Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (516 page)

She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of her feet die out along the gallery above.

MRS. BATHURST

FROM LYDEN’S “IRENIUS”

ACT III. Sc. II.

Gow. — Had it been your Prince instead of a groom caught in this noose there’s not an astrologer of the city —  —

PRINCE. — Sacked! Sacked! We were a city yesterday.

Gow. — So be it, but I was not governor. Not an astrologer, but would ha’ sworn he’d foreseen it at the last versary of Venus, when Vulcan caught her with Mars in the house of stinking Capricorn. But since ‘tis Jack of the Straw that hangs, the forgetful stars had it not on their tablets.

PRINCE. — Another life! Were there any left to die? How did the poor fool come by it?

Gow. —
Simpliciter
thus. She that damned him to death knew not that she did it, or would have died ere she had done it. For she loved him. He that hangs him does so in obedience to the Duke, and asks no more than “Where is the rope?” The Duke, very exactly he hath told us, works God’s will, in which holy employ he’s not to be questioned. We have then left upon this finger, only Jack whose soul now plucks the left sleeve of Destiny in Hell to overtake why she clapped him up like a fly on a sunny wall. Whuff! Soh!

PRINCE. — Your cloak, Ferdinand. I’ll sleep now.

FERDINAND. — Sleep, then.. He too, loved his life?

Gow. — He was born of woman … but at the end threw life from him, like your Prince, for a little sleep … “Have I any look of a King?” said he, clanking his chain — ”to be so baited on all sides by Fortune, that I must e’en die now to live with myself one day longer?” I left him railing at Fortune and woman’s love.

FERDINAND. — Ah, woman’s love!

(Aside)
Who knows not Fortune, glutted on easy thrones, Stealing from feasts as rare to coneycatch, Privily in the hedgerows for a clown With that same cruel-lustful hand and eye, Those nails and wedges, that one hammer and lead, And the very gerb of long-stored lightnings loosed Yesterday ‘gainst some King.

MRS. BATHURST The day that I chose to visit H.M.S.
Peridot
in Simon’s Bay was the day that the Admiral had chosen to send her up the coast. She was just steaming out to sea as my train came in, and since the rest of the Fleet were either coaling or busy at the rifle-ranges a thousand feet up the hill, I found myself stranded, lunchless, on the sea-front with no hope of return to Cape Town before five P.M. At this crisis I had the luck to come across my friend Inspector Hooper, Cape Government Railways, in command of an engine and a brake-van chalked for repair.

“If you get something to eat,” he said, “I’ll run you down to Glengariff siding till the goods comes along. It’s cooler there than here, you see.”

I got food and drink from the Greeks who sell all things at a price, and the engine trotted us a couple of miles up the line to a bay of drifted sand and a plank-platform half buried in sand not a hundred yards from the edge of the surf. Moulded dunes, whiter than any snow, rolled far inland up a brown and purple valley of splintered rocks and dry scrub. A crowd of Malays hauled at a net beside two blue and green boats on the beach; a picnic party danced and shouted barefoot where a tiny river trickled across the flat, and a circle of dry hills, whose feet were set in sands of silver, locked us in against a seven-coloured sea. At either horn of the bay the railway line, cut just above high water-mark, ran round a shoulder of piled rocks, and disappeared.

“You see there’s always a breeze here,” said Hooper, opening the door as the engine left us in the siding on the sand, and the strong south-easter buffeting under Elsie’s Peak dusted sand into our tickey beer. Presently he sat down to a file full of spiked documents. He had returned from a long trip up-country, where he had been reporting on damaged rolling- stock, as far away as Rhodesia. The weight of the bland wind on my eyelids; the song of it under the car roof, and high up among the rocks; the drift of fine grains chasing each other musically ashore; the tramp of the surf; the voices of the picnickers; the rustle of Hooper’s file, and the presence of the assured sun, joined with the beer to cast me into magical slumber. The hills of False Bay were just dissolving into those of fairyland when I heard footsteps on the sand outside, and the clink of our couplings.

“Stop that!” snapped Hooper, without raising his head from his work. “It’s those dirty little Malay boys, you see: they’re always playing with the trucks….”

