OUR CASUALTY AND OTHER STORIES
By G. A. Birmingham
I ~~ OUR CASUALTY
There is not in the whole British
Isles a more efficient military body than the Ballyhaine Veterans’ Corps. The
men look like soldiers when they have their grey uniforms on and their
brassards on their sleeves. They talk like soldiers. They have the true
military spirit. There is not a man in the company under fifty years of age,
but if the Germans attempt a landing on the Ballyhaine beach, by submarine or
otherwise, they will be sorry for themselves afterwards—those of them who
remain alive.
Ballyhaine is a residential
suburb, entirely built over with villas of the better kind. Each villa has its
garden. In times of peace we discuss sweet peas or winter spinach or
chrysanthemums on our way into town in the morning, travelling, as most of us
do, by the 9.45 train, with season tickets, first class.
When our boys went off from us,
as they all did early in the war, we felt that it was time for us to do
something too. There was not the least difficulty about enrolling the men. We
all joined the corps, even poor old Cotter, who must be close on seventy, and
who retired from business three years ago. He used to bore us all by talking
about his rheumatism, but when the Volunteer Corps was formed he dropped all
that, and went about saying that he had never suffered from pain or ache in his
life, and could do twenty miles a day without feeling it. We made Cotter a
corporal.
Our Commanding Officer is Haines,
who plays the best hand at bridge of any man in the club. He held a commission
in a line regiment before he went on the Stock Exchange. That was thirty-five
years ago, and it is not to be supposed that his knowledge of soldiering is
up-to-date, but he is the only one of us who has any knowledge of soldiering at
all, so we chose him.
The women were a difficulty at
first. They insisted on regarding us as a joke, and used to repeat the absurd
witticism of the street boys. I heard Janet say “Methusaleers” one day. She
denied it, but I am perfectly certain she did not say “Fusiliers,” My wife
fussed about dry socks and wanted me to take my umbrella on a route march one
wet Sunday.
Every other member of the corps
had similar experiences. It was Tompkins who hit on a way of dealing
satisfactorily with the women. Tompkins is our local doctor. He stays in
Ballyhaine all day long when the rest of us go up to town, so he naturally
knows a good deal about women. He enrolled them in a volunteer ambulance
brigade, and after that they were just as keen as any of us. We did the thing
handsomely for them. We bought six stretchers, a small motor ambulance waggon,
and some miles of bandages. Janet and Cotter’s youngest girl carried one of the
stretchers. I should not like to say that my wife actually hoped I should be
wounded, but I think she would have liked the chance of bandaging any other man
in the corps. The rest of the women felt as she did.
The drawback to Ballyhaine as a
centre of military activity is the difficulty of finding a place for practising
field manoeuvres. There is the golf links, of course, but we got tired of
marching round and round the golf links, and we did not want to dig trenches
there. Haines, who does not play golf, drew up a plan of trench digging which
would have ruined the golf links for years. But we would not have that. Nor
could we dig in each other’s gardens, or practise advancing over open country
in skirmishing order when there was no open country. The whole district is a
network of high walls with broken glass on top of them, a form of defence
rendered necessary by the attacks of small boys on our fruit trees.
Fortunately, we had the sea
beach. The strand—there are three miles of it—is one of the glories of
Ballyhaine. We did most of our manoeuvring there and dug our trenches there.
Haines was opposed to this plan at first.
“If the Germans come at all,”
said Cotter, “they’ll come from the sea. They must, this being an island.”
“Of course,” said Haines.
“Then,” said Cotter, “the beach
is the place where we shall have to meet them, and the strand is where our trenches
ought to be.”
There was no answering that
argument. Even Haines gave way.
“With barbed wire entanglements,”
said Cotter, “down to the water’s edge.”
The weather round about
Christmas-time was extraordinarily severe in Ballyhaine. We came in for a series
of gales, accompanied by driving rain, and the days at that time of year are so
short that most of our soldiering had to be done in the dark.
I got one cold after another, and
so did every other member of the corps. Poor old Cotter limped pitifully on
parade, but he did not say a word about rheumatism. The spirit of the men was
splendid, and not one of us showed a sign of shirking, though Haines kept us at
it with ferocity.
Haines varied the digging by
making us practise a horrible manoeuvre called “relieving trenches.” This was
always done in the middle of the night, between twelve and one o’clock. Part of
the corps went out early—about 10.30 p.m.—and manned the trenches. The rest of
us marched forth at midnight and relieved them.
The worst evening we had all
winter was December 8th. It was blowing terrifically from the south-east The
sea was tumbling in on the beach in enormous waves, fringing the whole line of
the shore with a broad stretch of white foam. The rain swept over the country
pitilessly. I came out of town by the 5.10 train, and called at the club on my
way home. I found a notice posted up:
“Ballyhaine Veterans’ Corps.
“Tonight, December the 8th,
trenches will be relieved at 12 midnight. No. 1 and No. 2 Platoons to parade at
10.30, march to north end of the strand, and occupy trenches.”
That meant a six-mile march for
those platoons—three there and three back.
“No. 3 and No. 4 Platoons to
parade at 11 p.m., march to cliffs, descend rocks, and relieve trenches as soon
as possible after midnight.”
I am in No. 3 Platoon, and I
confess I shuddered. The rocks at the north end of the beach are abominably
slippery. A year ago I should have hesitated about climbing down in broad
daylight in the finest weather. My military training had done a good deal for
me physically, but I still shrank from those rocks at midnight with a tempest
howling round me.
When I reached home I put a good
face on the matter. I was not going to admit to my wife or Janet—particularly
to Janet—that I was afraid of night operations in any weather.
“Please have my uniform left out
for me,” I said, “I shall put it on before dinner.”
“Surely,” said my wife, “you’re
not going out to-night? I don’t think you ought to.”
“Duty, my dear,” I said.
“Just fancy,” said Janet, “if the
Germans came and father wasn’t there! We might be murdered in our beds!”
I am sometimes not quite sure
whether Janet means to scoff or is in serious earnest On this occasion I was
inclined to think that she was poking fun at the Veterans’ Corps. I frowned at
her.
“You’ll get dreadfully wet,” said
my wife.
“Not the least harm in that,” I
said cheerily.
“It’ll give you another cold in
your head,” said Janet
This time she was certainly
sneering. I frowned again.
“Of course,” said my wife, “it
won’t matter to you. You’re so strong and healthy. Nothing does you any harm.”
I suspected her of attempting a
subtle form of flattery, but what she said was quite true. I am, for a man of
fifty-three, extremely hardy.
“I’m thinking,” she said, “of
poor old Mr. Cotter. I don’t think he ought to go. Mrs. Cotter was round here
this afternoon. She says he’s suffering dreadfully from rheumatism, though he
won’t admit it, and if he goes out to-night... But he’s so determined, poor old
dear. And she simply can’t stop him.”
“Cotter,” I said, “must stay at
home.”
“But he won’t,” said my wife.
“Military ardour is very strong
in him,” said Janet.
“I’ll ring up Dr. Tompkins,” I
said, “and tell him to forbid Cotter to go out. Tompkins is Medical Officer of
the corps, and has a right to give orders of the kind. In fact, it’s his duty
to see that the company’s not weakened by ill-health.”
“I’m afraid,” said my wife, “that
Dr. Tompkins can do nothing. Mrs. Cotter was with him before she came here. The
fact is that Mr. Cotter won’t give in even to the doctor’s orders.”
I rang up Tompkins and put the
case very strongly to him.
“It will simply kill Cotter,” I
said, “and we can’t have that. He may not be of any very great military value,
but he’s a nice old boy, and we don’t want to lose him.”
Tompkins agreed with me
thoroughly. He said he’d been thinking the matter over since Mrs. Cotter called
on him in the afternoon, and had hit upon a plan which would meet the case.
“If only the C.O. will fall in
with it,” he added.
Haines is in some ways a
difficult man. He likes to manage things his own way, and resents any
suggestions made to him, particularly by men in the ranks. However, Cotter’s
life was at stake, so I undertook to tackle Haines, even at the risk of being
snubbed. Tompkins explained his plan to me. I rang up Haines, and laid it
before him. I put the matter very strongly to him. I even said that the War
Office would probably deprive him of his command if it was discovered that he
had been wasting the lives of his men unnecessarily.
“The country needs us all,” I
said, “even Cotter. After all, Cotter is a non-commissioned officer and a most
valuable man. Besides, it’ll do the Ambulance Brigade a lot of good.”
It was this last consideration
which weighed most with Haines. He had felt for some time that our ambulance
ladies were coming to have too good an opinion of themselves. I had the
satisfaction of going back to the drawing-room and telling Janet that the
stretcher bearers were to parade at eleven o’clock, and march in the rear of
the column—Numbers 3 and 4 Platoons—which went to relieve trenches.
“Rot,” said Janet “We can’t
possibly go out on a night like this.”
“C.O.‘s orders,” I said.
“The stretchers will be utterly
ruined,” she said, “not to mention our hats.”
“C.O.‘s orders,” I said severely.
“If we must go,” said Janet,
“we’ll take the ambulance waggon.
“No, you won’t,” I said. “You’ll
take your stretchers and carry them. Yours not to reason why, Janet. And in any
case you can’t take the ambulance waggon, because we’re marching along the
beach, and you know perfectly well that the strand is simply scored with
trenches. We can’t have the ambulance waggon smashed up. It’s the only one we
have. If a few girls break their legs it doesn’t much matter. There are too many
girls about the place.”
Platoons Numbers 1 and 2 marched
off at 10.30 p.m. in a blinding downpour of rain. We watched them go from the
porch of the golf pavilion, and promised to relieve them as quickly as we
could. We paraded, according to orders, at 11 sharp, and I was glad to see that
Janet and the other girls were wet and draggled long before we started.
Haines made us a short speech. He
had to shout at the top of his voice because the storm was making a dreadful
noise. But we heard what he said. The business of relieving trenches, he told
us, would be carried out under strictly war conditions, precisely as if enemy
submarines were shelling us from the sea. There would necessarily, supposing
the submarines to be actually there, be casualties in our force. Haines told
off four men to act as casualties. The first on the list—this was the way
Tompkins’ plan worked out—was Corporal Cotter.
“Corporal Cotter,” said Haines,
“will drop out of the ranks as the column passes the third bathing-box,
numbering from the south end of the beach, Mrs. Tompkins’ bathing-box, which is
painted bright green.”
Haines was, very properly, most
particular about defining the bathing-box exactly.
“Corporal Cotter and the other
casualties,” said Haines, “will take waterproof ground-sheets with them—two
waterproof ground-sheets each—and keep as dry as possible. The stretcher
bearers will follow the column at a distance of two hundred paces to pick up
the casualties, affording first-aid on the spot, and, on reaching the field
hospital, will apply restoratives under the directions of the Company’s Medical
Officer. For the purposes of these manouvres. Corporal Cotter’s house will be
regarded as the Field Hospital.”
The other three casualties, all
elderly and rather delicate men, were ordered to drop out of the ranks at
places further along the beach. If it was Janet’s luck to reach the furthest
casualty she would walk, carrying a stretcher, about a mile and a half
altogether. When she got home she would be less inclined to sneer at people who
catch cold in the service of their country.
The night was extremely dark. I
do not think I have ever experienced a darker night. We could hear the sea
roaring on our left, and could see, when we looked back, a dim glow here and
there from the windows of our houses; but it was quite impossible to see
anything on the beach.
I missed Cotter when we had been
stumbling along for about a quarter of an hour, and felt glad that he had done
his share. In a minute or so, I hoped, he would be safe on a stretcher, and
half an hour later would be drinking whisky and water, hot. That, so Tompkins
told me, was the restorative which was to be administered to all the
casualties.
We got through the business of
relieving the trenches in the end, though we had a tough struggle. The great
difficulty was to find them. If Platoons Numbers 1 and 2 could have shouted to
us or flashed their electric torches we should have got them much sooner than
we did. But noise and light were strictly forbidden. They would, so Haines said,
attract the enemy’s fire, and result in our being wiped out by shrapnel.
I got separated at one time from
the rest of my platoon, and walked into the sea twice. Afterwards I fell over
the Company Sergeant-Major, who was sitting in a pool beside a rock. He said he
had sprained his ankle. But that turned out not to be true. He had only twisted
it a little, and was able to limp home. In civil life our Company
Sergeant-Major is one of the directors of the Corporate Banking Company Ltd.,
and drives into town in his own motor.
Then I came on Haines, wandering
by himself on a sandhill. He was swearing viciously. It was, indeed, the sound
of his oaths which led me to him. They were not loud, but they were uttered
with an intensity which gave them the power of piercing through the tumult of
the storm. He and I and the Company Sergeant-Major stuck together, and at 1
a.m.—we took the time from Haines’ luminous-faced wrist watch—we suddenly
tumbled into the trench.
We found the whole four platoons
waiting for us; but they would not have waited much longer. The senior Second
Lieutenant—a very well-known solicitor—had taken command of the company,
assuming, as he said, that Haines had become a casualty accidentally. His idea
was to march the men home, and then send the Ambulance Brigade to search for
Haines, the Company Sergeant-Major, and me.
“That’s the sort of thing,” he
said, “an ambulance is for. The men in the fighting line can’t be expected to
do it.”
We marched home in pretty good
order, considering that we were all very wet, greatly exhausted, and many of us
bruised in various parts of our bodies. Our spirit was quite unbroken, and
Haines, writing up the official diary afterwards, said that our moral was
excellent. He did us no more than bare justice. There was not a man among
us—except perhaps the Company Sergeant-Major, whose ankle was swelling up—who
would not have welcomed a German attack.
We got back to the golf pavilion,
and found the whole place in an uproar. Women, all of them very wet, were
rushing about. Tompkins was giving confused and contradictory orders to the
twelve stretcher bearers, who looked cowed and miserable. Mrs. Cotter was
sitting on the floor in a corner of the room crying bitterly. We got the
explanation out of Tompkins at last.
Three of the casualties had, it
appeared, been successfully picked up and carried home. The stretcher bearers
had somehow missed Cotter. Search parties had been sent out. Tompkins himself
had felt his way round each of the fifteen bathing-boxes. The nursing section
of the Ambulance Brigade had waved electric torches and stable lanterns up and
down the beach from the edge of the sea to the sandhills. The stretcher
bearers, scourged by the remarks Tompkins made about their incompetence, had
gone shouting through the storm until they were hoarse and utterly exhausted.
Nothing had been seen or heard of Cotter.
Haines took charge of the
situation at once. He formed up the four platoons, and marched us all back to
the beach. There we assumed open order, and skirmished in a northerly
direction. We were told to keep in touch with each other, and to leave no
square yard of the sand unexamined. We were to go on skirmishing until we found
Cotter, dead or alive. My own idea was that if we found anything it would be
his corpse.
I did my best to obey orders, but
I almost immediately lost touch with everybody else. The other men, so I learnt
afterwards, had the same experience. However, I had the good luck to find
Cotter. He came towards me, indeed he ran into me before I saw him. He was in
charge of a policeman, who held him firmly but kindly by the arm. The moment
Cotter saw me he burst out:
“Tell this infernal fool that I’m
not drunk,” he said.
“If you’re acquainted with the
gentleman,” said the policeman, “it would be well for you to take him home to
his bed. He’s not in a fit state to be out by himself.”
I drove off the policeman with
some difficulty, making myself personally responsible for Cotter’s safety. Then
I questioned the old gentleman.
“What have you been doing?” I
said.
“Waiting for the ambulance. I’d
be waiting still if that ass of a policeman hadn’t insisted that I was drunk
and dragged me away.”
“Good Lord!” I said, “and they’ve
been looking for you for hours.”
“I know that,” said Cotter. “I
saw their lights all over the place and heard them shouting.”
“Then why on earth didn’t you
shout back and let them know where you were?”
“Casualties don’t shout,” said
Cotter. “They can’t. They’re too weak. I groaned occasionally; but I suppose
they didn’t hear me.”
“And how long did you mean to lie
out in this storm?” I said.
“Till the stretcher bearers found
me,” said Cotter. “Those were the C.O.‘s orders.”
I do not know whether any medals
will be given to volunteers after the war. Cotter certainly deserves one. I
have never heard a finer story of devotion to duty than his. When I had got rid
of the policeman he actually wanted to go back and lie down again.
II ~~ GETTING EVEN
The battalion awaited its orders
to embark for France. A feeling of expectation, a certain nervousness, a
half-pleasurable excitement, prevailed in the officers’ mess and among the men.
No one thought of service in France as a picnic, or anticipated a good time in
the trenches. But there was a general sense of relief that the period of
training—a long, tiresome, very dull business—was over at last over or almost
over. For the Colonel and certain remote authorities behind the Colonel
believed in working the battalion hard up to the last moment. Therefore day
after day there were “stunts” and “shows,” field exercises of every conceivable
kind. The weather was hot, as hot as weather ought to be in the first week of
August Long marches became dusty horrors to the men. Manouvres meant hours of
desperate toil. Officers thought longingly of bygone summers, of the cool shade
of trees, of tennis played in white flannels, of luscious plates of
strawberries and cream. The Colonel, an old soldier, went on inventing new
“stunts” and more of them. He had laboured at the training of his battalion,
hammering raw boys into disciplined men, inspiring subalterns with something of
his own spirit.
On the whole he had been
successful. The men sweated, but grumbled very little. The officers kept up a
gallant pretence at keenness. Slackness was regarded as bad form, and only one
member of the mess made no secret of his opinion that the Colonel was overdoing
the “spit and polish” business. This was McMahon, the medical officer; and he
did not, properly speaking, belong to the battalion at all. Men and officers
alike were drawn for the most part from the English midlands. McMahon was an
Irishman. They were born with a sense of discipline and the Colonel worked on
material responsive to his methods. McMahon, like most Irishmen, was by
temperament a rebel. Yet there was no more popular officer than the Irish
doctor. His frank good humour, his ready wit, his unfailing kindliness, won him
affection. Even the Colonel liked him, and bore from McMahon behaviour which
would have led to the sharp snubbing of anyone else.
There came a day—the 6th of
August—for which the Colonel, or some higher authority, devised a “stunt” of
the most intense and laborious kind. A very great and remote man, the General
in command of the whole district, promised to be present and to witness the
performance. Orders were issued in minute detail, and every officer was
expected to be familiar with them. Maps were studied conscientiously. Field
glasses were polished. Rations were served out. Kits were inspected. The affair
was an attack upon a hill supposed to be strongly held by an enemy well
provided with machine-guns.
A genuine excitement possessed
the battalion. This, so it was felt, was very like the real thing. Just so,
some day in France, would an advance be made and great glory won. McMahon alone
remained cheerfully indifferent to the energetic fussiness which prevailed.
The day dawned cloudless with
promise of intense heat. Very early, after a hurried and insufficient
breakfast, B Company marched out. It was the business of B Company to take up a
position south of the enemy’s hill, to harass the foe with flanking fire and at
the proper moment to rush certain machine-gun posts. B Company had some ten
miles to march before reaching its appointed place. McMahon gave it as his
opinion that B Company would be incapable of rushing anything when it had
marched ten miles in blistering heat and had lain flat for an hour or two in a
shadeless field. A party of cooks, with a travelling kitchen, followed B
Company. McMahon said that if the cooks were sensible men they would lose their
way and come to a halt in a wood, not far from a stream. He added that he was
himself very sensible and had already fixed on the wood, about a mile from the
scene of the attack, where he intended to spend the day, with a novel.
The other three companies, the
Lewis gunners, and a battery of Stokes gun men, attached to the battalion for
the attack, marched out later, under the command of the Colonel himself.
Cyclist scouts scoured the roads ahead of the advance. McMahon, accompanied by
an orderly, marched in the rear and complained greatly of the dust. A Brigadier
appeared in a motor and cast a critical eye on the men. Two officers in staff
caps, understood to be umpires, rode by.
At noon, the heat being then very
great, a motor cyclist dashed up, his machine snorting horribly, the man
himself plastered with dust, sweat and oil. He announced that the battalion was
under heavy fire from the enemy artillery and that men were falling fast. The
Brigadier had sent an urgent message to that effect. The Colonel, who rather
expected that something of the sort would occur, gave the orders necessary in
such a situation. The men opened out into artillery formation and advanced, by
a series of short rushes, to take cover in some trenches, supposed to have been
abandoned, very conveniently, by the enemy the day before. The Brigadier,
seated in his motor-car in a wood on a neighbouring hill, watched the operation
through his field glasses, munched a sandwich, and enjoyed a glass of sherry
from his flask. McMahon, for whom short rushes in artillery formation had no
attractions at all, slipped through a hedge, skirted a field of ripening oats,
and settled himself very comfortably under a beech tree on the edge of a small
wood. His orderly followed him and laid down a large package on the grass
beside the doctor. The Colonel, an enthusiastic realist, had insisted that
McMahon should bring with him a supply of surgical instruments, dressings and
other things necessary for dealing with wounds. McMahon opened the package. He
took out a novel, a tin of tobacco, a great many packages of cigarettes, two
bottles of soda water, two lemons and several parcels of food.
“This,” he said to the orderly, “is
the advanced dressing station. When the casualties begin to arrive, we shall be
ready for them.”
The Brigadier sent another motor
cyclist to say that the battalion would be wiped out if it stayed where it was.
He suggested a move to the right and an attempt to get into touch with B
Company.
The Brigadier, though he drove in
a motor-car, was feeling the heat. If a direct advance had been made on the
hill from where the battalion lay he would have been obliged to drive out of
his wood in order to keep the battle in view. A move to the right could be
watched comfortably from where he sat The Colonel explained the situation, not
the Brigadier’s feelings, to his officers, exposing himself with reckless
gallantry as he passed from company to company. He said that he himself would
survey the ground to the right and would try to discover the exact position of
B Company.
“I shall,” he said to the
Adjutant, “climb a tree so as to get a good view.”
The Adjutant remonstrated. He
thought the Colonel was too old a man for climbing trees. He recommended that a
subaltern, a Second Lieutenant whom nobody would miss much if he fell, should
be sent up the tree. The suggestion, as the Adjutant might have guessed, made
the Colonel more determined and slightly exasperated him.
He gave orders that the Stokes
gunners should shell the enemy while he climbed the tree. The Stokes gunners
did not want to shell anyone. Their weapons are awkward to handle and their
ammunition very heavy. They were already as hot as any men ought to be. But
they were well trained and highly disciplined. They attacked the enemy with
small dummy shells, which rose gently into the air, made a half-circle, and
fell about fifteen yards from the muzzles of their guns.
The Colonel, looking about him
for a tree not too difficult to climb, caught sight of the beech under which
McMahon lay. It seemed exactly the kind of tree he required. It was high. Its
lower branches were close to the ground. It looked strong and sound. The
Colonel pushed his way through the hedge, avoided the oats, and approached the
tree across a pasture field. He came on McMahon stretched flat on his back, a
tumbler full of lemon squash beside him and his novel in his hand. The Colonel
was still irritated by the Adjutant’s suggestion that he was too old to climb
trees. He was also beginning, now that he was near a tree, to wonder uneasily
whether the Adjutant had not been right He saw an opportunity of expressing his
feelings at the expense of McMahon.
“What are you doing here?” he
asked.
McMahon, who had not seen the
Colonel approach, stood up hurriedly, upsetting his lemon squash, and saluting.
“What the deuce are you doing
here?” said the Colonel. “You’ve no business to be idling, drinking and smoking
under a tree, when the battalion is in action.”
“This is an advanced dressing
station, sir,” said McMahon. “I’m waiting for the casualties.
“That’s not your duty,” said the
Colonel. “Your duty is to be with the men, in the firing line, ready to render
first aid when required.”
“Beg pardon, sir,” said McMahon,
“but I don’t think that you’re quite right in saying——”
“Do you mean to tell me,” said
the Colonel, “that it isn’t the duty of a medical officer to accompany the men
into the firing line?”
McMahon saluted again.
“According to the instructions
issued by the R.A.M.C., sir,” he said, “my place is in the advanced dressing
station when there’s only one medical officer attached to the unit in action.
If there is more than one the position is, of course, quite different.”
The Colonel, though a soldier of
long experience, was not at all sure what instructions the R.A.M.C. authorities
might have issued to their officers. And doctors are a powerful faction, given
to standing together and defying anyone who attempts to interfere with them.
Besides, no one, not even the strongest and healthiest of us, knows how soon he
may find himself under the power of a doctor, seized with a pain or other form
of discomfort which only a doctor can alleviate. It is never wise to push
things to a quarrel with any member of the R.A.M.C.
The Colonel turned away and,
somewhat laboriously, climbed his tree. He was anxious, if possible, to make
McMahon do a little work. It was annoying to think that this young man,
horribly addicted to slacking, should be lying on his back in the shade. Yet he
did not at once see his way to any plan for making McMahon run about in the
heat.
It was while he scanned the
position of B Company through his field glasses that an idea suddenly occurred
to him. He climbed down rapidly and found McMahon standing respectfully to
attention at the foot of the tree.
“You told me, I think,” said the
Colonel, “that this is the advanced dressing station?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that you’re prepared to deal
with casualties?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I shall send some casualties
down to you,” said the Colonel.
“Yes, sir, certainly.”
“I shall expect,” said the
Colonel, “that each man shall be properly treated, exactly as if he were really
wounded, bandaged up, you know, ready for the ambulance to take him to the
casualty clearing station. And a proper record must be kept for each case. You
must have a list made out for me, properly classified, with a note of the
treatment adopted in each case and the nature of the injury, just as if you
were going to send it to the medical officer at the casualty clearing station.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And it must be done properly,”
said the Colonel. “No shirking. No short cuts. I don’t see why you shouldn’t
practise your job like the rest of us.”
He turned away with a smile, a
grim but well-satisfied smile. He intended to keep McMahon busy, very busy
indeed, for the rest of the day.
McMahon lay down again after the
Colonel left him. But he did not attempt to read his novel. He saw through the
Colonel’s plan. He was determined to defeat it if he could. He was enjoying a
peaceful afternoon, and had no intention of exhausting himself bandaging up men
who had nothing the matter with them or compiling long lists of imaginary
injuries. After five minutes’ thought he hit upon a scheme. Ten minutes later
the first casualty arrived.
“Sent to the rear by the Colonel,
sir,” said the man. “Orders are to report to you. Shrapnel wound in the left
thigh, sir.”
“Left thigh?” said McMahon.
“It was the left the Colonel
said, sir.”
“All right,” said McMahon.
“Orderly!”
The orderly, who had found a
comfortable couch among some bracken, roused himself and stood to attention in
front of McMahon.
“Take this man round to the far
side of the tree,” said McMahon, “and let him lie down there flat on his back.
You can give him a cigarette. He is to stay there until he gets orders to
leave.”
The orderly saluted. The man
grinned. He was quite ready to lie under the tree without attempting to move
until someone ordered him to get up.
In the course of the next ten
minutes six more casualties arrived. Their injuries were of several different
kinds. One man reported that his thumb had been taken off by a machine-gun
bullet. Another said he had a scalp wound. A third had lost a whole leg,
severed at the thigh. A fourth had a fragment of shell in his stomach. A fifth
was completely blinded. A sixth was suffering from gas poisoning. McMahon’s
treatment never varied. Each man was given a cigarette and led off by the
orderly to lie down in the shade at the far side of the tree. McMahon kept
quite cool, refreshed himself occasionally with a drink of lemon squash, and
smoked his pipe. He began to admire the activity of the Colonel’s imagination.
For two hours casualties poured in and every one had a different kind of wound.
There was scarcely any part of the human body with which McMahon was not called
upon to deal. And the Colonel never once repeated himself. Before four o’clock
about a third of the battalion and half of the officers were lying, very well
content, in the shade under McMahon’s care. Many of them were sound asleep.
The orderly was a man with a
sense of military propriety. He insisted on the casualties lying in straight
rows, as neatly aligned as if they were on their feet at parade in the barrack
square. At last the stream of wounded grew slacker and finally ceased to flow.
Between half-past four and five o’clock not a single man came to report himself
wounded. McMahon, lighting a fresh pipe, congratulated himself. Either the
Colonel’s knowledge of anatomy was exhausted and he was unable to think of any
more wounds, or the battle was over, and there was no further excuse for
inventing casualties. McMahon got up and stretched himself. He handed his
novel, the two empty soda-water bottles, and his tobacco tin to the orderly,
and bade him pack them up.
“No cigarettes left, I suppose?”
he said.
“No, sir, not one. In fact, sir,
the last twenty men didn’t get any. Weren’t enough to go round them all, sir.”
“Ah,” said McMahon, “it’s been an
expensive afternoon for me; but I don’t grudge it. Those poor fellows wanted a
smoke and a rest badly. Besides, I’ve had a very pleasant time, pleasant and
peaceful.”
He strolled round to the far side
of the tree and took a look at the men who lay stretched out. One of the
officers, a boy of untiring energy, complained that he was bored.
“I say, McMahon, can’t I get up
and go back to the mess? What’s the good of my lying here all the afternoon?”
“You’ll lie there,” said McMahon
severely, “until you get orders to go. And it may be a long time before you do.
In fact, you won’t be able to stir till the padre comes, and I haven’t the
least idea where he is, I doubt if he’s out with us at all to-day.”
“What the dickens has the padre
got to do with it?” said the officer.
“You’ll find that out in time.
For the present you’ve nothing to do but lie still.”
“But hang it all—— I say,
McMahon, can’t you finish off and let me go?”
“I?” said McMahon. “I’ve finished
with you long ago. There’s nothing more for me to do. The next man to take you
in hand is the padre.”
The orderly stood at his elbow
while he spoke. He seemed a little nervous and agitated.
“Beg pardon, sir,” he said. “The
Colonel’s just coming, sir. He and the General. He’s drove up in the General’s
car; and I’m afraid they’re both coming here, sir.”
McMahon turned. What the orderly
said was perfectly true. The Colonel, and with him the General, and the two
umpires in the fight, were skirting the oats and making for the little grove of
trees where the casualties were.
McMahon went to meet them.
“Ah, McMahon,” said the Colonel,
“I’ve come to see how you’ve treated the wounded. I’ve brought the General with
me. Casualties rather heavy, eh? Had a busy afternoon?”
The Colonel grinned. McMahon
saluted respectfully.
“Got your list made out?” said
the Colonel, “and your report on each case? Just hand them over to me, will
you? The General would like to see them.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said
McMahon, “but have you given orders for the padre to report here?”
“Padre?” said the Colonel. “What
do you want the padre for?”
“The padre and a burying party,
sir,” said McMahon. “The fact is, sir, that the wounded all died, every one of
them, on the way down from the firing line. Arrived here stone dead. I couldn’t
do anything for them, sir. Dead before they got to me. I’ve had them laid out,
if you’d like to see them, sir. It’s all I could do for the poor fellows. It’s
the padre’s job now. I understand that he keeps a register of burials, so there
was no need for me to make a list, and of course I didn’t attempt any
treatment. It wouldn’t have been any use, sir, when the men were dead.”
III ~~ A MATTER OF DISCIPLINE
O’Byrne, the Reverend Timothy, is
our padre. We call him Tim behind his back because we like him and Padre to his
face because some respect is due to his profession. Mackintosh is our medical
officer. The Reverend Tim used to take a special delight in teasing Mackintosh.
It may have been the natural antipathy, the cat and dog feeling, which exists
between parsons and doctors. I do not know.
But the padre never lost a chance
of pulling the doctor’s leg, and Mackintosh spent hours proving that the things
which the padre says he saw could not possibly have happened. I should not like
to call any padre a liar; but some of the Rev. Tim’s stories were rather tall,
and the doctor’s scepticism always goaded him to fresh flights of imagination.
The mess was a much livelier
place after the Rev. Tim joined it. Before he attached himself to us we used to
wonder why God made men like Mackintosh, and what use they are in the world.
Now we know. Mackintosh exists to
call out all that is best in our padre.
One night—the battalion was back
resting at the time—we had an Assistant Provost Marshal as a guest. The
conversation turned on the subject of deserters, and our A.P.M. told us some
curious stories about the attempts made by these poor devils to escape the net
of the military organization.
“The fact is,” said the A.P.M.,
“that a deserter hasn’t a dog’s chance, not here in France anyway. We are bound
to get him every time.”
“Not every time,” said the padre.
“I know one who has been at large for months and you’ll never lay hands on
him.”
The A.P.M., who did not of course
know our padre, sat up and frowned.
“I don’t think it’s his fault
that he’s a deserter,” said the padre. “He was forced into it. And anyway, even
if I give you his name and tell you exactly where he is, you’ll not arrest
him.”
“If he’s a deserter, I will,”
said the A.P.M.
“No, you won’t,” said the padre.
“Excuse my contradicting you, but when you hear the story you’ll see yourself
that you can’t arrest the man. Mackintosh here is protecting him.”
“Is it me?” said Mackintosh. “I’d
like you to be careful what you’re saying. In my opinion it’s libellous to say
that I’m protecting a deserter. I’ll have you court-martialled, Mr. O’Byrne,
padre or no padre. I’ll have you court-martialled if you bring any such
accusation against me.”
“I don’t mean you personally,”
said O’Byrne. “I am taking you as a representative of your profession. The man
I am speaking of”—he turned politely to the A.P.M.—“is under the direct
protection of the Army Medical. You can’t get at him.”
Mackintosh bristled, to the
padre’s great delight Anything in the way of an attack on the medical
profession excites Mackintosh fearfully.
“Binny is the man’s name,” said
the padre. “17932, Private Alfred Binny. He was in the Wessex, before the
hospital people made a deserter of him. I will give you his address if you
like, but you’ll not be able to arrest him. If you try you’ll have every doctor
in France down on you. They back each other up through anything, don’t they,
Mackintosh?”
“I’d like you to understand,”
said Mackintosh, “that you can’t be saying things like that with impunity.”
“Get on with the story, padre,” I
said, “and don’t exasperate Mackintosh.”
“It was while I was attached to
No. 97 General Hospital,” he said. “Know No. 97, Mackintosh? No. That’s a pity.
It’s a place which would just suit you. Patients wakened every morning at five
to have their faces washed. Discipline polished till you could see your face in
it, and so many rules and regulations that you can’t cross a room without
tripping over one. The lists and card indexes that are kept going in that
place, and the forms that are filled in! You’d glory in it, Mackintosh. But it
didn’t suit my temperament.”
“I believe you,” said Mackintosh
grimly.
“It was while I was there,” said
the padre, “that Biimy came down the line and was admitted to the hospital with
a cushy wound in the fleshy part of his arm. He’d have been well in three weeks
and back with his battalion in a month, if it hadn’t been for the doctors. It’s
entirely owing to them that he’s a deserter now.”
“Malingered, I suppose,” said
Mackintosh. “Got back to England by shamming shell shock and was given his
discharge. He wouldn’t have pulled it off if I’d been there.”
“You’ve guessed wrong,” said the
padre. “It wasn’t a case of malingering. As nearly as possible it was the exact
opposite. The doctors tried to make the poor fellow out much worse than he
really was.
“I don’t believe it,” said
Mackintosh.
“As a matter of fact,” said the
padre, “the mistake—you’ll hardly deny that it was a mistake when you hear the
story—arose through too strict attention to discipline, that and the number of
lists and returns that were made out. It doesn’t do to rely too much on lists,
and there is such a thing as overdoing discipline.
