Cupid in Africa
by Percival Christopher Wren · English · Gutenberg #37544 · 536,103 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Cupid in Africa
Author: Percival Christopher Wren
Release date: September 26, 2011 [eBook #37544]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37544
Credits: This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CUPID IN AFRICA ***
This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.
CUPID IN AFRICA
BY
P. C. WREN
AUTHOR OF “BEAU GESTE”
* * * * *
“_Ex Africa semper aliquid novi_”
* * * * *
“And the son shall take his father’s spear
And he shall avenge his father” . . .
—_Askari Song_
* * * * *
HEATH CRANTON LIMITED
6 FLEET LANE LONDON E.C.4
_First published 1920_
CONTENTS
PART I
THE MAKING OF BERTRAM
CHAPTER PAGE
I _Major Hugh Walsingham Green_ 7
II _Mr. Charles Stayne-Brooker (or Herr Karl 10
Stein-Brücker)_
III _Mrs. Stayne-Brooker—and Her Ex-Stepson_ 13
PART II
THE BAKING OF BERTRAM BY WAR
I _Bertram Becomes a Man of War_ 16
II _And is Ordered to East Africa_ 28
III _Preparations_ 40
IV _Terra Marique Jactatus_ 45
V _Mrs. Stayne-Brooker_ 59
VI _Mombasa_ 61
VII _The Mombasa Club_ 70
VIII _Military and Naval Manœuvres_ 78
IX _Bertram Invades Africa_ 97
X _M’paga_ 105
XI _Food and Feeders_ 112
XII _Reflections_ 123
XIII _Baking_ 137
XIV _The Convoy_ 146
XV _Butindi_ 154
XVI _The Bristol Bar_ 161
XVII _More Baking_ 171
XVIII _Trial_ 180
XIX _Of a Pudding_ 187
XX _Stein-Brücker Meets Bertram Greene—and 195
Death_
PART III
THE BAKING OF BERTRAM BY LOVE
I _Mrs. Stayne-Brooker Again_ 204
II _Love_ 208
III _Love and War_ 217
IV _Baked_ 226
V _Finis_ 236
PART I
THE MAKING OF BERTRAM
CHAPTER I
_Major Hugh Walsingham Greene_
There never lived a more honourable, upright, scrupulous gentleman than
Major Hugh Walsingham Greene, and there seldom lived a duller, narrower,
more pompous or more irascible one.
Nor, when the Great War broke out, and gave him something fresh to do and
to think about, were there many sadder and unhappier men. His had been a
luckless and unfortunate life, what with his two wives and his one son;
his excellent intentions and deplorable achievements; his kindly heart
and harsh exterior; his narrow escapes of decoration, recognition and
promotion.
At cards he was _not_ lucky—and in love he . . . well—his first wife,
whom he adored, died after a year of him; and his second ran away after
three months of his society. She ran away with Mr. Charles
Stayne-Brooker (elsewhere the Herr Doktor Karl Stein-Brücker), the man of
all men, whom he particularly and peculiarly loathed. And his son, his
only son and heir! The boy was a bitter disappointment to him, turning
out badly—a poet, an artist, a musician, a wretched student and
“intellectual,” a fellow who won prizes and scholarships and suchlike by
the hatful, and never carried off, or even tried for, a “pot,” in his
life. Took after his mother, poor boy, and was the first of the family,
since God-knows-when, to grow up a dam’ civilian. Father fought and bled
in Egypt, South Africa, Burma, China, India; grandfather in the Crimea
and Mutiny, great-grandfather in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, ancestors
with Marlborough, the Stuarts, Drake—scores of them: and this chap, _his_
son, _their_ descendant, a wretched creature of whom you could no more
make a soldier than you could make a service saddle of a sow’s ear!
It was a comfort to the Major that he only saw the nincompoop on the rare
occasions of his visits to England, when he honestly did his best to hide
from the boy (who worshipped him) that he would sooner have seen him win
one cup for boxing, than a hundred prizes for his confounded literature,
art, music, classics, and study generally. To hide from the boy that the
pæans of praise in his school reports were simply revolting—fit only for
a feller who was going to be a wretched curate or wretcheder
schoolmaster; to hide his distaste for the pale, slim beauty, which was
that of a delicate girl rather than of the son of Major Hugh Walsingham
Greene. . . . Too like his poor mother by half—and without one quarter
the pluck, nerve, and “go” of young Miranda Walsingham, his kinswoman and
playmate. . . . Too dam’ virtuous altogether. . . .
Gad! If this same Miranda had only been a boy, his boy, there would have
been another soldier to carry on the family traditions, if you like!
But this poor Bertram of his . . .
His mother, a Girton girl, and daughter of a Cambridge Don, had prayed
that her child might “take after” _her_ father, for whom she entertained
a feeling of absolute veneration. She had had her wish indeed—without
living to rejoice in the fact.
* * * * *
When it was known in the cantonment of Sitagur that Major Walsingham
Greene was engaged to Prudence Pym, folk were astonished, and a not
uncommon comment was “Poor little girl!” in spite of the fact that the
Major was admitted by all to be a most honourable and scrupulous
gentleman. Another remark which was frequently made was “Hm! Opposites
attract. What?”
For Prudence Pym was deeply religious, like her uncle, the Commissioner
of the Sitagur Division; she was something of a blue-stocking as became
her famous father’s daughter; she was a musician of parts, an artist of
more than local note, and was known to be writing a Book. So that if
“oppositeness” be desirable, there was plenty of it—since the Major
considered attendance at church to be part and parcel of
drill-and-parade; religion to be a thing concerning which no gentleman
speaks and few gentlemen think; music to be a noise to be endured in the
drawing-room after dinner for a little while; art to be the harmless
product of long-haired fellers with shockin’ clothes and dirty
finger-nails; and books something to read when you were absolutely
reduced to doing it—as when travelling. . . .
When Prudence Walsingham Greene knew that she was to have a child, she
strove to steep her soul in Beauty, Sweetness and Light, and to feed it
on the pure ichor of the finest and best in scenery, music, art and
literature. . . .
Entered to her one day—pompous, pleased, and stolid; heavy, dull, and
foolish—the worthy Major as she sat revelling in the (to her) marvellous
beauties of Rosetti’s _Ecce Ancilla Domini_. As she looked up with the
sad mechanical smile of the disappointed and courageous wife, he screwed
his monocle into his eye and started the old weary laceration of her
feelings, the old weary tramplings and defilements of tastes and
thoughts, as he examined the picture wherewith she was nourishing (she
hoped and believed) the æsthetic side of her unborn child’s mind.
“Picture of a Girl with Grouse, what?” grunted the Major.
“With a . . . ? There is no bird? I don’t . . . ?” stammered Prudence
who, like most women of her kind, was devoid of any sense of humour.
“Looks as though she’s got a frightful grouse about somethin’, _I_ should
say. The young party on the bed, I mean,” continued her spouse. “‘Girl
with the Hump’ might be a better title p’r’aps—if you say she hasn’t a
grouse,” he added.
“_Hump_?”
“Yes. Got the hump more frightfully about something or other—p’r’aps
because the other sportsman’s shirt’s caught alight. . . . Been smokin’,
and dropped his cigar. . . .”
“It is an angel shod with fire,” moaned Prudence as she put the picture
into its portfolio, and felt for her handkerchief. . . .
A little incident, a straw upon the waters, but a straw showing their
steady flow toward distaste, disillusionment, dislike, and hopeless
regret. The awful and familiar tragedy of “incompatibility of
temperament,” of which law and priests in their wisdom take no count or
cognizance, though counting trifles (by comparison) of infidelity and
violence as all important.
And when her boy was born, and named Bertram after her father, Dr.
Bertram Pym, F.R.S., she was happy and thankful, and happily and
thankfully died.
* * * * *
In due course the Major recovered from his grief and sent his son home to
his place, Leighcombe Abbey, where dwelt his elderly spinster relative,
Miss Walsingham, and her niece, Miranda Walsingham, daughter of General
Walsingham, his second cousin. Here the influence of prim, gentle, and
learned Miss Walsingham was all that his mother would have desired, and
in the direction of all that his father loathed—the boy growing up
bookish, thoughtful, and more like a nice girl than a human boy. Him
Miranda mothered, petted, and occasionally excoriated, being an Amazonian
young female of his own age, happier on the bare back of a horse than in
the seats of the learned.
CHAPTER II
_Mr. Charles Stayne-Brooker (or Herr Karl Stein-Brücker)_
When it was known in the cantonment of Hazarigurh that Major Hugh
Walsingham Greene was engaged to Dolly Dennison, folk were astonished,
and a not uncommon comment was “Poor old Walsingham Greene,” in spite of
the fact that the young lady was very beautiful, accomplished and
fascinating.
Here also another remark, that was frequently heard, was that opposites
attract, for Dolly was known to be seventeen, and the Major, though not
very much more than twice her age, looked as old as her father, the
Sessions Judge, and _he_ looked more like the girl’s grandfather than her
father.
It was agreed, however, that it was no case of kidnapping, for Dolly knew
her way about, knew precisely how many beans made five, and needed no
teaching from her grandmother as to the sucking of eggs, or anything
else. For Dolly, poor child, had put her hair up and “come out” at the
age of fifteen—in an Indian cantonment!
Little more need be said to excuse almost anything she might do or be.
Motherless, she had run her father’s hospitable house for the last two
years, as well as her weak and amiable father; and when Major Walsingham
Greene came to Hazarigurh he found this pitiable spoilt child (a child
who had never had any childhood) the _burra mem-sahib_ of the place, in
virtue of her position as the head of the household of the Senior
Civilian. With the manners, airs, and graces of a woman of thirty, she
was a blasé and world-weary babe—“fed up” with dances, gymkhanas, garden
parties, race meetings and picnics; and as experienced and cool a hand at
a flirtation as any garrison-hack or station-belle in the country. Dolly
knew the men with whom one flirts but does not marry, and the men one
marries but with whom one does not flirt.
Mr. Charles Stayne-Brooker was the pride of the former; Major Walsingham
Greene _facile princeps_ of the latter. Charles was the loveliest,
daringest, wickedest flirt you _ever_—and Hugh was a man of means and
position, with an old Tudor “place” in Dorset. So Charles for fun—and
Hugh for matrimony, just as soon as he suggested it. She hoped Hugh
would be quick, too, for Charles had a terrible fascination and power
over her. She had been frightened at herself one moonlight picnic,
frightened at Charles’s power and her own feelings—and she feared the
result if Hugh (who was most obviously of a coming-on disposition),
dallied and doubted. If Hugh were not quick, Charles would get her—for
she preferred volcanoes to icebergs, and might very easily forget her
worldly wisdom and be carried off her feet some night, as she lurked in a
_kala jugga_ with the daring, darling wicked Charles—whose little finger
was more attractive and mysterious than the Major’s whole body.
Besides—the Major was a grey-haired widower, with a boy at school in
England and _so_ dull and prosperous. . . .
But, ere too late, the Major proposed and was accepted. Charles was, or
affected to be, ruined and broken-hearted, and the wedding took place.
The Major was like a boy again—for a little while. And Dolly felt like a
girl taken from an hotel in Mentone and immured in a convent in Siberia.
For Major Hugh Walsingham Greene would have none of the “goings-on” that
had made Dolly’s father’s bungalow the centre of life and gaiety for the
subalterns and civilian youth of Hazarigurh; whilst Mr. Charles
Stayne-Brooker, whom he detested as a flamboyant bounder, he cut dead.
He also bade Dolly remove the gentleman’s name finally and completely
from her visiting-list, and on no account be “at home” when he called.
All of which Dolly quite flatly and finally refused to do.
* * * * *
Mr. Charles Stayne-Brooker (or the Herr Doktor Karl Stein-Brücker, as he
was at other times and in other places) was a very popular person
wherever he went—and he went to an astonishing number of places. It was
wonderful how intimate he became with people, and he became intimate with
an astonishing number and variety of people. He could sing, play, dance,
ride and take a hand at games above the average, and _talk_—never was
such a chatter-box—on any subject under the sun, especially on himself
and his affairs. And yet, here again, it was astonishing how little he
said, with all his talk and ingenious chatter. Everybody knew all about
dear old Charlie—and yet, did they know anything at all when it came to
the point? In most of the places in which he turned up, he seemed to be
a sort of visiting manager of a business house—generally a famous house
with some such old-fashioned British name as Schneider and Schmidt; Max
Englebaum and Son; Plügge and Schnadhorst; Hans Wincklestein and
Gartenmacher; or Grosskopf and Dümmelmann. In out-of-the-way places he
seemed to be just a jolly globe-trotter with notions of writing a book on
his jolly trip to India. Evidently he wanted to know something of the
native of India, too, for when not in large commercial centres like
Calcutta, Madras, Bombay or Colombo, he was to be found in cantonments
where there were Native Troops. He loved the Native Officer and
cultivated him assiduously. He also seemed to love the Bengali amateur
politician, more than some people do. . . . Often a thoughtful and
observant official was pleased to see an Englishman taking such a
friendly interest in the natives, and trying to get to know them well at
first hand—a thing far too rare. . . .
There were people, however—such as Major Walsingham Greene—who affected
to detect something of a “foreign” flavour about him, and wrote him down
as a flashy and bounderish outsider.
Certainly he was a great contrast to the Major, whose clipped moustache,
bleak blue eye, hard bronzed face and close-cut hair were as different as
possible from Mr. Stayne-Brooker’s waxed and curled moustache over the
ripe red mouth; huge hypnotic and strange black eyes; pink and white
puffy face, and long dark locks. And then again, as has been said, Mr.
Stayne-Brooker was only happy when talking, and the Major only happy (if
then) when silent.
On sight, on principle, and on all grounds, the latter gentleman detested
the jabbering, affected, over-familiar, foreign-like fellow, and took
great pleasure in ordering his bride, on their return from the
ten-days-leave honeymoon, to cut him dead and cut him out—of her life.
And, alas, his bride seemed to take an even greater pleasure in defying
her husband on this, and certain other, points; in making it clear to him
that she fully and firmly intended “to live her own life” and go her own
way; and in giving copious and convincing proof of the fact that she had
never known “discipline” yet, and did not intend to make its acquaintance
now.
Whereupon poor Major Walsingham Greene, while remaining the honourable,
upright and scrupulous gentleman that he was, exhibited himself the
irascible, pompous fool that he also was, and by his stupid and
overbearing conduct, his “_That’s enough_! _Those are my orders_,” and
his hopeless mishandling of the situation, drove her literally into the
arms of Mr. Charles Stayne-Brooker, with whom the poor little fool
disappeared like a beautiful dream.
* * * * *
When his kind heart got the better of his savage wrath and scourged
pride, the Major divorced her, and the Herr Doktor (who particularly
needed an English wife in his profession of Secret Agent especially
commissioned for work in the British Empire) married her, broke her
heart, dragged her down into the moral slime in which he wallowed, and,
on the rare occasions of her revolt and threat to leave him, pointed out
that ladies who were divorced once for leaving their husbands _might_
conceivably have some excuse, but that the world had a very hard name for
those who made a habit of it. . . . And then there was her daughter to
consider, too. _His_ daughter, alas! but also hers.
CHAPTER III
_Mrs. Stayne-Brooker—and Her Ex-Stepson_
From Hazarigurh Mr. Charles Stayne-Brooker went straight to Berlin,
became the Herr Doktor Stein-Brücker once more, and saw much of another
and more famous Herr Doktor of the name of Solf. He then went to South
Africa and thence to England, where his daughter was born. Having placed
her with the family of an English clergyman whose wife “accepted” a few
children of Anglo-Indians, he proceeded to America and Canada, and thence
to Vladivostok, Kïaou-Chiaou, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore; then to
the Transvaal by way of Lourenzo Marques and to German East Africa. And
every step of the way his wife went with him—and who so English, among
Englishmen, as jolly Charlie Stayne-Brooker, with his beautiful English
wife? . . . What he did, save interviewing stout gentlemen (whose necks
bulged over their collars, whose accents were guttural, and whose
table-manners were unpleasant) and writing long letters, she did not
know. What she did know was that she was a lost and broken woman, tied
for life to a base and loathsome scoundrel, by her yearning for
“respectability,” her love for her daughter, and her utter dependence for
food, clothing and shelter upon the man whom, in her mad folly, she had
trusted. By the time they returned to England _via_ Berlin, the child,
Eva, was old enough to go to an expensive boarding-school at Cheltenham,
and here Mrs. Stayne-Brooker had to leave her when her husband’s “duties”
took him, from the detailed study of the Eastern Counties of England, to
Africa again. Here he seemed likely to settle at last, interesting
himself in coffee and rubber, and spending much of his time in Mombasa
and Nairobi, as well as in Dar-es-Salaam, Tabora, Lindi and Zanzibar.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, Major Hugh Walsingham Greene, an embittered and disappointed
man, withdrew more and more into his shell, and, on each successive visit
to Leighcombe Priory, more and more abandoned hope of his son’s “doing
any good” in life. He was the true grandson of that most distinguished
scholar, Dr. Bertram Pym, F.R.S., of Cambridge University, and the true
son of his mother. . . . What a joy the lad would have been to these
two, with his love of books and his unbroken career of academic
successes, and what a grief he was to his soldier father, with his utter
distaste for games and sports and his dislike of all things military.
Useless it was for sweet and gentle Miss Walsingham to point to his
cleverness and wisdom, or for Amazonian and sporting Miranda Walsingham
hotly to defend him and rail against the Major’s “unfairness” and “stupid
prejudice.” Equally useless for the boy to do his utmost to please the
man who was to him as a god. . . .
When the Major learned that his son had produced the Newdigate Prize
Poem, won the Craven and the Ireland Scholarships, and taken his Double
First—he groaned. . . .
Brilliant success at Oxford? What is _Oxford_? He would sooner have
seen him miserably fail at Sandhurst and enlist for his commission. . . .
Finally the disappointing youth went to India as private secretary and
travelling companion to the great scientist, Sir Ramsey Wister, his
father being stationed at Aden.
* * * * *
Then came the Great War.
PART II
THE BAKING OF BERTRAM BY WAR
CHAPTER I
_Bertram Becomes a Man of War_
Mr. Bertram Greene, emerging from the King Edward Terminus of the Great
Indian Railway at Madrutta, squared his shoulders, threw out his chest,
and, so far as he understood the process and could apply it, strode along
with the martial tread and military swagger of all the Best Conquerors.
From khaki helmet to spurred brown heel, he was in full panoply of war,
and wore a dangerous-looking sword. At least, to the ignorant passer-by,
it appeared that its owner was in constant danger of being tripped up by
it. Bertram, however, could have told him that he was really in no peril
from the beastly thing, since a slight pressure on the hilt from his left
elbow kept the southern end clear of his feet.
What troubled him more than the sword was the feeling of constriction and
suffocation due to the tightness of the belts and straps that encompassed
him about, and the extreme heat of the morning. Also he felt terribly
nervous and unaccustomed, very anxious as to his ability to support the
weight of his coming responsibility, very self-distrustful, and very
certain that, in the full active-service kit of a British Officer of the
Indian Army, he looked a most frightful ass.
For Mr. Bertram Greene had never before appeared on this, or any other
stage, in such a part; and the change—from a quiet modest civilian,
“bashful, diffident and shy,” to what his friends at dinner last night
had variously called a thin red hero, a licentious soldiery, a brutal
mercenary, a hired assassin, a saviour of his Motherland, a wisp of
cannon-fodder, a pup of the bull-dog breed, a curly-headed hero, a
bloody-minded butcher, and one who would show his sword to be as mighty
as his pen—was overwhelmingly great and sudden. When any of the hundreds
of hurrying men who passed him looked at him with incurious eyes, he felt
uncomfortable, and blushed. He knew he looked an ass, and, far worse,
that whatever he might look, he actually was—a fraud, and a humbug.
Fancy him, Bertram Greene, familiarly known as “Cupid,” the pale-faced
“intellectual,” the highbrowed hero of the class-room and
examination-hall, the winner of scholarships and the double-first, guilty
of a thin volume of essays and a thinner one of verse—just fancy him, the
studious, bookish sedentary, disguised as a soldier, as a leader of men
in the day of battle, a professional warrior! . . . He who had never
played games was actually proposing to play the greatest Game of all: he
who had never killed an animal in his life was going to learn to kill
men: he who had always been so lacking in self-reliance was going to ask
others to rely on him!
And, as his spirits sank lower, Bertram held his head higher, threw back
his shoulders further, protruded his chest more, and proceeded with so
firm a tread, and so martial a demeanour, that he burst into profuse and
violent perspiration.
He wished he could take a taxi, but even had there been one available, he
knew that the Native Infantry Lines almost adjoined the railway terminus,
and that he had to cross a grass _maidan_ {17a} on foot.
Thank heaven it was not far, or he would arrive looking as though he had
come by sea—swimming. A few more steps would take him out of this crowd
of students, clerks, artisans, and business-men thronging to their
schools, colleges, offices, shops, mills, and works in Madrutta. . . .
What did they talk about, these queer “city men” who went daily from the
suburbs to “the office,” clad in turbans, sandals, _dhoties_, {17b} and
cotton coats? Any one of these bare-legged, collarless, not _very_
clean-looking worthies might be a millionaire; and any one of them might
be supporting a wife and large family on a couple of pounds a month. The
vast majority of them were doing so, of course. . . . Anyhow, none of
them seemed to smile derisively when looking at him, so perhaps his
general appearance was more convincing than he thought.
But then, short as had been his sojourn in India, he had been in the
country long enough to know that the native does not look with obvious
derision upon the European, whatever may be the real views and sentiments
of his private mind—so there was no comfort in that. . . . Doubtless the
Colonel and British officers of the regiment he was about to join would
not put themselves to the trouble of concealing their opinions as to his
merits, or lack of them, as soon as those opinions were conceived. . . .
Well, there was one thing Bertram Greene could do, and would do, while
breath was in his body—and that was his very best. No one can do more.
