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Title: Land and Sea Tales for Boys and Girls
Author: Kipling, Rudyard
Language: English
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
LAND AND SEA TALES
FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
BOOKS BY RUDYARD KIPLING
ACTIONS AND REACTIONS
BRUSHWOOD BOY, THE
CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS
COLLECTED VERSE
DAY’S WORK, THE
DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES AND BALLADS AND BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS
DIVERSITY OF CREATURES, A
EYES OF ASIA, THE
FEET OF THE YOUNG MEN, THE
FIVE NATIONS, THE
FRANCE AT WAR
FRINGES OF THE FLEET
FROM SEA TO SEA
HISTORY OF ENGLAND, A
IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR, THE
JUNGLE BOOK, THE
JUNGLE BOOK, SECOND
JUST SO SONG BOOK
JUST SO STORIES
KIM
KIPLING ANTHOLOGY PROSE AND VERSE
KIPLING STORIES AND POEMS EVERY CHILD SHOULD KNOW
KIPLING BIRTHDAY BOOK, THE
LETTERS OF TRAVEL
LIFE’S HANDICAP: BEING STORIES OF MINE OWN PEOPLE
LIGHT THAT FAILED, THE
MANY INVENTIONS
NAULAHKA, THE (With Wolcott Balestier)
PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS
PUCK OF POOK’S HILL
REWARDS AND FAIRIES
RUDYARD KIPLING’S VERSE: Inclusive Edition, 1885–1918
SEA WARFARE
SEVEN SEAS, THE
SOLDIER STORIES
SOLDIERS THREE, THE STORY OF THE GADSBYS, AND IN BLACK AND WHITE
SONG OF THE ENGLISH, A
SONGS FROM BOOKS
STALKY & CO.
THEY
TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES
UNDER THE DEODARS, THE PHANTOM RICKSHAW, AND WEE WILLIE WINKIE
WITH THE NIGHT MAIL
YEARS BETWEEN, THE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Land and Sea Tales for Boys and Girls
By Rudyard Kipling
[Illustration]
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1923
[Illustration]
COPYRIGHT, 1893, 1895, 1897, 1898, 1900, 1918, 1920, 1922, 1923, BY
RUDYARD KIPLING
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
_First Edition_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
To all to whom this little book may come—
Health for yourselves and those you hold most dear;
Content abroad, and happiness at home,
And—one grand secret in your private ear:—
_Nations have passed away and left no traces,
And History gives the naked cause of it—
One single, simple reason in all cases;
They fell because their people were not fit._
Now, though your Body be mis-shapen, blind,
Lame, feverish, lacking substance, power or skill,
Certain it is that men can school the Mind
To school the sickliest Body to her will—
As many have done, whose glory blazes still
Like mighty fires in meanest lanterns lit:
Wherefore, we pray the crippled, weak and ill—
Be fit—be fit! In mind at first be fit!
And, though your Spirit seem uncouth or small,
Stubborn as clay or shifting as the sand,
Strengthen the Body, and the Body shall
Strengthen the Spirit till she take command;
As a bold rider brings his horse in hand
At the tall fence, with voice and heel and bit,
And leaps while all the field are at a stand.
Be fit—be fit! In body next be fit!
_Nothing on earth—no arts, no gifts, nor graces—
No fame, no wealth—outweighs the want of it.
This is the Law which every law embraces—
Be fit—be fit! In mind and body be fit!_
The even heart that seldom slurs its beat—
The cool head weighing what that heart desires—
The measuring eye that guides the hands and feet—
The Soul unbroken when the Body tires—
These are the things our weary world requires
Far more than superfluities of wit;
Wherefore we pray you, sons of generous sires,
Be fit—be fit! For Honour’s sake be fit.
_There is one lesson at all Times and Places—
One changeless Truth on all things changing writ,
For boys and girls, men, women, nations, races—
Be fit—be fit! And once again, be fit!_
CONTENTS
PAGE
Winning the Victoria Cross 1
The Way That He Took 27
An Unqualified Pilot 65
_The Junk and the Dhow_ 84
His Gift 91
_The Master-Cook_ 118
A Flight of Fact 123
“Stalky” 149
_The Hour of the Angel_ 182
The Burning of the _Sarah Sands_ 185
_The Last Lap_ 199
The Parable of Boy Jones 203
_A Departure_ 222
The Bold ’Prentice 227
_The Nurses_ 246
The Son of His Father 251
An English School 291
_A Counting-Out Song_ 319
Land and Sea Tales
For Boys and Girls
WINNING THE VICTORIA CROSS
The history of the Victoria Cross has been told so often that it is only
necessary to say that the Order was created by Queen Victoria on January
29th, 1856, in the year of the peace with Russia, when the new racing
Cunard paddle-steamer _Persia_ of three thousand tons was making
thirteen knots an hour between England and America, and all the world
wondered at the advance of civilization and progress.
Any officer of the English Army, Navy, Reserve or Volunteer forces, from
a duke to a negro, can wear on his left breast the little ugly bronze
Maltese cross with the crowned lion atop and the inscription “For
Valour” below, if he has only “performed some signal act of valour” or
devotion to his country “in the presence of the enemy.” Nothing else
makes any difference; for it is explicitly laid down in the warrant that
“neither rank, nor long service, nor wounds, nor any other circumstance
whatsoever, save the merit of conspicuous bravery, shall be held to
establish a sufficient claim to this Order.”
There are many kinds of bravery, and if one looks through the records of
the four hundred and eleven men, living and dead, that have held the
Victoria Cross before the Great War, one finds instances of every
imaginable variety of heroism.
There is bravery in the early morning, when it takes great courage even
to leave warm blankets, let alone walk into dirt, cold and death; on
foot and on horse; empty or fed; sick or well; coolness of brain, that
thinks out a plan at dawn and holds to it all through the long,
murderous day; bravery of the mind that makes the jerking nerves hold
still and do nothing except show a good example; sheer reckless strength
that hacks through a crowd of amazed men and comes out grinning on the
other side; enduring spirit that wears through a long siege, never
losing heart or manners or temper; quick, flashing bravery that heaves a
lighted shell overboard or rushes the stockade while others are gaping
at it, and the calculated craftsmanship that camps alone before the
angry rifle-pit or shell-hole, and cleanly and methodically wipes out
every soul in it.
Before the Great War, England dealt with many different peoples, and,
generally speaking, all of them, Zulu, Malay, Maori, Burman, Boer, the
little hillsman of the Northeast Indian Frontier, Afreedi, Pathan,
Biluch, the Arab of East Africa and the Sudanese of the North of Africa
and the rest, played a thoroughly good game. For this we owe them many
thanks; since they showed us every variety of climate and almost every
variety of attack, from long-range fire to hand-to-hand scrimmage;
except, of course, the ordered movements of Continental armies and the
scientific ruin of towns.... That came later and on the largest scale.
It is rather the fashion to look down on these little wars and to call
them “military promenades” and so forth, but in reality no enemy can do
much more than poison your wells, rush your camp, ambuscade you, kill
you with his climate, fight you body to body, make you build your own
means of communication under his fire, and horribly cut up your wounded.
He may do this on a large or small scale, but the value of the teaching
is the same.
It is in these rough-and-tumble affairs that many of the first Crosses
were won; and some of the records for the far-away Crimea and the Indian
Mutiny are well worth remembering, if only to show that valour never
varies.
The Crimea was clean fighting as far as the enemy were concerned,—for
the very old men say that no one could wish for better troops than the
Russians of Inkerman and Alma,—but our own War Office then, as two
generations later, helped the enemy with ignorant mismanagement and
neglect. In the Mutiny of 1857 all India, Bengal and the North West
Provinces, seemed to be crumbling like sand-bag walls in flood, and
wherever there were three or four Englishmen left, they had to kill or
be killed till help came. Hundreds of Crosses must have been won then,
had anybody had time to notice; for the average of work allowing for the
improvements in man-killing machinery was as high as in the Great War.
For instance—this is a rather extensive and varied record—one man shut
up in the Residency at Lucknow stole out three times at the risk of his
life to get cattle for the besieged to eat. Later, he extinguished a
fire near a powder-magazine and a month afterwards put out another fire.
Then he led twelve men to capture two guns which were wrecking the
Residency at close range. Next day he captured an out-lying position
full of mutineers; three days later he captured another gun, and
finished up by capturing a fourth. So he got his Cross.
Another young man was a lieutenant in the Southern Mahratta Horse, and a
full regiment of mutineers broke into his part of the world, upsetting
the minds of the people. He collected some loyal troopers, chased the
regiment eighty miles, stormed the fort they had taken refuge in, and
killed, captured or wounded every soul there.
Then there was a lance corporal who afterwards rose to be
Lieutenant-Colonel. He was the enduring type of man, for he won his
Cross merely for taking a hand in every fight that came along through
nearly seventy consecutive days.
There were also two brothers who earned the Cross about six times
between them for leading forlorn hopes and such-like. Likewise there was
a private of “persuasive powers and cheerful disposition,” so the record
says, who was cut off with nine companions in a burning house while the
mutineers were firing in at the windows. He, however, cheerfully
persuaded the enemy to retire and in the end all his party were saved
through his practical “cheerfulness.” He must have been a man worth
knowing.
And there was a little man in the Sutherland Highlanders—a private who
eventually became a Major-General. In one attack near Lucknow he killed
eleven men with his claymore, which is a heating sort of weapon to
handle.
Even he was not more thorough than two troopers who rode to the rescue
of their Colonel, cut off and knocked down by mutineers. They helped him
to rise, and they must have been annoyed, for the three of them killed
all the mutineers—about fifty.
Then there was a negro captain of the foretop, William Hall, R. N., who
with two other negroes, Samuel Hodge and W. J. Gordon of the 4th and 1st
West Indian Infantry, came up the river with the Naval Brigade from
Calcutta to work big guns. They worked them so thoroughly that each got
a Cross. They must have done a good deal, for no one is quite so crazy
reckless as a West Indian negro when he is really excited.
There was a man in the Mounted Police who with sixty horsemen charged
one thousand mutineers and broke them up. And so the tale runs on.
Three Bengal Civilian Government officers were, I believe, the only
strict non-combatants who ever received the Cross. As a matter of fact
they had to fight with the rest, but the story of “Lucknow” Kavanagh’s
adventures in disguise, of Ross Mangle’s heroism after the first attempt
to relieve the Little House at Arrah had failed (Arrah was a place where
ten white men and fifty-six loyal natives barricaded themselves in a
billiard-room in a garden and stood the siege of three regiments of
mutineers for three weeks), and of McDonnel’s cool-headedness in the
retreat down the river, are things that ought to be told by themselves.
Almost any one can fight well on the winning side, but those men who can
patch up a thoroughly bad business and pull it off in some sort of
shape, are most to be respected.
Army chaplains and doctors are officially supposed to be
non-combatants—they are not really so—but about twenty years after the
Mutiny a chaplain was decorated under circumstances that made it
impossible to overlook his bravery. Still, I do not think he quite cared
for the publicity. He was a regimental chaplain—in action a chaplain is
generally supposed to stay with or near the doctor—and he seems to have
drifted up close to a cavalry charge, for he helped a wounded officer of
the Ninth Lancers into an ambulance. He was then going about his
business when he found two troopers who had tumbled into a water-course
all mixed with their horses, and a knot of Afghans were hurrying to
attend to them. The record says that he rescued both men, but the tale,
as I heard it unofficially, declares that he found a revolver somewhere
with which he did excellent work while the troopers were struggling out
of the ditch. This seems very possible, for the Afghans do not leave
disabled men without the strongest hint, and I know that in nine cases
out of ten if you want a coherent account of what happened in an action
you had better ask the chaplain or the Roman Catholic priest of a
battalion.
But it is difficult to get details. I have met perhaps a dozen or so of
V. C.’s, and in every case they explained that they did the first thing
that came to their hand without worrying about alternatives. One man
headed a charge into a mass of Afghans, who are very good fighters so
long as they stay interested in their work, and cut down five of them.
All he said was: “Well, they were there, and they couldn’t go away. What
was a man to do? Write ’em a note and ask ’em to shift?”
Another man I questioned was a doctor. Army doctors, by the way, have
special opportunities for getting Crosses. Their duty compels them to
stay somewhere within touch of the firing line, and most of them run
right up and lie down, keeping an eye on the wounded.
It is a heart-breaking thing for a doctor who has pulled a likely young
private of twenty-three through typhoid fever and set him on his feet
and watched him develop, to see the youngster wasted with a casual
bullet. It must have been this feeling that made my friend do the old,
splendid thing that never grows stale—rescue a wounded man under fire.
He won this Cross, but all he said was: “_I_ didn’t want any
unauthorized consultations—or amputations—while I was Medical Officer in
charge. ’Tisn’t etiquette.”
His own head was very nearly blown off as he was tying up an artery—for
it was blind, bad bushfighting, with puffs of smoke popping in and out
among the high grass and never a man visible—but he only grunted when
his helmet was cracked across by a bullet, and went on tightening the
tourniquet.
As I have hinted, in most of our little affairs before the war, the
enemy knew nothing about the Geneva Convention or the treatment of
wounded, but fired at a doctor on his face value as a white man. One
cannot blame them—it was their custom, but it was exceedingly awkward
when our doctors took care of their wounded who did not understand these
things and tried to go on fighting in hospital.
There is an interesting tale of a wounded Sudanese—what our soldiers
used to call a “fuzzy”—who was carefully attended to in a hospital after
a fight. As soon as he had any strength again, he proposed to a native
orderly that they two should massacre all the infidel wounded in the
other beds. The orderly did not see it; so, when the doctor came in he
found the “Fuzzy” was trying to work out his plan single-handed. The
doctor had a very unpleasant scuffle with that simple-minded man, but,
at last, he slipped the chloroform-bag over his nose. The man understood
bullets and was not afraid of them; but this magic smelly stuff that
sent him to sleep, cowed him altogether, and he gave no more trouble in
the ward.
So a doctor’s life is always a little hazardous and, besides his
professional duties, he may find himself senior officer in charge of
what is left of the command, if the others have been shot down. As
doctors are always full of theories, I believe they rather like this
chance of testing them. Sometimes doctors have run out to help a
mortally wounded man of their battalion, because they know that he may
have last messages to give, and it eases him to die with some human
being holding his hand. This is a most noble thing to do under fire,
because it means sitting still among bullets. Chaplains have done it
also, but it is part of what they reckon as their regular duty.
Another V. C. of my acquaintance—he was anything but a doctor or a
chaplain—once saved a trooper whose horse had been killed. His method
was rather original. The man was on foot and the enemy—Zulus this
time—was coming down at a run, and the trooper said, very decently, that
he did not see his way to perilling his officer’s life by
double-weighting the only available horse.
To this his officer replied: “If you don’t get up behind me, I’ll get
off and give you such a licking as you’ve never had in your life.” The
man was more afraid of fists than of assagais, and the good horse pulled
them both out of the scrape. Now by our Regulations an officer who
insults or “threatens with violence” a subordinate in the Service is
liable to lose his commission and to be declared “incapable of serving
the King in any capacity,” but for some reason or other the trooper
never reported his superior.
The humour and the honour of fighting are by no means all on one side. A
good many years ago there was a war in New Zealand against the Maoris,
who, though they tortured prisoners and occasionally ate a man, liked
fighting for its own sake. One of their chiefs cut off a detachment of
our men in a stockade where he might have starved them out, and eaten
them at leisure later. But word reached him that they were short of
provisions, and so he sent in a canoeful of pig and potatoes with the
message that it was no fun to play that game with weak men, and he would
be happy to meet them after rest and a full meal. There are many cases
in which men, very young as a rule, have forced their way through a
stockade of thorns that hook or bamboos that cut and held on in the face
of heavy fire or just so long as served to bring up their comrades.
Those who have done this say that getting in is exciting enough, but the
bad time, when the minutes drag like hours, lies between the first
scuffle with the angry faces in the smoke, and the “Hi, get out o’
this!” that shows that the others of our side are tumbling up behind.
They say it is as bad as foot-ball when you get off the ball just as
slowly as you dare, so that your own side may have time to come up.
Most men, after they have been shot over a little, only want a lead to
do good work; so the result of a young man’s daring is often out of all
proportion to his actual performances.
Here is a case which never won notice because very few people talked
about it—a case of the courage of Ulysses, one might say.
A column of troops, heavily weighted with sick and wounded, had drifted
into a bad place—a pass where an enemy, hidden behind rocks, were
picking them off at known ranges, as they retreated. Half a battalion
was acting as rear-guard—company after company facing about on the
narrow road and trying to keep down the wicked, flickering fire from the
hillsides. And it was twilight; and it was cold and raining; and it was
altogether horrible for everyone.
Presently, the rear-guard began to fire a little too quickly and to
hurry back to the main body a little too soon, and the bearers put down
the ambulances a little too often, and looked on each side of the road
for possible cover. Altogether, there were the makings of a nasty little
breakdown—and after that would come primitive slaughter.
A boy whom I knew was acting command of one company that was specially
bored and sulky, and there were shouts from the column of “Hurry up!
Hurry there!” neither necessary nor soothing. He kept his men in hand as
well as he could, hitting down rifles when they fired wild, till someone
along the line shouted: “What on earth are you fellows waiting so long
for?”
Then my friend—I am rather proud that he was my friend—hunted for his
pipe and tobacco, filled the bowl _in_ his pocket because, he said
afterwards, he didn’t want any one to see how his hand shook, lit a
fuzee, and shouted back between very short puffs: “Hold on a minute. I’m
lighting my pipe.”
There was a roar of rather crackly laughter and the company joker said:
“Since you _are_ so pressin’, I think I’ll ’ave a draw meself.”
I don’t believe either pipe was smoked out, but—and this is a very big
but—the little bit of acting steadied the company, and the news of it
ran down the line, and even the wounded in the doolies laughed, and
everyone felt better. Whether the enemy heard the laughing, or was
impressed by the even “one-two-three-four” firing that followed it, will
never be known, but the column came to camp at the regulation step and
not at a run, with very few casualties. That is what one may call the
courage of the much-enduring Ulysses, but the only comment that I ever
heard on the affair was the boy’s own, and all _he_ said was: “It was
transpontine (which means theatrical), but necessary.”
Of course he must have been a good boy from the beginning, for little
bits of pure inspiration seldom come to or are acted upon by slovens,
self-indulgent or undisciplined people. I have not yet met one V. C. who
had not strict notions about washing and shaving and keeping himself
decent on his way through the civilized world, whatever he may have done
outside it.
Indeed, it is very curious, after one has known hundreds of young men
and young officers, to sit still at a distance and watch them come
forward to success in their profession. Somehow, the clean and
considerate man mostly seems to take hold of circumstances at the right
end.
One of the youngest of the V. C.’s of his time I used to know distantly
as a beautiful being whom they called Aide-de-Camp to a big official in
India. So far as strangers could judge, his duties consisted in wearing
a uniform faced with blue satin, and in seeing that everyone was looked
after at the dances and dinners. He would wander about smiling, with
eyes at the back of his head, introducing men who were strangers and a
little uncomfortable, to girls whose dance-cards were rather empty;
taking old and uninteresting women into supper, and tucking them into
their carriages afterwards; or pleasantly steering white-whiskered
native officers all covered with medals and half-blind with confusion
through the maze of a big levee into the presence of the Viceroy or
Commander-in-Chief, or whoever it was they were being presented to.
After a few years of this work, his chance came, and he made the most of
it. We were then smoking out a nest of caravan-raiders, slave-dealers,
and general thieves who lived somewhere under the Karakoram Mountains
among glaciers about sixteen thousand feet above sea level. The mere
road to the place was too much for many mules, for it ran by precipices
and round rock-curves and over roaring, snow-fed rivers.
The enemy—they were called Kanjuts—had fortified themselves in a place
nearly as impregnable as nature and man could make it. One position was
on the top of a cliff about twelve hundred feet high, whence they could
roll stones directly on the head of any attacking force. Our men
objected to the stones much more than to the rifle-fire. They were
camped in a river-bed at the bottom of an icy pass with some three tiers
of these cliff-like defences above them, and the Kanjuts on each tier
were very well armed. To make all specially pleasant, it was December.
This ex-aide-de-camp happened to be a good mountaineer, and he was told
off with a hundred native troops, Goorkhas and Dogra Sikhs, to climb up
into the top tier of the fortifications. The only way of arriving was to
follow a sort of shoot in the cliff-face which the enemy had worn smooth
by throwing rocks down. Even in daylight, in peace, and with good
guides, it would have been fair mountaineering.
He went up in the dark, by eye and guess, against some two thousand
Kanjuts very much at war with him. When he had climbed eight hundred
feet almost perpendicular he found he had to come back, because even he
and his Goorkha cragsmen could find no way.
He returned to the river-bed and tried again in a new place, working his
men up between avalanches of stones that slid along and knocked people
over. When he struggled to the top he had to take his men into the forts
with the bayonet and the _kukri_, the little Goorkha knife. The attack
was so utterly bold and unexpected that it broke the hearts of the enemy
and practically ended the campaign; and if you could see the photograph
of the place you would understand why.
It was hard toenail and fingernail crag-climbing under fire, and the men
behind him were not regulars, but what are called Imperial Service
troops—men raised by the semi-independent kings and used to defend the
frontier. They enjoyed themselves immensely, and the little aide-de-camp
got a deserved Victoria Cross. The courage of Ulysses again; for he had
to think as he climbed, and until he was directly underneath the
fortifications, one chance-hopping boulder might just have planed his
men off all along the line.
But there is a heroism beyond all, for which no Victoria Cross is ever
given, because there is no official enemy nor any sort of firing, except
one volley in the early morning at some spot where the noise does not
echo into the newspapers.
It is necessary from time to time to send unarmed men into No Man’s Land
and the Back of Beyond across the Khudajantakhan (The Lord-knows-where)
Mountains, just to find out what is going on there among people who some
day or other may become dangerous enemies.
The understanding is that if the men return with their reports so much
the better for them. They may then receive some sort of decoration,
given, so far as the public can make out, for no real reason. If they do
not come back, and people disappear very mysteriously at the Back of
Beyond, that is their own concern and no questions will be asked, and no
enquiries made.
They tell a tale of one man who, some years ago, strayed into No Man’s
Land to see how things were, and met a very amiable set of people, who
asked him to a round of dinners and lunches and dances. And all that
time he knew, and they knew that he knew, that his hosts were debating
between themselves whether they should suffer him to live till next
morning, and if they decided not to let him live, in what way they
should wipe him out most quietly.
The only consideration that made them hesitate was that they could not
tell from his manner whether there were five hundred Englishmen within a
few miles of him or no Englishmen at all within five hundred miles of
him; and, as matters stood at that moment, they could not very well go
out to look and make sure.
So he danced and dined with those pleasant, merry folk,—all good
friends,—and talked about hunting and shooting and so forth, never
knowing when the polite servants behind his chair would turn into the
firing-party. At last his hosts decided, without rude words said, to let
him go; and when they made up their minds they did it very handsomely;
for, you must remember, there is no malice borne on either side of that
game.
They gave him a farewell banquet and drank his health, and he thanked
them for his delightful visit, and they said: “_So_ glad you’re glad—_au
revoir_,” and he came away looking a little bored.
Later on, so the tale runs, his hosts discovered that their guest had
been given up for lost by his friends in England where no one ever
expected to see him again. Then they were sorry that they had not put
him against a wall and shot him.
That is a case of the cold-blooded courage worked up to after years of
training—courage of mind forcing the body through an unpleasant
situation for the sake of the game.
When all is said and done, courage of mind is the finest thing any one
can hope to attain to. A weak or undisciplined soul is apt to become
reckless under strain (which is only being afraid the wrong way about),
or to act for its own immediate advantage. For this reason the Victoria
Cross is jealously guarded, and if there be suspicion that the man is
playing to the gallery or out pot-hunting for medals, as they call it,
he is often left to head his charges and rescue his wounded all over
again as a guarantee of good faith.
In the Great War there was very little suspicion, or chance, of
gallery-play for the V. C., because there was ample opportunity and,
very often, strong necessity, for a man to repeat his performances
several times over. Moreover, he was generally facing much deadlier
weapons than mere single rifles or edged tools, and the rescue of
wounded under fire was, by so much, a more serious business. But one or
two War V. C.’s of my acquaintance have told me that if you can manage
the little matter of keeping your head, it is not as difficult as it
sounds to get on the blind side of a machine gun, or to lie out under
its lowest line of fire where, they say, you are “quite comfortable if
you don’t fuss.” Also, every V. C. of the Great War I have spoken to has
been rather careful to explain that he won his Cross because what he did
happened to be done when and where someone could notice it. Thousands of
men they said did just the same, but in places where there were no
observers. And that is true; for the real spirit of the Army changes
very little through the years.
Men are taught to volunteer for anything and everything; going out
quietly after, not before, the authorities have filled their place. They
are also instructed that it is cowardly, it is childish, and it is
cheating to neglect or scamp the plain work immediately in front of
them, the duties they are trusted to do, for the sake of stepping aside
to snatch at what to an outsider may resemble fame or distinction. Above
all, their own hard equals, whose opinion is the sole opinion worth
having, are always sitting unofficially in judgment on them.
The Order itself is a personal decoration, and the honour and glory of
it belongs to the wearer; but he can only win it by forgetting himself,
his own honour and glory, and by working for something beyond and
outside and apart from his own self. And there seems to be no other way
in which you get anything in this world worth the keeping.
THE WAY THAT HE TOOK
_Almost every word of this story is based on fact. The Boer War of
1899–1902 was a very small one as wars were reckoned, and was fought
without any particular malice, but it taught our men the practical value
of scouting in the field. They were slow to learn at the outset, and it
cost them many unnecessary losses, as is always the case when men think
they can do their work without taking trouble beforehand._
The guns of the Field-Battery were ambushed behind white-thorned
mimosas, scarcely taller than their wheels, that marked the line of a
dry nullah; and the camp pretended to find shade under a clump of gums
planted as an experiment by some Minister of Agriculture. One small hut,
reddish stone with a tin roof, stood where the single track of the
railway split into a siding. A rolling plain of red earth, speckled with
loose stones and sugar-bush, ran northward to the scarps and spurs of a
range of little hills—all barren and exaggerated in the heat-haze.
Southward, the level lost itself in a tangle of scrub-furred hillocks,
upheaved without purpose or order, seared and blackened by the strokes
of the careless lightning, seamed down their sides with spent
watercourses, and peppered from base to summit with stones—riven, piled,
scattered stones. Far away, to the eastward, a line of blue-grey
mountains, peaked and horned, lifted itself over the huddle of the
tortured earth. It was the only thing that held steady through the
liquid mirage. The nearer hills detached themselves from the plain, and
swam forward like islands in a milky ocean. While the Major stared
through puckered eyelids, Leviathan himself waded through the far
shallows of it—a black and formless beast.
“That,” said the Major, “must be the guns coming back.” He had sent out
two guns, nominally for exercise—actually to show the loyal Dutch that
there was artillery near the railway if any patriot thought fit to
tamper with it. Chocolate smears, looking as though they had been swept
with a besom through the raffle of stones, wandered across the
earth—unbridged, ungraded, unmetalled. They were the roads to the brown
mud huts, one in each valley, that were officially styled farm-houses.
At very long intervals a dusty Cape-cart or a tilted wagon would move
along them, and men, dirtier than the dirt, would come to sell fruit or
scraggy sheep. At night the farm-houses were lighted up in a style out
of all keeping with Dutch economy; the scrub would light itself on some
far headland, and the house-lights twinkled in reply. Three or four days
later the Major would read bad news in the Capetown papers thrown to him
from the passing troop trains.
The guns and their escort changed from Leviathan to the likeness of
wrecked boats, their crews struggling beside them. Presently they took
on their true shape, and lurched into camp amid clouds of dust.
The Mounted Infantry escort set about its evening meal; the hot air
filled with the scent of burning wood; sweating men, rough-dried
sweating horses with wisps of precious forage; the sun dipped behind the
hills, and they heard the whistle of a train from the south.
“What’s that?” said the Major, slipping into his coat. The decencies had
not yet left him.
“Ambulance train,” said the Captain of Mounted Infantry, raising his
glasses. “I’d like to talk to a woman again, but it won’t stop here....
It _is_ stopping, though, and making a beastly noise. Let’s look.”
The engine had sprung a leaky tube, and ran lamely into the siding. It
would be two or three hours at least before she could be patched up.
Two doctors and a couple of Nursing Sisters stood on the rear platform
of a carriage. The Major explained the situation, and invited them to
tea.
“We were just going to ask _you_,” said the medical Major of the
ambulance train.
“No, come to our camp. Let the men see a woman again!” he pleaded.
Sister Dorothy, old in the needs of war, for all her twenty-four years,
gathered up a tin of biscuits and some bread and butter new cut by the
orderlies. Sister Margaret picked up the tea-pot, the spirit-lamp, and a
water-bottle.
“Capetown water,” she said with a nod. “Filtered too. _I_ know Karroo
water.” She jumped down lightly on to the ballast.
“What do you know about the Karroo, Sister?” said the Captain of Mounted
Infantry, indulgently, as a veteran of a month’s standing. He understood
that all that desert as it seemed to him was called by that name.
She laughed. “This is my home. I was born out they-ah—just behind that
big range of hills—out Oudtshorn way. It’s only sixty miles from here.
Oh, how good it is!”
She slipped the Nurses’ cap from her head, tossed it through the open
car-window, and drew a breath of deep content. With the sinking of the
sun the dry hills had taken life and glowed against the green of the
horizon. They rose up like jewels in the utterly clear air, while the
valleys between flooded with purple shadow. A mile away, stark-clear,
withered rocks showed as though one could touch them with the hand, and
the voice of a native herdboy in charge of a flock of sheep came in
clear and sharp over twice that distance. Sister Margaret devoured the
huge spaces with eyes unused to shorter ranges, snuffed again the air
that has no equal under God’s skies, and turning to her companion,
said:—“What do _you_ think of it?”
“I am afraid I’m rather singular,” he replied. “Most of us hate the
Karroo. I used to, but it grows on one somehow. I suppose it’s the lack
of fences and roads that’s so fascinating. And when one gets back from
the railway——”
“You’re quite right,” she said, with an emphatic stamp of her foot.
“People come to Matjesfontein—ugh!—with their lungs, and they live
opposite the railway station and that new hotel, and they think _that’s_
the Karroo. They say there isn’t anything in it. It’s _full_ of life
when you really get into it. You see that? I’m so glad. D’you know,
you’re the first English officer I’ve heard who has spoken a good word
for my country?”
“I’m glad I pleased you,” said the Captain, looking into Sister
Margaret’s black-lashed grey eyes under the heavy brown hair shot with
grey where it rolled back from the tanned forehead. This kind of nurse
was new in his experience. The average Sister did not lightly stride
over rolling stones, and—was it possible that her easy pace uphill was
beginning to pump him? As she walked, she hummed joyously to herself, a
queer catchy tune of one line several times repeated:—
Vat jou goet en trek, Ferriera,
Vat jou goet en trek.
It ran off with a little trill that sounded like,
Zwaar draa, alle en de ein kant;
Jannie met de hoepel bein![1]
“Listen!” she said, suddenly. “What was that?”
“It must be a wagon on the road. I heard the whip, I think.”
“Yes, but you didn’t hear the wheels, did you? It’s a little bird that
makes just that noise. ‘Whe-ew’!” she duplicated it perfectly. “We call
it”—she gave the Dutch name, which did not, of course, abide with the
Captain. “We must have given him a scare! You hear him in the early
mornings when you are sleeping in the wagons. It’s just like the noise
of a whiplash, isn’t it?”
They entered the Major’s tent a little behind the others, who were
discussing the scanty news of the Campaign.
“Oh, no,” said Sister Margaret coolly, bending over the spirit-lamp,
“the Transvaalers will stay round Kimberley and try to put Rhodes in a
cage. But, of course, if a commando gets through to De Aar they will all
rise——”
“You think so, Sister?” said the medical Major, deferentially.
“I know so. They will rise anywhere in the Colony if a commando comes
actually to them. Presently they will rise in Prieska—if it is only to
steal the forage at Van Wyk’s Vlei. Why not?”
“We get most of our opinions of the war from Sister Margaret,” said the
civilian doctor of the train. “It’s all new to me, but, so far, all her
prophecies have come true.”
A few months ago that doctor had retired from practice to a country
house in rainy England, his fortune made and, as he tried to believe,
his life-work done. Then the bugles blew, and, rejoicing at the change,
he found himself, his experience, and his fine bedside manner, buttoned
up in a black-tabbed khaki coat, on a hospital train that covered eleven
hundred miles a week, carried a hundred wounded each trip and dealt him
more experience in a month than he had ever gained in a year of home
practice.
Sister Margaret and the Captain of Mounted Infantry took their cups
outside the tent. The Captain wished to know something more about her.
Till that day he had believed South Africa to be populated by sullen
Dutchmen and slack-waisted women; and in some clumsy fashion betrayed
the belief.
“Of course, you don’t see any others where you are,” said Sister
Margaret, leniently, from her camp-chair. “They are all at the war. I
have two brothers, and a nephew, my sister’s son, and—oh, I can’t count
my cousins.” She flung her hands outward with a curiously un-English
gesture. “And then, too, you have never been off the railway. You have
only seen Capetown? All the schel—all the useless people are there. You
should see _our_ country beyond the ranges—out Oudtshorn way. We grow
fruit and vines. It is much prettier, _I_ think, than Paarl.”
“I’d like to very much. I may be stationed in Africa after the war is
over.”
“Ah, but we know the English officers. They say that this is a ‘beastly
country,’ and they do not know how to—to be nice to people. Shall I tell
you? There was an aide-de-camp at Government House three years ago. He
sent out invitations to dinner to Piet—to Mr. Van der Hooven’s wife. And
she had been dead eight years, and Van der Hooven—he has the big farms
round Craddock—just then was thinking of changing his politics, you
see—he was against the Government,—and taking a house in Capetown,
because of the Army meat contracts. That was why, you see?”
“I see,” said the Captain, to whom this was all Greek.
“Piet was a little angry—not much—but he went to Capetown, and that
aide-de-camp had made a joke about it—about inviting the dead woman—in
the Civil Service Club. You see? So of _course_ the opposition there
told Van der Hooven that the aide-de-camp had said he could not remember
all the old Dutch vrows that had died, and so Piet Van der Hooven went
away angry, and now he is more hot than ever against the Government. If
you stay with us you must not be like _that_. You see?”
“I won’t,” said the Captain, seriously. “What a night it is, Sister!” He
dwelt lovingly on the last word, as men did in South Africa.
