A Lost Recruit

The soldiers had been about in the district on the day before, scattered like poppy beds over the bog, and signalling and firing till the misty October air tingled with excitement. When you have lived your life among wide-bounded solitudes, where the silence is oftenest broken by the plover's pipe or the croak of some heavily flapping bird, you will know the meaning of a bugle-call. Mick and his contemporaries had acted as camp-followers from early till late with ever intensifying ardour; one outcome whereof was that he heard his especial crony, Paddy Joyce, definitely decide to go and enlist at Fortbrack next Monday, which gave a turn more to the pinching screw of his own banned wish. It was with a concerted scheme for ascertaining whether there were any chance of bringing his mother round to a rational view of the matter that he and his friend dropped into her cabin next morning on the way to carry up a load of turf. Mrs. Doherty was washing her couple of blue-checked aprons in an old brown butter-crock, and Mick thought he had introduced the subject rather happily when he told her "she had a right to be takin' her hands out of the suds, and dippin' the finest curtsey she could conthrive, and she wid the Commander-in-Gineral of the Army Forces steppin' in to pay her a visit." Of course this statement required, as it was intended to require, elucidation, so Mick proceeded to announce: "It's himself's off to Fortbrack a-Monday, 'listin' he'll be in the Edenderry Light Infantry; so the next time we set eyes on him it's blazin' along the street we'll see him, like the boys we had here yisterday."

"Ah! sure now, that'll be grand," said Mrs. Doherty, unwarily complaisant; "we'll all be proud to behold him that way. 'T is a fine thing far any young man who's got a fancy to take up wid it."

"Och, then, bedad it is so!" said Mick, with emphasis, promptly making for the opening given to him.

"Bedad it is," said Paddy.

"There's nothin' like it," said Mick.

"Ah, nothin' at all," said Paddy.

Mrs. Doherty made no remark as she twisted a dripping apron into a sausage-shaped roll to wring the water out.

"How much was it you were sayin' you'd have in the week, Paddy, just to put in your pocket for your divarsion like?" inquired Mick, with a convenient lapse of memory.

"Och, seven or eight shillin's anyway," said Paddy, in the tone of one to whom shillings had already become trivial coins; "and that, mind you, after you've ped for the best of aitin' and dhrinkin', and your kit free, and no call to be spendin' another penny unless you plase. Sure, Long Murphy was tellin' me he was up in the town awhile ago, on a day when they were just after gettin' their pay, and he said the Post-Office was that thick wid the soldier lads sendin' home the money to their friends, he couldn't get speech of a clerk to buy his stamp be no manner of manes, not if he'd wrecked the place. 'T was the Sidmouth Fusileers was in at that time; they're off to Limerick now."

"But that's a grand regulation they have," said Mick, "wid the short service nowadays. Where's the hardship in it when a man can quit at the ind of three year, if he's so plased? Three year's no time to speak of."

"Sure, not at all; you'd scarce notice it passin' by. Like Barney Bralligan's song that finished before it begun--isn't that the way of it, ma'am?"

"It's a goodish len'th of a while," said Mrs. Doherty.

"But thin there's the lave; don't be forgettin' the lave, Paddy man. Supposin' we--"

"Tub be sure, there's the lave. Why, it's skytin' home on lave they do be most continial. And the Edenderrys is movin' no farther than just to Athlone; that's as handy a place as you could get."

"You'd not thravel from this to Athlone in the inside of a week, if it was iver so handy," said Mrs. Doherty.

"Is it a week? Och! blathershins, Mrs. Doherty, ma'am, you're mistook intirely. Sure, onst you've stepped into the town yonder, the train'll take you there in a flash. And the trains do be oncommon convenient."

"Free passes!" prompted Mick.

"Ay, bedad, and free passes they'll give to any souldier takin' his furlough; so sorra the expense 't would be supposin' Mick here had a notion to slip home of an odd day and see you."

"MICK!" said Mrs. Doherty.

"Och well, I was just supposin'. But I'm tould" --the many remarkable facts which Paddy had been tould lost nothing in repetition--"that they'll sometimes have out a special train for a man in the army, if he wants to go anywhere partic'lar in a hurry; there's iligance for you. And as for promotion, it's that plinty you'll scarce git time to remimber your rank from one day to the next, whether it's a full private you are, or a lance-corporal, or maybe somethin' greater. Troth, there's nothin' a man mayn't rise to. And then, Mrs. Doherty, it's the proud woman you'd be--ANYBODY'D be--that they hadn't stood in the way of it. And pensions--he might be pensioned off wid as much as a couple of shillin's a day."

"Not this long while yet, plase the pigs," broke out Mick, squaring his shoulders, as if Time were a visible antagonist, and momentarily forgetting the matter immediately in hand. "But there's chances in it--splendid--och, it's somethin' you may call livin'."

"And," said his friend, "the rations, I'm tould, is surprisin' these times. The top of everythin' that's to be got, uncooked, widout bone."

Paddy and Mick discoursed for a good while in this strain about the dignities and amenities of a military life, and Mrs. Doherty had not much to say on the subject. During the conversation, however, she continued to rinse one of her aprons, and wring it dry very carefully, and drop it back into the water, like a machine slightly out of gear, which goes on repeating some process ineffectually. The two friends read in her silence an omen of acquiescent conviction, and congratulated each other upon it with furtive nods and winks. Mick went off to the bog in high feather, believing that the interview had been a great success, and that his mother was, as Paddy put it, "comin' round to the notion gradual, like an ould goat grazin' round its tetherin' stump." His hopes, indeed, were so completely in the ascendant that he summed up his most serious uneasiness when he said to himself: "She'll do right enough, no fear, or I'd niver think of it, if Thady was just somethin' steadier. But sure he might happen to git a thrifle more wit yet; he's no great age to spake of."

But when he came home about sunsetting, his mother was feeding her few hens outside their cabin, the end one of a mossy-roofed row, with its door turned at right angles to the others, looking out across the purple brown of the bog-land to the far-off hills, faint, like a blue mist with a waved pattern in it, against the horizon. Mick, brought up short by the group, woke out of his walking dream, in which he had been performing acts of valour to the tune of the "Soldier's Chorus" in Gounod's Faust, the last thing the band had played yesterday; and he noticed a diminution in the select circle of fowls, who crooned and crawked and pecked round the broken dish of scraps.

"I see the specklety pullet's after strayin' on you agin," he said; "herself's the conthrary little bein'; I must take a look about for her prisintly."

"Ah, sure she's sold," said his mother; "it's too many I had altogether. I was torminted thryin' to git feedin' for them. So I sold her this mornin' to Mrs. Dunne at Loughmore, that gave me a fine price for her. 'Deed she'd have took her off of me this while back, on'y I'd just a sort of notion agin' partin' from the crathur. But be comin' in to your supper, child alive; it's ready waitin' this good while. Molly's below at her sister's, and I dunno were Thady's off to, so there's on'y you and me in it to-night."

Contents