He might be as ignorant of all things military as a babe unborn: he might
be a simple, nervous, inexperienced sort of youth with more culture and
refinement than strength of character and decision of mind: he might be a
bit of an ass, whom other fellows were always ragging and calling
“Cupid”—but, when the end came, none should be able to say that he had
failed for want of doing his utmost, and for lack of striving, with might
and main, to learn _how_ to do his duty, and then to do it to the limit
of his ability.
A couple of British soldiers, privates of the Royal Engineers, came
towards him on their way to the station. Bertram attempted the
impossible in endeavouring to look still more inflexibly and inexorably
martial, as he eyed them hardily. Would they look at him and smile
amusedly? If so, what should he do? He might be a fool himself,
but—however farcically—he bore the King’s Commission, and it had got to
be respected and saluted by all soldiers. The men simultaneously placed
their swagger-sticks beneath their left arms, and, at three paces’
distance, saluting smartly and as one man, maintained the salute until
they were three paces beyond him.
Bertram’s heart beat high with pride and thankfulness. He would have
liked to stop and shake hands with the men, thanking them most sincerely.
As it was, he added a charming and friendly smile to the salute which he
gave in acknowledgment of theirs.
He passed on, feeling as though he had drunk some most stimulating and
exhilarating draught. He had received his first salute! Moreover, the
men had looked most respectfully, nay, almost reverentially, if with a
certain stereotyped and bovine rigidity of stare, toward the officer they
so promptly and smartly honoured. He would have given a great deal to
know whether they passed any contemptuous or derisive comment upon his
appearance and bearing. . . . In point of fact, Scrounger Evans had
remarked to Fatty Wilkes, upon abandoning the military position of the
salute: “Horgustus appears to ’ave ’ad a good night at bridge, and took a
few ’undreds orf Marmadook an’ Reginald. Wot?”
Whereunto Fatty had murmured:
“Jedgin’ by ’is ’appy liddle smile,” as he sought the smelly stump of a
cigarette in its lair behind his spreading shady ear.
Enheartened, but perspiring, Bertram strode on, and crossed the broad
grass _maidan_, at the far side of which he could see the parallel
streets of the Native Infantry Lines, where lay the One Hundred and
Ninety-Ninth Regiment, to which he had been ordered to report himself
“forthwith.” Yesterday was but crowded, excited yesterday, terminating
in a wild farewell dinner and an all-night journey. _To-day_ was
“forthwith.” . . . What would to-morrow be? Perhaps the date of the
termination of his career in the Indian Army—if the Colonel looked him
over, asked him a few questions, and then said: “Take away this bauble!”
or “Sweep this up!” or words to that effect. He had heard that Colonels
were brief, rude, and arbitrary persons, sometimes very terrible. . . .
Approaching the end of the first long row of the mud buildings of the
Native Infantry Lines, Bertram beheld a sentry standing outside his
sentry-box, in the shade of a great banyan tree. The man was clad in
khaki tunic, shorts and puttees, with a huge khaki turban, from which
protruded a fringed scrap of blue and gold; hob-nailed black boots, and
brown belt and bandolier. His bare knees, his hands and face were very
far from being black; in fact, were not even brown, but of a pale
wheat-colour.
The thoughts of Private Ilderim Yakub were far away, and his eyes beheld
a little _sungar_-enclosed watch-tower that looked across a barren and
arid valley of solid rock. In the low, small doorway sat a fair-faced
woman with long plaits of black hair, and, at her feet, crawled a tiny
naked boy . . . and then the eyes of Private Ilderim Yakub beheld a
British officer, in full war-paint and wearing his sword, bearing down
upon him. By Allah the Compassionate and the Beard of the Prophet! He
had been practically asleep at his post, and this must certainly be the
Orderly Officer Sahib or the Adjutant Sahib, if not the Colonel Sahib
himself! Possibly even the “Gineraal” Sahib (from the neighbouring
Brigade Headquarters) having a quiet prowl round. It must be _somebody_,
or he wouldn’t be “in drill order with sword,” and marching straight for
the guard-room.
Private Ilderim Yakub (in the days when he had been a—well—a scoundrelly
border-thief and raider) had very frequently been in situations demanding
great promptitude of thought and action; and now, although at one moment
he had been practically asleep and his wits wool-gathering in the Khost
Valley, the next moment he had sprung from his box, yelled “_Guard turn
out_!” with all the strength of his leathern lungs and brazen throat, and
had then frozen to the immobility of a bronze statue in the attitude of
the salute.
In response to his shout, certain similarly clad men arose from a bench
that stood outside a large thatched, mud-built hut, another, wearing a
red sash and three white stripes on the sleeve of his tunic, came
hurrying from within it, and the party, with promptitude and dispatch,
“fell in,” the Sergeant (or Havildar) beside them.
“Guard!” roared that bearded worthy, “_’Shun_! _Present_ arms!” and,
like the sentry, the Sergeant and the Guard stood as bronze statues to
the honour and glory of Second-Lieutenant Bertram Greene—the while that
gentleman longed for nothing more than that the ground might open and
swallow him up.
What on earth ought he to do? Had he not read in his newly purchased
drill-book that the Guard only turned out for Emperors or Field-Marshals,
or Field Officers or something? Or was it only for the Colonel or the
Officer of the Day? It most certainly was not for stray
Second-Lieutenants of the Indian Army Reserve. Should he try to explain
to the Sergeant that he had made a mistake, and that the Guard was
presenting arms to the humblest of God’s creatures that wore officer’s
uniform? Should he “put on dog” heavily and “inspect” the Guard? Should
he pretend to find fault? No! For one thing he had not enough
Hindustani to make himself intelligible. (But it was a sign that a
change was already coming over Bertram, when he could even conceive such
a notion, and only dismiss it for such a reason.)
What _should_ he do, in these distressingly painful circumstances?
Should he absolutely ignore the whole lot of them, and swagger past with
a contemptuous glance at the fool Sergeant who had turned the Guard out?
. . . It wasn’t _his_ fault that the wretched incident had occurred. . . .
_He_ hadn’t made the mistake, so why should he be made to look a fool?
It would be the others who’d look the fools, if he took not the slightest
notice of their silly antics and attitude-striking. . . (Heavens! How
they’d made the perspiration trickle again, by putting him in this absurd
and false position.) . . . Yes—he’d just go straight past the lot of
them as if they didn’t exist. . . . No—that would be horribly rude, to
say the least of it. They were paying him a military compliment, however
mistakenly, and he must return it. Moreover—it wasn’t the
Sergeant-fellow’s fault. The sentry had shouted to the Guard, and the
Sergeant had naturally supposed that one of those Great Ones, for whom
Guards turn out, was upon them.
Should he march past with a salute, as though he were perfectly
accustomed to such honours, and rather bored with them? Unless he were
near enough for them to see the single “pip” on his shoulder-strap, they
would never know they had made a mistake. (He would hate them to feel as
horribly uncomfortable as he did.)
And if he did, where should he go? He must find the Officers’ Lines, and
go to the Officers’ Mess and inquire for the Colonel. Besides, this was
_his_ regiment; he was attached to it, and these men would all see him
again and know who and what he was. . . .
Of course—he would do the correct and natural thing, and behave as though
he were merely slightly amused at the sentry’s not unnatural mistake and
its results. . . . With a smart salute to the Guard, Bertram smiled upon
the puzzled, imperturbable and immobile Havildar, with the remark:
“_Achcha_, {21a} Sergeant. Guard, dismiss _karo_” {21b}—upon hearing
which barbarous polyglot of English and Hindustani, the Non-Commissioned
Officer abandoned his rigid pose and roared, with extreme ferocity, in
the very ears of the Sepoys:
“Guard! _Or_der-r _ar-r-rms_. Stannat _eashe_. Dees_mees_!” and with
another salute, again turned to Bertram to await his further pleasure.
“_Ham Colonel Sahib mangta_. _Kither hai_?” {21c} said that gentleman,
and the intelligent Havildar gathered that this young and strange Sahib
“wanted” the Colonel. He smiled behind his vast and bushy beard at the
idea of sending a message of the “Hi! you—come here! You’re wanted”
description to that Great One, and pictured the meeting that would ensue
if the Colonel Sahib came hastily, expecting to find the
Commander-in-Chief-in-India awaiting him.
No—since the young Sahib wanted the Colonel, he had better go and find
him. Calling to a young Sepoy who was passing on some fatigue duty, he
bade him haste away, put on his tunic, tuck his long khaki shirt inside
his shorts, and conduct the Sahib to the Adjutant Sahib’s office. (That
would be quite in order; the Adjutant Sahib could decide as to the wisdom
of “wanting” the Colonel Sahib at this—or any other—hour of the day; and
responsibility would be taken from the broad, unwilling shoulders of
Havildar Afzul Khan Ishak.)
An uncomfortable five minutes followed. Bertram, longing with all his
soul to say something correct, natural, and pleasant, could only stand
dumb and unhappy, while the perspiration trickled; the Havildar stood
stiffly at attention and wondered whether the Sahib were as old as his
son, Private Mahommed Afzul Khan, new recruit of the One Hundred and
Ninety-Ninth; and the Guard, though dismissed, stood motionless in solemn
row beside the bench (on which they would sit as soon as the Sahib turned
his back), and, being Indian Sepoys, emptied their minds of all thought,
fixed their unseeing gaze upon Immensity and the Transcendental
Nothingness-of-Non-existent-Non-entity-in-Oblivion, and tried to look
virtuous.
Returning and saluting, the young Sepoy wheeled about and plodded heavily
down the road, walking as though each hob-nailed boat weighed a ton. But
pride must suffer pain, and not for worlds would this young man (who had,
until a few months ago, never worn anything heavier than a straw-plaited
sandal as he “skipped like a young ram” about his native hill-tops) have
been without these tokens of wealth and dignity. What he would have
liked, had the Authorities been less touchy about it, would have been to
wear them slung about his neck, plain for all to admire, and causing
their owner no inconvenience.
Following his guide through the lines of mud huts, saluted every few
yards by passing Sepoys and by groups who sat about doorways and
scrambled to their feet as he passed, Bertram found himself in a broad
sandy road, lined by large stone European bungalows, which ran at
right-angles across the ends of the Sepoys’ lines. Each bungalow stood
in a large compound, had a big lawn and flower-gardens in front of it,
and was embowered in palm-trees. Turning into the garden of the largest
of these, the young Sepoy pointed to the big house, ejaculated:
“Arfeecers’ Mess, Sahib,” saluted, performed a meticulously careful
“about turn,” the while his lips moved as though he were silently giving
himself the necessary orders for each movement, and solemnly marched
away.
A pair of large old-fashioned cannon and a white flagstaff gave the place
an important and official appearance. Beyond the big porch stretched to
left and right a broad and deep verandah, in the shady recesses of which
Bertram could see a row of chairs wherein lay khaki-clad figures, their
feet, raised upon the long leg-rests, presented unitedly and unanimously
towards him. Indeed, as he advanced with beating heart and sense of shy
discomfort, all that he could see of the half-dozen gentlemen was one
dozen boot-soles backed by a blur of khaki. Up to the time he had
reached the flight of steps, leading up from the drive to the verandah,
no one had moved. Mounting the steps, and coming to the level of the
recumbent figures, ranged along the rear wall of the verandah and on each
side of an open door, the unhappy Bertram, from this new standpoint, saw
that the face of each officer was hidden behind a newspaper or a
magazine. . . . Profound silence reigned as he regarded the twelve
boot-soles, each crossed by a spur-chain, and the six newspapers.
Another embarrassing and discomfortable situation. What should he do?
Should he cough—as the native does when he wishes to attract your
attention, or to re-affirm his forgotten presence? It seemed a rather
feeble and banal idea. Should he pretend he had not seen the six
stalwart men lying there in front of his nose, and shout: “_Qui hai_!” as
one does to call an invisible servant? And suppose none of them moved,
and a Mess servant came—he had no card to send in. He couldn’t very well
tell the man to announce in stentorian voice and the manner of a herald:
“Behold! Second-Lieutenant Bertram Greene, of the Indian Army Reserve,
standeth on the threshold!” And supposing the man did precisely this and
_still_ nobody moved, _what_ a superlative ass the said Second-Lieutenant
Bertram Greene would feel! . . . But could he feel a bigger ass than he
did already—standing there in awkward silence beneath the stony regard,
or disregard, of the twelve contemptuous boot-soles? . . .
Should he walk along the row of them, giving each alternate foot a heavy
blow? That would make them look up all right. . . . Or should he seize
a couple of them and operate them in the manner of the young lady in the
Railway Refreshment Rooms or the Village Inn, as she manipulates the
handles of the beer-engine? The owners of the two he grabbed and pulled
would come from behind their papers fast enough. . . . Bertram moved,
and his sword clanked sharply against a pillar. None of the readers had
looked up at the sound of footsteps—they were resting from the labours of
breakfast, and footsteps, as such, are of no interest. But, strange to
say, at the sound of a sword clanking, they moved as one man; six papers
were lowered and six pairs of eyes stared at the unhappy Bertram. After
three seconds of penetrating scrutiny, the six papers rose again as one,
as though at the sound of the ancient and useful military order, “_As you
were_.”
Major Fordinghame beheld a very good-looking boy, who appeared to be
taking his new sword and revolver for a walk in the nice sunshine and
giving the public a treat. He’d hardly be calling on the Mess dressed up
in lethal weapons. Probably wanted the Adjutant or somebody. He was
quite welcome to ’em. . . . These “planter” cheroots were
extraordinarily good at the price. . . . Lieutenant and Quartermaster
Macteith wondered who the devil _this_ was. Why did he stick there like
a stuck pig and a dying cod-fish? Still—if he wanted to stick, let him
stick, by all means. Free country. . . . Captain Brylle only vaguely
realised that he was staring hard at some bloke or other—he was bringing
all the great resources of his brain to bear upon a joke in the pink
paper he affected. It was so deep, dark and subtle a joke that he had
not yet “got” it. Bloke on the door-mat. What of it? . . . Captain
Tavner had received a good fat cheque that morning; he was going on ten
days’ leave to-morrow; he had done for to-day; and he had had a bottle of
beer for breakfast. _He_ didn’t mind if there were a rhinoceros on the
doorstep. Doubtless someone would take it into the Mess and give it a
drink. . . . Cove had got his sword on—or was it two swords? Didn’t
matter to him, anyway. . . .
Captain Melhuish idly speculated as to whether the chap would be
“calling” at so early an hour of the morning. It was the Mess
President’s business, anyhow. . . . Why the sword and revolver? And
mentally murmuring: “Enter—one in armour,” Captain Melhuish, the _doyen_
of the famous Madrutta Amateur Dramatic Society, returned to his perusal
of _The Era_. . . Lieutenant Bludyer didn’t give a damn, anyhow. . . .
And so none of these gentlemen, any one of whom would have arisen, had he
been sitting there alone, and welcomed Bertram hospitably, felt it
incumbent upon him to move, and the situation resumed what Bertram
privately termed its formerness.
Just as he had decided to go to the nearest reader and flatly request him
to arise and direct him to the Colonel, another officer came rushing from
the room whose open doorway faced the porch. In his mouth was a quill
pen, and in his hands were papers.
“Lazy perishers!” he remarked as he saw the others, and added: “Come
along, young Macteith,” and was turning to hurry down the verandah when
Bertram stepped forward.
“Excuse me,” he said, “d’you think I could see the Colonel? I have been
ordered to report to this regiment.”
“You _could_ see the Colonel,” replied this officer, “but I shouldn’t, if
I were you. I’d see the Adjutant. Much pleasanter sight. I’m the
Adjutant. Come along to my office,” and he led the way down the
verandah, across a big whitewashed room, simply furnished with a table, a
chair, and a punkah, to a smaller room, furnished with two of each of the
above-mentioned articles.
Dropping the pen and papers upon the table, the Adjutant wheeled round
upon Bertram, and, transfixing him with a cold grey eye, said, in hollow
voice and tragic tones:
“Do not trifle with me, Unhappy Boy! Say those blessed words again—or at
once declare them false. . . . _Did_ I hear you state that you have been
ordered to join this corps—or did I not?”
“You did, sir,” smiled Bertram.
“Shake,” replied the Adjutant. “God bless you, gentle child. For two
damns, I’d fall on your neck. I love you. Tell me your honoured name
and I’ll send for my will. . . .”
“I’m glad I’m welcome,” said the puzzled and astonished Bertram; “but I’m
afraid I shan’t be very useful. I am absolutely ignorant—you see, I’ve
not been a soldier for twenty-four hours yet. . . . Here’s the telegram
I got yesterday,” and he produced that document.
“Good youth,” replied Captain Murray. “I don’t give a tinker’s curse if
you’re deaf, dumb, blind and silly. You are my deliverer. I love you
more and more. I’ve been awaiting you with beating heart—lying awake for
you, listening for your footprints. Now you come—_I_ go.”
“What—to the Front?” said Bertram.
“You’ve guessed it in once, fair youth. East Africa for little Jock
Murray. We are sending a draft of a hundred men to our link battalion
there—awfully knocked about they’ve been—and I have it, straight from the
stable, that I’m the lad that takes them. . . . They go in a day or two.
. . . I was getting a bit anxious, I can tell you—but my pal in the
Brigade Office said they were certain to send a Reserve man here and
relieve me. . . . Colonel _will_ be pleased—he never _says_ anything but
‘_H’m_!’ but he’ll bite your ear if you don’t dodge.”
“I suppose he’ll simply hate losing an experienced officer and getting
me,” said Bertram, apprehensively.
“He’ll make himself perfectly miserable,” was the reply, “but nothing to
what he’ll make you. I’m the Adjutant, you see, and there’ll be a bit of
a muddle until my successor has picked up all the threads, and a bit of
extra bother for the Colonel. . . . Young Macteith’ll have to take it
on, I expect. . . . He’ll bite your other ear for that. . .” and Murray
executed a few simple steps of the _can-can_, in the joy of his heart
that the chance of his life had come. No one but himself knew the
agonies of mind that he had suffered, as he lay awake at night realising
that the war might he a short one, time was rushing on, and hundreds of
thousands of men had gone to fight—while he still sat in an office and
played C.O.’s lightning conductor. A usually undemonstrative Scot, he
was slightly excited and uplifted by this splendid turn of Fortune’s
wheel. Falling into a chair, he read the telegram:
_To Second-Lieutenant Bertram Greene_, _A.A.A._
_You have been appointed to Indian Army Reserve of Officers with rank of
Second-Lieutenant_, _and are ordered to report forthwith to O.C. One
Hundred and Ninety-Ninth Regiment_, _Madrutta_. _A.A.A._ _Military
Secretary_.
“Any relation to Major Walsingham Greene?” enquired Murray.
“Son,” replied Bertram, “and nephew of General Walsingham.”
“Not your fault, of course,” observed Murray. “Best to make a clean
breast of these things, though. . . . Had any sort of military
training?” he added.
“Absolutely none whatever. Soon after war broke out I felt I was a
disgrace to my family—they are all soldiers—and I thought of going home
and enlisting. . . . Then I thought it was a pity if nearly twenty years
of expensive education had fitted me for nothing more useful than what
any labourer or stable-boy can do—and I realised that I’m hardly strong
enough to be of much good in the trenches during a Belgian winter—I’ve
been there—so I wrote to my father and my uncle and told them I’d like to
get into the Indian Army Reserve of Officers. I thought I might soon
learn enough to be able to set free a better man, and, in time, I might
possibly be of some good—and perhaps go to the Frontier or something. . . .”
“Goo’ _boy_,” said the merry Murray. “I could strain you to my bosom.”
“Then I received some papers from the Military Secretary, filled them up,
and returned them with a medical certificate. I bought some kit and
ordered a uniform, and studied the drill-book night and day. . . . I got
that wire yesterday—and here I am.”
“I love you, Bertram,” repeated the Adjutant.
“I feel a dreadful fraud, though,” continued the boy, “and I am afraid my
uncle, General Walsingham, thinks I am ‘one of the Greenes’ in every way,
whereas I’m a most degenerate and unworthy member of the clan. Commonly
called ‘Cupid’ and ‘Blameless Bertram,’ laughed at . . . . Really he is
my father’s cousin—but I’ve always called him ‘Uncle,’” he added
ingenuously.
“Well—sit you there awhile and I’ll be free in a bit. Then I’ll take you
round the Lines and put you up to a few things. . . .”
“I should be most grateful,” replied Bertram.
Macteith entered and sat him down at the other desk, and for half an hour
there was a _va et vient_ of orderlies, clerks, Sepoys and messengers,
with much ringing of the telephone bell.
When he had finished his work, Murray kept his promise, gave Bertram good
advice and useful information, and, before tiffin, introduced him to the
other officers—who treated him with cordial friendliness. The Colonel
did not appear at lunch, but Bertram’s satisfaction at the postponement
of his interview was somewhat marred by a feeling that Lieutenant
Macteith eyed him malevolently and regarded his advent with disapproval.
CHAPTER II
_And is Ordered to East Africa_
That afternoon the Adjutant very good-naturedly devoted to assisting
Bertram to remedy his utter nakedness and ashamedness in the matter of
necessary campaigning kit. Taking him in his dog-cart to the great
Madrutta Emporium, he showed him what to buy, and, still better, what not
to buy, that he might be fully equipped, armed and well prepared, as a
self-supporting and self-dependent unit, provided with all he needed and
nothing he did not need, that he might go with equal mind wheresoever
Fate—or the Military Secretary—might suddenly send him.
After all, it was not very much—a very collapsible camp-bed of green
canvas, hardwood and steel; a collapsible canvas washstand to match; a
collapsible canvas bath (which was destined to endanger the blamelessness
of Blameless Bertram’s language by providing more collapses than baths);
a canteen of cooking utensils; a green canvas valise which contained
bedding, and professed to be in itself a warm and happy home from home,
even upon the cold hard ground; and a sack of similar material, provided
with a padlock, and suitable as a receptacle for such odds and ends of
clothing and kit as you might choose to throw in it.
“Got to remember that, if you go on active service, your stuff may have
to be carried by coolies,” said the Adjutant. “About forty pounds to a
man. No good trying to make one big package of your kit. Say, one sack
of spare clothing and things; one bundle of your bed, bath, and washing
kit; and the strapped-up valise and bedding. If you had to abandon one
of the three, you’d let the camp-bed, bath and wash-stand go, and hang on
to the sleeping-valise and sack of underclothes, socks, boots, spare
uniform and sundries,” and much other good advice.