The soft darkness had shut upon them unawares and the world had
vanished. There was not so much breeze as a slow motion of the whole dry
air under the vault of the immeasurably deep heavens. “Look up,” said
the Captain; “doesn’t it make you feel as if we were tumbling down into
the stars—all upside down?”
“Yes,” said Sister Margaret, tilting her head back. “It is always like
that. I know. And those are _our_ stars.”
They burned with a great glory, large as the eyes of cattle by
lamp-light; planet after planet of the mild Southern sky. As the Captain
said, one seemed to be falling from out the hidden earth sheer through
space, between them.
“Now, when I was little,” Sister Margaret began very softly, “there was
one day in the week at home that was all our own. We could get up as
soon as we liked after midnight, and there was the basket in the
kitchen—our food. We used to go out at three o’clock sometimes, my two
brothers, my sisters, and the two little ones—out into the Karroo for
all the day. All—the—long—day. First we built a fire, and then we made a
kraal for the two little ones—a kraal of thorn bushes so that they
should not be bitten by anything. You see? Often we made the kraal
before morning—when those”—she jerked her firm chin at the stars—“were
just going out. Then we old ones went hunting lizards—and snakes and
birds and centipedes, and all that sort of nice thing. Our father
collected them. He gave us half-a-crown for a spuugh-slange—a kind of
snake. You see?”
“How old were you?” Snake-hunting did not strike the Captain as a safe
amusement for the young.
“I was eleven then—or ten, perhaps, and the little ones were two and
three. Why? Then we came back to eat, and we sat under a rock all
afternoon. It was hot, you see, and we played—we played with the stones
and the flowers. You should see our Karroo in spring! All flowers! All
our flowers! Then we came home, carrying the little ones on our backs
asleep—came home through the dark—just like this night. That was our own
day! Oh, the good days! We used to watch the meer-cats playing, too, and
the little buck. When I was at Guy’s, learning to nurse how home-sick
that made me!”
“But what a splendid open-air life!” said the Captain.
“Where else _is_ there to live except the open air?” said Sister
Margaret, looking off into twenty thousand square miles of it with eyes
that burned.
“You’re quite right.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you two,” said Sister Dorothy, who had been
talking to the gunner Major; “but the guard says we shall be ready to go
in a few minutes. Major Devine and Dr. Johnson have gone down already.”
“Very good, Sister. We’ll follow.” The Captain rose unwillingly and made
for the worn path from the camp to the rail.
“Isn’t there another way?” said Sister Margaret. Her grey nursing gown
glimmered like some big moth’s wing.
“No. I’ll bring a lantern. It’s quite safe.”
“I did not think of _that_,” she said with a laugh; “only _we_ never
come home by the way we left it when we live in the Karroo. If any
one—suppose you had dismissed a Kaffir, or got him sjamboked,[2] and he
saw you go out? He would wait for you to come back on a tired horse, and
then.... You see? But, of course, in England where the road is all
walled, it is different. How funny! Even when we were little we learned
never to come home the way we went out.”
“Very good,” said the Captain, obediently. It made the walk longer, and
he approved of that.
“That’s a curious sort of woman,” said the Captain to the Major, as they
smoked a lonely pipe together when the train had gone.
“_You_ seemed to think so.”
“Well—I couldn’t monopolize Sister Dorothy in the presence of my senior
officer. What was she like?”
“Oh, it came out that she knew a lot of my people in London. She’s the
daughter of a chap in the next county to us, too.”
* * * * *
The General’s flag still flew before his unstruck tent to amuse Boer
binoculars, and loyal lying correspondents still telegraphed accounts of
his daily work. But the General himself had gone to join an army a
hundred miles away; drawing off from time to time every squadron, gun
and company that he dared. His last words to the few troops he left
behind covered the entire situation.
“If you can bluff ’em till we get round up north to tread on their
tails, it’s all right. If you can’t, they’ll probably eat you up. Hold
’em as long as you can.”
So the skeleton remnant of the brigade lay close among the kopjes till
the Boers, not seeing them in force on the sky-line, feared that they
might have learned the rudiments of war. They rarely disclosed a gun,
for the reason that they had so few; they scouted by fours and fives
instead of clattering troops and chattering companies, and where they
saw a too obvious way opened to attack they, lacking force to drive it
home, looked elsewhere. Great was the anger in the Boer commando across
the river—the anger and unease.
“The reason is they have so few men,” the loyal farmers reported, all
fresh from selling melons to the camp, and drinking Queen Victoria’s
health in good whisky. “They have no horses—only what they call Mounted
Infantry. They are afraid of us. They try to make us friends by giving
us brandy. Come on and shoot them. Then you will see us rise and cut the
line.”
“Yes, we know how you rise, you Colonials,” said the Boer commandant
above his pipe. “We know what has come to all your promises from
Beaufort West, and even from De Aar. _We_ do the work—all the work,—and
you kneel down with your parsons and pray for our success. What good is
that? The President has told you a hundred times God is on our side. Why
do you worry Him? We did not send you Mausers and ammunition for that.”
“We kept our commando-horses ready for six months—and forage is very
dear. We sent all our young men,” said an honoured member of local
society.
“A few here and a few servants there. What is that? You should have
risen down to the sea all together.”
“But you were so quick. Why did not you wait the year? We were not
ready, Jan.”
“That is a lie. All you Cape people lie. You want to save your cattle
and your farms. Wait till _our_ flag flies from here to Port Elizabeth
and you shall see what you will save when the President learns how you
have risen—you clever Cape people.”
The saddle-coloured sons of the soil looked down their noses. “Yes—it is
true. Some of our farms are close to the line. They say at Worcester and
in the Paarl that many soldiers are always coming in from the sea. One
must think of that—at least till they are shot. But we know there are
very few in front of you here. Give them what you gave the fools at
Stormberg, and you will see how we can shoot rooineks.”[3]
“Yes. I know that cow. She is always going to calve. Get away. I am
answerable to the President—not to the Cape.”
But the information stayed in his mind, and, not being a student of
military works, he made a plan to suit. The tall kopje on which the
English had planted their helio-station commanded the more or less open
plain to the northward, but did not command the five-mile belt of broken
country between that and the outmost English pickets, some three miles
from camp. The Boers had established themselves very comfortably among
these rock-ridges and scrub-patches, and the “great war” drizzled down
to long shots and longer stalking. The young bloods wanted rooineks to
shoot, and said so.
“See here,” quoth the experienced Jan van Staden that evening to as many
of his commando as cared to listen. “You youngsters from the Colony talk
a lot. Go and turn the rooineks out of their kopjes to-night. Eh? Go and
take their bayonets from them and stick them into them. Eh? You don’t
go!” He laughed at the silence round the fire.
“Jan—Jan,” said one young man appealingly, “don’t make mock of us.”
“I thought that was what you wanted so badly. No? Then listen to me.
Behind us the grazing is bad. We have too many cattle here.” (They had
been stolen from farmers who had been heard to express fears of defeat.)
“To-morrow, by the sky’s look, it will blow a good wind. So, to-morrow
early I shall send all our cattle north to the new grazing. That will
make a great dust for the English to see from their helio yonder.” He
pointed to a winking night-lamp stabbing the darkness with orders to an
out-lying picket. “With the cattle we will send all our women. Yes, all
the women and the wagons we can spare, and the lame ponies and the
broken carts we took from Andersen’s farm. That will make a big dust—the
dust of our retreat. Do you see?”
They saw and approved, and said so.
“Good. There are many men here who want to go home to their wives. I
shall let thirty of them away for a week. Men who wish to do this will
speak to me to-night.” (This meant that Jan needed money, and furlough
would be granted on strictly business lines.) “These men will look after
the cattle and see that they make a great dust for a long way. They will
run about behind the cattle showing their guns, too. So _that_, if the
wind blows well, will be our retreat. The cattle will feed beyond
Koopman’s Kop.”
“No good water there,” growled a farmer who knew that section. “Better
go on to Zwartpan. It is always sweet at Zwartpan.”
The commando discussed the point for twenty minutes. It was much more
serious than shooting rooineks. Then Jan went on:
“When the rooineks see our retreat they may all come into our kopjes
together. If so, good. But it is tempting God to expect such a favour.
_I_ think they will first send some men to scout.” He grinned broadly,
using the English word. “Almighty! To scoot! They have none of that new
sort of rooinek that they used at Sunnyside.” (Jan meant an
incomprehensible animal from a place called Australia across the
Southern seas who played what they knew of the war-game to kill.) “They
have only some Mounted Infantry,”—again he used the English words. “They
were once a Red-jacket regiment, so their scoots will stand up bravely
to be shot at.”
“Good—good, we will shoot them,” said a youngster from Stellenbosch, who
had come up on free pass as a Capetown excursionist just before the war
to a farm on the border, where his aunt was taking care of his horse and
rifle.
“But if you shoot their scoots I will sjambok you myself,” said Jan,
amid roars of laughter. “We must let them _all_ come into the kopjes to
look for us; and I pray God will not allow any of us to be tempted to
shoot them. They will cross the ford in front of their camp. They will
come along the road—so!” He imitated with ponderous arms the Army style
of riding. “They will trot up the road this way and that way”—here he
snaked his hard finger in the dust—“between kopjes, till they come here,
where they can see the plain and all our cattle going away. Then they
will _all_ come in close together. Perhaps they will even fix their
bayonets. _We_ shall be up here behind the rock—there and there.” He
pointed to two flat-topped kopjes, one on either side of the road, some
eight hundred yards away. “That is our place. We will go there before
sunrise. Remember we must be careful to let the very last of the
rooineks pass before we begin shooting. They will come along a little
careful at first. But we do not shoot. Then they will see our fires and
the fresh horse-dung, so they will know we have gone on. They will run
together and talk and point and shout in this nice open place. Then we
begin shooting them from above.”
“Yes, uncle, but if the scouts see nothing and there are no shots and we
let them go back quite quiet, they will think it was a trick. Perhaps
the main body may never come here at all. Even rooineks learn in
time—and so we may lose even the scouts.”
“I have thought of that too,” said Jan, with slow contempt, as the
Stellenbosch boy delivered his shot. “If you had been _my_ son I should
have sjamboked you more when you were a youngster. I shall put _you_ and
four or five more on the Nek [the pass], where the road comes from their
camp into these kopjes. You go there before it is light. Let the scoots
pass in or I will sjambok you myself. When the scoots come back after
seeing nothing here, then you may shoot them, but not till they have
passed the Nek and are on the straight road to their camp again. Do you
understand? Repeat what I have said, so that I shall know.”
The youth obediently repeated his orders.
“Kill their officers if you can. If not, no great matter, because the
scoots will run to camp with the news that our kopjes are empty. Their
helio-station will see your party trying to hold the Nek so hard—and all
that time they will see our dust out yonder, and they will think you are
the rear-guard, and they will think _we_ are escaping. They will be
angry.”
“Yes—yes, uncle, we see,” from a dozen elderly voices.
“But this calf does not. Be silent! They will shoot at you, Niclaus, on
the Nek, because they will think you are to cover our getting away. They
will shell the Nek. They will miss. You will then ride away. All the
rooineks will come after you, hot and in a hurry—perhaps, even, with
their cannon. They will pass our fires and our fresh horse-dung. They
will come here as their scoots came. They will see the plain so full of
our dust. They will say, ‘The scoots spoke truth. It is a full retreat.’
_Then_ we up there on the rocks will shoot, and it will be like the
fight at Stormberg in daytime. Do you understand _now_?”
Those of the commando directly interested lit new pipes and discussed
the matter in detail till midnight.
Next morning the operations began with, if one may borrow the language
of some official despatches—“the precision of well-oiled machinery.”
The helio-station reported the dust of the wagons and the movements of
armed men in full flight across the plain beyond the kopjes. A Colonel,
newly appointed from England, by reason of his seniority, sent forth a
dozen Mounted Infantry under command of a Captain. Till a month ago they
had been drilled by a cavalry instructor, who taught them “shock”
tactics to the music of trumpets. They knew how to advance in echelon of
squadrons, by cat’s cradle of troops, in quarter column of
stable-litter, how to trot, to gallop, and above all to charge. They
knew how to sit their horses unremittingly, so that at the day’s end
they might boast how many hours they had been in the saddle without
relief, and they learned to rejoice in the clatter and stamp of a troop
moving as such, and therefore audible five miles away.
They trotted out two and two along the farm road, that trailed lazily
through the wind-driven dust; across the half-dried ford to a nek
between low stony hills leading into the debatable land. (Vrooman of
Emmaus from his neatly bushed hole noted that one man carried a sporting
Lee-Enfield rifle with a short fore-end. Vrooman of Emmaus argued that
the owner of it was the officer to be killed on his return, and went to
sleep.) They saw nothing except a small flock of sheep and a Kaffir
herdsman who spoke broken English with curious fluency. He had heard
that the Boers had decided to retreat on account of their sick and
wounded. The Captain in charge of the detachment turned to look at the
helio-station four miles away. “Hurry up,” said the dazzling flash.
“Retreat apparently continues, but suggest you make sure. Quick.”
“Ye-es,” said the Captain, a shade bitterly, as he wiped the sweat from
a sun-skinned nose. “You want me to come back and report all clear. If
anything happens it will be my fault. If they get away it will be my
fault for disregarding the signal. I love officers who suggest and
advise, and want to make their reputations in twenty minutes.”
“’Don’t see much ’ere, sir,” said the sergeant, scanning the bare cup of
the hollow where a dust-devil danced alone.
“No? We’ll go on.”
“If we get among these steep ’ills we lose touch of the ’elio.”
“Very likely. Trot.”
The rounded mounds grew to spiked kopjes, heart-breaking to climb under
a hot sun at four thousand feet above sea level. This is where the
scouts found their spurs peculiarly useful.
Jan van Staden had thoughtfully allowed the invading force a front of
two rifle-shots or four thousand yards, and they kept a thousand yards
within his estimate. Ten men strung over two miles feel that they have
explored all the round earth.
They saw stony slopes combing over in scrub, narrow valleys clothed with
stone, low ridges of splintered stone, and tufts of brittle-stemmed
bush. An irritating wind, split up by many rocky barriers, cuffed them
over the ears and slapped them in the face at every turn. They came upon
an abandoned camp fire, a little fresh horse-dung, and an empty
ammunition-box splintered up for fire-wood, an old boot, and a stale
bandage.
A few hundred yards farther along the road a battered Mauser had been
thrown into a bush. The glimmer of its barrel drew the scouts from the
hillside, and here the road after passing between two flat-topped kopjes
entered a valley nearly half a mile wide, rose slightly, and over the
nek of a ridge gave clear view across the windy plain northward.
“They’re on the dead run, for sure,” said a trooper. “Here’s their fire
and their litter and their guns, and that’s where they’re bolting to.”
He pointed over the ridge to the bellying dust cloud a mile long. A
vulture high overhead flickered down, steadied herself, and hung
motionless.
“See!” said Jan van Staden from the rocks above the road, to his waiting
commando. “It turns like a well-oiled wheel. They look where they need
not look, but _here_, where they should look on both sides, they look at
our retreat—straight before them. It is tempting our people too much. I
pray God no one will shoot them.”
“That’s about the size of it,” said the Captain, rubbing the dust from
his binoculars. “Boers on the run. I expect they find their main line of
retreat to the north is threatened. We’ll get back and tell the camp.”
He wheeled his pony and his eye traversed the flat-topped kopje
commanding the road. The stones at its edge seemed to be piled with less
than Nature’s carelessness.
“That ’ud be a dashed ugly place if it were occupied—and that other one,
too. Those rocks aren’t five hundred yards from the road, either of ’em.
Hold on, sergeant, I’ll light a pipe.” He bent over the bowl, and above
his lighted match squinted at the kopje. A stone, a small roundish brown
boulder on the lip of another one, seemed to move very slightly. The
short hairs of his neck grated his collar. “I’ll have another squint at
their retreat,” he cried to the sergeant, astonished at the steadiness
of his own voice. He swept the plain, and, wheeling, let the glass rest
for a moment on the kopje’s top. One cranny between the rocks was
pinkish, where blue sky should have shown. His men, dotted down the
valley, sat heavily on their horses—it never occurred to them to
dismount. He could hear the squeak of the leathers as a man shifted. An
impatient gust blew through the valley and rattled the bushes. On all
sides the expectant hills stood still under the pale blue.
“And we passed within a quarter of a mile of ’em! We’re done!” The
thumping heart slowed down, and the Captain began to think clearly—so
clearly that the thoughts seemed solid things. “It’s Pretoria gaol for
us all. Perhaps that man’s only a look-out, though. We’ll have to bolt!
And I led ’em into it!... You fool,” said his other self, above the beat
of the blood in his eardrums. “If they could snipe you all from up
there, why haven’t they begun already? Because you’re the bait for the
rest of the attack. They don’t want you _now_. You’re to go back and
bring up the others to be killed. Go back! Don’t detach a man or they’ll
suspect. Go back all together. Tell the sergeant you’re going. Some of
them up there will understand English. Tell it aloud! Then back you go
with the news—the real news.”
“The country’s all clear, sergeant,” he shouted. “We’ll go back and tell
the Colonel.” With an idiotic giggle he added, “It’s a good road for
guns, don’t you think?”
“Hear you that?” said Jan van Staden, gripping a burgher’s arm. “God is
on our side to-day. They _will_ bring their little cannons after all!”
“Go easy. No good bucketing the horses to pieces. We’ll need ’em for the
pursuit later,” said the Captain. “Hullo, there’s a vulture! How far
would you make him?”
“Can’t tell, sir, in this dry air.”
The bird swooped towards the second flat-topped kopje, but suddenly
shivered sideways, and wheeled off again, followed intently by the
Captain’s glance.
“And that kopje’s simply full of ’em, too,” he said, flushing.
“Perfectly confident they are, that we’d take this road—and then they’ll
scupper the whole boiling of us! They’ll let us through to fetch up the
others. But I mustn’t let ’em know we know. By Jove, they do _not_ think
much of us! ’Don’t blame ’em.”
The cunning of the trap did not impress him until later.
Down the track jolted a dozen well-equipped men, laughing and talking—a
mark to make a pious burgher’s mouth water. Thrice had their Captain
explicitly said that they were to march easy, so a trooper began to hum
a tune that he had picked up in Capetown streets:—
Vat jou goet en trek, Ferriera,
Vat jou goet en trek;
Jannie met de hoepel bein, Ferriera,
Jannie met de hoepel bein!
Then with a whistle:—
Zwaar draa—alle en de ein kant—
The Captain, thinking furiously, found his mind turn to a camp in the
Karroo, months before; an engine that had halted in that waste, and a
woman with brown hair, early grizzled—an extraordinary woman.... Yes,
but as soon as they had dropped the flat-topped kopje behind its
neighbour he must hurry back and report.... A woman with grey eyes and
black eyelashes.... The Boers would probably be massed on those two
kopjes. How soon dare he break into a canter?... A woman with a queer
cadence in her speech.... It was not more than five miles home by the
straight road—
“_Even when we were children we learned not to go back by the way we had
come._”
The sentence came back to him, self-shouted, so clearly that he almost
turned to see if the scouts had heard. The two flat-topped kopjes behind
him were covered by a long ridge. The camp lay due south. He had only to
follow the road to the Nek—a notch, unscouted as he recalled now,
between the two hills.
He wheeled his men up a long valley.
“Excuse me, sir, that ain’t our road!” said the sergeant. “Once we get
over this rise, straight on, we come into direct touch with the ’elio,
on that flat bit o’ road there they ’elioed us goin’ out.”
“But we aren’t going to get in touch with them just now. Come along, and
come quick.”
“What’s the meaning of this?” said a private in the rear. “What’s ’e
doin’ this detour for? We shan’t get in for hours an’ hours.”
“Come on, men. Flog a canter out of your brutes, somehow,” the Captain
called back.
For two throat-parched hours he held west by south, away from the Nek,
puzzling over a compass already demented by the ironstone in the hills,
and then turned southeast through an eruption of low hills that ran far
into the re-entering bend of the river that circled the left bank of the
camp.
Eight miles to eastward that student from Stellenbosch had wriggled out
on the rocks above the Nek to have a word with Vrooman of Emmaus. The
bottom seemed to have dropped out of at least one portion of their
programme; for the scouting party were not to be seen.
“Jan is a clever man,” he said to his companion, “but he does not think
that even rooineks may learn. Perhaps those scouts will have seen Jan’s
commando, and perhaps they will come back to warn the rooineks. That is
why I think he should have shot them _before_ they came to the Nek, and
made quite sure that only one or two got away. It would have made the
English angry, and they would have come out across the open in hundreds
to be shot. Then when we ran away they would have come after us without
thinking. If you can make the English hurry, they never think. Jan is
wrong this time.”
“Lie down, and pray you have not shown yourself to their helio-station,”
growled Vrooman of Emmaus. “You throw with your arms and kick with your
legs like a rooinek. When we get back I will tell Jan and he will
sjambok you. All will yet come right. They will go and warn the rest,
and the rest will hurry out by this very nek. Then we can shoot. Now you
lie still and wait.”
“’Ere’s a rummy picnic. We left camp, as it were, by the front door. ’E
_’as_ given us a giddy-go-round, an’ no mistake,” said a dripping
private as he dismounted behind the infantry lines.
“Did you see our helio?” This was the Colonel, hot from racing down from
the helio-station. “There were a lot of Boers waiting for you on the
Nek. We saw ’em. We tried to get at you with the helio, and tell you we
were coming out to help you. Then we saw you didn’t come over that flat
bit of road where we had signalled you going out, and we wondered why.
We didn’t hear any shots.”
“I turned off, sir, and came in by another road,” said the Captain.
“By another road!” The Colonel lifted his eyebrows. “Perhaps you’re not
aware, sir, that the Boers have been in full retreat for the last three
hours, and that those men on the Nek were simply a rear-guard put out to
delay us for a little. We could see that much from here. Your duty, sir,
was to have taken them in the rear, and then we could have brushed them
aside. The Boer retreat has been going on all morning, sir—all morning.
You were despatched to see the front clear and to return at once. The
whole camp has been under arms for three hours; and instead of doing
your work you wander all about Africa with your scouts to avoid a
handful of skulking Boers! You should have sent a man back at once—you
should have——”
The Captain got off his horse stiffly.
“As a matter of fact,” said he, “I didn’t know for sure that there were
any Boers on the Nek, but I went round it in case it was so. But I _do_
know that the kopjes beyond the Nek are simply crawling with Boers.”
“Nonsense. We can see the whole lot of ’em retreating out yonder.”
“Of course you can. That’s part of their game, sir. I saw ’em lying on
the top of a couple of kopjes commanding the road, where it goes into
the plain on the far side. They let us come in to see, and they let us
go out to report the country clear and bring you up. Now they are
waiting for _you_. The whole thing is a trap.”
“D’you expect any officer of my experience to believe that?”
“As you please, sir,” said the Captain hopelessly. “My responsibility
ends with my report.”
AN UNQUALIFIED PILOT
_This tale is founded on something that happened a good many years ago
in the Port of Calcutta, before wireless telegraphy was used on ships,
and men and boys were less easy to catch when once they were in a ship.
It is not meant to show that anybody who thinks he would like to become
eminent in his business can do so at a moment’s notice; but it proves
the old saying that if you want anything badly enough and are willing to
pay the price for it, you generally get it. If you don’t get what you
want it is a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you
tried to bargain over the price._
Almost any pilot will tell you that his work is much more difficult than
you imagine; but the Pilots of the Hugli know that they have one hundred
miles of the most dangerous river on earth running through their
hands—the Hugli between Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal—and they say
nothing. Their service is picked and sifted as carefully as the bench of
the Supreme Court, for a judge can only hang the wrong man, or pass a
bad law; but a careless pilot can lose a ten-thousand-ton ship with crew
and cargo in less time than it takes to reverse her engines.
There is very little chance of anything getting off again when once she
touches in the furious Hugli current, loaded with all the fat silt of
the fields of Bengal, where the soundings change two feet between tides,
and new channels make and unmake themselves in one rainy season. Men
have fought the Hugli for two hundred years, till now the river owns a
huge building, with drawing, survey, and telegraph departments, devoted
to its private service, as well as a body of wardens, who are called the
Port Commissioners.
They and their officers govern everything that floats from the Hugli
Bridge to the last buoy at Pilots Ridge, one hundred and forty miles
away, far out in the Bay of Bengal, where the steamers first pick up the
pilots from the pilot brig.
A Hugli pilot does not kindly bring papers aboard for the passengers, or
scramble up the ship’s side by wet, swaying rope-ladders. He arrives in
his best clothes, with a native servant or an assistant pilot to wait on
him, and he behaves as a man should who can earn two or three thousand
pounds a year after twenty years’ apprenticeship. He has beautiful rooms
in the Port Office at Calcutta, and generally keeps himself to the
society of his own profession, for though the telegraph reports the more
important soundings of the river daily, there is much to be learned from
brother pilots between each trip.
Some million tons of shipping must find their way to and from Calcutta
each twelvemonth, and unless the Hugli were watched as closely as his
keeper watches an elephant, there is a fear that it might silt up, as it
has silted up round the old Dutch and Portuguese ports twenty and thirty
miles behind Calcutta.
So the Port Office sounds and scours and dredges the river, and builds
spurs and devices for coaxing currents, and labels all the buoys with
their proper letters, and attends to the semaphores and the lights and
the drum, ball and cone storm signals; and the pilots of the Hugli do
the rest; but, in spite of all care and the very best attention, the
Hugli swallows her ship or two every year. Even the coming of wireless
telegraphy does not spoil her appetite.
When Martin Trevor had waited on the river from his boyhood; when he had
risen to be a Senior Pilot, entitled to bring up to Calcutta the very
biggest ships; when he had thought and talked of nothing but Hugli
pilotage all his life to nobody except Hugli pilots, he was exceedingly
surprised and indignant that his only son should decide to follow his
father’s profession. Mrs. Trevor had died when the boy was a child, and
as he grew older, Trevor, in the intervals of his business, noticed that
the lad was very often by the river-side—no place, he said, for a nice
boy. But, as he was not often at home, and as the aunt who looked after
Jim naturally could not follow him to his chosen haunts, and as Jim had
not the faintest intention of giving up old friends there, nothing but
ineffectual growls came of the remark. Later, when Trevor once asked him
if he could make anything out of the shipping on the water, Jim replied
by reeling off the list of all the house-flags in sight at the moorings,
together with supplementary information about their tonnage and
captains.
“You’ll come to a bad end, Jim,” said Trevor. “Boys of your age haven’t
any business to waste their time on these things.”
“Oh, Pedro at the Sailors’ Home says you can’t begin too early.”
“At what, please?”
“Piloting. I’m nearly fourteen now, and—and I know where most of the
shipping in the river is, and I know what there was yesterday over the
Mayapur Bar, and I’ve been down to Diamond Harbour—oh, a hundred times
already, and I’ve——”
“You’ll go to school, son, and learn what they teach you, and you’ll
turn out something better than a pilot,” said his father, who wanted Jim
to enter the Subordinate Civil Service, but he might just as well have
told a shovel-nosed porpoise of the river to come ashore and begin life
as a hen. Jim held his tongue; he noticed that all the best pilots in
the Port Office did that; and devoted his young attention and all his
spare time to the river he loved. He had seen the nice young gentlemen
in the Subordinate Civil Service, and he called them a rude native name
for “clerks.”
He became as well known as the Bankshall itself; and the Port Police let
him inspect their launches, and the tug-boat captains had always a place
for him at their tables, and the mates of the big steam dredgers used to
show him how the machinery worked, and there were certain native
row-boats which Jim practically owned; and he extended his patronage to
the railway that runs to Diamond Harbour, forty miles down the river. In
the old days nearly all the East India Company’s ships used to discharge
at Diamond Harbour, on account of the shoals above, but now ships go
straight up to Calcutta, and they have only some moorings for vessels in
distress there, and a telegraph service, and a harbour-master, who was
one of Jim’s most intimate friends.
He would sit in the Office listening to the soundings of the shoals as
they were reported every day, and attending to the movements of the
steamers up and down (Jim always felt he had lost something
irretrievable if a boat got in or out of the river without his knowing
of it), and when the big liners with their rows of blazing portholes
tied up in Diamond Harbour for the night, Jim would row from one ship to
the other through the sticky hot air and the buzzing mosquitoes and
listen respectfully as the pilots conferred together about the habits of
steamers.
Once, for a treat, his father took him down clear out to the Sandheads
and the pilot brig there, and Jim was happily sea-sick as she tossed and
pitched in the Bay. The cream of life, though, was coming up in a tug or
a police boat from Diamond Harbour to Calcutta, over the “James and
Mary,” those terrible sands christened after a royal ship that they sunk
two hundred years before. They are made by two rivers that enter the
Hugli six miles apart and throw their own silt across the silt of the
main stream, so that with each turn of weather and tide the sands shift
and change under water like clouds in the sky. It was here (the tales
sound much worse when they are told in the rush and growl of the muddy
waters) that the _Countess of Stirling_, fifteen hundred tons, touched
and capsized in ten minutes, and a two-thousand-ton steamer in two, and
a pilgrim ship in five, and another steamer literally in one instant,
holding down her men with the masts and shrouds as she lashed over. When
a ship touches on the “James and Mary,” the river knocks her down and
buries her, and the sands quiver all around her and reach out under
water and take new shapes over the corpse.
Young Jim would lie up in the bows of the tug and watch the straining
buoys kick and choke in the coffee-coloured current, while the
semaphores and flags signalled from the bank how much water there was in
the channel, till he learned that men who deal with men can afford to be
careless, on the chance of their fellows being like them; but men who
deal with things dare not relax for an instant. “And that’s the very
reason,” old McEwan said to him once, “that the ‘James and Mary’ is the
safest part of the river,” and he shoved the big black _Bandoorah_, that
draws twenty-five feet, through the Eastern Gat, with a turban of white
foam wrapped round her forefoot and her screw beating as steadily as his
own heart.
If Jim could not get away to the river there was always the big, cool
Port Office, where the soundings were worked out and the maps drawn; or
the Pilots’ room, where he could lie in a long chair and listen quietly
to the talk about the Hugli; and there was the library, where if you had
money you could buy charts and books of directions against the time that
you would actually have to steam over the places themselves. It was
exceedingly hard for Jim to hold the list of Jewish Kings in his head,
and he was more than uncertain as to the end of the verb _audio_ if you
followed it far enough down the page, but he could keep the soundings of
three channels distinct in his head, and, what is more confusing, the
changes in the buoys from “Garden Reach” down to Saugor, as well as the
greater part of the _Calcutta Telegraph_, the only paper he ever read.
Unluckily, you cannot peruse about the Hugli without money, even though
you are the son of the best-known pilot on the river, and as soon as
Trevor understood how his son was spending his time, he cut down his
pocket money, of which Jim had a very generous allowance. In his
extremity he took counsel with Pedro, the plum-coloured mulatto at the
Sailors’ Home, and Pedro was a bad, designing man. He introduced Jim to
a Chinaman in Muchuatollah, an unpleasing place in itself, and the
Chinaman, who answered to the name of Erh-Tze, when he was not smoking
opium, talked business in pigeon-English to Jim for an hour. Every bit
of that business from first to last was flying in the face of every law
on the river, but it interested Jim.
“S’pose you takee. Can do?” Erh-Tze said at last.
Jim considered his chances. A junk, he knew, would draw about eleven
feet and the regular fee for a qualified pilot, outward to the
Sandheads, would be two hundred rupees. On the one hand he was not
qualified, so he dared not ask more than half. _But_, on the other hand,
he was fully certain of the thrashing of his life from his father for
piloting without license, let alone what the Port Authorities might do
to him. So he asked one hundred and seventy-five rupees, and Erh-Tze
beat him down to a hundred and twenty. The cargo of his junk was worth
anything from seventy to a hundred and fifty thousand rupees, some of
which he was getting as enormous freight on the coffins of thirty or
forty dead Chinamen, whom he was taking to be buried in their native
country.
Rich Chinamen will pay fancy prices for this service, and they have a
superstition that the iron of steamships is bad for the spiritual health
of their dead. Erh-Tze’s junk had crept up from Singapore, _via_ Penang
and Rangoon, to Calcutta, where Erh-Tze had been staggered by the Pilot
dues. This time he was going out at a reduction with Jim, who, as Pedro
kept telling him, was just as good as a pilot, and a heap cheaper.
Jim knew something of the manners of junks, but he was not prepared,
when he went down that night with his charts, for the confusion of cargo
and coolies and coffins and clay-cooking places, and other things that
littered her decks. He had sense enough to haul the rudder up a few
feet, for he knew that a junk’s rudder goes far below the bottom, and he
allowed a foot extra to Erh-Tze’s estimate of the junk’s depth. Then
they staggered out into midstream very early, and never had the city of
his birth looked so beautiful as when he feared he would not come back
to see it. Going down “Garden Reach” he discovered that the junk would
answer to her helm if you put it over far enough, and that she had a
fair, though Chinese, notion of sailing. He took charge of the tiller by
stationing three Chinese on each side of it, and standing a little
forward, gathered their pigtails into his hands, three right and three
left, as though they had been the yoke lines of a row-boat. Erh-Tze
almost smiled at this; he felt he was getting good care for his money
and took a neat little polished bamboo to keep the men attentive, for he
said this was no time to teach the crew pigeon-English. The more way
they could get on the junk the better would she steer, and as soon as he
felt a little confidence in her, Jim ordered the stiff, rustling sails
to be hauled up tighter and tighter. He did not know their names—at
least any name that would be likely to interest a Chinaman—but Erh-Tze
had not banged about the waters of the Malay Archipelago all his life
for nothing. He rolled forward with his bamboo, and the things rose like
Eastern incantations.
Early as they were on the river, a big American oil (but they called it
kerosene in those days) ship was ahead of them in tow, and when Jim saw
her through the lifted mist he was thankful. She would draw all of
seventeen feet, and if he could steer by her they would be safe. It is
easier to scurry up and down the “James and Mary” in a police boat that
someone else is handling than to cram a hard-mouthed old junk across the
same sands alone, with the certainty of a thrashing if you come out
alive.
Jim glued his eyes to the American, and saw that at Fultah she dropped
her tug and stood down the river under sail. He all but whooped aloud,
for he knew that the number of pilots who preferred to work a ship
through the “James and Mary” was strictly limited. “If it isn’t Father,
it’s Dearsley,” said Jim, “and Dearsley went down yesterday with the
_Bancoora_, so it’s Father. If I’d gone home last night instead of going
to Pedro, I’d have met him. He must have got his ship quick, but—Father
_is_ a very quick man.” Then Jim reflected that they kept a piece of
knotted rope on the pilot brig that stung like a wasp; but this thought
he dismissed as beneath the dignity of an officiating pilot, who needed
only to nod his head to set Erh-Tze’s bamboo to work.
