Part 46
They ought to have gulped out trivialities until the last minute, such as: “Don’t forget the whisky-flask!--it’s in your great-coat pocket.” “Not me, egad! trust a British soldier!” and “Do, now, remember, love!--_always_ to change wet socks!” Then, as the Fifes and Drums squealed, and company after company marched up the gangway, and the Colors were displayed on the quarter-deck, they should have choked and grabbed each other. And with the rasping scrub of a wet mustache upon her mouth, and the smell of wet umbrellas and oilskins in her nostrils, and the strains of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” and “Cheer, Boys, Cheer” in her ears; and the tears rolling down her cheeks as heavily as the rain dripped from the eaves of her bonnet--as the big steamer moved slowly, remorselessly away from the quay amidst cheering and good-byes--my pretty Aunt was left standing in a puddle--much to the detriment of a smart pair of velvet boots.
* * * * *
Heaven knows how long the poor soul would have stood there, but that her children’s nurse--a Sloughshire girl, married to a private of the Rathkeales--who made one of a group of disconsolate dripping soldiers’ wives--perching amongst piles or crates and timber-balks and coils of tarry rope to see the last of their men--ran to her, crying wildly: “Oh, ma’am!--ma’am!... my Tom!... Will he ever come back, do you think, ma’am?... Shall I ever see him again?...” And my Aunt wakened out of her desolate stupor, and took the weeping creature’s cold wet hand, and kissed her swollen cheek, and told her: “Of course you will, Mrs. Kennedy! They’re only sending them out to the East to send them home again!”
* * * * *
Ensign Mortimer Jowell--who for two years now had held Her Majesty’s Commission, did not sail with his regiment. A common, infantile complaint, characterized by a rubious rash and yclept the measles--had stricken the only hope of the House of Jowell down on the very threshold of Active Service, much to his indignation and chagrin.
The young man’s bosom-friend and brother-officer Ensign Lord Adolphus Noddlewood, marched in the uniform of a private of the Cut Red Feathers, from the train to the Docks between two of the men of his own company, thus avoiding a sheriff’s officer who--armed with a writ issued by Nathan and Moss of Giltspur Street--had been sent down to arrest this gay young nobleman.
But Morty, frying with fever and boiling with vexation, must perforce remain a prisoner in the huge palatial four-poster in the luxurious bedroom of the suite of private apartments which the fond father had caused to be specially decorated and furnished for his only son at the Jowell mansion in Hanover Square. Instead of farewell banquets washed down with the golden, creaming nectar of Sillery and Épernay--followed by bumpers of the Port of Carbonell--the young man perforce must subsist on blameless slops of chicken-broth and barley-water--must be regulated with saline doses of the cooling, nauseous, fizzy kind....
His mother presided over the medical regimen; administered the medicines, turned the pillows--pounded into feather-pancakes by her boy’s aching bullet-head--read him the newspaper-accounts of the departure of his comrades--washed him--scolded him--bore with his fevered grumblings; and--reverting to the days when the big young man was a mere topknotted youngster in plaid frocks, diamond socks, and strap-shoes--heard him say his nightly prayers.
In those early days referred to, young Mortimer--proving himself a true sapling of that sterling stem of stout old British oak, his father,--had been wont to derive profit of the solid, terrestrial description from these orisons, by tacking on to the supplementary petition for parents, requests for toys and treats particularly desired.
“Please God bless my mother, and make her buy me that new engine I saw in So-and-So’s shop-window”--was naturally followed by fulfillment.... Faith is the first of the theological virtues.... What Christian mother would have her boy grow up an atheist? Arguing thus, the poor lady would purchase the engine; and Morty’s prayers would be without addenda for a night, or maybe two. But before a week was over the maternal head, this infant Samuel would be praying for a new gun or a new puppy--and the thing would begin all over again....
To do Morty justice, he loved the meek, sad woman, despised by Jowell as being devoid of “spirit” and “go.” She never dreamed--when her darling went to Rugby--how many pugilistic encounters his promise of never forgetting his daily prayers was to cost a boy whose dogged obstinacy of nature led him to shun the concealment offered by blankets, and persist in saying them out of bed.... It is on record that the boys Morty pounded presently followed his example; while the boys who pounded him had suffered so many contusions in the course of the contest, that they had no urgent desire to provoke a renewal of war.
Do you hear the embarrassed, clumsy accents of the large young Ensign, mumbling that simplest, noblest, and most Divine of all petitions? Do you see that sorrowful, plain, dowdy woman, sitting in the shadow of his sumptuous brocade bed-curtains, cherishing the big, powerful, hot young hand?
