Page:Under the Deodars - Kipling (1890).djvu/87

 hasn't forgotten Wick of Chota-Buldana, and a lot of people will be kind to you for our sakes. The Mother will tell you more about outfit than I can: but remember this. Stick to your Regiment, Bobby—stick to your Regiment. You'll see men all round you going into the Staff Corps, and doing every possible sort of duty but regimental, and you may be tempted to follow suit. Now, so long as you keep within your allowance, and I haven't stinted you there, stick to the Line—the whole Line and nothing but the Line. Be careful how you back another young fool's bill and you fall in love with a woman twenty years older than yourself, don't tell me about it, that's all."

With these counsels, and many others equally valuable, did Papa Wick fortify Bobby ere that last awful night at Portsmouth when the Officers' Quarters held more inmates than were provided for by the Regulations, and the libertymen of the ships fell foul of the drafts for India, and the battle raged long and loud from the Dockyard Gates even to the slums of Longport, while the drabs of Fratton came down and scratched the faces of the Queen's Officers.

Bobby Wick, with an ugly bruise on his freckled nose, a sick and shaky detachment to manoeuvre in-ship, and the comfort of fifty scornful females to attend to, had no time to feel homesick till the Malabar reached mid-Channel, when he combined his emotions with a little guard-visiting and a great deal of nausea.

The Tail Twisters were a most particular Regiment. Those who knew them least said that they where eaten up with "side". But their reserve and their internal arrangements generally were merely protective diplomacy. Some five years before, the Colonel Commanding had looked into the fourteen fearless eyes of seven plump and juicy subalterns who had all applied to enter the Staff Corps, and had asked them why the three stars should he, a Colonel of the Line, command a dashed nursery for double-dashed bottle-suckers who put on condemned tin spurs and rode qualified mokes at the hiatused