The Prussian Officer | Page 2

rode one of his own horses at the
races--and at the officers club. Now and then he took himself a mistress.
But after such an event, he returned to duty with his brow still more
tense, his eyes still more hostile and irritable. With the men, however,
he was merely impersonal, though a devil when roused; so that, on the
whole, they feared him, but had no great aversion from him. They
accepted him as the inevitable.
To his orderly he was at first cold and just and indifferent: he did not
fuss over trifles. So that his servant knew practically nothing about him,
except just what orders he would give, and how he wanted them obeyed.
That was quite simple. Then the change gradually came.
The orderly was a youth of about twenty-two, of medium height, and
well built. He had strong, heavy limbs, was swarthy, with a soft, black,
young moustache. There was something altogether warm and young
about him. He had firmly marked eyebrows over dark, expressionless
eyes, that seemed never to have thought, only to have received life
direct through his senses, and acted straight from instinct.
Gradually the officer had become aware of his servant's young,
vigorous, unconscious presence about him. He could not get away from
the sense of the youth's person, while he was in attendance. It was like
a warm flame upon the older man's tense, rigid body, that had become
almost unliving, fixed. There was something so free and sen-contained
about him, and something in the young fellow s movement, that made
the officer aware of him. And this irritated the Prussian. He did not
choose to be touched into life by his servant. He might easily have
changed his man, but he did not. He now very rarely looked direct at
his orderly, but kept his face averted, as if to avoid seeing him. And yet
as the young soldier moved unthinking about the apartment, the elder
watched him, and would notice the movement of his strong young
shoulders under the blue cloth, the bend of his neck. And it irritated
him. To see the soldier s young, brown, shapely peasant's hand grasp
the loaf or the wine-bottle sent a Hash of hate or of anger through the
elder man's blood. It was not that the youth was clumsy: it was rather
the blind, instinctive sureness of movement of an unhampered young

animal that irritated the officer to such a degree.
Once, when a bottle of wine had gone over, and the red gushed out on
to the tablecloth, the officer had started up with an oath, and his eyes,
bluey like fire, had held those of the confused youth for a moment. It
was a shock for the young soldier. He felt some-thing sink deeper,
deeper into his soul, where nothing had ever gone before. It left him
rather blank and wondering. Some of his natural completeness in
himself was gone, a little uneasiness took its place. And from that time
an undiscovered feeling had held between the two men.
Henceforward the orderly was afraid of really meeting his master. His
subconsciousness remembered those steely blue eyes and the harsh
brows, and did not intend to meet them again. So he always stared past
his master, and avoided him. Also, in a little anxiety, he waited for the
three months to have gone, when his time would be up. He began to
feel a constraint in the Captain's presence, and the soldier even more
than the officer wanted to be left alone, in his neutrality as servant.
He had served the Captain for more than a year, and knew his duty.
This he performed easily, as if it were natural to him. The officer and
his commands he took for granted, as he took the sun and the rain, and
he served as a matter of course. It did not implicate him personally.
But now if he were going to be forced into a personal interchange with
his master he would be like a wild thing caught, he felt he must get
away.
But the influence of the young soldier's being had penetrated through
the officer's stiffened discipline, and perturbed the man in him. He,
however, was a gentleman, with long, fine hands and cultivated
movements, and was not going to allow such a thing as the stirring of
his innate self. He was a man of passionate temper, who had always
kept himself suppressed. Occasionally there had been a duel, an
outburst before the soldiers. He knew himself to be always on the point
of breaking out. But he kept himself hard to the idea of the Service.
Whereas the young soldier seemed to live out his warm, full nature, to
give it off in his very movements, which