Part 5

‘Gawd bless me--boy’s too small--can’t reach--never thought of that--dear, dear!’ He tugged at his moustache in great concern. ‘Hi! you boot-boy,’ he shouted, ‘bring a chair, two chairs, help the gentleman up, hi! you fool, hold the slack of the gentleman’s trousers, can’t you, while he washes;’ for Tally Ho in a transport of joy was taking a header into the basin. The remainder of his toilet was carefully attended to by the boot-boy, under the General’s anxious supervision.

When it was completed, and Tally Ho was once more presentable, they ascended to the dining-room--Tally Ho for once on his two feet, and conducting himself with a vast propriety. It was a little after the ordinary luncheon hour when the General finally anchored his guest, contrary to all laws and precedents, in the club dining-room. An old crony of his was finishing his lunch in one of the windows; next to him the General, greatly in want of support, took his stand, and having caused his guest to be lifted into his seat, abstractedly handed him a menu card. Tally Ho perused it gravely after the manner of a man accustomed to these things, and handing it to the waiter, remarked:

‘My will have cully and lice,’--he paused, debating gravely, ‘and plummers,’ he added, with a note of triumph in his voice.

The General twirled his moustache.

‘Curry and rice for this gentleman, plums afterwards--fried sole for me. Boy of decision,’ he continued, approvingly to himself. ‘Knows his own mind.’ He looked at the card. ‘Gawd bless me! not on the menu, either of them--’course, can’t read--how should he?--never mind, finer fellow than I thought--man of resource.’ He turned to the crony. ‘How do, ’Morant?’ he said--‘married man, just the man I want--stand by to support me, heh?’ He nodded imperceptibly in the direction of Tally Ho.

‘Certainly, my dear fellow,’ said the intelligent crony, ‘make me known.’

‘Colonel Morant--Mr Geoffrey Standing Blount.’

Tally Ho, whose round blue eyes were fixed immovably on the face of the waiter, greatly to the discomfiture of that youthful but solemn personage, turned and twinkled friendlily at his new acquaintance, but his mind was too agitated by the question then troubling it for more than a passing attention to other matters.

‘For why isn’t he black?’ he said in a loudly audible but awestricken whisper to the General, pointing with his chin at the unfortunate. ‘My foughted all club waiters was black.’

‘This is England, sir, not India; here they’re red, you know,’ said the General, blandly, with a chuckle. ‘It’s like lobsters, red in hot water; ain’t it, Morant?’

His eyes followed the vanishing form of the young waiter flying to hide the blushes spreading over his disconcerted countenance.

‘Oh!’ said Tally Ho, polite but unconvinced.

‘The point,’ said the General, after a pause, turning to his supporter. ‘The point is this--given small boy--gentleman--lost--name Geoffrey Standing Blount--new to England.’

‘Dat’s my,’ said Tally Ho to himself softly in parenthesis.

‘Guest of mine,’ continued the General, ‘don’t want to pump him--point is, how to find his belongings, heh?’ He wound up abruptly.

‘Where was he met with?’ said the crony. He was head of a county constabulary, and great on detective detail. ‘The time and place?’ Mechanically he took out a pocket-book.

‘Ducks--St James’s Park--one thirty.’

Tally Ho stared from one to the other; were they talking of him? He inclined to think so.

‘My’s losted,’ he said to the crony; ‘my’s Daddy’s Number One mud-and-water soldier in de Deyra Dhun.’

At this precise moment his curry arrived, and no further information did he volunteer, for, as he had remarked, he was ‘velly empty.’

‘I have it,’ said the crony, ‘waiter! fetch me an Army List. Number One mud-and-water soldier is pigeon-English for commanding engineer. Here you are,’ he continued, triumphantly, ‘R.E. Majors, Blount, F. Standing. India.’

‘India,’ said the General, ‘hum. Large place--and this is England.’

‘His bankers,’ said the crony, ‘probably Cox’s; waiter, fetch me a commissionaire, we’ll send him round and find out.’

‘Bravo,’ said the General, ‘invaluable fellow, brilliant idea--that’s it, young man,’ he turned approvingly to Tally Ho, ‘wire in.’

‘Exkullent dood chow-chow, nearly as dood as Foo Ching’s,’ responded Tally Ho. He was again oblivious of the fact that he was in process of being found, and was devoting himself in the intervals of luncheon to smiling sweetly at the waiter, whose feelings he was innocently conscious had been in some sort wounded. ‘Are ’oo feelin’ all light again?’ he said sympathetically, ‘’oo ’tant help not bein’ black, tan ’oo?’