“What happened was this. One
evening, when Binny had been in the hospital about a week, two orderlies came
to his bed with a stretcher. They told him they were going to carry him down to
the mortuary and put him into his coffin. Binny, of course, thought they were
making some new kind of joke, and laughed. But the orderlies were perfectly
serious. They said his name was on the list of those who had died during the
day and they had no choice except to obey orders and put him into a coffin.
They showed Binny the list, all nicely typed out, and there was no mistake
about it Binny’s name, number, regiment, and religion were all there.
“Binny began to get indignant. He
said he wasn’t dead, that anyone could see he wasn’t dead, and that it would be
a barbarous thing to bury him. The orderlies, who were very nice fellows,
admitted that Binny seemed to be alive, but they stuck to it that it was their
business to carry out their orders. Into the mortuary Binny would have to go.
They tried to console him by saying that the funeral would not be till the next
morning. But that did not cheer Binny much. In the end they took pity on the
poor fellow and said they would go away for an hour and come back. If Binny
could get the order changed they’d be very pleased to leave him where he was.
It wasn’t, so they explained, any pleasure to them to put Binny into a coffin.
“Binny did not get much chance
during his hour’s reprieve. The only person who came into the ward was a V.A.D.
girl, quite a nice little girl, good-looking enough to be bullied a lot by the
sister-in-charge. Binny told her about the fix he was in, and at first she
thought he was raving and tried to soothe him down. In the end, to pacify him,
I suppose, she went and asked the orderlies about him. She had not been out in
France long, that V.A.D., and wasn’t properly accustomed to things. When she
found out that what Binny had told her was true, she got fearfully excited. She
couldn’t do anything herself, of course, but she ran off to the matron as hard
as she could. The matron was a bit startled just at first, but she kept her
head.
“‘Tell Private Binny,’ she said,
‘that if he has any complaints to make they must be made at the proper time and
through the proper channels. The C.O. goes round the hospital every morning
between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. Private Binny can speak to him then.’
“‘But by that time,’ said the V.
A.D. girl, ‘the man will be buried.’
“‘I can’t help that,’ said the
matron. ‘The discipline of the hospital must be maintained. It would be
perfectly impossible to run a place like this if every man was allowed to make
complaints at all hours of the day and to all sorts of people.’
“That V.A.D. was a plucky girl,
and persistent—they sent her home afterwards in disgrace—and she talked on
until the matron agreed to take a look at Binny. I think she was staggered when
she saw him sitting up in bed and heard him cursing the orderlies, who had come
back by that time. But she couldn’t do anything. She wasn’t really a bad sort
of woman, and I don’t suggest for a moment that she wanted to have Binny buried
alive. But she had no authority. She could not alter an order. And there the
thing was in black and white. However, she persuaded the orderlies to wait
another half-hour. She went off and found one of the surgeons. He was a decent
sort of fellow, but young, and he didn’t see his way to interfering. There had
been several mistakes made in that hospital, and the C.O. had been rather
heavily strafed, which meant of course that everyone under him was strafed
worse, on the good old principle of passing it on. That surgeon’s idea was to
avoid trouble, if possible. Somebody, he said, had made a mistake, but it was
too late, then, to set things right, and the best thing to do was to say
nothing about it. He was sorry for Binny, but he couldn’t do anything.
“When the V.A.D. girl heard that,
she lost her temper. She said she’d write home and tell her father about it,
and that her father was a Member of Parliament and would raise hell about it
She didn’t, of course, say hell!”
“She couldn’t do that,” said
Mackintosh. “The censor wouldn’t pass a letter with a story like that in it.”
“Quite right,” said the padre,
“and it wouldn’t have been any good if her father had got the letter. He
couldn’t have done anything. If he’d asked a question in Parliament he’d simply
have been told a lie of some kind. It was a silly sort of threat to make. The
V.A.D. saw that herself and began to cry.
“That upset the surgeon so much
that he went round and took a look at Binny. The man was pale by that time and
in the deuce of a funk. But he wasn’t in the least dead. The surgeon felt that
it was a hard case, and said he’d take the risk of speaking to the C.O. about
it.
“The C.O. of No. 97 General at
that time was an oldish man, who suffered from suppressed gout, which is the
regular medical name for unsuppressed temper. He said emphatically that Private
Binny was reported dead, marked dead, removed from the hospital books, and must
stay dead. The whole system of the R.A.M.C. would break down, he said, and
things would drift into chaos if dead men were allowed to come to life again
whenever they chose.
“The surgeon was a plucky young
fellow in his way. Remembering how pretty the V.A.D. looked when she cried, he
pressed Binny’s case on the C.O. The old gentleman said he might have done something
two hours sooner; but the hospital returns had gone to the D.D.M.S. and
couldn’t possibly be got back again or altered. In the end, after a lot more
talk about regulations and discipline, he said he’d telephone to the D.D.M.S.
office and see if anything could be done. It is greatly to his credit that he
did telephone, explaining the case as well as he could over a faulty wire. The
staff colonel in the office was perfectly civil, but said that the returns had
been forwarded by a motor dispatch rider to G.H.Q. and could not be recalled by
any possibility. The C.O., who seems to have begun to realize the horrible
position of Binny, asked advice as to what he ought to do. The staff colonel
said he’d never come across a case of the kind before, but it seemed plain to
him that Binny was dead, that is to say, officially dead. The Chaplain’s
Department, he thought, might be able to do something for a man after he was
dead. If not nobody could.
“That,” said O’Byrne with a
smile, “is where I came in. The C.O. sent for me at once.”
“I suppose,” said Mackintosh,
“that you straightened the whole thing out without difficulty?”
Mackintosh is always irritated at
a suggestion that anyone connected with the medical profession can possibly
make a mistake. When irritated he is apt to attempt a kind of heavy sarcasm
which O’Byrne sucks in with obvious delight.
“No,” said the padre, “I couldn’t
straighten it out. But I did the best I could. I went to see poor Binny. He was
in the mortuary by that time. I found him sitting up in his coffin crying like
a child. I comforted him as well as I could.”
“Poor devil,” said Mackintosh.
“Not that I believe a word of this story. It couldn’t have happened. But you
may as well go on and tell us what you did. Sang hymns to him, I suppose.”
“Not at all,” said the padre. “I
got him something to eat and a couple of blankets. That mortuary is a cold
place, and, though you mightn’t think it, a coffin is draughty. Next morning I
buried him.”
“God bless me!” said the A.P.M.
explosively. “Do you mean to say you buried a man you knew to be alive?”
“Couldn’t help it,” said the
padre. “It was in orders, matter of discipline, you know. Can’t go back on
discipline, can you, Mackintosh? I got through it as quickly as I decently
could. Then I let Binny out. The graves in that cemetery are never filled in
for an hour or two after the coffins are let down, so I had lots of time. Jolly
glad poor Binny was to get out. He said he’d shivered all over when he heard
‘The Last Post.’ I had a suit of clothes for him; of course, civilian clothes.”
The padre filled himself a glass
of whisky and soda and lit his pipe. He looked round with a smile of triumph.
Most of us applauded him. He deserved it. The story was one of his best
imaginative efforts. I suppose the applause encouraged him to go further.
“I’ll give you his address if you
like,” he said to the A.P.M. “He’s working on a French farm and quite happy.
But I don’t see that you can possibly arrest him without getting the whole
medical profession on your back. They said he was dead, you see, and, as
Mackintosh will tell you, they never own up to making mistakes.”
IV ~~ THE SECOND BASS
“Be careful, Bates,” said Miss
Willmot; “we don’t want your neck broken.”
“No fear, miss,” said
Lance-Corporal Bates; “I’m all right.”
Lance-Corporal Bates had three
gold bars on the sleeve of his tunic. He might fairly be reckoned a man of
courage. His position, when Miss Willmot spoke to him, demanded nerve. He stood
on the top rail of the back of a chair, a feeble-looking chair. The chair was
placed on a table which was inclined to wobble, because one of its legs was
half an inch shorter than the other three. Sergeant O’Rorke, leaning on the
table, rested most of his weight on the seat of the chair, thereby balancing
Bates and preventing an upset. Miss Willmot sat on the corner of the table, so
that it wobbled very little. Bates, perilously balanced, hammered a nail, the
last necessary nail, into the wall through the topmost ray of a large white
star. Then he crept cautiously down.
Standing beside Miss Willmot he
surveyed the star.
“Looks a bit like Christmas,
don’t it, miss?” he said.
“The glitters on it,” said
Sergeant O’Rorke, “is the beautifullest that ever was seen. The diamonds on the
King’s Crown wouldn’t be finer.”
The star hung on the wall of the
canteen opposite the counter. It was made of cotton wool pasted on cardboard.
The wool had been supplied by a sympathetic nurse from a neighbouring hospital.
It was looted from the medical stores. The frosting, which excited Sergeant O’Rorke’s
admiration, was done with sugar. It was Miss Nelly Davis, youngest and merriest
of Miss Willmot’s helpers, who suggested the sugar, when the powdered glass
ordered from England failed to arrive.
“There can’t be any harm in using
it,” she said. “What we’re getting now isn’t sugar at all, it is fine gravel. A
stone of it wouldn’t sweeten a single urn of tea.”
Miss Willmot took the sugar from
her stores as she accepted the looted cotton-wool, without troubling to search
for excuse or justification. She was a lady of strong will. When she made up
her mind that the Christmas decorations of her canteen were to be the best in
France she was not likely to stick at trifling breaches of regulations.
She looked round her with an
expression of justifiable satisfaction. The long hut which served as a canteen
looked wonderfully gay. Underneath the white star ran an inscription done in
large letters made of ivy leaves. Miss Willmot, in the course of two years’
service in the canteen of a base camp, had gained some knowledge of the
soldier’s heart Her inscription was calculated to make an immediate appeal. “A
Merry Christmas,” it ran, “And the Next in Blighty.” The walls of the hut were
hung round with festoons of coloured paper. Other festoons, red, blue, and
green stretched across the room from wall to wall under the low ceiling.
Chinese lanterns, swinging on wires, threatened the head of anyone more than
six feet in height. Sergeant O’Rorke, an Irish Guardsman until a wound lamed
him, now a member of the camp police force, had to dodge the Chinese lanterns
when he walked about. Jam-pots and cigarette-tins, swathed in coloured paper,
held bunches of holly and sprigs of mistletoe. They stood on the tables and the
window sills.
But the counter was the crowning
glory of the canteen. In the middle of it stood an enormous Christmas cake,
sugar-covered, bedecked with flags. Round the cake, built into airy castles,
were hundreds of crackers. Huge dishes, piled high with mince pies, stood in
rows along the whole length of the counter on each side of the cake. Behind
them, rising to the height of five steps, was a long staircase made of packets
of cigarettes.
“Sure, it’s grand,” said Sergeant
O’Rorke; “and there isn’t one only yourself, miss, who’d do all you be doing
for the men.”
Miss Willmot’s eyes softened.
They were keen, grey eyes, not often given to expressing tender feeling. At
home in the old days men spoke of her as a good sport, who rode straight and
played the game; but they seldom tried to make love to her. Women said she was
a dear, and that it was a thousand pities she did not marry. It was no
sentimental recollection of bygone Christmases which brought the look of
softness into her eyes. She was thinking that next day the men for once would
feast to the full in the canteen—eat, drink, smoke, without paying a penny. She
knew how well they deserved all she could do for them, these men who had done
so much, borne so much, who still had so much to do and bear. Miss Willmot
thanked God as she stood there that she had money to spend for the men.
“Tea! tea! tea! Tea’s ready. Come
along, Miss Willmot.”
The call came from behind the
counter. Miss Nelly Davis stood there, a tall, fair girl in a long blue
overall.
“I’ve made toast and buttered it,
and Mr. Digby’s waiting.”
“Good evening, miss, and a happy
Christmas to you,” said Bates.
“If there’s a happy Christmas
going these times at all,” said Sergeant O’Rorke, “it’s yourself deserves it.”
“Thank you, thank you both,” said
Miss Willmot “If it hadn’t been for your help I’d never have got the
decorations done at all.”
The men left the hut, and Miss
Willmot locked the door behind them. The canteen was closed until it opened in
all its glory on Christmas afternoon.
She passed through a door at the
back of the counter, slipped off her overall, stained and creased after a long
day’s work, then she went into the kitchen.
Miss Nelly Davis was bending over
a packing-case which stood in the middle of the kitchen floor. It served as a
table, and she was spreading a cloth on it In front of the stove stood a young
man in uniform, wearing the badges of a fourth class Chaplain to the Forces.
This was Mr. Digby. Once he had been the popular curate of St Ethelburga’s, the
most fashionable of London churches. In those days Miss Willmot would have
treated him with scorn. She did not care for curates.
Now he was a fellow-worker in the
Camp. His waterproof hung dripping behind the kitchen door. Drops of rain ran
down his gaiters. He was trying to dry the knees of his breeches before the
stove. Miss Willmot greeted him warmly.
“Terrific night,” he said; “rain
coming down in buckets. Water running round the camp in rivers. I say, Miss
Davis, you’ll have to get out another cup. The Major’s coming to tea.”
“There isn’t a fourth cup,” said
Miss Nelly. “You’ll have to drink out of a mug.”
“Right-o! Mugs hold more,
anyway.”
“All padres are greedy,” said
Miss Nelly. “What’s bringing the Major here?”
“I’ve arranged a practice of the
Christmas carols,” said Digby.
“Bother your old carols,” said
Miss Nelly.
“Must have a practice,” said
Digby. “You and Miss Willmot are all right; but the Major is frightfully shaky
over the bass. It won’t do to break down to-morrow. By the way, Miss Willmot,
there’s something I want to speak to you about before the Major comes.
There’s——”
“Before the Major comes, Nelly,”
said Miss Willmot, “give me some tea. He always looks shocked when I drink four
cups, so let me get through the first two before he arrives.”
“I wouldn’t sit there if I were
you,” said Digby.
“There’s a drip coming through
the roof just there which will get you on the back of the neck every time you
lean forward.”
Miss Willmot shifted the
biscuit-tin. It was not easy to find a spot to put it. The roof of the kitchen
leaked badly in several places.
“Look here, Miss Willmot,” said
Digby. “I wonder if you could do anything about this. I’ve just been round to
the guard-room. There’s a poor devil there——”
“Language! language!” said Miss
Nelly.
She was on her knees beside the
stove rescuing her plate of toast from danger. Drops of water were falling on
it from the knees of Digby’s breeches every time he moved.
“There is,” said Digby, speaking
with great precision, “an unfortunate man at this moment incarcerated in the
cell behind the guard-room, under the stern keeping of the Provost Sergeant. I
hope that way of saying it satisfies you, Miss Davis.”
“For goodness’ sake, don’t talk
Camp shop,” said Miss Davis. “Let’s have our tea in peace.”
“Drink, I suppose,” said Miss
Willmot “Why will they do it, just at Christmas, too?”
“This isn’t a drunk,” said Digby.
“The wretched devil has been sent down here under arrest from No. 73 Hospital.
He’s to be court-martialled. He’s only a boy, and a decent-looking boy, too. I
hate to think of his being shut up in that cell all by himself at Christmas
with nobody to do anything for him.”
“What can we do?” said Miss Willmot.
“I can’t do anything, of course,”
said Digby, “but I thought you might.”
“I don’t see what I can do.”
“Well, try,” said Digby. “If
you’d seen the poor fellow—— But you’ll do something for him, won’t you?”
Digby had a fine faith in Miss
Willmot’s power to do “something” under any circumstances. Experience
strengthened his faith instead of shattering it. Had not Miss Willmot on one
occasion faced and routed a medical board which tried to seize the men’s
recreation-room for its own purposes? And in the whole hierarchy of the Army
there is no power more unassailable than that of a medical board. Had she not
obtained leave for a man that he might go to see his dying mother, at a time
when all leave was officially closed, pushing the application through office
after office, till it reached, “noted and forwarded for your information,
please,” the remote General in Command of Lines of Communication? Had she not
bent to her will two generals, several colonels, and once even a
sergeant-major? A padre, fourth class, though he had once been curate of St.
Ethelburga’s, was a feeble person. But Miss Willmot! Miss Willmot got things
done, levelled entanglements of barbed red tape, captured the trenches of
official persons by virtue of a quiet persistence, and—there is no denying
it—because the things she wanted done were generally good things.
The Major opened the door of the
kitchen. He stood for a moment on the threshold, the water dripping from his
cap and running down his coat, great drops of it hanging from his white
moustache. He was nearer sixty than fifty years of age. The beginning of the
war found him settled very comfortably in a pleasant Worcestershire village. He
had a house sufficiently large, a garden in which he grew wonderful vegetables,
and a small circle of friends who liked a game of bridge in the evenings. From
these surroundings he had been dug out and sent to command a base camp in
France. He was a professional soldier, trained in the school of the old Army,
but he had enough wisdom to realize that our new citizen soldiers require
special treatment and enough human sympathy to be keenly interested in the
welfare of the men. He grudged neither time nor trouble in any matter which
concerned the good of the Camp. He had very early come to regard Miss Willmot
as a valuable fellow-worker.
“Padre,” he said, “I put it to
you as a Christian man, is this an evening on which anyone ought to be asked to
practise Christmas carols?”
“Hear, hear,” said Miss Nelly.
“We’ve only had one practice,
sir,” said Digby, “and I’ve put up notices all over the Camp that the carols
will be sung to-morrow evening. It’s awfully good of you to come.”
“And of me,” said Miss Nelly.
“You’re here, in any case,” said
Digby. “The men are tremendously pleased, sir,” he added, “that you’re going to
sing. They appreciate it.”
“They won’t appreciate it nearly
so much when they hear me,” said the Major. “I haven’t sung a part for, I
suppose, twenty years.”
Christmas carols have been sung,
and we may suppose practised beforehand, in odd places, amid curious
surroundings. But it is doubtful whether even the records of missionaries in
heathen lands tell of a choir practice so unconventional as that held on
Christmas Eve in the kitchen of Miss Willmot’s canteen.
The rain beat a tattoo on the
corrugated iron roof. It dripped into a dozen pools on the soaking floor, it
fell in drops which hissed on to the top of the stove. There was no musical
instrument of any kind. The tea-tray was cleared away and laid in a corner. The
Major, white-haired, lean-faced, smiling, sat on the packing-case in the middle
of the room. Miss Willmot sat on her biscuit-tin near the stove. Miss Nelly
perched, with dangling feet, on a corner of the sink in which cups and dishes
were washed. Digby, choir-master and conductor, stood in front of the stove.
“Now then,” he said, “we’ll begin
with ‘Nowell.’ Major, here’s your note—La-a-a”—he boomed out a low note. “Got
it?”
“La-a-a,” growled the Major.
“Miss Willmot, alto,” said Digby,
“la-a-a. That’s right. Miss Davis, a third higher, la-a-a. My tenor is F.
Here’s the chord. La, la, la, la. Now, one, two, three. ‘The first Nowell the
angels did say——‘”
The rain hammered on the roof.
The Major plodded conscientiously at his bass. Miss Nelly sang a shrill treble.
Digby gave the high tenor notes in shameless shouts. “Good King Wenceslas”
followed, and “God rest you merry, gentlemen.” Then the Major declared that he
could sing no more.
“I wish you’d get another bass,
padre,” he said. “I’m not trying to back out, but I’m no good by myself. If I’d
somebody to help me, a second bass——”
“There’s nobody,” said Digby.
“I’ve scoured the whole camp looking for a man.”
“If only Tommy were here,” said
Miss Nelly.
“Tommy has a splendid voice. And
I don’t see why he mightn’t be here instead of stuck in that silly old
hospital. He’s quite well. He told me so yesterday. A bullet through the calf
of the leg is nothing. Major, couldn’t you get them to send Tommy over to the
Camp just for to-morrow?”
The Major shook his head. He had
every sympathy with Miss Nelly. He knew all about Tommy. So did Miss Willmot.
So did Digby. Miss Nelly made no secret of the fact that she was engaged to be
married to Tommy Collins. She was proud of the fact that he was serving as a
private in the Wessex Borderers, wishing to work his way up through the ranks
to the commission that he might have had for the asking. No Wessex man ever
entered the canteen without being asked if he knew Private 7432 Collins, of the
8th Battalion. Every one—even the sergeant-major—had to listen to scraps read
out from Tommy’s letters, written in trenches or in billets. When Tommy was
reported wounded, Miss Willmot had a bad day of it with an almost hysterical
Nelly Davis. When the wound turned out to be nothing worse than a hole in the
calf of the leg, made by a machine-gun bullet, Miss Nelly cried from sheer
relief. When, by the greatest good luck in the world, Private 7432 Collins was
sent down to 73 General Hospital, no more than a mile distant from the Camp,
Miss Nelly went wild with joy.
“Can’t be done,” said the Major.
“If it were any other hospital—but the people in No. 73 don’t like me.”
The Major was a stickler for
extreme accuracy in the filling in of all official papers. The staff of No. 73
Hospital cured its patients of their wounds, but sometimes turned them loose
afterwards, insufficiently, occasionally even wrongly, described and
classified. The Major invariably called attention to these mistakes.
The Major, though particular on
some points, was a kindly man. He did not want to speak evil of the hospital
authorities. He was also a little tired of hearing about Tommy Collins. He
changed the subject abruptly.
“By the way, Miss Willmot,” he
said, “it’s all right about the men’s Christmas dinner. I spent an hour this
morning strafing everybody in the cook-house. I told them they must try to make
the Yorkshire pudding. Heaven knows what it will be like?”
“If they’ll only follow the
receipt I gave them——” said Miss Willmot.
“If,” said Digby. “But those
cooks are rotters.”
“Anyhow,” said the Major,
“there’ll be a decent dinner. Roast beef, plum pudding, oranges, and then all
the things you have for them in the canteen. They’ll not do badly, not at all
badly.”
He rubbed his hands together and
smiled with benevolent satisfaction. He had arranged to eat his own Christmas
dinner at the unholy hour of three in the afternoon. He meant to see that all
went well at the men’s dinner, and that their tea was sufficient. He meant to
look in for an hour at the canteen festivities. He had promised to sing
Christmas carols. From three to four was the only time left at which he could
dine. But that thought did not spoil his satisfaction.
Digby saw, or thought he saw, his
opportunity.
“There’s one poor fellow in the
guard-room, sir,” he said. “Will he get any Christmas dinner?”
He winked at Miss Willmot as he
spoke. This was the time for her to back up his charitable appeal.
“Ah,” said the Major, “I’m afraid
I can’t do much for him. It’s a serious charge, a case of a Field General Court
Martial. I’m afraid there’s no doubt about the facts. I’m sorry for him. He’s
quite young; but it’s a disgraceful thing for any man to do.”
The Major’s face hardened. For
many offences and most offenders he had some sympathy; but a man who sinned
against the code of military honour had little pity to expect from the Major.
Miss Willmot looked up.
“Is it very bad?” she asked.
“One of those cases of self-wounding,”
said the Major. “Shot himself in the leg with his own rifle.”
There are cases of this kind, a
few of them. Some wretch, driven half frantic by terror, worn out with
hardships, hopeless of any end of his sufferings, seeks this way out. He gains
a week of rest and security in a hospital ward. Then he faces the stern
judgment of a court martial, and pays the penalty.
“Poor fellow!” said Miss Willmot.
“Poor boy! What he must have gone through before he did that!”
“He went through no more than any
other man went through,” said the Major; “but they stuck it and he shirked.
There are men enough who deserve our pity, Miss Willmot. We can’t afford to
waste sympathy on cowards.”
Miss Willmot was of another mind.
For her there was a law higher even than the Major’s lofty code of chivalry and
honour. She had pity to spare for cowards.
The Major himself was not wholly
consistent. As he rose to leave the kitchen he spoke of the prisoner again.
“He doesn’t look like a man who’d
do it. He looks like a gentleman. That makes it worse, of course, much worse.
All the same, he doesn’t look it.”
“Well?” said Digby, when the
Major left.
“I can’t do anything,” said Miss
Willmot “In a case of this kind there’s nothing to be done.”
But Miss Willmot made up a little
parcel before she left the canteen. There were cigarettes in it, and chocolate,
and a couple of mince pies, and a large slice of cake, and some biscuits.
Afterwards she acted lawlessly, offended against discipline, treated rules and
regulations with contempt.
Sergeant O’Rorke was sitting in
the guard-room playing patience when Miss Willmot entered. He stood up at once
and saluted.
“Terrible weather, miss. I’ll
never say again that it rains in the County Galway. Sure, it doesn’t know how.
A man would have to come to France to find out what rain is.”
“Sergeant,” said Miss Willmot, “I
want to speak to your prisoner.”
Sergeant O’Rorke scratched his
ear doubtfully. Miss Willmot had no right to see the prisoner. He had no right
to open the door of the cell for her. They had hammered some respect for
discipline into Sergeant O’Rorke when he served in the Irish Guards. But they
had not hammered the Irish nature altogether out of him. He was willing to go
to great lengths, to take risks in order to oblige a friend whom he liked and
respected. He had an Irishman’s feeling that laws and regulations are not meant
to apply to ladies like Miss Willmot.
“Did you think to ask leave of
the Major, miss?” he said.
“No,” said Miss Willmot, “I
didn’t ask anybody’s leave.”
“That’s a pity now,” said
O’Rorke; “but sure the Major would never have said no if you’d have asked him.”
He fitted the key into the lock
and flung open the door of the cell.
“Prisoner, ‘tention,” he said.
Miss Willmot entered the small
square room, lit by a single electric light. It was entirely bare of all
furniture, save a single rug, which lay rolled up in a corner. The walls and
floor were lined with sheets of zinc. A young man stood stiffly to attention in
the middle of the room. Miss Willmot stared at him.
Then she turned to Sergeant
O’Rorke. “Shut the door please, sergeant, and wait outside.”
The young man neither stirred nor
spoke.
“Tommy!” said Miss Willmot.
“7432! Private Collins, miss, 8th
Wessex Borderers.”
He spoke in a tone of hard, cold
fury.
“Tommy,” said Miss Willmot.
“Awaiting trial by Field General
Court Martial on a charge of deliberately wounding himself in the leg.”
“Tommy,” said Miss Willmot again,
“you didn’t do that.”
The boy broke down suddenly. The
hardness and the anger vanished.
“Miss Willmot,” he said, “for
God’s sake don’t tell Nelly that I’m here.”
“You didn’t do it,” said Miss
Willmot.
“Of course I didn’t do it,” he
said. “There’s been some infernal blunder. I didn’t know what the damned idiots
meant when they put me under arrest I didn’t know what the charge was till they
marched me in to the C.O. here. He told me. Oh, the Army’s a nice thing, I can
tell you. I was expecting to get my stripe over that raid when I got hit with a
bullet in my leg, and here I am charged with a coward’s trick. I suppose
they’ll prove it. I suppose they’ve got what they call evidence. I only hope
they’ll shoot me quick and have done with it I don’t want to live.”
Miss Willmot went over to the boy
and took his hand. She led him to the corner of the bare room. They sat down
together on the folded blanket She talked to him quietly, sanely, kindly. For
half an hour she sat there with him. Before she left, hope had come back to
him.
“Don’t you worry about my being
here,” he said “If things are cleared up in the end I shan’t mind a bit about
spending a night or two in this cell. With all the things you’ve brought
me”—the cake, chocolate, and cigarettes were spread out on the floor—“I’ll have
a merry Christmas, better than the trenches, anyhow. But, I say, don’t tell
Nelly. She might fret.”
The Christmas festivities in the
Camp were enormously successful. The men had cold ham for breakfast, a special
treat paid for by the Major. They assembled for church parade, and Digby gave
them the shortest sermon ever preached by a padre. The Major, who liked to play
the piano at church service, was so startled by the abrupt conclusion of the
discourse, that he started “O Come, All ye Faithful,” in a key so low that no one
could sing the second line. The Major pulled himself together.
“As you were,” he said, and
started again.
The men, thoroughly roused by the
novelty of the proceedings, yelled the hymn. The dinner was all that could be
hoped. Sweating cooks staggered into the dining-hall with huge dishes of meat
and steaming cauldrons of potatoes. Sergeants, on that day acting as servants
to the men, bore off from the carving-tables plates piled high. The Yorkshire
pudding looked like gingerbread, but the men ate it. The plum pudding was
heavy, solid, black.
The Major, smiling blandly, went
from table to table. Miss Nelly, flushed with excitement and pleasure, laughed
aloud. Only Miss Willmot looked on with grave eyes, somewhat sad. She was
thinking of Tommy Collins in his cell, with the weight of an intolerable
accusation hanging over him.
Later on, not even Miss Willmot
had time to be thoughtful. There was a pause in the festivities for an hour or
two after dinner. The men smoked, slept, or kicked at a football with spasmodic
fits of energy. Then the canteen was opened. Miss Willmot’s great cake was cut.
The men passed in a long file in front of the counter. Miss Willmot handed each
man a slice of cake. Other ladies gave crackers and mince pies. Digby,
garrulous and friendly, distributed cigarettes. The Major stood at the far end
of the room under the glistening white star. He was waiting for the moment to
arrive at which he should make his speech, a speech sure to be received with
genuine applause, for it was to be in praise of Miss Willmot. The Major did
that kind of thing well. He had the proper touch, could catch the note
appropriate for votes of thanks. He knew his talent, and that Christmas Day he
meant to do his best.
An orderly entered the canteen,
looked round it, caught sight of the Major. He pushed his way through a crowd
of laughing men who munched cake, smoked furiously, and decked each others’
heads with paper caps from crackers. He reached the Major at last, and handed
him a note. The Major read it and swore. Then he began to push his way towards
the counter. The orderly followed him.
“Gangway,” he called, “gangway,
men. Make way for the Major.”
Way was made at last. The Major
seized Digby by the arm.
“It’s a damned nuisance,” he
said. “I beg pardon, padre, an infernal nuisance. I’ve got to go to the orderly
room. Those fellows in No. 3 Hospital are ringing me up. Why couldn’t they keep
quiet on Christmas Day? I must go though, and I may be kept. You’ll have to
make the speech and thank Miss Willmot.”
Digby escaped making the speech
in the end. Just as the distribution of cakes and mince pies had finished, when
Digby was searching frantically for an opening sentence, the Major returned. He
made two speeches. One was in a low voice across the counter to Miss Willmot.
The other was to the men. It was all about Miss Willmot. It was beautifully
phrased. But she did not hear a word of it. She was scarcely aware of the men’s
cheers, though the paper festoons swayed to and fro, and the Chinese lanterns
shook with the violence of the shouting. For the Major had said this to her:
“It’s all right about that boy in
the guard-room, the prisoner you know, who was to have been court-martialled.
Some blatant idiot of an orderly sergeant mixed up two sets of papers, and put
the wrong man under arrest. They’re sending over the right man now. I told
Sergeant O’Rorke to bring that poor boy straight here from the guard-room. Keep
a bit of cake for him.”
It was while the men were
cheering the Major’s other speech that Tommy Collins, guided by Sergeant
O’Rorke, entered the canteen.
Miss Nelly saw him at once. She
stretched herself across the counter to grasp his hands, upsetting the few
remaining mince pies, and scattering crackers right and left. If the counter
had not been so broad and high she would in all probability have kissed him.
“Oh, Tommy!” she said. “And I’d
given up all hope of seeing you. This is just a perfect Christmas box. How did
you get here?”
Tommy Collins looked appealingly
to Miss Willmot. His eyes begged her as plainly as if words had crossed his
lips not to tell the story of his arrest.
“Now you are here,” said Miss
Nelly, “you must help us with the carols. The Major’s a perfect darling, but he
can’t sing bass for nuts. You’ll do it, won’t you? I’m singing, and so is Miss
Willmot.”
V ~~ HER RIGHT
Mrs. Jocelyn was generally
considered a clever woman. Her husband respected her intellect. He was, and
still is, Professor of Psychology in one of our younger Universities, so he
could give an expert’s opinion on any question of mental capacity. Her sons
said she was clever. There were two young Jocelyns, Ned, a barrister, and Tom,
a junior master in a public school. Ned used to give me his opinion of his
mother very often.
“The mater is extraordinarily
clear-headed,” he would say. “If you want to see your way through a muddle,
just you talk it over with her. It’s an awful pity she——”
Then Ned would shrug his
shoulders. He was a loyal son, and he never said in plain words what the pity
was. Tom spoke in the same way.
“Dad’s all right,” he used to
say, “European reputation and all that; but the mater has the brains of our
family. If only she wouldn’t——”
I agreed with both of them. Mrs.
Jocelyn was one of the cleverest women I ever met, but—well, on one subject she
was an intolerable bore. That subject was Woman’s Suffrage. She could not keep
off it for very long, and once she started there was no stopping her. All her
friends suffered. It cannot be said that she argued. She demanded, aggressively
insisted on sex equality, on justice and right for women, right in every sphere
of life, political right, social right, economic right, all kinds of other
right.
This, of course, was in the old
days before the war. Since August, 1914, most things have changed. Professor
Jocelyn, indeed, still lectures on psychology, half-heartedly now, to a rapidly
dwindling class of young women. But Ned Jocelyn’s name is painted in black
letters on a brown wooden cross at the head of a grave—one of a long row of
graves—in a French cemetery. Tom is trying to learn to walk without crutches in
the grounds of an English hospital. Mrs. Jocelyn is out in France, working in a
canteen, working very hard. It is only occasionally now that she demands a
“right;” but when she does, she demands it, so I understand, with all her old
ferocious determination to get it. This is the story of how she once demanded
and took a “right.”
It was nearly midday, and the
camp lay under a blazing sun. It was early in July, when all England and all
France were throbbing with hope, pride and terror as the news of the “Big Push”
came in day by day. There was little calm, and few hearts at ease in those
days, but Number 50 Convalescent Camp looked peaceful enough. It is miles from
the firing line. No shells ever burst over it or near it. Only occasionally can
the distant rumble of the guns be heard. A spell of dry weather had cracked the
clay of the paths which divided it into rectangles. The grass was burnt and
brown. The flower beds, in spite of diligent watering, looked parched. The
great white tents, marquees guyed up with many ropes, shone with a blinding
glare. In the strips of shade made by the fly sheets of the tents, men lay in
little groups. Their tunics were unbuttoned or cast aside. They smoked and
chatted, speaking slowly and briefly. Oftener they slept.
Only in one corner of the camp
was there any sign of activity. Near the main entrance is the orderly room.
Inside, a sweating adjutant toiled at a mass of papers on the desk before him.
From time to time a sergeant entered the room, saluted, spoke sharply, received
his orders, saluted and went out again. From the clerk’s room next door came
the sound of voices, the ceaseless clicking of a typewriter, and the frequent
clamorous summons of a telephone bell. Outside, orderlies hurried, stepping
quickly in one direction or another, to the Quarter-master’s stores, to the
kitchen, to the wash-houses, to twenty other points in the great camp to which
orders must go, and from which messages must return. The bugler stood in the
verandah outside the orderly room, ready to blow his calls or strike the hours
with a hammer on a suspended length of railway line. At the entrance gate,
standing sharply to attention as a guardsman should, even under a blazing sun,
was Private Malley, of the Irish Guards, wounded long ago, now wearing the brassard
of the Military Police. He saw to it that no person unauthorized entered the
camp. Above him, limp from its staff, hung the Red Cross flag, unrecognizable
that day, since there was no faintest breeze to stir its folds.
Close by the flag staff is the little
dressing station. Here the men in the camp, men discharged from hospital, are
seen by the doctors and the period of their rest and convalescence is decided.
