Soldiers Three - Part 2

“Yes, they shall be released for your sake, little Judson of my heart.” Then they drank the health of their respective sovereigns, while Mr. Davies superintended the removal of the scarred plank and the shot-marks on the deck and the bow-plates.

“Oh, this is too bad,” said Judson when they went on deck. “That idiot has exceeded his instructions, but — but yow must let me pay for this!”

Mr. Davies, his legs in the water as he sat on a staging slung over the bows, was acutely conscious that he was being blamed in a foreign tongue. He smiled uneasily, and went on with his work.

“What is it?” said the Governor.

“That thick-head has thought that we needed some gold-leaf, and he has borrowed that from your storeroom, but I must make it good.” Then in English, “Stand up, Mr. Davies. What the — in — do you mean by taking their gold-leaf? My — , are we a set of pirates to scrape the guts out of a Levantine bumboat? Look contrite, you butt-ended, broad-breeched, bottle-bellied, swivel-eyed son of a tinker, you! My Soul alive, can’t I maintain discipline in my own ship without a blacksmith of a boiler-riveter putting me to shame before a yellow-nosed picaroon. Get off the staging, Mr. Davies, and go to the engine-room. Put down that leaf first, though, and leave the books where they are. I’ll send for you in a minute. Go aft!”

Now, only the upper half of Mr. Davies’s round face was above the bulwarks when this torrent of abuse descended upon him; and it rose inch by inch as the shower continued: blank amazement, bewilderment, rage, and injured pride chasing each other across it till he saw his superior officer’s left eyelid flutter on the cheek twice. Then he fled to the engine-room, and wiping his brow with a handful of cotton-waste, sat down to overtake circumstances.

“I am desolated,” said Judson to his companions, “but you see the material that you give us. This leaves me more in your debt than before. The stuff I can replace” (gold-leaf is never carried on floating gun-platforms), “but for the insolence of that man how shall I apologise?”

Mr. Davies’s mind moved slowly, but after a while he transferred the cotton-waste from his forehead to his mouth and bit on it to prevent laughter. He began a second dance on the engine-room plates. “Neat! Oh, damned neat!” he chuckled. “I’ve served with a good few, but there never was one so neat as him. And I thought he was the new kind that don’t know how to put a few words, as it were!”

“Mr. Davies, you can continue your work,” said Judson down the engine-room hatch. “These officers have been good enough to speak in your favour. Make a thorough job of it while you are about it. Slap on every man you have. Where did you get hold of it?”

“Their storeroom is a regular theatre, sir. You couldn’t miss it. There’s enough for two first-rates, and I’ve scoffed the best half of it.”

“Look sharp, then. We shall be coaling from her this afternoon. You’ll have to cover it all.”

“Neat! Oh, damned neat!” said Mr. Davies under his breath, as he gathered his subordinates together, and set about accomplishing the long-deferred wish of Judson’s heart.

It was the “Martin Frobisher”, the flag-ship, a great war-boat when she was new, in the days when men built for sail as well as for steam. She could turn twelve knots under full sail, and it was under that that she stood up the mouth of the river, a pyramid of silver beneath the moon. The Admiral, fearing that he had given Judson a task beyond his strength, was coming to look for him, and incidentally to do a little diplomatic work along the coast. There was hardly wind enough to move the “Frobisher” a couple of knots an hour, and the silence of the land closed about her as she entered the fairway. Her yards sighed a little from time to time, and the ripple under her bows answered the sigh. The full moon rose over the steaming swamps, and the Admiral, gazing upon it, thought less of Judson and more of the softer emotions. In answer to the very mood of his mind, there floated across the silver levels of the water, mellowed by distance to a most poignant sweetness, the throb of a mandolin, and the voice of one who called upon a genteel Julia — upon Julia, and upon love. The song ceased, and the sighing of the yards was all that broke the silence of the big ship.

Again the mandolin began, and the commander on the lee side of the quarter-deck grinned a grin that was reflected in the face of the signal-midshipman. Not a word of the song was lost, and the voice of the singer was the voice of Judson.

“Last week down our alley came a toff,
Nice old geyser with a nasty cough,
Sees my missus, takes his topper off,
Quite in a gentlemanly way “ —

and so on to the end of the verse. The chorus was borne by several voices, and the signal-midshipman’s foot began to tap the deck furtively.

