Kitabı oku: «Barracks, Bivouacs and Battles», sayfa 13

A CHRISTMAS DINNER DE PROFUNDIS

I have eaten a good many Christmas dinners in strange places, and have gone without the great feast of our nation in yet stranger. I have lost my Christmas dinner in a wholly unexpected manner, and have achieved that meal by a not less unexpected stroke of good fortune. At noon on Christmas Day, just thirty years ago, the outlook for our Christmas dinner consisted of a scrap of raw rusty pork and a ship-biscuit sodden in sea-water; and the prospect of even that poor fare was precarious, in face of the momentary danger of a watery grave. Four hours later I was the guest at a board groaning with the good cheer appropriate to the “festive season.”

Just of age, I had been spending the summer of 1859 in travelling through Canada, and in the late autumn found myself in Quebec, intending to be back in England in time for the Christmastide with my relatives at home. One evening I took stock of my financial resources, and found I had only a very small sum to the fore – barely enough to clear me in Quebec and pay my fare to England either as steerage passenger in a steamer or as cabin passenger in a sailing-vessel.

I had made the passage out very pleasantly in an emigrant sailing-ship. It had been a summer voyage, and I did not reflect that on the Atlantic summer does not last the year round. My pride rather revolted at a steerage passage, and I determined on the cabin of a sailing-ship. I know now, but I did not know then, that the sailing-ship trading between the United Kingdom and Quebec is of the genus “timber-drogher,” species ancient tub, good for no other trade, and good for this only, because, no matter how leaky the timber-laden ship may be, owing to the buoyancy of her cargo she cannot sink, and (unless the working of her cargo break her up) the worst fate that can befall her is that she becomes water-logged.

Of course there are bad timber ships and worse timber ships, but I had left myself no selection. I had dallied on in the pleasantness of Quebec until the close of navigation was imminent, and Hobson’s choice offered in the shape of the last lingering drogher. Her brokers advertised a cabin passage at a low fare; I engaged it without taking the trouble to look at the ship, and on the morning named for sailing went on board. My arrival occasioned the profoundest surprise. The skipper had received no intimation to expect a cabin passenger, and there were no appliances aboard for his accommodation. I took possession of an empty bunk, into which by way of mattress I threw the horsehair cushion of the cabin locker. My bedclothes consisted of my travelling rug and a rough old boat-cloak I had brought from England.

We were on salt tack from the second day out, and I could not have believed that there was a ship that sailed so badly found as was this battered, rotten, dilapidated Emma Morrison– that was the jade’s name. I should have been more savage at the egregious swindle, but that I was too sorry to leave Quebec to have thought to spare for material concerns. By and by that sentiment became less poignant, and was soon supplanted by utter disgust at my surroundings. The skipper of the Emma Morrison was a sullen gloomy dog – a fellow of that breed which has all the evil attributes of the Scot and the Irishman, and none of the virtues of either. He hardly made a pretext of being civil to me. He helped readily but gloomily to drink the few bottles of Canadian whisky I had brought aboard, and, when that supply was finished, produced a single flask of the most atrocious gin that ever was concocted in the vilest illicit still of the Lower Town of Quebec, and swore it constituted his entire alcoholic supply for the voyage.

Even in fine weather the loathsome old tub leaked like a sieve: she had about half a foot of freeboard, and the water came through her gaping top-sides and uncaulked deck, so that the cabin and my berth were alike a chronic swamp. The junk we ate was green with decay and mould; the ship-biscuits were peripatetic because of the weevils that inhabited them; the butter was rancid with a rancidness indescribable; and the pea-soup was swarthy with the filth of vermin. With a fair wind – and as far as the Traverse we carried a fair wind – the rotten old hooker – rotten from truck to keel, for her sole suit of canvas was as rotten as the ragged remains of her copper-sheathing – had a maximum speed of five knots per hour. As she rolled lumberingly through the short seas of the Upper Gulf, the green water topped her low bulwarks, and, swashing down on to the deck, lifted heavily the great undressed pine-trunks which, lashed to stanchions, formed her deck load. As those rose they strained the deck till they all but tore it from the beams, and as they dropped when the water receded they fell with a crash that all but stove in deck and beams together. With all her defects and abominations, there was one redeeming feature in the Emma Morrison. Her mate – she had but one – was a stanch, frank, stalwart seaman; the boatswain was a tough old man-o’-war’s man; and the crew – scant in numbers, for she was atrociously undermanned – were as fine a set of fellows as ever set foot in ratline. How they obeyed the ill-conditioned skipper; how they endured the foul discomfort of the fo’k’sle and the wretched rations; how, hour after hour and day after day, they dragged loyally at the Sisyphean toil of the pumps; how they bore freezing cold, exposure, sleeplessness, and general misery I shall never forget.