They are marked “Fit,” and go to the fighting again, or sent back and enjoy
good quarters and pleasant food for a while longer. Or—best hope—marked
“Blighty” and go home. This is the routine. But sometimes there is a
difference. There had been a difference every day since the “Big Push” started.
Outside the dressing station was a group of forty or fifty men. They lay on the
ground, most of them sound asleep. They lay in the strangest attitudes, curled
up, some of them; others with arms and legs flung wide, the attitudes of men
utterly exhausted, whose overpowering need is rest. Some sat huddled up, too
tired to sleep, blinking their eyes in the strong sunshine. Most of these men
wore bandages. Bandages were on their heads, their hands, their arms and legs,
where sleeves and trousers had been cut away. Some of them had lost their caps.
One here and there had lost a boot. Many of them wore tattered tunics and
trousers with long rents in them. All of them were covered with mud, mud that
had dried into hard yellow cakes. These were men sent straight down from the
field dressing stations, men who had been slightly wounded, so slightly that
there was no need for them to go to hospital. Among them there was one man who
neither lay huddled nor sprawled. He sat upright, his knees drawn up to his
chest, held tight in his clasped hands. He stared straight in front of him with
wide, unblinking eyes. Of all the men in the group, he was the muddiest His
clothes were caked with mud. His face was covered with mud. His hair was matted
with mud. Also his clothes were the raggedest of all. The left leg of his
trousers was rent from knee to waistband. The skin of his thigh shone white,
strangely white compared to his face and hands, through the jagged tear. The
sleeves of his tunic were torn. There was a hole in the back of it, and one of
his shoulder straps was torn off. He was no more than a boy, youthful-looking
compared even to the men, almost all of them young, who lay around him. He had
a narrow face with that look of alert impudence which is common on the faces of
gutter snipes in large cities.
As he sat staring he spoke now
and then, spoke to himself, for there was no one to listen to him.
“We beat them,” he said once. “We
gave them the damnedest beating. We strafed them proper, and they ran. The
Prussian Guards they was.”
His accent betrayed him. He must
have come from Lancashire, from some grimy Lancashire town, from Warrington or
Bolton, from Liverpool itself perhaps, or Manchester. Before the war there were
crowds of such boys there. They made up the football crowds on Saturday
afternoons. They made the countryside hideous on bank holiday afternoons. They
were the despair of church and chapel, of the social reformer, and often of the
police. This boy was under-sized, of poor chest development, thin-limbed,
weedy; but there was a curious light in those staring eyes of his.
He turned to the man on his
right, a great, heavy-jawed Irishman with a bandaged knee, who was sound
asleep.
“Wake up, Pat,” he says, “wake up
till I tell you how we strafed Fritz. Out in the open it was, the Prussian
Guards.”
But the Irishman slept on.
Neither shaking nor shouting roused a sign of intelligence in him. The boy
turned to the man on his left, a Canadian, an older man with a gentle, worn
face. Perhaps because he was older or more utterly wearied out, or in pain this
man waked and raised himself on one elbow.
“We went for them proper,” said
the boy. “Prussians they was and Guards. They thought they’d walk over us; but
by God we talked to them, talked to them with the bayonet, we did.”
A slow smile played across the
Canadian’s face.
“Say, Tommy,” he said, “what’s
your name?”
“Wakeman, Private Wakeman, No.
79362. Gosh, Canada, but we handled them and they ran.”
“They certainly did run some,”
said the Canadian slowly.
Then Wakeman poured out his
story, a wonderful story, told in jerky sentences, garnished with blasphemies
and obscene words. He had been a member of the Lewis Gun team. Very early in
the advance the bursting of a high explosive shell had buried him, buried the
whole gun team with its officer, buried the gun. Wakeman and three other men
and the officer had crawled out from the mud and débris. Somehow they had
unearthed the gun. Driven on by a kind of frenzy, they had advanced again,
halting, firing a drum of cartridges, advancing again. Once more a shell caught
them and buried them. Once more Wakeman crawled out, clawed his way out with
hooked fingers, bit the loose clay with his mouth, bored through it with his
head, dug at it with his toes. This time he and the officer were alone. They
struggled to recover their gun, working fiercely, till a bullet hit the
officer. After that Wakeman went on by himself, managed somehow to get among
the men of the company to which his gun team belonged, and possessed himself of
a rifle. At that point his story became incoherent. But about one thing he was
clear. He and the others of his company had met in straight hand to hand
fighting the proudest troops of Germany. By stabbing, lunging, battering with
clubbed rifles, they had put the Prussian Guard to flight.
“Well,” drawled the Canadian,
“they did run. They certainly did run some. And what’s the matter with you,
sonny? Hit?”
“Buried,” said Wakeman, “buried
twice, and shrapnel in my leg, little bits.”
The bits were little, but there
were a good many of them. Half an hour later Wakeman passed into the dressing
station in his turn. The doctor looked him over, scribbled a word or two on the
label which hung from the lad’s breast pocket, and patted him on the shoulder.
“You’ll be all right, my boy,” he
said. “No shell shock. No D.A.H. Get along with you. Feeling a bit hungry, eh?”
“Thank you, sir,” said Wakeman.
“Yes, sir, feel as if I could do with a bit of something to eat. The way of it
was this, sir. We strafed them proper, we did. The Prussian Guards they was, and——”
But the doctor had no time to
listen to the story. “Get along now. Get along. The sooner the dressing is
done, the sooner you’ll get your dinner.”
The story, which the doctor would
not hear, bubbled out into the ears of the nursing sister who picked the scraps
of shrapnel out of Wakeman’s leg. They were tiny fragments, most of them, but
there were a great many, and it took the nurse twenty minutes to get through
her job. The story was told twice over in jerks and snatches, just as it had
been told to the Canadian, only the obscene words were unuttered and the oaths,
when they slipped out now and then, were followed by apologies. Every soldier,
even a Lancashire gutter snipe, has in him this curious instinct. His talk is
commonly full of blasphemies and obscenities, devoid of all sense or meaning,
efforts at futile emphasis, apparently necessary and inevitable. But if there
is a woman within earshot, no such words pass his lips. A girl might sit all
day among these men, and, if they knew she was there, her ears would never be
sullied with the sound of a foul word.
Released at last from the
dressing station, Wakeman and five or six others were taken to the bathhouse.
The corporal who led the way, the bath orderly who provided soap and towels,
and the wounded Irishman who was given the bath next to Wakeman’s, all heard
scraps of the story, learnt the essential fact that Wakeman and his pals had
strafed the Prussian Guard. It was the Irishman who reduced the excited boy to
silence for a few minutes.
“What do you want to be talking
that way for?” he said. “Didn’t we all give them hell? Didn’t I bring back
three prisoners myself. Three? It’s five I would have had, only for a stray
shell that bursted alongside of the communication trench and lifted two of them
off me. Bad luck to that same shell, for a bit of it took me under the knee.
But what matter? Only, mind this, what you did to the Prussian Guard wasn’t in
it with what that shell did to them two Boches. You’d have been sorry for the
blighters, so you would, if so be you could have found a bit of either of them
big enough to be sorry for.”
Wakeman had no reply to make to
that. It is not possible with a bayonet, or even with a Lewis gun, to cause the
total disappearance of an enemy’s body.
After his bath, with a clean
shirt on him and a clean pair of socks, Wakeman dined. There is no lack of good
food in Number 50 Convalescent Camp, and men recovering from wounds often have
healthy appetites. But Wakeman ate, gorged himself, to the astonishment even of
the kitchen orderlies. Plateful after plateful of stewed meat and potatoes,
steaming and savoury, disappeared. Yet there was no sign about the boy of the
lassitude of repletion. His eyes remained bright and glanced rapidly here and
there. His body was still alert, the movements of his hands quick and decisive.
After dinner, rest. Wakeman found
himself with other new-comers in a tent in the corner of the camp. The Irishman
was there, still lamenting in picturesque phrases the loss of his two
prisoners.
“And the biggest of them—a fine
figure of a man he was—had the beautifullest helmet on him that ever was seen;
worth twenty francs it was, any day, and me without a penny in my pocket. But
where was it after the shell bursted? Tell me that if you can.”
The Canadian was there, patiently
ready to listen to any story, having apparently no story of his own to tell.
Wakeman began again.
“It was the Prussian Guard,” he
said, “and we gave them proper hell, we did, out in the open. No blasted
machine guns. Just them and us with the bayonet. And——”
He talked in vain. In the tent
were beds, real beds with mattresses of woven wire, and palliasses stuffed with
straw. Stretched flat on his back the Irishman snored. His head pillowed on his
folded arm the Canadian slept peacefully, a quiet smile, like a child’s, on his
face. Wakeman looked at them and snorted with contempt. For him no sleep was
possible. He pulled a bench to the door of the tent, and sat in the sunshine.
He found the lid of a cigarette tin and set to work to scrape the mud off his
clothes and boots. But the work wearied him. With a piece of string he laced up
the long rent in his trousers, cutting holes in the material with the blade of
a knife. Then, still obstinately disinclined for sleep, he went out to explore
the camp.
At one end of the camp is a hut,
a long, low building. It is one of those canteens and recreation huts, which,
working through various organizations, the public at home provides for the men
in France. They are familiar enough to everyone in France, and the men know
that there is a welcome for them however often they pass the doors. In this hut
Mrs. Jocelyn works all day long and every day.
Sometimes she cooks, making vast
puddings, stewing cauldrons full of prunes or figs. Sometimes she stands behind
the counter serving bowls of tea, coffee, cocoa, lemonade, to thirsty men.
Sometimes, half asphyxiated with tobacco smoke, she sits at the piano and
hammers out rag-time tunes, while the men crowd round her, their faces close to
her as they peer at the music, their voices threatening her with deafness when
they bellow in her ears. Sometimes she sits for an hour beside some dull-eyed
victim of shell shock, patiently trying to coax or trick him back to some
interest in life again, giving him, literally, her own vitality, until, “virtue
gone out” of her, she must seek fresh strength for herself in the less
exhausting toil of a scullery maid. Thus she pays to man the debt she owes to
God for the cross over the grave of one son dead, and the unconquerable spirit
of the other crippled.
It was a slack hour when Private
Wakeman, in his grotesquely tattered clothes, limped through the door. Only a
few men were in the hut, writing or playing draughts. A boy at the piano was
laboriously beating out a discordant version of “Tennessee.” Mrs. Jocelyn sat
on a packing-case, a block of paper on her knee, writing a letter to a man who
had left the camp to go up the line again. Another woman, a fellow worker, was
arranging plates of cakes and biscuits on the counter, piling bowls ready to
hand for the crowd of men who would come later, clamouring for tea.
Private Wakeman stood in the
middle of the hut and looked around him. He sought companionship, longed to
find some one to whom he could tell his story and make his boast about the
Prussian Guard. His eyes wandered from one to another of the men who were
writing or playing games. He found little encouragement. It seemed impossible
to join himself to any one of them. He looked at the lady busy with the bowls
and plates. His eyes rested at last on a great dish of stewed figs which stood
on the counter. He had eaten an incredible quantity of food in the dining-hall
two hours before, soup, beef, potatoes, cabbage, pudding, cheese. But he had
not eaten stewed figs. His whole boy’s nature rose in him in one fierce longing
for stewed figs. He remembered. Before he went into the attack he had possessed
half a franc and two sous. He thrust his hand into his one trouser pocket. It
was empty. He tore at the string with which he had laced up the slit in his
trousers. On that side there was not a pocket left. It and all it ever
contained, were gone. He fumbled in the pockets of his tunic, found three
mangled cigarettes, the stump of a pencil, a letter from his mother, and, at
last, two English penny stamps, survivals of days which seemed years ago, when
he had been in camp in England.
His eyes were fixed on the stewed
figs. The longing in him grew fiercer, intolerable. He approached the counter
slowly. He laid on it the two stamps, dirty almost beyond recognition. He
smoothed them out carefully.
“Lady,” he said, “I haven’t got
no money but——”
The worker laid down her bowls,
looked at the two stamps, and then at the boy. She was a woman of experience
and discernment She saw the muddy, tattered clothes. She read the look of
desire in the eyes. She understood.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Stewed fruit, lady, and—and
custard.”
She turned from the boy to Mrs.
Jocelyn.
“It’s clean against all rules,”
she said. “I know I oughtn’t to, but I must—-I simply must give this boy
something.”
Mrs. Jocelyn looked up from her
writing. She saw all that the other had seen. She had talked with many men. One
glance was enough for her. She knew what the boy had been through. With swift
intuition she guessed at what he felt and how he yearned. She saw the name of
his regiment on his one remaining shoulder strap. It was her dead boy’s
regiment, and every man in it was dear to her. Already the other lady was at
work, putting a spoonful of stewed figs on a soup plate. Mrs. Jocelyn seized
her by the arm and dragged her roughly back from the counter.
“Don’t dare to do it,” she said,
“it’s my right. No one else has so good a right to do it as I have.”
So Private Wakeman sat down to a
plate piled with stewed figs, swamped with a yellowish liquid called custard in
canteens in France. Beside him were jam tarts and great slabs of cake. From a
mouth never empty, though he swallowed fast, came in short gushes the story of
the strafing of the Prussian Guard, told at last to ears which drank in
greedily every word of it.
So Mrs. Jocelyn claimed and took
at last her dearest right.
VI ~~ JOURNEY’S END
I had a long journey before me,
and I looked forward to it with dread. It is my habit when forced to travel in
France, the part of France chiefly affected by the war, to resign myself to a
period of misery. I relapse into a condition of sulky torpor. Railway Transport
Offices may amuse themselves by putting me into wrong trains. Officers in
command of trains may detach the carriage in which I am and leave it for hours
in a siding. My luggage may be—and generally is—hopelessly lost. I may arrive
at my destination faint for want of food. But I bear all these things without
protest or complaint. This is not because I am particularly virtuous or
self-trained to turn the other cheek to the smiter. I am morally feeble,
deficient in power of self-defence, a lover of peace with discomfort, rather
than honourable strife.
I felt no small joy when I
discovered that Thompson was to be my travelling companion on this particular
journey. I had travelled with Thompson before. I knew that he always secured
food, that he never lost his luggage, that he had an instinct for recognizing the
right train when he saw it, and that he had a healthy disregard for the dignity
of the official persons who clog the feet of wayfarers in France.
We met at the station. Thompson’s
breezy good humour gave me fresh confidence at once. He looked energetic,
hopeful and charged with vitality.
“Come along.” he said, “we’ll
report to the R.T.O. at once and get it over.”
In France under existing
conditions the traveller reports to the Railway Transport Officer when he
starts his journey, when he finishes it and at all intervening opportunities.
An R.T.O. must lead a harassed and distressful life. He sees to it that the
traveller has a fair share of life’s trouble.
This particular R.T.O. began by
trying to get us into a wrong train. I suppose that was the line of least
resistance for him. It was easier to put us into the first train that came
along. We should have been off his hands, and another R.T.O stationed somewhere
else, would have had the job of getting us switched back on to our proper track
again. The first man—and this was all he cared for—would have been rid of us.
Thompson was equal to the situation. He talked vigorously to that R.T.O..
Thompson holds no very exalted rank in the army. I often wonder he is not tried
by Court Martial for the things he says. But the R.T.O., so far from resenting
Thompson’s remarks, offered us a sort of apology.
“I’ve been on duty ten hours,” he
said, “and there’s a whole battery of artillery lost somewhere along the line.
It never was my fault; but every general in the whole army has been ringing me
up about it. The telephone bell hasn’t stopped all day. Damn! There it is
again.”
It was; loud, angry and horribly
persistent. Even Thompson felt sorry for the R.T.O.
“Never mind,” he said, “you’ll
get your Military Cross all right in the end. All you fellows do. Now buck up a
bit and find our train for us. It’s X. we want to get to.”
I mention this incident to show
the kind of man Thompson is and his way of dealing with difficulties. Under his
care I felt that I should travel safely and get to X. in the end. Comfort was
not to be expected, but Thompson did all that could be done to mitigate our
misery.
We made our start from a platform
blocked with piles of officers’ luggage and crowded with confused and anxious
men. Subalterns in charge of drafts asked other subalterns what they ought to
do and received counter inquiries by way of reply. Sergeants stormed
blasphemously at men who had disappeared in search of tea. Staff officers, red
tabbed and glorious, tried to preserve an appearance of dignity while their own
servants staggering under the weight of kit bags, bumped into them. Hilarious
men, going home on leave, shouted sudden snatches of song. A decrepit
Frenchman, patient in the performance of duty, blew feeble blasts on a small
horn. Thompson, alert and competent, found a compartment. He put me in and then
he bundled in my valise. After that he found his own luggage, an enormous kit
bag, two sacks, a camp bedstead, a hammock chair and a number of small parcels.
“Get them in somehow,” he said.
“We’ll settle down afterwards.”
Thompson did the settling
afterwards. He so arranged our belongings that we each had a seat The door by
which anyone else might have to get in at another station was hopelessly
blocked. The small parcels were put on the rack above our heads. Thompson gave
me a list of their contents as he put them in their places. They contained
bread, butter, meat, biscuits, cheese, a bottle of wine and a flask of brandy.
“We’re here till two o’clock
to-morrow morning—till two o’clock at best. We must have something to eat.”
A selfish traveller—I am
profoundly selfish—would have been content to keep that compartment secure from
intrusion. We had completely barricaded the door and no one could have got in
if we had chosen to defend our position. But Thompson was not selfish. The
train stopped at a station every quarter of an hour or so, and Thompson
climbing up the barricade, opened the window and took a look out every time we
stopped. At one station—it was then about 7 p.m. and quite dark—he discovered a
forlorn boy—a second-lieutenant—who was trying to find room for himself and his
belongings. Thompson hailed him. The next five minutes were passed in fierce
toil by all of us. But before the train started Thompson got the boy and his
belongings into our compartment. In my opinion no second-lieutenants ought to
be allowed to possess a suit-case as well as a valise. This boy also had three
top-coats and a Jaeger rug. We spent nearly half an hour settling down again
after that. Then we dined, sharing the food—Thompson’s food—with the
second-lieutenant. He was a nice boy and very grateful. I thought him a little
garrulous, but Thompson encouraged him to talk. He told us all about his job.
It was his duty to go up in captive balloons and send down messages to the
artillery. It was, by his account, a sea-sicky business, worse by several
degrees than crossing the Channel in the leave boat. Thompson, who has a thirst
for every kind of information, questioned and cross-questioned the boy. After
dinner—dinner was Thompson’s name for our meal—I prepared to go to sleep.
Thompson arranged valises on the floor in such a way that I could stretch my
legs. The boy went on talking. He told Thompson that he had dropped out of the
ballooning business and that he was going to X. to submit to a special course
of training. I forget what it was, bombing probably, or the use of trench
mortars, possibly map reading or—a subject part of the school curriculum of our
grandmothers—the use of globes. The army has a passion for imparting knowledge
of any kind to temporary lieutenants. I went to sleep while Thompson was
explaining just where the boy’s particular course of instruction was given, a
camp some three or four miles out of X. Thompson has an amazing knowledge of
what naturalists would call the habitat of the various parts of the army.
At 3 a.m. I was awakened from my
sleep. We had reached, an hour late, the junction at which we had to change.
Thompson and the boy were both alert and cheerful. They had, I fancy, been
talking all the time. Our junction proved to be a desolate, windswept platform,
without a sign of shelter of any kind except a bleak-looking cabin, the
habitation of the local R.T.O. Thompson roused him ruthlessly and learned that,
with luck, we might expect our next train to start at six. I shivered. Three
hours, the very coldest in the twenty-four, on that platform, did not strike me
as a pleasant prospect. Thompson used a favourite phrase of his.
“After all,” he said, “it’s war;
what the French call La Guerre.” He professed to have discovered, not from the
R.T.O. but from a sleepy French railway official, that the train, our train in
which we were to travel, was somewhere in the neighbourhood, waiting for its
engine. It did not come to us from anywhere else; but made its start, so to
speak took its rise, at that junction. Thompson and our new friend, the boy,
proposed to get into the train when they found it.
Thompson can speak French of a
sort, but he does not understand the language as spoken by the French people. I
did not believe that he had really found out about that train. I declined to
join in the search. He and the boy went off together. They came back in about
half an hour. They said they had found a train standing by itself in a field and
that it must be ours because there was no other. The reasoning did not seen
conclusive to me, but I agreed to go and sleep in whatever train they had
found. I suggested that we should leave our luggage on the platform and pick it
up when the train got there at 6 a.m.
“That,” said Thompson, “is just
the way luggage gets lost. Suppose—I don’t say it’s likely or even possible—but
suppose the train we get into goes somewhere else. Nice fools we’d look,
turning up in Paris or Marseilles without a brush or comb among us. No. Where I
go I take my luggage with me.”
Thompson was evidently not so
sure about that train as he pretended to be. But I had reached a pitch of
hopeless misery which left me indifferent about the future. It did not seem to
me to matter much just then whether I ever got to X. or not. We had to make
three trips, stumbling over railway lines and sleepers, in the dark, falling
into wet ditches and slipping on muddy banks; but in the end we got all our
luggage, including the boy’s top-coats, into a train which lay lifeless and
deserted in a siding.
This time Thompson and the boy
slept. I sat up stiff with cold. At half-past five a French railway porter
opened our door and invited us to descend, alleging that he wanted to clean the
carriage. I was quite pleased to wake Thompson who was snoring.
“Get up,” I said, “there’s a man
here who wants to clean the carriage and we’ve got to get out.”
“I’m damned if I get out,” said
Thompson.
The Frenchman repeated his
request most politely. If the gentlemen would be good enough to descend he
would at once clean the carriage.
Thompson fumbled in his pocket
and got out an electric torch. At first I thought he meant to make sure that
the carriage required cleaning. Thinking things over I came to the conclusion
that he felt he could talk French better if he could see a little. He turned
his ray of light on the Frenchman and said slowly and distinctly:
“Nous sommes officiers anglais,
et les officiers anglais ne descendent pas—jamais.”
The Frenchman blinked
uncertainly. Thompson added:
“Jamais de ma vie.”
That settled the French porter.
He was face to face with one of the national idiosyncrasies of the English, a
new one to him and incomprehensible, but he submitted at once to the
inevitable. He gave up all idea of cleaning the carriage and Thompson went to
sleep again. The boy slept soundly through the whole business.
At half-past seven—the train had
been jogging along since six—Thompson woke and said he thought he’d better
shave. The proposal struck me as absurd.
“We can’t possibly shave,” I
said, “without water.”
Thompson was quite equal to that
difficulty. The next time the train stopped—it stopped every ten minutes or
so—he hopped out with a folding drinking cup in his hand. He returned with the
cup full of hot water. He had got it from the engine driver. He and I shaved.
The boy still slept, but, as Thompson pointed out, that did not matter. He was
too young to require much shaving.
“Nice boy that,” said Thompson.
“Son of an archdeacon; was at Cambridge when the war broke out. Carries a photo
of his mother about with him. Only nice boys carry photos of their mothers. He
has it in a little khaki-coloured case along with one of the girl he’s going to
marry—quite a pretty girl with tously hair and large eyes.”
“Oh, he’s engaged to be married,
is he?”
“Of course he is. That sort of
boy is sure to be. Just look at him.”
As he lay there asleep his face
looked extraordinarily young and innocent. I admitted that he was just the sort
of boy who would get engaged to the first girl who took him seriously.
“Girl’s out here nursing,” said
Thompson. “V.A.D. Evidently has a strong sense of duty or she wouldn’t be doing
it. V.A.D.-ing isn’t precisely a cushy job. He’s tremendously in love.”
“Seems to have confided most of
his affairs in you,” I said.
“Told me,” said Thompson, “that
the girl has just been home on leave. He hoped to get back, too, to meet her,
thinks he would have got a week if he hadn’t been ordered off on this course,
bombing or whatever it is.”
Thompson washed while he talked.
It could scarcely be called a real wash, but he soaped his face, most of his
neck and his ears with his shaving brush and then dipped his handkerchief in
the drinking cup and wiped the soap off. He was certainly cleaner afterwards;
but I felt that what was left of the water would not clean me.
Later on Thompson secured some
rolls of bread, two jam pastries and six apples. The bread and pastry I think
he bought. The apples I am nearly sure he looted. I saw a large basket of
apples in one of the waggons of a train which was standing in the station at
which Thompson got out to buy our breakfast. They were exactly like the apples
he brought back.
We woke up the boy then. It did
not matter whether he shaved or not; but at his age it is a serious thing to
miss a chance of food.
About midday we arrived at a
large town. Thompson learned from the R.T.O. who inhabited the railway station
there that we could not get a train to take us any further till ten o’clock
that night. He said again that was war, what the French call guerre, but he
seemed quite pleased at the prospect of the wait. He spoke of looking for a
proper meal and a Turkish bath. The bath we did not succeed in getting; but we
had an excellent luncheon: omelette, fried fish, some kind of stewed meat and a
bottle of red wine. The boy stuck to us and told us a lot more about his girl.
His great hope, he said, was that he would meet her somewhere in France. I
could see that what he really looked forward to was a wound of a moderately
painful kind which would necessitate a long residence, as a patient, in her
hospital. He was, as Thompson said, a nice boy; but he talked too much about
the girl. He was also a well-educated boy and anxious to make the best of any
opportunities which came his way. He told us that there was an interesting
cathedral in the town and proposed that we should all go and see it after
lunch. Thompson is not an irreligious man. Nor am I. We both go to church regularly,
though not to excess, but we do not either of us care for spending week day
afternoons in a cathedral. Thompson still hankered after a Turkish bath. I had
a plan for getting a bedroom somewhere and going to sleep. We sent the boy off
to the cathedral by himself.
The Turkish bath, as I said, was
unobtainable. We walked through most of the streets of that town looking for
it. Then Thompson proposed that we should have afternoon tea. That we got in a
small room above a pastry cook’s shop. The girl who served us brought us tea
and a large assortment of sticky pastry. Thompson hates sticky pastry. There is
only one kind of cake made in France which he will eat. I knew what it was, for
I had often had tea with Thompson before. I should have recognized one if I had
seen it; but I could not remember the French name for it. Thompson insisted on
describing its appearance to the girl. He gave his description in English and
the girl looked puzzled. I tried to translate what he said into French and she
looked still more puzzled.
Then from the far corner of the
room came a pleasant voice.
“I think brioche is the word you
want.” It was. I recollected it directly I heard it. I turned to thank our
interpreter. She was a young woman in the uniform of a V.A.D. She was sitting
at a table by herself, was, in fact, the only other occupant of the room. I
thanked her. Thompson joined in and thanked her effusively. There was not much
light in the room and her corner was decidedly gloomy. Still, it was possible
to see that she was a decidedly pretty girl. We both said that if there was
anything we could do for her we should be very pleased to do it After the way
she helped us out with the brioche we could scarcely say less.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you may be
able to tell me when I will be able to get a train to——?”
She mentioned one of those towns
of which the English have taken temporary possession, turning the hotels into
hospitals, to the great profit of the original proprietors.
“Certainly,” said Thompson.
“There’s a train at 9 p.m. But you’ll be travelling all night in that. If I
were you I’d stay here till to-morrow morning and then——”
“Can’t,” said the girl. “Properly
speaking I’m due back to-day; but I missed the early train this morning and
only got here an hour ago. The boat was horribly late.”
“Ah,” said Thompson, “you’re
coming back after leave, I suppose.”
The girl sighed faintly.
“Yes.” she said, “but I’ve had a
fortnight’s leave; I can’t complain.”
“I’ll just write down that train
for you,” said Thompson.
He scribbled 9 p.m. on a piece of
paper and carried it over to the girl. It seemed to me an unnecessary thing to
do. Nine is a simple number, easy to remember. Some thought of the same kind
occurred to the girl. She looked at Thompson, first with some surprise, and
then, I thought, rather coldly. She was evidently not inclined to accept any
further friendly offers from Thompson. He did not seem in the least abashed
even when she turned her shoulder to us and looked the other way.
“Have you seen the cathedral
here?” said Thompson.
The girl made no answer.
“I really think,” said Thompson,
“that you ought to pay a visit to the cathedral. You’ll like it, you really
will. And you’ve got hours before you. I don’t see how you can fill in the time
if you don’t go to the cathedral.”
“Thank you,” said the girl
without turning round.
“I’m not going there,” said
Thompson, “or I’d offer to show you the way. But you can’t miss it. You can see
the spire from the window. It’s the finest specimen of early Gothic in the
north of France. The glass is superb. There’s an altar piece by Raphael or
Botticelli, I forget which. The screen is late Italian Renaissance, and there’s
a tomb in the west transept which is supposed to be that of the Venerable
Bede.”
The girl got up and walked out of
the room. I was not surprised.
“Thompson,” I said, “what do you
mean by behaving like a cad? Any one could see that she is a nice girl; a lady,
not that sort at all.”
Thompson grinned.
“And as for that rigmarole of
yours about the cathedral—what the devil do you know about Italian Renaissance,
or Botticelli or early Gothic? I never heard such rot in my life. As a matter
of fact I’ve always heard that the glass in this cathedral is poor.”
“All the same,” said Thompson,
“if she goes there she’ll be pleased. She’ll find something she’ll like a great
deal better than stained glass.”
“As for the Venerable Bede,” I
said, “he was buried in Oxford if he was buried anywhere, and I don’t know that
he was. He might have been cremated, or minced up by high explosives so that
they couldn’t bury him.”
“I thought I recognized her,”
said Thompson, “I went over to her table and had a good look to make sure.”
“Don’t pretend you know her,” I
said “She certainly didn’t know you.”
“I looked at her photograph five
times at least last night while you were asleep.”
I thought this over for a minute.
Then I said:
“You don’t mean to tell me that
she’s the girl that boy is engaged to be married to?”
“The exact same girl,” said
Thompson. “I couldn’t be mistaken.”
I meditated on the situation.
“I hope,” I said, “that he won’t
have left the cathedral before she gets there.”
“No fear,” said Thompson, “he’s a
most conscientious boy. Having started out to do that cathedral he’ll look at
every stone of it before he leaves. He’ll be there for hours yet. What I’m
afraid of is that she won’t go there.”
“She started in the right
direction,” I said “I saw her out of the window.”
“I did my best anyhow,” said
Thompson. “I told her I wasn’t going there. She didn’t like me. I could see
that. If I’d let her think I was going to the cathedral she’d have marched
straight off to the station and sat in the Ladies’ Waiting-room till her train
started.”
The girl, it appeared, did visit
the cathedral and the boy was there. He was waiting for us on the platform at
the railway station at half-past nine. He talked half the night to Thompson
about his wonderful stroke of luck. Just as I dropped off to sleep I heard
Thompson quoting Shakespeare. It was, to the best of my belief, the only time
in his life that Thompson ever did quote Shakespeare.
“Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know,” he said.
VII~~ HIS GIRL
There were thirty or forty
officers in the lounge of the hotel, all condemned, as I was, to spend the
greater part of the day there. Some men have better luck. It was the fourth
time I had been held up in this wretched place on my way back to France after leave.
Dragged out of our beds at an unreasonable hour, crammed into a train at
Victoria, rushed down to an embarkation port as if the fate of the empire
depended on our getting there without a minute’s delay, we find, when we get
out of the train, that the steamer will not start for three hours, four hours,
on this occasion six hours. We are compelled to sit about in an hotel, desolate
and disgusted, when we might have been comfortable in London.
I looked round to see if there
were anyone I wanted to talk to. There were—I had seen them at Victoria—three
or four men whom I knew slightly, but I had no particular wish to spend hours
with any one of them. I had just decided to go out for a walk by myself when I
felt a slap on my shoulder. I turned and saw Daintree. I was uncommonly glad to
see him. Daintree and I were friends before the war and I have always found him
an amusing companion. He greeted me heartily.
“Great luck,” he said, “running
into you like this. I don’t see a single other man I know in the whole crowd.
And any way I particularly wanted to talk to you. I’ve got a story to tell
you.”
We secured a corner and two
comfortable chairs. I lit a pipe and waited. Daintree is a wonderful man for
picking up stories. The most unusual things happen to him and he gets mixed up
in far more adventures than anyone else I know. And he likes telling stories.
Usually, the men who have stories to tell will not talk, and the men who like
talking have nothing interesting to tell. Daintree is exceptional.
“What is it this time?” I asked.
“What journalists call a ‘sob story,’ or is it meant to be humorous?”
“I should call it a kind of
joke,” said Daintree; “but my wife says it’s the most pathetic thing she’s ever
heard. It makes her cry even to think of it You can take it either way. I’ll be
interested to see how you do take it. I was thinking of writing it to you, ‘for
your information and necessary action, please.’ My wife wanted me to, but it’s
too long for a letter. Besides, I don’t see what you or anyone else could possibly
do in the matter. You may give advice—that’s what my wife expects of you—but
there’s really no advice to give. However, you can tell me how it strikes you.
That’s what I want to know, whether you agree with my wife or with me. You know
Simcox, don’t you, or do you? I forget.”
“Simcox?” I said. “Is that a
tall, cadaverous man in the Wessex? Rather mournful looking?”
“That’s the man. Came home from a
remote corner of the Argentine, or somewhere like that, early in the war, and
got a commission. He’s a captain now.”
“I met him,” I said, “down Albert
way, shortly before the push last year. I can’t say I knew him. He seemed to me
rather a difficult kind of man to know.”
“So my wife says,” said Daintree.
“He’s older than most of us, for one thing, and has spent twenty years all by
himself herding sheep or branding bullocks, or whatever it is they do out in
those places. Naturally he’d rather lost touch with life at home and found it
difficult to fit himself in; especially with a lot of boys straight from the
‘Varsities or school. They were mostly boys in his battalion. Anyhow, he seems
to have been a bit morose, but he did his job all right in the regiment and was
recommended for the M.C.. He got knocked out in the Somme push and jolly nearly
lost a leg. They saved it in the end and sent him down to my place to
convalesce.”
Daintree owns a very nice place
in the Midlands. In the old days it was one of the pleasantest houses I know to
stay in. Daintree himself was a capital host and his wife is a charming woman.
The house is a convalescent home for officers now, and Mrs. Daintree, with the
help of three nurses, runs it. Daintree pretends to regard this as a grievance,
and says it was all his wife’s doing, though he was just as keen on the place
as she was.
“Damned nuisance,” he said,
“finding the place full of boys rioting when I get home on leave. And it’s full
up now—twelve of them, no less. There’s hardly a spot in the house I can call
my own, and they’ve spoiled the little lake I made at the bottom of the lawn.
That young ass Pat Singleton started what he called boat-races on it——”
“Oh, Pat Singleton’s there?” I
said. “I knew he’d been wounded, but I didn’t hear he’d been sent to your
place.”
“Pat Singleton’s always
everywhere,” said Daintree. “I’ve never come across a place where he wasn’t,
and he’s a devil for mischief. Remind me afterwards to tell you about the trick
he played on the principal nurse, a Scotchwoman with a perfectly terrific sense
of her own dignity,” Daintree chuckled.
“If you’d rather tell me that
story,” I said, “instead of the one about Simcox, I’d just as soon have it. In
fact, I’d prefer it. Sob stories are always trying.”
“But I’m not sure that the Simcox
one is a sob story, though there’s a certain amount of slosh in it. Anyhow,
I’ve got to tell it to you, for my wife says you’re the only man she knows who
can advise what ought to be done.”
“All right,” I said, “but Pat
Singleton’s escapades always amuse me. I’d like to hear about his making an
apple-pie bed for that nurse.”
Daintree chuckled again, and I
gathered from the expression of his face that the nurse had endured something
worse than an apple-pie bed.
