Part 9
“Sir, since you do me the honor to inquire,” returned Dunoisse dryly, for the goggle-eyes of Mr. Thompson Jowell were curiously fixed on him, “I received my education at a public school in Paris.”
“Thought as much!” said Mr. Thompson Jowell, smiling in a satisfied way, crossing his extra-sized patent-leather-covered feet, and revolving the thumbs of the large ringed hands that were clasped upon his protuberant waistcoat. “I mayn’t comprenney the parly-voo, but I know the cut of a Frenchman’s jib when I see one. You might take in another man, I say, but you can’t deceive me. Sharp, sir, that’s what my name is!”
“I am gratified,” returned Dunoisse, without enthusiasm, “to make Mr. Sharp’s acquaintance!” And pointedly unfolded and began to read _The Times_, leaving Thompson Jowell uncertain whether he had or had not been insulted by a person whom he designated in his own mind as an “upstart Crappaw.”
But the paper presented little of interest, and presently, from behind its shelter, Dunoisse found himself watching his companion, who had drawn from various inner pockets of the large shaggy box-coat various little bags, containing pinches of divers brands of oats, together with divers other little parcels containing short-cut samples of straw and hay. From the inspection of these, by the nose and teeth, as well as by the organs of vision, he appeared to derive delight and satisfaction so intense, that the upstart Crappaw in the opposite corner, who had had dealings with Contractors in his own benighted, foreign country, could no longer be in doubt as to his calling.
Those black eyes of the ex-Adjutant of Chasseurs d’Afrique were extraordinarily observant, and the brain housed in the small well-shaped head, under the crisp close waves of his black hair, had not been forged and tempered and ground at the Training Institute for Officers of the Staff for nothing....
This man who had been addressed as Mr. Thompson Jowell, and who had said his name was Sharp, repelled Dunoisse and interested him, as a big and bloated spider might have disgusted and attracted an entomologist.
* * * * *
So, when the train, jolting and rattling and clanking in the Early Victorian manner, through the chilly, dripping country, at the terrific speed of twenty miles an hour, slowed up and slid groaning into a station close to a great permanent Military Encampment in the vicinity of Bagshot Heath, where, drawn up upon a deserted siding were a long row of open trucks, loaded with trusses of hay and straw, all unprotected from the pouring rain by any kind of covering whatever; and Mr. Sharp, moved to irrepressible ecstasy by this sight, was fain to get up and thrust his big hands deep in his jingling trousers-pockets to have his laugh out more comfortably; a sudden impulse of speech swayed the hitherto silent foreigner in the opposite corner to lean forwards, and say:
“You seem elated, sir, by the spectacle of all this spoiled and soaking forage?”
The person addressed, who was bending himself in the middle in the height of his enjoyment, straightened with a jerk. His big underjaw dropped; his nose, aggressively cocked, and with a blunted end, as though in early youth it had been held against a revolving grindstone, appeared to assume a less obstinate angle; his large face lost its ruddy color. Muddily pale, with eyes that rolled quite wildly in their large round orbits, he stared in the dark face of this bright-eyed, alert, military-looking, painfully-observant foreigner. For it occurred to him, with a breaking out of shiny perspiration upon the surface of his forehead and jowl, and a stiffening of the already bristling gray hairs upon his head, that this might be the devil.
Thompson Jowell was orthodox to the backbone, and firmly believed in the individual existence of the personage named. He glanced with nervous suspicion at the small, arched, well-booted feet of his fellow-passenger. Had one of the dark-faced stranger’s well-shaped gray trousered legs ended in a cloven hoof, Thompson Jowell would have said his prayers, or pulled the communication-cord that ended in the guard’s van. He was not quite certain which. As it was, he felt sufficiently reassured to be overbearing. He snorted, and resumed his seat with as much dignity as was compatible with the jolting of the Express. He thrust his knees apart, leaned his large hands upon them, stared the inquisitive stranger hard in the face, snorted again, and said:
“Perhaps you will be good enough to explain, sir, what you meant by that remark?”
“I shall be charmed to do so,” returned Dunoisse. “It will afford me gratification. What I meant was that you laughed: and the spectacle of waste and destruction that presumably provoked your laughter did not appear to me, a stranger and a foreigner, provocative of merriment.”