Off Anticosta we had our first gale. It was a good honest blow, that a staunch craft would have welcomed; but the rotten old Emma Morrison could not look it in the face. It left her sails in ribbons, her top-hamper anyhow, her hold full of water, in which her ill-stowed cargo of timber swashed about with gruesome thuds on her ribs and knees. When the gale blew itself out we were out somewhere on the western edge of the banks of Newfoundland, and dead helpless. All hands went to the pumps save the captain, the mate, and a couple of old seamen, who betook themselves assiduously to sail-mending. My work was at the wheel. With the foresail on her, the only whole sail extant, she had just steerage way; and I stood, twelve hours a day, day after day, at the old jade’s wheel. It was bitter work, for by this time it was the middle of December, and the spray froze where it lighted.

Before the sails were half repaired we encountered another spell of heavy weather, which reduced us to tatters again, and the ship was drifting about as wind and wave listed. Her masts and spars were a confused mass of wreckage. A green sea had swept the flush deck, carrying off galley (with the unfortunate cook inside) and long-boat, leaving standing only the wretched pigeon-hole of a topgallant fo’k’sle and the stumpy little companion-house abaft the mizzen. The bulwarks were shattered piecemeal; the tree-trunks constituting the deck load had worked their grapplings loose, and rose and fell with the wash of the cross seas. Two of the best men had been washed under the massive trunks, which had settled down on them and crushed the life out of them. Two more poor fellows had suffered broken limbs, and were lying helpless on the fo’k’sle exposed to the seas that continually broke over the bows. The ship was full of water, and pumping was useless. She lay like a log on the heaving face of the winter sea; helpless, yet safe from the fate of foundering unless the timber cargo working inside her should burst her open. The only dry spot aft was the top of the little companion-house, which belonged to the skipper and myself; the crew had the raised deck of the topgallant fo’k’sle and the upper bunks in its interior. One of these constituted our larder; its contents, some pieces of salt pork and beef, dragged out of the harness cask, and a bag of sodden biscuit rescued from the lazarette ere the water rose into the ’tween-decks. A water-cask had been trundled into the fo’k’sle before the great wave swept the deck. About five feet of water stood in the cabin, under which lay my portmanteau, and every belonging save the rough sea-worn suit I stood upright in. Altogether it was not easy to imagine a grimmer present or a darker future. And it was Christmas morning!

About 11 A.M. the remnant of the crew that were alive and could move came splashing along the main deck aft to the companion-house to propose launching the one boat left and abandoning the ship. The mate was in the maintop, where he had lashed himself and gone to sleep. The skipper had waded down into the cabin, as he said, to fish up from his desk the ship’s papers. I followed him to tell him of the errand of the crew. Wading across the cabin I could see into his state-room. There sat the fellow on his submerged bunk, up to the waist in water, with a black bottle raised to the ruffianly lips of him. He had lied when he denied having any store of spirits, and had been swigging on the sly, while his men had been toiling and suffering day and night in misery without a drop of the spirit that would have revived their sinking energies.