“‘But deliver us from evil.’... And make me a good boy--no! hang it!--I mean a good man and a good officer.... And make me well quick, and let me get to our fellows Out There--before all the fun of the fighting’s over!--And don’t let my mother fret and worry herself--and bring me back safe home to her again. For Christ’s sake, Amen!”
That brought the tears, hard as the mother tried to stop them--pattering, hot, and quick, and heavy, on her brown silk lap. She held the big hand until his tea came--fed him with strips of toast soaked in the blameless infusion--ere she crept away to compose herself in the solitude of her own huge palatial bedroom, before going down to preside over her silver teapot--set at the end of a vast expanse of dining-table spread with the customary complements of the distinctive British meal. The redness of her poor eyelids could not be concealed by any innocent application of cold water and Johann-Maria-Farina, and, at the sight of them Thompson Jowell--who came home early from the City in these days of his son’s sickness--dropped upon the hearthrug the newspaper he had been perusing, and--nimbly as the Zoological Society’s Rhinoceros might have quitted his private pond in the Regent’s Park Gardens--floundered out of his armchair.
“What the devil’s this, ma’am?” he blustered, staring at his wife with eyes rendered even more froggishly prominent than usual by apprehension. “You’re not going to tell me the boy’s taken a turn for the worse, and is in danger?” He added, as she reassured him on this point: “If you had, I wouldn’t have believed you! Tom Tough, my name is--when it comes to a question of constitution--and my son takes after his old Governor! But, Lord!--you’ve given me a start.”
He broke off to swab his face, and the hand that wielded the silk bandanna handkerchief, shook quite as though the great Contractor had been a being of common flesh and blood. It was to shake more, erelong. For, as though that curse of Trooper Joshua Horrotian had had real power to bring Misfortune down--strange ill-chances and cross-happenings, eventuating from the dubious business-methods of the parent Jowell, were to place in very frequent jeopardy the one person, of all living beings--whom the man desired should go scot-free. For all the gold that War would pour into his coffers, Jowell would not have risked a hair of the head of this beloved son....
* * * * *
He had always thriven upon disaster. Mildewed harvests brought him golden ones, even as the murrain among cattle and the rot among sheep glutted the storehouses of Cowell with barrels of Prime Salted Beef, and tins of First Class Preserved Mutton, for the nourishment of the British Army. And the skins of the diseased beasts above-named, being sold to Shoell, at a friendly lowness of price, were converted into Boots and Saddlery and so on....
Towell and Sewell, buying whole cargoes of Damaged Cotton--salvage from the spinning-mills that were always being set on fire and flooded with water--and the waste of countless Woolen Manufactories--the first to be woven into soldiers’ shirting, the second to be manufactured into shoddy cloth of gray or blue or brick-dust-red to upholster martial bodies withal--flourished on the same principle of Give as little as you may and Take all you can get.
Bowell, who took over obsolete or damaged medical stores and necessaries from Britannia’s Hospitals and Infirmaries and Workhouses, and sold them back again without a blush upon his tallowy countenance; Powell, who bought thousands of tons of waste and spoiled paper from the Horse Guards and the Admiralty and other Government offices--where paper is wasted and spoiled--and transformed it into cardboard wherewith to strengthen busbies, shakos, helmets, and cocked-hats, and render them proof against bullets and grape, stroke of saber or cut of sword--were in like manner enriched at the mere cost of discomfort to many men, and a man’s life here and there.... But until the War broke out, and the Genius of Jowell spread its leathery bat-wings and soared--none of these enterprising spirits had ever dreamed what wealth, beyond the dreams of avarice, might be gathered and piled up, at cost of misery to thousands, and innumerable lives. When they realized this, they bowed their foreheads in the dust before the roomy patent-leather boots of Jowell, and mumbled them. He grew great in their eyes, and greater still. The sun rose to light his path, and set because he had done with it for the present.... They whispered to each other--behind their ringed and stumpy hands--that he was the devil, the very devil, sir! And as the earthly Vicar and representative of that dark potentate they worshiped him, having forgotten GOD.
LXXVII
Morty--after an eclipse somewhat protracted--being at length emancipated from the shadow of the brocade bed-curtains, having changed his skin, shaved, and attired himself--by parental request--in his Mess-uniform, came down to the five o’clock dinner--a feast comprising every delicacy most beloved of the young man.
Morty was in great spirits. The solemn butler--who had presided over the sideboard of an Archbishop--condescended to smile at his jokes, and the three powdered footmen openly sniggered. All the female servants were gathered on the upper landing listening and giggling and admiring. Jowell, too, was in great form.