The waiter cast one beseeching look around him, and fled precipitately, leaving a trail of blushes behind.

‘Poor mans,’ said Tally Ho, ‘perwaps de big fire has strokled him; he _is_ velly led, isn’t he, Genelal Sahib?’

‘All right, my boy, all right,’ said the General, choking. He turned to the crony, who was smiling gravely. ‘Wonderful boy,’ he said, _sotto voce_, ‘make fine soldier--splendid touch--considers feelings of his men.’

‘Rather a curious way of doing so,’ said the crony, glancing with a twinkle in his eye at the door through which the waiter had disappeared.

‘All same--good intention,’ said the General.

But Tally Ho had entirely forgotten waiter, lunch, and hosts, in the contemplation of a new problem connected with the giant fireplace, which was crammed with plants.

‘It’s all tommy lot,’ he said abruptly to himself, climbing down from his chair and walking straight up to the fireplace. ‘Kotah Lal said dere was allerways fires in Ingeliland, but dere isn’t, and dere never wasn’t, ’cos dese would be burntled.’

‘Gawd bless me!’ said the General, ‘wonderful!--splendid soldier he’ll make--good reasonin’ power--fine forcible vocabulary.’

‘I should apply for a commission for him to-morrow if I were you,’ said the crony, drily.

‘So I will,’ said the General, ‘hum--well--not quite yet--but keep my eye on him.’

Tally Ho came back to the table, and stood waiting at attention. The two men rose.

‘Has ’oo finished?’ said Tally Ho, ’tum along, my wantles my’s cigar.’

‘It seems that your protégé has his vices as well,’ said the crony, as they went downstairs. In the hall the commissionaire handed him an address. He looked at it triumphantly. ‘Major Blount’s London reference,’ he said.

‘Capital,’ said the General, ‘I’ll send round at once--sure to know all about him there.’

He did so, then ordered coffee and cigars, and settled himself and his guest in armchairs. Tally Ho’s feet, when he sat back, just reached the edge of the chair.

‘My’s daddy,’ he said, ‘dives my one puffle of his cigars--Kotah Lal, my’s _sais_, ’mokes, but my doesn’t takle puffles from a _sais_,’ he added, proudly.

The General twinkled all over his war-worn face, took his cigar from his mouth and handed it to Tally Ho. The latter grasped it gingerly between his small brown finger and thumb, and applied it to his mouth, which it completely filled. Holding it firmly, and sitting well back, with his chair tilted up, he took one long diligent draw, then with his cheeks puffed out he gave it solemnly back to the General. Slowly and rapturously he let the smoke escape, and watched it curl up to the ceiling in little puffs and rings. When it was all expended, he snuggled his small fair head back amongst the cushions.

‘It allerways makles my sleepy,’ he said apologetically, and his head was nodding already. ‘Dood night, ‘tank de Number One up aloft Sahib for my’s goody day--but my wantled dose gleeny-blown ducks baddy.’ Here he heaved a serene little sigh, and snuggled still further into the recesses of the chair. ‘My’s lost-ed,’ he murmured contentedly, as his chin fell on to his chest, and he slept. A sunbeam flitted in through the blinds on to his dusty flaxen pate. The General leant forward.

‘All serene, my young friend,’ he said softly, ‘before you wake again we’ll have that careless beggar of a _sais_ of yours by the heels, and you’ll be “losted” no more. And mark my words, Morant,’ he went on, flicking the ash off his cigar, ‘when we’re done for, and stacked with the majority, that tow-headed young budmâsh’ll be as great, ay, a greater soldier than either of us; we shan’t know it--stacked, heh?--but the country will. One of us goes, but there’s always another fellow ready to take his place, thank the Lord.’

‘_Eke oper eke_,’ muttered Tally Ho in his dreams.

THE DOLDRUMS

‘The breeze would have savéd him, you know,’ said the mate.

Out of a cloudless sky, Into a sapphire sea, To the tune of a windless sigh, That is drawn in the tops’les three, The sun sinks fast thro’ a burning haze To the heart of the sapphire sea.

Over the shadowed deep, Topped with an oily swell, To the hours of the night asleep In the chime of her muffled bell The spent ship prays--and her spirit fails, On the heave of the sullen swell.