To festoon about Cupid’s person, in addition to his sword, revolver,
water-bottle and haversack, he selected a suitable compass, map-case,
field-glasses, ammunition-pouch, whistle and lanyards, since his earnest
and anxious protégé desired to be fitted out fully and properly for
manœuvres, and as though for actual active service.
Assurance being received that his purchases would be forthwith dispatched
to the Adjutant’s bungalow, Bertram drove back to the Mess with that
kindly officer, and gratefully accepted his invitation to dine with him,
that night, at the famous Madrutta Club.
“What about kit, though?” enquired Bertram. “I’ve only got what I stand
up in. I left all my—”
“That’s all right,” was the reply. “Everybody’s in khaki, now we’re
mobilised—except the miserable civilians,” he added with a grin, whereat
Bertram, the belted man of blood, blushed and smiled.
At dinner Bertram sat respectfully silent, collecting the pearls of
wisdom that fell from the lips of his seniors, fellow-guests of the
Adjutant. And his demeanour was of a gravity weighty and serious even
beyond his wont, for was he not now a soldier among soldiers, a
uniformed, commissioned, employed officer of His Majesty the King
Emperor, and attached to a famous fighting regiment? Yes—a King’s
Officer, and one who might conceivably be called upon to fight, and
perhaps to die, for his country and for those simple Principles for which
his country stood.
He was a little sorry when some of his bemedalled fellow-guests joked on
solemn and sacred subjects, and spoke a little slightingly of persons and
principles venerable to him; but he comforted and consoled himself with
the recollection and reflection that this type of man so loathed any
display, or even mention, of sentiment and feeling, that it went to the
opposite extreme, and spoke lightly of things weighty, talked ribaldly of
dignitaries, and gave a quite wrong impression as to its burning
earnestness and enthusiasm.
After dinner, when the party broke up for bridge, billiards or the bar,
he sat on, listening with all his ears to the conversation of the
Adjutant and an officer, who seemed exceedingly well informed on the
subject of the battle of Tanga, in German East Africa, concerning which
the general public knew nothing at all.
Murray noticed his intelligent and attentive silence, and counted it for
righteousness unto the boy, that he could “keep his head shut,” at any
rate. . . .
And next day The Blow fell!
For poor Captain and Adjutant Murray, of the Hundred and Ninety-Ninth
Infantry, it dawned like any ordinary day, and devoid of baleful omens.
There was nothing ominous about the coming of the tea, toast, and oranges
that “Abdul the Damned,” his bearer, brought into the big, bare and
comfortless room (furnished with two camp-beds, one long chair, one
_almirah_ {30} and a litter on the floor) in which he and Bertram slept.
Early morning parade passed off without unusual or untoward event.
Breakfast was quite without portent, omen, or foreshadow of disaster.
The Colonel’s silence was no more eloquent than usual, the Major’s
remarks were no ruder, the Junior Subaltern’s no sillier, and those of
the other fellows were no more uninteresting than upon other days; and
all unconscious of his fate the hapless victim strayed into his office,
followed by his faithful and devoted admirer, Second-Lieutenant Bertram
Greene, who desired nothing better than to sit at his feet and learn. . . .
And then it came!
It came in the shape of a telegram from the Military Secretary, and, on
the third reading of the fair-writ type, Murray had to realise that the
words undoubtedly and unmistakably were:
_To O.C. 199th Infantry_, _A.A.A._
_Second-Lieutenant Greene_, _I.A.R._, _to proceed to Mombasa forthwith in
charge of your draft of one hundred P.M.’s and one Native Officer_, _by
s.s. Elymas to-morrow and report to O.C._, _One Hundred and Ninety-Eighth
immediately_. _A.A.A._ _Military Secretary_, _Delhi_.
He read it through once again and then laid it on his table, leant his
head on his hand and felt physically faint and sick for a moment. He had
not felt quite as he did then more than three or four times in the whole
of his life. It was like the feeling he had when he received the news of
his mother’s death; when his proposal of marriage to the one-and-only
girl had been rejected; when he had been bowled first ball in the
Presidency Match, and when he had taken a toss from his horse at the
Birthday Parade, as the beast, scared at the _feu-de-joie_, had suddenly
bucked and bounced like an india-rubber ball. . . . He handed the
telegram to Bertram without comment.
That young gentleman read it through, and again. He swallowed hard and
read it once more. His hand shook. He looked at the Adjutant, who
noticed that he had turned quite pale.
“Got it?” enquired Murray. “Here, sit down.” He thought the boy was
going to faint.
“Ye-e-s. I—er—think so,” was the reply. “_I_ am to take the draft from
the Hundred and Ninety-Ninth to the Hundred and Ninety-Eighth in East
Africa! . . . Oh, Murray, I _am_ sorry—for you. . . . And I am so
utterly inadequate and incompetent. . . . It is cruel hard luck for you.
. . .”
The Adjutant, a really keen, good soldier, said nothing. There was
nothing to say. He felt that his life lay about him in ruins. At the
end of the war—which might come anywhen now that Russia had “got
going”—he would be one of the few professional soldiers without active
service experience, without a medal or decoration of any sort
whatever. . . . Children who had gone straight from Sandhurst to the Front
would join this very battalion, after the war, with their honours thick upon
them—and when he, the Adjutant, tried to teach them things, they’d smile
and say: “We—ah!—didn’t do it like that at the Marne and Ypres. . . .”
He could go straight away and shoot himself then and there. . . . And
this pink civilian baby! This “Cupid”! No, there was nothing to
say—apart from the fact that he could not trust himself to speak.
For minutes there was complete silence in the little office. Bertram was
as one in a dream—a dream which was partly sweet and partly a nightmare.
_He_ to go to the Front to-morrow? To go on Active Service? He whom
fellows always ragged, laughed at, and called Cupid and Blameless Bertram
and Innocent Ernest? To go off from here in sole charge of a hundred of
these magnificent fighting-men, and then to be an officer in a regiment
that had been fighting for weeks and had already lost a third of its men
and a half of its officers, in battle? He, who had never fired a gun in
his life; never killed so much as a pheasant, a partridge, a grouse or a
rabbit; never suffered so much as a tooth-extraction—to shoot at his
fellow-men, to risk being horribly mangled and torn! . . . Yes—but what
was that last compared with the infinitely greater horror, the
unspeakable ghastliness of being _inadequate_, of being too incapable and
inexperienced to do his duty to the splendid fellows who would look to
him, the White Man, their Officer, for proper leadership and handling?
To fail them in their hour of need. . . . He tried to moisten dry lips
with a dry tongue.
Oh, if only he had the knowledge and experience of the Adjutant—he would
then change places with no man in the world. Why had the England that
had educated him so expensively, allowed him to grow up so hopelessly
ignorant of the real elemental essentials of life in the World-As-It-Is?
He had been brought up as though the World were one vast Examination
Hall, and nothing else. Yes—he had been prepared for examinations all
his life, not prepared for the World at all. Oh, had he but Murray’s
knowledge and experience, or one-tenth part of it—he would find the
ability, courage, enthusiasm and willingness all right.
But, as it was, who was _he_, Bertram Greene, the soft-handed sedentary,
the denizen of libraries and lecture-rooms, the pale student, to dare to
offer to command, control and guide trained and hardy men of war? What
had he (brought up by a maiden “aunt”!) to do with arms and blood, with
stratagems and ambuscades, with gory struggles in unknown holes and
corners of the Dark Continent? Why, he had never shouted an order in his
life; never done a long march; never administered a harsh reprimand;
never fired a revolver nor made a pass with a sword. (If only he _had_
had more to do with such “passes” and less with his confounded
examination passes—he might feel less of an utter fraud now.) At school
and at Oxford he had been too delicate for games, and in India, too busy,
and too interested in more intellectual matters, for shikar, sport and
hunting. He had just been “good old Blameless Bertram” and “our valued
and respected Innocent Ernest,” and “our pretty pink Cupid”—more at home
with antiquarians, ethnologists, Orientalists and scientists than with
sportsmen and soldiers. . . .
The fact was that Civilisation led to far too much specialisation and
division of labour. Why shouldn’t fellows be definitely trained and
taught, physically as well as mentally? Why shouldn’t every man be a bit
of an artisan, an agriculturalist, a doctor, and a soldier, as well as a
mere wretched book-student? Life is not a thing of books. . . .
Anyhow, in the light of this telegram, it was pretty clear that his
uncle, General Sir Hugh Walsingham, K.C.S.I., had described him more
optimistically than accurately when forwarding his application for
admission to the Indian Army Reserve of Officers, to the Military
Secretary. . . . Another awful thought—suppose he let Uncle Hugh down
badly. . . . And what of his father? . . .
Well—there was one thing, he would do his absolute utmost, his really
ultimate best; and no one could do more. But, oh, the fathomless
profundity of his ignorance and inexperience! Quite apart from any
question of leading men in battle, how could he hope to avoid incurring
their contempt on the parade-ground? They’d see he was an Ass, and a
very ignorant one to boot, before he had been in front of them for five
minutes. . . . One thing—he’d know that drill-book absolutely by heart
before long. His wretched examination training would stand him in good
stead there, at any rate. . . .
“Must tell the Colonel,” said Murray suddenly, and he arose and left the
office.
A few minutes later the Quartermaster, Lieutenant Macteith, entered.
Instead of going to his desk and settling down to work, he took a
powerful pair of field-glasses from their case on Murray’s table and
carefully examined Bertram through them.
Bertram coloured, and felt quite certain that he did not like Macteith at
all.
Reversing the glasses, that gentleman then examined him through the
larger end.
“Oh, my God!” he ejaculated at last, and then feigned unconquerable
nausea.
He had heard the news, and felt personally injured and insulted that this
miserable half-baked rabbit should be going on Active Service while
Lieutenant and Quartermaster Macteith was not.
An orderly entered, saluted, and spoke to him in Hindustani.
“Colonel wants you,” he said, turning to Bertram, as the orderly again
saluted, wheeled about, and departed. “He wants to strain you to his
breast, to clasp your red right hand, to give you his photograph and beg
for yours—or else to wring your neck!” And as Bertram rose to go, he
added: “Here—take this pen with you.”
“What for?” asked Bertram.
“To write something in his autograph-album and birthday-book—he’s sure to
ask you to,” was the reply.
Bertram turned and departed, depressed in spirit. He hated anyone to
hate him, and he had done Macteith no harm. But in spite of his
depression, he was aware of a wild little devil of elation who capered
madly at the back of his brain. This exuberant little devil appeared to
be screaming joyous war-whoops and yelling: “_Active Service_! . . .
_You are going to see service and to fight_! . . . _You will have a
war-medal and clasps_! . . . _You are going to be a real war-hardened
and experienced soldier_! . . . _You are going to be a devil of a
fellow_! . . . _Whoop and dance_, _you Ass_! . . . _Wave your arms
about_, _and caper_! . . . _Let out a loud yell_, _and do a fandango_!
. . .” But in the Presence of the Colonel, Bertram declined to entertain
the little devil’s suggestions, and he neither whooped nor capered. He
wondered, nevertheless, what this cold monument of imperturbability would
do if he suddenly did commence to whoop, to caper and to dance before
him. Probably say “H’m!”—since that was generally reported to be the
only thing he ever said. . . .
Marching into the room in which the Colonel sat at his desk, Bertram
halted abruptly, stood at attention stiffly, and saluted smartly. Then
he blushed from head to foot as he realised that he had committed the
ghastly _faux pas_, the horrible military crime, of saluting bare-headed.
He could have wept with vexation. To enter so smartly, hearing himself
like a trained soldier—and then to make such a Scarlet Ass of himself!
. . . The Colonel gazed at him as at some very repulsive and
indescribable, but very novel insect.
“. . . And I’ll make a list of the cooking-pots and other kit that
they’ll have to take for use on board, sir, and give it to Greene with a
letter to Colonel Rock asking him to have them returned here,” the
Adjutant was saying, as he laid papers before the Colonel for signature.
“H’m!” said the Colonel.
“I have ordered the draft to parade at seven to-morrow, sir,” he
continued, “and told the Bandmaster they will be played down to the
Docks. . . . Greene can take them over from me at seven and march them
off. I have arranged for the kits to go down in bullock-carts
beforehand. . . .”
“H’m!” said the Colonel.
“I’ll put Greene in the way of things as much as possible to-day,” went
on the Adjutant. “I’ll go with him and get hold of the cooking-pots
he’ll take for the draft to use on board—and then I’d better run down and
see the Staff Embarkation Officer with him, about his cabin and the men’s
quarters on the _Elymas_, and. . .”
“H’m!” said the Colonel, and taking up his cane and helmet, departed
thence without further remark.
“. . . And—I hope you’ll profit by every word you’ve heard from the
Colonel, my lad,” the Adjutant concluded, turning ferociously upon
Bertram. “Don’t stand there giggling, flippant and indifferent—a perfect
picture of the Idle Apprentice, I say,” and he burst into a peal of
laughter at the solemn, anxious, tragic mask which was Bertram’s face.
“No,” he added, as they left the room. “Let the Colonel’s wise and
pregnant observations sink into your mind and bring forth fruit. . . .
Such blossoming, blooming flowers of rhetoric _oughter_ bring forth fruit
in due season, anyhow. . . . Come along o’ me.”
Leaving the big Mess bungalow, the two crossed the _maidan_, wherein
numerous small squads of white-clad recruits were receiving
musketry-instruction beneath the shady spread of gigantic banyans. The
quickly signalled approach of the dread Adjutant-Sahib galvanised the
Havildar and Naik instructors to a fearful activity and zeal, which waned
not until he had passed from sight. In one large patch of shade the
Bandmaster—an ancient Pathan, whose huge iron-rimmed spectacles accorded
but incongruously with his fierce hawk face, ferocious curling white
moustache and beard, and bemedalled uniform—was conducting the band’s
tentative rendering of “My Bonnie is over the Ocean,” to Bertram’s
wide-eyed surprise and interest. Through the Lines the two officers made
a kind of Triumphal Progress, men on all sides stiffening to “attention”
and saluting as they passed, to where, behind a cook-house, lay nine
large smoke-blackened cooking-pots under a strong guard.
“There they are, my lad,” quoth the hitherto silent Adjutant. “Regard
them closely, and consider them well. Familiarise yourself with them,
and ponder.”
“Why?” asked Bertram.
“For in that it is likely that they, or their astral forms, will haunt
your thoughts by day, your dreams by night. Your every path through life
will lead to them,” answered the Adjutant.
“What have I got to do with them?” enquired Bertram, with uncomfortable
visions of adding the nine big black cauldrons to his kit.
“Write about them,” was the succinct reply.
“To whom?” was the next query.
“Child,” said the Adjutant solemnly, “you are young and ignorant, though
earnest. To you, in your simplicity and innocence—
‘A black cooking-pot by a cook-house door
A black cooking-pot is, and nothing more,’
as dear William Wordsworth so truly says in his _Ode on the Imitations of
Immorality_, is it—or is it in ‘_Hark how the Shylock at Heaven’s gate
sings_’? I forget. . . . But these are _much_ more. Oh, very much.”
“How?” asked the puzzled but earnest one.
“_How_? . . . Why they are the subject-matter, from this moment, of a
Correspondence which will be still going on when your children’s
grandchildren are doddering grey-beards, and you and I are long since
swept into the gulf of well-deserved oblivion. _Babus_ yet unborn will
batten on that Correspondence and provide posts for their relatives
unnumbered as the sands of the seashore, that it may be carried on
unfailing and unflagging. As the pen drops from their senile palsied
hands they will see the Correspondence take new lease of life, and they
will turn their faces to the wall, smile, and die happy.”
“I am afraid I don’t really understand,” admitted Bertram.
“_Do_ you think Colonel Rock will return these pots? Believe me, he will
not. He will say, ‘_A pot in the hand is worth two in the
bush-country_,’ or else ‘_What I have I hold_,’ or ‘_Ils suis_, _ils
reste_’—being a bit of a scholar like—or perhaps he’ll just swear he
bought ’em off a man he went to see about a dog, just round the corner,
at the pub. I don’t know about _that_—but return them he will not. . . .”
“But if I say they belong to Colonel Frost and that he wants them
back—and that I promised to make it clear to him that Colonel Frost
desires their immediate return,” protested Bertram, who visualised
himself between the anvil of Colonel Rock and the hammer of Colonel
Frost.
“Why then he’ll probably say they now ‘belong to Colonel Rock and that he
_doesn’t_ want them to go back, and that you must promise to make it
clear to Colonel Frost that he desires _his_ immediate return’—to the
devil,” replied the Adjutant.
“Yes—every time,” he continued. “He will pretend that fighting Germans
is a more urgent and important matter than returning pots. He will lay
aside no plans of battle and schemes of strategy to attend to the pots.
He will detail no force of trusty soldiers to convoy them to the coast. . . .
He will refuse to keep them prominently before his vision. . . . In
short, he will hang on to the damn things. . . . And when the war is
o’er and he returns, he’ll swear he never had a single cooking-pot in
Africa, and in any case they are his own private property, and always
were. . . .”
“I shall have to keep on reminding him about them,” observed Bertram,
endeavouring to separate the grain of truth from the literal “chaff” of
the Adjutant—who seemed to be talking rapidly and with bitter humour, to
keep himself from thinking of his cruel and crushing disappointment, or
to hide his real feelings.
“If you go nightly to his tent, and, throwing yourself prostrate at his
feet, clasp him around the knees, and say: ‘_Oh_, _sir_, _think of poor
pot-less Colonel Frost_,’ he will reply: ‘_To hell with Colonel Frost_!
. . .’ Yes—every time. . . . Until, getting impatient of your reproachful
presence, he will say: ‘_You mention pots again and I’ll fill you with
despondency and alarm_. . .’ He’ll do it, too—he’s quite good at it.”
“Rather an awkward position for me,” ventured Bertram.
“Oh, quite, quite,” agreed Murray. “Colonel Frost will wire that unless
you return his pots, he’ll break you—and Colonel Rock will state that if
you so much as hint at pots, _he’ll_ break you. . . . But that’s neither
here nor there—the Correspondence is the thing. It will begin when you
are broke by one of the two—and it will be but waxing in volume to its
grand climacteric when the war is forgotten, and the pots are but the
dust of rust. . . . A great thought. . . Yes. . .”
Bertram stared at the Adjutant. Had he gone mad? Fever? A touch of the
sun? It was none of these things, but a rather terrible blow, a
blighting and a shattering of his almost-realised hopes—and he must
either talk or throw things about, if he were not to sit down and
blaspheme while he drank himself into oblivion. . . .
For a time they regarded the pots in awed contemplative silence and felt
themselves but ephemeral in their presence, as they thought of the Great
Correspondence, but yet with just a tinge of that comforting and
sustaining _quorum pais magna fui_ feeling, to which Man, the Mighty
Atom, the little devil of restless interference with the Great Forces, is
ever prone.
In chastened silence they returned to the Adjutant’s office, and Bertram
sat by his desk and watched and wondered, while that official got through
the rest of his morning’s work and dealt faithfully with many—chiefly
sinners.
He then asked the Native Adjutant, who had been assisting him, to send
for Jemadar Hassan Ali, who was to accompany Bertram and the draft on the
morrow, and on that officer’s arrival he presented him to the young
gentleman.
As he bowed and shook hands with the tall, handsome Native Officer,
Bertram repressed a tendency to enquire after Mrs. Ali and all the little
Allies, remembering in time that to allude directly to a native
gentleman’s wife is the grossest discourtesy and gravest immorality. All
he could find to say was: “_Salaam_, _Jemadar Sahib_! _Sub achcha hai_?”
{38a} which at any rate appeared to serve, as the Native Officer gave
every demonstration of cordiality and pleasure. What he said in reply,
Bertram did not in the least understand, so he endeavoured to put on a
look combining pleasure, comprehension, friendliness and agreement—which
he found a slight strain—and remarked: “_Béshak_! _Béshak_!” {38b} as he
nodded his head. . . .
The Jemadar later reported to his colleagues that the new Sahib, albeit
thrust in over the heads of tried and experienced Native Officers,
appeared to _be_ a Sahib, a gentleman of birth, breeding, and good
manners; and evidently possessed of far more than such slight perception
and understanding as was necessary for proper appreciation of the worth
and virtues of Jemadar Hassan Ali. Also that he was but a hairless-faced
babe—but doubtless the Sircar knew what it was about, and was quite right
in considering that a young boy of the Indian Army Reserve was fitter to
be a Second-Lieutenant in the _pultan_, than was a Jemadar of fifteen
years’ approved service and three medals. One of his hearers laughed
sarcastically, and another grunted approval, but the Subedar-Major
remarked that certain opinions, however tenable, were, perhaps, better
left unvoiced by those who had accepted service under the Sircar on
perfectly clear and definite terms and conditions.
When the Jemadar had saluted and left the office, Murray turned upon
Bertram suddenly, and, with a concentrated glare of cold ferocity,
delivered himself.
“Young Greene,” quoth he, “yesterday I said you were a Good Egg and a
desirable. I called you Brother, and fell upon your neck, and I welcomed
you to my hearth. I overlooked your being the son of a beknighted
General. I looked upon you and found you fair and good—as a ‘relief.’
You were a stranger, and I took you in. . . . Now you have taken _me_
in—and I say you are a cuckoo in the nest, a viper in the back-parlour, a
worm in the bud, a microbe in the milk, and an elephant in the ointment.
. . . You are a—a—”.
“I’m _awfully_ sorry, Murray,” interrupted the unhappy Bertram. “I’d do
_anything_—”
“Yes—and any _body_,” continued the Adjutant. “I say you are a pillar of
the pot-houses of Gomorrah, a fly-blown turnip and a great mistake.
Though of apparently most harmless exterior and of engaging manners, you
are an orange filled with ink, an addled egg of old, and an Utter
Improbability. I took you up and you have done me down. I took you out
and you have done me in. I took you in and you have done me out—of my
chance in life. . . . Your name is now as a revolting noise in my ears,
and your face a repulsive sight, a thing to break plates on . . . and
they ‘call you _Cupid_’!”