He had--like other bulky birds of the carrion-feeding kind--who display excitement when there are preparations amongst humans for hostilities--been clumsily flying from place to place, making Contracts and Arrangements. He would be at the Horse Guards one moment--at the Admiralty the next, at Plymouth, Southampton, or Portsmouth before you could turn round. He had seen all the fine sights his boy had missed.... The Queen’s Review of the Baltic Fleet, and the Embarkation of the Guards, as of the first Drafts of Regiments of the Line--and he described these stirring sights to his wife and son in the characteristic Jowellian way.
“It brought tears to My Eyes--it did, upon my word!” he assured his hearers, in reference to such and such a demonstration of patriotic enthusiasm. And whether he spoke the truth or not, the water certainly stood in those bulging orbs of his, as he bade the archiepiscopal butler bring forth his most ancient white-sealed Port, wherein to pledge his newly-recovered son.
“To my dear boy’s health! Good luck to him, and God bless him!” he proposed, goggling fondly at the large young figure in the scarlet Mess-Jacket, through the tawny-golden wine. The next glass was swallowed to the toast of “The Queen, our Army and our Allies!” while the third was “Here’s to the Flour, Forage, Freightage, and Transport Trade. Large Profits and No returns!”
He chuckled so over this cryptic sentiment (which Cowell, Shoell, Sewell and Co. would have perfectly understood and enthusiastically applauded)--that he choked in his wine, and gasped and crowed so awfully that his wife--upon her way to the door, which Morty, with his recently-acquired gloss of good manners rather too obviously upon him, held open--was fain to pause behind her husband’s chair and pat him on the back. And then she kissed her son, whispering. “Not too much wine, my dearest!” And with a wistful smile at her one joy, went away to sit and knit at stockings for him, in a gorgeous gilded desert of drawing-rooms, opening one out of the other.
Left alone, Morty chatted with his sire, and found him well-informed and interesting. He knew so many things at first-hand. For instance, how many picked squadrons went to the Cavalry Division that was under orders for the East, and what vessels these warriors and their steeds would sail in. For as the British Government possessed but three available transports, Britannia may be said to have leaned with confidence, at this juncture, upon the bosom of Jowell. Who--it not being desirable that lofty officials should soil their fingers with such vulgar transactions--not only acted as the Government’s middleman or agent, in the hire and charter of such vessels of the Regular Screw Steamship Company; the Eastern and Occidental Steamship Company; and the Antipodean Company, as had been marked down for War-Service--and reaped very considerable profit and enrichment from such mediation--but for the conveyance of the heavier munitions of War; the Forage, the Commissariat Stores, and the horses of the Cavalry and Artillery--had been privileged to place his own private fleet of sailing-vessels and steamers at the service of an appreciative country.
It is to be whispered here, that the knowledge of ships and maritime matters indubitably possessed by Thompson Jowell had been gained by that great man in his earlier years, while serving in the humble capacity of private in a Regiment of Marines....
The private soared to become Quartermaster-Sergeant, and married the penniless orphan daughter of a Naval Surgeon. Being of a bilious temperament, and invariably deadly sick when upon sea-service, Thompson Jowell made haste to retire, upon a nest-egg that he had accumulated by the sweat of the brow of a true-born Englishman.... Which nest-egg, being invested in the shop, stock, and goodwill of a ship’s chandler and drysalter--later expanding into a rope walk (taken over for a bad trade-debt), and in process of time engulfing the business of a bankrupt forage merchant--was in time to hatch out the Great Contractor, the glory of his age.
He was in a beaming, radiant mood upon this particular afternoon. Smiles garlanded his large visage, even his rummaging, sniffing nose was cocked at a less aggressive angle, say forty-five instead of sixty degrees.... As the wine warmed him--though he could drink enough of his old tawny port to float a jolly-boat, without overheating or muddling the hard, sharp little brain enclosed in his pear-shaped skull--the strings of his tongue were loosed, and he spoke to his son and heir as to a second self, unreservedly.
He had attended at the newly-created Transport Office at the Admiralty, and had secured fresh Contracts--and he had been to the Victualling Office--(also a sub-department of the first-named Institution) and there he had received such gracious usage at the hands of the presiding genius, Mr. Commissary-General Blunder, that it had brought the tears into his eyes again.
Pray take a glimpse of Mr. Commissary-General Blunder, whose name was later to be spelt by prejudiced Press correspondents and critics of the Commission of ’56 with an initial to be found much later in the alphabet.