“Or about the boat-races,” I
said. “I didn’t know you had anything which floated on that lake of yours.”
“I haven’t,” said Daintree,
“except the kind of wooden box in which the gardener goes out to clear away the
duck-weed. However, Pat Singleton comes into the Simcox story in the end. It’s
really about him that my wife wants your advice.”
“No one,” I said, “can give
advice about Pat Singleton.”
“Knowing the sort of man Simcox
is,” said Daintree, “you’ll understand that he was rather out of it at first in
a house full of boys just out of hospital and jolly glad to have a chance of
running about a bit. Pat Singleton wasn’t there when Simcox arrived. But the
others were nearly as bad; silly jokes from morning to night and an infernal
row always going on. My wife likes that sort of thing, fortunately.”
“Simcox, I suppose, just sat by
himself in a corner of the veranda and glowered?”
“Exactly. And at first my wife
could do nothing with him. In the end, of course——”
“In the end,” I said, “she
persuaded him to tell her his inmost secrets and to confide to her the tragedy
of his soul. That’s just what she would do.”
Mrs. Daintree is a very kind and
sympathetic lady. When she talks to me I feel ready to tell her anything. A man
like Simcox, shy, reserved, and wholly unaccustomed to charming ladies, would
succumb to her easily and pour out a love story or anything else he happened to
have on his chest at the time.
“You see,” said Daintree, “his
leg was pretty stiff and he couldn’t get about much, even if he’d wanted to.
There was nothing for him to do except sit in a deck-chair. My wife felt it her
duty to talk to him a good deal.”
Daintree seemed to be making
excuses for Mrs. Daintree and Simcox. They were unnecessary. Mrs. Daintree
would have got his story out of him if she thought he was really in need of
sympathy, whether he sat in a chair all day or was able to row races in the
lake in the gardener’s punt.
“Anyhow,” said Daintree, “what he
told her—he told it to me afterwards, so there’s no secret about it—was this:
He got hit in the leg during an advance through one of those woods north of the
Somme, Mametz, I think. It was a beastly place. Our fellows had been in there
two days before and had to clear out again. Then Simcox’s lot went in—you know
the sort of thing it was?”
I nodded.
“Shell holes, and splintered tree
trunks,” I said. “Machine-guns enfilading you, and H.E. bursting promiscuous. I
know.”
“Well, Sirmcox’ fellows went in
all right, and stayed there for a while. Simcox says he remembers noticing that
the ground was strewed with débris left by the Germans when they cleared out,
and by our fellows afterwards. Equipment, rifles and all the rest of it lying
about, as well as other things—pretty ghastly things.”
“You needn’t go into details,” I
said. “I can guess.”
“I’m only telling you this,” said
Daintree, “because all the stuff lying about seems to have interested Simcox.
It’s odd the feelings men have at these times. Simcox says the thing he chiefly
wanted to do was to tidy up. He had a kind of strong desire to pick things up
and put them away somewhere. Of course he couldn’t; but he did pick up one
thing, a cigarette case. He showed it to me. It was one of those long-shaped,
flat white metal cases which fellows carry because they hold about thirty
cigarettes. Simcox says he doesn’t know why he picked it up. He didn’t want it
in the least. He just saw it lying there on the ground and stuffed it into his
pocket. Almost immediately after that he was hit. Bit of shrapnel under the
knee.”
“I remember hearing about that
business,” I said. “We were driven out again, weren’t we?”
“Exactly. And Simcox was left
behind. He couldn’t walk, of course. But he crawled into a shell hole, and
there he lay. Well, for the next two days that wood wasn’t healthy for either
side. The Germans couldn’t get back, because we were sprinkling the whole place
with shrapnel. We couldn’t advance for similar reasons. Simcox just lay in his
shell hole. He tied up his leg somehow. He had some brandy in a flask as well
as his iron rations. But he hadn’t much tobacco. There were only two cigarettes
in his own case. However, he had the other case, the one he picked up. There
were nearly twenty in it Also there was—I say, at this point the story gets sloppy.”
“Never mind,” I said. “Go on.
What else was in the cigarette case? A farewell letter to a loving wife? Love
to little Willie and a text of Scripture?”
“Not so bad as that. A photo of a
girl. He showed it to me when he told me the story.”
“Good looking girl?”
“Very. Large eyes—sort of tender,
you know, and appealing; and a gentle, innocent face, and a mouth——”
“I suppose,” I said, “that these
raptures are necessary if I’m to understand the story. Otherwise, you may skip
them.”
“Can’t possibly skip them,” said
Daintree. “The whole point of the story depends on your realizing the sort of
girl she was. Pathetic—that’s the word I want. Looked at you out of the photo
as if she was a poor, lonely, but uncommonly fetching little thing, who wanted
a strong, true man to shelter her from the evil world. She was got up in some
sort of fancy dress which kind of heightened the effect. I don’t altogether
profess to understand what happened, though my wife says she does. But Simcox
in a sort of way fell in love with her. That’s not the way he put it. He didn’t
feel that she was just an ordinary girl—the sort one falls in love with. She
was—well, he didn’t think of her as flesh and blood—more a kind of
vision—spiritual, you know.”
“Angel?” I said.
“That sort of thing. You know.
That was the idea that gripped Simcox while he lay there in the shell hole.
Stars came out at night and Simcox felt that she was looking down at him. In
the day he used to lie and gaze at her. When he thought it was all up with him
and that he couldn’t live, he seemed to hear her voice—I say, you ought to hear
my wife telling this part of the story. Simcox wouldn’t tell it to me,
naturally; but he seems to have enlarged on it a good deal to her. He says that
only for that photo he’d have given in and just died. I daresay he wouldn’t
really, but he thinks he would. Anyhow, he didn’t. He stuck it out and his leg
didn’t hurt nearly as much as he expected. He attributes that to the influence
of this—this——”
“Angel visitant?” I said.
“You can call her an angel if you
like,” said Daintree.
“This,” I said, “seems to me a
pure sob story. If there’s any other part less harrowing, I wish you’d hurry up
and get to it.”
“All right,” said Daintree. “I’ll
cut out the rest of his experiences in that shell hole, though, mind you,
they’re rather interesting and frightfully poetic the way my wife tells them.
After two days our fellows got back into the wood and kept it. The
stretcher-bearers found Simcox in his hole and they lugged him down to a
Casualty Clearing Station. From that he went to a hospital—the usual round. He
had a pretty bad time, first over there, and then, when they could move him, in
London. By degrees he got more sane about the photo. He stopped thinking she
was any kind of spirit and took to regarding her just as a girl, though a very
exceptional kind of girl, of course. He was hopelessly in love with her. Do you
think a man really could fall in love with a photo?”
“Simcox did,” I said, “so we
needn’t discuss that point.”
“The chances were, of course,”
said Daintree, “that she was some other fellow’s girl, possibly some other
fellow’s wife. But Simcox didn’t care. He was too far gone to care for anything
except to get that girl. Those morose, shy men are frightfully hard hit in that
sort of way, I’m told. That’s what my wife says, anyhow. They get it much worse
than we do when they do get it. Simcox would have dragged that girl out of the
arms of an archbishop if that was where he found her. Of course he couldn’t go
hunting her over England while he was in hospital with a bad leg; but he made
up his mind to find out who she was and where she lived as soon as he was well
enough to go about. He’d very little to go on—practically nothing. The photo
had been cut down so as to fit into the cigarette case, so that there wasn’t
even a photographer’s name on it.”
“He might have advertised,” I
said. “There are papers which go in for that sort of thing, publish rows of
reproductions of photographs ‘Found on the battle-field,’ with requests for
identification.”
“My wife thought of that,” said
Daintree, “but Simcox didn’t seem to take to the idea. He said the photo was
too sacred a thing to be reproduced in a paper. My own idea is that he was
afraid of any kind of publicity. You see, the other fellow might turn up—the fellow
who really had a right to the girl.”
“How the deuce did he propose to
find her?”
“I don’t know. He told my wife
some rotten yarn about instinct guiding him to her; said he felt sure that the
strength of his great love would somehow lead him to her side. He didn’t say
that to me, couldn’t, you know. But it’s wonderful what a fellow will say to a
woman, if she’s sympathetic, and my wife is. Still, even so, he must be more or
less mad to think a thing like that. Mad about the girl. He’s sane enough in
every other way.”
“He can’t be so mad as that,” I
said. “Just fancy going out into a field—I suppose that’s the way you’d do
it—and hanging about until your great love set you strolling off either to the
right or to the left. No man, however mad, could expect to come on a girl that
way—no one particular girl, I mean. Of course you’d meet several girls
whichever way you went. Couldn’t help it. The world’s full of girls.”
“I don’t know what he meant,”
said Daintree, “but my wife sympathized with him and seemed to think he’d pull
it off in the end. At first he was a bit shy of letting her see the photo; but
when he saw she was as sympathetic as all that he showed it to her. Well, the
moment she saw it, she felt that she knew the face.”
“That was a stroke of luck for
Simcox.”
“No it wasn’t,” said Daintree,
“for my wife couldn’t put a name to the girl. She was sure she had seen her
somewhere, knew her quite well, in fact, but simply couldn’t fix her. Funny
thing, but it was exactly the same when they showed me the photo. At the first
glance I said right away that I knew her. Then I found I couldn’t say exactly
who she was. The more I looked the more certain I was that I’d seen her
somewhere, her or someone very like her. And it wasn’t a commonplace face by
any means. Poor Simcox kept begging us to think. My wife went over our
visitors’ book—we’ve kept one of those silly things for years—but there wasn’t
a name in it which we couldn’t account for. I got out all the old albums of
snapshots and amateur photos in the house. You know the way those things
accumulate; groups of all sorts. But we couldn’t find the girl. And yet both my
wife and I were sure we’d met her. Then one morning Simcox burst into my wife’s
little sitting-room—a place none of the convalescents have any right to go. He
was in a fierce state of excitement. Said that an officer who’d arrived the
night before was exactly like the photo and that the girl must be his sister or
cousin, or something. The only officer who came that night was—you’d never
guess!—Pat Singleton.”
“Pat,” I said, “though a young
devil, is cheerful, and I never saw him anything but self-confident. I can’t
imagine a girl such as you described bearing the faintest resemblance to that
boy. You said that she was a kind of die-away, pathetic, appealing angel. Now
Pat——”
“I know,” said Daintree. “All the
same, the likeness was there. The moment I looked at the photo with Pat in my
mind I knew why I thought I recognized it My wife said the same thing.”
“But Pat Singleton hasn’t any
sisters,” I said.
“No, he hasn’t. He hasn’t even a
first cousin anything like the age of the girl in the photo. I knew all the
Singletons well, have for years. But Simcox insisted his girl must be some
relation of Pat’s, and in the end I promised to ask the boy. In the first
place, if she was a relation, it seemed an impudent sort of thing to do, and if
she wasn’t, Pat would be sure to make up some infernal story about me and a
girl and tell it all over the place. However, my wife egged me on and poor
Simcox was so frightfully keen that I promised.
“Well, I sent for Pat Singleton
next morning. He was a little subdued at first, as much subdued as I’ve ever
seen him. He thought I was going to rag him about the spoof he’d played off on
the nurse. He did that before he was twelve hours in the house. Remind me to
tell you about it afterwards. I don’t wonder he looked piano. She’d been going
for him herself and that woman is a real terror. However, he cheered up the
moment I showed him the photo of the girl. He asked me first of all where the
devil I’d got it. Said he’d lost it somewhere before he was wounded.”
“Oh, it was his, then?” I said.
“Yes,” said Daintree, grinning,
“it was his. He was particularly anxious to know how I came by it. I didn’t
tell him, of course. Couldn’t give Simcox away, you know. Then Pat began to
cheek me. Asked if I’d fallen in love with the girl and what my wife would say
when he told her. Said he carried the photo about with him and showed it to
fellows just to watch them falling in love with her. It seems that nine men out
of ten admired her greatly. He asked me if I didn’t think she was the prettiest
girl I’d ever seen, and that I wasn’t the first man by any means who wanted her
name and address. He grinned in a most offensive way and said that he never
gave away that girl’s name to anyone; that I ought to know better than to go
running after a nice, innocent little thing like that who wouldn’t know how to
take care of herself. I wasn’t going to stand much of that sort of talk from
Pat Singleton. I told him straight that if he didn’t tell me that girl’s name
and where she lived I’d make things hot for him. I threatened to report the
little game he’d had with the nurse and that if I did he’d be court-martialled.
I don’t know whether a man could be court-martialled for cheeking a nurse, but
the threat had a good effect on Pat. He really was a bit afraid of that woman.
I don’t wonder, though it’s the first time I’ve ever known him afraid of
anyone.”
Daintree paused and chuckled
horribly.
“Well,” I said, “who was the
girl?”
“Haven’t you tumbled to it yet?”
said Daintree.
“No. Do I know her?”
“I can’t say you exactly know
her,” said Daintree. “You know him. It was a photo of Pat himself dressed up as
the Sleeping Beauty, or Fatima, or some such person in a pantomime they did
down at the base last Christmas when he was there. The young devil carried the
thing about with him so as to play off his silly spoof on every fellow he met.
I must say he made a damned pretty girl.”
“Good Lord!” I said. “And how did
Simcox take it?”
“Simcox hasn’t been told—yet,”
said Daintree. “That’s just what my wife wants your advice about. You see it’s
an awkward situation.”
“Very,” I said.
“If we tell him,” said Daintree,
“he’ll probably try to kill Pat Singleton, and that would lead to a lot of
trouble. On the other hand, if we don’t tell him he’ll spend the rest of his
life roaming about the world looking for a girl who doesn’t exist, and never
did. It seems a pity to let that happen.”
“My idea,” I said, “would be to
get another girl, not necessarily like the photo, but the same type, appealing
and pathetic and all that. He’d probably take to her after a time.”
“I suggested that,” said
Daintree, “but my wife simply won’t hear of it. She says the story as it stands
is a great romance and that it would be utterly spoiled if Simcox switched off
after another girl. I can’t see that, can you?”
“In a case like this,” I said,
“when the original girl wasn’t a girl at all——”
“Exactly,” said Daintree, “but
when I say that my wife brings up the Angel in the Shell Hole part of the story
and says that a great romance is its own reward.”
“I don’t know what to advise,” I
said.
“I didn’t think you would,” said
Daintree, “though my wife insisted that you’d be able to suggest something. But
you can tell me what you think of the story. That’s what I really want to get
out of you. Is it a Sob Story or just a rather unusual spoof?”
“That,” I said, “depends entirely
whether you look at it from Simcox’ point of view or Pat Singleton’s.”
VIII ~~ SIR GALAHAD
The order, long expected and
eagerly desired, came at last. The battalion moved out from dusty and crowded
barracks to a camp in the wilderness. Lieutenant Dalton, a cheerful boy who had
been taught Holy Scripture in his childhood, wrote to his mother that the new
camp was “Somewhere in the wilderness beyond Jordan between the river of Egypt
and the great sea.” This description of the situation was so entirely
inaccurate that the Censor allowed it to pass without complaint. Old Mrs.
Dalton told her friends that her son was living under the shadow of Mount
Sinai. He was, in fact, nowhere near either Jordan or Sinai. He was some miles
east of the Suez Canal. For a week or so officers and men rejoiced in their new
quarters. There was plenty of elbow room; no more of the overcrowding they had
suffered since they landed. They had, indeed, miles of totally unoccupied
desert at their disposal. Each tent might have stood in its own private
grounds, three acres or so in extent, if that had not been felt by the colonel
to be an inconvenient arrangement. There was also—and this particularly pleased
the battalion—the prospect of a fight with the Turks. Everyone believed when
the move was made that a battle was imminent, and the battalion, which had no
experience of fighting, was most anxious to show what it could do.
After awhile the enthusiasm for
the new camp began to fade. The Turks did not put in an appearance, and life
was as peaceful as it had been in the English camp where the battalion was
trained. The situation of the camp, though roomy, was not exciting. Both
officers and men began to find existence exceedingly dull. Lieutenant Dalton,
who at this time wrote long letters to his mother, told her that he understood
at last why the Children of Israel were so desperately anxious to get back to
Egypt and were inclined to rag Moses about the want of melons and cucumbers. At
the end of the month the whole battalion was bored to exasperation.
The desert which stretched in
front of the camp was intolerably flat. The sun rose with pitiless regularity,
shone with a steady glare for a great many hours, and then set. That was all
that ever happened. The coming of a cloud into the sky would have been greeted
with cheers. No cloud appeared. A sandstorm, however disagreeable, would have
been welcomed as a change. The sand stayed quietly where it was. The men tried
football, and gave it up because of the blistering heat. They played “House”
until even the excitement of that mild gamble exhausted itself. No other form
of amusement suggested itself. There was not even any work to do. Had the
battalion belonged to the Brigade of Guards it would no doubt have gone on
doing barrack-square drill every day and all day long until the men learned to
move like parts of a machine. But this was a Territorial battalion, and the
colonel held reasonable views about modern warfare. The value of drill, a
mechanical business, was in his opinion easily exaggerated. Had the battalion
belonged to an Irish regiment there would probably have been several interesting
fights and some means of obtaining whisky would have been devised. In such ways
the men would have escaped the curse of monotony, and the officers would have
been kept busy in the orderly room. But this battalion came from the English
Midlands. The men did not want to fight each other, and had no overpowering
desire to get drunk. When the morning parades were over they lay in their tents
and grumbled peacefully. Under such circumstances tempers often wear thin, and
a habit of bickering takes possession of a mess. It is greatly to the credit of
everyone concerned that there was no sign of bad temper among the officers of
the battalion. The colonel lived a good deal by himself in his tent, but was
always quietly good-humoured. Lieutenant Dalton, an incurably merry boy, kept
the other subalterns cheerful. Only Captain Maitland was inclined to complain a
little, and he had a special grievance, an excuse which justified a certain
amount of grumbling. He slept badly at night, and liked to read a book of some
sort after he went to bed. The mess had originally possessed an excellent
supply of books, some hundred volumes of the most varied kind supplied by the
Camps Libraries’ Association at home. Unfortunately, almost all the books were
left behind when the move was made. Only three volumes were to be found in the
new camp—one novel, a treatise on the culture of apple trees, and Mallory’s
“Morte D’Arthur.”
Captain Maitland blamed the
chaplain for the loss.
“You ought to have looked after
those books, padre,” he said. “It’s a padre’s business to look after books.”
The Rev. John Haddingly, C.F.,
was a gentle little man, liked by the officers because he was entirely
unassuming, and popular with the men because he was always ready to help them.
He accepted the whole blame for the loss of the books without an attempt to
defend himself.
“I’m awfully sorry, Maitland,” he
said. “I ought to have seen to those books. I did look after the Prayer Books.
They’re here all right; at least most of them are.”
“Prayer Books!” said Maitland.
“If they were even whole Prayer Books! But those little yellow tracts of yours!
They haven’t even got the Thirty-Nine Articles in them. If they were pukka
Prayer Books I’d borrow one and try to read it. I expect there are lots of
interesting things in the small print parts of the Prayer Book, the parts you
padres never read out. But what’s the good of the books you have? Nothing in
them but what we all know off by heart.”
Haddingly sighed. He was
painfully conscious of the shortcomings of the Field Service Books supplied for
the use of the troops. Dalton came to his defence.
“Don’t strafe the padre,” he
said. “He brought along a church, an entire church. Is there another padre in
the whole Army who could have got a church to a place like this?”
Dalton’s almost incredible
statement was literally true. Haddingly had succeeded, contrary to all
regulations, in bringing with him from England a corrugated iron church. It was
quite a small one, it folded up and could be packed flat. When unpacked and erected
it was undeniably a church. It had a large cross at one end of it outside.
Inside it was furnished with an altar, complete with cross and candlesticks, a
collapsible harmonium and a number of benches. Chaplains have certainly no
right to load up troopships with churches, but Haddingly had somehow got his to
Egypt. By what blandishments the transport officer had been induced to drag the
thing out into the desert beyond the canal no one knew. Haddingly was one of
those uncomplainingly meek men who never stand up for themselves. It is a
curious fact, but it is a fact, that a really helpless person gets things done
for him which the most aggressive and masterful men cannot accomplish. The
success in life of women of the “clinging” kind is an illustration of this law.
Haddingly smiled with joy at the
mention of his church. It stood, securely bolted together, a little outside the
camp. No one, the cross being disproportionately large, could possibly mistake
it for anything but a church. In front of it was a notice board, a nice black
notice board with a suggestion of Gothic architecture about it. On the board,
in bright white letters, was a list of services and the name of the church—St
John in the Wilderness.
Originally, before the move into
the desert, it had been simply St John the Evangelist, but Haddingly felt that
the new circumstances demanded a change of dedication. Everyone, from the
colonel down to the humblest private, was secretly proud of the church. The
possession of such a thing gave a certain distinction to the battalion.
Haddingly was a good deal chaffed about it; but the building was in a fair way
to become a regimental mascot. “I’m not strafing the padre,” said Captain
Maitland, “but I wish we had a few of the books we left behind.”
“To listen to you talking,” said
Dalton, “anyone would think you were some kind of literary swell—Hall Caine and
Wordsworth rolled into one, whereas we all know that the only thing you take an
interest in is horses.” Captain Maitland was very far from being a literary
swell or claiming any such title. The books he really liked, the only books he
read when he had a free choice, were sporting stories with a strong racing and
betting interest. But in camp in the wilderness no sporting stories were
obtainable. The one novel which remained to the mess dealt with the sex
problem, a subject originally profoundly uninteresting to Maitland, who had a
healthy mind. He read it, however, as a remedy for insomnia. It proved
effective. A couple of chapters sent him to sleep every night, so the book
lasted a good while.
Every morning at breakfast
Maitland used to propound the problems raised by the chapters which he had read
the night before. The mess got into the way of holding informal debates on the
divorce laws. When he finished the book, Maitland declared that he intended to
devote himself to Eugenics and the more enlightened kind of social reform as
soon as the war was over.
“I never thought of it before,”
he said, “but I can see now that the future of the Empire really depends on the
proper legislation for child welfare, on ante-natal clinic, and the abolition
of the old empiric methods of marriage.”
“Wait till after I’m married
before you begin,” said Dalton.
Haddingly was a little pained. He
said things about the sanctity of marriage and the family as a divine
institution. No one else took Maitland seriously. It was felt that when the war
came to an end—if it ever did—he would go back to horse-racing and leave the
scientific aspects of marriage in decent obscurity.
When he had finished the novel he
took the book on apple trees to bed with him. He became, after a short time,
interested in that subject. He announced that when the war was over he intended
to buy a small place in Devonshire and go in for orchards.
“Apple growing,” he said, “is
just exactly the peaceable, shady kind of life a man wants after being stuck
down in a desert like this.”
“With your taste for the turf,”
said Dalton, “you’ll get into a shady kind of life all right, whether you plant
apple trees or not.”
Dalton was an irreverent boy.
Haddingly was greatly pleased at the thought of Maitland sitting innocently
under an apple tree.
The turn of Mallory came next.
Maitland left it for the last because the print was very small and the only
light in his tent was a feeble candle. When he got fairly started in the book
he became profoundly interested, and the other members of the mess were treated
at breakfast time to a good deal of information about medieval warfare.
“As far as I can make out,”
Maitland said, “every officer in those days was knighted as soon as he got his
commission.”
“Jolly good idea,” said Dalton.
“I should buck about like anything if they made me a K.C.B.”
“You wouldn’t have been an
officer or a knight,” said Maitland. “You’d have been the court fool. You’ve no
idea whatever of chivalry.”
Like most simple men who read
very little, Maitland took the books he did read seriously and was greatly
influenced by them. The apple tree treatise made him want to be a gardener. A
slow and careful study of Mallory filled him with a profound admiration for
medieval romance.
“The reason modern war is such a
sordid business,” he said, “is that we’ve lost the idea of chivalry.”
“Chivalry is all very well,” said
Dalton, “if there’s anyone to chival about. I haven’t read much about those old
knights of yours, Maitland; but so far as I can make out from what you tell us
they were always coming across damsels, fair, distressed, and otherwise
fetching. Now, I haven’t seen a damsel since I left England. How the deuce can
I be chivalrous? I defy anyone, even that Lancelot blighter of yours, to go
into raptures about the old hag you turned out of the camp yesterday for
selling rotten dates to the men.”
Dalton was not the only member of
the mess who made jokes about the knights of King Arthur’s fellowship. But
Maitland went on reading out selected passages from Mallory, and there is no
doubt that everyone, even Dalton, became interested. Haddingly, the padre, made
no attempt to conceal the fact that he was profoundly influenced.
He had always been proud of his
church, but had hitherto been content to use it in the normal way for parade
services on Sunday morning. The services were undeniably popular. The men
enjoyed singing hymns, and they listened patiently to the sermons because they
liked Haddingly. The officers, who also liked Haddingly, attended the Sunday
morning services with great regularity. Dalton, though he preferred playing
rag-time on the piano, accompanied the hymns on the harmonium.
Haddingly was greatly moved by
Maitland’s account of the medieval spirit. He took to spending half an hour in
the church every morning before breakfast Nobody knew what he did there. The
officers, through feelings of delicacy, never asked him questions about these
new devotions. The men, who were getting to know and like Haddingly better and
better as time went on, regarded his daily visits to the church as proof that
their padre was one who knew his job and did it thoroughly.
One morning—the mess had then
been discussing medieval chivalry for about a fortnight—Maitland read out a
passage from Mallory about a visit paid by Sir Galahad to a lonely chapel among
the mountains, “where he found nobody at all for all was desolate.” Haddingly
had just spent his lonely half hour in the church of St John in the Wilderness.
He sighed. He found nobody there in the mornings, and could not help wishing
that the battalion contained a Galahad. Dalton felt that something must be done
to preserve the credit of the mess and the dignity of English manhood. He felt
sure that sentiment about desolate chapels was an unwholesome thing. He
scoffed:
“All very well for Gallipot,” he
said, “but——”
“Galahad,” said Maitland.
“Galahad, or Gallipot, or
Golly-wog,” said Dalton. “If a man has a silly name like that, it doesn’t
matter how you spell it. The point is that it would be simply ridiculous to
attempt that sort of thing now. Suppose, for instance—— I put it to you, padre.
Suppose you saw Maitland mounted on one of the transport gee-gees trotting up
to that tin cathedral of yours—on a week-day, mind! I’m not talking about
Sundays. Suppose he got down and went inside all by himself, what would you
think, padre? There’s only one thing you could think, that Maitland had been
drinking.”
“Sir Galahad,” said Maitland,
“went in to say his prayers. He was on his way to a battle. They didn’t have to
wait months and months for a battle in those days. They had a scrap of some
sort about once a week.”
He sighed. The Turks had failed
to do what was expected of them, and life in the camp was intolerably dull.
He looked at Haddingly. It was
plainly a padre’s duty to support a spiritual and romantic view of life against
the profane jibes of Dalton. Haddingly spoke judicially.
“The general tone of society in
those days,” he said, “seems to have been very different from what it is now.
Men had much less difficulty in giving expression to their emotions. No doubt
we still feel much as they did, but——”
Haddingly became aware that no
one was listening to him. The attention of everyone at the table was attracted
by something else. The men sat stiffly, listening intently. Haddingly heard a
faint, distant humming sound. It grew louder.
“Jiminy!” said Dalton, “an
aeroplane!”
The breakfast table was laid in
the open air outside the mess tent The men rose from their seats and stared in
the direction of the coming sound. It was the first time that an aeroplane had
approached the camp in the desert. Its coming was an intensely exciting event,
an unmistakable evidence of activity somewhere; surely a sign that activity
everywhere might be expected.
The sound increased in volume.
The machine appeared, a distant speck in the clear sky. It grew rapidly larger,
flying fast. It was seen to be a biplane. It passed directly over the camp,
flying so low that the head of the pilot was plainly visible. In a few minutes
it passed from sight. The hum of its engines grew fainter. But till the sound
became inaudible no one spoke.
Then a babble of inquiry and
speculation broke out. Where was the thing going? What was it doing? What did
its sudden swift voyage mean? For the rest of the day the camp was less sleepy
than usual. Men everywhere discussed the aeroplane. Dalton was not the only one
who envied the members of the Flying Corps. It seemed a very desirable thing to
be able to rush through the air over unknown deserts; to have the chance of
seeing strange and thrilling things, Arab encampments, green oases, mirages,
caravans and camels; to drop bombs perhaps on Syrian fortresses; to estimate
the numbers of Turkish columns on the march, to reckon their strength in
artillery; to take desperate risks; to swerve and dart amid clouds of bursting
shrapnel. How much more gloriously exciting such a life than that of men baking
slowly in the monotony of a desert camp.
Maitland, stimulated by his
reading to an unnatural effort of imagination, recognized in the men of the
Flying Corps the true successors of Mallory’s adventurous knight-errants. For
them war still contained romance. Chivalry was still possible. Haddingly caught
the thought and expanded it. Knights of old had this wonderful spirit, because
to them the forests through which they roamed were unknown wastes, where all
strange things might be expected. Then when all the land became familiar,
mapped, intersected with roads, covered thick with towns, sailors inherited the
spirit of romance. Afterwards all the seas were charted, policed, and ships
went to and fro on ocean highways. The romance of adventure was lost to seamen,
lost to the world, until the airmen came and found it again by venturing on new
ways.
In the evening the aeroplane
returned. Once more its engines were heard. Once more it appeared, a speck, a
shape, a recognizable thing. But this time it did not pass away. On reaching
camp it circled twice, and then, with a long swift glide, took the ground outside
the camp a few yards beyond Haddingly’s church of St. John in the Wilderness.
The pilot stepped out of the machine.
“Good man,” said Dalton.
“Friendly of him dropping in on us like this. Must want a drink after that fly.
Eight hours at least. I’ll go and bring him along to the mess. Hope he’ll tell
us what he’s been doing. Wonder if the Turks potted at him.”
The pilot left his machine. He
walked stiffly, like a man with cramped limbs, towards the camp.
“Something wrong with the engine,
perhaps,” said Dalton. “Or he’s short of petrol. I’ll fetch him along. A whisky
and soda in a big tumbler is the thing for him. I dare say he’ll stay for
dinner.”
He started and walked quickly
towards the machine. The airman, approaching the camp, reached the church.
Instead of passing it he stopped, opened the door, and went in. Dalton paused
and looked back.
“Must have mistaken your tin
cathedral for the mess, padre,” he said. “I’ll run on and fetch him out.”
“If he’s made a mistake,” said
Haddingly, “he’ll find it out for himself and come out without your fetching
him.”
Dalton stood still. His eyes were
on the door of the church. Maitland and Haddingly were gazing at it too. The
other officers, gathered in a group outside the mess tent, stood in silence,
staring at the church. It seemed as if hours passed. In fact, nearly half an
hour went by before the door of the church opened and the airman came out. He
turned his back on the camp and went towards his machine. Neither Dalton nor
anyone else made an attempt to overtake him. The noise of the engine was heard
again. The machine raced a few yards along the ground and then rose in steep
flight. It passed across the camp and sped westwards, its shape sharply
outlined for a minute against the light of the setting sun. Then it disappeared.
Maitland took Haddingly by the
arm and led him to his tent. The two men sat down together on the camp
bedstead. Maitland opened Mallory’s “Morte d’Arthur,” and read aloud:
“Then Sir Galahad came unto a
mountain, where he found an old chapel, and found there nobody, for all was
desolate, and there he kneeled before the altar and besought of God wholesome
counsel.”
“I suppose it was just that,”
said Haddingly.
Dalton put his head into the
tent.
“I thought I’d find you here,” he
said. “I just wanted to ask the padre something. Was that Sir Golliwog come to
life again or just some ordinary blighter like me suffering from nerve strain?”
Haddingly had no answer to give
for a moment.
“He can’t have really wanted to
sit in that church for half an hour,” said Dalton. “What the dickens would he
do it for?”
“He might have wanted to pray,”
said Haddingly.
Not even his profession justified
the saying of such a thing as that outside church. But every excuse must be
made for him. He had been soaked in Mallory for a fortnight. Deserts, even when
there are camps in them, are queer places, liable to upset men’s minds, and the
conduct of the airman was certainly peculiar.
“Of course, if you put it that
way,” said Dalton, “I’ve nothing more to say. All the same, he might have come
into the mess for a drink. I’m not complaining of his doing anything he liked
in the way of going to church; but I don’t see that a whisky and soda would
have hurt him afterwards. He must have wanted it.”
IX ~~ A GUN-RUNNING EPISODE
Sam McAlister walked into my
office yesterday and laid down a handful of silver on my desk.
“There you are,” he said, “and I
am very much obliged to you for the loan.”
For the moment I could not
recollect having lent Sam any money; though I should be glad to do so at any
time if I thought he wanted it. Sam is a boy I like. He is an undergraduate of
Trinity College, Dublin, and has the makings of a man in him, though he is not
good at passing examinations and has never figured in an honours list. Some
day, when he takes his degree, he is to come into my office and be made into a
lawyer. His father, the Dean, is an old friend of mine.
I looked at the money lying
before me, and then doubtfully at Sam.
“If you’ve forgotten all about
it,” he said, “it’s rather a pity I paid. But I always was honest. That’s one
of my misfortunes. If I wasn’t—— That’s the fine you paid for me.”
Then I remembered. Sam got into
trouble with the police a few weeks ago. He and a dozen or so of his
fellow-students broke loose and ran riot through the streets of Dublin. All
high-spirited boys do this sort of thing occasionally, whether they are junior
army officers, lawyers’ clerks, or university undergraduates. Trinity College
boys, being Irish and having a large city at their gates, riot more
picturesquely than anyone else. Sam had captured the flag which the Lord Mayor
flies outside his house, had pushed a horse upstairs into the office of a
respectable stockbroker, and had driven a motor-car, borrowed from an unwilling
owner, down a narrow and congested street at twenty-five or thirty miles an
hour. He was captured in the end by eight policemen, and was very nearly sent
to gaol with hard labour. I got him off by paying a fine of one pound, together
with £2 4s. 6d. for the damage done by the horse to the stockbroker’s staircase
and office furniture. The motorcar, fortunately, had neither injured itself nor
anyone else.
“I hope,” I said, pocketing the
money, “that this will be a lesson to you, Sam.”
“It won’t,” he said. “At least,
not in the way you mean. It’ll encourage me to go into another rag the very
first time I get the chance. As a matter of fact, being arrested was the
luckiest thing ever happened to me, though I didn’t think so at the time.”
“Well,” I said, “if you like
paying up these large sums it’s your own affair. I should have thought you
could have got better value for your money by spending it on something you
wanted.”
“Money isn’t everything in the
world,” said Sam. “There is such a thing as having a good time, a rattling good
time, even if you don’t make money out of it and run a chance of being
arrested. I daresay you’d like to hear what I’ve been at.”
“If you’ve committed any kind of
crime,” I said, “I’d rather you didn’t tell me. It might be awkward for me
afterwards when you are tried.”
“I don’t think it’s exactly a
crime,” said Sam, “anyhow, it isn’t anything wrong, though, of course, it may
be slightly illegal. I’d rather like to have your opinion about that.”
“Is it a long story? I’m rather
busy to-day.”
“Not very long,” said Sam, “but I
daresay it would sound better after dinner. What would you say now to asking me
to dine to-night at your club? We could go up to that library place afterwards.
There’s never anybody there, and I could tell you the whole thing.”