Enraged beyond the power of self-restraint by the caitiff’s selfishness, I gripped him by the throat with one hand as I wrenched the bottle from him with the other. He fell a-snivelling maudlin tears. I swore I’d drown him if he did not deliver up for the common good what of his spirit-supply remained. He fished up three bottles from out the blankets in the inundated bunk. That ran to just a glass apiece for all hands except him, leaving another glass apiece for “next time.” While he yet snivelled, the mainbrace was promptly spliced on deck.

The mate and myself persuaded the crew to hold by the ship yet a little longer. By the morrow the sea might have gone down, or we might sight a ship; the Emma Morrison promised to hold together, after her fashion, a bit longer, and she was, after all, preferable to a frail boat in heavy weather.

About one o’clock the mate, who had gone back to his uncomfortable but dry dormitory in the maintop, suddenly shouted “Sail ho!” The poor fellows came tumbling out of the fo’k’sle with eager eyes; a bit too diffident of fortune to cheer just yet, but with the bright light of hope in their faces. Yes; there she was, presently visible from the fo’k’sle, and the abominable old Emma Morrison right in her fairway. And now with a hearty cheer we finished to the last drop the skipper’s grog. Our flag of distress had been flying for days, but the chaos aloft was more eloquent than any upside-down Union Jack. With what majesty came the succouring ship, borne by the strong wind of favour, the white seas dashing from her gallant stem, her great wet sides rising higher and higher as she neared us! Up alongside she ranged, scarce a pistol-shot distant, a full-rigged clipper: “One of the flying Yankees,” said the mate, with, as it seemed, a touch of envy in his voice. “Get ready smart; going to send for you right away!” came her commander’s cheery shout across the sullen water. As she came up into the wind and lay to, she showed us her dandy stern, and sure enough on it in gold letters was the legend, “Moses Taylor, of New York.” Her boat put off; her second mate jumped aboard us with a friendly peremptory “Hurry up!” in five minutes more we had quitted the Emma Morrison for ever, her skipper skulking off her hang-dog fashion, yet the last man. We had agreed, for the good name of the old country among foreigners, to keep counsel regarding the selfish sneak, but he never held up his head more during the time he and I were in the same ship.

A ship like a picture, a deck trim and clean as a new pin, a hearty skipper with a nasal twang, his comely wife, his winsome daughter, and a smart, full-powered crew welcomed us forlorn and dilapidated derelicts on board the Moses Taylor. Circumstances prevented us from dressing for the Christmas dinner to which we – skipper, mate, and passenger – were presently bidden; but there were modified comfort and restored self-respect in the long unaccustomed wash in fresh water; and the hosts were more gracious than if we had been dressed more comme il faut. To this day I remember that first slice of roast turkey, that first slice of plum-pudding. But closer in my memory remain the cheery accents of the genial American skipper, the glow of kindness in the sonsy face of his wife, and the smile of mixed fun and compassion in the bright eyes of their pretty daughter. And there hung a spray of mistletoe in the cabin doorway of the Moses Taylor.

ABSIT OMEN!

Chapter I

Edmund L’Estrange was a man who, because of his daring, his skill in devising, his self-possession, in no matter what situation, the influence he could exercise over his fellow-men, would probably have made a distinguished figure in the world if he pursued an honest and loyal career. Circumstances in a measure, and probably a natural bent toward plotting and duplicity, had made him what he was – a prominent man among the dark and dangerous conspirators who live, and who are ready to die, in the devilish cause of anarchy, and of whose machinations the communities of civilisation may well be more apprehensive than of the most widespread and prolonged war, or any other phase of unquietude with which the future of the world may be pregnant.

Among his ancestors was that Sir Roger L’Estrange who was the earliest of all the vast tribe of British journalists, and whom Macaulay somewhat intolerantly denounced as a “scurrilous pamphleteer.” According to the doctrine of evolution, Sir Roger’s descendant should have been a broad-acred, narrow-minded, and pretentious squire, chief owner of a lucrative, dictatorial, but somewhat obsolete journal, a trimmer in politics, and ready to accept a peerage at the hands of any party caring to concede the dignity. But Edmund L’Estrange was an emphatic traversal of the Darwinian theory. In vigour, resource, and personal courage he harked back to the original L’Estrange who came over with the Conqueror, and who was the progenitor of a long line of gallant warriors. Wellington’s regiments in the Peninsula were fuller of L’Estranges than of Napiers. Guy L’Estrange’s stand with the 31st at Albuera contributed as much to the winning of that bloody battle as did the famous manœuvre which gained for Hardinge his earliest gleam of fame. Another L’Estrange escaped from the rock-dungeon of Bitche to fight at Orthez and Toulouse, and to meet a soldier’s death on the field of Waterloo.

