CHAPTER VI ISOBEL'S "DREAM" For the next day or two Alf found life very hard. Bill's appetite for beer increased by geometrical progression; and Eustace's possible indignation at being constantly summoned merely to supply Private Grant with large bitters filled Alf with the liveliest apprehension. He felt that Bill—who, under the influence of unlimited liquor, was losing his moral sense—was not playing the game. He even descended to the level of intimidating Higgins, when he declared himself unprepared to risk the djinn's displeasure any longer, by the use of threats. "Stop me beer, will yer?" said Grant. "Very well, then. We'll just see what the R.S.M. 'as to say about yer goin's on. 'E won't 'arf tell yer orf, I don't think!" The regimental sergeant-major is ex officio the most terrible individual of a battalion from the point of view of the private soldier. True, the colonel is greater than he, in that from that officer the R.S.M. takes his orders; but the colonel—so far as Higgins and his peers were concerned—was a mere abstraction. The R.S.M. overshadowed[Pg 63] him much as, in the eyes of unimaginative heathens, the priest overshadows the deity whose minister he is. [Pg 63] The R.S.M. of the 5th Middlesex Fusiliers, too, was a martinet of the most approved Regular Army type. His horizon was bounded on the one side by King's Regulations and on the other by the Manual of Military Law; and if he should become aware that a private of his battalion was so lost to the meaning of military discipline as to keep an unauthorized familiar spirit, the only possible result would be an explosion of wrath too terrible even to contemplate. Of this threat, therefore, Bill Grant made shameless use; and day by day he became more bibulous, Eustace more displeased, and Alf more miserable. Alf racked his rather inadequate brains in the hope that Necessity would acknowledge her reputed offspring, Invention, and find him a way out of his troubles. But in the end Bill brought about his own undoing. He had a lively and, in his cups, a lurid imagination; and by giving it too free rein, he suggested to Alf a counter-threat. "'Ow'd it be, ole f'ler," said Bill thickly, on the second day, after having kept Eustace almost continuously employed for several hours, "to 'ave old Eustish up again 'n tell 'im to turn the R.Esh.M. into a rhinosherush?" To Alf this remark seemed not so much humorous
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