The Argosy, April 1916 — page 147: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE RUBBER. It was horribly cold, and deadly dull, and the smallest diversion was eagerly wel- comed. This morning there was a break in the gray clouds, and a pale sheen and glimpses of a clear frosty blue. A tall private caked with mud turned from the periscope through which he had been looking. “Hullo!” he exclaimed, “Old yellow-face coming out of prison at last. Looks as if they’d been bleaching ’im.” ‘“What’s doing?” asked Corporal Grays. “‘Nothing,”’ answered the tall private. “There’s our own bloomin’ wires, and there’s the smoke from the street opposite, and there are the never-no-mores between.” ‘Any not-outs?” “One poor devil waggling a bit.” “Ours or theirs?” another man asked. “Ours, I think, but they’re all so spat- tered and mussed up, you can hardly tell.” “Tf he’s ours,” said the corporal, “we must have a try when it gets dark, but we shall have to be nippy.” “Then we must get old Twitchem to go. He'll be out and back again before we can say ‘Jack Robinson.’ ” As he spoke he glanced towards another private, a big, heavy man, rather good- looking, but in a dull, bovine kind of way. “Oh, shut up, for goodness’ sake, Harker!” a fresh voice clipped in. ‘Why can’t you let Blades alone? A joke’s a joke, but you’re like a nagging woman or those bloomin’ pop-guns over there.”’ “Poor old chap,” answered Harker. “I didn’t know you were married, and yet I might a’ guessed it too. You look as if most of the fun had been knocked out of you.” The intervener scorned to reply, and there was a long pause, broken at last by Blades’s deep voice speaking with portent- ous deliberation as if each word demanded a special and painful effort. “Perhaps — you’ll—get—it—knocked — out—of—you.” Harker gave a dramatic start and burst into a roar of laughter. “Oh, good Lord, Quicksilver!” he ex- claimed, ‘you did give mea jolt. I haven’t heard you make a speech that length since we were at old Chignett together.” TF ‘BLADES and Harker were old acquain- tances; as Harker had claimed, they had 137 gone to the same primary school in the days of their youth. Then, Harker had been cock of the walk, a scholarship boy, and cricket and football captain. Blades, on the other hand, had come up from the coun- try, a shy, slow, heavy lad with a stammer and an unfortunate habit of twitching which his new schoolmaster found at once irresist- ible and unpardonable. ‘they led him a terrible life, and Harker was among the most ingenious, if not the most active, of his tormentors. Eventually, he persuaded his mother to send him to an- other school, but not before he had fought Harker in the playground and by a lucky blow, and to his own astonishment, had knocked him out. Since then they had seen nothing of each other. Harker’s career had been a disappoint- ment. Clever and self-confident, he had little ballast of principle. From the first, his friendships were ill-chosen. To most of the temptations that lie in wait for unwary youth he held out a bold and friendly hand. His program for life was to have a good time; his ideal virtue was what he called “manly independence.” The result was what might have been ex- pected. He changed his jobs with the regularity and almost with the frequency of the sea- sons, and as a family man of thirty, was earning less than when he was twenty. Nor was this the worst. Drink and fast living had lowered his physique and weakened his nerves. To him, at any rate, the war came as op- portunity. Out of work, disgusted with himself, and—it must be said—fired by the appeal to play the game, he had struck while the iron was hot, and had entered Kitchener’s fold. Blades had come to the same goal by a — different path. In spite of his stutter and his twitchings, his slowness and his awkwardness, he had always been sound in the essential qualities; straight, truthful, clean-minded. Little as he looked it, he was a very impressionable boy, and the curates under whose influence he had fallen, found him as clay for the potter. His mother, a widow, was even less pre- possessing in appearance than he, but to her he was devoted, and he had made up his mind not to marry as long as she lived. He had gone straight from school to a place comicloool C@