Edmund L’Estrange’s branch of the family had been long settled in Ireland. It was staunchly loyalist. His grandfather, as colonel of an Irish militia regiment, had been active in the quelling of the Rebellion of ’98, and had smitten his malcontent fellow-countrymen hip and thigh. His father was a conscientious absentee. Edmund, a younger son, had spent his youth on the old L’Estrange demesne in county Clare, and, an Englishman by extraction, had grown up more Irish than the Irish. As a lad of fifteen he had commanded a scratch company of Fenian rapparees, he armed with a shot-gun, his ragged band with pikes. One dark night the dragoons swept on to the moorland where the Fenian drill was in progress. In the stampede fierce old Major Towers, outstripping his squadron, felled young L’Estrange with a blow of his loaded riding-whip, and then savagely rode over the prostrate lad. Edmund, bruised and half-stunned, rolled into a bog-hag, and fainted. When he recovered he staggered to his feet, softly cursed a little – he was not a violent person – then knelt down and swore eternal enmity against England and against all persons, things, enterprises, and devices that were English. After two years spent in hard study of Continental languages, he sold for money down his succession to his dead mother’s property which he was to inherit when of age, and left the country without the ceremony of bidding farewell to his family.

It is for the most part in the poor and proud old families of Scotland wherein generation after generation has been developed that centrifugal force which propels their cadets all over the face of the earth. But this force has been in operation also in many Irish and in some English houses. It had been a characteristic, for instance, of the L’Estranges. Of that race there had been a cadet family in Russia ever since a young L’Estrange had found his way to St. Petersburg along with a Greig, a Barclay, a Ramsay, a Taafe, and a Mackenzie – bent on taking service in the army or the navy of the Empress Catherine – not Carlyle’s infâme Catin du Nord, but the greater and perhaps more infamous Muscovite sovereign. To General L’Estrange, the chief of the famous Pauloff Grenadiers, his young cousin betook himself and was well received. Tactful, astute, silent, and resourceful, the youngster made his way marvellously. Treskoff the arch-policeman, and Milutin the War Minister, both had uses for this scion of the British Empire who notoriously hated the realm whose fealty he had repudiated. When the Russo-Turkish War began, Ignatieff brought him to Kischeneff and presented him to the Emperor. He and poor Prince Tzeretleff together exploited the Hankioj Pass for Gourko’s troopers. He was with Skobeleff before Plevna and before Constantinople. When, baulked of the fair Queen of the Bosphorus, Alexander determined on the Afghan diversion, young L’Estrange was sent post haste to Samarcand, and rode into Cabul as Stolietoff’s subaltern. When Stolietoff and his Cossacks scrambled back to the Oxus over the craggy pathway by Bamian and Balkh, L’Estrange remained in Afghanistan. It was he, when the Afghan Major courteously enough blocked the entrance of Neville Chamberlain and his mission into the Khyber Pass, who jeered at that grand old soldier as he wheeled his Arab in front of the sungah behind which the Afghan picket lay with fingers on the triggers. He it was, on that gloomy day in the rough valley beyond the Sherpur cantonment, when the jezail-fire staggered the finest Lancer regiment in the British service, from whose rifle sped the bullet that wrought the long agony and final death of the gallant Cleland.

