God Is an Englishman Read Free Page A

rest of their lives. In a sense it crystallised their characters. Roberts, the dedicated careerist; Swann, the man who had taken a wrong turning but had never abandoned hope of finding his way out again. In the very early days of their association, when both were cadets, each had had a band of disciples. Roberts, starting out with many, had lost his one by one, a few from conviction but the majority by death and gangrened wounds. Swann’s converts had also gone and Roberts, the implacable, was not slow to remind him of the fate of two of them.
    “There was Standford-Green and Badgery,” he said, “they threw up their commissions in order to go home and make fortunes and what happened to them?
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    6 G O D I S A N E N G L I S H M A N
    Standford-Green put his hoarded savings in railway stock and lost it overnight, but he was luckier than Badgery. Badgery caught a chill in a London fog and was buried within four months of the farewell party we gave him in the Mess. If the fog hadn’t killed him he would have starved, for at least Standford-Green could write a legible hand. They tell me he’s working as a clerk in the Law Courts.” The man in bed was at a disadvantage, but he had no intention of conceding Roberts his point. He never had and he never would. Respecting Roberts as a man he had never succeeded in exonerating him from bigotry. He said, deliberately, “I had no business in that last brush, Bobs. My contract expired more than a month ago. I could have asked for my passage before we moved up here, and because you and I are unlikely to dispute the claims of Queen and common-sense again I’ll remind you why I’m lying here trussed up like a chicken. It’s on your account, yours and ‘Circus’ Howard’s. You were the very last of them, and a man can’t travel as far as we have without incurring obligations of a sort. But those obligations are personal and private, to me at any rate. They don’t extend to Crown, Company, or the City merchants, who pay us small change to enable them to milk a sub-continent and install fat wives in four-storey houses, with cook, parlourmaid, governess and basement.”
    “I know that,” Roberts said, unexpectedly. “With you there has never been any other motive but comradeship, has there?”
    “None. Just a dwindling batch of three-card-trick victims, relying on one another to stay sane and alive!”
    Over in the square the drums rolled and the cannon boomed again. Roberts said, with his back to the bed, “You feel pity for those butchers out there?”
    “They’re not involved in what I’m trying to say, what I’ve always argued.”
    “But they are. We can hang a few hundred, and blow a few more from cannon, but there has to be a new beginning, here and elsewhere. How could that be achieved without a trained army standing behind the law?”
    “You still believe in law? After all you’ve seen since the Mutiny began?”
    “Yes, I believe in it. English law. And in my experience it makes a bad joke of everybody else’s.”
    It struck Swann then that he might be seeing Roberts for the first time, that what he had always assumed to be an impersonal passion for rule-of-thumb, for precedent, for good order and discipline, was really something far more personal and fervent, a private creed, imbedded in a man who saw himself more as a missionary than a soldier. If it was so then it added a new dimension to their differences, setting them as far apart as the savage and the city sophisticate. Curiosity pricked him as GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 6
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    Man with a Casket: 1857–1858 7
    he said, “Trade and barter on one side, we have a God-given mission here? Is that what you believe?”
    “Implicitly.” He swung round facing the bed, fighting the terrible battle all Englishmen of his type enter upon when called to acknowledge idealism.
    “Should I apologise? Is material gain essential to everything a man feels and