Sergeant Nelson of the Guards Read Online Free PDF

laughter. D’Annunzio told a story about a man like Barker in the last war.
    I forget his actual words. The poet was looking over a little soggy black hell of shot-harrowed mud between front-line trenches. A handful of British soldiers held a trench. They were wounded, and tired almost to death. You must imagine the scene … the unutterable melancholy of autumnal Flanders, and the rain, and the cold, and the hopelessness, and the heartsickness, and the ache of throbbing woundsand empty bellies, and the helplessness of exhausted ammunition…. Suddenly one of the soldiers shouted: “Are we downhearted?”
    A pause.
    Then, from a pit of mud out in No Man’s Land, animated by its very last flicker of life a thing like a scarecrow out of a slaughterhouse leapt up, and screamed:
    “Nao!” And died.
    That could have been Barker.
    He is a long, gaunt man of twenty-eight or so, with the kind of face one associates with adenoids. He hasn’t got adenoids, but looks as if he ought to have. His eyes are prominent, under thick, arched eyebrows as mobile as caterpillars which almost meet at the beginning of his beaky nose. His upper lip is long and outstanding. His mouth is always half open, so that his chin, which at its firmest is far from prominent, seems to slip away down to his big, wobbling Adam’s-apple . He has a bass voice. When he swallows his throat expands and contracts in the tight compass of the white rayon scarf he wears knotted round it. The ends of this scarf are tucked into a flash waistcoat. Barker dresses for show. It is for Barker that unknown heroines in mass-production tailors’ shops sew on fantastic superabundancies of buttons, and fix incredible pleats in extraordinary coats. If anything new appears in the way of purple suitings or velvet collars, Barker will be the first to wear them. He knows, and carefully specifies, the circumference of his trouser legs—no less than twenty-four inches, though the heavens fall. He crams his big feet into torpedo-shaped shoes … unless the salesman tells him that America is wearing square toes, in which case Barker will wear square toes too.
    For work, he wears his flash suits gone to seed. Barker shoves a barrow: fruit. He is the one permanent type of the Londoner—the indomitable , the virile, the astute, the nervy, the brave and cocky Cockney of the markets, who speaks a language, and has a background of colour and misery. His phraseology is debased. He uses slang. To Barker, a row is a Bull-an’-a-Cow; a suit is a Whistle, or Whistle- an’-Flute ;a kid is a Gord-Forbid; a car is a Jam, or Jam-Jar; talk is Rabbit , or Rabbit-an’-Pork; beer is Pig’s Ear … and so on, up and down the language. He has a secret code; for sometimes Barker and his brothers have to hold their own against organised, English-speaking society: they can exchange conversation in slang and hint, spoken fast, and incomprehensible as Hungarian to the man or woman of polite pretensions. Barker has his own financial jargon. If the Stock Exchange can speak mysteriously of “Clo-to-clo” and “At the mark,” Barker can refer to “Forty tosheroons” or “Six o’ Clods.”
    He loves a rhyme, has as keen an ear for euphony as James Agate, and speaks in irony and satire. “Who made that hole?” asks the Rookie, at the shell hole; and the Old Sweat replies: “Mice.” This is a Barker joke, pure and simple. If it is pouring with rain, he will say, not “Isn’t it a terrible day?” but “Ain’t it lovely?” As a free trader, he will starve rather than take a steady job. He has got to be his own master … even if he, as master, drives himself out at four in the morning and pushes himself round the streets with the barrow until midnight, when there is a chance of selling a bit of fruit at an advanced price to the girls and the drunks. He will short-change the prosperous without pity … or recklessly give stock away to the children of the poor. His father, a costermonger of the old