Sam knows the ways of my club
nearly as well as I do myself. There is never anyone in the library in the
evening. I gave the required invitation.
We dined comfortably, and I got a
good cigar for Sam afterwards. When the waiter had left the room he plunged
into his story.
“You remember the day I was
hauled up before that old ass of a magistrate. He jawed a lot and then fined me
£3 4s. 6d., which you paid. Jolly decent of you. I hadn’t a shilling in the
world, being absolutely stony broke at the time; so if you hadn’t paid—and lots
of fellows wouldn’t—I should have had to go to gaol.”
“Never mind about that,” I said.
“You’ve paid me back.”
“Still, I’m grateful, especially
as I should have missed the spree of my life if I’d been locked up. As it was,
thanks to you, I walked out of the court without a stain on my character.”
“Well, hardly that. You were
found guilty of riotous behaviour, you know.”
“Anyhow, I walked out,” said Sam,
“and that’s the main point.”
It was, of course, the point
which mattered most; and, after all, the stain on Sam’s character was not
indelible. Lots of young fellows behave riotously and turn out excellent men
afterwards. I was an undergraduate myself once, and there is a story about
Sam’s father, now a dean, which is still told occasionally. When he was an
undergraduate a cow was found tied up in the big examination hall.
Sam’s father, who was very far
from being a dean then, had borrowed the cow from a milkman.
“There were a lot of men waiting
outside,” said Sam. “They wanted to stand me a lunch in honour of my escape.”
“Your fellow-rioters, I suppose?”
“Well, most of them had been in
the rag, and, of course, they were sorry for me, being the only one actually
caught. However, the lunch never came off. There was a queer old fellow
standing on the steps of the court who got me by the arm as I came out. Said he
wanted to speak to me on important business, and would I lunch with him. I
didn’t know what he could possibly have to say to me, for I had never seen him
before; but he looked—it’s rather hard to describe how he looked. He wasn’t
exactly what you’d call a gentleman, in the way of clothes, I mean; but he
struck me as being a sportsman.”
“Horsey?”
“Not the least. More like one’s
idea of some kind of modern pirate, though not exactly. He talked like an American.
I went with him, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, “anyone with
an adventurous spirit would prefer lunching with an unknown American buccaneer
to sharing a commonplace feast with a mob of boys. Did you happen to hear his
name?”
“He said it was Hazlewood, but——”
“But it may not have been?”
“One of the other fellows called
him Cassidy later on.”
“Oh,” I said, “there were other
fellows?”
“There were afterwards,” said
Sam, “not at first. He and I lunched alone. He did me well. A bottle of
champagne for the two of us and offered me a second bottle. I refused that.”
“He came to business after the
champagne, I suppose?”
“He more or less talked business
the whole time, though at first I didn’t know quite what he was at. He gassed a
lot about my having knocked down those two policemen. You remember that I
knocked down two, don’t you? I would have got a third only that they collared
me from behind. Well, Hazlewood, or Cassidy, or whatever his name was, had seen
the scrap, and seemed to think no end of a lot of me for the fight I put up.”
“The magistrate took a serious
view of it, too,” I said.
“There wasn’t much in it,” said
Sam modestly. “As I told Hazlewood, any fool can knock down a policeman.
They’re so darned fat. He asked me if I liked fighting policemen. I said I
did.”
“Of course.”
Sam caught some note of sarcasm
in my voice. He felt it necessary to modify his statement.
“Well, not policemen in
particular. I haven’t a special down on policemen. I like a scrap with anyone.
Then he said—Hazlewood, that is—that he admired the way I drove that car down
Grafton Street. He said he liked a man who wasn’t afraid to take risks; which
was rot. There wasn’t any real risk.”
“The police swore that you went
at thirty miles an hour,” I said. “And that street is simply crowded in the
middle of the day.”
“I don’t believe I was doing
anything like thirty miles an hour,” said Sam. “I should say twenty-seven at
the outside. And there was no risk because everybody cleared out of my way. I
had the street practically to myself. It was rather fun seeing all the other
cars and carts and things piled up upon the footpaths at either side and the
people bolting into the shops like rabbits. But there wasn’t any risk. However,
old Hazlewood evidently thought there was, and seemed frightfully pleased about
it. He said he had a car of his own, a sixty h.p. Daimler, and that he’d like
to see me drive it. I said I’d take him for a spin any time he liked. I gave
him a hint that we might start immediately after lunch and run up to Belfast in
time for dinner. With a car like that I could have done it easy. However, he
wasn’t on.”
“Do you think he really had the
car?”
“Oh, he had her all right. I
drove her afterwards. Great Scott, such a drive! The next thing he said was
that he believed I was a pretty good man in a boat. I said I knew something
about boats, though not much.”
Modesty is one of Sam’s virtues.
He is, I believe, an excellent hand in a small yacht, and does a good deal of
racing.
“I asked him what put it into his
head that I could sail a boat, and he said O’Meara told him. O’Meara is a man I
sail with occasionally, and I thought it nice of him to mention my name to this
old boy. I can hoist a spinnaker all right and shift a jib, but I’m no good at
navigation. Always did hate sums and always will. I told him that, and he said
he could do the navigation himself. All he wanted was a good amateur crew for a
thirty-ton yawl with a motor auxiliary. He had four men, and he asked me to
make a fifth. I said I’d go like a shot. Strictly speaking, I ought to have
been attending lectures; but what good are lectures?” “Very little,” I said.
“In fact, hardly any.” “I wasn’t going to lose a cruise for the sake of any
amount of lectures,” said Sam, “particularly with the chance of a tour on that
sixty h.p. car thrown in.”
Sam paused at this point. It
seemed to me that he wanted encouragement.
“You’d have been a fool if you
had,” I said.
“Up to that time,” said Sam
thoughtfully, “I hadn’t tumbled to what he was at. I give you my word of honour
I hadn’t the dimmest idea that he was after anything in particular. I thought
he was simply a good old sport with lots of money, which he knew how to spend
in sensible ways.”
“The criminal part of the
business was mentioned later on, I suppose?”
“I don’t know that there’s
anything criminal about it,” said Sam. “I’m jolly well sure it wasn’t wrong,
under the circumstances. But it may have been criminal. That’s just what I want
you to tell me.
“I’ll give you my opinion,” I
said, “when I hear what it was.”
“Gun-running,” said Sam.
Gun-running has for some time
been a popular sport in Ireland, and I find it very difficult to say whether it
is against the law or not. The Government goes in for trying to stop it, which
looks as if a gun-runner might be prosecuted when caught. On the other hand,
the Government never prosecutes gun-runners, even those who openly boast of
their exploits, and that looks as if it were quite a legal amusement. I
promised Sam that I would consider the point, and I asked him to tell me
exactly what he did.
“Well,” he said, “when I heard it
was gunrunning I simply jumped at the chance. Any fellow would. I said I’d
start right away, if he liked. As a matter of fact, we didn’t start for nearly
a fortnight. The boat turned out to be the Pegeen. You know the Pegeen, don’t
you?”
I did not. I am not a sailor, and
except that I cannot help seeing paragraphs about Shamrock IV. in the daily
papers I do not think I know the name of a single yacht.
“Well,” said Sam, “she’s
O’Meara’s boat I’ve sailed in her sometimes in cruiser races. She’s slow and
never does any good, but she’s a fine sea boat. My idea was that Hazlewood had
hired her, and I didn’t find out till after we had started that O’Meara was on
board. That surprised me a bit, for O’Meara goes in for being rather an extreme
kind of Nationalist—not the sort of fellow you’d expect to be running guns for
Carson and the Ulster Volunteers. However, I was jolly glad to see him. He
crawled out of the cabin when we were a couple of miles out of the harbour, and
by that time I’d have been glad to see anyone who knew one end of the boat from
the other. Old Hazlewood was all right; but the other three men were simply
rotters, the sort of fellows who’d be just as likely as not to take a pull on a
topsail halyard when told to slack away the lee runner. I was just making up my
mind to work the boat single-handed when O’Meara turned up. There was a
middling fresh breeze from the west, and we were going south on a reach. I
didn’t get much chance of a talk with O’Meara because he was in one watch and I
in the other—had to be, of course, on account of being the only two who knew
anything about working the boat. I did notice, though, that when he spoke to
Hazlewood he called him Cassidy. However, that was no business of mine. We
sailed pretty nearly due south that day and the next, and the next after that.
Then we hove to.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Ask me another,” said Sam. “I
told you I couldn’t navigate. I hadn’t an idea within a hundred miles where we
were. What’s more, I didn’t care. I was having a splendid time, and had
succeeded in knocking some sort of sense into the other fellow in my watch.
Hazlewood steered, and barring that he was sea-sick for eight hours, my man
turned out to be a decent sort, and fairly intelligent. He said his name was
Temple, but Hazlewood called him O’Reilly as often as not.”
“You seem to have gone in for a
nice variety of names,” I said. “What did you call yourself?”
“I stuck to my own name, of
course. I wasn’t doing anything to be ashamed of. If we’d been caught and the
thing had turned out to be a crime—I don’t know whether it was or not, but if
it was, I suppose———”
“I suppose I should have paid
your fine,” I said.
“Thanks,” said Sam. “Thanks,
awfully. I rather expected you would whenever I thought about that part of it,
but I very seldom did.”
“What happened when you lay to?”
“Nothing at first. We bumped
about a bit for five or six hours, and Temple got frightfully sick again. I
never saw a man sicker. Hazlewood kept on muddling about with charts, and doing
sums on sheets of paper, and consulting with O’Meara. I suppose they wanted to
make sure that they’d got to the right place. At last, just about sunset, a
small steamer turned up. She hung about all night, and next day we started
early, about four o’clock, and got the guns out of her, or some of them. We
couldn’t take the whole cargo, of course, in a 30-ton yacht I don’t know how
many more guns she had. Perhaps she hadn’t any more. Only our little lot
Anyhow, I was jolly glad when the job was over. There was a bit of a
roll—nothing much, you know, but quite enough to make it pretty awkward. Temple
got over his sea-sickness, which was a comfort. I suppose the excitement cured
him. The way we worked was this—but I daresay you wouldn’t understand, even if
I told you.”
“Is it very technical? I mean,
must you use many sea words?”
“Must,” said Sam. “We were at
sea, you know.”
“Well,” I said, “perhaps you’d
better leave that part out. Tell me what you did with the guns when you’d got
them.”
“Right. It was there the fun
really came in. Not that I’m complaining about the other part. It was sport all
right, but the funny part, the part you’ll like, came later. What about another
cigar?”
I rang the bell, and got two more
cigars for Sam.
“We had rather a tiresome passage
home,” he said. “It kept on falling calm, and O’Meara’s motor isn’t very powerful.
It took us a clear week to work our way up to the County Down coast. It was
there we landed, in a poky little harbour. We went in at night, and had to wait
for a full tide to get in at all. We got the sails of the boat outside, and
just strolled in, so to speak, with the wretched little engine doing about half
it could. Hazlewood told me that he expected four motor-cars to meet us, and
that I was to take one of them, and drive like hell into County Armagh. There I
was to call at a house belonging to O’Meara, and hand over my share of the
guns. He said he hoped I knew my way about those parts, because it would be
awkward for me trying to work with road maps when I ought to drive fast. I said
I knew that country like the palm of my hand. The governor’s parish is up
there, you know.”
Sam certainly ought to know
County Down. He was brought up there, and must have walked, cycled, and driven
over most of the roads.
“The only thing I didn’t know,”
said Sam, “was O’Meara’s house. I’d never heard of his having a house in that
part of the country. However, he said he’d only taken it lately, and that when
I got over the border into Armagh there’d be a man waiting to show me where to
go. He told me the road I was to take and I knew every turn of the way, so I
felt pretty sure of getting there. It was about two in the morning when we got
alongside the pier. The four motors were there all right, but there wasn’t a
soul about except the men in charge of them. We got out the guns. They were
done up in small bundles and the cartridges in handy little cases; but it took
us till half-past four o’clock to get them ashore. By that time there were a
few people knocking about; but they didn’t seem to want to interfere with us.
In fact, some of them came and helped us to pack the stuff into the cars. They
were perfectly friendly.”
“That doesn’t surprise me in the
least,” I said “The people up there are nearly all Protestants. Most of them
were probably Volunteers themselves. I daresay it wasn’t the first cargo they’d
helped to land.”
“It was the first cargo they ever
helped to land for the National Volunteers,” said Sam with a grin.
“The National Volunteers!”
I admit that Sam startled me. I
do not suppose that he has any political convictions. At the age of twenty a
man has a few prejudices but no convictions. If he is a young fellow who goes
in for being intellectual they are prejudices against the party his father
belonged to. If—and this is Sam’s case—he is a healthy-minded young man, who
enjoys sport, he takes over his father’s opinions as they stand, and regards
everybody who does not accept them as an irredeemable blackguard. The Dean is a
very strong loyalist. He is the chaplain of an Orange Lodge, and has told me
more than once that he hopes to march to battle at the head of his regiment of
Volunteers.
“Smuggling arms for the Nationalists!”
I said.
“That’s what I did,” said Sam,
grinning broadly. “But I thought all the time that I was working for the other
side. I didn’t know the Nationalists went in for guns; thought they only
talked. In fact, to tell you the truth, I forgot all about them. Otherwise I
wouldn’t have done it At least I mightn’t. But I had a great time.”
“Of course,” I said, “I don’t
mind. So far as I am concerned personally I’d rather neither side had any guns.
But if your father finds out, Sam, there’ll be a frightful row. He’ll disown
you.”
“The governor knows all about
it,” said Sam, “and he doesn’t mind one bit. Just wait till you hear the end of
the story. You’ll be as surprised as I was.”
“I certainly shall,” I said, “if
the story ends in your father’s approving of your smuggling guns for rebels.
He’d call them rebels, you know.”
“Oh,” said Sam, “as far as
rebellion goes I don’t see that there’s much to choose between them. However,
that doesn’t matter. What happened was this. I got off with my load about five
o’clock, and I had a gorgeous spin. There wasn’t a cart or a thing on the
roads, and I just let the car rip. I touched sixty miles an hour, and hardly
ever dropped below forty. Best run I ever had. Almost the only thing I passed
was a motor lorry, going the same way I was. I didn’t think anything of it at
the time, but it turned out to be important afterwards. It was about seven
o’clock when I got out of County Down into Armagh. I began looking out for the
fellow who was to meet me. It wasn’t long before I spotted him, standing at a
corner, trying to look as if he were a military sentry. You know the sort of
thing I mean. Bandolier, belt, and frightfully stiff about the back. He held up
his hand and I stopped. ‘A loyal man,’ he said. Well, I was, so far as I knew
at that time, so I said ‘You bet.’ ‘That’s not right,’ said he. ‘Give the
countersign.’ I hadn’t heard anything about a countersign, so I told him not to
be a damned fool, and that I’d break his head if he said I wasn’t a loyal man.
That seemed to puzzle him a bit. He got out a notebook and read a page or two,
looking at me and the car every now and then as if he wasn’t quite satisfied. I
felt pretty sure, of course, that he was the man I wanted. He couldn’t very
well be anyone else. So by way of cutting the business short I told him I was
loaded up with guns and cartridges, and that I wished he’d hop in and show me
where to go. ‘That’s all very fine,’ he said, ‘but you oughtn’t to be in a car
like that.’ I told him there was no use arguing about the car. I wasn’t going
back to change it to please him. He asked me who I was, and I told him,
mentioning that I was the governor’s son. I thought that might help him to make
up his mind, and it did. The governor is middling well known up in those parts,
and the mention of his name was enough. The fellow climbed in beside me. We
hadn’t very far to go, as it turned out, and in the inside of twenty minutes I
was driving up the avenue of a big house. The size of it rather surprised me,
for I didn’t think O’Meara was well enough off to keep up a place of the kind.
However, I was evidently expected, for I was shown into the dining-room by a
footman. There were three men at breakfast, my old dad, Dopping—you know
Dopping, don’t you?”
Dopping is a retired cavalry colonel.
I do business for him and know him pretty well He is just the sort of man who
would be in the thick of any gun-running that was going on.
“There was another man,” said
Sam, “whom I didn’t know and wasn’t introduced to. The fact is there wasn’t
much time for politeness. My dad looked as if he’d been shot when he saw me,
and old Dopping bristled all over like an Irish terrier at the beginning of a
fight, and asked me who the devil I was and what I was doing there. Of course,
he jolly well knew who I was, and I thought he must know what brought me there,
so I just winked by way of letting him understand that I was in the game. He
got so red in the face that I thought he’d burst. Then the other man chipped in
and asked me what I’d got in the car. The three of them whispered together for
a bit, and I suggested that if they didn’t believe me they’d better go and see.
The car was outside the door, and their own man was sitting on the guns.
Dopping went, and I suppose he told the other two that the guns were there all
right. Dad asked me where I got them, and I told them, mentioning Hazlewood’s
name and the name of the yacht. I was a bit puzzled, but I still thought
everything was all right, and that there’d be no harm in mentioning names. I
very soon saw that there was some sort of mistake somewhere. The governor and
old Dopping and the other man, who seemed to be the coolest of the three, went
over to the window and looked at the car. Then they started whispering again,
and I couldn’t hear a word they said. Didn’t want to. I was as hungry as a
wolf, and there was a jolly good breakfast on the table. I sat down and gorged.
I had just started my third egg when the door opened, and a rather nice-looking
young fellow walked in. The footman came behind him, looking as white as a
sheet, and began some sort of apology for letting the stranger in. Old Dopping,
who was still in a pretty bad temper, told the footman to go and be damned.
Then the new man introduced himself. He said he was Colonel O’Connell, of the
first Armagh Regiment of National Volunteers. I expected to see old Dopping
kill him at sight. Dopping is a tremendous loyalist, and the other
fellow—well—phew!”
Sam whistled. Words failed him, I
suppose, when it came to expressing the disloyalty of a colonel of National
Volunteers.
“Instead of that,” said Sam,
“Dopping stood up straight, and saluted O’Connell. O’Connell stiffened his
back, and saluted Dopping. The third man, the one I didn’t know, stood up, too,
and saluted. O’Connell saluted him. Then the governor bowed quite civilly, and
O’Connell saluted him. I can tell you it was a pretty scene. ‘I beg to inform
you, gentlemen,’ said O’Connell, ‘that a consignment of rifles and ammunition,
apparently intended for your force, has arrived at our headquarters in a motor
lorry.’ Nothing could have been civiller than the way he spoke. But Dopping was
not to be beat. He’s a bristly old bear at times, but he always was a
gentleman. ‘Owing to a mistake,’ he said, ‘some arms, evidently belonging to
you, are now in a car at our door.’ The governor and the other man sat down and
laughed till they were purple, but neither O’Connell nor old Dopping so much as
smiled. It was then—and I give you my word not till then—that I tumbled to the
idea that I’d been running guns for the other side. I expected that there’d be
a furious row the minute the governor stopped laughing. But there wasn’t. In
fact, no one took any notice of me. There was a long consultation, and in the
end they settled that it might be risky to start moving the guns about again,
and that each party had better stick to what it had got. Our fellows—I call
them our fellows, though, of course, I was really acting for the others—our
fellows got rather the better of the exchange in the way of ammunition. But
O’Connell scooped in a lot of extra rifles. When they had that settled they all
saluted again, and the governor said something about hoping to meet O’Connell
at Philippi. I don’t know what he meant by that, but O’Connell seemed
tremendously pleased. Where do you suppose Philippi is?”
“Philippi,” I said, “is where
somebody—Julius Caesar, I think, but it doesn’t matter—— What your father meant
was that he hoped to have a chance of fighting it out with O’Connell some day.
Not a duel, you know, but a proper battle. The Ulster Volunteers against the
other lot.”
“We shall have to wipe out the
police first,” said Sam, “to prevent their interfering. I hope I shall be there
then. I want to get my own back out of those fellows who collared me from
behind the day of the last rag. But, I say, what about the soldiers—the regular
soldiers, I mean? Which side will they be on?”
“That,” I said, “is the one
uncertain factor in the problem. Nobody knows.”
“The best plan,” said Sam, “would
be to take them away altogether, and leave us to settle the matter ourselves.
We’d do it all right, judging by the way old Dopping and O’Connell behaved to
each other.”
Out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings. I should never have suspected Sam of profound political wisdom. But
it is quite possible that his suggestion would meet the case better than any
other.
X ~~ IRELAND FOR EVER
Lord Dunseverick picked his way
delicately among the pools and tough cobble stones. He was a very well-dressed
young man, and he seemed out of place amid the miry traffic of the Belfast
quays. A casual observer would have put him down as a fashionable nincompoop,
one of those young men whose very appearance is supposed to move the British
worker to outbursts of socialistic fury. The casual observer would, in this
case, have been mistaken. Lord Dunseverick, in spite of his well-fitting
clothes, his delicately coloured tie, and his general air of sleek well-being,
was at that moment—it was the month of May, 1914—something of a hero with the
Belfast working man. And the Belfast working man, as everybody knows, is more
bitterly contemptuous of the idle rich, especially of the idle rich with
titles, than any other working man.
The Belfast working man had just
then worked himself up to a degree of martial ardour, unprecedented even in
Ulster, in his opposition to Home Rule. Lord Dunseverick was one of the
generals of the Ulster Volunteer Force. He had made several speeches which
moved Belfast to wild delight and sober-minded men elsewhere to dubious shaking
of the head. Enthusiasm in a cause is a fine thing, especially in the young,
but when Lord Dunseverick’s enthusiasm led him to say that he would welcome the
German Emperor at the head of his legions as the deliverer of Ulster from the
tyranny of a Parliament in Dublin, why then—then the rank and file of the
volunteer army cheered, and other people wondered whether it were quite wise to
say such things. Yet Lord Dunseverick, when not actually engaged in making a
speech, was a pleasant and agreeable young man with a keen sense of humour. He
even—and this is a rare quality in men—saw the humorous side of his own
speeches. The trouble was that he never saw it till after he had made them.
A heavy motor-lorry came
thundering along the quay. Lord Dunseverick dodged it, and escaped with his
life. He was splashed from head to foot with mud. He looked at his neat boots
and well-fashioned grey trousers. The black slime lay thick on them. He wiped a
spot of mud off his cheek and rubbed some wet coal dust into his collar. Then
he lit a cigarette, and smiled.
He stepped into the porch of a
reeking public-house and found himself beside a grizzled man, who looked like a
sailor. Lord Dunseverick turned to him.
“Can you tell me,” he said,
“where Mr. McMunn’s office is?”
“Is it coal you’re wanting?”
asked the sailor.
It is thus that questions are
often met in Belfast with counter-questions. Belfast is a city of business men,
and it is not the habit of business men to give away anything, even
information, without getting something in return. The counter-question may draw
some valuable matter by way of answer from the original questioner. In this
case the counter-question was a reasonable one. McMunn, of McMunn Brothers,
Limited, was a coal merchant. Lord Dunseverick, though a peer, belonged to the
north of Ireland. He understood Belfast.
“What I want,” he said, “is to
see Mr. Andrew McMunn.”
“I’ve business with Andrew McMunn
myself,” said the sailor, “and I’m going that way.”
“Good. Then we’ll go together.”
“My name,” said the sailor, “is
Ginty. If you’re intimate with Andrew McMunn you’ll likely have heard of me.”
“I haven’t. But that’s no reason
why you shouldn’t show me the way.”
“It’s no that far,” said Ginty.
They walked together, sometimes
side by side, sometimes driven apart by a string of carts.
“If it had been Jimmy McMunn you
wanted to see,” said Ginty, “you might have had further to go. Some says
Jimmy’s in the one place, and more is of opinion that he’s in the other. But
I’ve no doubt in my own mind about where Andrew will go when his time comes.”
“You know him pretty well, then?”
“Ay, I do. It would be queer if I
didn’t, seeing that I’ve sailed his ships this ten year. Andrew McMunn will go
to heaven.”
“Ah,” said Lord Dunseverick,
“he’s a good man, then?”
“I’ll no go so far as to say
precisely that,” said Ginty, “but he’s a man who never touches a drop of whisky
nor smokes a pipe of tobacco. It’ll be very hard on him if he doesna go to
heaven after all he’s missed in this world. But you’ll find out what kind of
man he is if you go in through the door forninst you. It’s his office, thon one
with the brass plate on the door. My business will keep till you’re done with
him.”
Lord Dunseverick pushed open one
of a pair of swinging doors, and found himself in a narrow passage. On his
right was a ground glass window bearing the word “Inquiries.” He tapped at it.
For a minute or two there was no
response. Lord Dunseverick brushed some of the mud, now partially dry, off his
trousers, and lit a fresh cigarette. The ground glass window was opened, and a
redhaired clerk looked out.
“I want to see Mr. McMunn,” said
Lord Dunseverick, “Mr. Andrew McMunn.”
The clerk put his head and
shoulders out through the window, and surveyed Lord Dunseverick suspiciously.
Very well dressed young men, with pale lavender ties and pearl tie-pins—Lord
Dunseverick had both—are not often seen in Belfast quay-side offices.
“If you want to see Mr. McMunn,”
said the clerk, “—and I’m no saying you will, mind that—you’d better take yon
cigarette out of your mouth. There’s no smoking allowed here.”
Lord Dunseverick took his
cigarette out of his mouth, but he did not throw it away. He held it between
his fingers.
“Just tell Mr. McMunn,” he said, “that
Lord Dunseverick is here.”
The clerk’s manner altered
suddenly. He drew himself up, squared his shoulders, and saluted.
The discovery that a stranger is
a man of high rank often produces this kind of effect on men of strong
democratic principles, principles of the kind held by clerks in all business
communities, quite as firmly in Belfast as elsewhere. But it would have been a
mistake to suppose that Mr. McMunn’s junior clerk was a mere worshipper of
title. His salute was not the tribute of a snob to the representative of an
aristocratic class. It was the respect due by a soldier, drilled and
disciplined, to his superior officer. It was also the expression of a young
man’s sincere hero-worship. The redhaired clerk was a Volunteer, duly enrolled,
one of the signatories of the famous Ulster Covenant. Lord Dunseverick had made
speeches which moved his soul to actual rapture.
“Come inside, my lord,” he said.
“I’ll inform Mr. McMunn at once.”
Lord Dunseverick passed through a
door which was held open for him. He entered a large office, very grimy, which
is the proper condition of a place where documents concerning coal are dealt
with. Six other clerks were at work there. When Lord Dunseverick entered, all
six of them stood up and saluted. They, too, so it appeared, were members of
the Volunteer Force. The red-haired junior clerk crossed the room towards a
door marked “Private.” Then he paused, and turned to Lord Dunseverick.
“Might I be so bold as to ask a
question?” he said.
“A dozen if you like,” said Lord
Dunseverick.
“What about the rifles? It’s only
them we’re wanting now. We’re drilled and we’re ready, but where’s the rifles?”
“You shall have them,” said Lord
Dunseverick.
The clerks in Mr. McMunn’s office
were accustomed to behave with decorum. No more than a low murmur of approval
greeted Lord Dunseverick’s words; but the men looked as if they wished to cheer
vehemently. The red-haired boy tapped at the door which was marked “Private.” A
minute later he invited Lord Dunseverick to pass through it.
Andrew McMunn is a hard-faced,
grizzled little man, with keen blue eyes. He can, when he chooses, talk
excellent English. He prefers, when dealing with strangers, to speak with a
strong Belfast accent, and to use, if possible, north of Ireland words and
phrases. This is his way of asserting independence of character. He admires
independence.
His office is a singularly
unattractive room. He writes at a large table, and has a fireproof safe at his
elbow. There are three wooden chairs ranged against the wall opposite the
writing-table. Four photographs of steamers, cheaply framed, hang above the
chairs. They are The Andrew McMunn, The Eliza McMunn, and, a tribute to the
deceased Jimmy, The McMunn Brothers. These form the fleet owned by the firm,
and carry coal from one port to another, chiefly to Belfast. On the
chimney-piece under a glass shade, is a model of The McMunn Brothers, the
latest built and largest of the ships.
“Good-morning to you, my lord!”
said McMunn, without rising from his seat.
He nodded towards one of the
chairs which stood against the wall. This was his way of inviting his visitor
to sit down. His eyes were fixed, with strong disapproval, on the cigarette,
which still smoked feebly in Lord Dunseverick’s hand.
“Your clerk gave me a hint,” said
Dunseverick, “that you object to tobacco.”
“It’s my opinion,” said McMunn,
“that the man who pays taxes that he needn’t pay—I’m alluding to the duty on
tobacco, you’ll understand—for the sake of poisoning himself with a nasty stink,
is little better than a fool. That’s my opinion, and I’m of the same way of
thinking about alcoholic drink.”
Lord Dunseverick deposited the
offending cigarette on the hearth and crushed it with his foot.
“Teetotaller?” he said. “I dare
say you’re right, though I take a whisky-and-soda myself when I get the
chance.”
“You’ll no get it here,” said
McMunn; “and what’s more, you’ll no’ get it on any ship owned by me.”
“Thank you. It’s as well to
understand before-hand.”
“I’m a believer in speaking
plain,” said McMunn. “There’s ay less chance of trouble afterwards if a man
speaks plain at the start. But I’m thinking that it wasn’t to hear my opinion
on the Christian religion that your lordship came here the day.”
McMunn, besides being a
teetotaller, and opposed to the smoking of tobacco, was the president of a
Young Men’s Anti-Gambling League. He was, therefore, in a position to throw
valuable light on the Christian religion.
“I came to settle the details
about this expedition to Hamburg,” said Lord Dunseverick.
“Well,” said McMunn, “there’s no
that much left to settle. The Brothers is ready.”
“The Brothers?”
“The McMunn Brothers. Thon’s the
model of her on the chimneypiece.”
Lord Dunseverick looked at the
model attentively. It represented a very unattractive ship. Her bow was
absurdly high, cocked up like the snout of a Yorkshire pig. Her long waist lay
low, promising little freeboard in a sea. Her engines and single funnel were
aft. On a short, high quarterdeck was her bridge and a squat deck-house. She
was designed, like her owner, for purely business purposes.
“You’ll have the captain’s
cabin,” said McMunn. “Him and me will sleep in the saloon.”
“Oh, you’re coming too?”
“I am. Have you any objection?”
“None whatever. I’m delighted.
We’ll have a jolly time.”
“I’ll have you remember,” said
McMunn, “that it’s not pleasuring we’re out for.”
“It’s serious business. Smuggling
rifles in the teeth of a Royal Proclamation is——”
“When I understand,” said McMunn,
“and you understand, where’s the use of saying what we’re going for? I’m taking
risks enough anyway, without unnecessary talking. You never know who’s
listening to you.”
“About paying for
the—er—the—er—our cargo? Is that all arranged?”
“They’ll be paid in bills on a
Hamburg bank,” said McMunn.
“Won’t they expect cash? I should
have thought that in transactions of this kind——”
“You’re not a business man, my
lord; but I’d have you know that a bill with the name of McMunn to it is the
same as cash in any port in Europe.”
“Well, that’s your part of the
affair. I am leaving that to you.”
“You may leave it. What I say
I’ll do. But there’s one thing that I’m no quite easy in my mind about.”
“If you’re thinking about the
landing of the guns——”
“I’m no asking what arrangements
you’ve made about that. The fewer there is that knows what’s being done in a
business of this kind, the better for all concerned. What’s bothering me is
this. There’s a man called Edelstein.”
“Who’s he? I never heard of him before.”
“He’s the Baron von Edelstein, if
that’s any help to you.”
“It isn’t. He’s not the man we’re
buying the stuff from.”
“He is not. Nor he wasn’t
mentioned from first to last till the letter I got the day.”
He turned to the safe beside him
and drew out a bundle of papers held together by an elastic band.
“That’s the whole of the
correspondence,” he said, “and there’s the last of it.”
He handed a letter to Lord
Dunseverick, who read it through carefully.
“This baron,” he said, “whoever
he is, intends to pay his respects to us before we leave Hamburg. Very civil of
him.”
“It’s a civility we could do
without. When I’m doing business I’d rather do it with business men, and a
baron, you’ll understand, is no just——”
“I’m a baron myself,” said Lord
Dunseverick.
“Ay, you are.”
McMunn said no more. He left it
to be understood that his opinion of barons in general was not improved by his
acquaintance with Lord Dunseverick.
“I don’t think we need bother
about Von Eddstein, anyway,” said Lord Dunseverick. “What harm can he do us?”
“I’m no precisely bothering about
him,” said McMunn; “but I’d be easier in my mind if I knew what he wanted with
us.”
“We sail to-night, anyway,” said
Lord Dunseverick.
“Ay, we do. I tell’t Ginty. He’s
the captain of The McMunn Brothers, and a good man.”
“I’ve met him. In fact——”
“If you’ve met Ginty you’ve met a
man who knows his business, though I wish he’d give over drinking whisky.
However, he’s a strong Protestant and a sound man, and you can’t expect
perfection.”
“Capital!” said Lord Dunseverick.
“It’s a great comfort to be sure of one’s men.”
“I wish I was as sure of every
one as I am of Ginty,” said McMunn. “I’m no saying that your lordship’s not
sound. The speech you made last night at Ballymena was good enough, and I’m
with you in every word of it; but——”
“Oh, speeches!” said Lord
Dunseverick.
He was uneasily conscious that he
had allowed himself to be carried away by the excitement of the occasion when
speaking at Ballymena. It was right and proper to threaten armed resistance to
Home Rule. It was another thing to offer a warm welcome to the German Emperor
if he chose to land in Ulster. The cold emphasis with which McMunn expressed
agreement with every word of the speech made Lord Dunseverick vaguely uneasy.
“Ay,” said McMunn; “your speeches
are well enough, and I don’t say, mind you, that you’re not a sound man; but
I’d be better pleased if you were more serious. You’re too fond of joking, in
my opinion.”
“Good heavens!” said Lord
Dunseverick. “I haven’t ventured on the ghost of a joke since I came into your
office!” He looked round him as he spoke, and fixed his eyes at last on the
fireproof safe. “Nobody could.”
“It’s no what you’ve said, it’s
your lordship’s appearance. But it’s too late to alter that, I’m thinking.”
“Not at all,” said Lord
Dunseverick. “I’ll join you this evening in a suit of yellow oilskins, the
stickiest kind, and a blue fisherman’s jersey, and a pair of sea-boots. I’ll
have——”
“You will,” said McMunn, “and
you’ll look like a play actor. It’s just what I’m complaining of.”
II
The McMunn Brothers lay, with
steam up, at a single anchor a mile below the Hamburg quays. The yellow, turbid
waters of the Elbe swept past her sides. Below her stretched the long waterway
which leads to the North Sea. The lights of the buoys which marked the channel
twinkled dimly in the gloom of the summer evening. Shafts of brighter light
swept across and across the water from occulting beacons set at long intervals
among buoys. Above the steamer lay a large Norwegian barque waiting for her
pilot to take her down on the ebb tide. Below The McMunn Brothers was an
ocean-going tramp steamer. One of her crew sat on the forecastle playing the
“Swanee River” on a melodeon.
McMunn, Ginty, and Lord
Dunseverick were together in the cabin of The McMunn Brothers. McMunn, dressed
precisely as he always dressed in his office, sat bolt upright on the cabin
sofa. In front of him on the table were some papers, which he turned over and
looked at from time to time.