“Now look you here, young sir!” said Thompson Jowell, getting very red about the ears and gills, and jabbing at the speaker with a stout and mottled forefinger. “Foreigner or no foreigner, you have an eye in your head, I take it? Very well, then, look at me! I am not the sort of person to be called to account for my laughter--if, indeed, I laughed at all, which I don’t admit!--by any living man--British or French or Cannibal Islander--unless that individual wants to be made to laugh on the wrong side of his own mouth. Jack Blunt, my name is--and so you know! As regards those truckloads, they have been delivered on a certain date According to Contract, they have been paid for on Delivery, also According to Contract, and whether the troop-horses of Her Majesty’s Army like the hay when they get it, or whether they would prefer plum-cake and macaroons, damme if I care!”
With which the speaker threw himself back in the corner and folded his thick, short arms upon his voluminous waistcoat, which was of velvet, magnificently embroidered, and into the bosom of which cascaded a superb cravat of blue satin, ornamented with three blazing ruby breast-pins. He breathed hard awhile and frowned majestically, and then relaxed his frown in pity for the evident confusion of the snubbed foreigner; who said, without the humility that one might have expected:
“Sir, that you and other men of your standing and influence in this country do not care, is in my poor opinion a national calamity.”
The brows of Thompson Jowell relaxed at this implied concession to his greatness. He closed his eyes and puffed out his pendulous cheeks, and said, nodding his pear-shaped head, the beaver hat belonging to which was in the rack above it:
“Aye--aye! Well--well! Not badly put by half!”
“A national calamity,” pursued Dunoisse, “when one reflects how large a sum of the nation’s money went into the pockets of the Contractor who delivered the consignment, and further, when it occurs to one how impossible it will become for any expert to determine whether straw and hay so drenched and spoiled was not rotten and fermenting previous to delivery, and the exposure that must inevitably set up both conditions. And further still, when it is extremely possible that the neglect to cover the trucks was of design; and that the person--Quartermaster-Sergeant or Railway Official--whose duty it was to take this precaution, had been--for all men are not as scrupulous, sir, as yourself, and some are capable of such roguery--bribed by the Contractor or his confidential agent, to omit it!”
This being an exact summary of what had taken place, the above sentences, coined in Dunoisse’s somewhat precise and formal English, and uttered with the short, clipped inflection that characterized it, came pelting about the large and tingling ears of Thompson Jowell like stinging flakes of ice. He gasped and rolled his eyes at them in apoplectic fashion, and wagged his head and shook it from side to side, until the speaker stopped.
“No, no, young sir!” said Thompson Jowell at that juncture. “Don’t tell me! I won’t listen to you; it’s past crediting; it couldn’t be! Frenchmen might be guilty of such doings, I can credit it; Italians very likely, Germans uncommonly-probably, Roosians without doubt! But when you go to tell a true-blue Briton such as I am, that Englishmen with British blood running in their veins and British hearts a-beating in their bosoms could be capable of such doings, I tell you by Gosh the thing’s impossible! I won’t listen to you! Don’t talk to me!”
He fell back gasping at the end of this splendid tribute to the virtues of his countrymen. And, of such queerly conflicting elements are even liars and knaves composed, they were real tears that he whisked away with his big, flaming silk handkerchief, and the trembling of the hand that held it was due as much to appreciation of his own eloquence, as to alarm at the uncanny sharpness with which this disturbing young foreigner, with the cold black eyes and the admirable command of English, had put his finger on the ugly truth.
Dunoisse, far from suspecting that he had at his mercy the identical Contractor whose methods he had sketched with such brilliant fidelity to nature, pursued:
“Rogues are everywhere, sir. We have plenty of them in France, and, unhappily for other countries, we do not enjoy the monopoly. And--the person I reverence and honor, with one exception, above all living women, is an English lady. Respect for her great nation--and yours!--is not lacking in me, the adopted son of another nation, no less great; with whom England has striven in honorable war, with whom she is now most happily at peace. Yet though I admire I may criticise; and plainly say that the lamentable spectacle that has furnished our discussion, plainly points, if not to willful neglect, to lack of forethought and foresight upon the part of certain officials who should,--in the interests of the British Army,--have been trained to think and to see.”