“‘What cheer!’ all the neighbours cried.
‘’Oo are you going to meet, Bill?
‘Ave you bought the street, Bill?’
Laugh? — I thought I should ha’ died
When I knocked ‘em in the old Kent Road.”

It was the Admiral’s gig, rowing softly, that came into the midst of that merry little smoking-concert. It was Judson, the beribboned mandolin round his neck, who received the Admiral as he came up the side of the “Guadala”, and it may or may not have been the Admiral who stayed till two in the morning and delighted the hearts of the Captain and the Governor. He had come as an unbidden guest, and he departed as an honoured one, but strictly unofficial throughout. Judson told his tale next day in the Admiral’s cabin as well as he could in the face of the Admiral’s gales of laughter, but the most amazing tale was that told by Mr. Davies to his friends in the dockyard at Simon’s Town from the point of view of a second-class engine-room artificer, all unversed in diplomacy.

And if there be no truth either in my tale, which is Judson’s tale, or the tale of Mr. Davies, you will not find in harbour at Simon’s Town to-day a flat-bottomed twin-screw gunboat, designed solely for the defence of rivers, about two hundred and seventy tons’ displacement and five feet draught, wearing in open defiance of the rules of the Service a gold line on her gray paint. It follows also that you will be compelled to credit that version of the fray which, signed by His Excellency the Governor and despatched in the “Guadala”, satisfied the self-love of a great and glorious people, and saved a monarchy from the ill-considered despotism which is called a Republic.

A CONFERENCE OF THE POWERS

Life liveth but in life, and doth not roam
To other lands if all be well at home:
“Solid as ocean foam,” quoth ocean foam.

The room was blue with the smoke of three pipes and a cigar. The leave-season had opened in India, and the first-fruits on this side of the water were “Tick” Boileau, of the 45th Bengal Cavalry, who called on me, after three years’ absence, to discuss old things which had happened. Fate, who always does her work handsomely, sent up the same staircase within the same hour The Infant, fresh from Upper Burma, and he and Boileau looking out of my window saw walking in the street one Nevin, late in a Goorkha regiment which had been through the Black Mountain Expedition. They yelled to him to come up, and the whole Street was aware that they desired him to come up, and he came up, and there followed Pandemonium in my room because we had foregathered from the ends of the earth, and three of us were on a holiday, and none of us were twenty-five, and all the delights of all London lay waiting our pleasure.

Boileau took the only other chair, The Infant, by right of his bulk, the sofa; and Nevin, being a little man, sat cross-legged on the top of the revolving bookcase, and we all said, “Who’d ha’ thought it!” and “What are you doing here?” till speculation was exhausted and the talk went over to inevitable “shop.” Boileau was full of a great scheme for winning a military attache-ship at St. Petersburg; Nevin had hopes of the Staff College, and The Infant had been moving heaven and earth and the Horse Guards for a commission in the Egyptian army.

“What’s the use o’ that?” said Nevin, twirling round on the bookcase.

“Oh, heaps! ‘Course if you get stuck with a Fellaheen regiment, you’re sold; but if you are appointed to a Soudanese lot, you’re in clover. They are first-class fighting-men — and just think of the eligible central position of Egypt in the next row!”

This was putting the match to a magazine. We all began to explain the Central Asian question off-hand, flinging army corps from the Helmund to Kashmir with more than Russian recklessness. Each of the boys made for himself a war to his own liking, and when we had settled all the details of Armageddon, killed all our senior officers, handled a division apiece, and nearly torn the atlas in two in attempts to explain our theories, Boileau needs must lift up his voice above the clamour, and cry, “Anyhow it’ll be the hell of a row!” in tones that carried conviction far down the staircase.

Entered, unperceived in the smoke, William the Silent. “Gen’elman to see you, sir,” said he, and disappeared, leaving in his stead none other than Mr. Eustace Cleever. William would have introduced the Dragon of Wantley with equal disregard of present company.

“I — I beg your pardon. I didn’t know that there was anybody — with you. — ”

But it was not seemly to allow Mr. Cleever to depart; he was a great man. The boys remained where they were, for any movement would have choked up the little room. Only when they saw his gray hairs they stood on their feet, and when The Infant caught the name, he said:

“Are you — did you write that book called ‘As it was in the Beginning’?”

