Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [4]
'Oh, no hard feelings,' said Hooper. 'I can take a bit of sport.'
Hooper had no illusions about the Army—or rather no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe. He had come to it reluctantly, under compulsion, after he had made every feeble effort in his power to obtain deferment. He accepted it, he said, 'like the measles'. Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert's horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthusside; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry—that stoic, redskin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man—Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry's speech on St Crispin's day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon—these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.
He seldom complained. Though himself a man to whom one could not confidently entrust the simplest duty, he had an overmastering regard for efficiency and, drawing on his modest commercial experience, he would sometimes say of the ways of the Army in pay and supply and the use of 'man-hours': 'They couldn't get away with that in business.'
He slept sound while I lay awake fretting.
In the weeks that we were together Hooper became a symbol me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting 'Hooper' and seeing if they still seemed as plausible. Thus in the dark hour before reveille I sometimes pondered: 'Hooper Rallies', 'Hooper Hostels', 'International Hooper Cooperation', and 'the Religion of Hooper'. He was the acid test of all these alloys.
So far as he had changed at all, he was less soldierly now than when he arrived from his OCTU. This morning, laden with full equipment, he looked scarcely human. He came to attention with a kind of shuffling dance-step and spread a wool-gloved palm across his forehead.
'I wan't to speak to Mr Hooper, sergeant-major ... well, where the devil have you been? I told you to inspect the lines.'
'Am I late? Sorry. Had a rush getting my gear together.'
'That's what you have a servant for.'
'Well, I suppose it is, strictly speaking. But you know how it is. He had his own stuff to do. If you get on the wrong side of these fellows they take it out of you other ways.'
'Well, go and inspect the lines,now.'
'Rightyoh.'
'And for Christ's sake don't say "rightyoh".'
'Sorry. I do try to remember. It just slips out.'
When Hooper left the sergeant-major returned.
'C.O. just coming up the path, sir,' he said.
I went out to meet him.
There were beads of moisture on the hog-bristles of his little red moustache.
'Well, everything squared up here?'
'Yes, I think so, sir.'
'Think so? You ought to know.'
His eyes fell on the broken window. 'Has that been entered in the barrack damages?'
'Not yet, sir.'
'Not yet? I wonder when it would have been, if I hadn't seen it.'
He was not at ease with me, and much of his bluster rose from timidity, but I thought none the better of it for that.
He led me behind the huts to a wire fence which divided my area from the carrierplatoon's, skipped briskly over, and made for an overgrown ditch and bank which had once been a field boundary on the farm. Here he began grubbing with his stick like a truffling pig and presently gave a cry of triumph.