“I can’t tell you how distressed I am about it, Murray,” broke in the
suffering youth. “If only there were anything I could do so that you
could go, and not I—”
“You can do nothing,” was the cold reply. “You can not even, in mere
decency, die this night like a gentleman. . . . And if you did, they’d
only send some other pale Pimple to take the bread out of a fellow’s
mouth. . . . This is a civilians’ war, mark you; they don’t want
professional soldiers for a little job like this. . . .”
“It wasn’t _my_ fault, Murray,” protested Bertram, reduced almost to
tears by his sense of wicked unworthiness and the injustice to his kind
mentor of yesterday.
“Perhaps not,” was the answer, “but why were you ever _born_, Cupid
Greene, that’s what I ask? You say it isn’t your fault—but if you’d
never been born . . . Still, though I can never forget, I forgive you,
and would share my last pot of rat-poison with you cheerfully. . . .
Here—get out your note-book,” and he proceeded to give the boy every
“tip” and piece of useful advice and information that he could think of
as likely to be beneficial to him, to the men, to the regiment, and to
the Cause.
CHAPTER III
_Preparations_
That night Bertram could not sleep. The excitement of that wonderful day
had been too much for his nerves, and he lay alternating between the
depths of utter black despair, fear, self-distrust and anxiety on the one
hand, and the heights of exultation, hope, pride, and joy on the other.
At one moment he saw himself the butt of his colleagues, the contempt of
his men, the _bête noir_ of his Colonel, the shame of his Service, and
the disgrace of his family.
At another, he saw himself winning the approval of his brother officers
by his modesty and sporting spirit, the affection and admiration of his
men by his kindness and firmness, the good-will of his Colonel by his
obvious desire to learn and his keen enthusiasm in his duty, the respect
of his Service for winning a decoration, and the loving regard of the
whole clan of Greene for his general success as a soldier.
But these latter moments were, alas, far less realistic and convincing
than the others. In them he merely hoped and imagined—while in the black
ones he felt and _knew_. He could not do otherwise than realise that he
was utterly inexperienced, ignorant, untried and incompetent, for it was
the simple fact. If _he_ could be of much use, then what is the good of
training men for years in colleges, in regiments, and in the field, to
prepare them to take their part in war?
He knew nothing of either the art or the science of that great and
terrible business. He had neither the officer’s trained brain nor the
private soldier’s trained body; neither the theory of the one nor the
practice of the other. Even if, instead of going to the Front to-morrow
as an officer, he had been going in a British regiment as a private, he
would have been equally useless. He had never been drilled, and he had
never used a weapon of any kind. All he had got was a burning desire to
be of use, a fair amount of intelligence, and, he hoped, the average
endowment of courage. Even as to this last, he could not be really
certain, as he had never yet been tried—but he was very strongly of
opinion that the dread of showing himself a coward would always be far
stronger than the dread of anything that the enemy could do to his vile
body. His real fear was that he should prove incompetent, be unequal to
emergency, and fail those who relied upon him or trusted in him. When he
thought of that, he knew Fear, the cold terror that causes a fluttering
of the heart, a dryness of the mouth, a weakness of the knees, and a
sinking of the stomach.
That was the real dread, that and the fear of illness which would further
decrease capacity and usefulness. What were mere bullets and bayonets,
wounds and death, beside revealed incompetence and failure in duty?
Oh, that he might have luck in his job, and also keep in sufficient
health to be capable of his best—such as it was.
When Hope was in the ascendant, he assured himself that the greatest work
and highest duty of a British officer in a Native regiment was to
encourage and enhearten his men; to set them a splendid example of
courage and coolness; to hearten them up when getting depressed; to win
their confidence, affection and respect, so that they would cheerfully
follow him anywhere and “stick it” as long as he did, no matter what the
hardship, danger, or misery. These things were obviously a thousand
times more important than parade-ground knowledge and such details as
correct alignment, keeping step, polishing buttons, and so
forth—important as these might be in their proper place and season. And
one did not learn those greater things from books, nor on parade, nor at
colleges. A man as ignorant as even he of drill, internal economy,
tactics and strategy, might yet be worth his rations in the trenches, on
the march, yes, or in the wild, fierce bayonet-charge itself, if he had
the attributes that enable him to encourage, uplift, enhearten and give
confidence.
And then his soaring spirit would swiftly stoop again, as he asked
himself: “And have _I_ those qualities and attributes?” and sadly
replied: “Probably not—but what is, at any rate, certain, is the fact
that I have no knowledge, no experience, no understanding of the very
alphabet of military lore, no slightest grasp of the routine details of
regimental life, discipline, drill, regulations, internal economy,
customs, and so forth—the things that are the elementary essentials of
success to a body of armed men proceeding to fight.” . . . And in black
misery and blank despair he would groan aloud: “_I cannot go_. _I cannot
do it_.” . . . He was very young, very much a product of modern
civilisation, and a highly specialised victim of a system and a
generation that had taken too little account of naked fact and elemental
basic tendency—a system and a generation that pretended to believe that
human nature had changed with human conditions. As he realised, he had,
like a few million others, been educated not for Life and the
World-As-It-Is, but for examinations and the world as it is not, and
never will be. . . .
He tossed and turned through the long hot night on the little hard
camp-bed, listening to Murray’s regular breathing and the scampering of
the rats as they disported themselves on the other side of the canvas
ceiling cloth and went about their unlawful occasions. . . .
He reviewed the events of that epoch-making day from the arrival of the
telegram to his getting into bed. . . . A memorable morning, a busy
afternoon and evening, a rotten night—with a beastly climax—or
anti-climax. . . . Would he never get to sleep on this hard, narrow bed?
. . . What would he be fit for on the dreadful morrow if he slept not at
all? . . . What a day it had been! Rather amusing about those
cooking-pots. It wouldn’t be very amusing for _him_ if the situation
developed as Murray had prophesied. . . . Rather a good bit of work that
he had put in between lunch and dinner with the drill-book and a box of
matches. Matches made good sections, companies, and battalions for
practising drill-manœuvres on a desk—but it would he a different thing to
give the orders correctly and audibly to hundreds of men who watched one
with inscrutable eyes. . . . How he wished he had declined the
invitation of Bludyer to accompany him and Macteith to the theatre. . . .
They had proceeded in a car to the Club and there picked up some other
fellows. The play was _The Girl in the Taxi_, and Bertram sat ashamed,
humiliated and angry, as a third-rate company of English actors and
actresses performed their sorry parts in a travesty of European life and
manners, before the avid eyes of hundreds of natives. There they sat,
with faces contemptuous, sensual, blank, eager, gleeful or disgusted,
according to their respective conditions and temperaments—the while they
gathered from the play that English life is a medley of infidelity,
dissipation, intrigue and vulgarity.
And, after the play, Macteith had said: “Let’s go to the Home-from-Home
for a ‘drink-and-a-little-music—what—what’?”
Bertram had thought it a somewhat strange proceeding to go to a Home, at
eleven o’clock at night, for music, and he would greatly have preferred
to go to bed. However, he could not very well say that they must take
him back to bed first, nor announce his intention of leaving the party
and walking home. . . .
. . . Macteith having given instructions to the Eurasian chauffeur, the
taxi sped away and, skirting the sea-shore, turned off into a quiet
avenue of giant palms, in which stood detached bungalows of retiring and
unobtrusive mien. Into the compound of one of these the taxi turned, and
a bell rang loudly, apparently of its own volition. As they got out of
the car, a lady came out to the brilliantly lighted verandah from the
drawing-room which opened on to it. Bertram did not like the look of
this lady at all. Her face reminded him of that of a predatory animal or
bird, with its fierce eyes, thin, hard lips and aquiline nose. Nor, in
his estimation, did the obvious paint and powder, the extreme-fashioned
satin gown, and the profusion of jewellery which she wore, do anything to
mitigate the unfavourable impression received at first sight of her face.
. . . Really the last person one would have expected to find in charge
of a Home. . . . Nor was Macteith’s greeting of “Hullo, Fifi, my dear!
Brought some of the Boys along,” calculated to allay a growing suspicion
that this was not really a Home at all.
Entering the drawing-room with the rest, Bertram beheld a bevy of ladies
sitting in an almost perfect circle, each with a vacant chair beside her.
Some of them were young, and some of them presumably had been. All were
in evening dress and in the exaggerated extreme of fashion. All seemed
to be painted and powdered, and all looked tired and haggard. Another
attribute common to the whole party was that they all seemed to be
foreigners—judging by their accents as they welcomed Macteith and some of
the others as old acquaintances.
Bertram liked the look of these ladies as little as he did that of the
person addressed as “Fifi,” and he hoped that the party would not remain
at the house long. He was tired, and he felt thoroughly uncomfortable,
as noisy horse-play and badinage began, and waxed in volume and pungency.
A servant, unbidden, entered with a tray on which stood three bottles of
champagne and a number of glasses. He noticed that the bottles had been
opened, that the corks and gold-foil looked weary and experienced, and
that the wine, when poured out, was singularly devoid of bubbles and
froth. He wished he had not come. . . . He did not want to drink
alleged champagne at midnight. . . . There was no music, and the people
were of more than doubtful breeding, taste and manners. . . . Macteith
had actually got his arm round the waist of one woman, and she was
patting his cheek as she gazed into his eyes. Another pair exchanged a
kiss before his astonished gaze. He decided to walk out of the house,
and was about to do so when the girl nearest to him seized his hand and
said: “You seet daown ’ere an’ spik to me, sare,” as she pulled him
towards the chair that stood vacant beside her. In an agony of
embarrassment born of a great desire to refuse to stay another minute,
and a somewhat unnecessary horror of hurting the young lady’s feelings by
a refusal, he seated himself with the remark: “Merci, mam’selle—mais il
se fait tard. Il est sur les une heure . . .” as she appeared to be a
French woman.
“Laissez donc!” was the reply. “Il est l’heure du berger,” a remark the
point of which he missed entirely. Finding that he knew French, she
rattled on gaily in that tongue, until Bertram asked her from what part
of France she came. On learning that she was from Alais in Provence, he
talked of Arles, Nismes, Beaucaire, Tarascon, Avignon and the
neighbourhood, thinking to please her, until, to his utter amazement and
horror, she turned upon him with a vile, spitting oath, bade him be
silent, and then burst into tears. Feeling more shocked, unhappy and
miserable than he had ever felt before, he begged the girl to accept his
regrets and apologies—as well as his farewell—and to tell him if he could
in any way compensate her for the unintentional hurt he had somehow
inflicted.
On her sullen reply of “Argent comptant porte médecine,” Bertram dropped
a fifty rupee note into her lap and literally fled from the house. . . .
. . . Yes—a rotten night with a beastly anti-climax to the wonderful day
on which he had received . . . _he_, of all people in the world! . . .
had received orders to proceed to the Front. . . . Bertram Greene on
Active Service! How could he have the impudence—and it all began again
and was revolved once more in his weary mind. . . .
Dawn brought something of hope and a little peace to the perturbed soul
of the over-anxious boy.
CHAPTER IV
_Terra Marique Jactatus_
As he arrayed himself in all his war-paint, after his sleepless and
unhappy night, Bertram felt feverish, and afraid. His head throbbed
violently, and he had that distressing sensation of being remorselessly
urged on, fatedly fury-driven and compelled to do all things with
terrible haste and hurry.
Excitement, anxiety, sleeplessness and the conflicting emotions of hope
and fear, were taking their toll of the nervous energy and vitality of
the over-civilised youth.
He felt alarmed at his own alarm, and anxious about his own anxiety—and
feared that, at this rate, he would be worn out before he began, a
physical and mental wreck, fitter for a hospital-ship than a troop-ship,
before ever he started.
“The lad’s over-engined for his beam,” observed Murray to himself, as he
lay on his camp cot, drinking his _choti hazri_ tea, and watching
Bertram, who, with white face and trembling fingers, stood making more
haste than speed, as he fumbled with straps and buckles. “Take it easy,
my son,” he said kindly. “There’s tons of time, and then some. I’ll see
you’re not late. . . .”
“Thanks, Murray,” replied Bertram, “but—”
“Here—take those belts off at once,” interrupted the Adjutant. “Take the
lot off and lie down again—and smoke this cigarette. . . . _At once_,
d’ye hear?” and the tone was such that Bertram complied without comment.
He sank on to the camp-bed, swung up his long legs, with their heavy
boots, shorts, and puttees and puffed luxuriously. He had intended to be
a non-smoker as well as a teetotaller, now that he was “mobilised,” but
it would be as well to obey Murray now and begin his abstinence from
tobacco when he got on board. He lay and smoked obediently, and soon
felt, if not better, at least calmer, cooler and quieter.
“Blooming old tub won’t start till to-night—you see’f she does,” said
Murray. “Sort of thing we always do in the Army. . . . _Always_. . . .
Harry and hurry everybody on parade at seven, to catch a boat that
doesn’t profess to sail till two, and probably won’t actually do it till
midnight.”
“I should die of shame if I were late for my first parade,” said Bertram
anxiously.
“You’d die of the Colonel, if you didn’t of shame,” was the reply. . . .
“I’ll see you’re not late. You take things a bit easier, my son. Your
King and Country want you in East Africa, not in a lunatic asylum—”
“_Pappa_! _What part did you take in the Great War_?” squeaked a
falsetto voice from the door, and looking up, Bertram beheld Lieutenant
Bludyer, always merry and bright, arrayed in crimson, scarlet-frogged
pyjama coat, and pink pyjama trousers. On his feet were vermilion velvet
slippers.
“I’ll take a leading part in your dirty death,” said the Adjutant,
turning to the speaker, or squeaker.
“Thought this might be useful, Greene,” continued Bludyer in his natural
voice, as he handed Bertram a slab of thin khaki linen and a conical cap
of a kind of gilded corduroy. “Make yourself a regimental _puggri_ in
the day of battle. Put the cap on your nut and wind the turban over it.
. . . Bloke with a helmet and a white face hasn’t an earthly, advancing
with a line of Sepoys in _puggris_. The enemy give him their united
attention until he is outed. . . .”
“Oh, thanks, awfully, Bludyer,” began Bertram.
“So go dirty till your face is like Murray’s, grow a hoary, hairy beard,
an’ wear a turban on your fat head,” continued Bludyer. “Your orderly
could do it on for you, so that it wouldn’t all come down when you
waggled. . . .”
“Thanks, most awfully. It’s exceedingly kind of you, Bludyer,”
acknowledged Bertram, and proceeded to stuff the things into his
haversack.
“Wow! Wow!” ejaculated Bludyer. “Nice-mannered lad and well brought up,
ain’t he, Randolph Murray?” and seating himself on that officer’s bed, he
proceeded to use the tea-cosy as a foot-warmer, the morning being chilly.
The Adjutant arose and proceeded to dress.
“Devil admire me!” he suddenly shouted, pointing at Bertram. “Look at
that infernal lazy swine! Did you ever see anything like it, Bludyer?
Lying hogging there, lolling and loafing in bed, as if he had all day to
finish nothing in! . . . Here, get up, you idle hound, and earn your
living. Dress for parade, if you can do nothing else.”
And Bertram gathered that he might now get on with his preparations.
“Yes,” added Bludyer, “you really ought to get on with the war, Greene.
_Isn’t_ he a devil-may-care fellow, Murray? He don’t give a damn if it
snows,” and adding that it was his flute-night at the Mission, and he now
must go, the young gentleman remained seated where he was.
“You aren’t hurrying a bit, Greene,” he remarked, after eyeing Bertram
critically for a few minutes. “He won’t prosper and grow rich like that,
will he, Randolph Murray? That is not how the Virtuous Apprentice got on
so nicely, and married his master’s aunt. . . . No. . . . And Samuel
Smiles was never late for parade—of that I’m quite certain. No.
‘_Self_-help’ was _his_ motto, and the devil take the other fellow. . . .
Let me fasten that for you. This strap goes under not over. . . .” And,
with his experienced assistance, Bertram was soon ready, and feeling like
a trussed fowl and a Christmas-tree combined, by the time he had
festooned about him his sword, revolver, full ammunition-pouches,
field-glasses, water-bottle, belt-haversack, large haversack, map-case,
compass-pouch, whistle-lanyard, revolver-lanyard, rolled cape, and the
various belts, straps and braces connected with these articles.
By the time the last buckle was fastened, he longed to take the whole lot
off again for a few minutes, and have a really comfortable breathe. (But
he _did_ wish Miranda Walsingham could see him.)
* * * * *
In a corner of the parade-ground stood the Hundred, the selected draft
which was to proceed to Africa to fill the gaps that war had torn in the
ranks of the Hundred and Ninety-Eighth. On their flank the regimental
band was drawn up in readiness to play them to the docks. The men wore
khaki turbans, tunics, shorts, puttees and hob-nailed boots, and carried
only haversacks, water-bottles, bandoliers, rifles and bayonets. The
rest of their kit, each man’s done up in a neat bundle inside his
waterproof ground-sheet and striped cotton sleeping-_dhurrie_, had gone
on in bullock-carts to await them at the wharf.
Around the Hundred stood or squatted the remainder of the battalion, in
every kind and degree of dress and undress. Occasionally one of these
would arise and go unto his pal in the ranks, fall upon his neck, embrace
him once again, shake both his hands alternately, and then return to the
eligible site whence, squatting on his heels, he could feast his eyes
upon his _bhai_, his brother, his friend, so soon to be torn from him. . . .
As the officers approached, these spectators fell back. Bertram’s
heart beat so violently that he feared the others would hear it. Was he
going to have “palpitations” and faint, or throw a fit or something? He
was very white, and felt very ill. Was his ignorance and incompetence to
be exposed and manifested now? . . .
“Look fierce and take over charge, my son,” said the Adjutant, as the
small party of officers came in front of the draft.
“Company!” shouted Bertram, “Shun!”
That was all right. He had hit the note nicely, and his voice had fairly
boomed. He had heard that men judge a new officer by his voice, more
than anything.
The Hundred sprang to attention, and Bertram, accompanied by the Adjutant
and Macteith, walked slowly down the front rank and up the rear, doing
his best to look as though he were critically and carefully noting
certain points, and assuring himself that certain essentials were in
order. He was glad that he had not suddenly to answer such a question as
“_What_ exactly are you peering at and looking for?” He wished he had
sufficient Hindustani to ask a stern but not unkindly question here and
there, or to make an occasional comment in the manner of one from whom no
military thing is hid. He suddenly remembered that he knew the
Hindustani for “How old are you?” so he asked this question of a man
whose orange-coloured beard would obviously have been white but for henna
dye. Not in the least understanding the man’s reply, he remarked “H’m!”
in excellent imitation of the Colonel, and passed on.
“Not the absolute pick of the regiment, I should think, are they?” he
remarked to Murray, as they returned to the front of the company.
“They are not,” he said.
“Pretty old, some of them,” added Bertram, who was privately hoping that
he did not look such a fraudulent Ass as he felt.
Major Fordinghame strolled up and returned the salutes of the group of
officers.
“This experienced officer thinks the draft is not the pure cream of the
regiment, Major,” said Murray, indicating Bertram.
“Fancy that, now,” replied Major Fordinghame, and Bertram blushed hotly.
“I thought some of them seemed rather old, sir,” he said, “but—er—perhaps
old soldiers are better than young ones?”
“It’s a matter of taste—as the monkey said when he chewed his father’s
ear,” murmured Bludyer.
Silence fell upon the little group.
“And both have their draw-backs—as the monkey said when she pulled her
twins’ tails,” he added pensively.
Bertram wondered what he had better do next.
The Native Officer of the draft came hurrying up, and saluted. Another
Hindustani sentence floated into Bertram’s mind. “You are late, Jemadar
Sahib,” said he, severely.
Jemadar Hassan Ali poured forth a torrent of excuse or explanation which
Bertram could not follow.
“What do you do if a Havildar or Naik or Sepoy is late for parade?” he
asked, or attempted to ask, in slow and barbarous Hindustani.
Another torrent of verbiage, scarcely a word of which was intelligible to
him.
He put on a hard, cold and haughty look, or attempted to do so, and kept,
perforce, an eloquent but chilling silence. Murray and the Major
exchanged glances.
“Greene Sahib is _very_ particular and _very_ strict, Jemadar Sahib,”
said the Major. “You had better bear it in mind, and tell the men too.
He’ll stand no sort of nonsense from anybody. You’ll find him very kind
so long as he is satisfied, but if he isn’t—well!” and the Major shrugged
his shoulders expressively.
Bertram looked gratefully at the Major (for he understood “Englishman’s
Hindustani”), and as sternly as he could at the Jemadar, who saluted
again and retired.
The Colonel rode up, and the officers sprang to attention.
“Everything ready, sir,” said the Adjutant. “They can march off when you
like.”
“H’m!” said the Colonel, and stared at Bertram as though he honestly and
unaffectedly did wonder why God made such things. He then wheeled his
horse towards the waiting Hundred. “Men of the Hundred and
Ninety-Ninth,” said he in faultless Hindustani, “you are now going across
the Black Water to fight the enemies of the King Emperor, and of
yourselves. They would like to conquer your country and oppress you.
You go to fight for your own homes and children, as well as for your
Emperor. Bring honour to your regiment and yourselves. Show the
_Germanis_ and their _Hubshis _{50} what Indian Sepoys can do—both in
time of battle and in time of hunger, thirst, and hardship. Before God I
say I would give anything to come with you, but I have to do my duty
here—for the present. We may meet again in Africa. Good-bye. Good
luck. . . . Good-bye. . . .” The Jemadar called for three cheers for
the Colonel, and the Hundred lustily cried: “_’Eep_, _’Eep_, _’Oorayee_.”
The remainder of the regiment joined in, and then cheered the Hundred.
Meanwhile, the Colonel turned to Bertram.
“Good-by, young Greene. Good luck,” he said, and leaning from his horse,
wrung Bertram’s hand as though it had been that of his only son.
Similarly did the others, with minor differences.
“Well—it’s useless to weep these unavailing tears,” sobbed Bludyer.