Beside him was Ginty, in his
shirt sleeves, with his peaked cap pushed far back on his head. He sat with his
elbows on the table. His chin, thrust forward, rested on his knuckles. He
stared fixedly at the panelling on the opposite wall of the cabin. Lord
Dunseverick, who had a side of the table to himself, leaned far back. His legs
were stretched out straight in front of him. His hands were in his pockets. He
gazed wearily at the small lamp which swung from the cabin roof.
For a long time no one spoke. It
was Lord Dunseverick who broke the silence in the end. He took his
cigarette-case from his pocket.
“You may say what you like about
tobacco, McMunn,” he said, “but it’s a comfort to a man when he has no company
but a bear with a sore head.”
“Ay,” said McMunn, “you’ll smoke and
you’ll smoke, but you’ll no make me any easier in my mind by smoking.”
Ginty drew a plug of black
tobacco from his pocket, and began cutting shreds from it with a clasp knife.
He was apparently of opinion that smoking would relieve the strain on his mind.
“I’m no satisfied,” said McMunn.
“I don’t see what you have to
grumble about,” said Lord Dunseverick. “We’ve got what we came for, and we’ve
got our clearance papers. What more do you want? You expected trouble about
those papers, and there wasn’t any. You ought to be pleased.”
“There you have it,” said McMunn.
“According to all the laws of nature there ought to have been trouble. With a
cargo like ours there ought to have been a lot of trouble. Instead of that the
papers are handed over to us without a question.”
“It’s peculiar,” said Ginty.
“It’s very peculiar, and that’s a fact.”
“Then there’s the matter of those
extra cases,” said McMunn. “How many cases is there in the hold, Ginty?”
“A hundred, seventy-two.”
“And the contract was for
one-fifty. What’s in the odd twenty-two? Tell me that.”
“Pianos,” said Lord Dunseverick.
“Look at your clearance papers. ‘Nature of Cargo—Pianos.’”
“You’d have your joke,” said
McMunn, “if the flames of hell were scorching the soles of your boots.”
“It’s peculiar,” said Ginty.
“It’s more than peculiar,” said
McMunn. “I’ve been in business for thirty years, and it’s the first time I ever
had goods given me that I didn’t ask for.”
“Well,” said Lord Dunseverick,
“if we’ve got an extra five hundred rifles we can’t complain. There’s plenty of
men in Ulster ready to use them.”
“Maybe you’ll tell me,” said
McMunn, “why they wouldn’t let me pay for the goods in the office this
afternoon. Did anyone ever hear the like of that—a man refusing money that was
due to him, and it offered?”
“It’s out of the course of
nature,” said Ginty.
“They told you,” said Lord
Dunseverick, “that you could pay Von Edelstein, and he’d give you a receipt.”
“Ay, Von Edelstein. And where’s
Von Edelstein?”
“He’s coming on board this
evening,” said Lord Dunseverick. “But you needn’t wait for him unless you like.
We’ve got steam up. Why not slip away?”
“Because it’s no my way of doing
business,” said McMunn, “to slip away, as you call it, without paying for what
I’ve got. I’m a man of principle.”
“Talking of your principles,”
said Lord Dunseverick, “what did you bring on board in that basket this
afternoon? It looked to me like beer.”
“It was beer.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Lord
Dunseverick. “Let’s have a couple of bottles.”
Ginty took his pipe from his
mouth and grinned pleasantly. He wanted beer.
“You’ll be thinking maybe,” said
McMunn, “that I’m going back on my temperance principles?”
“We don’t think anything of the
sort,” said Lord Dunseverick. “We think that foreign travel has widened your
principles out a bit. That’s what we think, isn’t it, Ginty?”
“My principles are what they
always were,” said McMunn, “but I’ve some small share of commonsense. I know
there’s a foreigner coming on board the night, a baron and a dissipated man——”
“Come, now,’” said Lord
Dunseverick, “you can’t be sure that Von Edelstein is dissipated. You’ve never
met him.”
“He’s a foreigner and a baron,”
said McMunn, “and that’s enough for me, forbye that he’s coming here under very
suspicious circumstances. If I can get the better of him by means of strong
drink and the snare of alcoholic liquors——”
“Good Lord!” said Lord
Dunseverick. “You don’t expect to make a German drunk with half a dozen bottles
of lager beer, particularly as Ginty and I mean to drink two each.”
“There’s a dozen in the basket.
And, under the circumstances, I consider myself justified I’m no man for
tricks, but if there’s any tricks to be played, I’d rather play them myself
than have them played on me. Mind that now. It’s the way I’ve always acted, and
it’s no a bad way.”
“Gosh,” said Ginty, “there’s
somebody coming aboard of us now. The look-out man’s hailing him.”
He left the cabin as he spoke.
A few minutes later Ginty entered
the cabin again. He was followed by a tall man, so tall that he could not stand
quite upright in the little cabin.
“It’s the baron,” said Ginty.
“Guten Abend,” said McMunn.
He possessed some twenty more
German words, and knew that “beer” was represented by the same sound as in
English. The equipment seemed to him sufficient for the interview.
“I have the good fortune to speak
English easily,” said Von Edelstein. “Am I addressing myself to Mr. McMunn?”
“Ay,” said McMunn, “you are. And
this is Lord Dunseverick, a baron like yourself.”
Von Edelstein bowed, and held out
his hand.
“I prefer,” he said, “my military
title, Captain von Edelstein. I believe that Lord Dunseverick also has a
military title. Should I say colonel?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Lord
Dunseverick, “I’m not in the Army.”
“I understand,” said Von
Edelstein. “You are in the Volunteers, the Ulster Volunteers. But, perhaps I
should say general?”
“I don’t call myself that,” said
Lord Dunseverick.
“As a matter of fact, my rank is
not officially recognized, in England, I mean.”
“Ah, but here—we recognize it. I
assure you, general, we regard the Ulster Volunteers as a properly constituted
military force.”
McMunn had been groping in a
locker behind him. He interrupted Von Edelstein by setting a basket on the
table.
“Beer,” he said.
Von Edelstein bowed, and sat
down.
“Ginty,” said McMunn, “get some
tumblers. And now Baron——”
“Captain,” said Von Edelstein.
“Well get to business. What’s in
them twenty-two cases that was dumped into our hold today?”
“Ah,” said Von Edelstein,
smiling. “A little surprise. I hope, I feel confident, a pleasant surprise, for
my comrades of the Ulster Volunteer Force.”
Ginty entered the cabin carrying
three tumblers and a corkscrew. The beer was opened and poured out. Von
Edelstein raised his glass.
“To the Ulster Volunteer Force,”
he said, “and to the day when the pleasant little surprise we have prepared for
you may prove a very unpleasant surprise for—the enemy.”
He bowed and drank.
“What’s in them cases?” said
McMunn.
“Gentlemen,” said Von Edelstein,
“something that will be of great value to you—machine guns.”
“We didn’t order them,” said
McMunn, “and I’m not going to pay for them.”
“I am not authorized,” said Von
Edelstein, “to reveal secrets of State; but I think I may trust your discretion
so far as to say that one very highly placed desires that the Ulster Volunteer
Force should be thoroughly equipped for war. It is his wish:——”
“Baron,” said McMunn, “here’s a
bill drawn on my firm for the price of the rifles. I’ll trouble you for a
receipt, and in the matter of the contents of them cases—I don’t say they’re
not machine guns, but I’ve no way of knowing at present. If it turns out that
they’re any use to us we may strike a bargain, but I’ll no pay for a pig in a
poke.”
He laid his bill and a form of
receipt on the table. Von Edelstein pushed them aside.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “between
comrades in arms there is no question of payment. It is the wish of one who is
very highly placed that your army——”
“But look here,” said Lord
Dunseverick, “we are not comrades in arms, as you call it.”
“Ah,” said Von Edelstein. “Not
to-day, not to-morrow perhaps. But who knows how soon? When the word is given,
and some batteries of our artillery land in Belfast to support your excellent
infantry——”
“What’s that?” said Ginty.
“And a regiment of Prussian
Guards——”
“There’ll be no Prussians in
Belfast,” said Ginty, “for we’ll not have it.”
“I am afraid,” said Lord
Dunseverick, “that you’ve got some wrong idea into your head.”
“But,” said Von Edelstein, “you
cannot fight alone. You would be—what do you call it?—you would be wiped out.
Even the English Army could do that. You have no artillery. You have no
cavalry. What are you but——”
“Who said we were going to fight
the English Army?” said Lord Dunseverick.
“If you think we’re a pack of
dirty rebels,” said Ginty, “you’re making a big mistake. We’re loyal men.”
“But if you are not going to
fight the English,” said Von Edelstein, “God in heaven, who are you going to
fight?”
“Young man,” said McMunn, “you’re
drinking beer in my ship, a thing which is clean contrary to my principles,
though I’m putting up with it; but you’re going beyond the beyonds when you sit
here and take the name of the Almighty in vain. I’ll trouble you not to swear.”
Von Edelstein stared at him in
blank amazement. Then very slowly a look of intelligence came over his face. He
turned to Lord Dunseverick.
“I think I understand,” he said.
“You do not quite trust me. You fear that I may be a spy in the pay of infamous
Englishmen. But you are mistaken—entirely mistaken. I offer you proof of my
good faith. General, be so kind as to read my commission.”
He drew a folded document from
his pocket, and spread it out before Lord Dunseverick.
“It is signed,” he said, “as you
see, by the Emperor himself. It places my services, the services of Captain von
Edelstein, of the Prussian Guard, at the disposal of the Ulster Volunteer
Force, as military organiser.”
Lord Dunseverick glanced at the
document before him. He read parts of it with close attention. He laid his
finger on the signature as if to convince himself by actual touch that it
really was what it seemed to be.
“You see,” said Von Edelstein, “I
am to be trusted. When you and I are fighting side by side against the cursed
English, your enemies and ours——”
Von Edelstein was still smiling.
What happened then happened in an instant. Lord Dunseverick struck the German
full on the mouth with his fist. Von Edelstein’s head went back. His hands
clutched convulsively at the tablecloth. Before he had recovered, Lord
Dunseverick hit him again, beat him down on the cabin sofa, and struck blow
after blow at his face.
“You infernal scoundrel,” he
said, “do you take me for a traitor?”
“Quit it,” said McMunn. “Quit it
when I tell you. You cannot kill the man with your naked fists, and you’ll
break the furniture.”
Ginty drew a long coil of rope
from a locker. He tied up Von Edelstein and laid him, a helpless figure, on the
table.
“It’s my opinion,” said McMunn,
“that we’d better be getting out to sea.”
“I’m thinking the same,” said
Ginty.
He went on deck. Soon The McMunn
Brothers was under way.
Lord Dunseverick looked at the
prostrate Von Edelstein.
“What are we going to do with
him?” he asked.
“Drown him,” said McMunn.
A trickle of blood was running
down Von Edelstein’s chin. He spat out some fragments of broken teeth.
“It appears,” he said, “that I
have made a mistake about your intentions.”
“You’ve offered an outrageous
insult to loyal men,” said McMunn.
“A mistake,” said Von Edelstein,
“but surely excusable. I have in my pocket at the present moment—would you be
so kind as to feel in my breast pocket? You’ll find some papers there, and a
newspaper cutting among them.”
Lord Dunseverick slipped his hand
into the prisoner’s pocket. He drew out a number of letters and a newspaper
cutting. It was a report, taken from the Belfast News Letter, of the speech
which he had made at Ballymena a fortnight before. He had proclaimed the Kaiser
the deliverer of Ulster. His own words stared him in the face. McMunn took the
cutting and glanced at it. He thumped his fist on the table.
“I stand by every word of it,” he
said. “We will not have Home Rule.”
“You are a curious people,” said
Von Edelstein. “I thought—and even now you say——”
“That speech,” said McMunn, “was
made for an entirely different purpose. If you thought that we wanted a German
Army in Ulster, or that we meant to fire on the British flag——”
“It is exactly what I did think,”
said Von Edelstein.
“You’re a born fool, then,” said
McMunn.
“Perhaps,” said Lord Dunseverick,
“we ought not to drown him. Suppose we take him home, and hand him over to the
Ulster Provisional Government?”
“I wish you would,” said Von
Edelstein, “I am a student of human nature. I should greatly like to meet your
Ulster Government.”
“You’ll maybe not like it so much
when they hang you,” said McMunn, “and it’s what they’ll do.”
XI ~~ SIR TIMOTHY’S DINNER-PARTY
Mr. Courtney, the R.M., was a man
of ideas, and prided himself on his sympathy with progress, the advance of
thought, and similar delights. If he had been thirty years younger, and had
lived in Dublin, he would have been classed among the “Intellectuals.” He would
then have written a gloomy play or two, several poems and an essay, published
at a shilling, in a green paper cover, on the “Civilization of the Future.”
Being, unfortunately, fifty-five years of age, he could not write poetry or
gloomy plays. Nobody can after the age of forty. Being a Resident Magistrate,
he was debarred from discussing the Civilization of the Future in print. No
Government allows its paid servant to write books on controversial subjects.
But Mr. Courtney remained intellectually alert, and was a determined champion
of the cause of progress, even amid the uncongenial society of a West of
Ireland town.
The introduction of Summer Time
gave Mr. Courtney a great opportunity. Almost everyone else in the
neighbourhood objected to the change of the clock. Cows, it was said, disliked
being milked before their accustomed hour. Dew collects in deep pools, and
renders farm work impossible in the early morning. It is unreasonable to expect
labourers, who have to rise early in any case, to get out of their beds before
the day is properly warm. Mr. Courtney combated all these objections with
arguments which struck him as sound, but irritated everybody else. When it
appeared that Ireland, worse treated as usual than England, was to be fined an
additional twenty-five minutes, and was to lose the proud privilege of Irish
time, Mr. Courtney was more pleased than ever. He made merry over what he
called the arguments of reactionary patriotism.
Sir Timothy was the principal
landlord, and, socially, the most important person in the neighbourhood. Sir
Timothy did not like Mr. Courtney. He was of opinion that the R.M. was inclined
to take a high hand at Petty Sessions and to bully the other magistrates—Sir
Timothy was himself a magistrate—who sat with him on the Bench. He also thought
that Mr. Courtney was “too d——d superior” in private life. Sir Timothy had the
lowest possible opinion of the progress made by civilization in his own time.
The Civilization of the Future, about which Mr. Courtney talked a great deal,
seemed to Sir Timothy a nasty kind of nightmare.
It was natural, almost
inevitable, that Sir Timothy should take a conservative view on the subject of
the new time.
“I don’t see the use of playing
silly tricks with the clock,” he said. “You might just as well say that I’d
live ten years longer if everybody agreed to say that I’m forty-eight instead
of fifty-eight. I’d still be fifty-eight in reality. It’s just the same with
the time. We may all make up our minds to pretend it’s eight o’clock when it’s really
seven, but it will still be seven.”
Mr. Courtney smiled in a gentle,
but very annoying manner.
“My dear Sir Timothy,” he said,
“don’t you see that what is really wanted is a complete change in the habits of
the population? We’ve been gradually slipping into wasteful ways of living. Our
expenditure on artificial light———”
“I know all about that,” said Sir
Timothy. “If you’ve said it to me once, you’ve said it a dozen times, and last
year I did alter my clocks. But this year—hang it all! They’re sticking another
twenty-five minutes on it. If they go on at this rate, moving us back an extra
half hour every May, we’ll be living in the middle of the night before we die.”
“I’m sorry to hear you taking up
that question of the so-called Irish time,” said Mr. Courtney. “Reactionary
patriotism——”
Sir Timothy spluttered. Being an
Irish gentleman, he hated to be accused of patriotism, which he held—following
Dr. Johnson—to be the last refuge of a scoundrel.
“There’s nothing patriotic about
it,” he said. “What I object to hasn’t anything to do with any particular
country. It’s simply a direct insult to the sun.”
“The sun,” said Mr. Courtney,
smiling more offensively than ever, “can take care of itself.”
“It can,” said Sir Timothy, “and
does. It takes jolly good care not to rise in Dublin at the same time that it
does in Greenwich, and what you’re trying to do is to bluff it into saying it
does. When you come to think of it, the sun doesn’t rise here the same time it
does in Dublin. We’re a hundred and twenty miles west of Dublin, so the real
time here——”
“We can’t have a different time
in every parish,” said Mr. Courtney. “In the interests of international
civilization——”
“I don’t care a row of pins about
international civilization. We’re something like twenty minutes wrong already
here. When you’ve made your silly change to summer time, and wiped out that
twenty-five minutes Irish time, we shall be an hour and three quarters wrong.”
“At all events,” said Mr.
Courtney, “you’ll have to do it.”
“I won’t.”
“And when you’ve got accustomed
to it, you’ll see the advantages of the change.”
Sir Timothy was profoundly
irritated.
“You may do as you like,” he
said, “I mean to stick to the proper time. The proper time, mind you, strictly
according to the sun, as it rises in this neighbourhood. I haven’t worked it
out exactly yet, but I should say, roughly, that there’ll be two hours’
difference between your watch and mine.”
Mr. Courtney gasped.
“Do you mean to say that you’re
actually going to add on two hours?
“I’m going to take off two
hours,” said Sir Timothy.
Mr. Courtney thought for a
moment.
“You’ll be adding on those two
hours,” he said, “not taking them off——”
“You’re an extraordinarily
muddle-headed man, Courtney. Can’t you see that if I call it six when you say
it’s eight I’m taking off——”
“You’re not. The way to look at
it is this: A day is twenty-four hours long. You say it’s twenty-six hours.
Therefore, you add on.”
“I don’t do anything of the
sort,” said Sir Timothy. “Look here, the sun rises, say, at 6 a.m. You and a
lot of other silly people choose to say that it rises at 8. What I’m doing—I
and the sun, Courtney—mind that. The sun’s with me—— What we’re doing is taking
off two hours.”
The argument went on for some
time. Its result was that Sir Timothy and Mr. Courtney did not speak to each
other again for a fortnight. Arguments, religious, political and economic,
often end in this way.
During that fortnight summer time
established itself, more or less, in the neighbourhood. Mr. Courtney, the local
bank, the railway company, and the police observed the new time in its full
intensity. The parish priest and most of the farmers took a moderate line. They
sacrificed the twenty-five minutes of the original Irish time, but resisted the
imposition of a whole extra hour. With them it was eight o’clock when the nine
o’clock train started for Dublin. A few extremists stood out for their full
rights as Irishmen, and insisted that the bank, which said it opened at 10
a.m., was really beginning business at 8.35 a.m. Sir Timothy, dragging his
household with him, set up what he called actual time, and breakfasted a full
two hours after the progressive party.
The practical inconvenience of
these differences of opinion became obvious when Sir Timothy arrived at the
Petty Sessions Court to take his seat on the Bench just as Mr. Courtney, having
completed the business of the day, was going home for a rather late luncheon.
“No cases to-day?” said Sir
Timothy, coldly polite.
“Oh, yes, there were, several.
I’ve finished them off.”
“But,” said Sir Timothy, “it’s
only just the hour for beginning.”
“Excuse me, it’s 2 p.m.”
“12 noon,” said Sir Timothy.
“2 p.m.,” repeated Mr. Courtney.
Sir Timothy took out his watch.
The hands were together at the hour of 12. He showed it to Mr. Courtney, who
grinned. Sir Timothy scowled at him and turned fiercely to a police sergeant
who stood by.
“Sergeant,” he said, “what time
is it?”
It is not the function of the
Irish police to decide great questions of State. Their business is to enforce
what the higher powers, for the time being, wish the law to be. In case of any
uncertainty about which power is the higher, the police occupy the
uncomfortable position of neutrals. The sergeant was not quite sure whether Sir
Timothy or Mr. Courtney were the more influential man. He answered cautiously.
“There’s some,” he said, “who do
be saying that it’s one o’clock at the present time. There’s others—and I’m not
saying they’re wrong—who are of opinion that it’s half-past twelve, or about
that. There’s them—and some of the most respectable people is with them
there—that says it’s 2 p.m. If I was to be put on my oath this minute, I’d find
it mortal hard to say what time it was.”
“By Act of Parliament,” said Mr.
Courtney, “its 2 p.m.&dquo;
“In the matter of an Act of
Parliament,” said the sergeant, “I wouldn’t like to be contradicting your
honour.”
Sir Timothy turned on his heel
and walked away. The victory was with Mr. Courtney, but not because he had an
Act of Parliament behind him. Nobody in Ireland pays much attention to Acts of
Parliament. He made his point successfully, because the police did not like to
contradict him. From that day on Sir Timothy made no attempt to take his seat
on the Magistrates’ Bench in the Court House.
Late in the summer Sir Archibald
Chesney visited the neighbourhood. Sir Archibald is, of course, a great man. He
is one of the people who are supposed to govern Ireland. He does not actually
do so. Nobody could. But he dispenses patronage, which, after all, is one of
the most important functions of any Government. It was, for instance, in Sir
Archibald’s power to give Mr. Courtney a pleasant and well-paid post in Dublin,
to remove him from the uncongenial atmosphere of Connaught, and set him in an
office in the Lower Castle Yard. There, and in a house in Ailesbury Road—houses
in Ailesbury Road are most desirable—Mr. Courtney could mingle in really
intellectual society.
Mr. Courtney knew this, and invited
Sir Archibald to be his guest during his stay in the neighbourhood. Sir
Archibald gracefully accepted the invitation.
Then a surprising thing happened.
Mr. Courtney received a very friendly letter from Sir Timothy.
“I hear,” so the letter ran, “that
Sir Archibald Chesney is to be with you for a few days next week. We shall be
very pleased if you will bring him out to dine with us some evening. Shall we
say Tuesday at 7.30? I shall not ask anyone else. Three of us will be enough
for a couple of bottles of my old port.”
Sir Timothy’s port was very old
and remarkably good. Mr. Courtney had tasted it once or twice before the days
when summer time was thought of. No doubt, Sir Archibald would appreciate the
port.
He might afterwards take an
optimistic view of life, and feel well disposed towards Mr. Courtney. The
invitation was accepted.
Sir Archibald and Mr. Courtney
dressed for dinner, as gentlemen belonging to the high official classes in
Ireland should and do. They put on shirts with stiff fronts and cuffs. With
painful efforts they drove studs through tightly sealed buttonholes. They
fastened white ties round their collars. They encased their stomachs in stiff
white waistcoats. They struggled into silk-lined, silk-faced, long-tailed
coats. They wrapped their necks in white silk scarves. They even put high silk
hats on their heads. Their overcoats were becomingly open, for the day was
warm. They took their seats in the motor. Every policeman in the village
saluted them as they passed. They sped up the long, tree-lined avenue which led
to Sir Timothy’s house. They reached the lofty doorway, over which crouched
lions upheld a shield, bearing a coat of arms.
On the lawn opposite the door Sir
Timothy, his two daughters and a young man whom Mr. Courtney recognized as the
police inspector, were playing tennis. It was a bright and agreeable scene. The
sun shone pleasantly. Sir Timothy and the police inspector were in white
flannels. The girls wore pretty cotton frocks.
Sir Archibald looked at Mr.
Courtney.
“We’ve come the wrong day,” he
said, “or the wrong hour, or something.”
“It is Tuesday,” said Mr.
Courtney, “and he certainly said 7.30.”
“It’s infernally awkward,” said
Sir Archibald, glancing at his clothes.
Sir Timothy crossed the lawn,
swinging his tennis racket and smiling.
“Delighted to see you,” he said.
“I’d have asked you to come up for a game of tennis if I’d thought you’d have
cared for it. Had an idea you’d be busy all day, and would rather dress at your
own place. Hullo, you are dressed! A bit early, isn’t it? But I’m delighted to
see you.”
Sir Archibald stepped slowly from
the car. Men who undertake the task of governing Ireland must expect to find
themselves looking like fools occasionally. But it is doubtful whether any turn
of the political or administrative machine can make a man look as foolish as he
feels when, elaborately dressed in evening clothes, he is suddenly set down on
a sunny lawn in the middle of a group of people suitably attired for tennis.
Sir Archibald, puzzled and annoyed, turned to Mr. Courtney with a frown.
“He said half-past seven,” said
Mr. Courtney.
“I’m delighted to see you now or
at any time, but, as a matter of fact, it’s only half-past five,” said Sir
Timothy.
Sir Archibald looked at his
watch.
“It’s—surely my watch can’t have
gained two hours?”
“It’s half-past seven,” said Mr.
Courtney, firmly.
“Oh, no it isn’t,” said Sir
Timothy. “I don’t dine by Act of Parliament.”
Sir Archibald frowned angrily.
“We’d better go home again,” he
said. “We mustn’t interrupt the tennis.”
He climbed stiffly into the
motor.
“I suppose,” he said to Mr.
Courtney a few minutes later, “that this is some kind of Irish joke.”
Mr. Courtney explained,
elaborately and fully, Sir Timothy’s peculiar views about time.
“If I’d known,” said Sir Archibald,
“that you were taking me to dine with a lunatic, I should not have agreed to
go.”
Mr. Courtney recognized that his
chances of promotion to a pleasant post in Dublin had vanished. The Irish
Government had no use for men who place their superiors in embarrassing
positions.
XII ~~ UNITED IRELAND
“I’ll say this for old
MacManaway, an honester man never lived nor what he was; and I’m sorry he’s
gone, so I am.”
The speaker was Dan Gallaher. The
occasion was the morning of the auction of old MacManaway’s property. The place
was the yard behind the farmhouse in which MacManaway had lived, a solitary
man, without wife or child, for fifty years. Dan Gallaher held the hames of a
set of harness in his hand as he spoke and critically examined the leather of
the traces. It was good leather, sound and well preserved. Old MacManaway while
alive liked sound things and took good care of his property.
“An honester man never lived,”
Dan repeated “And I’m not saying that because the old man and me agreed
together, for we didn’t.”
“How could you agree?” said James
McNiece. “It wasn’t to be expected that you would agree. There wasn’t a
stronger Protestant nor a greater Orangeman in the whole country nor old
MacManaway.”
James McNiece turned from the
examination of a cart as he spoke and gave his attention to the hames. His
description of the dead man’s religious and political convictions was just. No
one in all the Ulster border land ever held the principle of the Orange Society
more firmly or opposed any form of Home Rule more bitterly than old MacManaway.
And Dan Gallaher was a Roman
Catholic and a Nationalist of the extremest kind.
“They tell me,” said Dan
Gallaher, in a pleasant conversational tone, “that it’s to be yourself, James
McNiece, that’s to be the head of the Orangemen in the parish now that
MacManaway is gone.”
James looked at him sideways out
of the corners of his eyes. Dan spoke in a friendly tone, but it is never wise
to give any information to “Papishes and rebels.”
“The Colonel,” he said, “is the
Grand Master of the Orangemen in these parts.”
Colonel Eden, a J.P., and the
principal landlord in the parish, drove into the yard in his motor. A police
sergeant slipped his pipe into his pocket, stepped forward and took the number
of the Colonel’s car. It has never been decided in Ireland whether motor cars
may or may not be used, under the provisions of D.O.R.A., for attending
auctions.
We know that the safety of the
empire is compromised by driving to a race meeting. We know that the King and
his Army are in no way injured by our driving to market. Attendance at an
auction stands midway between pleasure and business; and the use of motors in
such matters is debatable.
“It’s the D.I’s orders, sir,”
said the sergeant apologetically.
“All right,” said the Colonel,
“but if the D.I. expects me to fine myself at the next Petty Sessions hell be
disappointed.”
James McNiece and Dan Gallaher
touched their hats to the Colonel.
“Morning, James,” said the
Colonel. “Morning, Dan. Fine day for the sale, and a good gathering of people.
I don’t know that I ever saw a bigger crowd at an auction.”
He looked round as he spoke. The
whole parish and many people from outside the parish had assembled. The yard
was full of men, handling and appraising the outdoor effects. Women passed in
and out of the house, poked mattresses with their fingers, felt the fabrics of
sheets and curtains, examined china and kitchen utensils warily.
“There’s the doctor over there,”
said the Colonel, “looking at the stable buckets, and who’s that young fellow
in the yellow leggings, James?”
“I’m not rightly sure,” said
James McNiece, “but I’m thinking he’ll be the new D.I. from Curraghfin.”
“It is him,” said Dan Gallaher.
“I was asking the sergeant this minute and he told me. What’s more he said he
was a terrible sharp young fellow.”
“That won’t suit you, Dan,” said
the Colonel. “You and your friends will have to be a bit careful before you get
up another rebellion.”
“It may not suit me,” said Dan,
“but there’s others it won’t suit either. Didn’t I see the sergeant taking the
number of your motor, Colonel, and would he be doing the like of that if the
new D.I. hadn’t told him?”
The Colonel laughed. As commander
of a battalion of the Ulster Volunteer Force, he was fully prepared to meet Dan
Gallaher on the field of battle—Dan leading the National Volunteers. He looked
forward with something like pleasure to the final settlement of the Home Rule
question by the ordeal of battle. In the meanwhile he and Dan Gallaher by no
means hated each other, and were occasionally in full sympathy when the police
or some ridiculous Government department made trouble by fussy activity.
Mr. Robinson, the auctioneer,
drove up in his dogcart. He touched his hat to Colonel Eden, gave an order to
his clerk and crossed the yard briskly. He twisted the cigarette he smoked into
the corner of his mouth with deft movements of his lips, waved his hand to various
acquaintances and looked round him with quick, cheerful glances. No man in the
country was quicker to appreciate the financial worth of a crowd. He knew
before a single bid was made whether people were in a mood to spend lavishly.
He found himself very well satisfied with the prospect of this particular
auction. The stuff he had to sell, indoors and out, was good. The farmers were
enjoying a prosperous season. They had money in their pockets which they would
certainly want to spend. Mr. Robinson had visions of a percentage, his share of
the proceeds, running into three figures.
He began work in a corner of the
yard with a cross-cut saw. The bidding rose merrily to a point slightly higher
than the cost of a similar saw new in a shop. At 23/6 Mr. Robinson knocked it
down to a purchaser who seemed well satisfied. A number of small articles,
scythes, barrows, spades, were sold rapidly, Mr. Robinson moving round the yard
from outhouse to outhouse, surrounded by an eager crowd which pressed on him.
His progress was not unlike that of a queen bee at swarming time. He made—as
she makes—short flights, and always at the end of them found himself in the
centre of a cluster of followers.
At about half-past twelve Mr.
Robinson reached his most important lot. He lit a fresh cigarette—his
eighth—before putting up for sale a rick of hay.
“About four tons,” said Mr.
Robinson, “new meadow hay, well saved, saved with not a drop of rain.
Gentlemen, I needn’t tell you that this is a rare, under existing conditions, a
unique opportunity. Hay—you know this better than I do—is at present
unobtainable in the ordinary market. Now, don’t disappoint me, gentlemen. Let
me have a reasonable offer. Thirty pounds. Did I hear some one say fifteen
pounds? Less than four pounds a ton! Now, gentlemen, really——”
But the crowd in front of Mr.
Robinson knew just as well as he did that four pounds a ton is not a reasonable
offer. The bids succeeded each other rapidly. The original fifteen pounds
changed to twenty pounds, then to twenty-five, rose a little more slowly to
thirty pounds. At thirty-two pounds the bidding hesitated. Mr. Robinson,
dropping his cigarette from his mouth, urged his clients on with gusts of
eloquence. There was a short spurt. The bids rose by five shillings at a time
and finally stopped dead at thirty-four pounds. The hay was sold at a little
over eight pounds a ton. Public interest, roused to boiling point by the sale
of a whole rick of hay, cooled down a little when Mr. Robinson went on to the
next lot on his list.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I am now
offering the hay stored in the loft above the stable. A small lot, gentlemen,
but prime hay. I offer no guarantee as to the quantity in the loft; but I
should guess it at anything between ten and fifteen hundred-weight.”
Several of the more important
farmers drew out of the crowd which surrounded Mr. Robinson. It was not worth
while bidding for so small a quantity of hay. Other members of the crowd,
feeling that a breathing space had been granted them, took packets of
sandwiches from their pockets and sat down in one of the outhouses to refresh
themselves. Mr. Robinson viewed the diminishing group of bidders with some
disappointment. He was gratified to see that the new police officer from
Curraghfin, a gentleman who had not so far made a single bid, crossed the yard
and took a place on the steps leading to the loft. Colonel Eden, too, appeared
interested in the new lot of hay. If the inspector of police and Colonel Eden
began to bid against each other the hay might realize a good price.
“Now, gentlemen,” said Mr.
Robinson, “shall we make a start with three pounds?”
He glanced at Colonel Eden, then
at the police officer. Neither gentleman made any sign of wishing to bid. It
was James McNiece who made the first offer.
“Two pounds,” he said.
There was a pause.
“Two pounds,” said Mr. Robinson,
“two pounds. Going at two pounds. You’re not going to let this hay,—more than
half a ton of it—go at two pounds.”
He looked appealingly at Colonel
Eden and at the police officer. They were entirely unresponsive.
“And at two pounds, going——” said
Mr. Robinson.
“Two-ten,” said Dan Gallaher, in
a quiet voice.
“Two-fifteen,” said James
McNiece.
Dan Gallaher, still apparently
bored by the proceedings, raised the price another five shillings. James
McNiece went half a crown further. Dan Gallaher, becoming slightly interested,
made a jump to three pounds ten. McNiece, with an air of finality, bid four
pounds. The contest began to attract attention. When the price rose to five
pounds interest became lively, and those who had drawn out of the group round
Mr. Robinson began to dribble back. It seemed likely that the contest was one
of those, not uncommon at Irish auctions, into which personal feelings enter
largely and the actual value of the article sold is little considered. There
was a certain piquancy about a struggle of this kind between a prominent
Orangeman like James McNiece, and Dan Gallaher, whom everyone knew to be the
leader of the Sinn Fein party.
Interest developed into actual
excitement when the price rose to ten pounds. A half ton of hay never is and
never has been worth ten pounds. But ten pounds was by no means the final bid.
“Mr. McNiece,” said Mr. Robinson,
“the bid is against you.”
“Guineas,” said McNiece.
“Eleven,” said Dan Gallaher.
“Guineas,” said McNiece.
The duet went on, McNiece capping
Gallaher’s pounds with a monotonous repetition of the word guineas until the
price rose to twenty pounds. At that point McNiece faltered for a moment. The
auctioneer, watching keenly, saw him turn half round and look at Colonel Eden.
The Colonel nodded slightly, so slightly that no one except Mr. Robinson and
McNiece himself saw the gesture.
“At twenty pounds,” said Mr.
Robinson, “going, and at twenty pounds——”
“Thirty,” said McNiece.
The crowd of watchers gasped
audibly. This was something outside of all experience. A man might willingly
pay a few shillings, even a pound, too much for the sake of getting the better
of an opponent; but to give thirty pounds for half a ton of hay—not even the
natural enmity of an Orangeman for a Sinn Feiner would account for such
recklessness.
“Guineas,” said Dan Gallaher.
It was his turn to say guineas
now, and he repeated the word without faltering until the price rose to fifty
pounds. Mr. Robinson took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
Never in all his experience of auctions had he heard bidding like this. He lit
a fresh cigarette, holding the match in fingers which trembled visibly.
“You will understand, gentlemen,
that I am only selling the hay, not the barn or the stable.”
“Guineas,” said Dan Gallaher.
It was the last bid. As he made
it Colonel Eden turned and walked out of the group round the auctioneer. James
McNiece took his pipe from his pocket and filled it slowly.
“The hay is yours, Mr. Gallaher,”
said the auctioneer.
Dan Gallaher, having secured the
hay, left the yard. He found his horse, which he had tethered to a tree, and
mounted. He rode slowly down the rough lane which led from the farm. At the
gate leading to the high road the police sergeant stopped him.