As the American came round, just before the Fultah Sands, Jim raked her
with his spy-glass, and saw his father on the poop, an unlighted cigar
between his teeth. That cigar, Jim knew, would be smoked on the other
side of the “James and Mary,” and Jim felt so entirely safe and happy
that he lit a cigar on his own account. This kind of piloting was
child’s play. His father could not make a mistake if he tried; and Jim,
with his six obedient pigtails in his two hands, had leisure to admire
the perfect style in which the American was handled—how she would point
her bowsprit jeeringly at a hidden bank, as much as to say, “Not to-day,
thank you, dear,” and bow down lovingly to a buoy as much as to say,
“_You_’re a gentleman, at any rate,” and come round sharp on her heel
with a flutter and a rustle, and a slow, steady swing something like a
well-dressed woman staring all round the theatre through opera-glasses.
It was hard work to keep the junk near her, though Erh-Tze set
everything that was by any means settable, and used his bamboo most
generously. When they were nearly under her counter, and a little to her
left, Jim, hidden behind a sail, would feel warm and happy all over,
thinking of the thousand nautical and piloting things that he knew. When
they fell more than half a mile behind, he was cold and miserable
thinking of all the million things he did not know or was not quite sure
of. And so they went down, Jim steering by his father, turn for turn,
over the Mayapur Bar, with the semaphores on each bank duly signalling
the depth of water, through the Western Gat, and round Makoaputti Lumps,
and in and out of twenty places, each more exciting than the last, and
Jim nearly pulled the six pigtails out for pure joy when the last of the
“James and Mary” had gone astern, and they were walking through Diamond
Harbour.
From there to the mouth of the Hugli things are not so bad—at least,
that was what Jim thought, and held on till the swell from the Bay of
Bengal made the old junk heave and snort, and the river broadened into
the inland sea, with islands only a foot or two high scattered about it.
The American walked away from the junk as soon as they were beyond
Kedgeree, and the night came on and the river looked very big and
desolate, so Jim promptly anchored somewhere in grey water, with the
Saugor Light away off toward the east. He had a great respect for the
Hugli to the last yard of her, and had no desire whatever to find
himself on the Gasper Sand or any other little shoal. Erh-Tze and the
crew highly approved of this piece of seamanship. They set no watch, lit
no lights, and at once went to sleep.
Jim lay down between a red-and-black lacquer coffin and a little live
pig in a basket. As soon as it was light he began studying his chart of
the Hugli mouth, and trying to find out where in the river he might be.
He decided to be on the safe side and wait for another sailing-ship and
follow her out. So he made an enormous breakfast of rice and boiled
fish, while Erh-Tze lit firecrackers and burned gilt paper to the Joss
who had saved them so far. Then they heaved up their rough-and-tumble
anchor, and made after a big, fat, iron four-masted sailing-ship, heavy
as a hay-wain.
The junk, which was really a very weatherly boat, and might have begun
life as a private pirate in Annam forty years before, followed under
easy sail; for the four-master would run no risks. She was in old
McEwan’s hands, and she waddled about like a broody hen, giving each
shoal wide allowances. All this happened near the outer Floating Light,
some hundred and twenty miles from Calcutta, and apparently in the open
sea.
Jim knew old McEwan’s appetite, and often heard him pride himself on
getting his ship to the pilot brig close upon meal hours, so he argued
that if the pilot brig was get-at-able (and Jim himself had not the
ghost of a notion where she would lie), McEwan would find her before one
o’clock.
It was a blazing hot day, and McEwan fidgeted the four-master down to
“Pilots Ridge” with what little wind remained, and sure enough there lay
the pilot brig, and Jim felt shivers up his back as Erh-Tze paid him his
hundred and twenty rupees and he went over-side in the junk’s one crazy
dinghy. McEwan was leaving the four-master in a long, slashing
whale-boat that looked very spruce and pretty, and Jim could see that
there was a certain amount of excitement among the pilots on the brig.
There was his father too. The ragged Chinese boatmen gave way in a most
ragged fashion, and Jim felt very unwashen and disreputable when he
heard the click of McEwan’s oars alongside, and McEwan saying, “James
Trevor, I’ll trouble you to lay alongside me.”
Jim obeyed, and from the corner of one eye watched McEwan’s angry
whiskers stand up all round his face, which turned purple.
“An’ how is it you break the regulations o’ the Porrt o’ Calcutta? Are
ye aware o’ the penalties and impreesonments ye’ve laid yourself open
to?” McEwan began.
Jim said nothing. There was not very much to say just then; and McEwan
roared aloud: “Man, ye’ve perrsonated a Hugli pilot, an’ that’s as much
as to say ye’ve perrsonated _ME_! What did yon heathen give ye for
honorarium?”
“’Hundred and twenty,” said Jim.
“’An’ by what manner o’ means did ye get through the ‘James and Mary’?”
“Father,” was the answer. “He went down the same tide and I—we—steered
by him.”
McEwan whistled and choked, perhaps it was with anger. “Ye’ve made a
stalkin’-horse o’ your father, then? Jim, laddie, he’ll make an example
o’ you.”
The boat hooked on to the brig’s chains, and McEwan said, as he set foot
on deck before Jim could speak, “Yon’s an enterprising cub o’ yours,
Trevor. Ye’d better enter him in the regular business, or one o’ these
fine days he’ll be acting as pilot before he’s qualified, and sinkin’
junks in the Fairway. He fetched yon junk down last night. If ye’ve no
other designs I’m thinkin’ I’ll take him as my cub, for there’s no
denying he’s a resourceful lad—for all he’s an unlicked whelp.”
“That,” said Trevor, reaching for Jim’s left ear, “is something we can
remedy,” and he led him below.
The little knotted rope that they keep for general purposes on the pilot
brig did its duty, but when it was all over Jim was unlicked no longer.
He was McEwan’s property to be registered under the laws of the Port of
Calcutta, and a week later, when the _Ellora_ came along, he bundled
over the pilot brig’s side with McEwan’s enamelled leather hand-bag and
a roll of charts and a little bag of his own, and he dropped into the
sternsheets of the pilot gig with a very creditable imitation of
McEwan’s slow, swaying sit-down and hump of the shoulders.
THE JUNK AND DHOW
Once a pair of savages found a stranded tree.
(_One-piecee stick-pidgin—two-piecee man.
Straddle-um—paddle-um—push-um off to sea.
That way Foleign Devil-boat began._[4])
But before and before, and ever so long before
Any shape of sailing-craft was known,
The Junk and Dhow had a stern and a bow,
And a mast and a sail of their own—alone, alone!
As they crashed across the Oceans on their own!
Once there was a pirate-ship, being blown ashore—
(_Plitty soon pilum up, s’posee no can tack.
Seven-piecee stlong man pullum sta’boa’d oar.
That way bling her head alound and sailo back._)
But before, and before, and ever so long before
Grand Commander Noah took the wheel,
The Junk and the Dhow, though they look like anyhow,
Had rudders reaching deep below their keel—akeel—akeel!
As they laid the Eastern Seas beneath their keel!
Once there was a galliot yawing in a tide.
(_Too much foolee side-slip. How can stop?
Man catchee tea-box lid—lasha longaside.
That way make her plenty glip and sail first-chop._)
But before, and before, and ever so long before
Any such contrivances were used,
The whole Confucian sea-board had standardized the lee-board,
And hauled it up or dropped it as they choosed—or chose—or choosed!
According to the weather, when they cruised!
Once there was a caravel in beam-sea roll—
(_Cargo shiftee—alla dliftee—no can livee long.
S’posum’ nailo boa’d acloss—makee ploper hol’?
That way, cargo sittum still, an’ ship mo’ stlong._)
But before, and before, and ever so long before
Any square-rigged vessel hove in sight
The Canton deep-sea craft carried bulkheads fore and aft,
And took good care to keep ’em water-tight—atite—atite!
From Amboyna to the Great Australian Bight!
Once there was a sailor-man singing just this way—
(_Too muchee yowl-o, sickum best flend!
Singee all-same pullee lope—haul and belay.
Hully up and coilum down an’—bite off end!_)
But before, and before, and ever so long before
Any sort of chanty crossed our lips,
The Junk and the Dhow, though they look like anyhow,
Were the Mother and the Father of all Ships—ahoy!—aships!
And of half the new inventions in our Ships!
From Tarifa to Formosa of our Ships!
From Socotra to Sel_ank_hor of the windlass and the anchor,
And the Navigators’ Compass on our Ships—ahoy!—our Ships
(_O, hully up and coilum down and bite off end!_)
HIS GIFT
His Scoutmaster and his comrades, who disagreed on several points, were
united in one conviction—that William Glasse Sawyer was, without
exception, the most unprofitable person, not merely in the Pelican
Troop, who lived in the wilderness of the 47th Postal District, London
S. E., but in the whole body of Boy Scouts throughout the world.
No one, except a ferocious uncle who was also a French-polisher, seemed
responsible for his beginnings. There was a legend that he had been
entered as a Wolf-Cub at the age of eight, under Miss Doughty, whom the
uncle had either bribed or terrorized to accept him; and that after six
months Miss Doughty confessed that she could make nothing of him and
retired to teach school in the Yorkshire moors. There is also a
red-headed ex-cub of that troop (he is now in a shipping-office) who
asserts proudly that he used to bite William Glasse Sawyer on the leg in
the hope of waking him up, and takes most of the credit for William’s
present success. But when William moved into the larger life of the
Pelicans, who were gay birds, he was not what you might call alert. In
shape he resembled the ace of diamonds; in colour he was an oily sallow.
He could accomplish nothing that required one glimmer of reason, thought
or commonsense. He cleaned himself only under bitter compulsion; he lost
his bearings equally in town or country after a five-minutes’ stroll. He
could track nothing smaller than a tram-car on a single line, and that
only if there were no traffic. He could neither hammer a nail, carry an
order, tie a knot, light a fire, notice any natural object, except food,
or use any edged tool except a table knife. To crown all, his
innumerable errors and omissions were not even funny.
But it is an old law of human nature that if you hold to one known
course of conduct—good or evil—you end by becoming an institution; and
when he was fifteen or thereabouts William achieved that position. The
Pelicans gradually took pride in the notorious fact that they possessed
the only Sealed Pattern, Mark A, Ass—an unique jewel, so to speak, of
Absolute, Unalterable Incapacity. The poet of a neighbouring troop used
to write verses about him, and recite them from public places, such as
the tops of passing trams. William made no comment, but wrapped himself
up in long silences that he seldom broke till the juniors of the Troop
(the elders had given it up long before) tried to do him good turns with
their scout-staves.
In private life he assisted his uncle at the mystery of
French-polishing, which, he said, was “boiling up things in pots and
rubbing down bits of wood.” The boiling-up, he said, he did not mind so
much. The rubbing down he hated. Once, too, he volunteered that his
uncle and only relative had been in the Navy, and “did not like to be
played with”; and the vision of William playing with any human being
upset even his Scoutmaster.
Now it happened, upon a certain summer that was really a summer with
heat to it, the Pelicans had been lent a dream of a summer camp in a
dream of a park, which offered opportunities for every form of
diversion, including bridging muddy-banked streams, and unlimited
cutting into young alders and undergrowth at large. A convenient village
lay just outside the Park wall, and the ferny slopes round the camp were
rich in rabbits, not to mention hedgehogs and other fascinating vermin.
It was reached—Mr. Hale their Scoutmaster saw to that—after two days’
hard labour, with the Troop push-cart, along sunny roads.
William’s share in the affair was—what it had always been. First he lost
most of his kit; next his uncle talked to him after the fashion of the
Navy of ’96 before refitting him; thirdly he went lame behind the
push-cart by reason of a stone in his shoe, and on arrival in camp
dropped—not for the first, second or third time—into his unhonoured
office as Camp Orderly, and was placed at the disposal of The Prawn,
whose light blue eyes stuck out from his freckled face, and whose long
narrow chest was covered with badges. From that point on, the procedure
was as usual. Once again did The Prawn assure his Scoutmaster that he
would take enormous care of William and give him work suited to his
capacity and intelligence. Once again did William grunt and wriggle at
the news, and once again in the silence of the deserted camp next
morning, while the rest of the Pelicans were joyously mucking themselves
up to their young bills at bridging brooks, did he bow his neck to The
Prawn’s many orders. For The Prawn was a born organizer. He set William
to unpack the push-cart and then to neatly and exactly replace all
parcels, bags, tins, and boxes. He despatched him thrice in the forenoon
across the hot Park to fetch water from a distant well equipped with a
stiff-necked windlass and a split handle that pinched William’s fat
palms. He bade him collect sticks, thorny for choice, out of the flanks
of a hedge full of ripe nettles against which Scout uniforms offer small
protection. He then made him lay them in the camp cooking-place,
carefully rejecting the green ones, for most sticks were alike to
William; and when everything else failed, he set him to pick up stray
papers and rubbish the length and breadth of the camp. All that while,
he not only chased him with comments but expected that William would
show gratitude to him for forming his young mind.
“’Tisn’t everyone ’ud take this amount o’ trouble with you, Mug,” said
The Prawn virtuously, when even his energetic soul could make no further
work for his vassal. “Now you open that bully-beef tin and we’ll have
something to eat, and then you’re off duty—for a bit. I shall try my
hand at a little camp-cooking.”
William found the tin—at the very bottom, of course, of the push-cart;
cut himself generously over the knuckles in opening it (till The Prawn
showed him how this should be done), and in due course, being full of
bread and bully, withdrew towards a grateful clump of high fern that he
had had his eye on for some time, wriggled deep into it, and on a little
rabbit-browsed clearing of turf, stretched out and slept the sleep of
the weary who have been up and under strict orders since six A.M. Till
that hour of that day, be it remembered, William had given no proof
either of intelligence or initiative in any direction.
He waked, slowly as was his habit, and noticed that the shadows were
stretching a little, even as he stretched himself. Then he heard The
Prawn clanking pot-lids, between soft bursts of song. William sniffed.
The Prawn was cooking—was probably qualifying for something or other;
The Prawn did nothing but qualify for badges. On reflection William
discovered that he loved The Prawn even less this camp than the last, or
the one before that. Then he heard the voice of a stranger.
“Yes,” was The Prawn’s reply. “I’m in charge of the camp. Would you like
to look at it, sir?”
“Seen ’em—seen heaps of ’em,” said the unknown. “My son was in ’em
once—Buffaloes, out Hendon-way. What are _you_?”
“Well, just now I’m a sort of temporary Cook,” said The Prawn, whose
manners were far better than William’s.
“Temp’ry! Temp’ry!” the stranger puffed. “Can’t be a temp’ry cook any
more’n you can be a temp’ry Parson. Not so much. Cookin’s cookin’. Let’s
see _your_ notions of cookin’.”
William had never heard any one address The Prawn in these tones, and
somehow it cheered him. In the silence that followed he turned on his
face and wriggled unostentatiously through the fern, as a Scout should,
till he could see that bold man without attracting The Prawn’s notice.
And this, too, was the first time that William had ever profited by the
instruction of his Scoutmaster or the example of his comrades.
Heavenly sights rewarded him. The Prawn, visibly ill at ease, was
shifting from one sinewy leg to the other, while an enormously fat
little man with a pointed grey beard and arms like the fins of a fish
investigated a couple of pots that hung on properly crutched sticks over
the small fire that William had lighted in the cooking-place. He did not
seem to approve of what he saw or smelt. And yet it was the impeccable
Prawn’s own cookery!
“Lor!” said he at last after more sniffs of contempt, as he replaced the
lid. “If you hot up things in tins, _that_ ain’t cookery. That’s
vittles—mere vittles! And the way you’ve set that pot on, you’re drawing
all the nesty wood-smoke into the water. The spuds won’t take much harm
of it, but you’ve ruined the meat. That is meat, ain’t it? Get me a
fork.”
William hugged himself. The Prawn, looking exactly like his namesake
well-boiled, fetched a big fork. The little man prodded into the pot.
“It’s stew!” The Prawn explained, but his voice shook.
“Lor!” said the man again. “It’s boilin’! It’s boilin’! You don’t boil
when you stew, my son; an’ as for _this_”—up came a grey slab of
mutton—“there’s no odds between this and motor-tyres. Well! Well! As I
was sayin’——” He joined his hands behind his globular back and shook his
head in silence. After a while, The Prawn tried to assert himself.
“Cookin’ isn’t my strong point,” began The Prawn, “but——”
“Pore boys! Pore boys!” the stranger soliloquized, looking straight in
front of him. “_Pore_ little boys! Wicked, _I_ call it. They don’t ever
let you make bread, do they, my son?”
The Prawn said they generally bought their bread at a shop.
“Ah! I’m a shopkeeper meself. Marsh, the Baker here, is me. _Pore_ boys!
Well! Well!... Though it’s against me own interest to say so, _I_ think
shops are wicked. They sell people things out o’ tins which save ’em
trouble, an’ fill the ’ospitals with stummick-cases afterwards. An’ the
muck that’s sold for flour....” His voice faded away and he meditated
again. “Well—well! _As_ I was sayin’—— Pore boys! _Pore_ boys! I’m glad
you ain’t askin’ me to dinner. Good bye.”
He rolled away across the fern, leaving The Prawn dumb behind him.
It seemed to William best to wriggle back in his cover as far as he
could, ere The Prawn should call him to work again. He was not a Scout
by instinct, but his uncle had shown him that when things went wrong in
the world, someone generally passed it onto someone else. Very soon he
heard his name called, acidly, several times. He crawled out from the
far end of the fern-patch, rubbing his eyes, and The Prawn re-enslaved
him on the spot. For once in his life William was alert and intelligent,
but The Prawn paid him no compliments, nor when the very muddy Pelicans
came back from the bridging did The Prawn refer in any way to the visit
of Mr. E. M. Marsh & Son, Bakers and Confectioners in the village street
just outside the Park wall. Nor, for that matter, did he serve the
Pelicans much besides tinned meats for their evening meal.
To say that William did not sleep a wink that night would be what has
been called “nature-faking”; which is a sin. His system demanded at
least nine hours’ rest, but he lay awake for quite twenty minutes,
during which he thought intensely, rapidly and joyously. Had he been
asked he would have said that his thoughts dealt solely with The Prawn
and the judgment that had fallen upon him; but William was no
psychologist. He did not know that hate—raging hate against a
too-badged, too virtuous senior—had shot him into a new world, exactly
as the large blunt shell is heaved through space and dropped into a
factory, a garden or a barracks by the charge behind it. And, as the
shell, which is but metal and mixed chemicals, needs only a graze on the
fuse to spread itself all over the landscape, so did his mind need but
the touch of that hate to flare up and illuminate not only all his
world, but his own way through it.
Next morning something sang in his ear that it was long since he had
done good turns to any one except his uncle, who was slow to appreciate
them. He would amend that error; and the more safely since The Prawn
would be off all that day with the Troop on a tramp in the natural
history line, and his place as Camp Warden and Provost Marshal would be
filled by the placid and easy-going Walrus, whose proper name was
Carpenter, who never tried for badges, but who could not see a rabbit
without going after him. And the owner of the Park had given full leave
to the Pelicans to slay by any means, except a gun, any rabbits they
could. So William ingratiated himself with his Superior Officer as soon
as the Pelicans had left....
No, the excellent Carpenter did not see that he needed William by his
side all day. He might take himself and his bruised foot pretty much
where he chose. He went, and this new and active mind of his that he did
not realize, accompanied him—straight up the path of duty which, poetry
tells us, is so often the road to glory.
He began by cleaning himself and his kit at seven o’clock in the
morning, long before the village shops were open. This he did near a
postern gate with a crack in it, in the Park wall, commanding a limited
but quite sufficient view of the establishment of E. M. Marsh & Son
across the street. It was perfect weather, and about eight o’clock Mr.
Marsh himself in his shirt-sleeves rolled out to enjoy it before he took
down the shutters. Hardly had he shifted the first of them when a
fattish Boy Scout with a flat face and a slight limp laid hold of the
second and began to slide it towards him.
“Well, well!” said Mr. Marsh. “Ah! Your good turn, eh?”
“Yes,” said William briefly.
“That’s right! Handsomely now, handsomely,” for the shutter was jamming
in its groove. William knew from his uncle that “handsomely” meant
slowly and with care. The shutter responded to the coaxing. The others
followed.
“Belay!” said Mr. Marsh, wiping his forehead, for, like William, he
perspired easily. When he turned round William had gone. The Movies had
taught him, though he knew it not, the value of dramatic effect. He
continued to watch Mr. Marsh through the crack in the postern—it was the
little wooden door at the end of the right of way through the Park—and
when, an hour or so later, Mr. Marsh came out of his shop and headed
towards it, William retired backwards into the high fern and brambles.
The manœuvre would have rejoiced Mr. Hale’s heart, for generally William
moved like an elephant with its young. He turned up, quite casually,
when Mr. Marsh had puffed his way again into the empty camp. Carpenter
was off in pursuit of rabbits, with a pocket full of fine picture-wire.
It was the first time William had ever done the honours of any
establishment. He came to attention and smiled.
“Well! Well!” Mr. Marsh nodded friendlily. “What are _you_?”
“Camp-guard,” said William, improvising for the first time in his life.
“Can I show you anything, sir?”
“No, thank’ee. My son was a Scout once. I’ve just come to look round at
things. ’No one tryin’ any cookin’ to-day?”
“No, sir.”
“’Bout’s well. _Pore_ boys! What you goin’ to have for dinner? Tinned
stuff?”
“I expect so, sir.”
“D’you like it?”
“’Used to it.” William rather approved of this round person who wasted
no time on abstract ideas.
“_Pore_ boys! Well! Well! It saves trouble—for the present. Knots and
splices in your stummick afterwards—in ’ospital.” Mr. Marsh looked at
the cold camp cooking-place and its three big stones, and sniffed.
“Would you like it lit?” said William, suddenly.
“What for?”
“To cook with.”
“What d’ _you_ know about cookin’?” Mr. Marsh’s little eyes opened wide.
“Nothing, sir.”
“What makes you think _I_’m a cook?”
“By the way you looked at our cooking-place,” the mendacious William
answered. The Prawn had always urged him to cultivate habits of
observation. They seemed easy—after you had observed the things.
“Well! Well! Quite a young Sherlock, you are. ’Don’t think much o’
_this_, though.” Mr. Marsh began to stoop to rearrange the open-air
hearth to his liking.
“Show me how and I’ll do it,” said William.
“Shove that stone a little more to the left then. Steady—So! That’ll do!
Got any wood? No? You slip across to the shop and ask them to give you
some small brush-stuff from the oven. Stop! _And_ my apron, too. Marsh
is the name.”
William left him chuckling wheezily. When he returned Mr. Marsh clad
himself in a long white apron of office which showed so clearly that
Carpenter from far off returned at once.
“H’sh! H’sh!” said Mr. Marsh before he could speak. “You carry on with
what you’re doing. Marsh is my name. My son was a Scout once.
Buffaloes—Hendon-way. It’s all right. Don’t you grudge an old man
enjoying himself.”
The Walrus looked amazedly at William moving in three directions at once
with his face on fire.
“It’s all right,” said William. “He’s giving us cooking-lessons.”
Then—the words came into his mouth by themselves—“I’ll take the
responsibility.”
“Yes, yes! He knew I could cook. Quite a young Sherlock he is! _You_
carry on.” Mr. Marsh turned his back on the Walrus and despatched
William again with some orders to his shop across the road. “And you’d
better tell ’em to put ’em all in a basket,” he cried after him.
William returned with a fair assortment of mixed material, including
eggs, two rashers of bacon, and a packet of patent flour concerning
which last Mr. Marsh said things no baker should say about his own
goods. The frying-pan came out of the push-cart, with some other
oddments, and it was not till after it was greased that Mr. Marsh
demanded William’s name. He got it in full, and it produced strange
effects on the little fat man.
“An’ ’ow do you spell your middle name?” he asked.
“G-l-a-double-s-e,” said William.
“Might that be your mother’s?” William nodded. “Well! Well! I wonder
now! I _do_ wonder. It’s a great name. There was a Sawyer in the cooking
line once, but ’e was a Frenchman and spelt it different. Glasse is
serious though. And you say it was your ma’s.” He fell into an
abstraction, frying-pan in hand. Anon, as he cracked an egg miraculously
on its edge—“Whether you’re a descendant or not, it’s worth livin’ up
to, a name like that.”
“Why?” said William, as the egg slid into the pan and spread as evenly
as paint under an expert’s hand.
“I’ll tell you some day. She was a very great cook—but she’d have come
expensive at to-day’s prices. Now, you take the pan an’ I’ll draw me own
conclusions.”
The boy worked the pan over the level red fire with a motion that he had
learned somehow or other while “boiling up” things for his uncle. It
seemed to him natural and easy. Mr. Marsh watched in unbroken silence
for at least two minutes.
“It’s early to say—yet,” was his verdict. “But I ’ave ’opes. You ’ave
good ’ands, an’ your knowin’ I was a cook shows you ’ave the instinck.
_If_ you ’ave got the Touch—mark you, I only say if—but _if_ you ’ave
anything like the Genuine Touch, you’re provided for for life. _An’_
further—don’t tilt her that way!—you ’old your neighbours, friends and
employers in the ’ollow of your ’and.”
“How do you mean?” said William, intent on his egg.
“Everything which a man _is_ depends on what ’e puts inside ’im,” was
the reply. “A good cook’s a King of men—besides being thunderin’ well
off if ’e don’t drink. It’s the only sure business in the whole round
world; and _I_’ve been round it eight times, in the Mercantile Marine,
before I married the second Mrs. M.”
William, more interested in the pan than Mr. Marsh’s marriages, made no
reply. “Yes, a good cook,” Mr. Marsh went on reminiscently, “even on
Board o’ Trade allowance, ’as brought many a ship to port that ’ud
otherwise ’ave mut’nied on the ’igh seas.”
The eggs and bacon mellowed together. Mr. Marsh supplied some wonderful
last touches and the result was eaten, with the Walrus’s help, sizzling
out of the pan and washed down with some stone ginger-beer from the
convenient establishment of Mr. E. M. Marsh outside the Park wall.
“I’ve ruined me dinner,” Mr. Marsh confided to the boys, “but I ’aven’t
enjoyed myself like this, not since Noah was an able seaman. You wash
up, young Sherlock, an’ I’ll tell you something.”
He filled an ancient pipe with eloquent tobacco, and while William
scoured the pan, he held forth on the art and science and mystery of
cooking as inspiredly as Mr. Jorrocks, Master of Foxhounds, had lectured
upon the Chase. The burden of his song was Power—power which, striking
directly at the stomach of man, makes the rudest polite, not to say
sycophantic, towards a good cook, whether at sea, in camp, in the face
of war, or (here he embellished his text with personal experiences) the
crowded competitive cities where a good meal was as rare, he declared,
as silk pyjamas in a pig-sty. “An’ mark you,” he concluded, “three times
a day the ’aughtiest and most overbearin’ of ’em all ’ave to come
crawling to you for a round belly-full. Put _that_ in your pipe and
smoke it out, young Sherlock!”
He unloosed his sacrificial apron and rolled away.
The Boy Scout is used to strangers who give him good advice on the
smallest provocation; but strangers who fill you up with bacon and eggs
and ginger-beer are few.
“What started it all?” the Walrus demanded.
“Well, I can’t exactly say,” William answered, and as he had never been
known to give a coherent account of anything, the Walrus returned to his
wires, and William lay out and dreamed in the fern among the
cattle-flies. He had dismissed The Prawn altogether from his
miraculously enlarging mind. Very soon he was on the High Seas, a
locality which till that instant had never appealed to him, in a gale,
issuing bacon and eggs to crews on the edge of mutiny. Next, he was at
war, turning the tides of it to victory for his own land by meals of
bacon and eggs that brought bemedalled Generals in troops like Pelicans,
to his fire-place. Then he was sustaining his uncle, at the door of an
enormous restaurant, with plates of bacon and eggs sent out by gilded
commissionaires such as guard the cinemas, while his uncle wept with
gratitude and remorse, and The Prawn, badges and all, begged for scraps.
His chin struck his chest and half waked him to fresh flights of glory.
He might have the Genuine Touch, Mr. Marsh had said it. Moreover, he,
the Mug, had a middle name which filled that great man with respect. All
the 47th Postal District should ring with that name, even to the
exclusion of the racing-news, in its evening papers. And on his return
from camp, or perhaps a day or two later, he would defy his very uncle
and escape for ever from the foul business of French-polishing.
Here he slept generously and dreamlessly till evening, when the Pelicans
returned, their pouches full of samples of uncookable vegetables and
insects, and the Walrus made his report of the day’s Camp doings to the
Scoutmaster.
“Wait a minute, Walrus. You say the Mug actually _did_ the cooking?”
“Mr. Marsh had him under instruction, sir. But the Mug did a lot of
it—he held the pan over the fire. I saw him, sir. And he washed up
afterwards.”
“Did he?” said the Scoutmaster lightly. “Well, that’s something. But
when the Walrus had gone Mr. Hale smote thrice upon his bare knees and
laughed, as a Scout should, without noise.”
He thanked Mr. Marsh next morning for the interest he had shown in the
camp, and suggested (this was while he was buying many very solid buns
for a route-march) that nothing would delight the Pelicans more than a
few words from Mr. Marsh on the subject of cookery, if he could see his
way to it.
“Quite so,” said Mr. Marsh, “_I_’m worth listenin’ to. Well! Well! I’ll
be along this evening, and, maybe, I’ll bring some odds and ends with
me. Send over young Sherlock-Glasse to ’elp me fetch ’em. _That’s_ a boy
with ’is stummick in the proper place. ’Know anything about ’im?”
Mr. Hale knew a good deal, but he did not tell it all. He suggested that
William himself should be approached, and would excuse him from the
route-march for that purpose.
“Route-march!” said Mr. Marsh in horror. “Lor! The very worst use you
can make of your feet is walkin’ on ’em. ’Gives you bunions. Besides, ’e
ain’t got the figure for marches. ’E’s a cook by build as well as
instinck. ’Eavy in the run, oily in the skin, broad in the beam, short
in the arm, _but_, mark you, light on the feet. That’s the way cooks
ought to be issued. You never ’eard of a really good _thin_ cook yet,
did you? No. Nor me. An’ I’ve known millions that called ’emselves
cooks.”
Mr. Hare regretted that he had not studied the natural history of cooks,
and sent William over early in the day.
Mr. Marsh spoke to the Pelicans for an hour that evening beside an open
wood fire, from the ashes of which he drew forth (talking all the while)
wonderful hot cakes called “dampers”; while from its top he drew off
pans full of “lobscouse,” which he said was not to be confounded with
“salmagundi,” and a hair-raising compound of bacon, cheese and onions
all melted together. And while the Pelicans ate, he convulsed them with
mirth or held them breathless with anecdotes of the High Seas and the
World, so that the vote of thanks they passed him at the end waked the
cows in the Park. But William sat wrapped in visions, his hands
twitching sympathetically to Mr. Marsh’s wizardry among the pots and
pans. He knew now what the name of Glasse signified; for he had spent an
hour at the back of the baker’s shop reading, in a brown-leather book
dated 1767 A.D. and called “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by a
Lady,” and that lady’s name, as it appeared in facsimile at the head of
Chap. I, was “H. Glasse.” Torture would not have persuaded him, or Mr.
Marsh, by that time, that she was not his direct ancestress; but, as a
matter of form, he intended to ask his uncle.
When The Prawn, very grateful that Mr. Marsh had made no reference to
his notions of cookery, asked William what he thought of the lecture and
exhibition, William came out of his dreams with a start, and “Oh, all
right, I suppose, but I wasn’t listening much.” Then The Prawn, who
always improved an occasion, lectured him on lack of attention; and
William missed all that too. The question in his mind was whether his
uncle would let him stay with Mr. Marsh for a couple of days after Camp
broke up, or whether he would use the reply-paid telegram, which Mr.
Marsh had sent him, for his own French-polishing concerns. When The
Prawn’s voice ceased, he not only promised to do better next time, but
added, out of a vast and inexplicable pity that suddenly rose up inside
him, “And I’m grateful to you, Prawn. I am really.”
On his return to town from that wonder-revealing visit, he found the
Pelicans treating him with a new respect. For one thing, the Walrus had
talked about the bacon and eggs; for another, The Prawn, who when he let
himself go, could be really funny, had given some artistic imitations of
Mr. Marsh’s comments on his cookery. Lastly, Mr. Hale had laid down that
William’s future employ would be to cook for the Pelicans when they
camped abroad. “And look out that you don’t poison us too much,” he
added.
There were occasional mistakes and some very flat failures, but the
Pelicans swallowed them all loyally; no one had even a stomachache, and
the office of Cook’s mate to William was in great demand. The Prawn
himself sought it next Spring when the Troop stole a couple of fair May
days on the outskirts of a brick-field, and were very happy. But William
set him aside in favour of a new and specially hopeless recruit;
oily-skinned, fat, short-armed, but light on his feet, and with some
notion of lifting pot-lids without wrecking or flooding the whole
fire-place.
“You see, Prawn,” he explained, “cookin’ isn’t a thing one can just pick
up.”
“Yes, I could—watchin’ you,” The Prawn insisted.
“No. Mr. Marsh says it’s a Gift—same as a Talent.”
“D’you mean to tell me Rickworth’s got it, then?”
“Dunno. It’s _my_ job to find that out—Mr. Marsh says. Anyway, Rickworth
told me he liked cleaning out a fryin’ pan because it made him think of
what it might be cookin’ next time.”
“Well, if that isn’t silliness, it’s just greediness,” said The Prawn.
“What about those dampers you were talking of when I bought the
fire-lighters for you this morning?”
William drew one out of the ashes, tapped it lightly with his small
hazel-wand of office, and slid it over, puffed and perfect, towards The
Prawn.
Once again the wave of pity—the Master’s pity for the mere consuming
Public—swept over him as he watched The Prawn wolf it down.
“I’m grateful to you. I reely _am_, Prawn,” said William Glasse Sawyer.
After all, as he was used to say in later years, if it hadn’t been for
The Prawn, where would he have been?
PROLOGUE TO THE MASTER-COOK’S TALE
_This is what might be called a parody or imitation of the verses of
Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the earliest and the greatest of our English
poets. It looks difficult to read, but you will find it comes quite
easily if you say it aloud, remembering that where there is an accent
over the end of a word, that word is pronounced as two syllables—not
one. “Snailés,” for instance, would be spoken as “snai-les” and so on._
With us there rade a Maister-Cook that came
From the Rochelle which is neere Angoulême.