“I don’t agree with you, young sir,” said Mr. Thompson Jowell, hooking his large splay thumbs into the armholes of his superb velvet waistcoat in a bullying manner, and folding his pendulous chin into fresh creases on his cravat after a fashion he employed in the browbeating of clerks and agents. “I disagree with you flatly, and--my name being Tom Plain--I’ll tell you for why. You called that spoiled hay and straw--my name being John Candid, I’ll admit it is spoiled!--‘a lamentable spectacle.’ To me it is not a lamentable spectacle. Far from it! I call it a beautiful illustration, sir!--a standing example of the greatness of England, and the Immensity of the resources that she has at command.”
“Name of Heaven, why?” cried Dunoisse, confounded and surprised out of his usual self-possession by this extraordinary statement.
“Aha! Now you’re getting warm, young sir,” said Thompson Jowell, triumphantly. “Keep your temper and leave Heaven out of the question, that’s my advice to you. And let me tell you that Great Britain is not so poor that she can’t afford to be at the expense of a little loss and damage, and that the high-bred, wealthy, fashionable gentlemen who hold commissions in her Army have other fish to fry and other things to attend to than keeping an eye on Quartermaster-Sergeants, Forage and Supply Agent’s clerks and Railway Officials. And that the coroneted noblemen who sit at the head of Departments in her War Office are too great, and grand, and lofty to dirty their hands with common affairs and vulgar details--and it does ’em honor! Honor, by George!” said Thompson Jowell, and smote his podgy hand upon his gross and bulky thigh, clad in a pantaloon of shepherd’s plaid of the largest pattern procurable. “My name’s John Downright--and what I say is--it does ’em honor!”
“I have to learn, sir,” said Dunoisse, with recovered and smiling urbanity, “that the criterion of a gentleman lies in his incapacity for discharging the duties of his profession, any more than in his capacity for being gulled by knavish subordinates and cheated by thievish tradesmen.”
“Now take care where you’re treading, my young sir!” said Thompson Jowell, frowning and swelling portentously. “For you’re on thin ice, that’s what you’re on. My name’s Jack Blunt, and I tell you so plumply. For I am a Contractor of Supplies and an Auxiliary-Transport Agent to the British Army, and I glory in my trade, that’s what I do! And go to the Horse Guards in Whitehall, London--and ask my Lords of the Army Council, and His Honor the Adjutant-General, and His Excellency the Quartermaster-General whether the character of Thompson Jowell is respected? Maybe you’ll get an answer--maybe you won’t! And call at the Admiralty--perhaps they don’t know him at the Victualing Office!--and the Director of Transport never heard of him! They might tell you at the Treasury that the Commissary-General bows to him! I’m not going to boast!--it ain’t my way. But if you don’t hear in every one of the high places I’ve mentioned, that the individual inside this waistcoat”--he smote it as he spoke--“is an honor to Old England and such a sturdy stem of seasoned British oak as may be relied on to uphold the Crown and Constitution in the hour of need with the last penny in his purse, and the best blood of his bosom, call me a damned liar!”
“I shall not fail in the event you mention to avail myself of the permission accorded me,” returned Dunoisse politely, “in the spirit in which it is given.”
“Ha, ha! You’re a joker, I see!” said Mr. Thompson Jowell. “Excuse me, young sir,” he added, “but if you have quite finished with that newspaper, it will save me buying one if you’ll kindly pass it over!”
With which the great man deftly whipped the unperused _Times_ from the seat where it had been laid aside by its owner, and ignoring the political articles and Foreign Intelligence (under which heading a brief paragraph announcing the decease of the aged paralytic Hereditary Prince of Widinitz, might, had the glance of his fellow-traveler fallen upon it, have seemed to him of more than passing interest), dived into those thrilling columns that deal with the rise and fall in value of wheat and oats, hay and straw, beans and chaff, and other staple commodities of the Forage Trade, and record the fluctuations of the Stock Exchange; became in virtue of such elevations and depressions, immersed in perusal; and spoke no more either on the greatness of Great Britain, the greatness of Thompson Jowell or any other kindred subject. And the Waterloo Road Terminus being reached, a luxuriously-appointed brougham, drawn by a handsome horse, and ornamented, as to the door-panels and harness, with repetitions, illuminated or engraved, of a large and showy coat-of-arms recently purchased at Heralds’ College, received the glorious being, and whirled him away through murky miles of foggy streets to his shabby little office in The Poultry.