* * * * *

Fanning the crimson flare Lit by the coming dawn, Thro’ the hush in the breathless air Of the night that is past and gone, The wind speeds swift to the weary sails, In a song of the coming morn.

But away from the stifled ship, Fleeter than any wind, With a kiss on the twisted lip Of the face that she leaves behind, A breath steals forth--and the wind but plays On a mask that is left behind.

Six bells clanged the dawning of the last hour in the midnight watch. I dropped my cards, for it was the peculiar custom to stop whist just as the bell sounded.

‘Time up!’ said the Captain regretfully, mopping his brow, ‘How do we stand, Jenny?’

His wife’s voice--‘Eight and three eleven, and four’--rose in a vinegary triumph of addition from across the saloon table, to culminate in an emphatic ‘Fifteen points.’

‘Good! I rather think that’s the best night yet, sir.--Bed, Jenny. Good-night, gentlemen. A hot night, an’t it?’

‘Good-night, Captain! Good-night, Mrs Cape! Coming on deck, Jaques?’

‘No!’ said my partner, ‘bed for this child, g’night;’ and murmuring a disgusted ‘Fifteen points--and the vinegar--and the heat--phew!’ he shut his cabin door with a jerk.

I climbed the stern hatchway, and joined the three men lounging against the skylight on the poop. The moon hung hazily between the softly flapping sails of the idling ship. Out of the deadly calm waters a little purposeless heave rocked her ever and anon to this side and that, and the old shellback at the useless wheel whistled softly to himself, as he looked vainly for the ship’s wake in the oily tropical ocean.

The Southern Cross dipped afar on the port quarter, and innumerable stars spangled the stilly depths of the dark heavens. The curiously dissonant miaul of the focs’le cat hit the ear, through the sultry stifling air, with a sense of the relieved ridiculous.

‘Dosé fallows you know’ (he pronounced it ‘gnau’), said the mate in his slightly nasal, foreign accent, evidently resuming, ‘it’s very curious you know, dey rrãally haven’t anny feelings.’

‘Do you mean, they feel no emotions, as we understand the word?’ said young Raymond impatiently, his intolerance of human beings so constituted ringing in the high-pitched tones of his clear voice.

‘Not a blessed one!’ said a third voice from the ship’s side, shrill and worn, ‘Yellow devils! Yellow devils! they’ve only one virtue.’

‘And that, Doctor?’

‘Opium, sirree. They’re tolerable, when they’re opium drunk.’

The mate looked up sharply, and with his brown, almond-shaped Slav eyes scrutinized keenly the dim figure of the speaker, and his mouth, between the close-trimmed pointed beard and drooping moustaches, took a more than usually cynical and mournful curve.

‘You are severe, Doctor,’ he said; but the other, without answering, turned away, and leaned over the bulwark wearily.

‘Ah! that is bad, you know,’ I heard the mate say to himself under his breath.

‘Yes,’ said the shrill voice presently from the darkness, ‘you may have seen ’em and you may talk about ’em, but you don’t _know_ them. You’ve not worked in China Town amongst John Chinaman, as I’ve worked. I guess you’ve not seen ’em born, and die, and marry, as I’ve seen them. Ugh! devils--devils--hog-skinned, slit-eyed devils!’

‘It is all tempérrament, you know,’ said the mate, ‘dosé fallows, you know, they are different all through, it is not a question of degree. A white man will never understand how their minds wōrrk. Will you have a cigarette, Doctor?’ He watched the thin face and trembling hand closely, and shook his head, as the Doctor turned back with his lighted cigarette to the ship’s side.

‘It is bad, you know,’ he muttered again to himself. Young Raymond had strolled to the wheel, and was standing talking cheerily to the helmsman; the heat seemed to have no effect on his buoyant spirits. I, stretched on a locker, fanned myself lazily with the mate’s cap, and the mate himself sat in his favourite attitude with his hands clasping his knees, his chin sunk on his chest.

Presently the Doctor began to talk again, more to himself than to us.

‘What a night!’ he said. ‘What a ghastly, hellish, stifling night! Look at that oily pond, can’t you feel the heat lifting out of it into your face. I used to think nothing could lick the Queensland bush, but, Great Lordy! this is worse, many points worse; there was always a kind of a breeze there and some stir of life, but this flat, oily waste--Oh! for a breath of air. I can’t breathe; I tell you, Armand, I can’t breathe.’ He turned round to the mate fiercely, and threw out his thin hands, as if to thrust from him some suffocating weight. ‘What’s the good of you sea-men,’ he laughed a feeble hoarse laugh, ‘if you can’t fetch some sort of air up out of your hell-doomed oceans?’