Littel hee was, but rounder than a topp,
And his small berd hadde dipped in manie a soppe.
His honde was smoother than beseemeth mann’s,
And his discoorse was all of marzipans,[5]
Of tripes of Caen, or Burdeux snailés swote,[6]
And Seinte Menhoulde wher cooken piggés-foote.[7]
To Thoulouse and to Bress and Carcasson
For pyes and fowles and chesnottes hadde hee wonne;[8]
Of hammés of Thuringie[9] colde hee prate,
And well hee knew what Princes hadde on plate
At Christmas-tide, from Artois to Gascogne.
Lordinges, quod hee, manne liveth nat alone
By bred, but meatés rost and seethed, and broth,
And purchasable[10] deinties, on mine othe.
Honey and hote gingere well liketh hee,
And whalés-flesch mortred[11] with spicerie.
For, lat be all how man denie or carpe,[12]
Him thries a daie his honger maketh sharpe,
And setteth him at boorde[13] with hawkés eyne,
Snuffing what dish is set beforne to deyne,
Nor, till with meate he all-to fill to brim,
None other matter nowher mooveth him.
Lat holie Seintés sterve[14] as bookés boast,
Most mannés soule is in his bellie most.
For, as man thinketh in his hearte is hee,
But, as hee eateth so his thought shall bee.
And Holie Fader’s self[15] (with reveraunce)
Oweth to Cooke his port and his presaunce.
Wherbye it cometh past disputison[16]
Cookes over alle men have dominion,
Which follow them as schippe her gouvernail[17]
Enoff of wordes—beginneth heere my tale:—
A FLIGHT OF FACT
_Most of this tale actually happened during the War about the year 1916
or 1917 but it was much funnier as I heard it told by an English Naval
officer than it is as I have written it from memory. It shows, what one
always believed was true, that there is nothing that cannot happen in
the Navy._
H. M. S. _Gardenia_ (we will take her name from the Herbaceous Border
which belonged to the sloops, though she was a destroyer by profession)
came quietly back to her berth some time after midnight, and disturbed
half a dozen of her sisters as she settled down. They all talked about
it next morning, especially _Phlox_ and _Stephanotis_, her left- and
right-hand neighbours in the big basin on the east coast of England,
that was crowded with destroyers.
But the soul of the _Gardenia_—Lieutenant-in-Command H. R. Duckett—was
lifted far above insults. What he had done during his last trip had been
well done. Vastly more important—_Gardenia_ was in for a
boiler-clean—which meant four days’ leave for her commanding officer.
“Where did you get that fender from, you dock-yard burglar?”
_Stephanotis_ clamoured over his rail, for _Gardenia_ was wearing a
large coir-matting fender, evidently fresh from store, over her rail. It
creaked with newness. “You common thief of the beach, where did you find
that new fender?”
The only craft that a destroyer will, sometimes, not steal equipment
from is a destroyer; which accounts for the purity of her morals and the
loftiness of her conversation, and her curiosity in respect to stolen
fillings.
Duckett, unmoved, went below, to return with a valise which he carried
on to His Majesty’s quarter-deck, and, atop of a suit of rat-catcher
clothes, crammed into it a pair of ancient pigskin gaiters.
Here _Phlox_, assisted by her Dandy Dinmont, Dinah, who had been trained
to howl at certain notes in her master’s voice, gave a spirited and
imaginary account of _Gardenia’s_ return the night before, which was
compared to that of an ambulance with a lady-driver. Duckett retaliated
by slipping on to his head for one coquettish instant a gravy-coloured
soft cloth cap. It was the last straw. _Phlox_ and _Stephanotis_, who
had no hope of any leave for the present, pronounced it an offence, only
to be wiped out by drinks.
“All things considered,” said Duckett. “I don’t care if I _do_. Come
along!” and, the hour being what it was, he gave the necessary orders
through the wardroom’s tiny skylight. The captains came.
_Phlox_—Lieutenant Commander Jerry Marlett, a large and weather-beaten
person, docked himself in the arm-chair by the wardroom stove with his
cherished Dinah in his arms. Great possessions and much land, inherited
from an uncle, had removed him from the Navy on the eve of war. Three
days after the declaration of it he was back again, and had been very
busy ever since. _Stephanotis_—Lieutenant-in-Command Augustus Holwell
Rayne, _alias_ “The Damper,” because of his pessimism, spread himself
out on the settee. He was small and agile, but of gloomy outlook, which
a D. S. O. earned, he said, quite by mistake, could not lighten. “Horse”
Duckett, _Gardenia’s_ skipper, was a reversion to the primitive Marryat
type—a predatory, astute, resourceful pirate, too well known to all His
Majesty’s dockyards, a man of easily injured innocence who could always
prove an alibi, and in whose ship, if his torpedo-coxswain had ever
allowed any one to look there, several sorts of missing Government
property might have been found. His ambition was to raise pigs (animals
he only knew as bacon) in Shropshire (a county he had never seen) after
the war, so he waged his war with zeal to bring that happy day nearer.
He sat in the arm-chair by the door, whence he controlled the operations
of “Crippen,” the wardroom steward, late of Bolitho’s Travelling Circus
and Swings, who had taken to the high seas to avoid the attentions of
the Police ashore.
As usual, Duckett’s character had been blackened by My Lords of the
Admiralty, and he was in the midst of a hot campaign against them. An
able-seaman’s widowed mother had sent a ham to her son whose name was E.
R. Davids. Unfortunately, Engineroom-Artificer E. Davies, who swore that
he had both a mother and expectations of hams from her, came across the
ham first, and, misreading its address, had had it boiled for, and at
once eaten by, the Engineers’ mess. E. R. Davids, a vindictive soul,
wrote to his mother, who, it seems, wrote to the Admiralty, who,
according to Duckett, wrote to him daily every day for a month to know
what had become of E. R. Davids’ ham. In the meantime the guilty
Engineroom-Artificer E. Davies had been transferred to a sloop off the
Irish coast.
“An’ what the dooce _am_ I to do?” Duckett asked his guests plaintively.
“Apply for leave to go to Ireland with a stomach-pump and heave the ham
out of Davies,” Jerry suggested promptly.
“That’s rather a wheeze,” said Duckett. “I _had_ thought of marrying
Davids’ mother to settle the case. Anyhow, it was all Crippen’s fault
for not steering the ham into the wardroom when it came aboard. Don’t
let it occur again, Crippen. Hams are going to be very scarce.”
“Well, now you’ve got all that off your chest”—Jerry Marlett lowered his
voice—“suppose you tell us about what happened—the night before last.”
The talk became professional. Duckett produced certain evidence—still
damp—in support of the claims that he had sent in concerning the fate of
a German submarine, and gave a chain of facts and figures and bearings
that the others duly noted.
“And how did your Acting Sub do?” asked Jerry at last.
“Oh, very fair, but I didn’t tell him so, of course. They’re hard enough
to hold at the best of times, these makee-do officers. Have you noticed
that they are always above their job—always thinkin’ round the corner
when they’re thinkin’ at all. On our way back, this young merchant o’
mine—when I’d almost made up my mind to tell him he wasn’t as big tripes
as he looked—told me his one dream in life was to fly. Fly! He flew
alright by the time I’d done with him, but—imagine a Sub _tellin’_ one a
thing like that! ‘It must be _so_ interestin’ to fly,’ he said. The
whole North Sea one blooming burgoo of what-come-nexts, an’ this pup
complainin’ of lack of interest in it! Fly! Fly! When _I_ was a
Sub-Lootenant——”
He turned pathetically towards The Damper, who had known him in that
rank in the Mediterranean.
“There wasn’t much flyin’ in our day,” said The Damper mournfully. “But
I can’t remember anything else we didn’t do.”
“Quite so; but we had some decency knocked into us. The new breed
wouldn’t know decency if they met it on a dungfork. _That’s_ what I
mean.”
“When _I_ was Actin’ Sub,” Jerry opened thoughtfully, “in the
_Polycarp_—the pious _Polycarp_—Nineteen-O-Seven, I got nine cuts of the
best from the Senior Sub for occupyin’ the bathroom ten seconds too
long. Twenty minutes later, just when the welts were beginnin’ to come
up, y’ know, I was sent off in the gig with a Corporal o’ Marines an’ a
private to fetch the Headman of All the Pelungas aboard. He was wanted
for slavery, or barratry, or bigamy or something.”
“All the Pelungas?” Duckett repeated with interest. “’Odd you should
mention that part of the world. What are the Pelungas like?”
“Very nice. Hundreds of islands and millions of coral reefs with atolls
an’ lagoons an’ palm-trees, an’ all the population scullin’ round in
outrigger canoes between ’em like a permanent regatta. Filthy
navigation, though. _Polycarp_ had to lie five miles out on account of
the reefs (even then our navigator was tearin’ his hair) an’ I had an
hour’s steerin’ on hot hard thwarts. Talk o’ tortures! _You_ know. We
landed in a white lather at the boat-steps of the Headman’s island. The
Headman wasn’t takin’ any at first. He’d drawn up his whole army—three
hundred strong, with old Martini rifles an’ a couple of ancestral
seven-pounders in front of his fort. _We_ didn’t know anything about his
domestic arrangements. We just dropped in among ’em so to say. Then my
Corporal of Marines—the fattest man in the Service bar one—fell down the
landin’ steps. The Headman had a Prime Minister—about as fat as my
Corporal—and he helped him up. Well, _that_ broke the ice a bit. The
Prime Minister was a statesman. He poured oil on the crisis, while the
Headman cursed me and the Navy and the British Government, and I kept
wrigglin’ in my white ducks to keep ’em from drawin’ tight on me. _You_
know how it feels! I remember I told the Headman the _Polycarp_ ’ud blow
him an’ his island out of the water if he didn’t come along quick. She
could have done it—in a week or two; but we were scrubbin’ hammocks at
the time. I forgot that little fact for the minute. I was a bit hot—all
over. The Prime Minister soothed us down again, an’ by and by the
Headman said he’d pay us a state call—as a favour. I didn’t care what he
called it s’long as he came. So I lay about a quarter of a mile
off-shore in the gig, in case the seven-pounders pooped off—I knew the
Martinis couldn’t hit us at that range—and I waited for him till he
shoved off in his State barge—forty rowers a side. Would you believe it,
he wanted to take precedence of the White Ensign on the way to the ship?
I had to fall him in behind the gig and bring him alongside properly. I
was so sore I could hardly get aboard at the finish.”
“What happened to the Headman?” said The Damper.
“Nothing. He was acquitted or condemned—I forget which—but he was a
perfect gentleman. We used to go sailing with him and his people—dancing
with ’em on the beach and all that sort of thing. _I_ don’t want to meet
a nicer community than the Pelungaloos. They aren’t used to white
men—but they’re first-class learners.”
“Yes, they _do_ seem a cheery crowd,” Duckett commented.
“Where have _you_ come across them?” said Jerry.
“Nowhere; but this Acting Sub of mine has got a cousin who’s been flying
down there.”
“Flying in All the Pelungas?” Jerry cried. “That’s impossible!”
“In these days? Where’s your bright lexicon of youth? Nothing’s
impossible anywhere now,” Duckett replied. “All the best people fly.”
“Count me out,” Jerry grunted. “We went up once, Dinah, little dog, and
it made us both very sick, didn’t it? When did it all happen, Horse?”
“Some time last year. This chap, my Sub’s cousin—a man called
Baxter—went adrift among All the Pelungas in his machine and failed to
connect with his ship. He was reported missing for months. Then he
turned up again. That’s all.”
“He was called Baxter?” said The Damper. “Hold on a shake! I wonder if
he’s ‘Beloo’ Baxter, by any chance. There was a chap of that name about
five years ago on the China Station. He had himself tattooed all over,
regardless, in Rangoon. Then he got as good as engaged to a woman in
Hongkong—rich woman too. But the Pusser of his ship gave him away. He
had a regular cinema of frogs and dragonflies up his legs. And that was
only the beginnin’ of the show. So she broke off the engagement, and he
half-killed the Pusser, and then he became a Buddhist, or something.”
“That couldn’t have been this Baxter, or my Sub would have told me,”
said Duckett. “My Sub’s a morbid-minded young animal.”
“_Maskee_[18] your Sub’s mind!” said Jerry. “What was this Baxter
man—plain _or_ coloured—doin’ in All _my_ Pelungas?”
“As far as I can make out,” said Duckett, “Lootenant Baxter was flyin’
in those parts—with an observer—out of a ship.”
“Yes, but what _for_?” Jerry insisted. “And what ship?”
“He was flyin’ for exercise, I suppose, an’ his ship was the
_Cormorang_. D’you feel wiser? An’ he flew, an’ he flew, an’ he flew
till, between him an’ his observer and the low visibility and Providence
and all that sort of thing, he lost his ship—just like some other people
I know. Then he flapped about huntin’ for her till dusk among the
Pelungas, an’ then he effected a landin’ on the water.”
“A nasty wet business—landin’ that way, Dinah. We know,” said Jerry into
the keen little cocked ear in his lap.
“Then he taxied about in the dark till he taxied on to a coral reef and
couldn’t get the machine off. Coral ain’t like mud, is it?” The question
was to Jerry, but the insult was addressed to The Damper, who had lately
spent eighteen hours on a soft and tenacious shoal off the East Coast.
The Damper launched a kick at his host from where he lay along the
settee.
“Then,” Duckett went on, “this Baxter-man got busy with his wireless and
S O S’ed like winkie till the tide came and floated the old bus off the
reef, and they taxied over to another island in the dark.”
“Thousands of Islands in All the Pelungas,” Jerry murmured. “Likewise
reefs—hairy ones. What about the reefs?”
“Oh, they kept on hittin’ reefs in the dark, till it occurred to them to
fire their signal lights to see ’em by. So they went blazin’ an’
stinkin’ and taxyin’ up and down the reefs till they found a gap in one
of ’em and they taxied bung on to an uninhabited island.”
“That must have been good for the machine,” was Jerry’s comment.
“I don’t deny it. I’m only tellin’ you what my Sub told me. Baxter wrote
it all home to his people, and the letters have been passed round the
family. Well, then o’ course, it rained. It rained all the rest of the
night, up to the afternoon of the next day. (It always does when you’re
in a hole.) They tried to start their engine in the intervals of
climbin’ palm-trees for coco-nuts. They’d only a few buscuits and some
water with ’em.”
“’Don’t like climbin’ palm-trees. It scrapes you raw,” The Damper
moaned.
“An’ when they weren’t climbin’ or crankin’ their engine, they tried to
get into touch with the natives on the next nearest island. But the
natives weren’t havin’ any. They took to the bush.”
“Ah!” said Jerry sympathetically. “That aeroplane was too much for ’em.
Otherwise, they’re the most cosy, confidential lot _I_ ever met. Well,
what happened?”
“Baxter sweated away at his engine till she started up again. Then he
flew round lookin’ for his ship some more till his petrol ran out. Then
he landed close to _another_ uninhabited island and tried to taxi up to
it.”
“Why was he so keen on _un_inhabited islands? I wish I’d been there.
_I’d_ ha’ shown him round the town,” said Jerry.
“I don’t know his reasons, but that was what he wrote home to his
people,” Duckett went on. “Not havin’ any power by that time, his
machine blew on to another reef and there they were! No grub, no petrol,
and plenty of sharks! So they snugged her down. I don’t know how one
snugs down an aeroplane,” Duckett admitted, “but Baxter took the
necessary steps to reduce the sail-area, and cut the spanker-boom out of
the tail-tassels or whatever it is they do on an aeroplane when they
want her to be quiet. Anyhow, they more or less secured the bus to that
reef so they thought she wouldn’t fetch adrift; and they tried to coax a
canoe over that happened to be passing. Nothin’ doin’ _there_! ’Canoe
made one bunk of it.”
“He tickled ’em the wrong way,” Jerry sighed. “There’s a song they sing
when they’re fishing.” He began to hum dolefully.
“I expect Baxter didn’t know that tune,” Duckett interrupted. “He an’
his observer cursed the canoe a good deal, an’ then they went in for
swimmin’ stunts all among the sharks, until they fetched up on the
_next_ island when they came to it—it took ’em an hour to swim there—but
the minute they landed the natives all left. ’Seems to me,” said Duckett
thoughtfully, “Baxter and his observer must have spread a pretty healthy
panic scullin’ about All the Pelungas in their shirts.”
“But why shirts?” said Jerry. “Those waters are perfectly warm.”
“If you come to that, why _not_ shirts?” Duckett retorted. “A shirt’s a
badge of civilization——”
“Never mind your shirts. What happened after that?” said The Damper.
“They went to sleep. They were tired by that time—oddly enough. The
natives on _that_ island had left everything standing when they
bunked—fires lighted, chickens runnin’ about, and so forth. Baxter slept
in one of the huts. About midnight some of the bold boys stole back
again. Baxter heard ’em talkin’ just outside, and as he didn’t want his
face trod on, he said ‘Salaam.’ That cleared the island for the second
time. The natives jumped three foot into the air and shoved off.”
“Good Lord!” said Jerry impatiently. “_I’d_ have had ’em eating out of
my hand in ten seconds. ‘Salaam’ isn’t the word to use at all. What he
ought to have said——”
“Well, anyhow, he didn’t,” Duckett replied. “He and his observer had
their sleep out an’ they woke in the mornin’ with ragin’ appetites and a
strong sense of decency. The first thing they annexed was some native
loin-cloths off a bush. Baxter wrote all this home to his people, you
know. I expect he was well brought up.”
“If he was ‘Beloo’ Baxter no one would notice——” The Damper began.
“He wasn’t. He was just a simple, virtuous Naval Officer—like me. He an’
his observer navigated the island in full dress in search of the
natives, but they’d gone and taken the canoe with ’em. Baxter was so
depressed at their lack of confidence that he killed a chicken an’
plucked it and drew it (I bet neither of you know how to draw fowls) an’
boiled it and ate it all at once.”
“Didn’t he feed his observer?” The Damper asked. “I’ve a little brother
what’s an observer up in the air. I’d hate to think he——”
“The observer was kept busy wavin’ his shirt on the beach in order to
attract the attention of local fishin’ craft. That was what _he_ was
for. After breakfast Baxter joined him an’ the two of ’em waved shirts
for two hours on the beach. An’ that’s the sort of thing my Sub prefers
to servin’ with me!—_Me!_ After a bit, the Pelungaloos decided that they
must be harmless lunatics, and one canoe stood pretty close in, an’ they
swam out to her. But here’s a curious thing! Baxter wrote his people
that, when the canoe came, his observer hadn’t any shirt at all. ’Expect
he’d expended it wavin’ for succour. But Baxter’s shirt was all right.
He went out of his way to tell his people so. An’ my Sub couldn’t see
the humour of it one little bit. How does it strike you?”
“Perfectly simple,” said Jerry. “Lootenant Baxter as executive officer
in charge took his subordinate’s shirt owin’ to the exigencies of the
Service. I’d ha’ done the same. Pro-ceed.”
“There’s worse to follow. As soon as they got aboard the canoe and the
natives found they didn’t bite, they cottoned to ’em no end. ’Gave ’em
grub and dry loin-cloths and betel-nut to chew. What’s betel-nut like,
Jerry?”
“Grateful an’ comfortin’. Warms you all through and makes you spit pink.
It’s non-intoxicating.”
“Oh! I’ve never tried it. Well then, there was Baxter spittin’ pink in a
loin-cloth an’ a canoeful of Pelungaloo fishermen, with his shirt dryin’
in the breeze. ’Got that? Well, then his aeroplane, which he thought he
had secured to the reef of the next island, began to drift out to sea.
That boy had to keep his eyes open, I tell you. He wanted the natives to
go in and makee-catchee the machine, and there was a big palaver about
it. They naturally didn’t care to compromise themselves with strange
idols, but after a bit they lined up a dozen canoes—no, eleven, to be
precise—Baxter was awfully precise in his letters to his people—an’
tailed on to the aeroplane an’ towed it to an island.”
“Excellent,” said Jerry Marlett, the complete Lieutenant Commander. “I
was gettin’ worried about His Majesty’s property. Baxter must have had a
way with him. A loin-cloth ain’t uniform, but it’s dashed comfortable.
An’ how did All my Pelungaloos treat ’em?”
“We-ell!” said Duckett, “Baxter was writin’ home to his people, so I
expect he toned things down a bit, but, readin’ between the lines, it
looks as if—an’ _that’s_ why my Sub wants to take up flyin’ of course—it
looks as if, from then on, they had what you might call Garden-of-Eden
picnics for weeks an’ weeks. The natives put ’em under a guard o’ sorts
just for the look of the thing, while the news was sent to the Headman,
but as far as I can make out from my Sub’s reminiscences of Baxter’s
letters, their guard consisted of the entire male and female population
goin’ in swimmin’ with ’em twice a day. At night they had
concerts—native songs _versus_ music-hall—in alternate what d’you call
’em? Anti-somethings. ’Phone, ain’t it?”
“They _are_ a musical race! I’m glad he struck that side of their
nature,” Jerry murmured.
“I’m envious,” Duckett protested. “Why should the Flyin’ Corps get all
the plums? But Baxter didn’t forget His Majesty’s aeroplane. He got ’em
to tow it to his island o’ delights, and in the evenings he an’ his
observer, between the musical turns, used to give the women electric
shocks off the wireless. And, one time, he told his observer to show ’em
his false teeth, and when he took ’em out the people all bolted.”
“But that’s in Rider Haggard. It’s in ‘King Solomon’s Mines’,” The
Damper remarked.
“P’raps that’s what put it into Baxter’s head then,” said Duckett. “Or
else,” he suggested warily, “Baxter wanted to crab his observer’s
chances with some lady.”
“Then he was a fool,” The Damper snarled. “It might have worked the
other way. It generally does.”
“Well, one can’t foresee everything,” said Duckett. “Anyhow, Baxter
didn’t complain. They lived there for weeks and weeks, singin’ songs
together and bathin’ an’—oh, yes!—gamblin’. Baxter made a set of dice
too. He doesn’t seem to have neglected much. He said it was just to pass
the time away, but I wonder what he threw for. I wish I knew him. His
letters to his people are too colourless. What a life he must have led!
Women, dice and song, an’ your pay rollin’ up behind you in perfect
safety with no exertion on your part.”
“There’s a dance they dance on moonlight nights,” said Jerry, “with just
a few banana leaves—Never mind. Go ahead!”
“All things bright and beautiful—fineesh,” Duckett mourned. “Presently
the Headman of All the Pelungas came along——”
“’My friend? I hope it was. A first-class sportsman,” said Jerry.
“Baxter didn’t say. Anyhow, he turned up and they were taken over to the
capital island till they could be sent back to their own ship. The
Headman did ’em up to the nines in every respect while they were with
him (Baxter’s quite enthusiastic over it, even in writin’ to his own
people), but, o’ course, there’s nothing like first love, is there? They
must have felt partin’ with their first loves. _I_ always do. And then
they were put into the full uniform of All the Pelungaloo Army. What’s
that like, Jerry? You’ve seen it.”
“It’s a cross between a macaw an’ a rainbow-ended mandrill. Very tasty.”
“Just as they were gettin’ used to that, and they’d taught the Headman
and his Court to sing: ‘Hello! Hello! Who’s your lady friend?’ they were
embarked on a dirty common sailin’ craft an’ taken over the ocean and
returned to the _Cormorang_, which, o’ course, had reported ’em missing
and dead months before. They had one final kick-up before returnin’ to
duty. You see, they’d both grown torpedo-beards in the Pelungas, and
they were both in Pelungaloo uniform. Consequently, when they went
aboard the _Cormorang_ they weren’t recognized till they were half-way
down to their cabins.”
“And then?” both Captains asked at once.
“That’s where Baxter breaks off—even though he’s writin’ to his own
people. He’s so apologetic to ’em for havin’ gone missin’ and worried
’em, an’ he’s so sinful proud of havin’ taught the Headman music-hall
songs, that he only said that they had ‘some reception aboard the
_Cormorang_.’ It lasted till midnight.”
“It is possible. What about their machine?” said Jerry.
“The _Cormorang_ ran down to the Pelungas and retrieved it all right.
But _I_ should have liked to have seen that reception. There is nothing
I’d ha’ liked better than to have seen that reception. And it isn’t as
if I hadn’t seen a reception or two either.”
“The leaf-signal is made, sir,” said the Quartermaster at the door.
“Twelve-twenty-four train,” Duckett muttered. “Can do.” He rose, adding,
“I’m going to scratch the backs of swine for the next three days.
G’wout!”
The well-trained servant was already fleeting along the edge of the
basin with his valise. _Stephanotis_ and _Phlox_ returned to their own
ships, loudly expressing envy and hatred. Duckett paused for a moment at
his gang-way rail to beckon to his torpedo-coxswain, a Mr. Wilkins, a
peacetime sailor of mild and mildewed aspect who had followed Duckett’s
shady fortunes for some years.
“Wilkins,” he whispered, “where _did_ we get that new starboard fender
of ours from?”
“Orf the dredger, sir. She was asleep when we came in,” said Wilkins
through lips that scarcely seemed to move. “But our port one come orf
the water-boat. We ’ad to over’aul our moorin’s in the skiff last night,
sir, and we—er—found it on ’er.”
“Well, well, Wilkins. Keep the home fires burning,” and
Lieutenant-in-Command H. R. Duckett sped after his servant in the
direction of the railway station. But not so fast that he could outrun a
melody played aboard the _Phlox_ on a concertina to which manly voices
bore the burden:
When the enterprisin’ burglar ain’t aburglin’—ain’t aburglin’,
When the cut-throat is not occupied with crime—’pied with crime.
He loves to hear the little brook agurglin’——
Moved, Heaven knows, whether by conscience or kindliness, Lieutenant
Duckett smiled at the policeman on the Dockyard gates.
“STALKY”
_This happens to be the first story that was written concerning the
adventures and performances of three schoolboys—“Stalky,” McTurk and
“Beetle.” For some reason or other, it was never put into the book,
called “Stalky & Co.,” that was made out of the stories. A certain
amount of it, I am sorry to say, is founded on fact, though that is no
recommendation; and the only moral that I can see in it is, that when
for any reason you happen to get into a tight place, you have a better
chance of coming out of it comfortably if you keep your head than if you
get excited and don’t stop to think._
“And then,” it was a boy’s voice, curiously level and even, “De Vitré
said we were beastly funks not to help, and _I_ said there were too many
chaps in it to suit us. Besides, there’s bound to be a mess somewhere or
other, with old De Vitré in charge. Wasn’t I right, Beetle?”
“And, anyhow, it’s a silly biznai, bung through. What’ll they _do_ with
the beastly cows when they’ve got ’em? You can milk a cow—if she’ll
stand still. That’s all right, but drivin’ ’em about——”
“You’re a pig, Beetle.”
“No, I ain’t. What _is_ the sense of drivin’ a lot of cows up from the
Burrows to—to—where is it?”
“They’re tryin’ to drive ’em up to Toowey’s farmyard at the top of the
hill—the empty one, where we smoked last Tuesday. It’s a revenge. Old
Vidley chivied De Vitré twice last week for ridin’ his ponies on the
Burrows; and De Vitré’s goin’ to lift as many of old Vidley’s cattle as
he can and plant ’em up the hill. He’ll muck it, though—with Parsons,
Orrin and Howlett helpin’ him. They’ll only yell, an’ shout, an’ bunk if
they see Vidley.”
“_We_ might have managed it,” said McTurk slowly, turning up his
coat-collar against the rain that swept over the Burrows. His hair was
of the dark mahogany red that goes with a certain temperament.
“We should,” Corkran replied with equal confidence. “But they’ve gone
into it as if it was a sort of spadger-hunt. I’ve never done any
cattle-liftin’, but it seems to me-e-e that one might just as well be
stalky about a thing as not.”
The smoking vapours of the Atlantic drove in wreaths above the boys’
heads. Out of the mist to windward, beyond the grey bar of the
Pebble-Ridge, came the unceasing roar of mile-long Atlantic rollers. To
leeward, a few stray ponies and cattle, the property of the Northam
potwallopers, and the unwilling playthings of the boys in their leisure
hours, showed through the haze. The three boys had halted by the
Cattle-gate which marks the limit of cultivation, where the fields come
down to the Burrows from Northam Hill. Beetle, shock-headed and
spectacled, drew his nose to and fro along the wet top-bar; McTurk
shifted from one foot to the other, watching the water drain into either
print; while Corkran whistled through his teeth as he leaned against a
sod-bank, peering into the mist.
A grown or sane person might have called the weather vile; but the boys
at that School had not yet learned the national interest in climate. It
was a little damp, to be sure; but it was always damp in the Easter
term, and sea-wet, they held, could not give one a cold under any
circumstances. Mackintoshes were things to go to church in, but
crippling if one had to run at short notice across heavy country. So
they waited serenely in the downpour, clad as their mothers would not
have cared to see.
“I say, Corky,” said Beetle, wiping his spectacles for the twentieth
time, “if we aren’t going to help De Vitré, what are we here for?”
“We’re goin’ to watch,” was the answer. “Keep your eye on your Uncle and
he’ll pull you through.”
“It’s an awful biznai, driving cattle—in open country,” said McTurk,
who, as the son of an Irish baronet, knew something of these operations.
“They’ll have to run half over the Burrows after ’em. ’S’pose they’re
ridin’ Vidley’s ponies?”
“De Vitré’s sure to be. He’s a dab on a horse. Listen! What a filthy row
they’re making. They’ll be heard for miles.”
The air filled with whoops and shouts, cries, words of command, the
rattle of broken golf-clubs, and a clatter of hooves. Three cows with
their calves came up to the Cattle-gate at a milch-canter, followed by
four wild-eyed bullocks and two rough-coated ponies. A fat and freckled
youth of fifteen trotted behind them, riding bareback and brandishing a
hedge-stake. De Vitré, up to a certain point, was an inventive youth,
with a passion for horse-exercise that the Northam farmers did not
encourage. Farmer Vidley, who could not understand that a grazing pony
likes being galloped about, had once called him a thief, and the insult
rankled. Hence the raid.
“Come on,” he cried over his shoulder. “Open the gate, Corkran, or
they’ll all cut back again. We’ve had no end of bother to get ’em. Oh,
won’t old Vidley be wild!”
Three boys on foot ran up, “shooing” the cattle in excited and amateur
fashion, till they headed them into the narrow, high-banked Devonshire
lane that ran uphill.
“Come on, Corkran. It’s no end of a lark,” pleaded De Vitré; but Corkran
shook his head. The affair had been presented to him after dinner that
day as a completed scheme, in which he might, by favour, play a minor
part. And Arthur Lionel Corkran, No. 104, did not care for
lieutenancies.
“You’ll only be collared,” he cried, as he shut the gate. “Parsons and
Orrin are no good in a row. You’ll be collared sure as a gun, De Vitré.”
“Oh, you’re a beastly funk!” The speaker was already hidden by the fog.
“Hang it all,” said McTurk. “It’s about the first time we’ve ever tried
a cattle-lift at the Coll. Let’s——”
“Not much,” said Corkran firmly; “keep your eye on your Uncle.” His word
was law in these matters, for experience had taught them that if they
manœuvred without Corkran they fell into trouble.
“You’re wrathy because you didn’t think of it first,” said Beetle.
Corkran kicked him thrice calmly, neither he nor Beetle changing a
muscle the while.
“No, I ain’t; but it isn’t stalky enough for me.”
“Stalky,” in their school vocabulary, meant clever, well-considered and
wily, as applied to plans of action; and “stalkiness” was the one virtue
Corkran toiled after.
“’Same thing,” said McTurk. “You think you’re the only stalky chap in
the Coll.”
Corkran kicked him as he had kicked Beetle; and even as Beetle, McTurk
took not the faintest notice. By the etiquette of their friendship, this
was no more than a formal notice of dissent from a proposition.
“They haven’t thrown out any pickets,” Corkran went on (That school
prepared boys for the Army). “You ought to do that—even for apples.
Toowey’s farmyard may be full of farm-chaps.”
“’Twasn’t last week,” said Beetle, “when we smoked in that cartshed
place. It’s a mile from any house, too.”
Up went one of Corkran’s light eyebrows. “Oh, Beetle, I _am_ so tired o’
kickin’ you! Does that mean it’s empty _now_? They ought to have sent a
fellow ahead to look. They’re simply bound to be collared. An’ where’ll
they bunk to if they have to run for it? Parsons has only been here two
terms. _He_ don’t know the lie of the country. Orrin’s a fat ass, an’
Howlett bunks from a guv’nor” [vernacular for any native of Devon
engaged in agricultural pursuits] “as far as he can see any. De Vitré’s
the only decent chap in the lot, an’—an’ _I_ put him up to usin’
Toowey’s farmyard.”
“Well, keep your hair on,” said Beetle. “What are we going to do? It’s
hefty damp here.”
“Let’s think a bit.” Corkran whistled between his teeth and presently
broke into a swift, short double-shuffle. “We’ll go straight up the hill
and see what happens to ’em. Cut across the fields; an’ we’ll lie up in
the hedge where the lane comes in by the barn—where we found that dead
hedgehog last term. Come on!”
He scrambled over the earth bank and dropped onto the rain-soaked
plough. It was a steep slope to the brow of the hill where Toowey’s
barns stood. The boys took no account of stiles or foot-paths, crossing
field after field diagonally, and where they found a hedge, bursting
through it like beagles. The lane lay on their right flank, and they
heard much lowing and shouting in that direction.
“Well, if De Vitré isn’t collared,” said McTurk, kicking off a few
pounds of loam against a gate-post, “he jolly well ought to be.”
“We’ll get collared, too, if you go on with your nose up like that.
Duck, you ass, and stalk along under the hedge. We can get quite close
up to the barn,” said Corkran. “There’s no sense in not doin’ a thing
stalkily while you’re about it.”
They wriggled into the top of an old hollow double hedge less than
thirty yards from the big black timbered barn with its square
outbuildings. Their ten-minutes’ climb had lifted them a couple of
hundred feet above the Burrows. As the mists parted here and there, they
could see its great triangle of sodden green, tipped with yellow
sand-dunes and fringed with white foam, laid out like a blurred map
below. The surge along the Pebble Ridge made a background to the wild
noises in the lane.
“What did I tell you?” said Corkran, peering through the stems of the
quickset which commanded a view of the farmyard. “Three
farm-chaps—getting out dung—with pitchforks. It’s too late to head off
De Vitré. We’d be collared if we showed up. Besides, they’ve heard ’em.
They couldn’t help hearing. What asses!”
