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Having satisfied himself that to burnish further its glittering buttons would be to gild refined gold, he commenced a vigorous brushing for it was now his high ambition to "get the stick" in other words to be dismissed from guard-duty as reward for being the best-turned-out man on parade.... As he reached up to his shelf for his gauntlets and pipe-clay box, Trooper Phelim O'Shaughnessy swaggered over with much jingle of spur and playfully smote him, netherly, with his cutting whip.
It seemed a poor return for such confidence and loyalty to be hustled out of the way on an official threat. It seemed to him the regiment was infernally light-hearted, as, pipe-clay white and nickel bright in the morning sun, it swung out of camp for the parade-ground, where the dog-carts and runabouts and automobiles were gathering from Del Monte and the cottages along the shore.
For some time the regulars fared ill in the warfare with the savages; and a succession of mortifying failures closed with a defeat more ruinous than any which had been experienced since the days of the "iron-tempered general the pipe-clay brain," for the disaster which befell St. Clair was as overwhelming as that wherein Braddock met his death.
We saw him flirting with the beautiful wedded Wreech; talking to Lieutenant-General Schulenburg about marriage, in a way which shook the pipe-clay of that virtuous man. He knows he would not get his choice, if he had one; strives not to care. Nor does he, in fact, much care; the romance being all out of it.
The Austrians had been very merry at the expense of the Prussian system of tactics, and had promised to beat the pipe-clay out of their jackets at the first meeting; and now the words of scorn were to be made good.
This is a common mode of salutation in Londa; and when they wish to be excessively polite, they bring a quantity of ashes or pipe-clay in a piece of skin, and, taking up handfuls, rub it on the chest and upper front part of each arm; others, in saluting, drum their ribs with their elbows; while others still touch the ground with one cheek after the other, and clap their hands.
If you stood to leeward of them upon the plain a mile away you could clearly get the raw, earthy smell of the ochre upon their hands and faces. Some had black bars streaked across their cheeks, and hideous crimson circles about their eyes. Some, likewise, had stars in pipe-clay painted upon the forehead.
He held a broken cork helmet, that had not seen pipe-clay for many a month, in his grimy hands, and scraped one foot and ducked his dripping head, as I turned toward him with a gruff, "Well?" "Beg pardon, sir," he said, in a harsh, rasping voice, "but I heard that the American Consul was here. I am an American." He looked up with a watery leer in his eyes.
The veteran soldier inspires our people with no such awe we hold that democratic weapon the fist in much more honor than the sabre and bayonet, and laugh at a man tricked out in scarlet and pipe-clay. That regiment of heroes is "marching to divine service," to the tune of the "British Grenadiers."
He went into the great world, to which he gains admission with an ease which shows that he has a good position, and tries to make up his leeway in the graces by learning to fence, dance, and ride. He wishes to extend his tour and see the European armies; but the Duke inexorably calls him back to pipe-clay.
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