Commissioned always from Russia, L’Estrange was in Joubert’s camp when poor Colley climbed the Majuba to his untimely death. Those who held that it was the futile and garrulous Aylward who gave the Boers the plan of campaign which scared Mr. Gladstone into restoring their independence, were strangely mistaken. L’Estrange prescribed the tactics which prevailed at Laing’s Neck and the Ingogo, and it was he who lured Colley to his disaster by enjoining the removal of the Boer picket which had been wont to occupy the summit of the Majuba. When Herbert Stewart was brought a prisoner into the Boer camp, L’Estrange insulted the captive man as he was being led away from his interview with the studiously courteous Joubert. With a straight one from the shoulder, learnt in the big dormitory of Winchester College, Stewart promptly grassed the renegade, who, as he rose to his feet, muttered with an evil smile that he would “bide his time.”

From the Transvaal restored to independence by Mr. Gladstone, L’Estrange, having made his way to Egypt, stimulated covertly the Nationalist rising in that country; and he it was who was known among our people in the campaign of 1882 as “Arabi’s Englishman.” He supervised the preparation of the fortified position of Tel-el-Kebir, and was the real leader of the Egyptian soldiery in the fight of Kassassin, which came so near being disastrous to Sir Gerald Graham. The shout of “Retire! Retire!” which caused the temporary retirement of the Highland Brigade from the mêlée inside the Egyptian position in the gray morning of the storm of Tel-el-Kebir, and which Sergeant Palmer has persisted in ascribing to a couple of “Glasgow Irishmen” of the Cameron Highlanders, really came from the lips of L’Estrange – a ready-witted ruse on the part of the renegade, which was foiled only by Hamley’s soldier-like precaution. From Egypt, under a safe-conduct and recommendation furnished him by Zebehr, he journeyed southward into the Soudan and joined the Mahdi at El Obeid. It was he who mainly planned and conducted the annihilation of Hicks Pasha’s ill-fated army. In the climax of the massacre he recognised and was recognised by Edmund O’Donovan, the correspondent of the Daily News, whom he had known and admired in his youth-time in Ireland. In an impulse of kindly emotion, he offered to save the life of his brother Irishman. O’Donovan replied with a contemptuous objurgation and a pistol-shot. L’Estrange, wounded in the arm and faint as he was, pulled himself together sufficiently to send a bullet through O’Donovan’s head, and so by the hand of a fellow-countryman was ended a life of singular adventure and vicissitude.

Later, L’Estrange went east to Osman Digna. After the Arab stampede from El Teb, he rallied the spearmen who tried to hinder Herbert Stewart’s gallop in pursuit. Stewart, well mounted and a fine horseman, rode him down, parrying his spear-thrust with his sabre. L’Estrange lay where he fell for a moment, till Barrow came dashing on at the head of the 19th Hussars, when he sprang up, gave Barrow the spear-wound which ultimately caused his death, and then leaped into the bush. L’Estrange it was who later headed the sudden rush of Arab spearmen up from out the khor into the heart of Davis’s square at Tamai, and drove it back in chaotic confusion on the steadfast phalanx of Redvers Buller. His last fight in the Soudan was at Abu Klea. The rush he headed there on the corner manned by the Royal Dragoons was meant by him to open a path for him toward Stewart, for whose blood he had thirsted ever since that knock-down blow in the Boer camp under the Majuba. The rush was baulked, but L’Estrange doggedly maintained his bloodthirsty purpose. When the British column had halted after the fight, he ascended the low elevation commanding the position. He marked down Herbert Stewart through his field-glasses, he judged the distance, and deliberately sighted his rifle accordingly. Then he drew trigger, and as the gallant Stewart first staggered and then dropped on the sand, L’Estrange muttered while he reloaded, “We are quits now – I told him I should ‘bide my time’!”