The natives, brandishing their weapons, talked together, using many
times the word “Colleger.” As the tumult swelled, they disappeared into
various pens and byres. The first of the cattle trotted up to the
yard-gate, and De Vitré felicitated his band.
“That’s all right,” he shouted. “Oh, won’t old Vidley be wild! Open the
gate, Orrin, an’ whack ’em through. They’re pretty warm.”
“So’ll you be in a minute,” muttered McTurk as the raiders hurried into
the yard behind the cattle. They heard a shout of triumph, shrill yells
of despair; saw one Devonian guarding the gate with a pitchfork, while
the others, alas! captured all four boys.
“Of all the infernal, idiotic, lower-second asses!” said Corkran. “They
haven’t even taken off their house-caps.” These dainty confections of
primary colours were not issued, as some believe, to encourage
House-pride or esprit-de-corps, but for purposes of identification from
afar, should the wearer break bounds or laws. That is why, in time of
war, any one but an idiot wore his inside out.
“Aie! Yeou young rascals. We’ve got ’e! Whutt be doin’ to Muster
Vidley’s bullocks?”
“Oh, we found ’em,” said De Vitré, who bore himself gallantly in defeat.
“Would you like ’em?”
“Found ’em! They bullocks drove like that—all heavin’ an’ penkin’ an’
hotted! Oh! Shameful. Yeou’ve nigh to killed the cows—lat alone stealin’
’em. They sends pore boys to jail for half o’ this.”
“That’s a lie,” said Beetle to McTurk, turning on the wet grass.
“I know; but they always say it. ’Member when they collared us at the
Monkey Farm that Sunday, with the apples in your topper?”
“My Aunt! They’re goin’ to lock ’em up an’ send for Vidley,” Corkran
whispered, as one of the captors hurried downhill in the direction of
Appledore, and the prisoners were led into the barn.
“But they haven’t taken their names and numbers, anyhow,” said Corkran,
who had fallen into the hands of the enemy more than once.
“But they’re bottled! Rather sickly for De Vitré,” said Beetle. “It’s
one lickin’ anyhow, even if Vidley don’t hammer him. The Head’s rather
hot about gate-liftin’, and poachin’, an’ all that sort of thing. He
won’t care for cattle-liftin’ much.”
“It’s awfully bad for cows, too, to run ’em about in milk,” said McTurk,
lifting one knee from a sodden primrose-tuft. “What’s the next move,
Corky?”
“We’ll get into the old cartshed where we smoked. It’s next to the barn.
We can cut across over while they’re inside and climb in through the
window.”
“S’pose we’re collared?” said Beetle, cramming his house-cap into his
pocket. Caps may tumble off, so one goes into action bare-headed.
“That’s just it. They’d never dream of any more chaps walkin’ bung into
the trap. Besides, we can get out through the roof if they spot us. Keep
your eye on your Uncle. Come on,” said Corkran.
A swift dash carried them to a huge clump of nettles, beneath the
unglazed back window of the cartshed. Its open front, of course, gave on
to the barnyard.
They scrambled through, dropped among the carts, and climbed up into the
rudely boarded upper floor that they had discovered a week before when
in search of retirement. It covered a half of the building and ended in
darkness at the barn wall. The roof-tiles were broken and displaced.
Through the chinks they commanded a clear view of the barnyard, half
filled with disconsolate cattle, steaming sadly in the rain.
“You see,” said Corkran, always careful to secure his line of retreat,
“if they bottle us up here, we can squeeze out between these rafters,
slide down the roof, an’ bunk. They couldn’t even get out through the
window. They’d have to run right round the barn. Now are you satisfied,
you burbler?”
“Huh! You only said that to make quite sure yourself,” Beetle retorted.
“If the boards weren’t all loose, I’d kick you,” growled Corkran. “’No
sense gettin’ into a place you can’t get out of. Shut up and listen.”
A murmur of voices reached them from the end of the attic. McTurk
tiptoed thither with caution.
“Hi! It leads through into the barn. You can get through. Come along!”
He fingered the boarded wall.
“What’s the other side?” said Corkran the cautious.
“Hay, you idiot.” They heard his boot-heels click on wood, and he had
gone.
At some time or other sheep must have been folded in the cartshed, and
an inventive farm-hand, sooner than take the hay round, had displaced a
board in the barn-side to thrust fodder through. It was in no sense a
lawful path, but twelve inches in the square is all that any boy needs.
“Look here!” said Beetle, as they waited for McTurk’s return. “The
cattle are coming in out of the wet.”
A brown, hairy back showed some three feet below the half-floor, as one
by one the cattle shouldered in for shelter among the carts below,
filling the shed with their sweet breath.
“That blocks our way out, unless we get out by the roof, an’ that’s
rather too much of a drop, unless we have to,” said Corkran. “They’re
all bung in front of the window, too. What a day we’re havin’!”
“Corkran! Beetle!” McTurk’s whisper shook with delight. “You can see
’em; I’ve seen ’em. They’re in a blue funk in the barn, an’ the two
clods are makin’ fun of ’em—horrid. Orrin’s tryin’ to bribe ’em an’
Parsons is nearly blubbin’. Come an’ look! I’m in the hayloft. Get
through the hole. Don’t make a row, Beetle.”
Lithely they wriggled between the displaced boards into the hay and
crawled to the edge of the loft. Three years’ skirmishing against a hard
and unsympathetic peasantry had taught them the elements of strategy.
For tactics they looked to Corkran; but even Beetle, notoriously
absent-minded, held a lock of hay before his head as he crawled. There
was no haste, no betraying giggle, no squeak of excitement. They had
learned, by stripes, the unwisdom of these things. But the conference by
a root-cutter on the barn floor was deep in its own affairs; De Vitré’s
party promising, entreating, and cajoling, while the natives laughed
like Inquisitors.
“Wait till Muster Vidley an’ Muster Toowey—yis, an’ the policemen come,”
was their only answer. “’Tis about time to go to milkin’. What’ull us
do?”
“Yeou go milk, Tom, an’ I’ll stay long o’ the young gentlemen,” said the
bigger of the two, who answered to the name of Abraham. “Muster Toowey,
he’m laike to charge yeou for usin’ his yard so free. Iss fai! Yeou’ll
be wopped proper. ’Rackon yeou’ll be askin’ for junkets to set in this
week o’ Sundays to come. But Muster Vidley, he’ll give ’ee the best
leatherin’ of all. He’m passionful, I tal ’ee.”
Tom stumped out to milk. The barn doors closed behind him, and in the
fading light a great gloom fell on all but Abraham, who discoursed
eloquently on Mr. Vidley, his temper and strong arm.
Corkran turned in the hay and retreated to the attic, followed by his
army.
“No good,” was his verdict. “I’m afraid it’s all up with ’em. We’d
better get out.”
“Yes, but look at these beastly cows,” said McTurk, spitting on to a
heifer’s back. “It’ll take us a week to shove ’em away from the window,
and that brute Tom’ll hear us. He’s just across the yard, milkin’.”
“Tweak ’em, then,” said Corkran. “Hang it, I’m sorry to have to go,
though. If we could get that other beast out of the barn for a minute we
might make a rescue. Well, it’s no good. Tweakons!”
He drew forth a slim, well-worn homemade catapult—the “tweaker” of those
days—slipped a buckshot into its supple chamois leather pouch, and
pulled to the full stretch of the elastic. The others followed his
example. They only wished to get the cattle out of their way, but seeing
the backs so near, they deemed it their duty each to choose his bird and
to let fly with all their strength.
They were not prepared in the least for what followed. Three bullocks,
trying to wheel amid six close-pressed companions, not to mention three
calves, several carts, and all the lumber of a general-utility shed, do
not turn end-for-end without confusion. It was lucky for the boys that
they stood a little back on the floor, because one horned head, tossed
in pain, flung up a loose board at the edge, and it came down lancewise
on an amazed back. Another victim floundered bodily across the shafts of
a decrepit gig, smashing these and oversetting the wheels. That was more
than enough for the nerves of the assembly. With wild bellowings and a
good deal of left-and-right butting, they dashed into the barnyard,
tails on end, and began a fine free fight on the midden. The last cow
out hooked down an old set of harness; it flapped over one eye and
trailed behind her. When a companion trod on it, which happened every
few seconds, she naturally fell on her knees; and, being a Burrows cow,
with the interests of her calf at heart, attacked the first passer-by.
Half-awed, but wholly delighted, the boys watched the outburst. It was
in full flower before they even dreamed of a second shot. Tom came out
from a byre with a pitchfork, to be chased in again by the harnessed
cow. A bullock floundered on the muck-heap, fell, rose and bedded
himself to the belly, helpless and bellowing. The others took great
interest in him.
Corkran, through the roof, scientifically “tweaked” a frisky heifer on
the nose, and it is no exaggeration to say that she danced on her hind
legs for half a minute.
“Abram! Oh, Abram! They’m bewitched. They’m ragin’. ’Tes the milk fever.
They’ve been drove mad. Oh, Abram! They’ll horn the bullock! They’ll
horn _me_! Abram!”
“Bide till I lock the door,” quoth Abraham, faithful to his trust. They
heard him padlock the barn door; saw him come out with yet another
pitchfork. A bullock lowered his head, Abraham ran to the nearest
pig-pen, where loud squeakings told that he had disturbed the peace of a
large family.
“Beetle,” snapped Corkran. “Go in an’ get those asses out. Quick! We’ll
keep the cows happy.”
A people sitting in darkness and the shadow of monumental lickings, too
depressed to be angry with De Vitré, heard a voice from on high saying,
“Come up here! Come on! Come up! There’s a way out.”
They shinned up the loft-stanchions without a word; found a boot-heel
which they were bidden to take for guide, and squeezed desperately
through a hole in darkness, to be hauled out by Corkran.
“Have you got your caps? Did you give ’em your names and numbers?”
“Yes. No.”
“That’s all right. Drop down here. Don’t stop to jaw. Over the
cart—through that window, and bunk! Get _out_!”
De Vitré needed no more. They heard him squeak as he dropped among the
nettles, and through the roof-chinks they watched four slight figures
disappear into the rain. Tom and Abraham, from byre and pig-pen,
exhorted the cattle to keep quiet.
“By gum!” said Beetle; “that _was_ stalky. How did you think of it?”
“It was the only thing to do. Anybody could have seen that.”
“Hadn’t we better bunk, too, now?” said McTurk uneasily.
“Why? _We_’re all right. _We_ haven’t done anything. I want to hear what
old Vidley will say. Stop tweakin’, Turkey. Let ’em cool off. Golly! how
that heifer danced! I swear I didn’t know cows could be so lively. We’re
only just in time.”
“My Hat! Here’s Vidley—and Toowey,” said Beetle, as the two farmers
strode into the yard.
“Gloats! oh, gloats! Fids! oh, fids! Hefty fids and gloats to us!” said
Corkran.
These words, in their vocabulary, expressed the supreme of delight.
“Gloats” implied more or less of personal triumph, “fids” was felicity
in the abstract, and the boys were tasting both that day. Last joy of
all, they had had the pleasure of Mr. Vidley’s acquaintance, albeit he
did not love them. Toowey was more of a stranger, his orchards lying
over-near to the public road.
Tom and Abraham together told a tale of stolen cattle maddened by
overdriving; of cows sure to die in calving, and of milk that would
never return; that made Mr. Vidley swear for three consecutive minutes
in the speech of north Devon.
“’Tes tu bad. ’Tes tu bad,” said Toowey, consolingly; “let’s ’ope they
’aven’t took no great ’arm. They be wonderful wild, though.”
“’Tes all well for yeou, Toowey, that sells them dom Collegers seventy
quart a week.”
“Eighty,” Toowey replied, with the meek triumph of one who has
under-bidden his neighbour on public tender; “but that’s no odds to me.
Yeou’m free to leather ’em saame as if they was yeour own sons. On my
barn floor shall ’ee leather ’em.”
“Generous old pig!” said Beetle. “De Vitré ought to have stayed for
this.”
“They’m all safe an’ to rights,” said the officious Abraham, producing
the key. “Rackon us’ll come in an’ hold ’em for yeou. Hey! The cows are
fair ragin’ still. Us’ll have to run for it.”
The barn being next to the shed, the boys could not see that stately
entry. But they heard.
“Gone an’ hided in the hay. Aie! They’m proper afraid,” cried Abraham.
“Rout un out! Rout un out!” roared Vidley, rattling a stick impatiently
on the root-cutter.
“Oh, my Aunt!” said Corkran, standing on one foot.
“Shut the door. Shut the door, I tal ’ee. Rackon us can find un in the
dark. Us don’t want un boltin’ like rabbits under our elbows.” The big
barn door closed with a clang.
“My Gum!” said Corkran, which was always his War oath in time of action.
He dropped down and was gone for perhaps twenty seconds.
“And _that’s_ all right,” he said, returning at a gentle saunter.
“Hwatt?” McTurk almost shrieked, for Corkran, in the shed below, waved a
large key.
“Stalks! Frabjous Stalks! Bottled ’em! all four!” was the reply, and
Beetle fell on his bosom. “Yiss. They’m so’s to say, like, locked up. If
you’re goin’ to laugh, Beetle, I shall have to kick you again.”
“But I must!” Beetle was blackening with suppressed mirth.
“You won’t do it here, then.” He thrust the already limp Beetle through
the cartshed window. It sobered him; one cannot laugh on a bed of
nettles. Then Corkran stepped on his prostrate carcass, and McTurk
followed, just as Beetle would have risen; so he was upset, and the
nettles painted on his cheek a likeness of hideous eruptions.
“’Thought that ’ud cure you,” said Corkran, with a sniff.
Beetle rubbed his face desperately with dock-leaves, and said nothing.
All desire to laugh had gone from him. They entered the lane.
Then a clamour broke from the barn—a compound noise of horse-like kicks,
shaking of door-panels, and fivefold yells.
“They’ve found it out,” said Corkran. “How strange!” He sniffed again.
“Let ’em,” said Beetle. “No one can hear ’em. Come on up to Coll.”
“What a brute you are, Beetle! You only think of your beastly self.
Those cows want milkin’. Poor dears! Hear ’em low,” said McTurk.
“Go back and milk ’em yourself, then.” Beetle danced with pain. “We
shall miss call-over, hangin’ about like this; an’ I’ve got two black
marks this week already.”
“Then you’ll have fatigue-drill on Monday,” said Corkran. “Come to think
of it, I’ve got two black marks _aussi_. Hm! This is serious. This is
hefty serious.”
“I told you,” said Beetle, with vindictive triumph. “An’ we want to go
out after that hawk’s nest on Monday. We shall be swottin’ dum-bells,
though. _All_ your fault. If we’d bunked with De Vitré at first——”
Corkran paused between the hedgerows. “Hold on a shake an’ don’t burble.
Keep your eye on Uncle. Do you know, _I_ believe someone’s shut up in
that barn. I think we ought to go and see.”
“Don’t be a giddy idiot. Come on up to Coll.” But Corkran took no notice
of Beetle.
He retraced his steps to the head of the lane, and, lifting up his
voice, cried as in bewilderment, “Hullo? Who’s there? What’s that row
about? Who are you?”
“Oh, Peter!” said Beetle, skipping, and forgetting his anguish in this
new development.
“Hoi! Hoi! ’Ere! Let us out!” The answers came muffled and hollow from
the black bulk of the barn, with renewed thunders on the door.
“Now play up,” said Corkran. “Turkey, you keep the cows busy. ’Member
that we’ve just discovered ’em. _We_ don’t know anything. Be polite,
Beetle.”
They picked their way over the muck and held speech through a crack by
the door-hinge. Three more genuinely surprised boys the steady rain
never fell upon. And they were so difficult to enlighten. They had to be
told again and again by the captives within.
“We’ve been ’ere for hours an’ hours.” That was Toowey. “An’ the cows to
milk, an’ all.” That was Vidley. “The door she blewed against us an’
jammed herself.” That was Abraham.
“Yes, we can see that. It’s jammed on this side,” said Corkran. “How
careless you chaps are!”
“Oppen un. Oppen un. Bash her oppen with a rock, young gen’elmen! The
cows are milk-heated an’ ragin’. Haven’t you boys no sense?”
Seeing that McTurk from time to time tweaked the cattle into renewed
caperings, it was quite possible that the boys had some knowledge of a
sort. But Mr. Vidley was rude. They told him so through the door,
professing only now to recognize his voice.
“Humour un if ’e can. I paid seven-an’-six for the padlock,” said
Toowey. “Niver mind _him_. ’Tes only old Vidley.”
“Be yeou gwaine to stay a prisoneer an’ captive for the sake of a lock,
Toowey? I’m shaamed of ’ee. Rowt un oppen, young gen’elmen! ’Twas a
God’s own mercy yeou heard us. Toowey, yeou’m a borned miser.”
“It’ll be a long job,” said Corkran. “Look here. It’s near our
call-over. If we stay to help you we’ll miss it. We’ve come miles out of
our way already—after you.”
“Tell yeour master, then, what keeped ’ee—an arrand o’ mercy, laike.
I’ll tal un tu when I bring the milk to-morrow,” said Toowey.
“That’s no good,” said Corkran; “we may be licked twice over by then.
You’ll have to give us a letter.” McTurk, backed against the barn wall,
was firing steadily and accurately into the brown of the herd.
“Yiss, yiss. Come down to my house. My missus shall write ’ee a beauty,
young gen’elmen. She makes out the bills. I’ll give ’ee just such a
letter o’ racommendation as I’d give to my own son, if only yeou can
humour the lock!”
“Niver mind the lock,” Vidley wailed. “Let me get to me pore cows, ’fore
they’m dead.”
They went to work with ostentatious rattlings and wrenchings, and a good
deal of the by-play that Corkran always loved. At last—the noise of
unlocking was covered by some fancy hammering with a young boulder—the
door swung open and the captives marched out.
“Hurry up, Mister Toowey,” said Corkran; “we ought to be getting back.
Will you give us that note, please?”
“Some of yeou young gentlemen was drivin’ my cattle off the Burrowses,”
said Vidley. “I give ’ee fair warnin’, I’ll tell yeour masters. I know
_yeou_!” He glared at Corkran with malignant recognition.
McTurk looked him over from head to foot. “Oh, it’s only old Vidley.
Drunk again, I suppose. Well, we can’t help that. Come on, _Mister_
Toowey. We’ll go to your house.”
“Drunk, am I? I’ll drunk ’ee! How do I know yeou bain’t the same lot?
Abram, did ’ee take their names an’ numbers?”
“What _is_ he ravin’ about?” said Beetle. “Can’t you see that if we’d
taken your beastly cattle we shouldn’t be hanging round your beastly
barn. ’Pon my Sam, you Burrows guv’nors haven’t any sense——”
“Let alone gratitude,” said Corkran. “I suppose he _was_ drunk, Mister
Toowey; an’ you locked him in the barn to get sober. Shockin’! Oh,
shockin’!”
Vidley denied the charge in language that the boys’ mothers would have
wept to hear.
“Well, go and look after your cows, then,” said McTurk. “Don’t stand
there cursin’ us because we’ve been kind enough to help you out of a
scrape. Why on earth weren’t your cows milked before? _You_’re no
farmer. It’s long past milkin’. No wonder they’re half crazy.
Disreputable old bog-trotter, you are. Brush your hair, sir.... I _beg_
your pardon, Mister Toowey. ’Hope we’re not keeping you.”
They left Vidley dancing on the muck-heap, amid the cows, and devoted
themselves to propitiating Mr. Toowey on their way to his house.
Exercise had made them hungry; hunger is the mother of good manners; and
they won golden opinions from Mrs. Toowey.
* * * * *
“Three-quarters of an hour late for Call-over, and fifteen minutes late
for Lock-up,” said Foxy, the school Sergeant, crisply. He was waiting
for them at the head of the corridor. “Report to your housemaster,
please—an’ a nice mess you’re in, young gentlemen.”
“Quite right, Foxy. Strict attention to dooty does it,” said Corkran.
“Now where, if we asked you, would you say that his honour Mister Prout
might, at this moment of time, be found prouting—eh?”
“In ’is study—as usual, Mister Corkran. He took Call-over.”
“Hurrah! Luck’s with us all the way. Don’t blub, Foxy. I’m afraid you
don’t catch us this time.”
* * * * *
“We went up to change, sir, before comin’ to you. That made us a little
late, sir. We weren’t really very late. We were detained—by a——”
“An errand of mercy,” said Beetle, and they laid Mrs. Toowey’s
laboriously written note before him. “We thought you’d prefer a letter,
sir. Toowey got himself locked into a barn, and we heard him
shouting—it’s Toowey who brings the Coll. milk, sir—and we went to let
him out.”
“There were ever so many cows waiting to be milked,” said McTurk; “and
of course, he couldn’t get at them, sir. They said the door had jammed.
There’s his note, sir.”
Mr. Prout read it over thrice. It was perfectly unimpeachable; but it
said nothing of a large tea supplied by Mrs. Toowey.
“Well, I don’t like your getting mixed up with farmers and potwallopers.
Of course you will not pay any more—er—visits to the Tooweys,” said he.
“Of course not, sir. It was really on account of the cows, sir,” replied
McTurk, glowing with philanthropy.
“And you came straight back?”
“We ran nearly all the way from the Cattle-gate,” said Corkran,
carefully developing the unessential. “That’s one mile, sir. Of course,
we had to get the note from Toowey first.”
“But it was because we went to change—we were rather wet, sir—that we
were _really_ late. After we’d reported ourselves to the Sergeant, sir,
and he knew we were in Coll., we didn’t like to come to your study all
dirty.” Sweeter than honey was the voice of Beetle.
“Very good. Don’t let it happen again.” Their housemaster learned to
know them better in later years.
They entered—not to say swaggered—into Number Nine form-room, where De
Vitré, Orrin, Parsons, and Howlett, before the fire, were still telling
their adventures to admiring associates. The four rose as one boy.
“What happened to _you_? We just saved Call-over. Did you stay on? Tell
us! Tell us!”
The three smiled pensively. They were not distinguished for telling more
than was necessary.
“Oh, we stayed on a bit and then we came away,” said McTurk. “That’s
all.”
“You scab! You might tell a chap anyhow.”
“’Think so? Well, that’s awfully good of you, De Vitré. ’Pon my sainted
Sam, that’s awfully good of you,” said Corkran, shouldering into the
centre of the warmth and toasting one slippered foot before the blaze.
“So you really think we might tell you?”
They stared at the coals and shook with deep, delicious chuckles.
“My Hat! We _were_ stalky,” said McTurk. “I swear we were about as
stalky as they make ’em. Weren’t we?”
“It was a frabjous Stalk,” said Beetle. “’Much too good to tell you
brutes, though.”
The form wriggled under the insult, but made no motion to avenge it.
After all, on De Vitré’s showing, the three had saved the raiders from
at least a public licking.
“It wasn’t half bad,” said Corkran. “Stalky _is_ the word.”
“_You_ were the really stalky one,” said McTurk, one contemptuous
shoulder turned to a listening world. “By Gum! you _were_ stalky.”
Corkran accepted the compliment and the name together. “Yes,” said he;
“keep your eye on your Uncle Stalky an’ he’ll pull you through.”
“Well, you needn’t gloat so,” said De Vitré, viciously; “you look like a
stuffed cat.”
Corkran, henceforth known as Stalky, took not the slightest notice, but
smiled dreamily.
“My Hat! Yes. Of course,” he murmured. “Your Uncle Stalky—a doocid good
name. Your Uncle Stalky is no end of a stalker. He’s a Great Man. I
swear he is. De Vitré, you’re an ass—a putrid ass.”
De Vitré would have denied this but for the assenting murmurs from
Parsons and Orrin.
“You needn’t rub it in, then.”
“But I do. I does. You are such a woppin’ ass. D’you know it? Think over
it a bit at prep. Think it up in bed. Oblige me by thinkin’ of it every
half hour till further notice. Gummy! _What_ an ass you are! But your
Uncle Stalky”—he picked up the form-room poker and beat it against the
mantelpiece—“is a Great Man!”
“Hear, hear,” said Beetle and McTurk, who had fought under that general.
“Isn’t your Uncle Stalky a great man, De Vitré? Speak the truth, you
fat-headed old impostor.”
“Yes,” said De Vitré, deserted by all his band. “I—I suppose he is.”
“’Mustn’t suppose. _Is_ he?”
“Well, he is.”
“A Great Man?”
“A Great Man. _Now_ won’t you tell us?” said De Vitré pleadingly.
“Not by a heap,” said “Stalky” Corkran.
Therefore the tale has stayed untold till to-day.
THE HOUR OF THE ANGEL[19]
Sooner or late—in earnest or in jest—
(But the stakes are no jest) Ithuriel’s Hour
Will spring on us, for the first time, the test
Of our sole unbacked competence and power
Up to the limit of our years and dower
Of judgment—or beyond. But here we have
Prepared long since our garland or our grave.
For, at that hour, the sum of all our past,
Act, habit, thought, and passion, shall be cast
In one addition, be it more or less,
And as that reading runs so shall we do;
Meeting, astounded, victory at the last,
Or, first and last, our own unworthiness.
And none can change us though they die to save!
“SARAH SANDS”
THE BURNING OF THE “SARAH SANDS”
_Men have sailed the seas for so many years, and have there done such
amazing things in the face of danger, difficulty and death, that no one
tale of heroism exists which cannot be equalled by at least scores of
others. But since the behaviour of bodies of untried men under trying
circumstances is always interesting, and since I have been put in
possession of some facts not very generally known, I am trying to tell
again the old story of the_ Sarah Sands, _as an example of
long-drawn-out and undefeatable courage and cool-headedness._
She was a small four-masted, iron-built screw-steamer of eleven hundred
tons, chartered to take out troops to India. That was in 1857, the year
of the Indian Mutiny, when anything that could sail or steer was in
great demand; for troops were being thrown into the country as fast as
circumstances allowed—which was not very fast.
Among the regiments sent out was the 54th of the Line, now the Second
Battalion of the Dorset Regiment—a good corps, about a hundred years
old, with a very fair record of service, but in no special way
differing, so far as one could see, from many other regiments. It was
despatched in three ships. The Head-quarters—that is to say, the
Lieutenant-Colonel, the Regimental books, pay-chest, Band and Colours,
which last represent the very soul of a Battalion—and some fourteen
officers, three hundred and fifty-four rank and file, and perhaps a
dozen women, left Portsmouth on the 15th of August all packed tight in
the _Sarah Sands_.
Her crew, with the exception of the engineers and firemen, seem to have
been foreigners and pier-head jumpers picked up at the last minute. They
turned out bad, lazy and insubordinate.
The accommodation for the troops was generously described as “inferior,”
and what men called “inferior” in 1857 would now be called unspeakable.
Nor, in spite of the urgent need, was there any great hurry about the
_Sarah Sands_. She took two long months to reach Capetown, and she
stayed there five days to coal, leaving on the 20th of October. By this
time, the crew were all but openly mutinous, and the troops, who must
have picked up a little seamanship, had to work the ship out of harbour.
On the 7th of November, nearly three weeks later, a squall struck her
and carried away her foremast; and it is to be presumed that the troops
turned to and cleared away the wreckage. On the 11th of November the
real trouble began, for, in the afternoon of that day, ninety days out
from Portsmouth, a party of soldiers working in the hold saw smoke
coming up from the after-hatch. They were then, maybe, within a thousand
miles of the Island of Mauritius, in half a gale and a sea full of
sharks.
Captain Castles, the master, promptly lowered and provisioned the boats;
got them over-side with some difficulty and put the women into them.
Some of the sailors—the engineers, the firemen and a few others behaved
well—jumped into the long-boat, lowered it and kept well away from the
ship. They knew she carried two magazines full of cartridges, and were
taking no chances.
The troops, on the other hand, did not make any fuss, but under their
officers’ orders cleared out the starboard or right-hand magazine,
while volunteers tried to save the Regimental Colours. These stood at
the end of the saloon, probably clamped against the partition behind
the Captain’s chair, and the saloon was full of smoke. Two lieutenants
made a dash thither but were nearly suffocated. A ship’s
quartermaster—Richard Richmond was his name—put a wet cloth over his
face, managed to tear down the Colours, and then fainted. A
private—and his name was W. Wiles—dragged out both Richmond and the
Colours, and the two men dropped senseless on the deck while the
troops cheered. That, at least, was a good beginning; for, as I have
said, the Colours are the soul of every body of men who fight or work
under them.
The saloon must have been one of the narrow, cabin-lined, old-fashioned
“cuddies,” placed above the screw, and all the fire was in the stern of
the ship, behind the engine-room. It was blazing very close to the port
or left-hand magazine, and, as an explosion there would have blown the
_Sarah Sands_ out like a squib they called for more volunteers, and one
of the lieutenants who had been choked in the saloon recovered, went
down first and passed up a barrel of ammunition, which was at once hove
overboard. After this example, work went on with regularity.
When the men taking out the ammunition fainted, as they did fairly
often, they pulled them up with ropes. Those who did not faint, grabbed
what explosives they could feel or handle in the smother, and brought
them up, and an official and serene quartermaster-sergeant stood on the
hatch and jotted down the number of barrels so retrieved in his
notebook, as they were thrown into the sea. They pulled out all except
two barrels which slid from the arms of a fainting man—there was a fair
amount of fainting that evening—and rolled out of reach. Besides these,
there were another couple of barrels of signalling powder for the ship’s
use; but this the troops did not know, and were the more comfortable for
their ignorance.
Then the flames broke through the after-deck, the light attracting
shoals of sharks, and the mizzen-mast—the farthest aft of all the
masts—flared up and went over-side with a crash. This would have veered
the stern of the ship-head to the wind, in which case the flames must
have swept forward; but a man with a hatchet—his name is lost—ran along
the bulwarks and cut the wreck clear, while the boat full of women
surged and rocked at a safe distance, and the sharks tried to upset it
with their tails.
A Captain of the 54th—he was a jovial soul, and made jokes throughout
the struggle—headed a party of men to cut away the bridge, the
deck-cabins, and everything else that was inflammable—this in case of
the flames sweeping forward again—while a provident lieutenant, with
some more troops, lashed spars and things together for a raft, and other
gangs pumped water desperately on to what was left of the saloon and the
magazines.
One record says quaintly: “It was necessary to make some deviation from
the usual military evolutions while the flames were in progress. The men
formed in sections, counter-marched round the forward part of the ship,
which may perhaps be better understood when it is stated that those with
their faces to the after part where the fire raged were on their way to
relieve their comrades who had been working below. Those proceeding
‘forward’ were going to recruit their exhausted strength and prepare for
another attack when it came to their turn.”
No one seemed to have much hopes of saving the ship so long as the last
of the powder was unaccounted for. Indeed, Captain Castles told an
officer of the 54th that the game was up, and the officer replied,
“We’ll fight till we’re driven overboard.” It seemed he would be taken
at his word, for just then the signalling powder and the
ammunition-casks went up, and the ship seen from midships aft looked
like one floating volcano.
The cartridges spluttered like crackers, and cabin doors and timbers
were shot up all over the deck, and two or three men were hurt. But—this
is not in any official record—just after the roar of it, when her stern
was dipping deadlily, and all believed the _Sarah Sands_ was settling
for her last lurch, some merry jester of the 54th cried, “Lights out,”
and the jovial captain shouted back, “All right! We’ll keep the old
woman afloat yet.” Not one man of the troops made any attempt to get on
to the rafts; and when they found the ship was still floating they all
went back to work double tides.
At this point in the story we come across Mr. Frazer, the Scotch
engineer, who, like most of his countrymen, had been holding his
trump-card in reserve. He knew the _Sarah Sands_ was built with a
water-tight bulkhead behind the engine-room and the coal-bunkers; and he
proposed to cut through the bulkhead and pump on the fire. Also, he
pointed out that it would be well to remove the coal in the bunkers, as
the bulkhead behind was almost red-hot, and the coal was catching light.
So volunteers dropped into the bunkers, each man for the minute or two
he could endure it, and shovelled away the singeing, fuming fuel, and
other volunteers were lowered into the bonfire aft, and when they could
throw no more water on it they were pulled up half roasted.
Mr. Frazer’s plan saved the ship, though every particle of wood in the
after part of her was destroyed, and a bluish vapour hung over the
red-hot iron beams and ties, and the sea for miles about looked like
blood under the glare, as they pumped and passed water in buckets,
flooding the stern, sluicing the engine-room bulkhead and damping the
coal beyond it all through the long night. The very sides of the ship
were red-hot, so that they wondered when her plates would buckle and
wrench out the rivets and let the whole affair down to the sharks.
The foremast had carried away on the squall of the 7th of November; the
mizzen-mast, as you know, had gone in the fire; the main-mast, though
wrapped round with wet blankets, was alight, and everything abaft the
main-mast was one red furnace. There was the constant danger of the
ship, now broadside on to the heavy seas, falling off before the heavy
wind, and leading the flames forward again. So they hailed the boats to
tow and hold her head to wind; but only the gig obeyed the order. The
others had all they could do to keep afloat; one of them had been
swamped, though all her people were saved; and as for the long-boat full
of mutinous seamen, she behaved infamously. One record says that “She
not only held aloof, but consigned the ship and all she carried to
perdition.” So the _Sarah Sands_ fought for her own life alone, with the
sharks in attendance.
About three on the morning of the 12th of November, pumping, bucketing,
sluicing and damping, they began to hope that they had bested the fire.
By nine o’clock they saw steam coming up from her insides instead of
smoke, and at mid-day they called in the boats and took stock of the
damage. From the mizzen-mast aft there was nothing that you could call
ship except just the mere shell of her. It was all one steaming heap of
scrap-iron with twenty feet of black, greasy water flooding across the
bent and twisted rods, and in the middle of it all four huge water-tanks
rolled to and fro, thundering against the naked sides.
Moreover,—this they could not see till things had cooled down—the powder
explosions had blown a hole right through her port quarter, and every
time she rolled the sea came in there green. Of the four masts only one
was left; and the rudder-head stuck up all bald, black and horrible
among the jam of collapsed deck-beams. A photograph of the wreck looks
exactly like that of a gutted theatre after the flames and the firemen
have done their worst.
They spent the whole of the 12th of November pumping water out as
zealously as they had pumped it in. They lashed up the loose, charging
tanks as soon as they were cool enough to touch. They plugged the hole
at the stern with hammocks, sails, and planks, and a sail over all. Then
they rigged up a horizontal bar gripping the rudder-head. Six men sat on
planks on one side and six at the other over the empty pit beneath,
hauling on to the bar with ropes and letting go as they were told. That
made the best steering-gear that they could devise.