“There’s an end to everything, as the monkey said when he seized the tip
of his mother’s nose. . . .”
“Farewell, my blue-nosed, golden-eyed, curly-eared Mother’s Darling,”
said Macteith.
“Good luck, sonny. Write and let me know how you get on,” said Murray.
“You’ll do. You’ve got the guts all right, and you’ll very soon get the
hang of things. . . .”
“March ’em off, now,” he added. “Chuck a chest, and don’t give a damn
for anybody,” and Bertram carefully collected his voice, swallowed a kind
of lump in his throat, bade his wildly beating heart be still, gave
thought to the drill-book, and roared:
“Company! . . . _’Shun_! . . . Slope _Arms_! . . . Form _fours_! . . .
_Right_! . . . Quick _march_!”—the band struck up—and they were off.
Yes, he, Bertram Greene, pale clerkly person, poet and æsthete, was
marching proudly, in full military attire, at the head of a hundred
fighting-men—marching to the inspiring strains of the regimental band, to
where the trooper waited on the tide! If his father could only see him!
He was happy as he had never been before in his life, and he was proud as
he never had been before. . . . If Miranda could only see him! He,
Bertram Greene, was actually marching to war, with sword on thigh, and
head held high, in sole command of a hundred trained fighting-men!
His heart beat very fast, but without pain now, and he was, for the
moment, free of his crushing sense of inadequacy, inexperience and
unworthiness. He was only conscious of a great pride, a great hope, and
a great determination to be worthy, so far as in him lay the power, of
his high fate. . . .
No man forgets his first march at the head of his own force, if he
forgets his first march in uniform. For Bertram this was both. It was
his first march in uniform, and he was in whole and sole control of this
party—like a Centurion of old tramping the Roman Road at the head of his
hundred Legionaries—and Bertram felt he would not forget it if he lived
till his years equalled the number of his men.
It was not a very long march, and it was certainly not a very picturesque
one—along the cobbled Dock Road, with its almost innumerable cotton-laden
bullock-carts—but Bertram trod on air through a golden dream city and was
exalted, brother to the Knights of Arthur who quested for the Grail and
went about to right the wrong and to succour the oppressed. . . .
Arrived at the dock-gates, he was met and guided aright, by a brassarded
myrmidon of the Embarkation Staff Officer, to where His Majesty’s
Transport _Elymas_ lay in her basin beside a vast shed-covered wharf.
Beneath this shed, Bertram halted his men, turned them into line, and
bade them pile arms, fall out, and sit them down in close proximity to
their rifles.
Leaving the Jemadar in charge, he then went up the gangway of the
_Elymas_ in search of the said Embarkation Staff Officer, who, he had
been told, would allot him and his men their quarters on the ship. As he
gazed around the deserted forward well-deck, he saw an officer, who wore
a lettered red band round his arm, hurrying towards him along the
promenade deck, his hands full of papers, a pencil in his mouth, and a
careworn, worried look upon his face.
“You Greene, by any chance?” he called, as he ran sideway down the narrow
ladder from the upper deck.
“Yes, sir,” replied Bertram, saluting as he perceived that the officer
was a captain. “Just arrived with a draft of a hundred men from the
Hundred and Ninety-Ninth,” he added proudly.
“Good dog,” was the reply, “keep the perishers out of it for a bit till
I’m ready. . . . Better come with me now though, and I’ll show you,
_one_, where they’re to put their rifles; _two_, where they’re to put
themselves; _three_, where they will do their beastly cooking; and
_four_, where you will doss down yourself. . . . Don’t let there be any
mistakes, because there are simply millions more coming,” and he led the
way to a companion hatch in the after well-deck, and clattered down a
ladder into the bowels of the ship, Bertram following him in his twists
and turns with a growing sense of bewilderment.
He was very glad to hear that he and his merry men were not to have the
ship to themselves, for there were a thousand and one points that he
would be very glad to be able to refer to the decision of Authority, or
the advice of Experience.
The Embarkation Officer, dripping and soaked and sodden with
perspiration, as was Bertram himself, wound his devious way, along narrow
passages, ladders and tunnels, to a kind of cage-like cloak-room fitted
with racks.
“Your men’ll come here in single file, by the way we have come,” said he,
“enter this armoury one by one, leave their rifles on these racks, and go
up that ladder to the deck above, and round to the ladder leading out on
the forward well-deck. You’ll have to explain it carefully, and shepherd
’m along too, or there’ll be a jam and loss of life and—worse—loss of
time. . . . In the early days we managed badly on one occasion and got a
crowd of Sikhs pushing against a crowd of Pathans. . . .” He then led
the disintegrating Bertram by devious paths to a dark oven-like and
smelly place (which Bertram mentally labelled “the horizontal section of
the fo’c’sle, three storeys down”) in which the Hundred were to live, or
to die—poor devils! There would hardly be standing room—and thence to
the scene of their culinary labours. Lastly, when the bewildered youth
was again feeling very ill, the Embarkation Officer retraced his steps,
showed him certain water-taps for the use of his men, and led the way up
and out to the blessed light of day, fresh air, and the comparative
coolness of the deck. “Your cabin’s along here,” said he, entering a
long corridor that debouched on to the well-deck. “Let’s see, Number 43,
I think. Yes. A two-berth cabin to yourself—and last trip we had three
generals in a one-berth cabin, four colonels in a bath at once, and five
common officers on top of one another in each chair at table. . . .
Fact—I assure you. . . . Go in and chuck away all that upholstery—you
can run about in your shirt-sleeves now, or naked if you like, so long as
you wear a helmet to show you are in uniform. . . . Bye-bye—be a good
boy,” and he bustled away.
Bertram thankfully took the Embarkation Officer’s advice, and cast off
all impedimenta until he was clad only in khaki shirt, shorts, puttees
and boots. He thought he could enter into the feelings of a butterfly as
it emerges from the constricting folds of its cocoon.
He sat down for a minute on the white bed prepared for his occupation.
The other was cumbered with his valise, sack, and strapped bundle, which
had come down on the first of the bullock-carts and been brought on board
at once. He looked round the well-appointed, spotless cabin, with its
white paint and mahogany fittings, electric fans and lights. That one
just beside his pillow would be jolly for reading in bed. Anyhow, he’d
have a comfortable and restful voyage. What a blessing that he had a
cabin to himself, and what a pity that the voyage took only about ten
days. . . . Would life on a troop-ship be a thing of disciplined
strenuousness, or would it be just a perfectly slack time for everybody?
. . . It should be easy for him to hide his ignorance while on
board—there couldn’t be very much in the way of drill. . . . How his
head throbbed, and how seedy and tired he felt! . . . He lay back on his
bed and then sprang up in alarm and horror at what he had done. A pretty
way to commence his Active Service!—and, putting on his heavy and
uncomfortable helmet, he hurried to the wharf.
Going down the gangway, he again encountered the Embarkation Officer.
“Better let your men file on board with their rifles first, and then off
again for their kits and bedding, and then back again to the quarters I
showed you. Having pegged out their claims there, and each man hung his
traps on the peg above his sleeping-mat, they can go up on the after
well-deck and absolutely nowhere else. See? And no man to leave the
ship again, on any pretence whatever. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Bertram, and privately wondered if he would even find
his way again to that cage-like cloak-room in the hold, and that
“horizontal section of the fo’c’sle three storeys down.”
But he _must_ do this, his very first job, absolutely correctly, and
without any bungling and footling. He must imagine that he was going in
for an examination again—an examination this time in quite a new subject,
“The art of getting men on board a ship, bedding them down, each with his
own bundle of kit, in one place, and storing their rifles in another,
without confusion or loss of time.” _Quite_ a new subject, and one in
which previous studies, Classics, Literature, Philosophy, Art, were not
going to be of any great value.
Perhaps it would be as well to take the Jemadar, Havildars and Naiks on a
personally conducted tour to the armoury, quarters, cooking-places and
taps, and explain the _modus operandi_ to them as well as he could. One
can do a good deal to eke out a scanty knowledge of the vernacular by
means of signs and wonders—though sometimes one makes the signs and the
other person wonders. . . .
Returning to the oven-like shed, resonant with the piercing howls of
_byle-ghari-wallas_, {54} coolies, Lascars and overseers; the racking
rattle and clang and clatter of chains, cranes, derricks and
donkey-engines; the crashing of iron-bound wheels over cobble-stones, and
the general pandemonium of a busy wharf, he beckoned the Jemadar to him
and made him understand that he wanted a couple of Havildars and four
Naiks to accompany him on board.
Suddenly he had a bright idea. (Good old drill-book and retentive memory
of things read, heard, or seen!) . . . “Why have you set no sentry over
the arms, Jemadar Sahib? It should not be necessary for me to have to
give the order,” he said as well as he could in his halting Hindustani.
The Jemadar looked annoyed—and distinctly felt as he looked. Half the
men had heard the reproof. He, an old soldier of fifteen years’ service,
to be set right by a child like this! And the annoying part of it was
that the amateur was right! Of course he should have put a sentry over
the arms. It was probably the first time he had omitted to do so, when
necessary, since he had first held authority . . . and he raged inwardly.
There are few things that annoy an Indian more than to be “told off”
before subordinates, particularly when he is obviously in the wrong. Was
this youthful Greene Sahib a person of more knowledge and experience than
had been reported by the Adjutant’s Office _babu_? The _babu_ had
certainly described him as one whom the other officers laughed at for his
ignorance and inexperience. Had not the worthy Chatterji Chuckerbutti
related in detail how Macteith Sahib had called upon his gods and feigned
great sickness after offensively examining Greene Sahib through his
field-glasses? Strange and unfathomable are the ways of Sahibs, and
perhaps the true inwardness of the incident had been quite otherwise? It
might have been an honorific ceremony, in fact, and Macteith Sahib might
have feigned sickness at his own unworthiness, according to etiquette?
. . . After all, the military salute itself is only a motion simulating
the shading of one’s eyes from the effulgent glory of the person one
salutes; and the Oriental bowing and touching the forehead is only a
motion simulating taking up dust and putting it on one’s head. . . .
Yes—the _babu_ may have been wrong, and Macteith Sahib may really have
been acclaiming Greene Sahib his superior, and declaring his own
miserable unworthiness. . . . One never knew with Sahibs. Their minds
are unreadable, and one can never get at what they are thinking, or grasp
their point of view. One could only rest assured that there is always
method in their madness—that they are clever as devils, brave as lions,
and—averse from giving commissions as lieutenants, captains, majors, and
colonels to Indian Native Officers. . .
“Get a move on, Jemadar Sahib,” said the voice of Greene Sahib curtly, in
English, and the Jemadar bustled off to set the sentry and call the
Havildars and Naiks—rage in his heart. . . .
More easily than he had expected, Bertram found his way, at the head of
the party, to the required places, and showed the Jemadar and
Non-commissioned Officers how the men should come and depart, in such
manner as to avoid hindering each other and to obviate the possibility of
a jam.
The Jemadar began to ask questions, and Bertram began to dislike the
Jemadar. He was a talker, and appeared to be what schoolboys call
“tricky.” He knew that Bertram had very little Hindustani, and seemed
anxious to increase the obviousness of the fact.
Bertram felt unhappy and uncomfortable. He wished to be perfectly
courteous to him as a Native Officer, but it would not do to let the man
mistake politeness for weakness, and inexperience for inefficiency. . . .
Was there a faint gleam of a grin on the fellow’s face as he said: “I do
not understand,” at the end of Bertram’s attempt at explanation?
“Do _you_ understand?” the latter said, suddenly, turning to the senior
Havildar, the man who had turned out the Guard for him on his first
approach to the Lines on that recent day that seemed so long ago.
“_Han_, {56a} _Sahib_,” replied the man instantly and readily.
“_Béshak_!” {56b}
“Then you’d better explain to the Jemadar Sahib, who does not,” said
Bertram with a click of his jaw, as he turned to depart.
The Jemadar hastened to explain that he _fully_ understood, as Bertram
strode off. Apparently complete apprehension had come as soon as he
realised that his dullness was to be enlightened by the explanation of
the quicker-witted Havildar. He gave that innocent and unfortunate man a
look of bitter hatred, and, as he followed Bertram, he ground his teeth.
Havildar Afzul Khan Ishak should live to learn the extreme unwisdom of
understanding things that Jemadar Hassan Ali professed not to understand.
As for Second-Lieutenant Greene—perhaps he should live to learn the
unwisdom of quarrelling with an experienced Native Officer who was the
sole channel of communication between that stranger and the Draft at
whose head he had been placed by a misguided Sircar. . . .
Returning to the wharf, and conscious that he had a splitting head, a
sticky mouth, shaking limbs, sore throat and husky voice, Bertram roared
orders to the squatting Sepoys, who sprang up, fell in, unpiled arms, and
marched in file up the gangway and down into the bowels of the ship,
shepherded and directed by the Non-commissioned Officers whom he had
posted at various strategic points. All went well, and, an hour later,
his first job was successfully accomplished. His men were on board and
“shaking down” in their new quarters. He was free to retire to his
cabin, bathe his throbbing head, and lie down for an hour or so.
* * * * *
At about midday he arose refreshed, and went on deck, with the delightful
feeling that, his own labours of the moment accomplished, he could look
on at the accomplishment of those of others. Excellent! . . . And for
many days to come he would be free from responsibility and anxiety, he
would have a time of rest, recuperation, and fruitful thought and study.
. . . Throughout the morning detachments of Sepoys of the Indian Army
and Imperial Service Troops continued to arrive at the wharf and to
embark. Bertram was much interested in a double-company of Gurkhas under
a Gurkha Subedar, their yellowish Mongolian faces eloquent of
determination, grit, and hardiness.
They contrasted strongly with a company of tall, hairy Sikhs, almost
twice their size, man for man, but with evidences of more enthusiasm than
discipline in their bearing. Another interesting unit was a band of
warriors of very mixed nationality, under a huge Jemadar who looked a
picture of fat contentment, his face knowing no other expression than an
all-embracing smile. It was whispered later that this unit saw
breech-loading rifles for the first time, on board the _Elymas_, having
been more familiar, hitherto, with jezails, jingals, match-locks,
flintlocks, and blunderbusses. Probably a gross exaggeration, or an
invention of Lieutenant Stanner, of the Hundred and Ninety-Eighth, who
gave them the name of “The Mixed Pickles.”
All three of these detachments were Imperial Service Troops—that is to
say, were in the service of various Indian Rajahs—but were of very
different value, both the Gurkhas and the Sikhs being as good material as
could be found among native troops anywhere in the world.
To Bertram, the picture of the little Gurkha Subedar, the tall Sikh
Subedar, and the burly Jemadar of the Mixed Pickles, was a very
interesting one, as the three stood together on the wharf, eyeing each
other like three strange dogs of totally different breeds—say, a fighting
terrier, a wolf-hound and a mastiff.
With a snap and a slick, and a smart “_One two_,” a company of British
Infantry arrived and embarked. Beside the Mixed Pickles they were as a
Navy motor-launch beside a native bunderboat. At them they smiled
amusedly, at the Sikhs they stared, and at the Gurkhas they grinned
appreciatively.
The news having spread that the _Elymas_ would not start until the
morrow, various visitors came on board, in search of friends whom they
knew to be sailing by her. Captain Stott, R.A.M.C., came over from the
_Madras_ hospital ship, in search of Colonel Haldon. Murray and Macteith
came down to see Stanner, of the Hundred and Ninety-Eighth, and one
Terence Brannigan, of the Baluchis. . . .
“Who’s the chap on your right, Colonel?” asked Captain Stott, of gentle
and kindly old Colonel Haldon at dinner that evening. “Rather an unusual
face to be ‘in’ khaki—or one would have said so before the war,” and he
indicated Bertram.
“Dunno,” was the reply. “Stranger to me. Nice-lookin’ boy. . . . Looks
a wee-trifle more like a chaplain than a butcher, as you say,” though
Captain Stott had not said that at all.
Seeing Bertram talking to Murray and Macteith after dinner, Captain Stott
asked the latter who he was, for physiognomy and character-study were a
hobby of his.
Macteith told him what he knew, and added: “And they’re sending _that_
half-baked milksop to British East” (and implied: “While _I_, Lieutenant
and Quartermaster Reginald Macteith, remain to kick my heels at the
depot.”)
Next day the _Elymas_ began her voyage, a period of delightful _dolce far
niente_ that passed like a dream, until one wonderful evening, the
palm-clad shores of Africa “arose from out of the azure sea,” and, with a
great thrill of excitement, hope, anxiety and fear Bertram gazed upon the
beautiful scene, as the _Elymas_ threaded the lovely Kilindini Creek
which divides the Island of Mombasa from the mainland.
CHAPTER V
_Mrs. Stayne-Brooker_
And on those same palm-clad shores that arose from out the azure sea, an
unhappy woman had been expiating, by long years of bitter suffering, in
tears and shame and humiliation, the madness of a moment. . . .
Mrs. Stayne-Brooker’s life in German East Africa was, if possible less
happy than her life in the British colony. The men she met in Nairobi,
Mombasa, Zanzibar, Witu or Lamu, though by no means all gentlemen, all
treated her as a gentlewoman; while the men she met in Dar-es-Salaam,
Tanga, Tabora, Lindi or Bukoba, whether “gentlemen” or otherwise, did
not. In British East Africa her husband was treated by planters,
Government officials, sportsmen, and Army men, as the popular and cheery
old Charlie Stayne-Brooker—a good man in the club-bar, card-room and
billiard-room, on the racecourse, at the tent club, and on shooting
trips. With several Assistant District Commissioners and officers of the
King’s African Rifles he was very intimate. In German East Africa he was
treated differently—in a way difficult to define. It was as though he
were a person of importance, but _déclassé_ and contemptible, and this
impression she gained in spite of her knowing no German (a condition of
ignorance upon which her husband insisted). The average German official
and officer, whether of the exiled Junker class, or of plebeian origin,
she loathed—partly because they seemed to consider her “fair game,” and
made love to her, in more or less broken English, without shame or
cessation. Nor did it make life easier for the poor lady that her
husband appeared to take delight in the fact. She wondered whether this
was due to pride in seeing a possession of his coveted by his
“high-well-born,” and other, compatriots, or to a desire to keep ever
before her eyes a realisation of what her fate would be if he cast her
off, or she ran away from him.
Worst of all was life in the isolated lonely house on his coffee and
rubber plantation, where for months on end she would never see a white
face but his, and for weeks on end, when he was away on his mysterious
affairs, no white face at all. . . . And at the bottom of his compound
were _bandas_, grass huts, in an enclosure, wherein dwelt native women.
. . .
One night, in the year 1914, she sat alone in the silent lonely house,
thinking of her daughter Eva at Cheltenham, of her happy, if hapless,
girlhood in her father’s house, of her brief married life with an
honourable English gentleman (oh, the contrast!), and wondering how much
longer she could bear her punishment. . . Suddenly and noiselessly
appeared in the verandah her husband’s chief factotum, head house-boy,
and familiar, one Murad, an Arab-Swahili, whom she feared and detested.
“_Bwana_ coming,” said he shortly, and as noiselessly disappeared.
Going out on to the verandah, she saw her husband and a few “boys”
(gun-bearers, porters, and servants) coming through the garden. It was
seven weeks since she had seen or heard anything of him.
“Pack,” was his greeting, “at once. You start on _safari_ to the railway
as soon as possible, or sooner. You are going to Mombasa. I have cabled
to Eva to come out by the next boat. . . . P. and O. to Aden, and thence
to Mombasa. . . . She should be here in three weeks or so . . .” and he
went off to bath and change. At dinner he informed her that she was to
settle at Mombasa with Eva, make as many new friends as possible,
entertain, and generally be the most English of English matrons with the
most English of English daughters—the latter fresh from boarding-school
in England. . . . Dear old Charlie Stayne-Brooker, it was to be known,
had gone to Bukoba, to the wonderful sleeping-sickness hospital, for
diagnosis of an illness. Nothing serious, really, of course—but one
couldn’t be too careful when one had trouble with the glands of the neck,
and certain other symptoms, after spending some time in that beastly
tsetse-fly country. . . . She was to give the impression that he had
made light of it, and quite “taken her in”—wouldn’t dream of allowing his
wife and daughter to go up there. People were to form the opinion that
poor old Charlie might be in a worse way than his wife imagined.
_And_ if such a thing as war broke out; _if_ such a thing came to pass,
mark you; her house in Mombasa was to be a perfect Home-from-Home for the
officers of the British Expeditionary Force which would undoubtedly be
dispatched from India. It would almost certainly be the Nth Division
from Bombay—so she need not anticipate the pleasure of receiving her late
husband and his friends. . . . Further instructions she would receive in
the event of war, but meanwhile, and all the time, her business was to
demonstrate the utter Englishness of the Stayne-Brooker family, and to
keep her eyes and ears open. What General or Staff-Officer will not
“talk” to a beautiful woman—of the right sort? Eh? Ha-Ha! That was her
business in Mombasa now—_and ten times more so if war broke out_—to be a
beautiful woman—of the right sort, tremendously popular with the people
who know things and do things. Moreover, Eva, her daughter, was to be
trained right sedulously to be a beautiful woman—of the right sort. . . .
Staff-officers in her pocket. Eh? Ha-Ha! . . . And, sick at heart,
loving her daughter, loathing her husband, and loathing the unspeakable
rôle he would force upon her, Mrs. Stayne-Brooker travelled to Mombasa,
met her daughter with mingled joy and terror, happiness and apprehensive
misery, and endeavoured to serve two masters—her conscience and her
husband.
CHAPTER VI
_Mombasa_
“If you’d like to go ashore and have a look at Mombasa after tiffin, Mr.
Greene,” said the fourth officer of the _Elymas_ to Bertram, the next
morning, as he leant against the rail and gazed at the wonderful
palm-forest of the African shore, “some of us are going for a row—to
stretch our muscles. We could drop you at the Kilindini _bunder_.”
“Many thanks,” replied Bertram. “I shall be very much obliged,” and he
smiled his very attractive and pleasant smile.