“If you wouldn’t mind waiting a
minute, Mr. Gallaher,” said the sergeant, “the D.I. would like to speak to
you.”
“What about?” said Gallaher.
The sergeant winked ponderously.
“It might be,” he said, “about
the hay you’re just after buying.”
“If he wants it,” said Gallaher,
“he can have it, and I’ll deliver it to him at his own home at half the price I
paid for it.”
The District Inspector, smiling
and tapping his gaiters with a riding switch, explained in a few words that he
did not want the hay and did not intend to pay for it.
“I’m taking over the contents of
that loft,” he said, “in the name of the Government under the provisions of D.O.R.A.”
“I don’t know,” said Gallaher,
“that you’ve any right to be taking over what I’ve bought in that kind of way,
and what’s more you’ll not be able to do it without you show me a proper order
in writing, signed by a magistrate.”
“If I were you,” said the D.I.,
“I wouldn’t insist on any kind of legal trial about that hay. At present
there’s no evidence against you, Mr. Gallaher, except that you paid a perfectly
absurd price for some hay that you didn’t want, and I’m not inclined to press
the matter now. I’ve got what I wanted; but if you insist on dragging the
matter into Court——”
“I do not,” said Gallaher.
At ten o’clock that evening Dan
Gallaher and James McNiece sat together in the private room behind the bar of
Sam Twining’s public-house. The house was neutral ground used by Orangemen and
Nationalists alike, a convenient arrangement, indeed a necessary arrangement,
for there was no other public-house nearer than Curraghfin.
“Dan,” said James McNiece, “I’m
an Orangeman and a Protestant and a loyalist, and what I’ve always said about
Home Rule and always will say is this:—We’ll not have it and to Hell with the
rebels. But I’m telling you now I’d rather you had them, papist and rebel and
all as you are, than see them swept off that way by the police. And what’s
more, I’m not the only one says that. The Colonel was talking to me after he
heard what happened, and what he said was this—‘The Government of this
country,’ said he, meaning the police, ‘is a disgrace to civilization.’”
“Give me your hand, James
McNiece,” said Gallaher. “Let me shake your hand to show there’s no ill feeling
about the way I bid against you at the sale to-day.”
McNiece laid down the glass of
whisky which he was raising to his lips and stretched out his hand. Gallaher
grasped it and held it.
“Tell me this now, James
McNiece,” he said, “for it’s what I was never sure of—How many was there behind
that hay?”
McNiece looked round him
carefully and made sure that no third person could hear him. Neglecting no
precaution he sank his voice to a whisper.
“Twenty rifles,” he said, “of the
latest pattern, the same as the soldiers use, and four hundred rounds of ball
cartridge.”
“Gosh,” said Gallaher, “but we’d
have done great work with them. Either your lads or mine, James McNiece, would
have done great work with them. But, sure, what’s the use of talking? The
police has them now.”
“Damn the police,” said James
McNiece.
XIII ~~ OLD BIDDY AND THE REBELS
The other servants—there were
four of them—spoke of her as “the ould cat” or in moments of extreme
exasperation “that divil Biddy O’Halloran.” When they spoke to her they called
her “Mrs. O’Halloran,” or even “Mrs. O’Halloran, ma’am.” Even Lady Devereux,
though nominal mistress of the house, did not dare to call her “Biddy,” She
would as soon have addressed an archbishop as “Dickie,” if, indeed, there is an
arch-bishop whose Christian name is Richard. There is probably not a woman
anywhere, however brave, who would venture to speak to Mrs. O’Halloran face to
face and call her “Biddy.” But a man, especially if he be young and
good-looking, is in a different case. Harry Devereux called her “Biddy.” He had
earned the right to be familiar with his aunt’s cook.
As a schoolboy Harry spent most
of his holidays at his aunt’s house in Dublin, and in those days Mrs.
O’Halloran used to box his ears and occasionally spank him. When he grew to be
a man and was called in due course to the Irish Bar, he was often at his aunt’s
house and still visited Mrs. O’Halloran in her kitchen. She gave up smacking
him but she still called him “Master Harry,” After the outbreak of war Harry
Devereux became a Second Lieutenant in the Wessex Regiment. He displayed
himself in his uniform to his aunt, who admired his appearance in her placid
way. He also showed himself to Mrs. O’Halloran, who snubbed him sharply.
“So it’s fighting you’re for now,
Master Harry,” she said. “Well, it’s what’ll suit you. It’s my opinion that
you’re never out of mischief only when you’re in something worse. It is that
way with you as long as I know you and that’s since you were born or pretty
near. It’s the Germans, is it? Well, I’m sorry for them Germans if there’s many
like you going to be soldiers.”
Harry took this as a compliment.
It was his hope that the Germans would be sorry for themselves when he got out
to France with his platoon of Wessex men.
After dinner, Molly, the
parlourmaid, her day’s work ended, became sentimental. She said it was a
terrible thing to think of all the fine men that would be killed, and maybe
young Mr. Devereux among them. Mrs. O’Halloran checked her flow of feeling.
“Is it Master Harry be killed?
Talk sense, can’t you? Sure you couldn’t kill the like of that one. Haven’t I
seen him, not once but a dozen times, climbing out on the roof of the house and
playing himself to and fro among the chimneys. If that wasn’t the death of him,
and him not more than twelve years old at the time, is it likely the Germans
would be able to kill him? The like of him is the same as fleas that you’d be
squeezing with your finger and thumb or maybe drowning in a basin of water. You
know well they’d be hopping over you after the same as before.”
Molly sniffed. It was not wise to
argue with “Ould Biddy,” who had a talent for forcible speech.
Mrs. O’Halloran had the best
right in the world to the free use of her tongue. She was a really good cook.
She had satisfied Sir Joseph Devereux while he lived. She satisfied Lady
Devereux afterwards. And Lady Devereux appreciated good cooking. Her husband
dead, her three daughters safely married, she had leisure to enjoy eating and
had money enough to pay for the best which the Dublin markets provided. Next to
good food Lady Devereux valued peace and the absence of worry. Mrs. O’Halloran
enjoyed strife and liked a strenuous life. She took all the annoyances of the
household on herself, and when they proved too few for her, created unnecessary
worry for herself by harassing the maids. Lady Devereux slept untroubled at
night, rose late in the morning, found all things very much to her liking, and
grew comfortably fat.
For eight months of the year,
from October till the end of May, Lady Devereux lived in one of the fine Georgian
houses which are the glory of the residential squares of Dublin. It was a
corner house, rather larger than the others in the square, with more light and
more air, because its position gave it a view up and down two streets as well
as across the lawn which formed the centre of the square.
Before the war Harry Devereux
used to say that his aunt’s house was the best in Dublin for a dance. It pained
him to see its possibilities wasted. After receiving his commission he looked
at the world with the eye of a soldier and gave it as his opinion that the
house occupied the finest strategic position in Dublin. There was not much
chance of persuading plump old Lady Devereux to give a ball. There seemed even
less chance of her home ever being used as a fortress. But fate plays strange
tricks with us and our property, especially in Ireland. It happened that Lady
Devereux’ house was occupied more or less by the soldiers of one army, and shot
at with some vigour by the soldiers of another on Easter Monday, 1916. Oddly enough
it was neither the rebels nor the soldiers who earned credit by their military
operations, but old Biddy O’Halloran.
Mrs. O’Halloran always enjoyed
Bank holidays greatly. She did not go out, visit picture houses or parade the
streets in her best clothes. She found a deeper and more satisfying pleasure in
telling the younger maids what she thought of them when they asked and obtained
leave to go out for the afternoon, and in making scathing remarks about their
frocks and hats as they passed through the kitchen to reach the area door. On
that particular Easter Monday she was enjoying herself thoroughly. A
kitchenmaid—she was new to the household or she would not have done it—had
asked Lady Devereux’ permission to go out for the afternoon and evening. She
got what she asked for. Everybody who asked Lady Devereux for anything got it
as a matter of course. The kitchenmaid ought to have made her application
through Mrs. O’Halloran. It is the rule in all services that remote authorities
must be approached only through the applicant’s immediate superiors. Mrs.
O’Halloran took her own way of impressing this on the kitchenmaid.
“I suppose now,” she said, “that
you’ll be trapsing the streets of Dublin in the new pink blouse that you spent
your last month’s wages on?”
That was exactly what the
kitchenmaid meant to do. Mrs. O’Halloran looked the girl over critically.
“I don’t know,” she said, “that I
ever seen a girl that would look worse in a pink blouse than yourself. The face
that’s on you is the colour of a dish of mashed turnips, and the pink blouse
will make it worse, if worse can be.”
The kitchenmaid was a girl of
some spirit. She felt inclined to cry, but she pulled herself together and
snorted instead.
“I suppose,” said Mrs.
O’Halloran, “that you’ll be looking out for a young man to keep you company?”
The kitchenmaid did, in fact,
hope to walk about with a young man; but she denied this.
“I’ll be looking for no such
thing,” she said.
“It’s well for you then,” said
Mrs. O’Halloran, “for I’m thinking you’d look a long while before you found
one. It’s very little sense men has, the best of them, but I never met one yet
that hadn’t more sense than to go after a girl like you. If you were any good
for any mortal thing a man might be content to marry you in spite of your face;
but the way you are, not fit to darn your own stockings, let alone sew for a
man, or cook the way he could eat what you put before him, it would be a queer
one that would walk the same side of the street with you, pink blouse or no
pink blouse.”
The kitchenmaid, though a girl of
spirit, was still young. She was washing potatoes in the scullery while Mrs.
O’Halloran spoke to her. Two large tears dropped from her eyes into the sink.
Mrs. O’Halloran smiled.
Then Molly, the parlourmaid,
flung open the kitchen door and rushed to Mrs. O’Halloran. Her face was flushed
with excitement and terror. Her eyes were staring. She was panting. Her nice
frilly cap was over one ear. She held her apron crumpled into a ball and
clutched tightly in her hand.
“It’s murdered we’ll be, killed
and murdered and worse! There’s them in the house with guns and all sorts
that’ll ruin and destroy everything that’s in it. The mistress is dead this
minute and it’s me they’re after now. What’ll we do at all, at all?”
The kitchenmaid, stirred from her
private grief by the news, left her potatoes and came to the kitchen. She and
Molly clung to each other.
“It’s the Sinn Feiners,” she
said, “and they’re out for blood.”
“Where’s the police?” said Molly.
“What good is the police that they wouldn’t be here and us being murdered?”
“It’s blood they want,” said the
kitchenmaid, “and It’s blood they’ll have.”
“Molly,” said Mrs. O’Halloran,
“is there men in the house or is there not? Stop your bawling now, and tell
me.”
“There is, there is,” said Molly,
“with guns and cannons and knives. Glory be to God, but I never thought to die
this way. What’ll we do at all, at all? Would it be any good hiding?”
Mrs. O’Halloran, with cool
deliberation, shifted the position of two pots on the kitchen range. Then she
wiped her hands on her apron.
“It’s your place to attend the
door and not mine, Molly,” she said, “but if you’re afeard....”
She looked scornfully at the two
girls and left the kitchen.
In the hall a young man stood
just inside the door on the mat. He wore a greenish-grey uniform and carried a
rifle. Across his chest was a bandolier. He looked uncomfortable, like a man
who finds himself unexpectedly in a public place when wearing a fancy dress.
The door was wide open. On the steps outside were two other young men. They
also wore uniforms and carried rifles.
“Now what may you be wanting?”
said Mrs. O’Halloran.
The man on the mat—he was really
little more than a boy—fumbled in one pocket after another.
His uniform, like that of the
British soldier, had a good many pockets. Finally he drew out a sheet of paper.
“This is my authority,” he said,
“from the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic.”
He handed the paper to Mrs.
O’Halloran.
“If it’s a collection you’re
making for the Irish Language Fund,” said Mrs. O’Halloran, “her ladyship gave
half a crown last week to one of yees, and she’ll give no more, so you can take
yourselves off out of this as quick as you like.”
“We are not collectors,” said the
young man, with dignity.
“Whether you are not, it’s what
you look,” said Mrs. O’Halloran, “dressed up in them clothes, with your toy
guns and all. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
The suggestion that his rifle was
not a real weapon roused the spirit of the young man.
“In the name of the Irish
Republic,” he said, “I take possession of this house for military purposes.”
“Musha, but that’s fine talk,”
said Mrs. O’Halloran. “Will nothing do you, only military purposes?”
“We shall do no harm to the inmates
or the contents of the house,” said the young man.
“You will not, for you won’t be
let.”
“But I demand free entrance to
the upper storeys for myself and my men.”
He turned to the two boys on the
steps outside the door.
“Enter,” he said, “and follow
me.”
“Will you wipe your boots on the
mat,” said Mrs. O’Halloran, “and not be carrying all the mud of the streets
into the house with you. Do you think the girls that does be here has nothing
to do only to be sweeping carpets and polishing floors after the likes of you?”
The army of the Irish Republic
has had many crimes laid to its charge; but it has not been said that its
soldiers were guilty of any needless discourtesy to the inhabitants of the
houses of which they took possession. The three young men wiped their boots on
Lady Devereux’ doormat with elaborate cafe. Mrs. O’Halloran watched them
critically.
“Is it the police you’re out
after with them guns?” she said. “It’s a pity, so it is, to see fine young
fellows like you mixing yourselves up with that foolishness. Sure they’ll get
you at the latter end, and you’ll be had up in Court.”
The leader of the little party of
Sinn Feiners was not inclined to discuss the future prospects of the
insurrection with Mrs. O’Halloran. He moved across the hall towards the
staircase, followed by his two young men. They walked delicately, stepping
carefully from one to another of the rugs which lay on the floor and avoiding
the polished boards. They were courteous and considerate rebels.
“Will nothing but the front
stairs suit you?” said Mrs. O’Halloran. “Cock you up, indeed, the likes of you,
that never was in a lady’s house before. The back stairs is good enough for me,
so I’m thinking it’s good enough for you. Come along with you now.”
She led them past the foot of the
great staircase and through a swing door covered with green baize. That door,
such was the fancy of the designer of Lady Devereux’ house, concealed another,
a very solid door, made after the Georgian fashion, of thick mahogany. The
baize-covered door had a spring on it so that it swung shut of itself. Mrs.
O’Halloran held it open with one hand. With the other she turned the handle of
the solid door beyond.
“Will you come along now,” she
said to the three young men, “and take care you don’t be scratching the polish
off the door with them guns you’re so proud of?”
They were foolish rebels, those
three. They were young and, though Irish, this was the first time they had
taken part in an insurrection. They had marched forth to garrison Lady
Devereux’ house expecting much, hand-to-hand fighting perhaps in the hall, the
tears and hysterics of terrified women, revolver shots from outraged loyalists.
Anything of that sort, anything heroic they were prepared for. Old Biddy
O’Halloran, with her humorous eyes and her ready tongue, took them aback. They
walked through the mahogany door meekly enough.
They found themselves in a small
cloak room. There was a wash-hand basin and a couple of towels in one corner. A
pile of carriage rugs lay on a shelf. Some waterproof coats hung from pegs.
There were three umbrellas in a stand. There was one small window which looked
out on a back yard and was heavily barred. There was not the smallest sign of a
staircase leading to the upper storey of the house or to anywhere else.
A nervous and excitable woman who
had trapped three young men would have made haste to lock them in. Mrs.
O’Halloran was in no hurry at all. The key of the mahogany door was on the
inside of the lock. She took it out deliberately.
“There you stay,” she said, “the
three of yous, till you’ve sense enough to go back to your homes, and it’s your
mothers will be thankful to me this day for keeping you out of mischief. Listen
to me now before I lock the door.”
She fitted the key into the
outside of the lock and half closed the door while she spoke.
“If I hear a word out of your
heads or if there’s any shooting of them guns, or if you start cracking and
banging on that door, or kicking up any sort of a noise that might disturb her
ladyship, I’ll give you neither bite nor sup, not if I have to keep you here
for a week, so be good now and mind what I’m telling you.”
She shut the door and turned the
key in the lock.
At the head of the kitchen stairs
stood Molly and the kitchenmaid.
“Will I run for the police?” said
the kitchenmaid. “Sure I wouldn’t be afeard to do it if Molly would come with
me.”
“You’ll run down to the
scullery,” said Mrs. O’Halloran, “and you’ll go on washing them potatoes, and
Molly along with you. That’s all the running either the one or the other of you
will do this day.”
“Her ladyship’s bell is ringing,”
said Molly. “Will I not go to her? It could be she’s not dead yet and might be
wanting help.”
“It’s little help you’d give her
if she was wanting it, you with your cap on your ear, instead of the top of
your head, and your apron like a wrung dishclout I wonder you’re not ashamed to
be seen. Get along with you down to the kitchen and stay there. Anything that’s
wanted for her ladyship I’ll do myself.”
Lady Devereux was in her morning
room, a pleasant sunny apartment which looked out on the square. The day was
warm, but Lady Devereux was an old woman. She sat in front of a bright fire.
She sat in a very deep soft chair with her feet on a footstool. She had a pile
of papers and magazines on a little table beside her. She neither stirred nor
looked up when Mrs. O’Halloran entered the room.
“Molly,” she said, “I heard some
men talking in the hall. I wish they wouldn’t make so much noise.”
Mrs. O’Halloran cleared her
throat and coughed. Lady Devereux looked up.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s not Molly.
It’s you, Mrs. O’Halloran. Then I suppose it must be plumbers.”
The inference was a natural one.
Mrs. O’Halloran always dealt with plumbers when they came. She was the only
person in the house who could deal with plumbers.
“Or perhaps some men about the
gas,” said Lady Devereux. “I hope they won’t want to come in here.”
The pleasant quiet life in Lady
Devereux’ house was occasionally broken by visits from plumbers and gas men. No
one, however wealthy or easygoing, can altogether escape the evils which have
grown up with our civilization.
“It’s not plumbers, my lady,”
said Mrs. O’Halloran, “nor it isn’t gas men. It’s Sinn Feiners.”
“Dear me, I suppose they want a
subscription. My purse is on my writing table, Mrs. O’Halloran. Will five
shillings be enough? I think I ought to give them something. I’m always so
sorry for people who have to go round from house to house collecting.”
“I have the three of them in the
cloakroom downstairs and the key turned on them,” said Mrs. O’Halloran.
It is quite possible that Lady
Devereux might have expressed some surprise at this drastic way of treating
men, presumably well-meaning men, who came to ask for money. Before she spoke
again she was startled by the sound of several rifle shots fired in the street
outside her house. She was not much startled, not at all alarmed. A rifle fired
in the open air at some distance does not make a very terrifying sound.
“Dear me,” she said, “I wonder
what that is. It sounds very like somebody shooting.”
Mrs. O’Halloran went over to the
window and opened it. There was a narrow iron balcony outside. She stepped on
to it.
“It’s soldiers, my lady,” she
said. “They’re in the square.”
“I suppose it must be on account
of the war,” said Lady Devereux.
She had learned—before Easter,
1916, everybody had learned—to put down all irregularities to the war. Letters
got lost in the post. The price of sugar rose. Men married unexpectedly, “on
account of the war.”
“But I don’t think they ought to
be allowed to shoot in the square,” she added. “It might be dangerous.”
It was dangerous. A bullet—it
must have passed very close to Mrs. O’Halloran—buried itself in the wall of the
morning room. A moment later another pierced a mirror which hung over Lady
Devereux’ writing table. Mrs. O’Halloran came into the room again and shut the
window.
“You’d think now,” she said “that
them fellows were shooting at the house.”
“I wish you’d go down and tell
them to stop,” said Lady Devereux. “Of course I know we ought to do all we can
to help the soldiers, such gallant fellows, suffering so much in this terrible
war. Still I do think they ought to be more careful where they shoot.”
Mrs. O’Halloran went quietly down
the two flights of stairs which led from the morning-room to the ground floor
of the house. She had no idea of allowing herself to be hustled into any
undignified haste either by rebels or troops engaged in suppressing the
rebellion. When she reached the bottom of the stairs she stopped. Her attention
was held by two different noises. The Sinn Feiners were battering the door of
their prison with the butts of their rifles. Molly, the kitchenmaid and Lady
Devereux’ two other servants were shrieking on the kitchen stairs. Mrs.
O’Halloran dealt with the rebels first. She opened the baize-covered door and
put her mouth to the keyhole of the other.
“Will yous keep quiet or will
yous not?” she said. “There’s soldiers outside the house this minute waiting
for the chance to shoot you, and they’ll do it, too, if you don’t sit down and
behave yourselves. Maybe it’s that you want. If it is you’re going the right
way about getting it. But if you’ve any notion of going home to your mothers
with your skins whole you’ll stay peaceable where you are. Can you not hear the
guns?”
The three rebels stopped
battering the door and listened. The rifle fire began to slacken. No more than
an occasional shot was to be heard. The fighting had died down. It was too late
for the prisoners to take any active part in it. They began to consider the
future. They made up their minds to take the advice given them and stay quiet.
Mrs. O’Halloran went to the head
of the kitchen stairs. The four maids were huddled together. Mrs. O’Halloran
descended on them. She took Molly, who was nearest to her, by the shoulders and
shook her violently. The housemaid and Lady Devereux’ maid fled at once to the
coal cellar. The kitchenmaid sat down and sobbed.
“If there’s another sound out of
any of yous,” said Mrs. O’Halloran, “it’ll be the worse for you after. Isn’t it
enough for one day to have three young fellows in the house trying to get shot,
and soldiers outside trying to shoot them, and every sort of divilment in the
way of a row going on, without having a pack of girls bellowing and bawling on
the kitchen stairs? It’s mighty fond you are, the whole of you, of dressing
yourselves up, in pink blouses and the like” (she looked angrily at the
kitchenmaid) “and running round the streets to see if you can find a man to
take up with you. And now when there’s men enough outside and in, nothing will
do but to be screeching. But sure girls is like that, and where’s the use of
talking?”
Mrs. O’Halloran might have said
more. She felt inclined to say a good deal more but she was interrupted by a
loud knocking at the hall door.
“I dursent go to it.” said Molly.
“I dursent. You wouldn’t know who might be there nor what they might do to
you.”
“Nobody’s asking you to go,” said
Mrs. O’Halloran.
She went to the door herself and
opened it. A sergeant and eight men were on the steps.
“And what may you be wanting?”
said Mrs. O’Halloran. “What right have you to come battering and banging at the
door of her ladyship’s house the same as if it was a public-house and you
trying to get in after closing time? Be off out of this, now, the whole of you.
I never seen such foolishness.”
“My orders are to search the
house,” said the sergeant; “rebels have been firing on us from the roof.”
“There’s no rebels been firing
out of this house,” said Mrs. O’Halloran, “and what’s more——”
“My orders,” said the sergeant.
“There’s no orders given in this
house,” said Mrs. O’Halloran, “only mine and maybe her ladyship’s at odd
times.”
She need scarcely have mentioned
Lady Devereux. An order from her was a very exceptional thing.
“Our officer——” said the sergeant
“Private Beggs, go and report to the officer that we are refused admission to
this house.”
Private Beggs turned to obey the
order. The officer in charge of the party came out of the door of a house
half-way along the side of the square. Mrs. O’Halloran recognised him. It was
Second Lieutenant Harry Devereux.
“Master Harry,” she called,
“Master Harry, come here at once. Is it you that’s been raising ructions about
the square? Shooting and destroying and frightening decent people into fits?
Faith, I might have known it was you. If there’s divilment going you’d be in
it.”
Harry Devereux, intensely
conscious of his responsibility as commander of men in a real fight, reached
the bottom of the steps which led to his aunt’s door.
“Enter the house, sergeant,” he
said, “and search it.”
Mrs. O’Halloran stood right in
the middle of the doorway. The sergeant looked at her doubtfully and hesitated.
“Come up out of that, Master
Harry,” said Mrs. O’Halloran, “and don’t be trying to hide behind the sergeant.
It’s no wonder you’re ashamed of yourself, but I see you plain enough. Come
here now till I talk to you.”
The sergeant grinned. Private
Beggs, who was behind his officer, laughed openly.
“Was there nowhere else in the
world for you to have a battle—if a battle was what you wanted,” said Mrs.
O’Halloran, “only in front of your aunt’s house? Many and many’s the time I’ve
smacked you for less than what you’ve done to-day. Isn’t there bullets in her
ladyship’s morning-room? Isn’t there a grand looking-glass in a gold frame gone
to smithers with your shooting? Isn’t Molly and the other girls screeching this
minute down in the coal cellar, for fear you’ll kill them, and now nothing will
do you seemingly only to be tramping all over the house. Search it, moya,
search it! But you’ll not be let, Master Harry; neither you nor the sergeant
nor any of the rest of you.”
Second Lieutenant Harry Devereux
pulled himself together and made an effort to save what was left of his
dignity. He had led his men across the square under a shower of rebel bullets
from the roofs of the houses. He had taken cool advantage of all possible
cover. He had directed his men’s fire till he drove the rebels from their
shelters. No one could say of him that he was other than a gallant officer. But
his heart failed him when he was face to face with his aunt’s cook.
“I think we needn’t search this
house, sergeant,” he said. “I know it.”
“If you’d like to come back in an
hour or two, Master Harry,” said Mrs. O’Halloran, “I’ll have a bit of dinner
ready for you, and I wouldn’t say but there might be something for the sergeant
and his men. It’s what her ladyship is always saying that we ought to do the
best we can for the lads that’s fighting for us against the Germans—so long as
they behave themselves. But mind this now, sergeant, if you do look in in the
course of the evening there must be no carrying on with the girls. The Lord
knows they’re giddy enough without you upsetting them worse.”
That night, after dark, three
young Sinn Feiners climbed the wall at the end of Lady Devereux’ back yard and
dropped into a narrow lane beyond it. A fortnight later Mrs. O’Halloran
received a large parcel containing three suits of clothes, the property of
Second Lieutenant Devereux, left by him in his aunt’s house when he first put
on his uniform. They were carefully brushed and folded, in no way the worse for
having been worn by strangers for one night.
In the bottom of Mrs.
O’Halloran’s trunk there are three rebel uniforms. And on the top of the cupboard
in her room are three rifles, made in Germany.
XIV ~~ CIVILIZED WAR
“This,” said Captain Power, “is
an utterly rotten war.”
The rain was dripping through the
roof of the shed which had been allotted to Power as a billet. The mud outside
was more than ankle deep. The damp inside was chilly and penetrating. Ned
Waterhouse, a Second Lieutenant, the only other occupant of the shed, looked up
from an old newspaper which he was trying to read.
“All wars are rotten,” he said.
“Not at all,” said Power; “a properly
conducted war, run in a decent way by civilized men is quite agreeable, rather
fun, in fact. Now the last in which I was mixed up was rather fun.”
Waterhouse eyed Power
suspiciously. He suspected that he was being made the victim of some kind of joke.
Waterhouse was an Englishman and it was not of his own desire that he was an
officer in the Hibernian light Infantry. He felt himself out of place among
Irishmen whom he never quite understood. He was particularly distrustful of
Captain Power. Power was an expert in the art of “pulling the legs” of innocent
people. Waterhouse had several times found himself looking like a fool without
knowing exactly why.
“What I call a civilized war,”
said Power, “is waged in fine weather for one thing, and men have a chance of
keeping clean. The combatants show some regard for the other side’s feelings
and don’t try to make things as nasty for each other as they can. The business
is done in a picturesque way, with flags and drums and speeches. There are
negotiations and flags of truce and mutual respect for gallant foemen—instead
of this d____d coldblooded, scientific slaughter.”
“No war was ever like that,” said
Waterhouse. “Novelists and other silly fools write about war as if it were a
kind of sport. But it never was really.”
“The last war I was in, was,”
said Power.
“I don’t believe you ever were in
a war before,” said Waterhouse. “You’re not old enough to have gone to South
Africa.”
“All the same I was in a war,”
said Power, “though I didn’t actually fight. I was wounded at the time and
couldn’t. But I was there. Our Irish war at Easter, 1916.”
“That footy little rebellion,”
said Waterhouse.
“You may call it what you like,”
said Power, “but it was a much better war than this one from every point of
view, except mere size. It was properly conducted on both sides.”
“I suppose you want to tell a
yarn about it,” said Waterhouse, “and if you do I can’t stop you; but you
needn’t suppose I’ll believe a word you say.”
“The truth of this narrative,”
said Power, “will compel belief even in the most sceptical mind. I happened to
be at home at the time on sick leave, wounded in the arm. Those were the days
when one got months of sick leave, before some rotten ass invented convalescent
homes for officers and kept them there. I had three months’ leave that time and
I spent it with my people in Ballymahon.”
“The whole of it?” said
Waterhouse. “Good Lord!”
“You’d have spent it in the
Strand Palace Hotel, I suppose, running in and out of music halls, but I prefer
the simple joys of country life, though I couldn’t shoot or ride properly on
account of my arm. Still I could watch the sunset and listen to the birds singing,
which I like. Besides, I was absolutely stoney at the time, and couldn’t have
stayed in London for a week. As it happened, it was a jolly good thing I was
there. If I’d been in London I’d have missed that war. Perhaps I’d better begin
by telling you the sort of place Ballymahon is.”
“You needn’t,” said Waterhouse.
“I spent three months in camp in County Tipperary. I know those dirty little
Irish towns. Twenty public-houses. Two churches, a workhouse and a police
barrack.”
“In Ballymahon there is also a
court house and our ancestral home. My old dad is the principal doctor in the
neighbourhood. He lives on one side of the court house. The parish priest lives
on the other. You must grasp these facts in order to understand the subsequent
military operations. The only other thing you really must know is that
Ballymahon lies in a hole with hills all round it, like the rim of a saucer.
Well, on Monday afternoon, Easter Monday, the enemy, that is to say, the Sinn
Feiners, marched in and took possession of the town. It was a most imposing
sight, Waterhouse. There were at least eight hundred of them. Lots of them had
uniforms. Most of them had flags. There were two bands and quite a lot of
rifles. The cavalry——”
“You can’t expect me to believe
in the cavalry,” said Waterhouse. ‘’But I say, supposing they really came,
didn’t the loyal inhabitants put up any kind of resistance?”
“My old dad,” said Power, “was
the only loyal inhabitant, except four policemen. You couldn’t expect four
policemen to give battle to a whole army. They shut themselves up in their
barrack and stayed there. My dad, being a doctor, was of course a
non-combatant. I couldn’t do anything with my arm in a sling, so there was no
fight at all.”
“I suppose the next thing they
did was loot the public-houses,” said Waterhouse, “and get gloriously drunk?”
“Certainly not. I told you that
our war was properly conducted. There was no looting in Ballymahon and I never
saw a drunken man the whole time. If those Sinn Feiners had a fault it was
over-respectability. I shouldn’t care to be in that army myself.”
“I believe that,” said
Waterhouse. “It’s the first thing in this story that I really have believed.”
“They used to march about all day
in the most orderly manner, and at night there were sentries at every street
corner who challenged you in Irish. Not knowing the language, I thought it
better to stay indoors. But my dad used to wander about. He’s a sporting old
bird and likes to know what’s going on. Well, that state of things lasted three
days and we all began to settle down comfortably for the summer. Except that
there were no newspapers or letters there wasn’t much to complain about. In
fact, you’d hardly have known there was a war on. It wasn’t the least like this
beastly country where everyone destroys everything he sees, and wretched devils
have to live in rabbit-holes. In Ballymahon we lived in houses with beds and
chairs and looked after ourselves properly. Then one morning—it must have been
Friday—news came in that a lot of soldiers were marching on the town. Some
country girls saw them and came running in to tell us. I must say for the Sinn
Fein commander that he kept his head. His name was O’Farrelly and he called
himself a Colonel. He sent out scouts to see where the soldiers were and how
many there were. Quite the proper thing to do. I didn’t hear exactly what the
scouts reported; but that evening O’Farrelly came round to our house to talk
things over with my dad.”
“I thought you said your father
was a loyal man.”
“So he is. There isn’t a loyaller
man in Ireland. You’d know that if you’d ever seen him singing ‘God Save the
King.’ He swells out an inch all over when he’s doing it.”
“If he’s as loyal as all that,”
said Waterhouse, “he wouldn’t consult with rebels.”
“My dad, though loyal, has some
sense, and so, as it happened, had O’Farrelly. Neither one nor the other of
them wanted to see a battle fought in the streets of Ballymahon. You’ve seen
battles, Waterhouse, and you know what they’re like. Messy things. You can
understand my father’s feelings. O’Farrelly was awfully nice about it. He said
that the people of Ballymahon, including my father and even the police, were a
decent lot, and he’d hate to see licentious English soldiers rioting through
the streets of the town. His idea was that my dad should use his influence with
the C.O. of the troops and get him to march his men off somewhere else, so as
to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. O’Farrelly promised he wouldn’t go after them
or molest them in any way if they left the neighbourhood. My dad said he
couldn’t do that and even if he could, he wouldn’t. He suggested that
O’Farrelly should take his army away. O’Farrelly said he was out to fight and
not to run away. I chipped in at that point and said he could fight just as
well in a lonelier place, where there weren’t any houses and no damage would be
done. I said I felt pretty sure the soldiers would go after him to any bog he
chose to select. O’Farrelly seemed to think there was something in the
suggestion and said he’d hold a council of war and consult his officers.”
“What an amazing liar you are,
Power,” said Waterhouse.
Captain Power took no notice of
the insult. He went on with his story.
“The Council of War assembled
next morning,” he said, “and sat for about four hours. It might have all day if
an English officer hadn’t ridden in on a motor-bike about noon. He was stopped
by a sentry, of course, and said he wanted to see the C.O. of the rebel army.
So the sentry blindfolded him——”
“What on earth for?”
“In civilized war,” said Power
severely, “envoys with flags of truce are invariably blindfolded. I told you at
the start that our war was properly conducted; but you wouldn’t believe me. Now
you can see for yourself that it was. The sentry led that officer into the
council, which was sitting in the court house. I told you, didn’t I, that the
court house was the rebel H.Q.?”
“You didn’t mention it, but it
doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. And you’ll see
later on it’s most important. Well, O’Farrelly was frightfully polite to the
officer, and asked him what he wanted. The officer said that he had come to
demand the unconditional surrender of the whole of the rebel army. O’Farrelly,
still quite politely, said he’d rather die than surrender, and everybody
present cheered. The officer said that the town was entirely surrounded and
that there was a gun on top of one of the hills which would shell the place
into little bits in an hour if it started firing. O’Farrelly said he didn’t
believe all that and accused the officer of putting up a bluff. The officer
stuck to it that what he said was true. That brought the negotiations to a
dead-lock.”
“Why the devil didn’t they shell
the place and have done with it, instead of talking?”
“That’s what would happen out
here,” said Power. “But as I keep telling you our war was run on humane lines.
After the officer and O’Farrelly had argued for half an hour my dad dropped in
on them. He’s a popular man in the place and I think everyone was glad to see
him. He sized up the position at once and suggested the only possible way out.
O’Farrelly, with a proper safe conduct, of course, was to be allowed to go and
see whether the town was really surrounded, and especially whether there was a
gun on top of the hill, as the officer said. That, I think you’ll agree with
me, Waterhouse, was a sensible suggestion and fair to both sides. But they both
boggled at it. The officer said he’d no power to enter into negotiation of any
kind with rebels, and that all he could do was take yes or no to his proposal
of unconditional surrender. O’Farrelly seemed to think that he’d be shot, no
matter what safe conducts he had. It took the poor old dad nearly an hour to
talk sense into the two of them; but in the end he managed it O’Farrelly agreed
to go if the safe conduct was signed by my dad as well as the officer, and the
officer agreed to take him on condition that my dad went too to explain the
situation to his colonel. I went with them just to see what would happen.”