“Don’t be hard on ‘em. The railway’s a general refuge in Africa,” I replied.

“‘Tis — up-country at any rate. That reminds me,” he felt in his waistcoat- pocket, “I’ve got a curiosity for you from Wankies — beyond Buluwayo. It’s more of a souvenir perhaps than —  — ”

“The old hotel’s inhabited,” cried a voice. “White men from the language.
Marines to the front! Come on, Pritch. Here’s your Belmont. Wha — i — i!”

The last word dragged like a rope as Mr. Pyecroft ran round to the open door, and stood looking up into my face. Behind him an enormous Sergeant of Marines trailed a stalk of dried seaweed, and dusted the sand nervously from his fingers.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought the
Hierophant
was down the coast?”

“We came in last Tuesday — from Tristan D’Acunha — for overhaul, and we shall be in dockyard ‘ands for two months, with boiler-seatings.”

“Come and sit down,” Hooper put away the file.

“This is Mr. Hooper of the Railway,” I exclaimed, as Pyecroft turned to haul up the black-moustached sergeant.

“This is Sergeant Pritchard, of the
Agaric
, an old shipmate,” said he. “We were strollin’ on the beach.” The monster blushed and nodded. He filled up one side of the van when he sat down.

“And this is my friend, Mr. Pyecroft,” I added to Hooper, already busy with the extra beer which my prophetic soul had bought from the Greeks.

“
Moi aussi
” quoth Pyecroft, and drew out beneath his coat a labelled quart bottle.

“Why, it’s Bass,” cried Hooper.

“It was Pritchard,” said Pyecroft. “They can’t resist him.”

“That’s not so,” said Pritchard, mildly.

“Not
verbatim
per’aps, but the look in the eye came to the same thing.”

“Where was it?” I demanded.

“Just on beyond here — at Kalk Bay. She was slappin’ a rug in a back verandah. Pritch hadn’t more than brought his batteries to bear, before she stepped indoors an’ sent it flyin’ over the wall.”

Pyecroft patted the warm bottle.

“It was all a mistake,” said Pritchard. “I shouldn’t wonder if she mistook me for Maclean. We’re about of a size.”

I had heard householders of Muizenburg, St. James’s, and Kalk Bay complain of the difficulty of keeping beer or good servants at the seaside, and I began to see the reason. None the less, it was excellent Bass, and I too drank to the health of that large-minded maid.

“It’s the uniform that fetches ‘em, an’ they fetch it,” said Pyecroft. “My simple navy blue is respectable, but not fascinatin’. Now Pritch in ‘is Number One rig is always ‘purr Mary, on the terrace’ —
ex officio
as you might say.”

“She took me for Maclean, I tell you,” Pritchard insisted. “Why — why — to listen to him you wouldn’t think that only yesterday —  — ”

“Pritch,” said Pyecroft, “be warned in time. If we begin tellin’ what we know about each other we’ll be turned out of the pub. Not to mention aggravated desertion on several occasions —  — ”

“Never anything more than absence without leaf — I defy you to prove it,” said the Sergeant hotly. “An’ if it comes to that how about Vancouver in ‘87?”

“How about it? Who pulled bow in the gig going ashore? Who told Boy
Niven…?”

“Surely you were court martialled for that?” I said. The story of Boy Niven who lured seven or eight able-bodied seamen and marines into the woods of British Columbia used to be a legend of the Fleet.

“Yes, we were court-martialled to rights,” said Pritchard, “but we should have been tried for murder if Boy Niven ‘adn’t been unusually tough. He told us he had an uncle ‘oo’d give us land to farm. ‘E said he was born at the back o’ Vancouver Island, and
all
the time the beggar was a balmy Barnado Orphan!”

“
But
we believed him,” said Pyecroft. “I did — you did — Paterson did — an’ ‘oo was the Marine that married the cocoanut-woman afterwards — him with the mouth?”

“Oh, Jones, Spit-Kid Jones. I ‘aven’t thought of ‘im in years,” said Pritchard. “Yes, Spit-Kid believed it, an’ George Anstey and Moon. We were very young an’ very curious.”

“
But
lovin’ an’ trustful to a degree,” said Pyecroft.

