Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (337 page)

The flat-iron went down-stream through the dark. The Governor slept on deck, and Judson took the wheel, but how he steered, and why he did not run into each bank many times, that officer does not remember. Mr. Davies did not note anything unusual, for there are two ways of taking too much, and Judson was only ward-room, not fo’c’s’le drunk. As the night grew colder the Governor woke up, and expressed a desire for whisky and soda. When that came they were nearly abreast of the stranded Guadala, and His Excellency saluted the flag that he could not see with loyal and patriotic strains.

‘They do not see. They do not hear,’ he cried. ‘Ten thousand saints! They sleep, and I have won battles! Ha!’

He started forward to the gun, which, very naturally, was loaded, pulled the lanyard, and woke the dead night with the roar of the full charge behind a common shell. That shell, mercifully, just missed the stern of the Guadala, and burst on the bank. ‘Now you shall salute your Governor,’ said he, as he heard feet running in all directions within the iron skin. ‘Why you demand so base a quarter? I am here with all my prisoners.’

In the hurly-burly and the general shriek for mercy his reassurances were not heard.

‘Captain,’ said a grave voice from the ship, ‘we have surrendered. Is it the custom of the English to fire on a helpless ship?’

‘Surrendered! Holy Virgin! I go to cut off all their heads. You shall be ate by wild ants — flog and drowned! Throw me a balcony. It is I, the Governor! You shall never surrender. Judson of my soul, ascend her inside, and send me a bed, for I am sleepy; but, oh, I will multiple time kill that captain!’

‘Oh!’ said the voice in the darkness, ‘I begin to comprehend.’ And a rope-ladder was thrown, up which the Governor scrambled, with Judson at his heels.

‘Now we will enjoy executions,’ said the Governor on the deck. ‘All these Republicans shall be shot. Little Judson, if I am not drunk, why are so sloping the boards which do not support?’

The deck, as I have said, was at a very stiff cant. His Excellency sat down, slid to leeward, and fell asleep again.

The captain of the Guadala bit his moustache furiously, and muttered in his own tongue ‘“This land is the father of great villains and the step-father of honest men.” You see our material, Captain. It is so everywhere with us. You have killed some of the rats, I hope?’

‘Not a rat,’ said Judson genially.

‘That is a pity. If they were dead, our country might send us men, but our country is dead too, and I am dishonoured on a mud-bank through your English treachery.’

‘Well, it seems to me that firing on a little tub of our size without a word of warning when you knew that the countries were at peace is treachery enough in a small way.’

‘If one of my guns had touched you, you would have gone to the bottom, all of you. I would have taken the risk with my Government. By that time it would have been — ’

‘A Republic. So you really did mean fighting on your own hook! You’re rather a dangerous officer to cut loose in a navy like yours. Well, what are you going to do now?’

‘Stay here. Go away in boats. What does it matter? That drunken cat’ — he pointed to the shadow in which the Governor slept — ’is here. I must take him back to his hole.’

‘Very good. I’ll tow you off at daylight if you get steam up.’

‘Captain, I warn you that as soon as she floats again I will fight you.’

‘Humbug! You’ll have lunch with me, and then you’ll take the Governor up the river.’

The captain was silent for some time. Then he said: ‘Let us drink. What must be, must be, and after all we have not forgotten the Peninsular. You will admit, Captain, that it is bad to be run upon a shoal like a mud-dredger?’

‘Oh, we’ll pull you off before you can say knife. Take care of His Excellency. I shall try to get a little sleep now.’

They slept on both ships till the morning, and then the work of towing off the Guadala began. With the help of her own engines, and the tugging and puffing of the flat-iron, she slid off the mud bank sideways into deep water, the flat-iron immediately under her stern, and the big eye of the four-inch gun almost peering through the window of the captain’s cabin.