“I suppose they made O’Farrelly
prisoner?” said Waterhouse.
“You are judging everybody by the
standards of this infernal war,” said Power. “That English colonel was a
soldier and a gentleman. He stood us drinks and let O’Farrelly look at the gun.
It was there all right and Ballymahon was entirely surrounded. We got back
about five o’clock, with an ultimatum written out on a sheet of paper. Unless
O’Farrelly and his whole army had marched out and laid down their arms by 8
p.m. the town would be shelled without further warning. You’d have thought that
would have knocked the heart out of O’Farrelly, considering that he hadn’t a
dog’s chance of breaking through. But it didn’t. He became cheerfuller than I’d
seen him before, and said that the opportunity he’d always longed for had come
at last. His men, when he told them about the ultimatum, took the same view.
They said they’d never surrender, not even if the town was shelled into dust
and them buried in the ruins. That naturally didn’t suit my dad—or for that
matter, me. The soldiers were sure to begin by shelling the rebel H.Q. and that
meant that they’d hit our house. I told you, didn’t I, that it was next door to
the court house? My poor dad did his best. He talked to O’Farrelly and the rest
of them till the sweat ran off him. But it wasn’t the least bit of good. They
simply wouldn’t listen to reason. It was seven o’clock before dad gave the job
up and left the court house. He was going home to make his will, but on the way
he met Father Conway, the priest. He was a youngish man and a tremendous
patriot, supposed to be hand-in-glove with the rebels. Dad explained to him
that he had less than an hour to live and advised him to go home and bury any
valuables he possessed before the shelling began. It took Father Conway about
ten minutes to grasp the situation. I chipped in and explained the bracket system
on which artillery works. I told him that they wouldn’t begin by aiming at the
court house, but would drop their first shell on his house and their next on
ours, so as to get the range right. As soon as he believed that—and I had to
swear it was true before he did—he took the matter up warmly and said he’d talk
to O’Farrelly himself. I didn’t think he’d do much good, but I went into the
court house with him, just to see what he’d say. I must say for him he wasted
no time. It was a quarter past seven when he began, so there wasn’t much time
to waste.”
“‘Boys,’ he said, ‘will you tell
me straight and plain what is it you want?’ O’Farrelly began a long speech
about an Irish republic and things of that kind. I sat with my watch in my hand
opposite Father Conway and every now and then I pointed to the hands, so as to
remind him that time was going on. At twenty-five past seven he stopped
O’Farrelly and said they couldn’t have an Irish republic just then—though they
might later—on account of that gun. Then he asked them again to say exactly
what they wanted, republics being considered a wash-out. You’d have been
surprised if you heard the answer he got. Every man in the place stood up and
shouted that he asked nothing better than to die for Ireland. They meant it,
too. I thought it was all up and Father Conway was done. But he wasn’t.”
“‘Who’s preventing you?’ he said.
‘Just form fours in the square outside and you’ll all be dead in less than half
an hour. But if you stay here a lot of other people who don’t want to die for
Ireland or anything else will be killed too; along with having their homes
knocked down on them.’
“Well, they saw the sense of
that. O’Farrelly formed his men up outside and made a speech to them. He said
if any man funked it he could stay where he was and only those who really
wanted to die need go on. It was a quarter to eight when he finished talking
and I was in terror of my life that there’d be some delay getting rid of the
men who fell out. But there wasn’t a single defaulter. Every blessed one of
those men—and most of them were only boys—did a right turn and marched out of
the town in column of fours. I can tell you, Waterhouse, I didn’t like watching
them go. Father Conway and my dad were standing on the steps of the court
house, blubbering like children.”
“I suppose they weren’t all
killed?” said Waterhouse.
“None of them were killed,” said
Power. “There wasn’t a shot fired. You see, when the English officer saw them
march out of the town he naturally thought they’d come to surrender, and didn’t
fire on them.”
“He couldn’t possibly have
thought that,” said Waterhouse, “unless they laid down their arms.”
“As a matter of fact,” said
Power, “hardly any of them had any arms, except hockey sticks, and the Colonel
thought they’d piled them up somewhere. He seems to have been a decent sort of
fellow. He made O’Farrelly and a few more prisoners, and told the rest of them
to be off home.”
“Ireland,” said Waterhouse, “must
be a d____d queer country.”
“It’s the only country in
Europe,” said Power, “which knows how to conduct war in a civilized way. Now if
a situation of that sort turned up out here there’d be bloodshed.”
“I suppose O’Farrelly was hanged
afterwards?” said Waterhouse.
“No, he wasn’t.”
“Shot, then? Though I should
think hanging is the proper death for a rebel.”
“Nor shot,” said Power. “He is
alive still and quite well. He’s going about the country making speeches. He
was down in Ballymahon about a fortnight ago and called on my dad to thank him
for all he’d done during the last rebellion. He inquired after me in the
kindest way. The old dad was greatly touched, especially when a crowd of about
a thousand men, all O’Farrelly’s original army with a few new recruits,
gathered round the house and cheered, first for an Irish republic and then for
dad. He made them a little speech and told them I’d got my company and was
recommended for the M.C. When they heard that they cheered me like anything and
then shouted ‘Up the Rebels!’ for about ten minutes.”
“I needn’t tell you,” said
Waterhouse, “that I don’t believe a word of that story. If I did I’d say——”
He paused for a moment.
“I’d say that Ireland——”
“Yes,” said Power, “that
Ireland——”
“I’d say that Ireland is a
country of lunatics,” said Waterhouse, “and there ought to be an Irish Republic
I can’t think of anything to say worse than that.”
XV ~~ THE MERMAID
We were on our way home from
Inishmore, where we had spent two days; Peter O’Flaherty among his
relatives—for everyone on the island was kin to him—I among friends who give me
a warm welcome when I go to them. The island lies some seventeen miles from the
coast. We started on our homeward sail with a fresh westerly wind. Shortly
after midday it backed round to the north and grew lighter. At five o’clock we
were stealing along very gently through calm water with our mainsail boom out
against the shroud. The jib and foresail were drooping in limp folds. An hour
later the mainsheet was hanging in the water and the boat drifted with the
tide. Peter, crouching in the fore part of the cockpit, hissed through his
clenched teeth, which is the way in which he whistles for a wind. He glanced
all round the horizon, searching for signs of a breeze. His eyes rested finally
on the sun, which lay low among some light, fleecy clouds. He gave it as his
opinion that when it reached the point of setting it “might draw a light air
after it from the eastward.” For that it appeared we were to wait. I shrank
from toil with the heavy sweeps. So, I am sure did Peter, who is a good man in
a boat but averse from unnecessary labour. And there was really no need to row.
The tide was carrying us homeward, and our position was pleasant enough. Save
for the occasional drag of a block against the horse we had achieved unbroken
silence and almost perfect peace.
We drifted slowly past Carrigeen
Glos, a low, sullen line of rocks. A group of cormorants, either gorged with
mackerel fry or hopeless of an evening meal, perched together at one end of the
reef, and stared at the setting sun. A few terns swept round and round
overhead, soaring or sliding downwards with easy motion. A large seal lay
basking on a bare rock just above the water’s edge. I pointed it out to Peter,
and he said it was a pity I had not got my rifle with me. I did not agree with
him. If I had brought the rifle Peter would have insisted on my shooting at the
seal. I should certainly not have hit it on purpose, for I am averse from
injuring gentle creatures; but I might perhaps have killed or wounded it by
accident, for my shooting is very uncertain. In any case I should have broken
nature’s peace, and made a horrible commotion. Perhaps the seal heard Peter’s
remark or divined his feeling of hostility. It flopped across the rock and slid
gracefully into the sea. We saw it afterwards swimming near the boat, looking
at us with its curiously human, tender eyes.
“A man might mistake it for a
mermaid,” I said.
“He’d have to be a fool
altogether that would do the like,” said Peter.
He was scornful; but the seal’s
eyes were human. They made me think of mermaids.
“Them ones,” said Peter, “is
entirely different from seals. You might see a seal any day in fine weather.
They’re plenty. But the other ones—But sure you wouldn’t care to be hearing
about them.”
“I’ve heard plenty about them,” I
said, “but it was all poetry and nonsense. You know well enough, Peter, that
there’s no such thing as a mermaid.”
Peter filled his pipe slowly and
lit it. I could see by the way he puffed at it that he was full of pity and
contempt for my scepticism.
“Come now,” I said: “did you ever
see a mermaid?”
“I did not,” said Peter, “but my
mother was acquainted with one. That was in Inishmore, where I was born and
reared.”
I waited. The chance of getting
Peter to tell an interesting story is to wait patiently. Any attempt to goad
him on by asking questions is like striking before a fish is hooked. The chance
of getting either story or fish is spoiled.
“There was a young fellow in the
island them times,” said Peter, “called Anthony O’Flaherty. A kind of uncle of
my father’s he was, and a very fine man. There wasn’t his equal at running or
lepping, and they say he was terrible daring on the sea. That was before my
mother was born, but she heard tell of what he did. When she knew him he was
like an old man, and the heart was gone out of him.”
At this point Peter stopped. His
pipe had gone out. He relit it with immense deliberation. I made a mistake. By
way of keeping the conversation going I asked a question.
“Did he see a mermaid?”
“He did,” said Peter, “and what’s
more he married one.”
There Peter stopped again abruptly,
but with an air of finality. He had, so I gathered, told me all he was going to
tell me about the mermaid. I had blundered badly in asking my question. I
suppose that some note of unsympathetic scepticism in my tone suggested to
Peter that I was inclined to laugh at him. I did my best to retrieve my
position. I sat quite silent and stared at the peak of the mainsail. The block
on the horse rattled occasionally. The sun’s rim touched the horizon. At last
Peter was reassured and began again.
“It was my mother told me about
it, and she knew, for many’s the time she did be playing with the young lads,
her being no more than a little girleen at the time. Seven of them there was,
and the second eldest was the one age with my mother. That was after herself
left him.”
“Herself” was vague enough; but I
did not venture to ask another question. I took my eyes off the peak of the
mainsail and fixed them inquiringly on Peter. It was as near as I dared go to
asking a question.
“Herself,” said Peter, “was one
of them ones.”
He nodded sideways over the
gunwale of the boat. The sea, though still calm, was beginning to be moved by
that queer restlessness which comes on it at sunset. The tide eddied in
mysteriously oily swirls. The rocks to the eastward of us had grown dim. A gull
flew by overhead uttering wailing cries. The graceful terns had disappeared. A
cormorant, flying so low that its wing-tips broke the water, sped across our
bows to some far resting-place. I fell into a mood of real sympathy with
stories about mermaids. I think Peter felt the change which had come over me.
“Anthony O’Flaherty,” said Peter,
“was a young man when he saw them first. It was in the little bay back west of
the island, and my mother never rightly knew what he was doing there in the
middle of the night; but there he was. It was the bottom of a low spring tide,
and there’s rocks off the end of the bay that’s uncovered at the ebb of the
springs. You’ve maybe seen them.”
I have seen them, and Peter knew
it well. I have seen more of them than I want to. There was an occasion when
Peter and I lay at anchor in that bay, and a sudden shift of wind set us to
beating out at three o’clock in the morning. The rocks were not uncovered then,
but the waves were breaking fiercely over them. We had little room for tacking,
and I am not likely to forget the time we went about a few yards to windward of
them. The stretch of wild surf under our lee looked ghastly white in the dim
twilight of the dawn. Peter knew what I was thinking.
“It was calm enough that night
Anthony O’Flaherty was there,” he said, “and there was a moon shining, pretty
near a full moon, so Anthony could see plain. Well, there was three of them in
it, and they playing themselves.”
“Mermaids?”
This time my voice expressed full
sympathy. The sea all round us was rising in queer round little waves, though
there was no wind. The boom snatched at the blocks as the boat rocked. The sail
was ghostly white. The vision of a mermaid would not have surprised me greatly.
“The beautifulest ever was seen,”
said Peter, “and neither shift nor shirt on them, only just themselves, and the
long hair of them. Straight it was and black, only for a taste of green in it.
You wouldn’t be making a mistake between the like of them and seals, not if
you’d seen them right the way Anthony O’Flaherty did.”
Peter made this reflection a
little bitterly. I was afraid the recollection of my unfortunate remark about
seals might have stopped him telling the story, but it did not.
“Once Anthony had seen them,” he
said, “he couldn’t rest content without he’d be going to see them again. Many a
night he went and saw neither sight nor light of them, for it was only at
spring tides that they’d be there, on account of the rocks not being uncovered
any other time. But at the bottom of the low springs they were there right
enough, and sometimes they’d be swimming in the sea and sometimes they’d be
sitting on the rocks. It was wonderful the songs they’d sing—like the sound of
the sea set to music was what my mother told me, and she was told by them that
knew. The people did be wondering what had come over Anthony, for he was
different like from what he had been, and nobody knew what took him out of his
house in the middle of the night at the spring tides. There was a girl that
they had laid down for him to marry, and Anthony had no objection to her before
he seen them ones; but after he had seen them he wouldn’t look at the girl. She
had a middling good fortune too but sure he didn’t care about that.”
I could understand Anthony’s
feelings. The air of wind which Peter had promised, drawn from its cave by the
lure of the departing sun, was filling our head-sails. I hauled in the
main-sheet gently hand over hand and belayed it. The boat slipped quietly along
close-hauled. The long line of islands which guards the entrance of our bay lay
dim before use. Over the shoulder of one of them I could see the lighthouse,
still a distinguishable patch of white against the looming grey of the land.
The water rippled mournfully under our bows and a long pale wake stretched
astern from our counter. “Fortune,” banked money, good heifers and even
enduringly fruitful fields seemed very little matters to me then. They must
have seemed still less, far less, to Anthony O’Flaherty after he had seen those
white sea-maidens with their green-black hair.
“There was a woman on the island
in those times,” said Peter, “a very aged woman, and she had a kind of plaster
which she made which cured the cancer, drawing it out by the roots, and she
could tell what was good for the chin cough, and the women did like to have her
with them when their children was born, she being knowledgable in them matters.
I’m told the priests didn’t like her, for there was things she knew which it
mightn’t be right that anyone would know, things that’s better left to the
clergy. Whether she guessed what was the matter with Anthony, or whether he up
and told her straight my mother never heard. It could be that he told her, for
many a one used to go to her for a charm when the butter wouldn’t come, or a
cow, maybe, was pining; so it wouldn’t surprise me if Anthony went to her.”
Peter crept aft. He took a pull
on the jib-sheet and belayed it again; but I do not believe that he really
cared much about the set of the sail. That was his excuse. He wanted to be
nearer to me. There is something in stories like this, told in dim twilight,
with dark waters sighing near at hand, which makes men feel the need of close
human companionship. Peter seated himself on the floorboards at my feet, and I
felt a certain comfort in the touch of his arm on my leg.
“Well,” he went on, “according to
the old hag—and what she said was true enough, however she learnt it—them ones
doesn’t go naked all the time, but only when they’re playing themselves on the
rocks at low tide, the way Anthony seen them. Mostly they have a kind of cloak
that they wear, and they take the same cloaks off of them when they’re up above
the water and they lay them down on the rocks. If so be that a man could put
his hand on e’er a cloak, the one that owned it would have to follow him
whether she wanted to or not. If it was to the end of the world she’d have to
follow him, or to Spain, or to America, or wherever he might go. And what’s
more, she’d have to do what he bid her, be the same good or bad, and be with
him if he wanted her, so long as he kept the cloak from her. That’s what the
old woman told Anthony, and she was a skilful woman, well knowing the nature of
beasts and men, and of them that’s neither beasts nor men. You’ll believe me
now that Anthony wasn’t altogether the same as other men when I tell you that
he laid his mind down to get his hand down on one of the cloaks. He was a good
swimmer, so he was, which is what few men on the island can do, and he knew
that he’d be able to fetch out to the rock where them ones played themselves.”
I was quite prepared to believe
that Anthony was inspired by a passion far out of the common. I know nothing
more terrifying than the chill embrace of the sea at night-time. To strike out
through the slimy weeds which lie close along the surface at the ebb point of a
spring tide, to clamber on low rocks, half awash for an hour or two at
midnight, these are things which I would not willingly do.
“The first time he went for to
try it,” said Peter, “he felt a bit queer in himself and he thought it would do
him no harm if he was to bless himself. So he did, just as he was stepping off
the shore into the water. Well, it might as well have been a shot he fired, for
the minute he did it they were off and their cloaks along with them; and
Anthony was left there. It was the sign of the cross had them frightened, for
that same is what they can’t stand, not having souls that religion would be any
use to. It was the old woman told Anthony that after, and you’d think it would
have been a warning to him not to make or meddle with the like of them any
more. But it only made him the more determined. He went about without speaking
to man or woman, and if anybody spoke to him he’d curse terrible, till the time
of the next spring tide. Then he was off to the bay again, and sure enough them
ones was there. The water was middling rough that night, but it didn’t daunt
Anthony. It pleased him, for he thought he’d have a better chance of getting to
the rocks without them taking notice of him if there was some noise loud enough
to drown the noise he’d be making himself. So he crept out to the point of the
cliff on the south side of the bay, which is as near as he could get to the
rocks. You remember that?”
I did. On the night when we beat
out of the bay against a rising westerly wind we went about once under the
shadow of the cliff, and, almost before we had full way on the boat, stayed her
again beside the rocks. Anthony’s swim, though terrifying, was short.
“That time he neither blessed
himself nor said a prayer, but slipped into the water, and off with him,
swimming with all his strength. They didn’t see him, for they were too busy
with their playing to take much notice, and of course they couldn’t be
expecting a man to be there. Without Anthony had shouted they wouldn’t have
heard him, for the sea was loud on the rocks and their own singing was louder.
So Anthony got there and he crept up on the rock behind them, and the first
thing his hand touched was one of the cloaks. He didn’t know which of them it
belonged to, and he didn’t care. It wasn’t any one of the three in particular
he wanted, for they were all much about the same to look at, only finer than
any woman ever was seen. So he rolled the cloak round his neck, the way he’d
have his arms free for swimming, and back with him into the water, heading for
shore as fast as he was able.”
“And she followed him?” I asked.
“She did so. From that day till
the day she left him she followed him, and she did what she was bid, only for
one thing. She wouldn’t go to mass, and when the chapel bell rang she’d hide
herself. The sound of it was what she couldn’t bear. The people thought that
queer, and there was a deal of talk about it in the island, some saying she
must be a Protestant, and more thinking that she might be something worse. But
nobody had a word to say against her any other way. She was a good enough
housekeeper, washing and making and mending for Anthony, and minding the
children. Seven of them there was, and all boys.”
The easterly breeze freshened as
the night fell I could see the great eye of the lighthouse blinking at me on
the weather side of the boat. It became necessary to go about, but I gave the
order to Peter very reluctantly. He handled the head-sheets, and then, instead
of settling down in his old place, leaned his elbows on the coaming and stared
into the sea. We were steadily approaching the lighthouse. I felt that I must
run the risk of asking him a question.
“What happened in the end?” I
asked.
“The end, is it? Well, in the
latter end she left him. But there was things happened before that. Whether it
was the way the priests talked to him about her—there was a priest in it them
times that was too fond of interfering, and that’s what some of them are—or
whether there was goings-on within in the inside of the house that nobody knew
anything about—and there might have been, for you couldn’t tell what one of them
ones might do or mightn’t. Whatever way it was, Anthony took to drinking more
than he ought. There was poteen made on the island then, and whisky was easy
come by if a man wanted it, and Anthony took too much of it.”
Peter paused and then passed
judgment, charitably, on Anthony’s conduct. “I wouldn’t be too hard on a man
for taking a drop an odd time.”
I was glad to hear Peter say
that. I myself had found it necessary from time to time, for the sake of an old
friendship, not to be too hard on Peter.
“Nobody would have blamed him,”
Peter went on, “if he had behaved himself when he had a drop taken; but that’s
what he didn’t seem able to do. He bet her. Sore and heavy he bet her, and
that’s what no woman, whether she was a natural woman or one of the other kind,
could be expected to put up with. Not that she said a word. She didn’t. Nor
nobody would have known that he bet her if he hadn’t token to beating the young
lads along with her. It was them told what was going on. But there wasn’t one
on the island would interfere. The people did be wondering that she didn’t put
the fear of God into Anthony; but of course that’s what she couldn’t do on
account of his having the cloak hid away from her. So long as he had that she
was bound to put up with whatever he did. But it wasn’t for ever.
“The house was going to rack and
ruin with the way Anthony wouldn’t mind it on account of his being three-parts
drunk most of the time. At last the rain was coming in through the roof. When
Anthony saw that he came to himself a bit and sent for my grandfather and
settled with him to put a few patches of new thatch on the worst places. My
grandfather was the best man at thatching that there was in the island in them
days, and he took the job though he misdoubted whether he’d ever be paid for
it. Anthony never came next or nigh him when he was working, which shows that
he hadn’t got his senses rightly. If he had he’d have kept an eye on what my
grandfather was doing, knowing what he knew, though of course my grandfather
didn’t know. Well, one day my grandfather was dragging off the old thatch near
the chimney. It was middling late in the evening, as it might be six or seven
o’clock, and he was thinking of stopping his work when all of a sudden he came
on what he thought might be an old petticoat bundled away in the thatch. It was
red, he said, but when he put his hand on it he knew it wasn’t flannel, nor it
wasn’t cloth, nor it wasn’t like anything he’d ever felt before in all his
life. There was a hole in the roof where my grandfather had the thatch
stripped, and he could see down into the kitchen. Anthony’s wife was there with
the youngest of the boys in her arms. My grandfather was as much in dread of
her as every other one, but he thought it would be no more than civil to tell
her what he’d found.
“‘Begging your pardon, ma’am,’ he
said, ‘but I’m after finding what maybe belongs to you hid away in the thatch.’
“With that he threw down the red
cloak, for it was a red cloak he had in his hand. She didn’t speak a word, but
she laid down the baby out of her arms and she walked out of the house. That
was the last my father seen of her. And that was the last anyone on the island
seen of her, unless maybe Anthony. Nobody knows what he saw. He stopped off the
drink from that day; but it wasn’t much use his stopping it. He used to go
round at spring tides to the bay where he had seen her first. He did that five
times, or maybe six. After that he took to his bed and died. It could be that
his heart was broke.”
We slipped past the point of the
pier. Peter crept forward and crouched on the deck in front of the mast I
peered into the gloom to catch sight of our mooring-buoy.
“Let her away a bit yet,” said
Peter. “Now luff her, luff her all you can.”
The boat edged up into the wind.
Peter, flat on his stomach, grasped the buoy and hauled it on board. The
fore-sheets beat their tattoo on the deck. The boom swung sharply across the
boat.
Ten minutes later we were leaning
together across the boom gathering in the mainsail.
“What became of the boys?” I asked.
“Is it Anthony O’Flaherty’s boys?
The last of them went to America twenty years ago. But sure that was before you
came to these parts.”
XVI ~~ AN UPRIGHT JUDGE
No one knows how the quarrel
between Peter Joyce and Patrick Joseph Flanagan began. It had been smouldering
for years, a steady-going feud, before it reached its crisis last June.
The Joyces and Flanagans were
neighbours, occupying farms of very poor land on the side of Letterbrack, a
damp and lonely hill some miles from the nearest market town. This fact
explains the persistence of the feud. It is not easy to keep up a quarrel with
a man whom you only see once a month or so. Nor is it possible to concentrate
the mind on one particular enemy if you live in a crowded place. Joyce and
Flanagan saw each other every day. They could not help seeing each other, for
their farms were small. They scarcely ever saw anyone else, because there were
no other farms on the side of the hill. And the feud was a family affair. Mrs.
Joyce and Mrs. Flanagan disliked each other heartily and never met without
using language calculated to embitter the feeling between them. The young
Joyces and the young Flanagans fought fiercely on their way to and from school.
The war, which has turned Europe
upside down and dragged most things from their familiar moorings, had its
effect on the lives of the two farmers on the side of Letterbrack. They became
better off than they had ever been before. It must not be supposed that they
grew rich. According to the standard of English working men they had always
been wretchedly poor. All that the war did for them was to put a little, a very
little, more money into their pockets. They themselves did not connect their
new prosperity with the war. They did not, indeed, think about the war at all,
bring fully occupied with their work and their private quarrel. They noticed,
without inquiring into causes, that the prices of the things they sold went up
steadily. A lean bullock fetched an amazing sum at a fair. Young pigs proved
unexpectedly profitable. The eggs which the women carried into town on market
days could be exchanged for unusual quantities of tea. And the rise in prices
was almost pure gain to these farmers. They lived for the most part on the
produce of their own land and bought very little in shops. There came a time
when Peter Joyce had a comfortable sum, about £20 in all, laid by after making
provision for his rent and taxes. He felt entitled to some little indulgence.
An Englishman, when he finds
himself in possession of spare cash spends it on material luxuries for himself
and, if he is a good man, for his family. He buys better food, better clothes,
and furniture of a kind not absolutely necessary, like pianos. An Irishman, in
a similar agreeable position, prefers pleasures of a more spiritual kind. Peter
Joyce was perfectly content to wear a “bawneen” of homemade flannel and a pair
of ragged trousers. He did not want anything better for dinner than boiled
potatoes and fried slices of bacon. He had not the smallest desire to possess a
piano or even an armchair. But he intended, in his own way, to get solid
enjoyment out of his £20.
It was after the children had
gone to bed one evening that he discussed the matter with his wife.
“I’m not sure,” he said, “but it
might be as well to settle things up one way or another with that old reprobate
Patrick Joseph Flanagan. It’s what I’ll have to do sooner or later.”
“Them Flanagans,” said Mrs.
Joyce, “is the devil. There isn’t a day passes but one or other of them has me
tormented. If it isn’t her it’s one of the children, and if, by the grace of
God, it isn’t the children it’s herself.”
“What I’m thinking of,” said
Joyce, “is taking the law of him.”
“It’ll cost you something to do
that,” said Mrs. Joyce cautiously.
“And if it does, what matter?
Haven’t I the money to pay for it?”
“You have,” said Mrs. Joyce. “You
have surely. And Flanagan deserves it, so he does. It’s not once nor twice, but
it’s every day I do be saying there’s something should be done to them Flanagans.”
“There’s more will be done to him
than he cares for,” said Joyce grimly. “Wait till the County Court Judge gets
at him. Believe me he’ll be sorry for himself then.”
Peter Joyce started early next
morning. He had an eight-mile walk before him and he wished to reach the town
in good time, being anxious to put his case into the hands of Mr. Madden, the
solicitor, before Mr. Madden became absorbed in the business of the day. Mr.
Madden had the reputation of being the smartest lawyer in Connaught, and his
time was very fully occupied.
It took Joyce nearly three hours
to reach the town and he had ample time to prepare his case against Flanagan as
he went. There was no lack of material for the lawsuit. A feud of years’
standing provides many grievances which can fairly be brought into court.
Joyce’s difficulty was to make a choice. He pondered deeply as he walked along
the bare road across the bog. When he reached the door of Mr. Madden’s office
he had a tale of injuries suffered at the hands of the Flanagans which would,
he felt sure, move the judge to vindictive fury.
Mr. Madden was already busy when
Joyce was shown unto his room.
“Well,” he said, “who are you and
what do you want?”
“My name’s Peter Joyce of
Letterbrack, your honour,” said Joyce. “A decent man with a long weak family,
and my father was a decent man before me, and it’s no fault of mine that I’m
here to-day, and going into court, though there isn’t another gentleman in all
Ireland I’d sooner come to than yourself, Mr. Madden, if so be I had to come to
anyone. And it’s what I’m druv to, for if I wasn’t——”
“What is it?” said Mr. Madden.
“Police? Drunk and disorderly?”
“It is not,” said Joyce. “Sure I
never was took by the police only twice, and them times they wouldn’t have
meddled with me only for the spite the sergeant had against me. But he’s gone
from the place now, thanks be to God, and the one that came after him wouldn’t
touch me.”
Peter Joyce sank his voice to a
whisper.
“It’s how I want to take the law
of Patrick Joseph Flanagan,” he said.
“Trespass or assault?” said Mr.
Madden.
He was a man of immense
experience. He succeeded in carrying on a large practice because he wasted no
time in listening to preliminary explanations of his clients. Most legal
actions in the West of Ireland are reducible to trespass or assault.
“It’s both the two of them,” said
Joyce.
Mr. Madden made a note on a sheet
of paper before him. Joyce waited until he had finished writing. Then he said
slowly:
“Trespass and assault and more
besides.”
Mr. Madden asked no question. He
added to the note he had written the words “And abusive language.” Abusive
language generally follows trespass and immediately precedes assault.
“Now,” said Mr. Madden, “get on
with your story and make it as short as you can.”
Peter Joyce did his best to make
the story short. He succeeded in making it immensely complicated. There was a
boundary wall in the story and it had been broken down. There was a heifer calf
and a number of young pigs. There was a field of oats trampled and destroyed by
the heifer, and a potato patch ruined beyond hope by the pigs. There was a
sheep torn by a dog, stones thrown at Mrs. Joyce, language that had defiled the
ears of Molly Joyce, an innocent child of twelve years old, and there was the
shooting of a gun at Peter himself.
Joyce was prepared to swear to
every item of the indictment. He did actually swear from time to time, laying
his hand solemnly on a large ledger which stood on Mr. Madden’s desk. Mr.
Madden listened until he had heard enough.
“You haven’t a ghost of a case
against Flanagan,” he said. “The judge won’t listen to a story like that. If
you take my advice you’ll go straight home and make it up with Flanagan. You’ll
simply waste your money if you go into court.”
Mr. Madden, it will be seen, was
a man of principle. He made his living out of other people’s quarrels, but he
gave honest advice to his clients. He was also a man of wide knowledge of West
of Ireland farmers. He knew perfectly well that his advice would not be taken.
“I’ve the money to pay for it,”
said Joyce, “and I’ll have the law of Patrick Joseph Flanagan if it costs me
the last penny I own. If your honour doesn’t like the case sure I can go to
someone else.”
Mr. Madden, though a man of
principle, was not quixotic.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll manage
your case for you; but I warn you fairly the judge will give it against you.”
“He might not,” said Joyce. “In
the latter end he might not.”
“He will,” said Mr. Madden,
“unless——”
He was watching Joyce carefully
as he spoke. The man’s face had an expression of cunning and self-satisfaction.
“Unless,” Mr. Madden went on,
“you’ve something up your sleeve that you haven’t told me yet.”
Joyce winked solemnly.
“It’s what it would be hardly
worth mentioning to your honour,” he said.
“You’d better mention it all the
same,” said Mr. Madden.
“What I was thinking,” said
Joyce, “is that if I was to send a pair of ducks to the judge a couple of days
before the case was to come on—fine ducks we have, as fine as ever was seen.”
“Listen to me,” said Mr. Madden.
“You’ve got the very smallest possible chance of winning your case. But you
have a chance. It’s a hundred to one against you. Still, odd things do happen
in courts. But let me tell you this. I know that judge. I’ve known him for
years, and if you try to bribe him with a pair of ducks he’d give it against
you even if you had the best case in the world instead of the worst. That’s the
kind of man he is.”
Joyce sighed heavily. The ways of
the law were proving unexpectedly difficult and expensive.
“Maybe,” he said, “I could send
him two pair of ducks, or two pair and a half, but that’s the most I can do;
and there won’t be a young duck left about the place if I send him that many.”
“Either you act by my advice,”
said Mr. Madden, “or I’ll drop your case. This isn’t a matter for the local
bench of magistrates. If it was them you were dealing with, ducks might be some
use to you. But a County Court Judge is a different kind of man altogether.
He’s a gentleman, and he’s honest. If you attempt to get at him with ducks or
any other kind of bribe you’ll ruin any chance you have, which isn’t much.”
“That’s a queer thing now, so it
is,” said Joyce.
“It’s true all the same,” said
Mr. Madden.
“Do you mean to tell me,” said
Joyce, “that his honour, the judge, would go against a man that had done him a
good turn in the way of a pair of ducks or the like?”
“That’s exactly what I do mean,”
said Mr. Madden. “No judge would stand it. And the one who presides over this
court would be even angrier than most of them, so don’t you do it.”
Joyce left Mr. Madden’s office a
few minutes later, and tramped home. In spite of the lawyer’s discouraging view
of the case he seemed fairly well satisfied.
That evening he spoke to his
wife.
“How many of them large white
dukes have you?” he asked; “how many that’s fit to eat?”
“There’s no more than six left
out of the first clutch,” said Mrs. Joyce. “There was eleven hatched out, but
sure the rats got the rest of them.” “I’d be glad,” said Joyce, “if you’d
fatten them six, and you needn’t spare the yellow meal. It’ll be worth your
while to have them as good as you can.”
A month later the case of Joyce
v. Flanagan came on in the County Court. Mr. Madden had hammered the original
story of the wall, the heifer, the pigs and the potatoes, into shape. It
sounded almost plausible as Mr. Madden told it in his opening remarks. But he
had very little hopes that it would survive the handling of Mr. Ellis, a young
and intelligent lawyer, who was acting for Flanagan. Joyce cheerfully confirmed
every detail of the story on oath. He was unshaken by Mr. Ellis’
cross-examination, chiefly because the judge constantly interfered with Mr.
Ellis and would not allow him to ask the questions he wanted to ask. Flanagan
and his witnesses did their best, but the judge continued to make things as
difficult as he could for their lawyer. The matter, when all the evidence was
heard, appeared tangled and confused, a result far beyond Mr. Madden’s best
expectations. He had feared that the truth might emerge with disconcerting
plainness. Then an amazing thing happened. The judge took Joyce’s view of the
circumstances and decided in his favour. Mr. Ellis gasped. Flanagan swore
audibly and was silenced by a policeman. Joyce left the court with a satisfied
smile.
“Well,” said Mr. Madden, a little
later, “you’ve won, but I’m damned if I know how it happened. I never went into
court with a shakier case.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Joyce,
“but it might have been the ducks that did it. I sent him six, your honour,
six, and as fat as any duck ever you seen.”
“Good Lord!” said Mr. Madden.
“After all I said to you—and—but, good heavens, man! He can’t have got them. If
he had——”
“He got them right enough,” said
Joyce, “for I left them at the door of the hotel myself, with a bit of a note,
saying as how I hoped he’d take a favourable view of the case that would be
before him to-day, and I told him what the case was, so as there’d be no
mistake—Joyce v. Flanagan was what I wrote, in a matter of trespass and
assault, and abusive language.”
“Well,” said Mr. Madden, “all I
can say is that if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes what happened in that court
to-day I wouldn’t have believed it. To think that the judge, of all men——”
“It was Flanagan’s name and not
my own,” said Joyce, “that I signed at the bottom of the note. ‘With the
respectful compliments of Patrick Joseph Flanagan, the defendant,’ was what I
wrote, like as if it was from him that the ducks came.”
“I’d never have thought of it,”
said Mr. Madden. “Joyce, it’s you and not me that ought to be a lawyer. Lawyer!
That’s nothing. You ought to be a Member of Parliament. Your talents are
wasted, Joyce. Go into Parliament You’ll be a Cabinet Minister before you die.”
THE END