Journeying from Berber to the coast, he was carried by an Arab dhow across the Red Sea, and at Hodeidah embarked on a British India steamer homeward bound from Kurrachee. Among the passengers in this vessel was an Anarchist leader of dubious and probably complex nationality, named Oronzha, who was returning from a secret mission to India, attended by an East Indian whose name was Shere Ali Beg, and who passed for, and acted as, Oronzha’s travelling servant, but whose relations with his apparent master L’Estrange soon discerned were too intimate for those of a domestic. Oronzha cautiously made some advances to the European gentleman who had embarked from a port so unwonted for Europeans as Hodeidah; with at least equal caution those advances were reciprocated by L’Estrange. At length Oronzha made a covert gesture, the significance of which, and the response to which, L’Estrange had learned among his varied experiences in Russia. He made the answering signal, and at once Oronzha and L’Estrange met on the common ground of anarchical Socialism. There was much matter for mutual communication. Oronzha expressed his conviction to L’Estrange that profound discontent with the English raj existed throughout the population of the Punjaub, and that the head of a Russian column on the Helmund or above the Bamian would be the signal for a universal uprising. He thought it advisable that, in the hope of such an incentive to revolt, Russia should, for the present, be exempted from the active machinations of Socialist propaganda. L’Estrange, in his turn, informed Oronzha that the harvest of Socialism in that empire might be garnered at any period thought fitting, since Nihilism and Socialism were practically synonymous, and since he believed the Russian people, from the very foot of the throne downward, were honeycombed with Nihilism. His old chief Skobeleff and all his dare-devil staff were Nihilists at heart. Ignatieff, at the late Czar’s right hand as he was, had a distinct leaning in the same direction. Nay, he had discerned in the course of his confidential intercourse with that monarch that a warp of Nihilism had been interwoven through the curious and complicated mental texture of Alexander himself.

As the Chybassa steamed languidly against the scorching wind that swept down the Red Sea, those two men – so diverse in birth and upbringing, yet so near akin in sentiment and hatred of the British power – discussed many problems and contrived many schemes, while the supple and astute Shere Ali Beg, conversant with the suppressed yet seething disaffection of all the great Indian cities from Peshawur to Calcutta, and thoroughly versed in the tortuous and fanatical plottings of that widespread Wahabee organisation which covers the East from the Golden Horn to the eastern coasts of the Bay of Bengal, interpolated occasionally a sentence of gloomy and ferocious import.

Oronzha was an arch-plotter, all the more influential and dangerous that he played the great game through instruments, and consistently kept his own personality in the background. His mission to the Punjaub had been a mere incident in the deep and far-reaching scheme he had been furthering for years. He had been in close although unobtrusive touch with every phase of the widespread Socialism of Europe, but his absence in India had thrown him somewhat in arrear regarding its latest developments. Before the Chybassa reached Port Said, he had confided to L’Estrange the commission to visit all the great centres of Continental Socialism, charged to communicate confidentially with the inner conclave at each, and to bring to him in London a report of the general situation. L’Estrange started on his errand, duly fortified with such credentials – a sign, a watchword, an apparently innocent note of introduction – as would insure to him the unreserved confidence of the leaders of the great International organisation which has for its aim the fundamental subversion of the political and social order of things throughout the length and breadth of the Continent.

It might be interesting to narrate in detail the experiences of L’Estrange in the fulfilment of this commission: how from Galatz he visited Lemberg, from Lemberg went on to Warsaw, from Warsaw to Cracow, thence into the chief cities of Hungary, from the Marchfeldt to Vienna, thence into Croatia and Dalmatia, from Trieste to Prague, from Prague through Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, into the teeming operative and mining regions of Westphalia and the more southern Rhine provinces; from Alsace to Lyons and thereabouts, through Paris into Belgium, and so, after the lapse of some months from his parting with Oronzha at Port Said, to the house in a court in Soho which Oronzha had designated as a rendezvous. Met here by this dégagé-seeming man of many subtle plots, he was bidden, as the best method of furthering the cause, to enlist in that crack English cavalry regiment the Scarlet Hussars, then quartered at Hounslow, with instructions covertly and cautiously to aim at subverting the loyalty of the troopers of that regiment, and to labour to instil mutinous tendencies by dwelling on the materialistically pleasant results, to the appreciation of the private soldier grumbling at scant rations and poor pay, of a fine free-and-easy régime of lawlessness and unlimited drink.