‘No fear, Doctor, we’ll get you some before long annyway, three days flat cãlm is a big spell even for the Doldrums. How’s her head, my son?’ he called to the grey-bearded helmsman.

‘Nor-nor West, zurr.’

‘Is she doing anny?’

‘Noa, zurr, but zims theer’s a but of a swell tu th’ Sou East, mebbe we’ll ’ave wind ’fore the marnin’.’ The Shellback spat on his hand and held it out, then shook his head doubtfully.

‘The dawn will bring it,’ said the mate, ‘you will see.’

‘Not to me,’ said the Doctor to himself, ‘I’m through.’

Young Raymond turned at the sound of the dreary despairing voice.

‘What’s that?’ he said, ‘Through! we’re _all_ through, we’re all kippered to the nines; don’t be so beastly egotistical, Doctor, you’ve got no blooming monopoly.’ The sunny ring of his voice through the jaded night was as refreshing as a breeze, but the Doctor only said moodily:

‘Yes, my friend, but I guess you weren’t fried to start with, there was still some English juice in you; _you_ haven’t been spread-eagled on a gridiron for seven years till everything’s been sucked out of you,--even sleep.’

‘Thank the Lord,’ said young Raymond in fervent tones, as he threw his head back, and snuffed at an imaginary breeze, ‘I can always sleep.’

‘Sleep!’ echoed the Doctor shrilly, and his thin scarecrow of a figure writhed against the railing of the bulwark, ‘I havn’t slept for _weeks_,--I’m going home, _home_, I tell you, after seven God-forsaken years, but I’d give it all, and chuck in the rest of my life, for twenty-four hours of natural sleep.’

At the word ‘natural’ the mate shifted uneasily in his seat, and his foot beat a tatoo incessantly on the deck.

‘There will be trouble,’ he said softly, ‘big trouble, unless we get the wind, you know. Come, my dear fallow,’ he went on to the Doctor, ‘what is the matter with you to-night, you were not even amuséd with the Wray baby--oh!’ he laughed with a sudden unrestrained merriment curious to listen to in that sultry, joyless air, ‘that is an interésting little ãnimal. Did you see Cotter fill it with plum-duff at dinner, and Mrs Wray opposite laughing all the time, you know, and little Wray looking ’orrifiéd,--ah-ha! and the little ãnimal likéd it, you know,’ his laughter died out as suddenly, and he gazed at the Doctor with his mournful eyes,--the eyes of a man who has been to the edge of the world many times, and looking over--come back again.

‘You are hipped to-night, you are quite dull you know. Tell us a yarn of John Chinaman; he has a most curious individuãlity, annyway.’

There was silence a moment, then the spanker boom creaked slightly from pure inaction, as floors creak in houses at the dead of night, and a spark from the mate’s cigarette floated straight upwards in the dead air; then came a weird, droning sing-song whisper from the bulwarks.

‘Once upon a time,’ it said, ‘there was a poor devil of a doctor, whose lot it became after many wanderings to minister for his living, in an oven, to the extremities of John Chinaman, whereby he learnt many things,--for instance, that it was good to eat puppy-dog and go unshaven, that there was no such thing as right or wrong, beauty or ugliness, cleanliness or dirt, heaven or hell,--that there was no end to the miseries of the white man, and neither end nor beginning to the miseries of the yellow man. But also,’--the whisper almost died away, ‘he learnt one supreme good, ‘το καλὸν,’ that without which man withers--life has no taste, no colour, no scent,--the great, the glorious--My God! O my God!!’ The voice from the faintest whisper rose suddenly to a scream. With a spring young Raymond’s lithe white-clothed figure was by the Doctor’s side, his arm round his neck.

‘Steady, dear old boy!’ he said.

The meaning of those muttered sayings had suddenly been rendered plain, and the mate stood leaning forward with his long arms half stretched towards the Doctor. The melancholy fatalism of his face, that outcome of his Slav blood, was veiled by a look of sorrowful concern.

‘Ohé!’ he said, ‘Ohé! tck tck----’

As for me, I moved swiftly to the wheel, and stood between the group of men and the helmsman, speaking to him at random, in the instinctive dread of what was coming next on the shrill tones that lifted themselves behind me.