This was a welcome offer, for, privately, he hated being taken ashore
from a ship by natives of the harbour in which the ship lay. One never
knew exactly what to pay the wretches. If one asked what the fare was,
they always named some absurd amount, and if one used one’s common sense
and gave them what seemed a reasonable sum they were inevitably hurt,
shocked, disappointed in one, indignantly broken-hearted, and invariably
waxed clamorous, protestful, demanding more. It had been the same at
Malta, Port Said and Aden on his way out to India. In Bombay harbour he
had once gone for a morning sail in a bunderboat, and on their return,
the captain of the crew of three had demanded fifteen rupees for a
two-hour sail. A pound for two hours in a cranky sailing-boat!—and the
scoundrels had followed him up the steps clamouring vociferously, until a
native policeman had fallen upon them with blows and curses. . . . How
he wished he was of those men who can give such people their due in such
a manner that they receive it in respectful silence, with apparent
contentment, if not gratitude. Something in the eye and the set of the
jaw, evidently—and so was glad of the fourth officer’s kind suggestion.
He would have been still more glad had he heard the fourth officer
announce, at table, to his colleagues: “I offered to drop that chap,
Lieutenant Greene, at Kilindini this afternoon, when we go for our grind.
He can take the tiller-ropes. . . . I like him the best of the lot—no
blooming swank and side about him.”
“Yes,” agreed the “wireless” operator, “he doesn’t talk to you as though
he owned the earth, but was really quite pleased to let you stand on it
for a bit. . . . I reckon he’ll do all right, though, when he
gets-down-to-it with the Huns—if he doesn’t get done in. . . .”
And so it came to pass that Bertram was taken ashore that afternoon by
some half-dozen officers and officials (including the doctor, the purser,
and the Marconi operator) of the _Elymas_—worthy representatives of that
ill-paid, little-considered service, that most glorious and
beyond-praise, magnificent service, the British Mercantile Marine—and,
landing in state upon the soil of the Dark Continent, knew “the pleasure
that touches the souls of men landing on strange shores.”
Arrived at the top of the stone steps of the Kilindini quay, Bertram
encountered Africa in the appropriately representative person of a vast
negro gentleman, who wore a red fez cap (or tarboosh), a very long white
calico night-dress and an all-embracing smile.
“_Jambo_!” quoth the huge Ethiopian, and further stretched his lips an
inch nearer to his ears on either side.
Not being aware that the African “_Jambo_” is equivalent to the Indian
“_Salaam_,” and means “Greeting and Good Health,” or words to that
effect, Bertram did not counter with a return “_Jambo_,” but nodded
pleasantly and said: “Er—good afternoon.”
Whereupon the ebon one remarked: “Oh, my God, sah, ole chap, thank you,”
to show, in the first place, that he quite realised the situation (to
wit, Bertram’s excusable ignorance of Swahili-Arabic), and that he was
himself, fortunately, a fluent English scholar. Bertram stared in
amazement at the pleasant-faced, friendly-looking giant.
“_Bwana_ will wanting servant, ole chap,” continued the negro, “don’t it?
I am best servant for _Bwana_. Speaking English like hell, sah, please.
Waiting here for _Bwana_ before long time to come. Good afternoon, thank
you, please, Master, by damn, ole chap. Also bringing letter for
_Bwana_. . . . You read, thanks awfully, your mos’ obedient servant by
damn, oh, God, thank you, sah,” and produced a filthy envelope from some
inner pocket of the aforementioned night-dress, which, innocent of
buttons or trimming, revealed his tremendous bare chest.
Bertram felt uncomfortable, and, for a moment, again wished that he was
one of those men-with-an-eye-and-a-jaw who could give a glare, a grunt,
and a jerk of the head which would cause the most importunate native to
fade unobtrusively away.
On the one hand, he knew it would be folly to engage as a servant the
first wandering scoundrel who accosted him and suggested that he should
do so; while, on the other, he distinctly liked this man’s cheery,
smiling face, he realised that servants would probably be at a decided
premium, and he recognised the extreme desirability of having a servant,
if have one he must, who spoke English, however weird, and understood it
when spoken. Should he engage the man then and there? Would he, by so
doing, show himself a man of quick decision and prompt action—one of
those forceful, incisive men he so admired? Or would he merely be acting
foolishly and prematurely, merely exhibiting himself as a rash and
unbalanced young ass? Anyhow, he would read the “chits” which the filthy
envelope presumably contained. If these were satisfactory, he would tell
the man that the matter was under consideration, and that he might look
out for him again and hear his decision.
As Bertram surmised, the envelope contained the man’s “chits,” or
testimonials. The first stated that Ali Sloper, the bearer, had been on
_safari_ with the writer, and had proved to be a good plain cook, a
reliable and courageous gun-carrier, a good shot, and an honest, willing
worker. The second was written by a woman whose house-boy Ali Suleiman
had been for two years in Mombasa, and who stated that she had had worse
ones. The third and last was written at the Nairobi Club by a
globe-trotting Englishman named Stayne-Brooker, who had employed the man
as personal “boy” and headman of porters, on a protracted lion-shooting
trip across the Athi and Kapiti Plains and found him intelligent, keen,
cheery, and staunch. (_Where had he heard the name Stayne-Brooker
before—or had he dreamed it as a child_?) Certainly this fellow was
well-recommended, and appeared to be just the man to take as one’s
personal servant on active service. But _did_ one take a servant on
active service? One could not stir, or exist, without one in India, and
officers took syces and servants with them on frontier campaigns—but
Africa is not India. . . . However, he could soon settle that point by
asking.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, returning the chits. “I shall be coming
ashore again to-morrow. . . . How much pay do you want?”
“Oh, sah! Master not mentioning it!” was the reply of this remarkable
person. “Oh, nothing, nothing, sah! _Bwana_ offering me forty rupees a
mensem, I say ‘No, sah! Too much.’ . . . Master not mention it.”
“It might not be half a bad idea to mention it, y’know,” said Bertram,
smiling and turning to move on.
“Oh, God, sah, thank you, please,” replied Ali Sloper, _alias_ Ali
Suleiman. “I do not wanting forty. I am accepting thirty rupees, sah,
and am now your mos’ obedient servant by damn from the beginning for
ever. And when _Bwana_, loving me still more, can pay more, ole chap.
God bless my thank-you soul”—and “fell in” behind Bertram as though
prepared to follow him thence to the end of the world or beyond.
Bertram gazed around, and found that he was in a vast yard, two sides of
which were occupied by the largest corrugated-iron sheds he had ever seen
in his life. One of these appeared to be the Customs shed, and into
another a railway wandered. Between two of them, great gates let a white
sandy road escape into the Unknown. On the stone quay the heat, shut in
and radiated by towering iron sheds, was the greatest he had ever
experienced, and he gasped for breath and trickled with perspiration. He
devoutly hoped that this was not a fair sample of Africa’s normal
temperature. Doubtless it would be cooler away from the quay, which,
with the iron sheds, seemed to form a Titanic oven for the quick and
thorough baking of human beings. It being Sunday afternoon, there were
but few such, and those few appeared to be thoroughly enjoying the
roasting process, if one might judge from their grinning faces and happy
laughter. They were all Africans, and, for the most part, clad in long,
clean night-dresses and fez caps. Evidently Ali Sloper or Suleiman was
dressed in the height of local fashion. On a bench, by the door of the
Customs shed, lounged some big negroes in dark blue tunics and shorts,
with blue puttees between bare knees and bare feet. Their tall
tarbooshes made them look even taller than they were, and the big brass
plates on their belt-buckles shone like gold. Bertram wondered whether
the Germans had just such brawny giants in their Imperial African Rifles,
and tried to imagine himself defeating one of them in single combat. The
effort was a failure.
At the gates was a very different type of person, smarter, quicker, more
active and intelligent-looking, a Sikh Sepoy of the local military
police. The man sprang to attention and saluted with a soldierly
promptness and smartness that were a pleasure to behold.
Outside the dock, the heat was not quite so intense, but the white sandy
road, running between high grass and palms, also ran uphill, and, as the
perspiration ran down his face, Bertram wished he might discover the
vilest, most ramshackle and moth-eaten _tikka-ghari_ that ever disgraced
the streets of Bombay. That the hope was vain he knew, and that in all
the island of Mombasa there is no single beast of burden, thanks to the
tsetse fly, whose sting is death to them. . . . And the Mombasa Club,
the Fort, and European quarter were at the opposite side of the island,
four miles away, according to report. Where were these trolley-trams of
which he had heard? If he had to walk much farther up this hill, his
uniform would look as though he had swum ashore in it.
“Master buck up like hell, ole chap, thank you,” boomed a voice behind.
“Trolley as nearer as be damned please. Niggers make push by Jove to
Club, thank God,” and turning, Bertram beheld the smiling Ali beaming
down upon him as he strolled immediately behind him.
“Go away, you ass,” replied the hot and irritated Bertram, only to
receive an even broader smile and the assurance that his faithful old
servant would never desert him—not after having been his devoted slave
since so long a time ago before and for ever more after also. And a
minute or two later the weary warfarer came in sight of a very narrow,
single tram-line, beside the road. Where this abruptly ended stood a
couple of strange vehicles, like small, low railway-trolleys, with wheels
the size of dinner-plates. On each trolley was a seat of sufficient
length to accommodate two people, and above the bench was a canvas roof
or shade, supported by iron rods. From a neighbouring bench sprang four
men, also clad in night-dresses and fez caps, who, with strange howls and
gesticulations, bore down upon the approaching European.
“_Hapa_, {66} _Bwana_!” they yelled. “_Trolley hapa_,” and, for a
moment, Bertram thought they would actually seize him and struggle for
possession of his body. He determined that if one of the shrieking
fiends laid a hand upon him, he would smite him with what violence he
might. The heat was certainly affecting his temper. He wondered what it
would feel like to strike a man—a thing he had never done in his life.
But, on reaching him, the men merely pointed to their respective trolleys
and skipped back to them, still pointing, and apparently calling Heaven
to witness their subtle excellences and charms.
As Bertram was about to step on to the foremost trolley, the men in
charge of the other sprang forward with yelps of anguish, only to receive
cause for louder yelps of deeper anguish at the hands of Ali, who, with
blows and buffets, drove them before him. Bertram wondered why the pair
of them, each as big as their assailant, should flee before him thus.
Was it by reason of Ali’s greater moral force, juster cause, superior
social standing as the follower of a white man, or merely the fact that
he took it upon him to be the aggressor. Probably the last.
Anyhow—thank Heaven for the gloriously cool and refreshing breeze, caused
by the rapid rush of the trolley through the heavy air, as the
trolley-“boys” ran it down the decline from the hill-top whence they had
started.
As soon as the trolley had gained sufficient momentum, they leapt on to
the back of the vehicle, and there clung until it began to slow down
again. Up-hill they slowly pushed with terrific grunts, on the level
they maintained a good speed, and down-hill the thing rattled, bumped and
bounded at a terrific pace, the while Bertram wondered how long it would
keep the rails, and precisely what would happen if it jumped them. Had
he but known it, there was a foot-brake beneath the seat, which he should
have used when going down-hill. ’Twas not for the two specimens of
Afric’s ebon sons, who perched and clung behind him, to draw his
attention to it. Was he not a _Bwana_, a white man, and therefore one
who knew all things? And if he wanted to break his neck had he not a
right so to do? And if they, too, should be involved in the mighty
smash, would not that fact prove quite conclusively that it was their
_kismet_ to be involved in the smash, and therefore inevitable? Who
shall avoid his fate? . . . And so, in blissful ignorance, Bertram
swooped down-hill in joyous, mad career. He wished the pace were slower
at times, for everything was new and strange and most interesting.
Native huts, such as he had seen in pictures (labelled “kaffir-kraals”)
in his early geography book, alternated with official-looking buildings,
patches of jungle; gardens of custard-apple, mango, paw-paw, banana, and
papai trees; neat and clean police-posts, bungalows, cultivated fields,
dense woods and occasional mosques, Arab houses, go-downs, {67} temples,
and native infantry “lines.”
On the dazzlingly white road (which is made of coral and nothing else)
were few people. An occasional Indian Sepoy, a British soldier, an
_askari_ of the King’s African Rifles, an official _peon_ with a
belt-plate as big as a saucer (and bearing some such legend as _Harbour
Police_ or _Civil Hospital_), a tall Swahili in the inevitable long
night-dress and tarboosh, or a beautifully worked skull cap, a file of
native women clad each in a single garment of figured cotton which
extended from arm-pit to ankle, leaving the arms and shoulders bare. The
hairdressing of these ladies interested Bertram, for each head displayed
not one, but a dozen, partings, running from the forehead to the neck,
and suggesting the seams on a football. At the end of each parting was a
brief pigtail bound with wire. Bertram wondered why these women always
walked one behind the other in single file, and decided that it was an
inherited and unconscious instinct implanted by a few thousand years of
use of narrow jungle-paths from which they dared not stray as the armed
men-folk did. . . .
After half an hour or so of travelling this thrillingly interesting road,
Bertram perceived that they were drawing near to the busy haunts of men.
From a church, a congregation of Goanese or else African-Portuguese was
pouring. The scene was a very Indian one—the women, with their dusky
faces and long muslin veils worn _sari_-fashion over their European
dresses of cotton or satin; the men, with their rusty black suits or
cotton coats and trousers and European hats or solar _topis_. One very
venerable gentleman, whose ancestors certainly numbered more Africans
than Portuguese, wore a golfing suit (complete, except for the
stockings), huge hob-nailed boots, and an over-small straw-yard with a
gay ribbon. A fine upstanding specimen of the race, obviously the idol
of his young wife, who walked beside him with her adoring gaze fixed upon
his shining face, began well with an authentic silk hat, continued
excellently with a swallow-tailed morning-coat, white waistcoat, high
collar and black satin tie, but fell away from these high achievements
with a pair of tight short flannel tennis-trousers, grey Army socks, and
white canvas shoes.
“An idol with feet of pipe-clay,” smiled Bertram to himself, as his
chariot drove heavily through the throng, and his charioteers howled
“_Semeele_! _Semeele_!” at the tops of their voices.
Soon the tram-line branched and bifurcated, and tributary lines joined it
from garden-enclosed bungalows and side turnings. Later he discovered
that every private house has its own private tram-line running from its
front door down its drive out to the main line in the street, and that,
in Mombasa, one keeps one’s own trolley for use on the public line, as
elsewhere one keeps one’s own carriage or motor-car.
On, past the Grand Hotel, a stucco building of two storeys, went the
rumbling, rattling vehicle, past a fine public garden and blindingly
white stucco houses that lined the blindingly white coral road, across a
public square adorned with flowering shrubs and trees, to where arose a
vast grey pile, the ancient blood-drenched Portuguese fort, and a
narrow-streeted, whitewashed town of tall houses and low shops began.
Here the trolley-boys halted, and Bertram found himself at the entrance
of the garden of the Mombasa Club, which nestles in the shadow of its
mighty neighbour, the Fort—where once resided the Portuguese Governor and
the garrison that defied the Arab and kept “the Island of Blood” for
Portugal, and where now reside the Prison Governor and the convicts that
include the Arab, and keep the public gardens for the public.
Boldly entering the Club, Bertram left his card on the Secretary and
Members (otherwise stuck it on a green-baize board devoted to that
purpose), and commenced a tour of inspection of the almost empty
building. Evidently Society did not focus itself until the cool of the
evening, in Africa as in India, and evidently this club very closely
resembled a thousand others across the Indian Ocean from Bombay to Hong
Kong, where the Briton congregates in exile. The only difference between
this and any “station” club in India appeared to be in the facts that the
servants were negroes and the trophies on the walls were different and
finer. Magnificent horns, such as India does not produce, alternated
with heads of lion and other feral beasts. Later Bertram discovered
another difference in that the cheery and hospitable denizens of the
Mombasa Club were, on the whole, a thirstier race than those of the
average Indian club, and prone to expect and desire an equal thirst in
one their guest. He decided that it was merely a matter of climate—a
question of greater humidity.
Emerging from an airy and spacious upstairs bar-room on to a vast
verandah, his breath was taken away by the beauty of the scene that met
his eye, a scene whose charm lay chiefly in its colouring, in the
wonderful sapphire blue of the strip of sea that lay between the low
cliff, on which the club was built, and the bold headland of the opposite
shore of the mainland, the vivid emerald green of the cocoa-palms that
clothed that same headland, the golden clouds, the snowy white-horses
into which the wind (which is always found in this spot and nowhere else
in Mombasa) whipped the wavelets of the tide-rip, the mauve-grey
distances of the Indian Ocean, with its wine-dark cloud-shadows, the
brown-grey of the hoary fort (built entirely of coral), the rich red of
tiled roofs, the vivid splashes of red, orange, yellow and purple from
flowering vine and tree and shrub—a wonderful colour-scheme enhanced and
intensified by the dazzling brightness of the sun and the crystal
clearness of the limpid, humid air. . . . And in such surroundings Man
had earned the title of “The Island of Blood” for the beautiful
place—and, once again, as in those barbarous far-off days of Arab and
Portuguese, the shedding of blood was the burden of his song and the high
end and aim of his existence. . . . Bertram sank into a long chair, put
his feet up on the mahogany leg-rests, and slaked the colour-thirst of
his æsthetic soul with quiet, joyous thankfulness. . . . Beautiful! . . .
What would his father say when he knew that his son was at the Front? . . .
What was Miranda doing? Nursing, probably. . . . What would _she_ say
when she knew that he was at the Front? . . . Dear old Miranda. . . .
Where had he heard the name, _Stayne-Brooker_, before? _Had_ he dreamed
it in a nightmare as a child—or had he heard it mentioned in hushed
accents of grief and horror by the “grown-ups” at Leighcombe Priory? . . .
Some newspaper case perhaps. . . . He had certainly heard it before.
. . . He closed his eyes. . . .
A woman strolled by with a selection of magazines in her hand, and took a
chair that commanded a view of his. Presently she noticed him. . . . A
new-comer evidently, or she would have seen him before. . . . What an
exceedingly nice face he had—refined, delicate. . . . Involuntarily she
contrasted it with the face of the evil and sensual satyr to whom she was
married. . . . She would like to talk to him. . . .
Bertram opened his eyes, and Mrs. Stayne-Brooker became absorbed in the
pages of her magazine. . . .
What a beautiful face she had, and _how_ sad and weary she looked . . .
drawn and worried and anxious. . . . Had she perhaps a beloved husband
in the fighting-line somewhere? He would like to talk to her—she looked
so kind and so unhappy. . . . A girl, whose face he did not see, came
and called her away. . .
CHAPTER VII
_The Mombasa Club_
As Bertram lay drinking in the beauty of the scene, the Club began to
fill, and more particularly that part of it devoted to the dispensation
and consumption of assorted alcoholic beverages. Almost everybody was in
uniform, the majority in that of the Indian Army (as there was a large
base camp of the Indian Expeditionary Force at Kilindini), and the
remainder in those of British regiments, the Navy, the Royal Indian
Marine, the Royal Engineers, the Royal Army Medical Corps, Artillery,
local Volunteer Corps, and the “Legion of Frontiersmen.” A few ladies
adorned the lawn and verandahs. Two large and weather-beaten but
unascetic-looking men of middle age sat them down in chairs which stood
near to that of Bertram. They were clad in khaki tunics, shorts and
puttees, and bore the legend “C.C.” in letters of brass on each
shoulder-strap.
“Hullo!” said the taller of them to Bertram, who was wondering what
“C.C.” might mean. “Just come ashore from the _Elymas_? Have a drink?”
“Yes,” replied he; “just landed. . . . Thanks—may I have a lime-squash?”
“What the devil’s that?” asked the other, and both men regarded him
seriously and with a kind of shocked interest. “Never heard of it.”
“Don’t think they keep it here,” put in the shorter of the two men. “How
d’you make it?”
“Lemon-juice, soda-water, and sugar,” replied Bertram, and felt that he
was blushing in a childish and absurd manner.
Both men shook their heads, more in sorrow than in anger. They looked at
each other, as might two physicians at the bedside of one whose folly has
brought him to a parlous pass.
“Quite new to Africa?” enquired the taller.
“Yes. Quite,” confessed Bertram.
“Ah! Well, let me give you a word of advice then,” continued the man.
“_Don’t touch dangerous drinks_. Avoid all harmful liquor as you would
poison. It is poison, in this climate. Drink is the curse of Africa.
It makes the place the White Man’s Grave. You can’t be too careful. . . .
Can you, Piggy?” he added, turning to his friend.
“Quite right, Bill,” replied “Piggy,” as he rang a little bell that stood
on a neighbouring table. “Let’s have a ‘Devil’s Own’ cocktail and then
some beer for a start, shall we? . . . No—can’t be too careful. . . .
Look at me f’r example. Been in the country quarter of a century, an’
never exceeded once! Never _tasted_ it, in fact.”
“What—alcohol?” enquired Bertram.
“No. . . . I was talking about harmful liquor,” replied Piggy patiently.
“Things like—_what_ did you call it? . . . Chalk-squash?”
“Lime-squash,” admitted Bertram with another glowing blush.
“Give it up, Sonny, give it up,” put in Bill. “Turn over a new leaf and
start afresh. Make up your mind that, Heaven helping you, you’ll never
touch a drop of the accursed poison again, but forswear slops and live
cleanly; totally abstaining from—what is it?—soda-crunch?—fruit-juice,
ginger-beer, lemonade, toast-water, barley-water, dirty-water,
raspberryade, and all such filthy decoctions and inventions. . . .”
“Yes—give the country a chance,” interrupted Piggy. “Climate’s all right
if you’ll take reasonable care and live moderately,” and he impatiently
rang the little bell again. “’Course, if you _want_ to be ill and come
to an early and dishonourable grave, drink all the rot-gut you can lay
hands on—and break your mother’s heart. . . .”
Piggy lay back in his chair and gazed pensively at the ceiling. So did
Bill. Bertram felt uncomfortable. “Dear, dear, dear!” murmured Bill,
between a sigh and a grunt. “Chalk-powder and lemonade! . . . what a
nerve! . . . Patient, unrecognised, unrewarded heroism. . . .”
“Merciful Heaven,” whispered Piggy, “slaked-lime and ginger-beer! . .
