The Man on Horseback/Chapter 26
CHAPTER XXVI
THE ARMY
The days passed, rounding into the swing of the week. But no spurred, booted, helmeted orderly knocked at Tom's door to hand him the dread blue envelope, sealed with red, of the summons to Militärgericht, to court-martial.
The waiting, the period of uncertainty got on Tom's nerves, and he turned to Krauss for an explanation.
"I have served my three years in the army, sir," replied the valet, "and I found it to be a velvet hand in an iron glove. You never know what to expect—velvet or iron."
"Well, I know what I'm going to give them if they drive me too far. Neither velvet nor iron. Just a good, plain, old-fashioned mule kick!"
But he felt less brave than his words. It was not that he was afraid. Not for himself, that is, for he did not understand that complicated emotion called Fear. He was thinking of Bertha. He had donned the blue and crimson of the Uhlans really more for her sake than for any other reason.
And to lose it now! To be court-martialed, perhaps disgraced?
Why, Bertha was a proud girl, quick, high spirited. She would look upon him with contempt. It would be the end of his love dream—the end of everything worth while in his life, he added bitterly.
And so he was greatly relieved when on a Tuesday, quite early in the morning, Baron von Götz-Wrede called on him and told him that cavalry riding school drill was on.
"You're detailed to it, Graves," he said.
"Me? Gosh. There's nothing they can teach me about a pony."
"I know," smiled the other. "Nor are you going to be taught. You are going to teach us, the other chaps."
"Bully," cried Tom, and he accompanied the Baron.
The riding school of the Uhlans of the Guard was a great, square, frowning brick barrack in the North ern part of the town, the ancient part of Berlin, way beyond the Janowitzer Bridge, which, many generations ago, at the time of Frederick the Great, had been the center of Prussian fashion.
To-day it is gray and hopeless and sad. Mile upon mile of jerry-built houses, covered on the out side with stucco, that panacea against all the social and hygienic evils of Berlin, but inside—the inside which the foreign tourist never sees—hotbeds of dirt and vice and degeneracy. Poor students live side by side with laborers, with the countless "police licensed" prostitutes of the capital, with underpaid, underfed clerks. A police station, presided over by a red-faced, bullying, saber rattling sergeant is every five blocks, and on every corner there is a Destille or Stehbierhalle—a low drinking den. It was in similar surroundings that the Parisian conceived the germs for the great French Revolution that, over night, swept away the cobwebs of Crown and Bourbonism with the clouting, unwashed, impatient fist of Democracy. Not so in the stuccoed slums of Berlin.
Not the slums of liberty gloriously, terribly in travail. Only the slums of hopeless misery, choking in their own stench and despair.
Liberty, Democracy, healthy Revolution, can only come to Germany from the outside!
It was in that quarter that the Uhlans had built their new riding school, their new, immense stables that were far better than the tenements surrounding them.
Inside, the first man whom Tom Graves saw was Colonel Heinrich Wedekind.
Tom saluted. The Colonel returned the greeting, then talked to the Westerner in an easy, friendly manner as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and the Baron, seeing both Tom's belief and astonishment, whispered to him not to mind "Old Ironside" (that was Wedekind's nickname), as he was liable to have martinet fits at times, and there was never any harm done.
Tom was shown through the stables, and the warm reek, the neighing, stamping horses made him forget his uniform. He was himself again, the horse wrangler, the rider, the free man of the plains born and bred to the game of hoof and saddle and quirt.
With zest he entered upon his new duties. Too, with absolute mastery. There was nothing about a horse that he did not know. He did not belong to the older generation of Westerners who broke a horse and, incidentally, its spirit. Tom trained them, with gentle voice, with infinite patience, with knowing hand and a certain sense of humor that seemed to establish a link between man and animal.
And thus he taught the others.
"Back up there!" he yelled to a fussy old major who was pressing his fat knees into a bay mare's withers. "This isn't a contest of strength between you and the horse! No, no! This isn't the way to make a horse go! Let your legs swing loose. What? Never rode on a long stirrup? Well, here's where you are going to start!"
And, waving aside the stable sergeant who came running up, he himself lengthened the stirrup leathers and adjusted the saddle girth.
He clacked his tongue.
"Get up, major! There—down on your seat … Down, I say! Don't hold on to the reins like that! My God, why do you have to have martingales in this benighted country?"
Again, to a young lieutenant:
"Don't lose your nerve, sonny. I'll show you. Got such a thing as a straight bit? No? All right!"
He turned to a farrier sergeant.
"Here. Take this and flatten it out. This way—hammer down the corners. Make it an inch shorter. And look out for the leather slips!"
Thus all morning, and that night, at mess, a consensus of opinion amongst the younger officers would have established the fact that Tom Graves, ex-horse wrangler, was the most popular man in the Uhlans of the Guard.