Remorse in the shape of a violent headache had overtaken the Governor. He was uneasily conscious that he might perhaps have exceeded his powers, and the captain of the Guadala, in spite of all his patriotic sentiments, remembered distinctly that no war had been declared between the two countries. He did not need the Governor’s repeated reminders that war, serious war, meant a Republic at home, possible supersession in his command, and much shooting of living men against dead walls.

‘We have satisfied our honour,’ said the Governor in confidence. ‘Our army is appeased, and the raporta that you take home will show that we were loyal and brave. That other captain? Bah! He is a boy. He will call this a — a — Judson of my soul, how you say this is — all this affairs which have transpirated between us?’

Judson was watching the last hawser slipping through the fairlead. ‘Call it? Oh, I should call it rather a lark. Now your boat’s all right, captain. When will you come to lunch?’

‘I told you,’ said the Governor, ‘it would be a larque to him.’

‘Mother of the Saints! then what is his seriousness?’ said the captain. ‘We shall be happy to come when you will. Indeed, we have no other choice,’ he added bitterly.

‘Not at all,’ said Judson, and as he looked at the three or four shot blisters on the bows of his boat a brilliant idea took him. ‘It is we who are at your mercy. See how His Excellency’s guns knocked us about.’

‘Senor Capitan,’ said the Governor pityingly, ‘that is very sad. You are most injured, and your deck too, it is all shot over. We shall not be too severe on a beat man, shall we, Captain?’

‘You couldn’t spare us a little paint, could you? I’d like to patch up a little after the — action,’ said Judson meditatively, fingering his upper lip to hide a smile.

‘Our storeroom is at your disposition,’ said the captain of the Guadala, and his eye brightened; for a few lead splashes on gray paint make a big show.

‘Mr. Davies, go aboard and see what they have to spare — to spare, remember. Their spar-colour with a little working up should be just our freeboard tint.’

‘Oh yes. I’ll spare them,’ said Mr. Davies savagely. ‘I don’t understand this how-d’you-do and damn-your-eyes business coming one atop of the other, in a manner o’ speaking! By all rights, they’re our lawful prize, after a manner o’ sayin’.’

The Governor and the captain came to lunch in the absence of Mr. Davies. Bai-Jove-Judson had not much to offer them, but what he had was given as by a beaten foeman to a generous conqueror. When they were a little warmed — the Governor genial and the captain almost effusive — he explained quite casually over the opening of a bottle that it would not be to his interest to report the affair seriously, and it was in the highest degree improbable that the Admiral would treat it in any grave fashion.

‘When my decks are cut up’ (there was one groove across four planks), ‘and my plates buckled’ (there were five lead patches on three plates), ‘and I meet such a boat as the Guadala, and a mere accident saves me from being blown out of the water — ’

‘Yes. Yes. A mere accident, Captain. The shoal buoy has been lost,’ said the captain of the Guadala.

‘Ah? I do not know this river. That was very sad. But as I was saying, when an accident saves me from being sunk, what can I do but go away — if that is possible? But I fear that I have no coal for the sea- voyage. It is very sad.’ Judson had compromised on what he knew of the French tongue as a medium of communication.

‘It is enough,’ said the Governor, waving a generous hand. ‘Judson of my soul, the coal is yours and you shall be repaired — yes, repaired all over, of your battle’s wounds. You shall go with all the honours of all the wars. Your flag shall fly. Your drum shall beat. Your, ah! — jolly-boys shall spoke their bayonets! Is it not so, Captain?’

‘As you say, Excellency. But those traders in the town. What of them?’

The Governor looked puzzled for an instant. He could not quite remember what had happened to those jovial men who had cheered him overnight. Judson interrupted swiftly: ‘His Excellency has set them to forced works on barracks and magazines, and, I think, a custom-house. When that is done they will be released, I hope, Excellency.’

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

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

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

‘What is it?’ said the Governor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘“What cheer!” all the neighbours cried.

“Oo are you goin’ to meet, Bill?

‘ave you bought the street, Bill?”

Laugh? — I thought I should ha’ died

When I knocked ‘em in the Old Kent Road.’

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

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