CHAPTER ILady Fenimore’s compliments, sir, and will you be so kind as to stepround to Sir Anthony at once?Heaven knows that never another step shall I take in this world again;but Sergeant Marigold has always ignored the fact. That is one of themany things I admire about Marigold. He does not throw my poorparalysed legs, so to speak, in my face. He accepts them as the normalequipment of an employer. I don’t know what I should do withoutMarigold…. You see we were old comrades in the South African War,where we both got badly knocked to pieces. He was Sergeant in mybattery, and the same Boer shell did for both of us. At times we joinin cursing that shell heartily, but I am not sure that we do not holdit in sneaking affection. It initiated us into the brotherhood ofdeath. Shortly afterwards when we had crossed the border-line back intolife, we exchanged, as tokens, bits of the shrapnel which they hadextracted from our respective carcases. I have not enquired what he didwith his bit; but I keep mine in a certain locked drawer…. There wereonly the two of us left on the gun when we were knocked out…. Ishould like to tell you the whole story, but you wouldn’t listen to me.And no wonder. In comparison with the present world convulsion in whichthe slaughtered are reckoned by millions, the Boer War seems a trumperyaffair of bows and arrows. I am a back-number. Still, back-numbers havetheir feelings–and their memories.I sometimes wonder, as I sit in this wheel-chair, with my abominablelegs dangling down helplessly, what Sergeant Marigold thinks of me. Iknow what I think of Marigold. I think him the ugliest devil that Godever created and further marred after creating him. He is a long, bonycreature like a knobbly ram-rod, and his face is about the colour andshape of a damp, mildewed walnut. To hide a bald head into which asilver plate has been fixed, he wears a luxuriant curly brown wig, likethose that used to adorn waxen gentlemen in hair-dressing windows. Hisis one of those unhappy moustaches that stick out straight and scantylike a cat’s. He has the slit of a letter-box mouth of the Irishman incaricature, and only half a dozen teeth spaced like a skeleton company.Nothing will induce him to procure false ones. It is a matter ofprinciple. Between the wearing of false hair and the wearing of falseteeth he makes a distinction of unfathomable subtlety. He is anobstinate beast. If he wasn’t he would not, with four fingers of hisright hand shot away, have remained with me on that gun. In the sameway, neither tears nor entreaties nor abuse have induced him to wear aglass eye. On high days and holidays, whenever he desires to look smartand dashing, he covers the unpleasing orifice with a black shade. Inordinary workaday life he cares not how much he offends the aestheticsense. But the other eye, the sound left eye, is a wonder–the preciousjewel set in the head of the ugly toad. It is large, of ultra-marineblue, steady, fearless, humorous, tender–everything heroic andbeautiful and romantic you can imagine about eyes. Let him clap a handover that eye and you will hold him the most dreadful ogre that everescaped out of a fairy tale. Let him clap a hand over the other eye andlook full at you out of the good one and you will think him theKnightliest man that ever was–and in my poor opinion, you would not befar wrong.
