral crawl, and in the first mourning-coach I saw the tearful face of a fat woman (his mother, doubtless), a handkerchief pressed to one eye, but the other rolling vigilantly, alight with proper pride. Last came a knot of uniformed men – privates, I took it – of the dead one's corps.

Said a man in the crowd beside us to the girl on his arm, "There, Jenny!

That's what I'll get if I 'ave the luck to meet 'em when my time comes."

"You an' your luck," she snapped. "'Ow can you talk such silly nonsense?"

"Played through by the Guard," he repeated slowly. "The undertaker 'oo could guarantee that, mark you, for all his customers – well, 'e'd monopolise the trade, is all I can say. See the horses passagin' sideways!"

"She done it a purpose," said the woman with a sniff.

"An' I only hope you'll follow her example. Just as long as you think I'll keep, too."

We reclosed when the funeral had left us twenty paces behind. A small boy stuck his head out of a carriage and watched us jealously.

"Amazing! Amazing!" I murmured. "Is it regulation?"

"No. Town-custom. It varies a little in different cities, but the people value being played through more than most things, I imagine. Duddell, the big Ipswich manufacturer – he's a Quaker – tried to bring in a bill to suppress it as unchristian." Pigeon laughed.

"And?"

"It cost him his seat next election. You see, we're all in the game."

We reached the Park without further adventure, and found the four company- guns with their spike teams and single drivers waiting for us. Many people were gathered here, and we were halted, so far as I could see, that they might talk with the men in the ranks. The officers broke into groups.

"Why on earth didn't you come along with me?" said Boy Bayley at my side.

"I was expecting you."

"Well, I had a delicacy about brigading myself with a colonel at the head of his regiment, so I stayed with the rear company and the horses. It's all too wonderful for any words. What's going to happen next?"

"I've handed over to Verschoyle, who will amuse and edify the school children while I take you round our kindergarten. Don't kill any one, Vee. Are you goin' to charge 'em?"

Old Verschoyle hitched his big shoulder and nodded precisely as he used to do at school. He was a boy of few words grown into a kindly taciturn man.

"Now!" Bayley slid his arm through mine and led me across a riding road towards a stretch of rough common (singularly out of place in a park) perhaps three-quarters of a mile long and half as wide. On the encircling rails leaned an almost unbroken line of men and women – the women outnumbering the men. I saw the Guard battalion move up the road flanking the common and disappear behind the trees.

As far as the eye could range through the mellow English haze the ground inside the railings was dotted with boys in and out of uniform, armed and unarmed. I saw squads here, half-companies there; then three companies in an open space, wheeling with stately steps; a knot of drums and fifes near the railings unconcernedly slashing their way across popular airs; and a batch of gamins labouring through some extended attack destined to be swept aside by a corps crossing the ground at the double. They broke out of furze bushes, ducked over hollows and bunkers, held or fell away from hillocks and rough sandbanks till the eye wearied of their busy legs.