What rash, waste courage and futile bravery. . . .” And suddenly leapt
to his feet, swung the bell like a railway porter announcing the advent
of a train, and roared “_Boy_!” until a white-clad, white-capped Swahili
servant came running.
“_N’jo_, Boy!” he shouted. “Come here! . . . Lot of lazy, fat
_n’gombe_. {72a} . . . Three ‘Devil’s Own’ cocktails, _late hapa_,”
{72b} and as, with a humble “_Verna_, _Bwana_,” the servant hurried to
the bar, grumbling.
“And now he’ll sit and have a _shauri_ {72c} with his pals, while we die
of thirst in this accursed land of sin and sorrow. . . . Beastly
_shenzis_. {72d} . . .”
“You don’t like Africa?” said Bertram, for the sake of something to say.
“Finest country on God’s earth. . . . The _only_ country,” was the
prompt reply.
“I suppose the negro doesn’t make a very good servant?” Bertram
continued, as Piggy rumbled on in denunciation.
“Finest servants in the world,” answered that gentleman. “The _only_
servants, in fact. . . .”
“Should I take one with me on active service?” asked Bertram, suddenly
remembering Ali Suleiman, _alias_ Sloper.
“If you can get one,” was the reply. “You’ll be lucky if you can. . . .
All snapped up by the officers of the Expeditionary Force, long ago.”
“Yes,” agreed Bill. “Make all the difference to your comfort if you can
get one. Don’t take any but a Swahili, though. . . . You can depend on
’em, in a tight place. The good ones, that is. . . .”
A big, fat, clean-shaven man, dressed in white drill, strolled up to the
little group. He reminded Bertram of the portraits of Mr. William
Jennings Bryan who had recently visited India, and in three days
unhesitatingly given his verdict on the situation, his solution of all
political difficulties, and his opinion of the effete Britisher—uttering
the final condemnation of that decadent.
“Hello! Hiram Silas P. Pocahantas of Pah,” remarked Piggy, with delicate
pleasantry, and the big man nodded, smiled, and drew up a chair.
“The drinks are on me, boys,” quoth he. “Set ’em up,” and bursting into
song, more or less tunefully, announced—
“I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,”
whereat Bill hazarded the opinion that the day might unexpectedly and
ruddily dawn when he’d blooming well wish he bally well _had_, and that
he could join them in a cocktail if he liked—or he could bung off if he
didn’t. Apparently William disapproved of the American’s attitude, and
that of his Government, toward the War and the Allies’ part therein; for,
on the American’s “allowing he would _con_sume a highball” and the liquor
arriving, he drank a health to those who are not too proud to fight, to
those who do not give themselves airs as the Champions of Freedom, and
then stand idly by when Freedom is trampled in the dust, and to those
whose Almighty God is not the Almighty Dollar!
Expecting trouble, Bertram was surprised to find that the American was
apparently amused, merely murmured “Shucks,” and, in the midst of a
violent political dissertation from Bill, ably supported by Piggy, went
to sleep with a long thin cigar in the corner of his long thin mouth. He
had heard it all before.
Bertram found his Devil’s Own cocktail an exceedingly potent and
unpleasant concoction. He decided that his first meeting with this
beverage of the Evil One should be his last, and when Piggy, suddenly
sitting up, remarked: “What’s wrong with the drinks?” and tinkled the
bell, he arose, said a hurried farewell in some confusion, and fled.
“’Tain’t right to send a half-baked lad like that to fight the Colonial
German,” observed Bill, idly watching his retreating form.
“Nope,” agreed the American, waking up. “I _was_ going to say it’s
adding insult to injury—but you ain’t injured Fritz any, yet, I guess,”
and went to sleep again before either of the glaring Englishmen could
think of a retort.
Ere Bertram left the Club, he heard two pieces of “inside” military
information divulged quite openly, and by the Staff itself. As he
reached the porch, a lady of fluffy appearance and kittenish demeanour
was delaying a red-tabbed captain who appeared to be endeavouring to
escape.
“And, oh, Captain, _do_ tell me what ‘A.S.C.’ and ‘C.C.’ mean,” said the
lady. “I saw a man with ‘A.S.C.’ on his shoulders, and there are two
officers with ‘C.C.,’ in the Club. . . . _Do_ you know what it means? I
am _so_ interested in military matters. Or is it a secret?”
“Oh, no!” replied the staff-officer, as he turned to flee. “‘A.S.C.’
stands for Ally Sloper’s Cavalry, of course, and ‘C.C.’ for Coolie
Catchers. . . . They are slave-traders, really, with a Government
contract for the supply of porters. They get twenty rupees for each
slave caught and delivered alive, and ten for a dead one, or one who dies
within a week.”
“What do they want the _dead_ ones for?” she whispered.
“_That_ I dare not tell you,” replied the officer darkly, and with a
rapid salute, departed.
Emerging from the Club garden on to the white road, Bertram gazed around
for his trolley-boys and beheld them not.
“All right, ole chap,” boomed the voice of Ali, who suddenly appeared
beside him. “I looking after _Bwana_. Master going back along shippy?
I fetch trolley now and see _Bwana_ at Kilindini, thank you, please sah,
good God,” and he disappeared in the direction of the town, returning a
couple of minutes later with the trolley.
“Master not pay these dam’ thieves too much, ole chap,” he remarked.
“Two journey and one hour wait, they ask five rupees. Master give
two-an’-a-puck.”
“How much is a ‘puck’?” enquired Bertram, ever anxious to learn.
“Sah?” returned the puzzled Ali.
“What’s a puck?” repeated Bertram, and a smile of bright intelligence
engulfed the countenance of the big Swahili.
“Oh, yessah!” he rumbled. “Give two rupee and what _Bwana_ call
‘puck-in-the-neck.’ All the same, biff-on-the-napper, dig-in-the-ribs,
smack-in-the-eye, kick-up-the—”
“_Oh_, yes, I see,” interrupted Bertram, smiling—but at the back of his
amusement was the sad realisation that he was not of the class of
_bwanas_ who can gracefully, firmly and finally present two-and-a-puck to
extortionate and importunate trolley-boys.
He stepped on to the trolley and sat down, as Ali, saluting and salaaming
respectfully, again bade him be of good cheer and high heart, as he would
see him at Kilindini.
“How will you get there? Would you like to ride?” asked the kind-hearted
and considerate Bertram (far too kind-hearted and considerate for the
successful handling of black or brown subordinates and inferiors).
“Oh, God, sah, no, please,” replied the smiling Ali. “This Swahili slave
cannot sit with _Bwana_, and cannot run with damn low trolley-boys. Can
running by self though like gentleman, thank you, please,” and as the
trolley started, added: “So long, ole chap. See Master at Kilindini by
running like hell. Ta-ta by damn!” When the trolley had disappeared
round a bend of the road, he generously kilted up his flowing night-dress
and started off at the long loping trot which the African can maintain
over incredible distances.
Arrived at Kilindini, Bertram paid the trolley-boys and discovered that,
while they absorbed rupees with the greatest avidity, they looked askance
at such fractions thereof as the eight-anna, four-anna, and two-anna
piece, poking them over in their palms and finally tendering them back to
him with many grunts and shakes of the head as he said:
“Well, you’ll _have_ to take them, you silly asses,” to the
uncomprehending coolies. “_That_ lot makes a rupee—one half-a-rupee and
two quarters, and that lot makes a rupee—four two-anna bits and two
four-annas, doesn’t it?”
But the men waxed clamorous, and one of them threw his money on the
ground with an impudent and offensive gesture. Bertram coloured hotly,
and his fist clenched. He hesitated; ought he. . . . _Smack_! _Thud_!
and the man rolled in the dust as Ali Sloper, _alias_ Suleiman, sprang
upon him, smote him again, and stood over him, pouring forth a terrific
torrent of violent vituperation.
As the victim of his swift assault obediently picked up the rejected
coins, he turned to Bertram.
“These dam’ niggers not knowing _annas_, sah,” he said, “only _cents_.
This not like East Indiaman’s country. Hundred cents making one rupee
here. All shopkeepers saying, ‘No damn good’ if master offering annas,
please God, sah.”
“Well—I haven’t enough money with me, then—” began Bertram.
“I pay trolley-boys, sah,” interrupted Ali quickly, “and Master can
paying me to-morrow—or on pay-day at end of mensem.”
“But, look here,” expostulated Bertram, as this new-found guide,
philosopher and friend sent the apparently satisfied coolies about their
business. “I might not see you to-morrow. You’d better come with me to
the ship and—”
“Oh, sah, sah!” cried the seemingly hurt and offended Ali, “am I not
_Bwana’s_ faithful ole servant?” and turning from the subject as closed,
said he would produce a boat to convey his cherished employer to his
ship.
“Master bucking up like hell now, please,” he advised. “No boat allowed
to move in harbour after six pip emma, sah, thank God, please.”
“Who on earth’s Pip Emma?” enquired the bewildered Bertram, as they
hurried down the hill to the quay.
“What British soldier-mans and officer-_bwanas_ in Signal Corps call
‘p.m.,’ sah,” was the reply. “Master saying ‘six p.m.,’ but Signal
_Bwana_ always saying ‘six pip emma’—all same meaning but different
language, please God, sah. P’r’aps German talk, sah? I do’n’ know,
sah.”
And Bertram then remembered being puzzled by a remark of Maxton (to the
effect that he had endeavoured to go down to his cabin at “three ack
emma” and being full of “beer,” had fallen “ack over tock” down the
companion), and saw light on the subject. Truly these brigade signaller
people talked in a weird tongue that might seem a foreign language to an
uninitiated listener.
At the pier he saw Commander Finnis, of the Royal Indian Marine, and
gratefully accepted an offer of a joy-ride in his launch to the good ship
_Elymas_, to which that officer was proceeding.
“We’re disembarking you blokes to-morrow morning,” said he to Bertram, as
they seated themselves in the stern of the smart little boat. “Indian
troops going under canvas here, and British entraining for Nairobi. Two
British officers of Indian Army to proceed by tug at once to M’paga, a
few hours down the coast, in German East. Scrap going on there. Poor
devils will travel on deck, packed tight with fifty sheep and a gang of
nigger coolies. . . . _Some_ whiff!” and he chuckled callously.
“D’you know who are going?” asked Bertram eagerly. Suppose he should be
one of them—and in a “scrap” by this time to-morrow! How would he
comport himself in his first fight?
“No,” yawned the Commander. “O.C. troops on board will settle that.”
And Bertram held his peace, visualising himself as collecting his kit,
hurrying on to a dirty little tug to sit in the middle of a flock of
sheep while the boat puffed and panted through the night along the
mysterious African shore, landing on some white coral beach beneath the
palms at dawn, hurrying to join the little force fighting with its back
to the sea and its face to the foe, leaping into a trench, seizing the
rifle of a dying man whose limp fingers unwillingly relaxed their grip,
firing rapidly but accurately into the—
“Up you go,” quoth Commander Finnis, and Bertram arose and stepped on to
the platform at the bottom of the ladder that hospitably climbed the side
of His Majesty’s Troop-ship _Elymas_.
CHAPTER VIII
_Military and Naval Manœuvres_
However nonchalant in demeanour, it was an eager and excited crowd of
officers that stood around the foot of the boat-deck ladder awaiting the
result of the conference held in the Captain’s cabin, to which
meeting-place its proprietor had taken Commander Finnis before requesting
the presence of Colonel Haldon, the First Officer, and the Ship’s
Adjutant, to learn the decision and orders of the powers-that-be
concerning all and sundry, from the ship’s Captain to the Sepoys’ cook.
Who would Colonel Haldon send forthwith to M’paga, where the scrap was
even then in progress (according to Lieutenant Greene, quoting Commander
Finnis)? What orders did the papers in the fateful little dispatch-case,
borne by the latter gentleman, contain for the various officers not
already instructed to join their respective corps? Who would be sent to
healthy, cheery Nairobi? Who to the vile desert at Voi? Who to
interesting, far-distant Uganda? Who to the ghastly mangrove-swamps down
the coast by the border of German East? Who to places where there was
real active service, fighting, wounds, distinction and honourable death?
Who to dreary holes where they would “sit down” and sit tight, rotting
with fever and dysentery, eating out their hearts, without seeing a
single German till the end of the war. . . .
Bertram thought of a certain “lucky-dip bran-tub,” that loomed large in
memories of childhood, whence, at a Christmas party, he had seen three or
four predecessors draw most attractive and delectable toys and he had
drawn a mysterious and much-tied parcel which had proved to contain a
selection of first-class coke. What was he about to draw from Fate’s
bran-tub to-day?
When the Ship’s Adjutant, bearing sheets of foolscap, eventually emerged
from the Captain’s cabin, ran sidling down the boat-deck ladder and
proceeded to the notice-board in the saloon-companion, followed by the
nonchalantly eager and excited crowd, as is the frog-capturing duck by
all the other ducks of the farm-yard, Bertram, with beating heart, read
down the list until he came to his own name—only to discover that Fate
had hedged.
The die was not yet cast, and Second-Lieutenant B. Greene would disembark
with detachments, Indian troops, and, at Mombasa, await further orders.
Captain Brandone and Lieutenant Stanner would proceed immediately to
M’paga, and with wild cries of “Yoicks! Tally Ho!” and “Gone away!”
those two officers fled to their respective cabins to collect their kit.
Dinner that night was a noisy meal, and talk turned largely upon the
merits or demerits of the places from Mombasa to Uganda to which the
speakers had been respectively posted.
“Where are you going, Brannigan?” asked Bertram of that cheery Hibernian,
as he seated himself beside him.
“Where am Oi goin’, is ut, me bhoy?” was the reply. “Faith, where the
loin-eating man—Oi mane the man-eating loins reside, bedad. Ye’ve heard
o’ the man-eaters of Tsavo? That’s where Oi’m goin’, me bucko—to the
man-eaters of Tsavo.”
Terence had evidently poured a libation of usquebagh before dining, for
he appeared wound up to talk.
“Begorra—if ut’s loin-eaters they are, it’s Terry Brannigan’ll gird up
_his_ loins an’ be found there missing entoirely. . . . Oi’d misloike to
be ’aten by a loin, Greene . . .” and he frowned over the idea and grew
momentarily despondent.
“’Tis not phwat I wint for a sojer for, at all, at all,” he complained,
and added a lament to the effect that he was not as tough as O’Toole’s
pig. But the mention of this animal appeared to have a cheering effect,
for he burst into song.
“Ye’ve heard of Larry O’Toole,
O’ the beautiful town o’ Drumgool?
Faith, he had but wan eye
To ogle ye by,
But, begorra, that wan was a jool. . . .”
After dinner, Bertram sought out Colonel Haldon for further orders,
information and advice.
“Everybody clears off to-morrow morning, my boy,” said he, “and in
twenty-four hours we shall be scattered over a country as big as Europe.
You’ll be in command, till further orders, of all native troops landed at
Mombasa. I don’t suppose you’ll be there long, though. You may get
orders to bung off with the Hundred and Ninety-Ninth draft of the Hundred
and Ninety-Eighth, or you may have to see them off under a Native Officer
and go in the opposite direction yourself. . . . Don’t worry, anyway.
You’ll be all right. . . .”
That night Bertram again slept but little, and had a bad relapse into the
old state of self-distrust, depression and anxiety. This sense of
inadequacy, inexperience and unworth was overwhelming. What did he know
about Sepoys that he should, for a time, be in sole command and charge of
a mixed force of Regular troops and Imperial Service troops which
comprised Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, Punjabi Mahommedans, Deccani Marathas,
Rajputs, and representatives of almost every other fighting race in
India? It would be bad enough if he could thoroughly understand the
language of any one of them. As it was, he had a few words of cook-house
Hindustani, and a man whom he disliked and distrusted as his sole
representative and medium of intercourse with the men. Suppose the
fellow was rather his _mis_-representative? Suppose he fomented trouble,
as only a native can? What if there were a sudden row and quarrel
between some of the naturally inimical races—a sort of inter-tribal
shindy between the Sikhs and the Pathans, for example? Who was wretched
little “Blameless Bertram,” to think he could impose his authority upon
such people and quell the riot with a word? What if they defied him and
the Jemadar did not support him? What sort of powers and authority had
he? . . . He did not know. . . . Suppose there _were_ a row, and there
was real fighting and bloodshed? It would get into the papers, and his
name would be held up to the contempt of the whole British Empire. It
would get into the American papers too. Then an exaggerated account of
it would be published in the Press of the Central Powers and their
wretched allies, to show the rotten condition of the Indian Army. The
neutral papers would copy it. Soon there would not be a corner of the
civilised world where people had not heard the name of Greene, the name
of the wretched creature who could not maintain order and discipline
among a few native troops, but allowed some petty quarrel between two
soldiers to develop into an “incident.” Yes—that’s what would happen, a
“regrettable incident.” . . . And the weary old round of self-distrust,
depreciation and contempt went its sorry cycle once again. . . .
Going on deck in the morning, Bertram discovered that supplementary
orders had been published, and that all native troops would be
disembarked under his command at twelve noon, and that he would report,
upon landing, to the Military Landing Officer, from whom he would receive
further orders. . . . Troops would carry no ammunition, nor cooked
rations. All kits would go ashore with the men. . . .
Bertram at once proceeded to the companion leading down to the well-deck,
called a Sepoy of the Hundred and Ninety-Ninth, and “sent his salaams” to
the Jemadar of that regiment, to the Subedar of the Gurkhas, the Subedar
of the Sherepur Sikhs and the Jemadar of the Very Mixed Contingent.
To these officers he endeavoured to make it clear that every man of their
respective commands, and every article of those men’s kit, bedding, and
accoutrements, and all stores, rations and ammunition, must be ready for
disembarkation at midday.
The little Gurkha Subedar smiled brightly, saluted, and said he quite
understood—which was rather clever of him, as his Hindustani was almost
as limited as was Bertram’s. However, he had grasped, from Bertram’s
barbarous and laborious “_Sub admi_ . . . _sub saman_ . . . _sub chiz_
. . . _tyar_ . . . _bara badji_ . . . _ither se jainga_ . . .” that “all
men . . . all baggage . . . all things . . . at twelve o’clock . . . will
go from here”—and that was good enough for him.
“Any chance of fighting to-morrow, Sahib?” he asked, but Bertram,
unfortunately, did not understand him.
The tall, bearded Sikh Subedar saluted correctly, said nothing but
“_Bahut achcha_, _Sahib_,” {81} and stood with a cold sneer frozen upon
his hard and haughty countenance.
The burly Jemadar of the Very Mixed Contingent, or Mixed Pickles, smiled
cheerily, laughed merrily at nothing in particular, and appeared mildly
shocked at Bertram’s enquiry as to whether he understood. Of _course_,
he understood! Was not the Sahib a most fluent speaker of most faultless
Urdu, or Hindi, or Sindhi, or Tamil or something? Anyhow, he had clearly
caught the words “all men ready at twelve o’clock”—and who could require
more than a nice clear _hookum_ like that.
Jemadar Hassan Ali looked pained and doubtful. So far as his
considerable histrionic powers permitted, he gave his rendering of an
honest and intelligent man befogged by perfectly incomprehensible orders
and contradictory directions which he may not question and on which he
may not beg further enlightenment. His air and look of “_Faithful to the
last I will go forth and strive to obey orders which I cannot
understand_, _and to carry out instructions given so incomprehensibly and
in so strange a tongue that Allah alone knows what is required of me_”
annoyed Bertram exceedingly, and having smiled upon the cheery little
Subedar and the cheery big Jemadar, and looked coldly upon the unpleasant
Sikh and the difficult Hassan Ali, he informed the quartette that it had
his permission to depart.
As they saluted and turned to go, he caught a gleam of ferocious hatred
upon the face of the Gurkha officer whom the Sikh jostled, with every
appearance of intentional rudeness and the desire to insult. Bertram’s
sympathy was with the Gurkha and he wished that it was with him and his
sturdy little followers that he was to proceed to the front. He felt
that they would follow him to the last inch of the way and the last drop
of their blood, and would fight for sheer love of fighting, as soon as
they were shown an enemy.
After a somewhat depressing breakfast, at which he found himself almost
alone, Bertram arrayed himself in full war paint, packed his kit, said
farewell to the ship’s officers and then inspected the troops, drawn up
ready for disembarkation on the well-decks. He was struck by the
apparent cheerfulness of the Gurkhas and the clumsy heaviness of their
kit which included a great horse-collar roll of cape, overcoat or
ground-sheet strapped like a colossal cross-belt across one shoulder and
under the other arm; by the apparent depression of the men of the Very
Mixed Contingent and their slovenliness; by what seemed to him the
critical and unfriendly stare of the Sherepur Sikhs as he passed along
their ranks; and by the elderliness of the Hundred and Ninety-Ninth
draft. Had these latter been perceptibly aged by their sea-faring
experiences and were they feeling terribly _terra marique jactati_, or
was it that the impossibility of procuring henna or other dye had caused
the lapse of brown, orange, pink and red beards and moustaches to their
natural greyness? Anyhow, they looked distinctly old, and on the whole,
fitter for the ease and light duty of “employed pensioner” than for
active service under very difficult conditions against a ferocious foe
upon his native heath. His gentle nature and kindly heart led Bertram to
feel very sorry indeed for one bemedalled old gentleman who had evidently
had a very bad crossing, still had a very bad cough, and looked likely to
have another go of fever before very long.
As he watched the piling-up of square-sided boxes of rations, oblong
boxes of ammunition, sacks, tins, bags and jars, bundles of kit and
bedding, cooking paraphernalia, entrenching tools, mule harness, huge
zinc vessels for the transport of water, leather _chhagals_ and canvas
_pakhals_ or waterbags, and wished that his own tight-strapped
impedimenta were less uncomfortable and heavy, a cloud of choking smoke
from the top of the funnel of some boat just below him, apprised him of
the fact that his transport was ready. Looking over the side he saw a
large barge, long, broad, and very deep, with upper decks at stem and
stern, which a fussy little tug had just brought into position below an
open door in the middle of the port side of the _Elymas_. It was a long
way below it too, and he realised that unless a ladder were provided
every man would have to drop from the threshold of the door to the very
narrow edge of the barge about six feet below, make his way along it to
the stern deck, and down a plank on to the “floor” of the barge itself.