On the 13th of November, still pumping, they spread one sail on their
solitary mast—it was lucky that the _Sarah Sands_ had started with four
of them—and took advantage of the trade winds to make for Mauritius.
Captain Castles, with one chart and one compass, lived in a tent where
some cabins had once been; and at the end of twelve more days he sighted
land. Their average run was about four knots an hour; and, it is no
wonder that as soon as they were off Port Louis, Mauritius, Mr. Frazer,
the Scotch engineer, wished to start his engines and enter port
professionally. The troops looked down into the black hollow of the ship
when the shaft made its first revolution, shaking the hull horribly; and
if you can realize what it means to be able to see a naked screw-shaft
at work from the upper deck of a liner, you can realize what had
happened to the _Sarah Sands_. They waited outside Port Louis for the
daylight, and were nearly dashed to pieces on a coral reef. Then the
gutted, empty steamer came in—very dirty, the men’s clothes so charred
that they hardly dared to take them off, and very hungry; but without
having lost one single life. Port Louis gave them all a public banquet
in the market place, and the French inhabitants were fascinatingly
polite as only the French can be.
But the records say nothing of what befell the sailors who “consigned
the ship to perdition.” One account merely hints that “this was no time
for retribution”; but the troops probably administered their own justice
during the twelve days’ limp to port. The men who were berthed aft, the
officers and the women, lost everything they had; and the companies
berthed forward lent them clothes and canvas to make some sort of
raiment.
On the 20th of December they were all re-embarked on the _Clarendon_. It
was poor accommodation for heroes. She had been condemned as a
coolie-ship, was full of centipedes and other animals picked up in the
Brazil trade; her engines broke down frequently; and her captain died of
exposure and anxiety during a hurricane. So it was the 25th of January
before she reached the mouth of the Hugli.
By this time—many of the men probably considered this quite as serious
as the fire—the troops were out of tobacco, and when they came across
the American ship _Hamlet_, Captain Lecran, lying at Kedgeree on the way
up the river to Calcutta, the officers rowed over to ask if there was
any tobacco for sale. They told the skipper the history of their
adventures, and he said: “Well, I’m glad you’ve come to me, because I
have some tobacco. How many are you?” “Three hundred men,” said the
officers. Thereupon Captain Lecran got out four hundred pounds of best
Cavendish as well as one thousand Manilla cigars for the officers, and
refused to take payment on the grounds that Americans did not accept
anything from shipwrecked people. They were not shipwrecked at the time,
but evidently they had been shipwrecked quite enough for Captain Lecran,
because when they rowed back a second time and insisted on paying, he
only gave them grog, “which,” says the record, “caused it to be dark
when we returned to our ship.” After this “our band played
‘Yankee-Doodle,’ blue lights were burned, the signal-gun fired”—that
must have been a lively evening at Kedgeree—“and everything in our power
was had recourse to so as to convey to our American cousins our
appreciation of their kindness.”
Last of all, the Commander-in-Chief issued a general order to be read at
the head of every regiment in the Army. He was pleased to observe that
“the behaviour of the 54th Regiment was most praiseworthy, and by its
result must render manifest to all the advantage of subordination and
strict obedience to orders under the most alarming and dangerous
circumstances in which soldiers can be placed.”
This seems to be the moral of the tale.
THE LAST LAP
How do we know, by the bank-high river,
Where the mired and sulky oxen wait,
And it looks as though we might wait for ever,
How do we know that the floods abate?
There is no change in the current’s brawling—
Louder and harsher the freshet scolds;
Yet we can feel she is falling, falling,
And the more she threatens the less she holds.
Down to the drift, with no word spoken,
The wheel-chained wagons slither and slue.
Steady! The back of the worst is broken.
And—lash your leaders!—we’re through—we’re through!
How do we know, when the port-fog holds us
Moored and helpless, a mile from the pier,
And the week-long summer smother enfolds us—
How do we know it is going to clear?
There is no break in the blind-fold weather,
But, one and another, around the bay,
The unseen capstans clink together,
Getting ready to up and away.
A pennon whimpers—the breeze has found us—
A headsail jumps through the thinning haze.
The whole hull follows, till—broad around us—
The clean-swept ocean says:—“Go your ways!”
How do we know, when the long fight rages,
On the old, stale front that we cannot shake;
And it looks as though we were locked for ages,
How do we know they are going to break?
There is no lull in the level firing,
Nothing has shifted except the sun.
Yet we can feel they are tiring, tiring.
Yet we can tell they are ripe to run.
Something wavers, and, while we wonder,
Their center trenches are emptying out,
And, before their useless flanks go under,
Our guns have pounded retreat to rout!
THE PARABLE OF BOY JONES
_This tale was written several years before the War, as you can see for
yourselves. It is founded on fact, and it is meant to show that one
ought to try to recognize facts, even when they are unpleasant and
inconvenient._
The long shed of the Village Rifle Club reeked with the oniony smell of
smokeless powder, machine-oil, and creosote from the stop-butt, as man
after man laid himself down and fired at the miniature target sixty feet
away. The Instructor’s voice echoed under the corrugated iron roof.
“Squeeze, Matthews, squeeze! Jerking your shoulder won’t help the
bullet.... Gordon, you’re canting your gun to the left.... Hold your
breath when the sights come on.... Fenwick, was that a bull? Then it’s
only a fluke, for your last at two o’clock was an outer. You don’t know
where you’re shooting.”
“I call this monotonous,” said Boy Jones, who had been brought by a
friend to look at the show. “Where does the fun come in?”
“Would you like to try a shot?” the Instructor asked.
“Oh—er—thanks,” said Jones. “I’ve shot with a shot-gun, of course, but
this”—he looked at the miniature rifle—“this isn’t like a shot-gun, is
it?”
“Not in the least,” said the Friend. The Instructor passed Boy Jones a
cartridge. The squad ceased firing and stared. Boy Jones reddened and
fumbled.
“Hi! The beastly thing has slipped somehow!” he cried. The tiny
twenty-two cartridge had dropped into the magazine-slot and stuck there,
caught by the rim. The muzzle travelled vaguely round the horizon. The
squad with one accord sat down on the dusty cement floor.
“Lend him a hair-pin,” whispered the jobbing gardener.
“Muzzle _up_, please,” said the Instructor (it was drooping towards the
men on the floor). “I’ll load for you. Now—keep her pointed towards the
target—you’re supposed to be firing at two hundred yards. Have you set
your sights? Never mind, I’ll set ’em. _Please_ don’t touch the trigger
till you shoot.”
Boy Jones was glistening at the edges as the Instructor swung him in the
direction of the little targets fifty feet away. “Take a fine sight! The
bull’s eye should be just sitting on the top of the fore-sight,” the
Instructor cautioned. “Ah!”
Boy Jones, with a grunt and a jerk of the shoulder, pulled the trigger.
The right-hand window of the shed, six feet above the target, starred
and cracked.
The boy who cleans the knives at the Vicarage buried his face in his
hands; Jevons, the bricklayer’s assistant, tied up his bootlace; the
Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society looked at the roof; the village
barber whistled softly. When one is twenty-two years old, and weighs
twelve-stone-eight in hard condition, one does not approve of any game
that one cannot play very well.
“I call this silly piffle,” said Boy Jones, wiping his face.
“Oh, not so bad as that,” said the Instructor. “We’ve all got to begin
somehow. Try another?” But Boy Jones was not practising any more that
afternoon. He seemed to need soothing.
“Come over to the big range,” said the Friend. “You’ll see the finished
article at work down there. This is only for boys and beginners.”
A knot of village lads from twelve to sixteen were scuffling for places
on the shooting-mat as Boy Jones left the shed. On his way to the range,
across the windy Downs, he preserved a silence foreign to his sunny
nature. Jevons, the bricklayer’s assistant, and the F. R. G. S. trotted
past him—rifles at the carry.
“Awkward wind,” said Jevons. “Fishtail!”
“What’s a fishtail?” said Boy Jones.
“Oh! It means a fishy, tricky sort of a wind,” said the Friend. A shift
in the uneasy northeast breeze brought them the far-away sob of a
service rifle.
“For once in your young life,” the Friend went on, “you’re going to
attend a game you do not understand.”
“If you mean I’m expected to make an ass of myself again——” Boy Jones
paused.
“Don’t worry! By this time I fancy Jevons will have told the Sergeant
all about your performance in the shed just now. _You_ won’t be pressed
to shoot.”
A long sweep of bare land opened before them. The thump of occasional
shots grew clearer, and Boy Jones pricked his ears.
“What’s that unholy whine and whop?” he asked in a lull of the wind.
“The whine is the bullet going across the valley. The whop is when it
hits the target—that white shutter thing sliding up and down against the
hillside. Those men lying down yonder are shooting at five hundred
yards. We’ll look at ’em,” said the Friend.
“This would make a thundering good golf-links,” said Boy Jones, striding
over the short, clean turf. “Not a bad lie in miles of it.”
“Yes, wouldn’t it?” the Friend replied. “It would be even prettier as a
croquet-lawn or a basket-ball pitch. Just the place for a picnic too.
Unluckily, it’s a rifle-range.”
Boy Jones looked doubtful, but said nothing till they reached the
five-hundred-yard butt. The Sergeant, on his stomach, binoculars to his
eye, nodded, but not at the visitors. “Where did you sight, Walters?” he
said.
“Nine o’clock—edge of the target,” was the reply from a fat, blue man in
a bowler hat, his trousers rucked half-way to his knees. “The wind’s
rotten bad down there!” He pointed towards the stiff-tailed wind-flags
that stuck out at all sorts of angles as the eddy round the shoulder of
the Down caught them.
“Let me try one,” the Sergeant said, and reached behind him for a rifle.
“Hold on!” said the F. R. G. S. “That’s Number Six. She throws high.”
“She’s _my_ pet,” said Jevons, holding out his hand for it. “Take Number
Nine, Sergeant.”
“Rifles are like bats, you know,” the Friend explained. “They differ a
lot.”
The Sergeant sighted.
“He holds it steady enough,” said Boy Jones.
“He mostly does,” said the Friend. “If you watch that white disc come up
you’ll know it’s a bull.”
“Not much of one,” said the Sergeant. “Too low—too far right. I gave her
all the allowance I dared, too. That wind’s funnelling badly in the
valley. Give your wind-sight another three degrees, Walters.”
The fat man’s big fingers delicately adjusted the lateral sight. He had
been firing till then by the light of his trained judgment, but some of
the rifles were fitted with wind-gauges, and he wished to test one.
“What’s he doing that for?” said Boy Jones.
“You wouldn’t understand,” said the Friend. “But take a squint along
this rifle, and see what a bull looks like at five hundred yards. It
isn’t loaded, but don’t point it at the pit of my stomach.”
“Dash it all! I didn’t _mean_ to!” said Boy Jones.
“None of ’em mean it,” the Friend replied. “That’s how all the murders
are done. Don’t play with the bolt. Merely look along the sights. It
isn’t much of a mark, is it?”
“No, by Jove!” said Jones, and gazed with reverence at Walters, who
announced before the marker had signalled his last shot that it was a
likely heifer. (Walters was a butcher by profession.) A well-centred
bull it proved to be.
“Now how the deuce did he do it?” said Boy Jones.
“By practice—first in the shed at two hundred yards. We’ve five or six
as good as him,” said the Friend. “But he’s not much of a snap-shooter
when it comes to potting at dummy heads and shoulders exposed for five
seconds. Jevons is our man then.”
“Ah! talking of snap-shooting!” said the Sergeant, and—while Jevons
fired his seven shots—delivered Boy Jones a curious little lecture on
the advantages of the foggy English climate, the value of enclosed land
for warfare, and the possibilities of well-directed small-arm fire
wiping up—“spraying down” was his word—artillery, even in position.
“Well, I’ve got to go on and build houses,” said Jevons. “Twenty-six is
my score-card—sign please, Sergeant.” He rose, dusted his knees, and
moved off. His place was taken by a dark, cat-footed Coastguard, firing
for the love of the game. He only ran to three cartridges, which he
placed—magpie, five o’clock; inner, three o’clock; and bull. “Cordery
don’t take anything on trust,” said the Sergeant. “He feels his way in
to the bull every time. I like it. It’s more rational.”
While the F. R. G. S. was explaining to Boy Jones that the rotation of
the earth on her axis affected a bullet to the extent of one yard in a
thousand, a batch of six lads cantered over the hill.
“We’re the new two-hundred-ers,” they shouted.
“I know it,” said the Sergeant. “Pick up the cartridge-cases; take my
mackintosh and bag, and come on down to the two hundred range, quietly.”
There was no need for the last caution. The boys picked up the things
and swung off in couples—scout fashion.
“They are the survivors,” the Friend explained, “of the boys you saw
just now. They’ve passed their miniature rifle tests, and are supposed
to be fit to fire in the open.”
“And are they?” said Boy Jones, edging away from the F. R. G. S., who
was talking about “jump” and “flip” in rifle-shooting.
“We’ll see,” said the Sergeant. “This wind ought to test ’em!”
Down in the hollow it rushed like a boulder-choked river, driving quick
clouds across the sun: so that one minute, the eight-inch Bisley bull
leaped forth like a headlight, and the next shrunk back into the
grey-green grass of the butt like an engine backing up the line.
“Look here!” said the Sergeant, as the boys dropped into their places at
the firing-point. “I warn you it’s a three-foot wind on the target,
_and_ freshening. You’ll get no two shots alike. Any boy that thinks he
won’t do himself justice can wait for a better day.”
Nothing moved except one grin from face to face.
“No,” said the Sergeant, after a pause. “I don’t suppose a thunder-storm
would shift you young birds. Remember what I’ve been telling you all
this spring. Sighting shots, from the right!”
They went on one by one, carefully imitating the well-observed actions
of their elders, even to the tapping of the cartridge on the rifle-butt.
They scowled and grunted and compared notes as they set and reset their
sights. They brought up their rifles just as shadow gave place to sun,
and, holding too long, fired when the cheating cloud returned. It was
unhappy, cold, nose-running, eye-straining work, but they enjoyed it
passionately. At the end they showed up their score-cards; one
twenty-seven, two twenty-fives, a twenty-four, and two twenty-twos. Boy
Jones, his hands on his knees, had made no remark from first to last.
“Could I have a shot?” he began in a strangely meek voice.
But the chilled Sergeant had already whistled the marker out of the
butt. The wind-flags were being collected by the youngsters, and, with a
tinkle of spent cartridge-cases returned to the Sergeant’s bag, shooting
ended.
“Not so bad,” said the Sergeant.
“One of those boys was hump-backed,” said Boy Jones, with the healthy
animal’s horror of deformity.
“But his shots aren’t,” said the Sergeant. “He was the twenty-seven
card. Milligan’s his name.”
“I should like to have had a shot,” Boy Jones repeated. “Just for the
fun of the thing.”
“Well, just for the fun of the thing,” the Friend suggested, “suppose
you fill and empty a magazine. Have you got any dummies, Sergeant?”
The Sergeant produced a handful of dummy cartridges from his
inexhaustible bag.
“How d’you put ’em in?” said Boy Jones, picking up a cartridge by the
bullet end with his left hand, and holding the rifle with his right.
“Here, Milligan,” the Friend called. “Fill and empty this magazine, will
you, please?”
The cripple’s fingers flickered for an instant round the rifle-breech.
The dummies vanished clicking. He turned towards the butt, pausing
perhaps a second on each aimed shot, ripped them all out again over his
shoulder. Mechanically Boy Jones caught them as they spun in the air;
for he was a good fielder.
“Time, fifteen seconds,” said the Friend. “You try now.” Boy Jones shook
his head. “No, thanks,” he said. “This isn’t my day out. That’s called
magazine-fire, I suppose.”
“Yes,” said the Sergeant, “but it’s more difficult to load in the dark
or in a cramped position.”
The boys drew off, larking among themselves. The others strolled
homewards as the wind freshened. Only the Sergeant, after a word or two
with the marker, struck off up the line of firing-butts.
“There seems to be a lot in it,” said Boy Jones, after a while, to his
friend. “But you needn’t tell me,” he went on in the tone of one ill at
ease with himself, “don’t tell _me_ that when the hour strikes every man
in England wouldn’t—er—rally to the defence of his country like one
man.”
“And he’d be _so_ useful while he was rallying, wouldn’t he?” said the
Friend shortly. “Imagine one hundred thousand chaps of your kidney
introduced to the rifle for the first time, all loading and firing in
your fashion! The hospitals wouldn’t hold ’em!”
“Oh, there’d be time to get the general hang of the thing,” said Boy
Jones cheerily.
“When that hour strikes,” the Friend replied, “it will already have
struck, if you understand. There may be a few hours—perhaps ten or
twelve—there will certainly not be more than a day and a night allowed
us to get ready in.”
“There will be six months at least,” said Boy Jones confidently.
“Ah, you probably read that in a paper. I shouldn’t rely on it, if I
were you. It won’t be like a county cricket match, date settled months
in advance. By the way, are you playing for your county this season?”
Boy Jones seemed not to hear the last question. He had taken the
Friend’s rifle, and was idly clicking the bolt.
“Beg y’ pardon, sir,” said the Marker to the Friend in an undertone,
“but the Sergeant’s tryin’ a gentleman’s new rifle at nine hundred, and
I’m waiting on for him. If you’d like to come into the trench?”—a
discreet wink closed the sentence.
“Thanks awfully. That ’ud be quite interesting,” said Boy Jones. The
wind had dulled a little; the sun was still strong on the golden gorse;
the Sergeant’s straight back grew smaller and smaller as it moved away.
“You go down this ladder,” said the Marker. They reached the raw line of
the trench beneath the targets, the foot deep in the flinty chalk.
“Yes, sir,” he went on, “here’s where all the bullets ought to come.
There’s fourteen thousand of ’em this year, somewhere on the premises,
but it don’t hinder the rabbits from burrowing, just the same. _They_
know shooting’s over as well as we do. You come here with a shot-gun,
and you won’t see a single tail; but they don’t put ’emselves out for a
rifle. Look, there’s the Parson!” He pointed at a bold, black rabbit
sitting half-way up the butt, who loped easily away as the Marker ran up
the large nine-hundred-yard bull. Boy Jones stared at the
bullet-splintered frame-work of the targets, the chewed edges of the
woodwork, and the significantly loosened earth behind them. At last he
came down, slowly it seemed, out of the sunshine, into the chill of the
trench. The marker opened an old cocoa box, where he kept his paste and
paper patches.
“Things get mildewy down here,” he explained. “Mr. Warren, our sexton,
says it’s too like a grave to suit _him_. But as I say, it’s twice as
deep and thrice as wide as what _he_ makes.”
“I think it’s rather jolly,” said Boy Jones, and looked up at the narrow
strip of sky. The Marker had quietly lowered the danger flag. Something
yowled like a cat with her tail trod on, and a few fragments of pure
white chalk crumbled softly into the trench. Boy Jones jumped, and
flattened himself against the inner wall of the trench. “The Sergeant is
taking a sighting-shot,” said the Marker. “He must have hit a flint in
the grass somewhere. We can’t comb ’em all out. The noise you noticed
was the nickel envelope stripping, sir.”
“But I didn’t hear his gun go off,” said Boy Jones.
“Not at nine hundred, with this wind, you wouldn’t,” said the Marker.
“Stand on one side, please, sir. He’s begun.”
There was a rap overhead—a pause—down came the creaking target, up went
the marking disc at the end of a long bamboo; a paper patch was slapped
over the bullet hole, and the target slid up again, to be greeted with
another rap, another, and another. The fifth differed in tone. “Here’s a
curiosity,” said the Marker, pulling down the target. “The bullet must
have ricochetted short of the butt, and it has key-holed, as we say.
See!” He pointed to an ugly triangular rip and flap on the canvas target
face. “If that had been flesh and blood, now,” he went on genially, “it
would have been just the same as running a plough up you.... Now he’s on
again!” The sixth rap was as thrillingly emphatic as one at a
spiritualistic séance, but the seventh was followed by another yaa-ow of
a bullet hitting a stone, and a tiny twisted sliver of metal fell at Boy
Jones’s rigid feet. He touched and dropped it. “Why, it’s quite hot,” he
said.
“That’s due to arrested motion,” said the F. R. G. S. “Isn’t it a
funking noise, though?”
A pause of several minutes followed, during which they could hear the
wind and the sea and the creaking of the Marker’s braces.
“He said he’d finish off with a magazine full,” the Marker volunteered.
“I expect he’s waiting for a lull in the wind. Ah! here it comes!”
It came—eleven shots slammed in at three-second intervals; a ricochet or
two; one on the right-hand of the target’s frame-work, which rang like a
bell; a couple that hammered the old railway ties just behind the bull;
and another that kicked a clod into the trench, and key-holed up the
target. The others were various and scattering, but all on the butt.
“Sergeant can do better than that,” said the Marker critically,
overhauling the target. “It was the wind put him off, or (he winked once
again), or ... else he wished to show somebody something.”
“I heard ’em all hit,” said Boy Jones. “But I never heard the gun go
off. Awful, I call it!”
“Well,” said his friend, “it’s the kind of bowling you’ll have to face
at forty-eight hours’ notice—_if_ you’re lucky.”
“It’s the key-holing that I bar,” said Boy Jones, following his own line
of thought. The Marker put up his flag and ladder, and they climbed out
of the trench into the sunshine.
“For pity’s sake, look!” said the Marker, and stopped. “Well, well! If I
’adn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have credited it. You poor little impident
fool. The Sergeant _will_ be vexed.”
“What has happened?” said Boy Jones, rather shrilly.
“He’s killed the Parson, sir!” The Marker held up the still kicking body
of a glossy black rabbit. One side of its head was not there.
“Talk of coincidence!” the Marker went on. “I know Sergeant’ll pretend
he aimed for it. The poor little fool! Jumpin’ about after his own
businesses and thinking he was safe; and then to have his head fair
mashed off him like this. Just look at him! Well! Well!”
It was anything but well with Boy Jones. He seemed sick.
* * * * *
A week later the Friend nearly stepped on him in the miniature rifle
shed. He was lying at length on the dusty coir matting, his trousers
rucked half-way to his knees, his sights set as for two hundred,
deferentially asking Milligan the cripple to stand behind him and tell
him whether he was canting.
“No, you aren’t now,” said Milligan patronizingly, “but you were.”
A DEPARTURE
Since first the White Horse Banner blew free,
By Hengist’s horde unfurled,
Nothing has changed on land or sea
Of the things that steer the world.
(As it was when the long-ships scudded through the gale
So it is where the Liners go.)
Time and Tide, they are both in a tale
“Woe to the weaker—woe!”
No charm can bridle the hard-mouthed wind
Or smooth the fretting swell.
No gift can alter the grey Sea’s mind,
But she serves the strong man well.
(As it is when her uttermost deeps are stirred
So it is where the quicksands show,)
All the waters have but one word—
“Woe to the weaker—woe!”
The feast is ended, the tales are told,
The dawn is overdue,
And we meet at the wharf in the whistling cold
Where the galley waits her crew.
Out with the torches, they have flared too long,
And bid the harpers go.
Wind and warfare have but one song—
“Woe to the weaker—woe!”
Hail to the great oars gathering way,
As the beach begins to slide!
Hail to the war-shields’ click and play
As they lift along our side!
Hail to the first wave over the bow—
Slow for the sea-stroke! Slow!
All the benches are grunting now—
“_Woe to the weaker—woe!_”
THE BOLD ’PRENTICE
_This story is very much of the same sort as “An Unqualified Pilot,” and
shows that, when any one is really keen on his job, he will generally
find some older man who is even keener than he, who will give him help
and instruction that could not be found in a whole library of books.
Olaf Swanson’s book of “Road-Locos Repair or the Young Driver’s
Vademecome,” was well known in the Railway sheds in its day, and was
written in the queerest English ever printed. But it told useful facts
and, as you will see, saved a train at a pinch. It may be worth noticing
that young Ottley’s chance did not come to him till he had worked on and
among engine-repairs for some five or six years and was well-grounded in
practical knowledge of his subject._
Young Ottley’s father came to Calcutta in 1857 as fireman on the first
locomotive ever run by the D. I. R., which was then the largest Indian
railway. All his life he spoke broad Yorkshire, but young Ottley, being
born in India, naturally talked the clipped sing-song that is used by
the half-castes and English-speaking natives. When he was fifteen years
old the D. I. R. took him into their service as an apprentice in the
Locomotive Repair Department of the Ajaibpore workshops, and he became
one of a gang of three or four white men and nine or ten natives.
There were scores of such gangs, each with its hoisting and overhead
cranes, jack-screws, vises and lathes, as separate as separate shops,
and their work was to mend locomotives and make the apprentices behave.
But the apprentices threw nuts at one another, chalked caricatures of
unpopular foremen on buffer-bars and discarded boilers, and did as
little work as they possibly could.
They were nearly all sons of old employés, living with their parents in
the white bungalows of Steam Road or Church Road or Albert Road—on the
broad avenues of pounded brick bordered by palms and crotons and
bougainvilleas and bamboos which made up the railway town of Ajaibpore.
They had never seen the sea or a steamer; half their speech was helped
out with native slang; they were all volunteers in the D. I. R.’s
Railway Corps—grey with red facings—and their talk was exclusively about
the Company and its affairs.
They all hoped to become engine-drivers earning six or eight hundred a
year, and therefore they despised all mere sit-down clerks in the Store,
Audit and Traffic departments, and ducked them when they met at the
Company’s swimming baths.
There were no strikes or tie-ups on the D. I. R. in those days, for the
reason that the ten or twelve thousand natives and two or three thousand
whites were doing their best to turn the Company’s employment into a
caste in which their sons and relatives would be sure of positions and
pensions. Everything in India crystallizes into a caste sooner or
later—the big jute and cotton mills, the leather harness and opium
factories, the coal-mines and the dockyards, and, in years to come, when
India begins to be heard from as one of the manufacturing countries of
the world, the labour Unions of other lands will learn something about
the beauty of caste which will greatly interest them.
Those were the days when the D. I. R. decided that it would be cheaper
to employ native drivers as much as possible, and the “Sheds,” as they
called the Repair Department, felt the change acutely; for a native
driver could misuse his engine, they said, more curiously than any six
monkeys. The Company had not then standardized its rolling-stock, and
this was very good for apprentices anxious to learn about machines,
because there were, perhaps, twenty types of locomotives in use on the
road. They were Hawthornes; E. types; O types; outside cylinders;
Spaulding and Cushman double-enders and short-run Continental-built tank
engines, and many others. But the native drivers burned them all out
impartially, and the apprentices took to writing remarks in Bengali on
the cabs of the repaired ones where the next driver would be sure to see
them.
Young Ottley worked at first as little as the other apprentices, but his
father, who was then a pensioned driver, taught him a great deal about
the insides of locomotives; and Olaf Swanson, the red-headed Swede who
ran the Government Mail, the big Thursday express, from Serai Rajgara to
Guldee Haut, was a great friend of The Ottley family, and dined with
them every Friday night.
Olaf was an important person, for besides being the best of the
mail-drivers, he was Past Master of the big railway Masonic Lodge, “St.
Duncan’s in the East,” Secretary of the Drivers’ Provident Association,
a Captain in the D. I. R. Volunteer Corps, and, which he thought much
more of, an Author; for he had written a book in a language of his own
which he insisted upon calling English, and had printed it at his own
expense at the ticket-printing works.
Some of the copies were buff and green, and some were pinkish and blue,
and some were yellow and brown; for Olaf did not believe in wasting
money on high-class white paper. Wrapping-paper was good enough for him,
and besides, he said the colours rested the eyes of the reader. It was
called “The Art of Road-Locos Repair or The Young Driver’s Vademecome,”
and was dedicated in verse to a man of the name of Swedenborg.
It covered every conceivable accident that could happen to an engine on
the road; and gave a rough-and-ready remedy for each; but you had to
understand Olaf’s written English, as well as all the technical talk
about engines, to make head or tail of it, and you had also to know
personally every engine on the D. I. R., for the “Vademecome” was full
of what might be called “locomotive allusions,” which concerned the D.
I. R. only. Otherwise, it would, as some great locomotive designer once
said, have been a classic and a text-book.
Olaf was immensely proud of it, and would pin young Ottley in a corner
and make him learn whole pages—it was written all in questions and
answers—by heart.
“Never mind what she _means_,” Olaf would shout. “You learn her
word-perfect, and she will help you in the Sheds. I drive the
Mail,—_the_ mail of all India,—and what I write and say is true.”
“But I do _not_ wish to learn the book,” said young Ottley, who thought
he saw quite enough of locomotives in business hours.
“You _shall_ learn! I haf great friendship for your father, and so I
shall teach you whether you like it or not.”
Young Ottley submitted, for he was really fond of old Olaf, and at the
end of six months’ teaching in Olaf’s peculiar way began to see that the
“Vademecome” was a very valuable help in the repair sheds, when
broken-down engines of a new type came in. Olaf gave him a copy bound in
cartridge paper and hedged round the margins with square-headed
manuscript notes, each line the result of years of experience and
accidents.
“There is nothing in this book,” said Olaf, “that I have not tried in my
time, and I say that the engine is like the body of a man. So long as
there is steam—the life, you see,—so long, if you know how, you can make
her move a little,—so!” He waggled his hand slowly. “Till a man is dead,
or the engine she is at the bottom of a river, you can do something with
her. Remember that! _I_ say it and I know.”
He repaid young Ottley’s time and attention by using his influence to
get him made a Sergeant in his Company, and young Ottley, being a keen
Volunteer and a good shot, stood well with the D. I. R. in the matter of
casual leave. When repairs were light in the Sheds and the honour of the
D. I. R. was to be upheld at some far-away station against the men of
Agra or Bandikui, the narrow-gauge railway-towns of the west, young
Ottley would contrive to get away, and help to uphold it on the glaring
dusty rifle-ranges of those parts.
A ’prentice never dreamed of paying for his ticket on any line in India,
least of all when he was in uniform, and young Ottley was practically as
free of the Indian railway system as any member of the Supreme
Legislative Council who wore a golden General Pass on his watch-chain
and could ride where he chose.
Late in September of his nineteenth year he went north on one of his
cup-hunting excursions, elegantly and accurately dressed, with
one-eighth of one inch of white collar showing above his grey uniform
stock, and his Martini-Henry rifle polished to match his sergeant’s
sword in the rack above him.
The rains were out, and in Bengal that means a good deal to the
railways; for the rain falls for three months lavishly, till the whole
country is one sea, and the snakes take refuge on the embankment, and
the racing floods puff out the brick ballast from under the iron ties,
and leave the rails hanging in graceful loops. Then the trains run as
they can, and the permanent-way inspectors spend their nights
flourishing about in hand-carts pushed by coolies over the dislocated
metals, and everybody is covered with the fire-red rash of prickly heat,
and loses his temper.
Young Ottley was used to these things from birth. All he regretted was
that his friends along the line were so draggled and dripping and sulky
that they could not appreciate his gorgeousness; for he considered
himself very consoling to behold when he cocked his helmet over one eye
and puffed the rank smoke of native-made cigars through his nostrils.
Until night fell he lay out on his bunk, in his shirt-sleeves, reading
the works of G. W. R. Reynolds, which were sold on all the railway
bookstalls, and dozing at intervals.
Then he found they were changing engines at Guldee Haut, and old
Rustomjee, a Parsee, was the new driver, with Number Forty in hand.
Young Ottley took this opportunity to go forward and tell Rustomjee
exactly what they thought of him in the Sheds, where the ’prentices had
been repairing some of his carelessness in the way of a dropped
crown-sheet, the result of inattention and bad stoking.
Rustomjee said he had bad luck with engines, and young Ottley went back
to his carriage and slept. He was waked by a bang, a bump, and a jar,
and saw on the opposite bunk a subaltern who was travelling north with a
detachment of some twenty English soldiers.
“What’s that?” said the subaltern.
“Rustomjee has blown her up, perhaps,” said young Ottley, and dropped
out into the wet, the subaltern at his heels. They found Rustomjee
sitting by the side of the line, nursing a scalded foot and crying aloud
that he was a dead man, while the gunner-guard—who is a kind of
extra-hand—looked respectfully at the roaring, hissing machine.
“What has happened?” said young Ottley, by the light of the
gunner-guard’s lantern.
“_Phut gya_ [she has gone smash],” said Rustomjee, still hopping.
“Without doubt; but where?”
“_Khuda jahnta!_ [God knows]. I am a poor man. Number Forty is broke.”
Young Ottley jumped into the cab and turned off all the steam he could
find, for there was a good deal escaping. Then he took the lantern and
dived under the drive-wheels, where he lay face up, investigating among
spurts of hot water.
“Doocid plucky,” said the subaltern. “_I_ shouldn’t like to do that
myself. What’s gone wrong?”
“Cylinder-head blown off, coupler-rod twisted, and several more things.
She is very badly wrecked. Oah, yes, she is a tottal wreck,” said young
Ottley between the spokes of the right-hand driver.
“Awkward,” said the subaltern, turning up his coat-collar in the wet.
“What’s to be done, then?”
Young Ottley came out, a rich black all over his grey uniform with the
red facings, and drummed on his teeth with his finger nails, while the
rain fell and the native passengers shouted questions and old Rustomjee
told the gunner-guard to walk back six or seven miles and wire to
someone for help.
“I cannot swim,” said the gunner-guard. “Go and lie down.” And that, as
you might say, settled that. Besides, as far as one could see by the
light of the gunner-guard’s lantern, all Bengal was flooded.
“Olaf Swanson will be at Serai Rajgara with the Mail. He will be
particularly angry,” said young Ottley. Then he ducked under the engine
again with a flare-lamp and sat cross-legged, considering things and
wishing he had brought his “Vademecome” in his valise.
Number Forty was an old reconstructed Mutiny engine, with Frenchified
cock-nosed cylinders and a profligate allowance of underpinning. She had
been through the Sheds several times, and young Ottley, though he had
never worked on her, had heard much about her, but nothing to her
credit.
“You can lend me some men?” he said at last to the subaltern. “Then I
think we shall disconnect her this side, and perhaps, notwithstanding,
she will move. We will try—eh?”
“Of course we will. Hi! Sergeant!” said the subaltern. “Turn out the men
here and do what this—this officer tells you.”
“Officer!” said one of the privates, under his breath. “’Didn’t think
I’d enlisted to serve under a Sergeant o’ Volunteers. ’Ere’s a ’orrible
street accident. ’Looks like mother’s tea-kettle broke. What d’yer
expect us to do, Mister Civilian Sergeant?”