‘Yes!’ said the worn voice, ‘look at me!--look at me!--what am I? What have I sunk to? I, who was even as you,--public school--’Varsity--Bart’s--What’s the use of it all? Look at us, I say, look’--he clutched with one hand the arm thrown about him; and as if answering the hysterical cry, the moonlight streamed from behind the main tops’le, with a cruel suddenness, full on to the two men. It lit up the bright, fresh face and yellow hair of the one,--tall and lithe and radiantly white--and threw into a ghastly relief the other,--long, shrunken and shambling, with his twisted yellow face and sunken hunted eyes, with the little brown streak at the corner of the thin distorted mouth, the lank discoloured hair, the writhing, skeleton hands. He cowered as the light fell upon him, and buried his head like a child on young Raymond’s shoulder.

When I turned again, old Carey, the Shellback, was looking steadily at the deck, and, contrary to all orders, spitting vigourously upon it.

‘Fact is we’m tu fur tu the East; yu zee, zurr, these y’er ca’ms is all along o’ that.’

What answer I made to the soft West-country drawl I know not, because it is bewildering to hear a man’s sobs drawn under hard pressure against a linen coat. Then the mate was speaking.

‘Come down to your bunk, my dear fallow, it will be ãll right, you know; I will give you some things to make you sleep.’

‘Sleep!’ came out of the sobs, as a voice might come out of a grave, on to which the earth was being shovelled. ‘My God!--if I could sleep _without_.... Armand, for pity’s sake make me sleep--’

‘There! there!’ young Raymond spoke as to a child.

As swiftly as it had streamed forth, the moonlight hid itself behind a kindly sail, and the three soft footsteps, moving along the deck, slowly died away out of my hearing.

‘Might yu ’appen to ’ave zum baccy, zurr, the mate’s gone down, yu zee, an’ it du be rale ’ot tu-night, that’s zartain.’

I gave the understanding Carey out of my pouch, and we smoked in a sympathetic silence.

* * * * *

I woke with a start; a faint light was showing through the open port hole, and the half-drawn curtain of the bunk wavered unsteadily.

‘She’s moving,’ I thought, feeling with a vast sense of relief the fluttering pulse beginning to beat at last in the wind-logged ship.

‘Yes, there’s a breeze from the South-East; get up!’ Young Raymond was standing by the side of the bunk, his white clothes unchanged, but with a face unknown to me, so grave, drawn, and sunless was it.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘The Doctor!’ he said, ‘Come!’

We crossed the dark saloon, unswept and ungarnished, just as it had been left the evening before. Raymond silently drew aside the green baize curtain of a cabin on the starboard side. Within it stood the mate, stooping over a figure stretched limply on the lower bunk; he looked up as we came in, and withdrew his hand, with something in it, from under the pillow.

‘Look!’ he said, holding up a little inlaid box. ‘I was afrayd of it; I lookéd for it last night, you know,’--there was a curious note of appeal in his voice,--‘but dosé fallows are so cunning, you know.’

I looked at the face lying upturned to the growing light. It was no longer twisted; the eyes stared quietly at the roof of the bunk, the hands were crossed peacefully on the sunken chest. In that face, which had writhed the night before in hunted agony, there remained only the little brown stain at the corner of the mouth to mark it as the same.

‘Dead?’

‘Quite.’ The mate knelt, and reverently drew the lids over the quiet eyes.

Young Raymond was leaning silently apart against the side of the cabin, his head framed in the open port-hole, and his face was ever grey and drawn. I turned from him to the mate.

‘How?’

He answered the double question of my glances hurriedly.

‘No,--it was an accident, see--’ he unscrewed the lid of the little box, and counted the tiny black-brown pills in it. ‘Six--seven--ãyt--there are manny happy hours, you see; while desé were here, he would not have done it, you know. No, it was an accident,--perrhaps he took one too manny,--but it was the heat, you know, and that’--he laid his hand gently over the dead man’s heart. ‘Poor fallow! I likéd him greatly.’

There was a long silence in the little cabin; the faint ‘lip-lip’ of the rising waves against the ship’s side seemed very far away somehow, and the measured tramp of the second mate on the poop above sounded in muffled harmony to our thoughts--then six bells rang out clear and full.

‘It is Cotter’s watch still,’ said the mate, ‘I am free for an hour yet. We must talk, you know.’

He moved over and shut the door, then seated himself on the side of the dead man’s bunk with a reverent callousness, born of an intimate familiarity with many kinds of death.