When his turn came he’d make an ass of himself—he’d fall—he knew he
would!
He tried to make Jemadar Hassan Ali understand that two Havildars were to
stand on the edge of the barge, one each side of the doorway and guide
the errant tentative feet of each man as he lowered himself and clung to
the bottom of the doorway. He also had the sacks thrown where anyone who
missed his footing and fell from the side of the barge to the bottom
would fall upon them and roll, instead of taking the eight feet drop and
hurting himself. When this did happen, the Sepoys roared with laughter
and appeared to be immensely diverted. It occurred several times, for it
is no easy matter to lower oneself some six feet, from one edge to
another, when heavily accoutred and carrying a rifle. When every man and
package was on board, Bertram cast one last look around the _Elymas_,
took a deep breath, crawled painfully out backwards through the port,
clung to the sharp iron edge, felt about wildly with his feet which were
apparently too sacred and superior for the Havildars to grab and guide,
felt his clutching fingers weaken and slip, and then with a pang of
miserable despair fell—and landed on the side of the barge a whole inch
below where his feet had been when he fell. A minute later he had made
his way to the prow, and, with a regal gesture, had signified to the
captain of the tug that he might carry on.
And then he sat him down upon the little piece of deck and gazed upon the
sea of upturned faces, black, brown, wheat-coloured, and yellow, that
spread out at his feet from end to end and side to side of the great
barge.
Of what were they thinking, these men from every corner of India and
Nepal, as they stood shoulder to shoulder, or squatted on the boxes and
bales that covered half the floor of the barge? What did they think of
him? Did they really despise and dislike him as he feared, or did they
admire and like and trust him—simply because he was a white man and a
Sahib? He had a suspicion that the Sikhs disliked him, the Mixed
Contingent took him on trust as an Englishman, the Hundred and
Ninety-Ninth kept an open mind, and the Gurkhas liked him—all reflecting
really the attitude of their respective Native Officers. . . .
In a few minutes the barge was run alongside the Kilindini quay, and
Bertram was, for the second time, climbing its stone stairs, in search of
the Military Landing Officer, the arbiter of his immediate destiny.
As he reached the top of the steps he was, as it were, engulfed and
embraced in a smile that he already knew—and he realised that it was with
a distinct sense of pleasure and a feeling of lessened loneliness and
unshared friendless responsibility that he beheld the beaming face of his
“since-long-time-to-come” faithful old retainer Ali Suleiman.
“God bless myself please, thank you, _Bwana_,” quoth that gentleman,
saluting repeatedly. “_Bwana_ will now wanting Military Embarkation
Officer by golly. I got him, sah,” and turning about added, “_Bwana_
come along me, sah, I got him all right,” as though he had, with much
skill and good luck, tracked down, ensnared, and encaged some wary and
wily animal. . . .
At the end of the little stone pier was a rough table or desk, by which
stood a burly officer clad in slacks, and a vast spine-pad of quilted
khaki. On the tables were writing-materials and a mass of papers.
“Mornin’,” remarked this gentleman, turning a crimson and perspiring face
to Bertram. “I’m the M.L.O. You’ll fall your men in here and they’ll
stack their kits with the rations and ammunition over there. Then you
must tell off working-parties to cart the lot up to the camp. I’ve only
got two trucks and your fatigue-parties’ll have to man-handle ’em.
You’ll have to ginger ’em up or you’ll be here all day. I don’t want you
to march off till all your stuff’s up to the camp. . . . Don’t bung off
yourself, y’know. . . . Right O. Carry on. . . .” Bertram saluted.
Another job which he must accomplish without hitch or error. The more
jobs he _could_ do, the better. What he dreaded was the job for the
successful tackling of which he had not the knowledge, ability or
experience.
“Very good, sir,” he replied. “Er—where _are_ the trolleys?” for there
was no sign of any vehicle about the quay.
“Oh, they’ll roll up by and by, I expect,” was the reply. Bertram again
saluted and returned to the barge. Calling to the Native Officers he
told them that the men would fall in on the bunder and await further
orders, each detachment furnishing a fatigue-party for the unloading of
the impedimenta. Before very long, the men were standing at ease in the
shade of a great shed, and their kits, rations and ammunition were piled
in a great mound at the wharf edge.
And thus, having nothing to do until the promised trucks arrived, Bertram
realised that it was terribly hot; suffocatingly, oppressively,
dangerously hot; and that he felt very giddy, shaky and faint.
The sun seemed to beat upward from the stone of the quay and sideways
from the iron of the sheds as fiercely and painfully as it did downward
from the sky. And there was absolutely nowhere to sit down. He couldn’t
very well squat down in the dirt. . . . No—but the men could—so he
approached the little knot of Native Officers and told them to allow the
men to pile arms, fall out, and sit against the wall of the shed—no man
to leave the line without permission.
Jemadar Hassan Ali did not forget to post a sentry over the arms on this
occasion. For an hour Bertram strolled up and down. It was less tiring
to do that than to stand still. His eyes ached most painfully by reason
of the blinding glare, his head ached from the pressure on his brows of
his thin, but hard and heavy, helmet (the regulation pattern, apparently
designed with an eye to the maximum of danger and discomfort) and his
body ached by reason of the weight and tightness of his accoutrements.
It was nearly two o’clock and he had breakfasted early. Suppose he got
sunstroke, or collapsed from heat, hunger, and weariness? What an
exhibition! When would the men get their next meal? Where were those
trolleys? It was two hours since the Military Landing Officer had said
they’d “roll up by and by.” He’d go and remind him.
The Military Landing Officer was just off to his lunch and well-earned
rest at the Club. He had been on the beastly bunder since six in the
morning—and anybody who wanted him now could come and find him, what?
“Excuse me, sir,” said Bertram as Captain Angus flung his portfolio of
papers to his orderly, “those trucks haven’t come yet.”
“_Wha’_ trucks?” snapped the Landing Officer. He had just told himself
he had _done_ for to-day—and he had had nothing since half-past five that
morning. People must be reasonable—he’d been hard at it for eight solid
hours damitall y’know.
“The trucks for my baggage and ammunition and stuff.”
“Well, _I_ haven’t got ’em, have I?” replied Captain Angus. “Be
reasonable about it. . . I can’t _make_ trucks. . . Anybody’d think I’d
stolen your trucks. . . . You must be _patient_, y’know, and _do_ be
reasonable. . . . _I_ haven’t got ’em. Search me.”
The Military Landing Officer had been on his job for months and had
unconsciously evolved two formulæ, which he used for his seniors and
juniors respectively, without variation of a word. Bertram had just
heard the form of prayer to be used with Captains and unfortunates of
lower rank, who showed yearnings for things unavoidable. To Majors and
those senior thereunto the crystallised ritual was:
“Can’t understand it, sir, at all. I issued the necessary orders all
right—but there’s a terrible shortage. One must make allowances in these
times of stress. It’ll turn up all right. _I_’ll see to it . . .” etc.,
and this applied equally well to missing trains, mules, regiments,
horses, trucks, orders, motor-cars or anything else belonging to the
large class of Things That Can Go Astray.
“You told me to wait, sir,” said Bertram.
“Then why the devil _don’t you_?” said Captain Angus.
“I am, sir,” replied Bertram.
“Then what’s all this infernal row about?” replied Captain Angus.
Bertram felt that he understood exactly how children feel when, unjustly
treated, they cannot refrain from tears. It was _too_ bad. He had stood
in this smiting sun for over two hours awaiting the promised trucks—and
now he was accused of making an infernal row because he had mentioned
that they had not turned up! If the man had told him where they were,
surely he and his three hundred men could have gone and got them long
ago.
“By the way,” continued Captain Angus, “I’d better give you your
route—for when you _do_ get away—and you mustn’t sit here all day like
this, y’know. You must ginger ’em up a bit” (more formula this) “or
you’ll all take root. Well, look here, you go up the hill and keep
straight on to where a railway-bridge crosses the road. Turn to the left
before you go under the bridge, and keep along the railway line till you
see some tents on the left again. Strike inland towards these, and
you’ll find your way all right. Take what empty tents you want, but
don’t spread yourself _too_ much—though there’s only some details there
now. You’ll be in command of that camp for the present. . . . Better
not bung off to the Club either—you may be wanted in a hurry. . . . I’ll
see if those trucks are on the way as I go up. Don’t hop off till you’ve
shifted all your stuff. . . So long! . . .” and the Military Landing
Officer bustled off to where at the Dock gates a motor-car awaited him. . . .
Before long, Bertram found that he must either sit down or fall down, so
terrific was the stifling heat, so heavy had his accoutrements become,
and so faint, empty and giddy did he feel.
Through the open door of a corrugated-iron shed he could see a huge,
burly, red-faced European, sitting at a little rough table in a big bare
room. In this barn-like place was nothing else but a telephone-box and a
chair. Could he go in and sit on it? That dark and shady interior
looked like a glimpse of heaven from this hell of crashing glare and
gasping heat. . . . Perhaps confidential military communications were
made through that telephone though, and the big man, arrayed in a singlet
and white trousers, was there for the very purpose of receiving them
secretly and of preventing the intrusion of any stranger? Anyhow—it
would be a minute’s blessed escape from the blinding inferno, merely to
go inside and ask the man if he could sit down while he awaited the
trucks. He could place the chair in a position from which he could see
his men. . . . He entered the hut, and the large man raised a
clean-shaven crimson face, ornamented with a pair of piercing blue eyes,
and stared hard at him as he folded a pinkish newspaper and said nothing
at all, rather disconcertingly.
“May I come in and sit down for a bit, please?” said Bertram. “I think
I’ve got a touch of the sun.”
“Put your wacant faice in that wacant chair,” was the prompt reply.
“Thanks—may I put it where I can see my men?” said Bertram.
“Putt it where you can cock yer feet on this ’ere table an’ lean back
agin that pertition, more sense,” replied the large red man, scratching
his large red head. “_You_ don’ want to see yore men, you don’t,” he
added. “They’re a ’orrid sight. . . . All natives is. . . . You putt
it where you kin get a good voo o’ _me_. . . . Shed a few paounds o’ the
hup’olstery and maike yerself atome. . . . Wisht I got somethink to
orfer yer—but I ain’t. . . . Can’t be ’osspitable on a basin o’ water
wot’s bin washed in—can yer?”
Bertram admitted the difficulty, and, with a sigh of intense relief,
removed his belt and cross-belts and all that unto them pertained. And,
as he sank into the chair with a grateful heart, entered Ali Suleiman,
whom he had not seen for an hour, bearing in one huge paw a great mug of
steaming tea, and in the other a thick plate of thicker biscuits.
Bertram could have wrung the hand that fed him. Never before in the
history of tea had a cup of tea been so welcome.
“Heaven reward you as I never can,” quoth Bertram, as he drank. “Where
on earth did you raise it?”
“Oh, sah!” beamed Ali. “Master not mentioning it. I am knowing
cook-fellow at R.E. Sergeants’ Mess, and saying my frien’ Sergeant Jones,
R.E., wanting cup of tea and biscuits at bunder P.D.Q.”
“P.D.Q.?” enquired Bertram.
“Yessah, all ’e same ‘pretty dam quick’—and bringing it to _Bwana_ by
mistake,” replied Ali, the son of Suleiman.
“But _isn’t_ there some mistake?” asked the puzzled youth. “I don’t want
to . . .”
“Lookere,” interrupted the large red man, “_you_ don’ wanter discover no
mistakes, not until you drunk that tea, you don’t. . . . You push that
daown yore neck and then give that nigger a cent an’ tell ’im to be less
careful nex’ time. You don’ wanter _dis_courage a good lad like that,
you don’t. Not ’arf, you do.”
“But—Sergeant Jones’s tea” began Bertram, looking unhappily at the
half-emptied cup.
“_Sergeant Jones’s tea_!” mimicked the rude red man, in a high falsetto.
“_If_ ole Shifter Jones drunk a cup o’ tea it’d be in all the paipers
nex’ mornin’, it would. Not arf it wouldn’t. Don’ believe ’e ever
tasted tea, I don’t, an’ if he _did_—”
But at this moment a white-clad naval officer of exalted rank strode into
the room, and the large red man sprang to his feet with every sign of
respect and regard. Picking up a Navy straw hat from the floor, the
latter gentleman stood at attention with it in his hand. Bertram decided
that he was a naval petty officer on some shore-job or other, perhaps
retired and now a coast-guard or Customs official of some kind.
Evidently he knew the exalted naval officer and held him, or his Office,
in high regard.
“Get my message, William Hankey?” he snapped.
“Yessir,” replied William Hankey.
“Did you telephone for the car at once?”
“Nossir,” admitted Hankey, with a fluttering glance of piteous appeal.
The naval officer’s face became a ferocious and menacing mask of wrath
and hate, lit up by a terrible glare. Up to that moment he had been
rather curiously like Hankey. Now he was even more like a very
infuriated lion. He took a step nearer the table, fixed his burning,
baleful eye upon the wilting William, and withered him with the most
extraordinary blast of scorching invective that Bertram had ever heard,
or was ever likely to hear, unless he met Captain Sir Thaddeus Bellingham
ffinch Beffroye again.
“You blundering bullock,” quoth he; “you whimpering weasel; you bleating
blup; you miserable dog-potter; you horny-eyed, bleary-nosed, bat-eared,
lop-sided, longshore loafer; you perishing shrimp-peddler; you Young
Helper; you Mother’s Little Pet; you dear Ministering Child; you
blistering bug-house body-snatcher; you bloated bumboat-woman; you
hopping hermaphrodite—what d’ye mean by it? Eh? . . . _What d’ye mean
by it_, you anæmic Aggie; you ape-faced anthropoid; you adenoid; you
blood-stained buzzard; you abject abortion; you abstainer; you sickly,
one-lunged, half-baked, under-fed alligator; you scrofulous scorbutic;
you peripatetic pimple; you perambulating pimp-faced poodle; what about
it? Eh? _What about it_?”
Mr. William Hankey stood silent and motionless, but in his face was the
expression of one who, with critical approval, listens and enjoys. Such
a look may be seen upon the face of a musician the while he listens to
the performance of a greater musician.
Having taken breath, the Captain continued: “What have you got to say for
yourself, you frig-faced farthing freak, you? Nothing! You purple
poultice-puncher; you hopeless, helpless, herring-gutted hound; you
dropsical drink-water; you drunken, drivelling dope-dodger; you mouldy,
mossy-toothed, mealy-mouthed maggot; you squinny-faced, squittering,
squint-eyed squab, you—what have you got to say for yourself? Eh? . . .
_Answer me_, you mole; you mump; you measle; you knob; you nit; you noun;
you part; you piece; you portion; you bald-headed, slab-sided,
jelly-bellied jumble; you mistake; you accident; you imperial stinker;
you poor, pale pudding; you populous, pork-faced parrot—why don’t you
speak, you doddering, dumb-eared, deaf-mouthed dust-hole; you jabbering,
jawing, jumping Jezebel, why don’t you answer me? Eh? _D’ye hear_ me,
you fighting gold-fish; you whistling water-rat; you Leaning Tower of
Pisa-pudding; you beer-belching ration-robber; you pink-eyed, perishing
pension-cheater; you flat-footed, frog-faced fragment; you trumpeting
tripe-hound? Hold your tongue and listen to me, you barge-bottom
barnacle; you nestling gin-lapper; you barmaid-biting bun-bolter; you
tuberculous tub; you mouldy manure-merchant; you moulting mop-chewer; you
kagging, corybantic cockroach; you lollipop-looting lighterman; you naval
know-all. _Why didn’t you telephone for the car_?”
“’Cos it were ’ere all the time, sir,” replied Mr. William Hankey,
perceiving that his superior officer had run down and required rest.
“_That’s_ all right, then,” replied Captain Sir Thaddeus Bellingham
ffinch Beffroye pleasantly, and strode to the door. There he turned, and
again addressed Mr. Hankey.
“Why couldn’t you say so, instead of chattering and jabbering and
mouthing and mopping and mowing and yapping and yiyiking for an hour, Mr.
Woozy, Woolly-witted, Wandering William Hankey?” he enquired.
The large red man looked penitent.
“Hankey,” the officer added, “you are a land-lubber. You are a pier-head
yachtsman. You are a beach pleasure-boat pilot. You are a canal
bargee.”
Mr. Hankey looked hurt, _touché_, broken.
“Oh, _sir_!” said he, stricken at last.
“William Hankey, you are a _volunteer_,” continued his remorseless judge.
Mr. Hankey fell heavily into his chair, and fetched a deep groan.
“William Hankey-Pankey—you are a _conscientious objector_,” said the
Captain in a quiet, cold and cruel voice.
A little gasping cry escaped Mr. Hankey. He closed his eyes, swayed a
moment, and then dropped fainting on the table, the which his large red
head smote with a dull and heavy thud, as the heartless officer strode
away.
A moment later Mr. Hankey revived, winked at the astonished Bertram, and
remarked:
“I’d swim in blood fer ’im, I would, any day. I’d swim in beer wi’ me
mouf shut, if ’e ast me, I would. . . . ’E’s the pleasant-manneredest,
kindest, nicest bloke I was ever shipmates wiv, ’e is. . .”
“His bark is worse than his bite, I suppose?” hazarded Bertram.
“Bark!” replied Mr. Hankey. “’E wouldn’ bark at a blind beggar’s deaf
dog, ’e wouldn’t. . . . The ship’s a ’Appy Ship wot’s got _’im_ fer Ole
Man. . . . Why—the matlows do’s liddle things jest to git brought up
before ’im to listen to ’is voice. . . . Yes. . . . Their Master’s
Voice. . . . Wouldn’ part brass-rags wiv ’im for a nogs’ead o’ rum. . . .”
Feeling a different man for the tea and biscuits, Bertram thanked Mr.
Hankey for his hospitality, and stepped out on to the quay, thinking, as
the heat-blast struck him, that one would experience very similar
sensations by putting his head into an oven and then stepping on to the
stove. In the shade of the sheds the Sepoys sprawled, even the cheery
Gurkhas seemed unhappy and uncomfortable in that fiery furnace.
Bertram’s heart smote him. Had it been the act of a good officer to go
and sit down in that shed, to drink tea and eat biscuits, while his men
. . . ? Yes, surely that was all right. He was far less acclimatised to
heat and glare than they, and it would be no service to them for him to
get heat-stroke and apoplexy or “a touch of the sun.” They had their
water-bottles and their grain-and-sugar ration and their cold
_chupattis_. They were under conditions far more closely approximating
to normal than he was. Of course it is boring to spend hours in the same
place with full equipment on, but, after all, it was much worse for a
European, whose thoughts run on a cool club luncheon-room; a bath and
change; and a long chair, a cold drink and a novel, under a punkah on the
club verandah thereafter. . . . Would those infernal trucks _never_
come? Suppose they never did? Was he to stay there all night? He had
certainly received definite orders from the “competent military
authority” to stay there until all his baggage had been sent off. Was
that to relieve the competent military authority of responsibility in the
event of any of it being stolen? . . . Probably the competent military
authority was now having his tea, miles away at the Club. What should he
do if no trucks had materialised by nightfall? How about consulting the
Native Officers? . . . Perish the thought! . . . They’d have to stick
it, the same as he would. The orders were quite clear, and all he had
got to do was to sit tight and await trucks—if he grew grey in the
process.
Some six hours from the time at which he had landed, a couple of small
four-wheeled trucks were pushed on to the wharf by a fatigue-party of
Sepoys from the camp; the Naik in charge of them saluted and fled, lest
he and his men be impounded for further service; and Bertram instructed
the Gurkha Subedar to get a fatigue-party of men to work at loading the
two trucks to their utmost capacity, with baggage, kit, and ration-boxes.
It was evident that the arrival of the trucks did not mean the early
departure of the force, for several journeys would he necessary for the
complete evacuation of the mound of material to be shifted. Having
loaded the trucks, the fatigue-party pushed off, and it was only as the
two unwieldy erections of baggage were being propelled through the gates
by the willing little men, that it occurred to Bertram to enquire whether
they had any idea as to where they were going.
Not the slightest, and they grinned cheerily. Another problem! Should
he now abandon the force and lead the fatigue-party in the light of the
Military Landing Officer’s description of the route, or should he
endeavour to give the Gurkha Subedar an idea of the way, and send him off
with the trucks? And suppose he lost his way and barged ahead straight
across the Island of Mombasa? That would mean that the rest of them
would have to sit on the wharf all night—if he obeyed the Military
Landing Officer’s orders. . . . Which he _must_ do, of course. . . .
Bertram was of a mild, inoffensive and quite unvindictive nature, but he
found himself wishing that the Military Landing Officer’s dinner might
thoroughly disagree with him. . . . His own did not appear likely to get
the opportunity. . . . He then and there determined that he would never
again be caught, while on Active Service, without food of some kind on
his person, if he could help it—chocolate, biscuits, something in a
tablet or a tin. . . . Should he go and leave the Native Officer in
command, or should he send forth the two precious trucks into the
gathering gloom and hope that, dove-like, they would return? . . .
And again the voice of Ali fell like balm of Gilead, as it boomed,
welcome, opportune and cheering.
“Sah, I will show the Chinamans the way to camp and bring them back
P.D.Q.,” quoth he.
“Oh! Good man!” said Bertram. “Right O! But they’re not Chinamen—they
are Gurkha soldiers. . . . Don’t you hit one, or chivvy them about. . . .”
“Sah, I am knowing all things,” was the modest reply, and the black giant
strode off, followed by the empiled wobbling waggons.
More weary waiting, but, as the day waned, the decrease of heat and
sultriness failed to keep pace with the increasing hunger, faintness and
sickness which made at least one of the prisoners of the quay wish that
either he or the Emperor of Germany had never been born. . . .
Journey after journey having been made, each by a fresh party of Gurkhas
(for Bertram, as is customary, used the willing horse, when he saw that
the little hill-men apparently liked work for its own sake, as much as
the other Sepoys disliked work for any sake), the moment at last arrived
when the ammunition-boxes could be loaded on to the tr
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