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Updated: May 31, 2025
"Shendish and I and Corporal Wilson over there, who was with the party, got permission to go out and search. We searched all round where the repair had been going on. But we could not find him." "Merci! I ought not to have reproached you," she said steadily. "C'est un grand malheur." "You are right. Life for me is no longer of much value." She looked at him in her penetrating way.
A letter practically identical. Practically. A very comfortable sort of word; but Doggie's cultivated mind disliked it. It was a slovenly word, a makeshift for the hard broom of clean thought. This infernal "practically" begged the whole question. Jeanne would not have sentimentalized to Mo Shendish about ships passing in the night.
"I've got her photograph," Shendish confided in a whisper, and laid his hand on his tunic pocket. Then he looked round at the half-filled canteen to see that he was unobserved. "You won't give me away if I show it yer, will yer?" Doggie swore secrecy.
How do you think I could pick up this blinking lingo quick?" "Make violent love to Toinette and ask her to teach you. There's nothing like it," said Doggie. "Who's Toinette?" "The nice old lady in the kitchen." Mo flung his arm away. "Oh, go and boil yourself!" said he. But the making of love to the old woman in the kitchen led to possibilities of which Mo Shendish never dreamed.
And there were his friends: the humorous, genial, deboshed, yet ever-kindly Phineas; dear old Mo Shendish, whose material feet were hankering after the vulgar pavement of Mare Street, Hackney, but whose spiritual tread rang on golden floors dimly imagined by the Seer of Patmos; Barrett, the D. C. M., the miniature Hercules, who, according to legend, though, modestly, he would never own to it, seized two Boches by the neck and knocked their heads together till they died, and who, musically inclined, would sit at his, Doggie's, feet while he played on his penny whistle all the sentimental tunes he had ever heard of; Sergeant Ballinghall, a tower of a man, a champion amateur heavy-weight boxer, with a voice compared with which a megaphone sounded like a maiden's prayer, and a Bardolphian nose and an eagle eye and the heart of a broody hen, who had not only given him boxing lessons, but had pulled him through difficult places innumerable ... and scores of others.
One of the men with whom he talked occasionally was a red-headed little cockney by the name of Shendish. For some reason or the other perhaps because his name conveyed a perfectly wrong suggestion of the Hebraic he was always called "Mo" Shendish.
And very many of his old comrades had gone, some to Blighty, some West of that Island of Desire; and those who remained had the eyes of children who had passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. McPhail and Mo Shendish had passed through unscathed. In the reconstruction of the regiment chance willed that the three of them found themselves in the same platoon of A Company.
He strode away greatly pleased with himself, and went and found Mo Shendish. "Man," said he, "have you ever reflected that the dispensing of happiness is the cheapest form of human diversion?" "What've you been doin' now?" asked Mo. "I've just left a lassie tottering over with blissful dreams." "Gorblime!" said Mo, "and to think that if I could sling the lingo, I might've done the same!"
Mo Shendish had leaped about her like a fox-terrier, and she had laughed, with difficulty restraining her tears. But to Phineas alone she told her whole story. He listened in bewilderment. And the greater the bewilderment, the worse his crude translations of English into French. She wound up a long, eager speech by saying: "He has done this for me. Why?" "Love," replied Phineas bluntly.
The sting had gone out of the name through his comrades' ignorance of its origin. But he loathed it as much as ever; it sounded in his ears an everlasting reproach. In spite of the ill turn done in drunkenness, Doggie missed McPhail. He missed Mo Shendish, his more constant companion, even more.
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