Here, in a shady alley of low-browed houses near the Banking House of Lubbock, amidst dirt and dust and cobwebs and incrustations of City mud, upon the floors that were never washed, upon the windows that were never cleaned, upon the souls of those who spent their lives there, the vast business of Thompson Jowell, Flour, Forage, and Straw Contractor, Freightage- and Auxiliary-Transport Agent to Her Majesty’s Army, had grown from a very little cuttle-fish into a giant octopus, all huge stomach and greedy parrot-beak; owning a hundred scaly tentacles, each panoplied with suckers for draining the golden life-blood of the British ratepayer from the coffers of the British Government; and furnished, moreover, with sufficient of that thick and oily medium, known as Humbug, in its ink-bag, to blind, not only the eyes of the people and their rulers and representatives to its huge, wholesale swindlings; but in some degree to becloud and veil its own vision, so that foul seemed fair, and petty greed and low cunning took on a pleasing aspect of great-minded and unselfish patriotism.
Cowell, the Beef-Contractor, and Sowell, who undertook to supply such garments as the Government generously provided to its soldiers free of cost; scamping materials in fashioning the one sparrow-tailed full-dress coatee and pair of trousers,--so that stalwart infantrymen found it incompatible with strict propriety to stoop; and legs and arms of robust troopers were so tightly squeezed into cases of coarse red or coarse blue cloth as to resemble nothing so much as giant sausages,--were persons of influence and standing. Towell, who turned out shirts, of regulation material something coarser than bed-ticking, paying wan workwomen fourpence per dozen--the worker finding buttons, needles and thread--and receiving for each garment two shillings and sevenpence, filched from the soldier’s pay; Rowell, who found the Cavalry and Artillery in saddlery of inferior leather and spurs of dubious metal; Powell, who roofed the British forces as to the head, with helmets, busbies, shakos, and fatigue-caps; Bowell, who stocked its surgeons’ medicine-chests with adulterated tincture of opium, Epsom-salts that never hailed from Epsom; decoction of jalap, made potent with croton oil; inferior squills and suspicious senna; and Shoell, who shod the rank-and-file with one annual pair of boots (made principally of brown paper), were, taken together, a gang of--let us write a community of upright and worthy individuals; but, viewed in comparison with Dunoisse’s acquaintance of the railway, they paled like farthing rushlights beside a transparency illuminated by gas.
A day was coming, when Britannia, leaning, in her hour of need, upon that sturdy stem of seasoned British oak, was to find it but a worm-eaten sham; a hollow shell of dust and rottenness, housing loathsome, slimy things, crawling and writhing amidst the green and fleshless bones that once wore Victoria’s uniform; housing and breeding in the empty skulls of brave and hardy men. Dead in their thousands, not of the shot and shell, the fire and steel and pestilence that are the grim concomitants of War: but dead of Privation and Want, Cold and Starvation--through the rapacity and greed, the mercenary cunning and base treachery of those staunch and loyal pillars of the British Crown and Constitution: Cowell, Sowell, Towell, Rowell, Powell, Bowell, Shoell, and, last but not least among those worthies, Thompson Jowell.
XV
Arrived at his dingy little office in The Poultry, halfway up the narrow, shady alley of low-browed, drab-faced houses near the Banking House of Lubbock, you saw Thompson Jowell, recruited by a solid luncheon, bending severe brows upon a pale-faced, weak-eyed clerk, who had grievously offended, and was up for judgment.
“What’s this? Now, what’s this, Standish?” the great man blustered. “You have been doing overtime and ask to be paid for it? Lawful claims are met with prompt settlement in this office, as you have good cause to know. But, lookee here!” The speaker puffed out his pendulous cheeks in his characteristic way, and held up a stout, menacing finger before the wincing eyes of the unfortunate Standish. “Don’t you, or any other man in my employment get trying to make money out of ME! Because you won’t, you know!” said Mr. Thompson Jowell. “D’ye see?” and jabbed at the thorax of the unfortunate Standish with the finger, and then rubbed his own nose smartly with it, and thrust it, with its fellows, into his large, deep trousers-pocket as the livid victim faltered:
“You were good enough, previously to the Christmas holidays, sir, to send for me, and say that if I cared to----”
Thompson Jowell solemnly shook his little pear-shaped head, and goggled with his large, round brown eyes upon the scared victim, saying:
“Not ‘cared to,’ Standish. Be accurate, my good fellow, in word as in deed!”
