THE RED PLANET

CHAPTER I


"Lady Fenimore's compliments, sir, and will you be so kind as to step
round to Sir Anthony at once?"

Heaven knows that never another step shall I take in this world again;
but Sergeant Marigold has always ignored the fact. That is one of the
many things I admire about Marigold. He does not throw my poor
paralysed legs, so to speak, in my face. He accepts them as the normal
equipment of an employer. I don't know what I should do without
Marigold.... You see we were old comrades in the South African War,
where we both got badly knocked to pieces. He was Sergeant in my
battery, and the same Boer shell did for both of us. At times we join
in cursing that shell heartily, but I am not sure that we do not hold
it in sneaking affection. It initiated us into the brotherhood of
death. Shortly afterwards when we had crossed the border-line back into
life, we exchanged, as tokens, bits of the shrapnel which they had
extracted from our respective carcases. I have not enquired what he did
with his bit; but I keep mine in a certain locked drawer.... There were
only the two of us left on the gun when we were knocked out.... I
should like to tell you the whole story, but you wouldn't listen to me.
And no wonder. In comparison with the present world convulsion in which
the slaughtered are reckoned by millions, the Boer War seems a trumpery
affair of bows and arrows. I am a back-number. Still, back-numbers have
their feelings--and their memories.

I sometimes wonder, as I sit in this wheel-chair, with my abominable
legs dangling down helplessly, what Sergeant Marigold thinks of me. I
know what I think of Marigold. I think him the ugliest devil that God
ever created and further marred after creating him. He is a long, bony
creature like a knobbly ram-rod, and his face is about the colour and
shape of a damp, mildewed walnut. To hide a bald head into which a
silver plate has been fixed, he wears a luxuriant curly brown wig, like
those that used to adorn waxen gentlemen in hair-dressing windows. His
is one of those unhappy moustaches that stick out straight and scanty
like a cat's. He has the slit of a letter-box mouth of the Irishman in
caricature, and only half a dozen teeth spaced like a skeleton company.
Nothing will induce him to procure false ones. It is a matter of
principle. Between the wearing of false hair and the wearing of false
teeth he makes a distinction of unfathomable subtlety. He is an
obstinate beast. If he wasn't he would not, with four fingers of his
right hand shot away, have remained with me on that gun. In the same
way, neither tears nor entreaties nor abuse have induced him to wear a
glass eye. On high days and holidays, whenever he desires to look smart
and dashing, he covers the unpleasing orifice with a black shade. In
ordinary workaday life he cares not how much he offends the aesthetic
sense. But the other eye, the sound left eye, is a wonder--the precious
jewel set in the head of the ugly toad. It is large, of ultra-marine
blue, steady, fearless, humorous, tender--everything heroic and
beautiful and romantic you can imagine about eyes. Let him clap a hand
over that eye and you will hold him the most dreadful ogre that ever
escaped out of a fairy tale. Let him clap a hand over the other eye and
look full at you out of the good one and you will think him the
Knightliest man that ever was--and in my poor opinion, you would not be
far wrong.