Mr. Cleever admitted that he had written the book.

“Then — then I don’t know how to thank you, sir,” said The Infant, flushing pink. “I was brought up in the country you wrote about — all my people live there; and I read the book in camp on the Hlinedatalone, and I knew every stick and stone, and the dialect too; and, by Jove! it was just like being at home and hearing the country people talk. Nevin, you know ‘As it was in the Beginning’? So does Ti — Boileau.”

Mr. Cleever has tasted as much praise, public and private, as one man may safely swallow; but it seemed to me that the outspoken admiration in The Infant’s eyes and the little stir in the little company came home to him very nearly indeed.

“Won’t you take the sofa?” said The Infant. “I’ll sit on Boileau’s chair, and — ” here he looked at me to spur me to my duties as a host; but I was watching the novelist’s face. Cleever had not the least intention of going away, but settled himself on the sofa.

Following the first great law of the Army, which says “all property is common except money, and you’ve only got to ask the next man for that,” The Infant offered tobacco and drink. It was the least he could do; but not the most lavish praise in the world held half as much appreciation and reverence as The Infant’s simple “Say when, sir,” above the long glass.

Cleever said “when,” and more thereto, for he was a golden talker, and he sat in the midst of hero-worship devoid of all taint of self-interest. The boys asked him of the birth of his book, and whether it was hard to write, and how his notions came to him; and he answered with the same absolute simplicity as he was questioned. His big eyes twinkled, he dug his long thin hands into his gray beard and tugged it as he grew animated. He dropped little by little from the peculiar pinching of the broader vowels — the indefinable “euh,” that runs through the speech of the pundit caste — and the elaborate choice of words, to freely-mouthed “ows” and “ois,” and, for him at least, unfettered colloquialisms. He could not altogether understand the boys, who hung upon his words so reverently. The line of the chin-strap, that still showed white and untanned on cheekbone and jaw, the steadfast young eyes puckered at the corners of the lids with much staring through red-hot sunshine, the slow, untroubled breathing, and the curious, crisp, curt speech seemed to puzzle him equally. He could create men and women, and send them to the uttermost ends of the earth, to help, delight, and comfort; he knew every mood of the fields, and could interpret them to the cities, and he knew the hearts of many in city and country, but he had hardly, in forty years, come into contact with the thing which is called a Subaltern of the Line. He told the boys this in his own way.

“Well, how should you?” said The Infant. “You — you’re quite different, y’ see, sir.”

The Infant expressed his ideas in his tone rather than his words, but Cleever understood the compliment.

“We’re only Subs,” said Nevin, “and we aren’t exactly the sort of men you’d meet much in your life, I s’pose.”

“That’s true,” said Cleever. “I live chiefly among men who write, and paint, and sculp, and so forth. We have our own talk and our own interests, and the outer world doesn’t trouble us much.”

“That must be awfully jolly,” said Boileau, at a venture. “We have our own shop, too, but ‘tisn’t half as interesting as yours, of course. You know all the men who’ve ever done anything; and we only knock about from place to place, and we do nothing.”

“The Army’s a very lazy profession if you choose to make it so,” said Nevin. “When there’s nothing going on, there is nothing going on, and you lie up.”

“Or try to get a billet somewhere, to be ready for the next show,” said The Infant with a chuckle.

“To me,” said Cleever softly, “the whole idea of warfare seems so foreign and unnatural, so essentially vulgar, if I may say so, that I can hardly appreciate your sensations. Of course, though, any change from idling in garrison towns must be a godsend to you.”

Like many home-staying Englishmen, Cleever believed that the newspaper phrase he quoted covered the whole duty of the Army whose toils enabled him to enjoy his many-sided life in peace. The remark was not a happy one, for Boileau had just come off the Frontier, The Infant had been on the warpath for nearly eighteen months, and the little red man Nevin two months before had been sleeping under the stars at the peril of his life. But none of them tried to explain, till I ventured to point out that they had all seen service and were not used to idling. Cleever took in the idea slowly.

“Seen service?” said he. Then, as a child might ask, “Tell me. Tell me everything about everything.”