“You hinted to me, sir----” stammered the unfortunate.
Thompson Jowell swelled to such portentous size at this that the clerk visibly shrank and dwindled before the awful presence.
“I am not accustomed to hint, Standish!”
“You intimated, sir, that if I was willing”--gulped the pallid Standish--“to devote my evenings to making up the New Year’s accounts and checking the files of duplicate invoices against the office-ledgers, you--you would undertake--or so you were good enough to give me to understand--that I should be the better for it!”
“But if I mentioned overtime,” returned his employer, thrusting his short fat hands under his wide coat-tails, and rocking backwards and forwards on the office hearthrug, a cheap and shabby article to which the great man was accustomed to point with pride as illustrative of the robust humility of his own nature, “I’ll eat my hat!” He glanced at the low-crowned, shiny beaver hanging on a wooden peg beside his private safe, in company with the shaggy box-coat and a fur-lined, velvet-collared cloak of sumptuous appearance, adding, “and that’s a meal would cost me thirty shillings. For there’s no such a thing as overtime. It don’t exist! And if you proved to me it did I wouldn’t believe you!” said Thompson Jowell, thrusting his thick right hand deep into the bosom of the gorgeous waistcoat, and puffing himself out still more. “For your time, young man! in return for a liberal salary of Twenty Shillings per week, belongs to Me--to Me, Standish, whenever I choose to employ it! As for being the better for having done the work you say you have, you _are_ the better morally, in having discharged your duty to a generous employer; and if you choose to injure your constitution by stopping here o’ nights until eleven p.m. it’s no affair of mine. John Downright my name is!--besides the one that’s on the brass doorplate of these offices, and what I say is--it’s no affair of mine! Though, mind you! in burning gas upon these premises up to I don’t know what hour of the night, you’ve materially increased the Company’s quarterly bill, and in common justice ought to defray their charges. I’ll let you off that!--so think yourself lucky! and don’t come asking me to remunerate you for overtime again. Now, get out with you!”
Unlucky Standish, yellow and green with disappointed hopes and secret fury, and yet admiring, in spite of himself, the clever way in which he had been defrauded, backed towards the narrow door, and in the act collided with a visitor, who, entering, straightway impregnated and enlivened the dead and musty atmosphere with a heterogeneous mixture of choice perfumes, in which super-fine Macassar and bear’s grease, the fashionable Frangipani and Jockey Club; Russia-leather, a suspicion of stables, and more than a hint of malt liquor, combined with the fragrance of the choice Havana cheroot which the newcomer removed from his mouth as he entered, to make way for the filial salutation:
“Halloa, Governor! All serene?”
You then saw young Mortimer Jowell, only surviving sapling of the sturdy stem of tough old British oak ticketed Thompson Jowell, received in that fond father’s arms, who warmly hugged him to his bosom, crying:
“Morty! My own boy!”
“How goes it, Governor?” responded Morty, winking tremendously, and patting his parent on his stout back with a large-sized hand, gloved with the most expensive lemon kid. “Hold on, you!” he hailed, as the ghastly Standish, seeing Distress for Rent written large across the page of the near future, was creeping out. “Come back and help us out of this watchbox, will yer?” Adding, as the clerk assisted him out of a capacious driving-coat of yellow cloth, with biscuit-sized mother-o’-pearl buttons:
“You look uncommon green, Standish, my boy--Standish’s your name, ain’t it?”
“Yes, Mr. Mortimer, sir. And--I am quite well, sir, thank you, sir. There’s nothing the matter with me beyond ordinary.”
He hung up the son’s coat on the peg beneath the low-crowned, curly-brimmed beaver of the parent, and went out. Morty, retaining his own fashionable, shaggy headgear upon a skull of the bullet rather than the pear-shaped order, had forgotten the clerk and his sick face before the door closed behind him.