Page:Soldiers Three - Kipling (1890).djvu/70

 Thomas isn't a brute, and his business, which is to look after the virtuous people, demands that he shall have his ammunition to his hand. He doesn't wear silk stockings and he really ought to be supplied with a new Adjective to help him to express his opinions: but, for all that, he is a great man. If you call him "the heroic defender of the national honour" one day, and "a brutal and licentious soldiery" the next, you naturally bewilder him, and he looks upon you with suspicion. There is nobody to speak for Thomas except people who have theories to work off on him and nobody understands Thomas except Thomas, and he does not know what is the matter with himself.

That is the prologue. This is the story:—

Corporal Slane was engaged to be married to Miss Jhansi McKenna, whose history is well known in the regiment and elsewhere. He had secured his Colonel's leave, and, being popular with the men, every arrangement had been made to give the wedding what Private Ortheris called "eeklar". It fell in the heart of the hot weather, and after the wedding Slane was going up to the Hills with the bride. None the less Slane's grievance was that the affair would be only a hired carriage wedding, and he felt that the "eeklar" of that was meagre. Miss McKenna did not care so much. The Sergeant's wife was helping her to make her wedding-dress, and she was very busy. Slane was, just then, the only moderately contented man in barracks. All the rest were more or less miserable.

And they had so much to make them happy, too! All their work was over at eight in the morning, and for the rest of the day they could lie on their backs and smoke Canteen plug and swear at the punkah-coolies. They enjoyed a fine, full flesh meal in the middle of the day, and then threw themselves down on their cots and sweated and slept till it was cool enough to go out with their "towny," whose vocabulary contained less than six hundred words and the Adjective, and whose views on every conceivable question they had heard many months before.