Young Ottley explained his plan of campaign while he was ravaging
Rustomjee’s tool-chest, and then the men crawled and knelt and levered
and pushed and hauled and turned spanners under the engine, as young
Ottley told them. What he wanted was to disconnect the right cylinder
altogether, and get off a badly twisted coupler-rod. Practically Number
Forty’s right side was paralyzed, and they pulled away enough
ironmongery there to build a culvert with.
Young Ottley remembered that the instructions for a case like this were
all in the “Vademecome,” but even he began to feel a little alarmed as
he saw what came away from the engine and was stacked by the side of the
line. After forty minutes of the hardest kind of work it seemed to him
that everything movable was cleared out, and that he might venture to
give her steam. She leaked and sweated and shook, but she moved—in a
grinding sort of way—and the soldiers cheered.
Rustomjee flatly refused to help in anything so revolutionary as driving
an engine on one cylinder, because, he said, Heaven had decreed that he
should always be unlucky, even with sound machines. Moreover, as he
pointed out, the pressure-gauge was jumping up and down like a
bottle-imp. The stoker had long since gone away into the night; for he
was a prudent man.
“Doocid queer thing altogether,” said the subaltern, “but look here, if
you like, I’ll chuck on the coals and you can drive the old jigamaroo,
if she’ll go.”
“Perhaps she will blow up,” said the gunner-guard.
“’Shouldn’t at all wonder by the sound of her. Where’s the shovel?” said
the subaltern.
“Oah no. She’s all raight according to my book, I think,” said young
Ottley. “Now we will go to Serai Rajgara—if she moves.”
She moved with long _ssghee! ssghee’s!_ of exhaustion and lamentation.
She moved quite seven miles an hour, and—for the floods were all over
the line—the staggering voyage began.
The subaltern stoked four shovels to the minute, spreading them thin,
and Number Forty made noises like a dying cow, and young Ottley
discovered that it was one thing to run a healthy switching-locomotive
up and down the yards for fun when the head of the yard wasn’t looking,
and quite another to drive a very sick one over an unknown road in
absolute darkness and tropic rain. But they felt their way along with
their hearts in their mouths till they came to a distant signal, and
whistled frugally, having no steam to spare.
“This _might_ be Serai Rajgara,” said young Ottley, hopefully.
“’Looks more like the Suez Canal,” said the subaltern. “I say, when an
engine kicks up that sort of a noise she’s a little impatient, isn’t
she?”
“That sort of noise” was a full-powered, furious yelling whistle half a
mile up the line.
“That is the Down Mail,” said young Ottley. “We have delayed Olaf two
hours and forty-five minutes. She must surely be in Serai Rajgara.”
“’Don’t wonder she wants to get out of it,” said the subaltern. “Golly,
what a country!”
The line here dipped bodily under water, and young Ottley sent the
gunner-guard on to find the switch to let Number Forty into the siding.
Then he followed and drew up with a doleful _wop! wop! wop!_ by the side
of the great forty-five-ton, six-wheel, coupled, eighteen-inch
inside-cylinder Number Twenty-five, all paint and lacquer, standing
roaring at the head of the Down Mail. The rest was all water—flat, level
and solid from one point of the horizon to the other.
Olaf’s red beard flared like a danger-signal, and as soon as they were
in range some knobby pieces of Giridih coal whizzed past young Ottley’s
head.
“’Your friend very mad?” said the subaltern, ducking.
“Aah!” roared Olaf. “This is the fifth time you make delay. Three hours’
delay you make _me_—Swanson—the Mail! Now I will lose more time to break
your head.” He swung on to the foot-board of Number Forty, with a shovel
in one hand.
“Olaf!” cried young Ottley, and Olaf nearly tumbled backward. “Rustomjee
is behind.”
“Of course. He always is. But you? How you come here?”
“Oah, we smashed up. I have disconnected her and arrived here on one
cylinder, by your book. We are only a—a diagram of an engine, I think.”
“My book! My very good book. My ‘Vademecome’! Ottley, you are a fine
driver. I forgive my delays. It was worth. Oh, my book, my book!” and
Olaf leapt back to Number Twenty-five, shouting things about Swedenborg
and steam.
“Thatt is all right,” said young Ottley, “but where is Serai Rajgara? We
want assistance.”
“There is no Serai Rajgara. The water is two feet on the embankment, and
the telegraph office is fell in. I will report at Purnool Road.
Good-night, good boy!”
The Mail train splashed out into the dark, and Ottley made great haste
to let off his steam and draw his fire. Number Forty had done enough for
that night.
“Odd chap, that friend of yours,” said the subaltern, when Number Forty
stood empty and disarmed in the gathering waters. “What do we do now?
Swim?”
“Oah, no! At ten-forty-five thiss morning that is coming, an engine will
perhaps arrive from Purnool Road and take us north. Now we will lie down
and go to sleep. You see there _is_ no Serai Rajgara. You could get a
cup of tea here once on a time.”
“Oh, my Aunt, what a country!” said the subaltern, as he followed Ottley
to the carriage and lay down on the leather bunk.
For the next three weeks Olaf Swanson talked to everybody of nothing but
his “Vademecome” and young Ottley. What he said about his book does not
matter, but the compliments of a mail-driver are things to be repeated,
as they were, to people in high authority, the masters of many engines.
So young Ottley was sent for, and he came from the Sheds buttoning his
jacket and wondering which of his sins had been found out this time.
It was a loop line near Ajaibpore, where he could by no possibility come
to harm. It was light but steady traffic, and a first-class
superintendent was in charge; but it was a driver’s billet, and
permanent after six months. As a new engine was on order for the loop,
the foreman of the Sheds told young Ottley he might look through the
stalls and suit himself.
He waited, boiling with impatience, till Olaf came in, and the two went
off together, old Olaf clucking, “Look! Look! Look!” like a hen, all
down the Sheds, and they chose a nearly new Hawthorne, No. 239, which
Olaf highly recommended. Then Olaf went away, to give young Ottley his
chance to order her to the cleaning-pit, and jerk his thumb at the
cleaner and say, as he turned magnificently on his heel, “Thursday,
eight o’clock. _Mallum?_ Understand?”
That was almost the proudest moment of his life. The very proudest was
when he pulled out of Atami Junction through the brick-field on the way
to his loop, and passed the Down Mail, with Olaf in the cab.
They say in the Sheds that you could have heard Number Two hundred and
Thirty-nine’s whistle from Raneegunge clear to Calcutta.
THE NURSES
When, with a pain he desires to explain to the multitude, Baby howls
Himself black in the face, toothlessly striving to curse;
And the six-month-old Mother begins to enquire of the Gods if it may be
Tummy, or Temper, or Pins—what does the adequate Nurse?
See! At one turn of her head the trouble is guessed; and, thereafter
She juggles (unscared by his throes) with drops of hot water and spoons,
Till the hiccoughs are broken by smiles, and the smiles pucker up into
laughter,
And he lies o’er her shoulder and crows, and she, as she nurses him,
croons!
When, at the head of the grade, tumultuous out of the cutting,
Pours the belated Express, roars at the night, and draws clear,
Redly obscured or displayed by her fire-door’s opening and shutting—
Symbol of strength under stress—what does her small engineer?
Clamour and darkness encircle his way. Do they deafen or blind him?
No!—nor the pace he must keep. He, being used to these things,
Placidly follows his work, which is laying his mileage behind him,
While his passengers trustfully sleep, and he, as he handles her, sings!
When, with the gale at her heel, the barque lies down and recovers—
Rolling through forty degrees, combing the stars with her tops,
What says the man at the wheel, holding her straight as she hovers
On the shoulders of wind-screening seas, steadying her as she drops?
Behind him the blasts without check from the Pole to the Tropic, pursue
him,
Heaving up, heaping high, slamming home, the surges he must not regard:
Beneath him the crazy wet deck, and all Ocean on end to undo him;
Above him one desperate sail, thrice-reefed but still buckling the yard!
Under his hand fleet the spokes and return, to be held or set free
again;
And she bows and makes shift to obey their behest, till the master-wave
comes
And her gunnel goes under in thunder and smokes, and she chokes in the
trough of the sea again!
Ere she can lift and make way to its crest; and he, as he nurses her,
hums!
_These have so utterly mastered their work that they work without
thinking;
Holding three-fifths of their brain in reserve for whatever betide.
So, when catastrophe threatens, of colic, collision or sinking,
They shunt the full gear into train, and take the small thing in their
stride._
THE SON OF HIS FATHER
“It is a queer name,” Mrs. Strickland admitted, “and none of our family
have ever borne it; but, you see, he _is_ the first man to us.”
So he was called Adam, and to that world about him he was the first of
men—a man-child alone. Heaven sent him no Eve for a companion, but all
earth, horse and foot, was at his feet. As soon as he was old enough to
appear in public he held a levée, and Strickland’s sixty policemen, with
their sixty clanking sabres, bowed to the dust before him. When his
fingers closed a little on Imam Din’s sword-hilt they rose and roared
till Adam roared too, and was withdrawn.
“Now that was no cry of fear,” said Imam Din afterwards, speaking to his
companion in the Police lines. “He was angry—and so young! Brothers, he
will make a very strong Police officer.”
“Does the Memsahib nurse him?” said a new recruit, the dye-smell not yet
out of his yellow cotton uniform.
“Ho!” said an up-country Naik scornfully; “it has not been known for
_more_ than ten days that my woman nurses him.” He curled his moustaches
as lordly as ever an Inspector could afford to do, for he knew that the
husband of the foster-mother of the son of the District Superintendent
of Police was a man of consideration.
“I am glad,” said Imam Din, loosening his belt. “Those who drink our
blood become of our own blood, and I have seen, in those thirty years,
that the sons of Sahibs once being born here return when they are men.
Yes, they return after they have been to Belait [Europe].”
“And what do they in Belait?” asked the recruit respectfully.
“Get instruction—which thou hast not,” returned the Naik. “Also they
drink of _belaitee-panee_ [soda-water] enough to give them that devil’s
restlessness which endures for all their lives. Whence we of Hind have
trouble.”
“My father’s uncle,” said Imam Din slowly, with importance, “was
Ressaldar of the Long Coat Horse; and the Empress called him to Europe
in the year that she had accomplished fifty years of rule. _He_ said
(and there were also other witnesses) that the Sahibs there drink only
common water even as do we; and that the _belaitee-panee_ does _not_ run
in all their rivers.”
“He said that there was a Shish Mahal—a glass palace—half a mile in
length, and that the rail-train ran under roads; and that there are
boats bigger than a village. He is a great talker.” The Naik spoke
scornfully. He had no well-born uncles.
“_He_ is at least a man of good birth,” said Imam Din, and the Naik was
silent.
“Ho! Ho!” Imam Din reached out to his pipe, chuckling till his fat sides
shook again. “Strickland Sahib’s foster-mother was the wife of a
gardener in the Ferozepur district. I was a young man then. This child
also will be suckled here and he will have double wisdom, and when he is
a Police officer it will be very bad for the thieves in this part of the
world. Ho! Ho!”
“Strickland Sahib’s butler has said,” the Naik went on, “that they will
call him Adam—and no jaw-splitting English name. Udaam. The _padre_ will
name him at their church in due time.”
“Who can tell the ways of Sahibs? Now Strickland Sahib knows more of the
Faith than ever I had time to learn—prayers, charms, names and stories
of the Blessed Ones. Yet he is not a Mussulman,” said Imam Din
thoughtfully.
“For the reason that he knows as much of the gods of Hindustan, and so
he rides with a rein in each hand. Remember that he sat under the Baba
Atal, a _faquir_ among _faquirs_, for ten days; whereby a man came to be
hanged for the murder of a dancing girl on the night of the great
earthquake,” the Naik replied.
“True—it is true. And yet—the Sahibs are one day so wise—and another so
foolish. But he has named the child well; Adam. Huzrut Adam. Ho! Ho!
Father Adam we must call him.”
“And all who minister to the child,” said the Naik quietly, but with
meaning, “will come to great honour.”
Adam throve, being prayed over before the Gods of at least three creeds,
in a garden almost as fair as Eden. There were gigantic clumps of
bamboos that talked continually, and enormous plantains, trees on whose
soft, paper skin he could scratch with his nails; green domes of
mango-trees as huge as the dome of St. Paul’s, full of parrots as big as
cassowaries and grey squirrels the size of foxes. At the end of the
garden stood a hedge of flaming poinsettias higher than anything in the
world, because, childlike, Adam’s eye could not carry to the tops of the
mango-trees. Their green went out against the blue sky, but the red
poinsettias he could just see. A nurse who talked continually about
snakes and pulled him back from the mouth of a fascinating dry well, and
a mother who believed that the sun hurt little heads, were the only
drawbacks to this loveliness. But, as his legs grew under him, he found
that by scaling an enormous rampart—three feet of broken-down mud wall
at the end of the garden—he could come into a ready-made kingdom, where
everyone was his slave. Imam Din showed him the way one evening, and the
Police troopers, cooking their supper, received him with rapture, and
gave him pieces of very indigestible, but altogether delightful, spiced
bread.
Here he sat or sprawled in the horse-feed where the Police were picketed
in a double line, and he named them, men and beasts together, according
to his ideas and experiences, as his First Father had done before him.
In those days everything had a name, from the mud mangers to the
heel-ropes, for things were people to Adam exactly as people are things
to folk in their second childhood. Through all the conferences—one hand
twisted into Imam Din’s beard, and the other on his polished belt
buckle—there were two other people who came and went across the
talk—Death and Sickness—persons greater than Imam Din, and stronger than
the heel-roped horses. There was Mata, the small-pox, a woman in some
way connected with pigs; and Heza, the cholera, a black man, according
to Adam; and Booka, starvation; and Kismet, who settled all questions,
from the untimely choking of a pet mungoose in the kitchen-drain to the
absence of a young Policeman who once missed a parade and never came
back. It was all very wonderful to Adam, but not worth much thinking
over; for a child’s mind is bounded by his eyes exactly as a horse’s
view of the road is limited by his blinkers. Between all these
objectionable shadowy vagrants stood a ring of kind faces and strong
arms, and Mata and Heza would never touch Adam, the first of men. Kismet
might do so, because—and this was a mystery no staring into his
looking-glass would solve—Kismet was written, like Police orders for the
day, in or on Adam’s head. Imam Din could not explain how this might be,
and it was from that grey, fat Mohammedan that Adam learned through
every inflection the _Khuda jhanta_ [God knows!] that settles everything
in the mind of Asia.
Beyond the fact that “Khuda” [God] was a very good man and kept lions,
Adam’s theology did not run far. Mrs. Strickland tried to teach him a
few facts, but he revolted at the story of Genesis as untrue. A turtle,
he said, upheld the world, and one-half the adventures of Huzrut Nu
[Father Noah] had never been told. If Mamma wanted to hear them she must
ask Imam Din.
“It’s awful,” said Mrs. Strickland, half crying, “to think of his
growing up like a little heathen.” Mrs. Strickland had been born and
brought up in England, and did not quite understand Eastern things.
“Let him alone,” said Strickland. “He’ll grow out of it all, or it will
only come back to him in dreams.”
“Are you sure?” said his wife.
“Quite. I was sent home when I was seven, and they flicked it out of me
with a wet towel at Harrow. Public schools don’t encourage anything that
isn’t quite English.”
Mrs. Strickland shuddered, for she had been trying not to think of the
separation that follows motherhood in India, and makes life there, for
all that is written to the contrary, not quite the most desirable thing
in the world. Adam trotted out to hear about more miracles, and his
nurse must have worried him beyond bounds, for she came back weeping,
saying that Adam Baba was in danger of being eaten alive by wild horses.
As a matter of fact he had shaken off Juma by bolting between a couple
of picketed horses, and lying down under their bellies. That they were
old personal friends of his, Juma did not understand, nor Strickland
either. Adam was settled at ease when his father arrived, breathless and
white, and the stallions put back their ears and squealed.
“If you come here,” said Adam, “they will hit you kicks. Tell Juma I
have eaten my rice, and I wish to be alone.”
“Come out at once,” said Strickland, for the horses were beginning to
paw.
“Why should I obey Juma’s order? She is afraid of horses.”
“It is not Juma’s order. It is mine. Obey!”
“Ho!” said Adam. “Juma did not tell me that”; and he crawled out on all
fours among the shod feet. Mrs. Strickland was crying bitterly with fear
and excitement, and as a sacrifice to the home gods Adam had to be
whipped. He said with perfect justice—
“There was no order that I should _not_ sit with the horses, and they
are _my_ horses. Why is there this _tamasha_ [fuss]?”
Strickland’s face showed him that the whipping was coming, and the child
turned white. Motherlike, Mrs. Strickland left the room, but Juma, the
foster-mother, stayed to see.
“Am I to be whipped here?” he gasped.
“Of course.”
“Before that woman? Father, I am a man—I am not afraid. It is my
_izzat_—my honour.”
Strickland only laughed—(to this day I cannot imagine what possessed
him), and gave Adam the little tap-tap with a riding cane that was
whipping sufficient for his years.
When it was all over, Adam said quietly, “I am little and you are big.
If I had stayed among my horse-folk I should not have been whipped.
_You_ are afraid to go there.”
The merest chance led me to Strickland’s house that afternoon. When I
was half-way down the drive Adam passed me without recognition, at a
fast run. I caught one glimpse of his face under his big hat, and it was
the face of his father as I had once seen it in the grey of the morning
when it bent over a leper. I caught the child by the shoulder.
“Let me go!” he screamed; though he and I were the best of friends, as a
rule. “Let me go!”
“Where to, Father Adam?” He was quivering like a haltered colt.
“To the well. I have been beaten. I have been beaten before a woman! Let
me go!” He tried to bite my hand.
“That is a small matter,” I said. “Men are born to beatings.”
“_Thou_ hast never been beaten,” he said savagely (we were talking in
the native tongue).
“Indeed I have; times past counting.”
“Before women?”
“My mother and my ayah saw. _By_ women, too, for that matter. What of
it?”
“What didst thou do?” He stared beyond my shoulder up the long drive.
“It is long ago, and I have forgotten. I was older than thou art; but
even then I forgot, and now the thing is only a jest to be talked of.”
Adam drew one big breath and broke down utterly in my arms. Then he
raised his head, and his eyes were Strickland’s eyes when Strickland
gave orders.
“Ho! Imam Din!”
The fat orderly seemed to spring out of the earth at our feet, crashing
through the bushes, and standing at attention.
“Hast _thou_ ever been beaten?” said Adam.
“Assuredly. By my father when I was thirty years old. He beat me with a
plough-beam before all the women of the village.”
“Wherefore?”
“Because I had returned to the village on leave from the Government
service, and said of the village elders that they had not seen the
world. Therefore he beat me to show that no seeing of the world changes
father and son.”
“And thou?”
“I stood up to the beating. He was my father.”
“Good,” said Adam, and turned on his heel without another word.
Imam Din looked after him. “An elephant breeds but once in a lifetime,
but he breeds elephants. Yet, I am glad I am no father of tuskers,” said
he.
“What is it all?” I asked.
“His father beat him with a whip no bigger than a reed. But the child
could not have done what he desired to do without leaping through me.
And I am of some few pounds weight. Look!”
Imam Din stepped back through the bushes, and the pressed grass showed
that he had been lying curled round the mouth of the dry well.
“When there was talk of beating, I knew that one who sat among horses
such as ours was not like to kiss his father’s hand. He might have done
away with himself. So I lay down in this place.” We stood still looking
at the well-curb.
Adam came along the garden path to us. “I have spoken to my father,” he
said simply. “Imam Din, tell thy Naik that his woman is dismissed my
service.”
“_Huzoor!_ [Your Highness!]” said Imam Din, stooping low.
“For no fault of hers.”
“Protector of the Poor!”
“And to-day.”
“_Khodawund!_ [Heaven-born!]”
“It is an order. Go!”
Again the salute, and Imam Din departed, with that same set of the back
which he wore when he had taken an order from Strickland. I thought that
it would be well to go too, but Strickland beckoned me from the
verandah. When I came up he was perfectly white, rocking to and fro in
his chair.
“Do you know he was going to chuck himself down the well—because I
tapped him just now?” he said helplessly.
“I ought to,” I replied. “He has just dismissed his nurse—on his own
authority, I suppose?”
“He told me just now that he wouldn’t have her for a nurse any more. I
never supposed he meant it for an instant. I suppose she’ll have to go.”
Now Strickland, the Police officer, was feared through the length and
breadth of the Punjab by murderers, horse-thieves, and cattle-lifters.
Adam returned, halting outside the verandah.
“I have sent Juma away because she saw that—that which happened. Until
she is gone I do not come into the house,” he said.
“But to send away thy foster-mother!” said Strickland with reproach.
“_I_ do not send her away. It is _thy_ blame,” and the small forefinger
was pointed to Strickland. “I will not obey her. I will not eat from her
hand. I will not sleep with her. Send her away!”
Strickland stepped out and lifted the child into the verandah.
“This folly has lasted long enough,” he said. “Come now and be wise.”
“I am little and you are big,” said Adam between set teeth. “You can
beat me before this man or cut me to pieces. But I will _not_ have Juma
for my ayah any more. She saw me beaten. I will not eat till she goes. I
swear it by—my father’s head.”
Strickland sent him indoors to his mother, and we could hear sounds of
weeping and Adam’s voice saying nothing more than “Send Juma away!”
Presently Juma came in and wept too, and Adam repeated, “It is no fault
of thine, but go!”
And the end of it was that Juma went with all her belongings, and Adam
fought his own way into his little clothes until the new ayah came. His
address of welcome to her was rather amazing. In a few words it ran: “If
I do wrong, send me to my father. If you strike me, I will try to kill
you. I do not wish my ayah to play with me. Go and eat rice!”
From that Adam foreswore the society of ayahs and small native boys as
much as a small boy can, confining himself to Imam Din and his friends
of the Police. The Naik, Juma’s husband, had been presuming not a little
on his position, and when Adam’s favour was withdrawn from his wife he
thought it best to apply for a transfer to another post. There were too
many companions anxious to report his shortcomings to Strickland.
Towards his father Adam kept a guarded neutrality. There was not a touch
of sulkiness in it, for the child’s temper was as clear as a bell. But
the difference and the politeness worried Strickland.
If the Policemen had loved Adam before the affair of the well, they
worshipped him now.
“He knows what honour means,” said Imam Din. “He has justified himself
upon a point thereof. He has carried an order through his father’s
household as a child of the Blood might do. Therefore he is not
altogether a child any longer. Wah! He is a tiger’s cub.” The next time
that Adam made his little unofficial inspection of the lines, Imam Din,
and, by consequence, all the others, stood upon their feet with their
hands to their sides, instead of calling out from where they lay,
“Salaam, Babajee,” and other disrespectful things.
But Strickland took counsel with his wife, and she with the cheque-book
and their lean bank account, and they decided that Adam must go “home”
to his aunts. But England is not home to a child who has been born in
India, and it never becomes homelike unless he spends all his youth
there. Their bank-book showed that if they economized through the summer
by going to a cheap hill-station instead of to Simla (where Mrs.
Strickland’s parents lived, and where Strickland might be noticed by the
Government) they could send Adam home in the next spring. It would be
hard pinching, but it could be done.
Dalhousie was chosen as being the cheapest of the
hill-stations;—Dalhousie and a little five-roomed cottage full of
mildew, tucked away among the rhododendrons.
Adam had been to Simla three or four times, and knew by name most of the
drivers on the road there, but this new place disquieted him. He came to
me for information, his hands deep in his knickerbocker pockets, walking
step for step as his father walked.
“There will be none of my _bhai-bund_ [brotherhood] up there,” he said
disconsolately, “and they say that I must lie still in a doolie
[palanquin] for a day and a night, being carried like a sheep. I wish to
take some of my mounted men to Dalhousie.”
I told him that there was a small boy, called Victor, at Dalhousie, who
had a calf for a pet, and was allowed to play with it on the public
roads. After that Adam could not sufficiently hurry the packing.
“First,” said he, “I shall ask that man Victor to let me play with the
cow’s child. If he is _muggra_ [ill-conditioned], I shall tell my
Policemen to take it away.”
“But that is unjust,” said Strickland, “and there is no order that the
Police should do injustice.”
“When the Government pay is not sufficient, and low-caste men are
promoted, what _can_ an honest man do?” Adam replied, in the very touch
and accent of Imam Din; and Strickland’s eyebrows went up.
“You talk too much to the Police, my son,” he said.
“Always. About everything,” said Adam promptly. “They say that when I am
an officer I shall know as much as my father.”
“God forbid, little one!”
“They say, too, that you are as clever as Shaitan [the Evil One], to
know things.”
“They say that, do they?” and Strickland looked pleased. His pay was
small, but he had his reputation, and it was dear to him.
“They say also—not to me, but to one another when they eat rice behind
the wall—that in your own heart you esteem yourself as wise as Suleiman
[Soloman], who was cheated by Shaitan.”
This time Strickland did not look so pleased. Adam, in all innocence,
launched into a long story about Suleiman-bin-Daoud, who once, out of
vanity, pitted his wits against Shaitan, and because God was not on his
side Shaitan sent “a little devil of low caste,” as Adam put it, who
cheated him utterly and put him to shame before “all the other Kings.”
“By Gum!” said Strickland, when the tale was done, and went away, while
Adam took me to task for laughing at Imam Din’s stories. I did not
wonder that he was called Huzrut Adam, for he looked old as all time in
his grave childhood, sitting cross-legged, his battered little helmet
far at the back of his head, his forefinger wagging up and down, native
fashion, and the wisdom of serpents on his unconscious lips.
That May he went up to Dalhousie with his mother, and in those days the
journey ended in fifty or sixty miles of uphill travel in a doolie or
palanquin along a road winding through the Himalayas. Adam sat in the
doolie with his mother, and Strickland rode and tied with me, a spare
doolie following. The march began after we got out of the train at
Pathankot, in a wet hot night among the rice and poppy fields.
II
It was all new to Adam, and he had opinions to advance—notably about a
fish that jumped in a way-side pond. “_Now_ I know,” he shouted, “how
God puts them there! First He makes them up above and then He drops them
down. That was a new one.” Then, lifting his head to the stars, he
cried: “Oh, God, do it again, but slowly, so that I, Adam, may see.”
But nothing happened, and the doolie-bearers lit the noisome, dripping
rag-torches, and Adam’s eyes shone big in the dancing light, and we
smelt the dry dust of the plains that we were leaving after eleven
months’ hard work.
At stated times the men ceased their drowsy, grunting tune, and sat down
for a smoke. Between the guttering of their water-pipes we could hear
the cries of the beasts of the night, and the wind stirring in the folds
of the mountain ahead. At the changing-station the voice of Adam, the
First of Men, would be lifted to rouse the sleepers in the huts till the
fresh relay of bearers shambled from their cots and the relief pony with
them.
Then we would re-form and go on, and by the time the moon rose Adam was
asleep, and there was no sound in the night except the grunting of the
men, the husky murmur of some river a thousand feet down in the valley,
and the squeaking of Strickland’s saddle. So we went up from date-palm
to deodar, till the dawn wind came round a corner all fresh from the
snows, and we snuffed it. I heard Strickland say, “Wife, my overcoat,
please,” and Adam, fretfully, “Where is Dalhousie and the cow’s child?”
Then I slept till Strickland turned me out of the warm doolie at seven
o’clock, and I stepped into all the splendour of a cool Hill day, the
Plains sweltering twenty miles back and four thousand feet below. Adam
waked too, and needs must ride in front of me to ask a million
questions, and shout at the monkeys and clap his hands when the painted
pheasants bolted across our road, and hail every woodcutter and drover
and pilgrim within sight, till we halted for breakfast at a rest house.
After that, being a child, he went out to play with a train of
bullock-drivers halted by the roadside, and we had to chase him out of a
native liquor shop, where he was bargaining with a native seven-year-old
for a parrot in a bamboo cage.
Said he, wriggling on my pommel as we went on again, “There were four
men _behosh_ [insensible] at the back of that house. Wherefore do men
grow _behosh_ from drinking?”
“It is the nature of the waters,” I said, and, calling back, “Strick,
what’s that grog-shop doing so close to the road? It’s a temptation to
any one’s servants.”
“Dunno,” said a sleepy voice in the doolie. “This is Kennedy’s District.
’Twasn’t here in _my_ time.”
“Truly the waters smell bad,” Adam went on. “I smelt them, but I did not
get the parrot even for six annas. The woman of the house gave me a love
gift that I found playing near the verandah.”
“And what was the gift, Father Adam?”
“A nose-ring for my ayah. Ohe! Ohe! Look at that camel with the muzzle
on his nose!”
A string of loaded camels came cruising round the corner as a fleet
rounds a cape.
“Ho, Malik! Why does not a camel salaam like an elephant? His neck is
long enough,” Adam cried.
“The Angel Jibrail made him a fool at the beginning,” said the driver,
as he swayed on the top of the leading beast, and laughter ran all along
the line of red-bearded men.
“That is true,” said Adam solemnly, and they laughed again.
At last, in the late afternoon, we came to Dalhousie, the loveliest of
the hill-stations, and separated, Adam hardly able to be restrained from
setting out at once to find Victor and the “cow’s child.” I found them
both, something to my trouble, next morning. The two young sinners had a
calf on a tight rope just at a sharp turn in the Mall, and were
pretending that he was a raja’s elephant who had gone mad; and they
shouted with delight. Then we began to talk, and Adam, by way of
crushing Victor’s repeated reminders to me that he and not “that other”
was the owner of the calf, said, “It is true I have no cow’s child; but
a great _dacoity_ [robbery] has been done on my father.”
“We came up together yesterday. There could have been nothing,” I said.
“It was my mother’s horse. She has been _dacoited_ with beating and
blows, and now is _so_ thin.” He held his hands an inch apart. “My
father is at the telegraph-house sending telegrams. Imam Din will cut
off _all_ their heads. I desire your saddle-cloth for a howdah for my
elephant. Give it me!”
This was exciting, but not lucid. I went to the telegraph office and
found Strickland in a black temper among many telegraph forms. A
dishevelled, one-eyed groom stood in a corner whimpering at intervals.
He was a man whom Adam invariably addressed as “_Be-shakl, be-ukl,
be-ank_” [ugly, stupid, eyeless]. It seemed that Strickland had sent his
wife’s horse up to Dalhousie by road, a fortnight’s march, in the
groom’s charge. This is the custom in Upper India. Among the foothills,
near Dhunnera or Dhar, horse and man had been violently set upon in the
night by four men, who had beaten the groom (his leg was bandaged from
knee to ankle in proof), had incidentally beaten the horse, and had
robbed the groom of the bucket and blanket, and all his money—eleven
rupees, nine annas. Last, they had left him for dead by the way-side,
where some woodcutters had found and nursed him. Then the one-eyed man
howled with anguish, thinking over his bruises. “They asked me if I was
Strickland Sahib’s servant, and I, thinking the Protection of the Name
would be sufficient, spoke the truth. Then they beat me grievously.”
“H’m!” said Strickland. “I thought they wouldn’t dacoit as a business on
the Dalhousie road. This is meant for me personally—sheer _badmashi_
[impudence]. All right.”
In justice to a very hard-working class it must be said that the thieves
of Upper India have the keenest sense of humour. The last compliment
that they can pay a Police officer is to rob him, and if, as once they
did, they can loot a Deputy Inspector-General of Police, on the eve of
his retirement, of everything except the clothes on his back, their joy
is complete. They cause letters of derision and telegrams of condolence
to be sent to the victim; for of all men thieves are most compelled to
keep abreast of progress.
Strickland was a man of few words where his business was concerned. I
had never seen a Police officer robbed before, and I expected some
excitement, but Strickland held his tongue. He took the groom’s
deposition, and then retired into himself for a time. Then he sent
Kennedy, of the Pathankot District, an official letter and an unofficial
note. Kennedy’s reply was purely unofficial, and it ran thus: “This
seems a compliment solely intended for you. My wonder is you didn’t get
it before. The men are probably back in your district by now. My
Dhunnera and foot-hill people are highly respectable cultivators, and,
seeing my Assistant is an unlicked pup, and I can’t trust my Inspector
out of my sight, I’m not going to turn their harvest upside down with
Police investigations. I’m run off my feet with vaccination Police work.
You’d better look at home. The Shubkudder gang were through here a
fortnight back. They laid up at the Amritsar Serai, and then worked
down. No cases against them in my charge; but, remember, you imprisoned
their head-man for receiving stolen goods in Prub Dyal’s burglary. They
owe you one.”
“Exactly what I thought,” said Strickland. “I had a notion it _was_ the
Shubkudder gang from the first. We must make it pleasant for them at
Peshawur, and in my District, too. They’re just the kind that would lie
up under Imam Din’s shadow.”
From this point onward the wires began to be worked heavily. Strickland
had a very fair knowledge of the Shubkudder gang, gathered at first
hand.
They were the same syndicate that had once stolen a Deputy
Commissioner’s cow, put horse-shoes on her, and taken her forty miles
into the jungle before they lost interest in the joke. They added insult
to insult by writing that the Deputy Commissioner’s cows and horses were
so much alike that it took them two days to find out the difference and
they would not lift the like of such cattle any more.
The District Superintendent at Peshawur replied to Strickland that he
was expecting the gang, and Strickland’s Assistant, in his own district,
being young and full of zeal, sent up the most amazing clues.
“Now that’s just what I want that young fool not to do,” said
Strickland. “He’s an English boy, born and bred, and his father before
him. He has about as much tact as a bull, and he won’t work quietly
under my Inspector. I wish the Government would keep our service for
country-born men. Those first five or six years in India give a man a
pull that lasts him all his life. Adam, if only you were old enough to
be my Assistant!” He looked down at the little fellow in the verandah.
Adam was deeply interested in the dacoity, and, unlike a child, did not
lose interest after the first week. On the contrary, he would ask his
father every evening what had been done, and Strickland had drawn him a
map on the white wall of the verandah, showing the different towns in
which Policemen were on the look-out for thieves. They were Amritsar,
Jullunder, Phillour, Gurgaon, Rawal Pindi, Peshawur and Multan. Adam
looked up at it as he answered—
“There has been great _dikh_ [trouble] in this case?”
“Very great trouble. I wish that thou wert a young man and my Assistant
to help me.”
“Dost thou need help, my father?” Adam asked curiously, with his head on
one side.
“Very much.”
“Leave it all alone. It is bad. Let loose everything.”
“That must not be. Those beginning a business continue to the end.”
“Thou wilt continue to the end? Dost thou not _know_ who did the
dacoity?”
Strickland shook his head. Adam turned to me with the same question, and
I answered it in the same way.
“What foolish people!” he said, and turned his back on us.
