But as the
little infantry drill he had ever learned had all been changed
since the Boer War, I gathered an unholy joy from seeing him hang
like a little child on the lips of the official Sergeant
Instructor of the corps. In the evenings he and I mugged up the
text-books together; and with the aid of the books I put him
through all the new physical exercises. I was a privileged person.
I could take my own malicious pleasure out of Marigold's enforced
humility, but I would be hanged if anybody else should. Sergeant
Marigold should instruct those volunteers as he once instructed
the recruits of his own battery. So I worked with him like a
nigger until there was nothing in the various drills of a modern
platoon that he didn't know, and nothing that he could not do with
the mathematical precision of his splendid old training.
One night during the thick of it Betty came in. I waved her into a
corner of the library out of the way, and she smoked cigarettes
and looked on at the performance. Now I come to think of it, we
must have afforded an interesting spectacle. There was the gaunt,
one-eyed, preposterously wigged image clad in undervest and
shrunken yellow flannel trousers which must have dated from his
gym-instructor days in the nineties, violently darting down on
his heels, springing up, kicking out his legs, shooting out his
arms, like an inspired marionette, all at the words of command
shouted in fervent earnest by a shrivelled up little cripple in a
wheel-chair.
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