“Remember when ‘e told us to walk in single file for fear o’ bears? ‘Remember, Pye, when ‘e ‘opped about in that bog full o’ ferns an’ sniffed an’ said ‘e could smell the smoke of ‘is uncle’s farm? An’
all
the time it was a dirty little out-lyin’ uninhabited island. We walked round it in a day, an’ come back to our boat lyin’ on the beach. A whole day Boy Niven kept us walkin’ in circles lookin’ for ‘is uncle’s farm! He said his uncle was compelled by the law of the land to give us a farm!”

“Don’t get hot, Pritch. We believed,” said Pyecroft.

“He’d been readin’ books. He only did it to get a run ashore an’ have himself talked of. A day an’ a night — eight of us — followin’ Boy Niven round an uninhabited island in the Vancouver archipelago! Then the picket came for us an’ a nice pack o’ idiots we looked!”

“What did you get for it?” Hooper asked.

“Heavy thunder with continuous lightning for two hours. Thereafter sleet- squalls, a confused sea, and cold, unfriendly weather till conclusion o’ cruise,” said Pyecroft. “It was only what we expected, but what we felt, an’ I assure you, Mr. Hooper, even a sailor-man has a heart to break, was bein’ told that we able seamen an’ promisin’ marines ‘ad misled Boy Niven. Yes, we poor back-to-the-landers was supposed to ‘ave misled him! He rounded on us, o’ course, an’ got off easy.”

“Excep’ for what we gave him in the steerin’-flat when we came out o’ cells. ‘Eard anything of ‘im lately, Pye?”

“Signal Boatswain in the Channel Fleet, I believe — Mr. L.L. Niven is.”

“An’ Anstey died o’ fever in Benin,” Pritchard mused. “What come to Moon?
Spit-Kid we know about.”

“Moon — Moon! Now where did I last…? Oh yes, when I was in the
Palladium
! I met Quigley at Buncrana Station. He told me Moon ‘ad run when the
Astrild
sloop was cruising among the South Seas three years back. He always showed signs o’ bein’ a Mormonastic beggar. Yes, he slipped off quietly an’ they ‘adn’t time to chase ‘im round the islands even if the navigatin’ officer ‘ad been equal to the job.”

“Wasn’t he?” said Hooper.

“Not so. Accordin’ to Quigley the
Astrild
spent half her commission rompin’ up the beach like a she-turtle, an’ the other half hatching turtles’ eggs on the top o’ numerous reefs. When she was docked at Sydney her copper looked like Aunt Maria’s washing on the line — an’ her ‘midship frames was sprung. The commander swore the dockyard ‘ad done it haulin’ the pore thing on to the slips. They
do
do strange things at sea, Mr. Hooper.”

“Ah! I’m not a tax-payer,” said Hooper, and opened a fresh bottle. The
Sergeant seemed to be one who had a difficulty in dropping subjects.

“How it all comes back, don’t it?” he said. “Why Moon must ‘ave ‘ad sixteen years’ service before he ran.”

“It takes ‘em at all ages. Look at — you know,” said Pyecroft.

“Who?” I asked.

“A service man within eighteen months of his pension, is the party you’re thinkin’ of,” said Pritchard. “A warrant ‘oose name begins with a V., isn’t it?”

“But, in a way o’ puttin’ it, we can’t say that he actually did desert,”
Pyecroft suggested.

“Oh, no,” said Pritchard. “It was only permanent absence up country without leaf. That was all.”

“Up country?” said Hooper. “Did they circulate his description?”

“What for?” said Pritchard, most impolitely.

“Because deserters are like columns in the war. They don’t move away from the line, you see. I’ve known a chap caught at Salisbury that way tryin’ to get to Nyassa. They tell me, but o’ course I don’t know, that they don’t ask questions on the Nyassa Lake Flotilla up there. I’ve heard of a P. and O. quartermaster in full command of an armed launch there.”

“Do you think Click ‘ud ha’ gone up that way?” Pritchard asked.

“There’s no saying. He was sent up to Bloemfontein to take over some Navy ammunition left in the fort. We know he took it over and saw it into the trucks. Then there was no more Click — then or thereafter. Four months ago it transpired, and thus the
casus belli
stands at present,” said Pyecroft.