He showed plainly in all our dealings afterwards how we had fallen in
his opinion. Strickland told me that he would sit at the door of his
father’s workroom and stare at him for half an hour at a time as he went
through his papers. Strickland seemed to work harder over the case than
if he had been in office in the Plains.
“And sometimes I look up and I fancy the little chap’s laughing at me.
It’s an awful thing to have a son. You see, he’s your own and _his_ own,
and between the two you don’t quite know how to handle him,” said
Strickland. “I wonder what in the world he thinks about.”
I asked Adam this later on, quietly. He put his head on one side for a
moment and replied: “In these days I think about great things. I do not
play with Victor and the cow’s child any more. Victor is only a baba.”
At the end of the third week of Strickland’s leave, the result of
Strickland’s labours—labours that had made Mrs. Strickland more
indignant against the dacoits than any one else—came to hand. The Police
at Peshawur reported that half of the Shubkudder gang were held at
Peshawur to account for the possession of some blankets and a
horse-bucket. Strickland’s assistant had also four men under suspicion
in his charge; and Imam Din must have stirred up Strickland’s Inspector
to investigations on his own account, for a string of incoherent
telegrams came in from the Club Secretary in which he entreated,
exhorted, and commanded Strickland to take his “mangy Policemen” off the
Club premises. “Your men, in servants’ quarters here, examining cook.
Billiard-marker indignant. Steward threatens resignation. Members
furious. Grooms stopped on roads. Shut up, or my resignation goes to
Committee.”
“Now I shouldn’t in the least wonder,” said Strickland thoughtfully to
his wife, “if the Club was not just _the_ place where the men would lie
up. Billy Watson isn’t at all pleased, though. I think I shall have to
cut my leave by a week and go down to take charge. If there’s anything
to be told, the men will tell me.”
Mrs. Strickland’s eyes filled with tears. “I shall try to steal ten days
if I can in the autumn,” he said soothingly, “but I must go now. It will
never do for the gang to think that they can burgle _my_ belongings.”
That was in the forenoon, and Strickland asked me to lunch to leave me
some instructions about his big dog, with authority to rebuke those who
did not attend to her. _Tietjens_ was growing too old and too fat to
live in the plains in the summer. When I came, Adam had climbed into his
high chair at table, and Mrs. Strickland seemed ready to weep at any
moment over the general misery of things.
“I go down to the Plains to-morrow, my son,” said Strickland.
“Wherefore?” said Adam, reaching out for a ripe mango and burying his
head in it.
“Imam Din has caught the men who did the dacoity, and there are also
others at Peshawur under suspicion. I must go to see.”
“_Bus!_ [enough],” said Adam, between sucks at his mango, as Mrs.
Strickland tucked the napkin round his neck. “Imam Din speaks lies. Do
not go.”
“It is necessary. There has been great _dikh-dari_ [trouble-giving].”
Adam came out of the fruit for a minute and laughed. Then, returning, he
spoke between slow and deliberate mouthfuls.
“The dacoits live in Beshakl’s head. They will never be caught. All
people know that. The cook knows, and the scullion, and Rahim Baksh
here.”
“Nay,” said the butler behind his chair hastily. “What should _I_ know?
Nothing at all does the Servant of the Presence know.”
“_Accha_ [good],” said Adam, and sucked on. “Only it _is_ known.”
“Speak, then,” said Strickland to him. “What dost thou know? Remember my
groom was beaten insensible.”
“That was in the bad-water shop where I played when we came up here. The
boy who would not sell me the parrot for six annas told me that a
one-eyed man had come there and drunk the bad waters and gone mad. He
broke bedsteads. They hit him with a bamboo till he was senseless, and
fearing he was dead, they nursed him on milk—like a little baba. When I
was playing first with the cow’s child, I asked Beshakl if he were that
man, and he said no. But _I_ knew, because many woodcutters in Dalhousie
asked him whether his head were whole now.”
“But why,” I interrupted, “did Beshakl tell lies?”
“Oh! He is a low-caste man, and desired to get consideration. Now he is
a witness in a great law-case, and men will go to the jail on his
account. It was to give trouble and obtain notice that he did it.”
“Was it all lies?” said Strickland.
“Ask him,” said Adam, through the mango-pulp.
Strickland passed through the door. There was a howl of despair in the
servants’ quarters up the hill, and he returned with the one-eyed groom.
“Now,” said Strickland, “it is known. Declare!”
“Beshakl,” said Adam, while the man gasped. “Imam Din has caught four
men, and there are some more at Peshawur. _Bus! Bus! Bus!_ [Enough.]”
“Thou didst get drunk by the way-side, and didst make a false case to
cover it. Speak!”
Like a good many other men, Strickland, in possession of a few facts,
was irresistible. The groom groaned.
“I—I did not get drunk till—till—Protector of the Poor, the mare
rolled.”
“_All_ horses roll at Dhunnera. The road is too narrow before that, and
they smell where the other horses have rolled. This the bullock-drivers
told me when we came up here,” said Adam.
“She rolled. So her saddle was cut and the curb-chain lost.”
“See!” said Adam, tugging a curb-chain from his pocket. “That woman in
the shop gave it to me for a love-gift. Beshakl said it was not his when
I showed it. But _I_ knew.”
“Then they at the grog-shop, knowing that I was the Servant of the
Presence, said that unless I drank and spent money they would tell.”
“A lie! A lie!” said Strickland. “Son of an owl, speak the truth now at
least.”
“Then I was afraid because I had lost the curb-chain, so I cut the
saddle across and about.”
“She did _not_ roll, then?” said Strickland, bewildered and angry.
“It was only the curb-chain that was lost. Then I cut the saddle and
went to drink in the shop. I drank and there was a fray. The rest I have
forgotten till I recovered.”
“And the mare the while? What of the mare?”
The man looked at Strickland and collapsed.
“She bore faggots for a week,” he said.
“Oh, poor _Diamond_!” said Mrs. Strickland.
“And Beshakl was paid four annas for her hire three days ago by the
woodcutter’s brother, who is the left-hand man of our rickshaw-men
here,” said Adam, in a loud and joyful voice. “We _all_ knew. We all
knew. I and the servants.”
Strickland was silent. His wife stared helplessly at the child; the soul
out of Nowhere that went its own way alone.
“Did no man help thee with the lies?” I asked of the groom.
“None. Protector of the Poor—not one.”
“They grew, then?”
“As a tale grows in telling. Alas! I am a very bad man!” and he blinked
his one eye dolefully.
“Now four men are held at my Police station on thy account, and God
knows how many more at Peshawur, besides the questions at Multan, and my
honour is lost, and my mare has been pack-pony to a woodcutter. Son of
Devils, what canst thou do to make amends?”
There was just a little break in Strickland’s voice, and the man caught
it. Bending low, he answered, in the abject fawning whine that confounds
right and wrong more surely than most modern creeds, “Protector of the
Poor, is the Police service shut to—an honest man?”
“Out!” cried Strickland, and swiftly as the groom departed he must have
heard our shouts of laughter behind him.
“If you dismiss that man, Strick, I shall engage him. He’s a genius,”
said I. “It will take you months to put this mess right, and Billy
Watson won’t give you a minute’s peace.”
“You aren’t going to tell him?” said Strickland appealingly.
“I couldn’t keep this to myself if you were my own brother. Four men
arrested with you—four or forty at Peshawur—and what was that you said
about Multan?”
“Oh, nothing. Only some camel-men there have been——”
“And a tribe of camel-men at Multan! All on account of a lost
curb-chain. Oh, my Aunt!”
“And whose memsahib [lady] was thy aunt?” said Adam, with the
mango-stone in his fist. We began to laugh again.
“But here,” said Strickland, pulling his face together, “is a very bad
child who has caused his father to lose his honour before all the
Policemen of the Punjab.”
“Oh, _they_ know,” said Adam. “It was only for the sake of show that
they caught people. Assuredly they all knew it was _benowti_ [make-up].”
“And since when hast thou known?” said the first policeman in India to
his son.
“Four days after we came here, after the woodcutter had asked Beshakl
after the health of his head. Beshakl all but slew one of them at the
bad-water place.”
“If thou hadst spoken then, time and money and trouble to me and to
others had all been spared. Baba, thou hast done a wrong greater than
thy knowledge, and thou hast put me to shame, and set me out upon false
words, and broken my honour. Thou hast done _very_ wrong. But perhaps
thou didst not think?”
“Nay, but I _did_ think. Father, _my_ honour was lost when that beating
of me happened in Juma’s presence. Now it is made whole again.”
And with the most enchanting smile in the world Adam climbed up on to
his father’s lap.
AN ENGLISH SCHOOL
Of all things in the world there is nothing, always excepting a good
mother, so worthy of honour as a good school. Our School was created for
the sons of officers in the Army and Navy, and filled with boys who
meant to follow their father’s calling.
It stood within two miles of Amyas Leigh’s house at Northam, overlooking
the Burroughs and the Pebble-ridge, and the mouth of the Torridge whence
the _Rose_ sailed in search of Don Guzmán. From the front dormitory
windows, across the long rollers of the Atlantic, you could see Lundy
Island and the Shutter Rock, where the _Santa Catherina_ galleon cheated
Amyas out of his vengeance by going ashore. If you have ever read
Kingsley’s “Westward Ho!” you will remember how all these things
happened.
Inland lay the rich Devonshire lanes and the fat orchards, and to the
west the gorse and the turf ran along the tops of the cliffs in combe
after combe till you come to Clovelly and the Hobby and Gallantry Bower,
and the homes of the Devonshire people that were old when the Armada was
new.
The Burroughs, lying between the school and the sea, was a waste of bent
rush and grass running out into hundreds of acres of fascinating
sand-hills called the Bunkers, where a few old people played golf. In
the early days of the School there was a small Club-house for golfers
close to the Pebble-ridge, but, one wild winter night, the sea got up
and drove the Pebble-ridge clean through the Club basement, and the
walls fell out, and we rejoiced, for even then golfers wore red coats
and did not like us to use the links. We played as a matter of course
and thought nothing of it.
Now there is a new Club-house, and cars take the old, red, excited men
to and from their game and all the great bunkers are known and written
about; but we were there first, long before golf became a fashion or a
disease, and we turned out one of the earliest champion amateur golfers
of all England.
It was a good place for a school, and that School considered itself the
finest in the world, excepting perhaps Haileybury, because it was
modelled on Haileybury lines and our caps were Haileybury colours; and
there was a legend that, in the old days when the School was new, half
the boys had been Haileyburians.
Our Head-master had been Head of the Modern Side at Haileybury, and,
talking it over with boys from other public schools afterwards, I think
that one secret of his great hold over us was that he was not a
clergyman, as so many head-masters are. As soon as a boy begins to think
in the misty way that boys do, he is suspicious of a man who punishes
him one day and preaches at him the next. But the Head was different,
and in our different ways we loved him.
Through all of five years I never saw him lose his temper, nor among two
hundred boys did any one at any time say or hint that he had his
favourites. If you went to him with any trouble you were heard out to
the end, and answered without being talked at or about or around, but
always _to_. So we trusted him absolutely, and when it came to the
choice of the various ways of entering the Army, what he said was so.
He knew boys naturally better than their fathers knew them, and
considerably better than they knew themselves. When the time came to
read for the Final Army Examinations, he knew the temper and powers of
each boy, the amount of training each would stand and the stimulus or
restraint that each needed, and handled them accordingly till they had
come through the big race that led into the English Army. Looking back
on it all, one can see the perfect judgment, knowledge of boys,
patience, and above all, power, that the Head must have had.
Some of the masters, particularly on the classical side, vowed that Army
examinations were making education no more than mark-hunting; but there
are a great many kinds of education, and I think the Head knew it, for
he taught us hosts of things that we never found out we knew till
afterwards. And surely it must be better to turn out men who do real
work than men who write about what they think about what other people
have done or ought to do.
A scholar may, as the Latin masters said, get more pleasure out of his
life than an Army officer, but only little children believe that a man’s
life is given him to decorate with pretty little things, as though it
were a girl’s room or a picture-screen. Besides, scholars are apt, all
their lives, to judge from one point of view only, and by the time that
an Army officer has knocked about the world for a few years he comes to
look at men and things “by and large,” as the sailors say. No books in
the world will teach that knack.
So we trusted the Head at school, and afterwards trusted him more.
There was a boy in the Canadian Mounted Police, I think, who stumbled
into a fortune—he was the only one of us who ever did—and as he had
never drawn more than seven shillings a day he very properly wrote to
the Head from out of his North Western wilds and explained his situation
proposing that the Head should take charge of and look after all his
wealth till he could attend to it; and was a little impatient when the
Head pointed out that executors and trustees and that sort of bird
wouldn’t hand over cash in that casual way. The Head was worth
trusting—he saved a boy’s life from diphtheria once at much greater risk
than being shot at, and nobody knew anything about it till years
afterwards.
But I come back to the School that he made and put his mark upon. The
boys said that those with whom Cheltenham could do nothing, whom
Sherbourne found too tough, and whom even Marlborough had politely asked
to leave, had been sent to the School at the beginning of things and
turned into men. They were, perhaps, a shade rough sometimes. One very
curious detail, which I have never seen or heard of in any school before
or since, was that the Army Class, which meant the Prefects, and was
generally made up of boys from seventeen and a half to nineteen or
thereabouts, was allowed to smoke pipes (cigarettes were then reckoned
the direct invention of the Evil One) in the country outside the
College. One result of this was that, though these great men talked a
good deal about the grain of their pipes, the beauty of their pouches,
and the flavour of their tobacco, they did not smoke to any ferocious
extent. The other, which concerned me more directly, was that it went
much harder with a junior whom they caught smoking than if he had been
caught by a master, because the action was flagrant invasion of their
privilege, and, therefore, rank insolence—to be punished as such. Years
later, the Head admitted that he thought something of this kind would
happen when he gave the permission. If any Head-master is anxious to put
down smoking nowadays, he might do worse than give this scheme a trial.
The School motto was, “Fear God, Honour the King”; and so the men she
made went out to Boerland and Zululand and India and Burma and Cyprus
and Hongkong, and lived or died as gentlemen and officers.
Even the most notorious bully, for whom an awful ending was prophesied,
went to Canada and was mixed up in Riel’s rebellion, and came out of it
with a fascinating reputation of having led a forlorn hope and behaved
like a hero.
All these matters were noted by the older boys, and when their fathers,
the grey-whiskered colonels and generals, came down to see them, or the
directors, who were K. C. B.’s and had been officers in their time, made
a tour of inspection, it was reported that the School tone was
“healthy.”
Sometimes an old boy who had blossomed into a Subaltern of the Queen
would come down for a last few words with the Head-master, before
sailing with the regiment for foreign parts; and the lower-school boys
were distracted with envy, and the prefects of the Sixth Form pretended
not to be proud when he walked with one of their number and talked about
“my men, you know,” till life became unendurable.
There was an unwritten law by which an old boy, when he came back to pay
his respects to the School, was entitled to a night in his old
dormitory. The boys expected it and sat up half the night listening to
the tales of a subaltern that the boy brought with him—stories about
riots in Ireland and camps at Aldershot, and all his first steps in the
wonderful world.
Sometimes news came in that a boy had died with his men fighting, and
the school said, “Killed in action, of course,” as though that were an
honour reserved for it alone, and wondered when its own chance would
come.
It was a curiously quiet School in many ways. When a boy was fourteen or
fifteen he was generally taken in hand for the Army Preliminary
Examination, and when that was past he was put down to “grind” for the
entrance into Sandhurst or Woolwich; for it was our pride that we passed
direct from the School to the Army, without troubling the “crammers.” We
spoke of “the Shop,” which means Woolwich, as though we owned it.
Sandhurst was our private reserve; and the old boys came back from
foreign parts and told us that India was only Westward Ho! spread thin.
On account of this incessant getting ready for examinations there was
hardly time for us (but we made it) to gather the beautiful Devonshire
apples, or to ferret rabbits in the sand-hills by the golf-links, and
saloon-pistols were forbidden because boys got to fighting-parties with
dust-shot, and were careless about guarding their eyes.
Nor were we encouraged to lower each other over the cliffs with a
box-rope and take the young hawks and jackdaws from their nests above
the sea. Once a rope broke, or else the boys above grew tired of holding
it, and a boy dropped thirty feet on to the boulders below. But as he
fell on his head nothing happened, except punishment at the other end
for all concerned.
In summer there was almost unlimited bathing from the Pebble-ridge, a
whale-backed bank four miles long of rounded grey boulders, where you
were taught to ride on the rollers as they came in, to avoid the
under-tow and to watch your time for getting back to the beach.
There was a big sea bath, too, in which all boys had to qualify for open
bathing by swimming a quarter of a mile, at least; and it was a matter
of honour among the school-houses not to let the summer end with a
single boy who could not “do his quarter,” at any rate.
Boating was impossible off that coast, but sometimes a fishing-boat
would be wrecked on Braunton Bar, and we could see the lifeboat and the
rocket at work; and once just after chapel there was a cry that the
herring were in. The School ran down to the beach in their Sunday
clothes and fished them out with umbrellas. They were cooked by hand
afterwards in all the studies and form-rooms till you could have smelt
us at Exeter.
But the game of the School, setting aside golf, which everyone could
play if he had patience, was foot-ball. Both cricket and foot-ball were
compulsory. That is to say, unless a boy could show a doctor’s
certificate that he was physically unfit to stand up to the wicket or go
into the scrimmage, he had to play a certain number of afternoons at the
game of the season. If he had engagements elsewhere—we called it
“shirking”—he was reasonably sure of three cuts with a ground-ash, from
the Captain of the Games delivered cold in the evening. A good player,
of course, could get leave off on any fair excuse, but it was a
beautiful rule for fat boys and loafers. The only unfairness was that a
Master could load you with an imposition to be shown up at a certain
hour, which, of course, prevented you from playing and so secured you a
licking in addition to the imposition. But the Head always told us that
there was not much justice in the world, and that we had better accustom
ourselves to the lack of it early.
Curiously enough, the one thing that the School did not understand was
an attempt to drill it in companies with rifles, by way of making a
volunteer cadet corps. We took our lickings for not attending that
cheerfully, because we considered it “playing at soldiers,” and boys
reading for the Army are apt to be very particular on these points.
We were weak in cricket, but our foot-ball team (Rugby Union) at its
best devastated the country from Blundell’s—we always respected
Blundell’s because “Great John Ridd” had been educated there—to Exeter,
whose team were grown men. Yet we, who had been taught to play together,
once drove them back over the November mud, back to their own
goal-posts, till the ball was hacked through and touched down, and you
could hear the long-drawn yell of “Schoo-_ool_! Schoo-_ool_!” as far as
Appledore.
When the enemy would not come to us our team went to the enemy, and if
victorious, would return late at night in a three-horse brake, chanting:
It’s a way we have in the Army,
It’s a way we have in the Navy,
It’s a way we have in the Public Schools,
Which nobody can deny!
Then the boys would flock to the dormitory windows, and wave towels and
join in the “Hip-hip-hip-hurrah!” of the chorus, and the winning team
would swagger through the dormitories and show the beautiful blue marks
on their shins, and the little boys would be allowed to get sponges and
hot water.
Very few things that the world can offer make up for having missed
a place in the First Fifteen, with its black jersey and
white—snow-white—knickerbockers, and the velvet skull-cap with the gold
tassel—the cap that you leave out in the rain and accidentally step upon
to make it look as old as if you had been in the First Fifteen for
years.
The other outward sign of the First Fifteen that the happy boy generally
wore through a hard season was the “jersey-mark”—a raw, red scrape on
ear and jawbone where the skin had been fretted by the rough jerseys in
either side in the steady drive of many scrimmages. We were trained to
put our heads down, pack in the shape of a wedge and shove, and it was
in that shape that the First Fifteen stood up to a team of trained men
for two and twenty counted minutes. We got the ball through in the end.
At the close of the winter term, when there were no more foot-ball teams
to squander and the Christmas holidays were coming, the School set
itself to the regular yearly theatricals—a farce and a three-act play
all complete. Sometimes it was “The Rivals,” or sometimes an attempt at
a Shakespearean play; but the farces were the most popular.
All ended with the School-Saga, the “_Vive la Compagnie!_” in which the
Senior boy of the School chanted the story of the School for the past
twelve months. It was very long and very difficult to make up, though
all the poets of all the forms had been at work on it for weeks; and the
School gave the chorus at the top of its voice.
On the last Sunday of the term the last hymn in chapel was “Onward,
Christian Soldiers.” We did not know what it meant then, and we did not
care, but we stood up and sang it till the music was swamped in the
rush. The big verse, like the “tug-of-war” verse in Mrs. Ewing’s “Story
of a Short Life,” was:
We are not divided,
All one body we,
One in faith and doctrine,
One in charity.
Then the organ would give a hurricane of joyful roars, and try to get us
in hand before the refrain. Later on, meeting our men all the world
over, the meaning of that hymn became much too plain.
Except for this outbreak we were not very pious. There was a boy who had
to tell stories night after night in the Dormitory, and when his stock
ran out he fell back on a book called “Eric, or Little by Little,” as
comic literature, and read it till the gas was turned off. The boys
laughed abominably, and there was some attempt to give selections from
it at the meeting of the Reading Society. That was quashed by authority
because it was against discipline.
There were no public-houses near us except tap-rooms that sold cider;
and raw Devonshire cider can only be drunk after a long and very hot
paper-chase. We hardly ever saw, and certainly never spoke to, anything
in the nature of a woman from one year’s end to the other; for our
masters were all unmarried. Later on, a little colony of mothers came
down to live near the School, but their sons were day-boys who couldn’t
do this and mustn’t do that, and there was a great deal too much
dressing up on weekdays and going out to tea, and things of that kind,
which, whatever people say nowadays, are not helpful for boys at work.
Our masters, luckily, were never gushing. They did not call us Dickie or
Johnnie or Tommy, but Smith or Thompson; and when we were undoubtedly
bad we were actually and painfully beaten with an indubitable cane on a
veritable back till we wept unfeigned tears. Nobody seemed to think that
it brutalized our finer feelings, but everybody was relieved when the
trouble was over.
Canes, especially when they are brought down with a drawing stroke,
sting like hornets; but they are a sound cure for certain offences; and
a cut or two, given with no malice, but as a reminder, can correct and
keep corrected a false quantity or a wandering mind, more completely
than any amount of explanation.
There was one boy, however, to whom every Latin quantity was an
arbitrary mystery, and he wound up his crimes by suggesting that he
could do better if Latin verse rhymed as decent verse should. He was
given an afternoon’s reflection to purge himself of his contempt; and
feeling certain that he was in for something rather warm, he turned
“_Donec gratus eram_” into pure Devonshire dialect, rhymed, and showed
it up as his contribution to the study of Horace.
He was let off, and his master gave him the run of a big library, where
he found as much verse and prose as he wanted; but that ruined his Latin
verses and made him write verses of his own. There he found all the
English poets from Chaucer to Matthew Arnold, and a book called
“Imaginary Conversations” which he did not understand, but it seemed to
be a good thing to imitate. So he imitated and was handed up to the
Head, who said that he had better learn Russian under his own eye, so
that if ever he were sent to Siberia for lampooning the authorities he
might be able to ask for things.
That meant the run of another library—English Dramatists this time;
hundreds of old plays; as well as thick brown books of voyages told in
language like the ringing of bells. And the Head would sometimes tell
him about the manners and customs of the Russians, and sometimes about
his own early days at college, when several people who afterwards became
great, were all young, and the Head was young with them, and they wrote
wonderful things in college magazines.
It was beautiful and cheap—dirt cheap, at the price of a permanent load
of impositions, for neglecting mathematics and algebra.
The School started a Natural History Society, which took the birds and
plants of North Devon under its charge, reporting first flowerings and
first arrivals and new discoveries to learned societies in London, and
naturally attracting to itself every boy in the School who had the
poaching instinct.
Some of us made membership an excuse for stealing apples and pheasant
eggs and geese from farmers’ orchards and gentlemen’s estates, and we
were turned out with disgrace. So we spoke scornfully of the Society
ever afterwards. None the less, some of us had our first introduction to
gunpowder in the shape of a charge of salt which stings like bees, fired
at our legs by angry game-keepers.
The institution that caused some more excitement was the School paper.
Three of the boys, who had moved up the School side by side for four
years and were allies in all things, started the notion as soon as they
came to the dignity of a study of their own with a door that would lock.
The other two told the third boy what to write, and held the staircase
against invaders.
It was a real printed paper of eight pages, and at first the printer was
more thoroughly ignorant of type-setting, and the Editor was more
completely ignorant of proof-reading, than any printer and any Editor
that ever was. It was printed off by a gas engine; and even the engine
despised its work, for one day it fell through the floor of the shop,
and crashed—still working furiously—into the cellar.
The paper came out at odd times and seasons, but every time it came out
there was sure to be trouble, because the Editor was learning for the
first time how sweet and good and profitable it is—and how nice it looks
on the page—to make fun of people in actual print.
For instance, there was friction among the study-fags once, and the
Editor wrote a descriptive account of the Lower School,—the classes
whence the fags were drawn,—their manners and customs, their ways of
cooking half-plucked sparrows and imperfectly cleaned blackbirds at the
gas-jets on a rusty nib, and their fights over sloe-jam made in a
gallipot. It was an absolutely truthful article, but the Lower School
knew nothing about truth, and would not even consider it as literature.
It is less safe to write a study of an entire class than to discuss
individuals one by one; but apart from the fact that boys throw books
and inkpots with a straighter eye, there is very little difference
between the language of grown-up people and that of children.
In those days the Editor had not learned this; so when the study below
the Editorial study threw coal at the Editorial legs and kicked in the
panels of the door, because of personal paragraphs in the last number,
the Editorial Staff—and there never was so loyal and hard-fighting a
staff—fried fat bacon till there was half an inch of grease in the pan,
and let the greasy chunks down at the end of a string to bob against and
defile the lower study windows.
When that lower study—and there never was a public so low and
unsympathetic as that lower study—looked out to see what was frosting
their window-panes, the Editorial Staff emptied the hot fat on their
heads, and it stayed in their hair for days and days, wearing shiny to
the very last.
The boy who suggested this sort of warfare was then reading a sort of
magazine, called _Fors Clavigera_, which he did not in the least
understand,—it was not exactly a boy’s paper,—and when the lower study
had scraped some of the fat off their heads and were thundering with
knobby pokers on the door-lock, this boy began to chant pieces of the
_Fors_ as a war-song, and to show that his mind was free from low
distractions. He was an extraordinary person, and the only boy in the
School who had a genuine contempt for his masters. There was no
affectation in his quiet insolence. He honestly _did_ despise them; and
threats that made us all wince only caused him to put his head a little
on one side and watch the master as a sort of natural curiosity.
The worst of this was that his allies had to take their share of his
punishments, for they lived as communists and socialists hope to live
one day, when everybody is good. They were bad, as bad as they dared to
be, but their possessions were in common, absolutely. And when “the
Study” was out of funds they took the most respectable clothes in
possession of the Syndicate, and leaving the owner one Sunday and one
week-day suit, sold the rest in Bideford town. Later, when there was
another crisis, it was _not_ the respectable one’s watch that was taken
by force for the good of the Study and pawned, and never redeemed.
Later still, money came into the Syndicate honestly, for a London paper
that did not know with whom it was dealing, published and paid a whole
guinea for some verses that one of the boys had written and sent up
under a nom-de-plume, and the Study caroused on chocolate and condensed
milk and pilchards and Devonshire cream, and voted poetry a much sounder
business than it looks.
So things went on very happily till the three were seriously warned that
they must work in earnest, and stop giving amateur performances of
“Aladdin” and writing librettos of comic operas which never came off,
and worrying their house-masters into grey hairs.
Then they all grew very good, and one of them got into the Army; and
another—the Irish one—became an engineer, and the third one found
himself on a daily paper half a world away from the Pebble-ridge and the
sea-beach. The three swore eternal friendship before they parted, and
from time to time they met boys of their year in India, and magnified
the honour of the old School.
The boys are scattered all over the world, one to each degree of land
east and west, as their fathers were before them, doing much the same
kind of work; and it is curious to notice how little the character of
the man differs from that of the boy of sixteen or seventeen.
The general and commander-in-chief of the Study, he who suggested
selling the clothes, never lost his head even when he and his friends
were hemmed round by the enemy—the Drill Sergeant—far out of bounds and
learning to smoke under a hedge. He was sick and dizzy, but he rose to
the occasion, took command of his forces, and by strategic manœuvres
along dry ditches and crawlings through tall grass, outflanked the enemy
and got into safe ground without losing one man of the three.
A little later, when he was a subaltern in India, he was bitten by a mad
dog, went to France to be treated by Pasteur, and came out again in the
heat of the hot weather to find himself almost alone in charge of six
hundred soldiers, and his Drill Sergeant dead and his office clerk run
away, leaving the Regimental books in the most ghastly confusion. Then
we happened to meet; and as he was telling his story there was just the
same happy look on his face as when he steered us down the lanes with
the certainty of a superior thrashing if we were caught.
And there were others who went abroad with their men, and when they got
into tight places behaved very much as they had behaved at foot-ball.
The boy who used to take flying jumps on to the ball and roll over and
over with it, because he was big and fat and could not run, took a
flying jump onto a Burmese dacoit whom he had surprised by night in a
stockade; but he forgot that he was much heavier than he had been at
School, and by the time he rolled off his victim the little dacoit was
stone dead.
And there was a boy who was always being led astray by bad advice, and
begging off punishment on that account. He got into some little scrape
when he grew up, and we who knew him knew, before he was reprimanded by
his commanding officer, exactly what his excuse would be. It came out
almost word for word as he was used to whimper it at School. He was
cured, though by being sent off on a small expedition where he alone
would be responsible for any advice that was going, as well as for fifty
soldiers.
And the best boy of all—he was really good, not book good—was shot in
the thigh as he was leading his men up the ramp of a fortress. All he
said was, “Put me up against that tree and take my men on”; and when the
men came back he was dead.
Ages and ages ago, when Queen Victoria was shot at by a man in the
street, the School paper made some verses about it that ended like this:
One school of many, made to make
Men who shall hold it dearest right
To battle for their ruler’s sake,
And stake their being in the fight,
Sends greeting, humble and sincere,
Though verse be rude and poor and mean,
To you, the greatest as most dear,
Victoria, by God’s Grace, our Queen!
Such greetings as should come from those
Whose fathers faced the Sepoy hordes,
Or served you in the Russian snows
And dying, left their sons their swords.
For we are bred to do your will
By land and sea, wherever flies
The Flag to fight and follow still,
And work your empire’s destinies.
Once more we greet you, though unseen
Our greetings be, and coming slow.
Trust us, if need arise, O Queen!
We shall not tarry with the blow.
And there are one or two places in the world that can bear witness how
the School kept its word.
A COUNTING-OUT SONG
What is the song the children sing
When doorway lilacs bloom in Spring,
And the Schools are loosed, and the games are played
That were deadly earnest when Earth was made?
Hear them chattering, shrill and hard,
After dinner-time, out in the yard,
As the sides are chosen and all submit
To the chance of the lot that shall make them “It.”
(Singing) “_Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!
Catch a nigger by the toe!
If he hollers let him go
Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!
You—are—It!_”
Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, and Mo
Were the First Big Four of the Long Ago,
When the Pole of the Earth sloped thirty degrees,
And Central Europe began to freeze,
And they needed Ambassadors staunch and stark
To steady the Tribes in the gathering dark:
But the frost was fierce and flesh was frail,
So they launched a Magic that could not fail.
(Singing) “_Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!
Hear the wolves across the snow!
Someone has to kill ’em—so
Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo
Make—you—It!_”
Slowly the Glacial Epoch passed,
Central Europe thawed out at last;
And, under the slush of the melting snows,
The first dim shapes of the Nations rose.
Rome, Britannia, Belgium, Gaul—
Flood and avalanche fathered them all;
And the First Big Four, as they watched the mess,
Pitied Man in his helplessness.
(Singing) “_Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!
Trouble starts when Nations grow.
Someone has to stop it—so
Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo
Make—you—It!_”
Thus it happened, but none can tell
What was the Power behind the spell—
Fear, or Duty, or Pride, or Faith—
That sent men shuddering out to death—
To cold and watching, and, worse than these,
Work, more work, when they looked for ease—
To the day’s discomfort, the night’s despair,
In the hope of a prize that they never would share.
(Singing) “_Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!
Man is born to toil and woe.
One will cure the other—so
Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo
Make—you—It._”
Once and again, as the Ice went North
The grass crept up to the Firth of Forth.
Once and again, as the Ice came South
The glaciers ground over Lossiemouth.
But, grass or glacier, cold or hot,
Men went out who would rather not,
And fought with the Tiger, the Pig and the Ape,
To hammer the world into decent shape.
(Singing) “_Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!
What’s the use of doing so?
Ask the Gods, for we don’t know;
But Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo
Make—us—It!_”
Nothing is left of that terrible rune
But a tag of gibberish tacked to a tune
That ends the waiting and settles the claims
Of children arguing over their games;
For never yet has a boy been found
To shirk his turn when the turn came round;
Or even a girl has been known to say
“If you laugh at me I sha’n’t play.”
For— “_Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo,
Don’t you let the grown-ups know!
You may hate it ever so,
But if you’re chose you’re bound to go,
When Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo
Make—you—It!_”
THE END
-----
Footnote 1:
Pack your kit and trek, Ferriera,
Pack your kit and trek.
A long pull, all on one side,
Johnnie with the lame leg.
Footnote 2:
Beaten.
Footnote 3:
Red necks—English soldiers.
Footnote 4:
Remember, the Chinaman generally says “l” for “r.”
Footnote 5:
A kind of sticky sweatmeat.
Footnote 6:
Bordeaux snails are specially large and sweet.
Footnote 7:
They grill pigs’-feet still at St. Menehoulde, not far from Verdun,
better than anywhere else in all France.
Footnote 8:
Gone—to get pâtés of ducks’ liver at Toulouse; fatted poultry at Bourg
in Bresse, on the road to Geneva; and very large chestnuts in sugar at
Carcassonne about forty miles from Toulouse.
Footnote 9:
This would probably be some sort of wild boar ham from Germany.
Footnote 10:
Expensive.
Footnote 11:
Beaten up.
Footnote 12:
Sneer or despise.
Footnote 13:
Brings him to table.
Footnote 14:
Starve.
Footnote 15:
The Pope himself, who depends on his cook for being healthy and
well-fed.
Footnote 16:
Dispute or argument.
Footnote 17:
Men are influenced by their cooks as ships are steered by their
rudders.
Footnote 18:
Never mind.
Footnote 19:
Ithuriel was that Archangel whose spear had the magic property of
showing everyone exactly and truthfully what he was.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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