* * * * *
Comparatively obscure, previously to this period, you found him suddenly become all-powerful in half-a-dozen Departments. He was indubitably an official of great experience, having been present at the later Peninsular battles of the Duke’s time, in the character of a Director of Wagon Trains--unhappily abolished during the days of the Prince Regent, and not yet replaced by any organized means of Land Transport. Now you saw him as a little dry, meager man of seventy, his baldness covered with a black, scratch-wig, his sharp black eyes looking out over angular cheek-bones, scrawled with strange characters as though in official red-ink. Topped with the cocked-hat of a Brigadier-General, his little round pot-stomach buttoned up in the epauletted gold-laced swallowtail of Full Dress, he was barely a stately or imposing figure. But later, he was to reveal himself as a powerful Necromancer, who with so many strokes of a pen would create a squadron of paper horses, clap these unsubstantial beasts between the legs of as many solid, British troopers, and make the Nation pay for them in good hard money. Or, with a wave of the same inky wand he would command forage and rations, shirts and great-coats and blankets to be compounded and formed out of impalpable air; so that real horses and real men might feed upon these shadows and be clothed with them.
Newly endued with the power to pay away vast sums of Government money, it is little wonder that Mr. Commissary-General Blunder seemed to Jowell a being almost divine. By dint of perching him upon the piled-up bodies of his forty Commissariat staff-clerks, the Contractor saw him--and conveyed to his son the impression that he too saw him--as a giant rather than a dwarf.... Hearken to Thompson Jowell, enlarging in his idol’s praise....
“Comes into the Office--hangs up his hat himself--cracks a joke with the head of his staff of clerks--a Man Like That--who has authority, in case of need, to communicate direct with Foreign Governments--and can dip his hand in the Treasury as if it was his own breeches’ pocket.... ‘The weather’s warum, Colonel Jinkins,’ says he, in his sing-song Northern drawl--by the New Order they have military ranks according to grade, and, by Gosh! you should see ’em in their uniforms!--‘but by the latest adveece from the East we’re to have it warumer still!’ Says Jinkins: ‘Glad to hear it, Sir, and so is Mr. Thompson Jowell, unless I’m mistaken?’ Says I: ‘My name being John Bull--it can’t be too hot for me!’ ‘Glaed to find you in such speerits, Mr. Jowell,’ says His Honor, taking a pinch of snuff and speaking as dry as chips and shavings--‘for when I saw you I was afraid you were going to aesk me for some of the Government’s money.... What?... You are?... Waell!--since we caen’t stave you off, sign your name to this Contract Demand Dischaerge Receipt, and I’ll make you out an Order on the Treasury.’ Wuff! goes the sand over the wet ink--none of your new-fangled blotting-paper at the Crown Offices. ‘There you are, Mr. Jowell!... Thirty-Five Thousand Pounds!’ And between me, and my boy, and the bedpost,” said Thompson Jowell, nodding over his wine at his son and heir, “that’s a mere flea-bite to what I am a-going to get out of this here Eastern Expedition--long before the end!”
“Gaw!” ejaculated the Ensign, who had inherited the paternal reverence for money. He added, with a tongue somewhat thickened by the frequency with which, in defiance of his mother’s warning, he had applied to the decanters. “You jolly old Croe--what the dooce was the tremendously wealthy feller’s name who was ordered to be burnt alive?--don’t I wish I was in your jolly old shoes, that’s all!”
“You are in ’em, Morty, my own boy!” said the father, goggling at the younger Jowell tenderly. “Don’t think that what I do is done for myself--for I am a bloody humble man!” His little slanting forehead--so like the lid of a Noah’s Ark hooked tightly down over the jumbled beasts inside--the Lamb and the Dove being uppermost at that psychological moment--was full of anxious lines and corrugations. He mopped his overflowing eyes with his table-napkin, and his voice shook and wobbled with emotion as he went on:
“What I do is done for you--what I get is got for you! Remember that!” said Thompson Jowell, leaning forward over his dessert-plate until his vast expanse of shirt-front bulged--why are the shirt-fronts of great financiers invariably badly got up?--and two or three diamond studs unshipped their moorings, and the son caught a glimpse of the hairy bosom the hardy parent scorned to shield with a flannel vest. “Win distinction in the Field--out there!” Jowell waved a gross fat hand in the direction of the London Docks. “You can do it--it’s in your blood!--if you told me that it wasn’t I shouldn’t believe you!--and I shall see you General Sir Mortimer Jowell, K.C.B., before I die, please Heaven!”
“Gaw, Governor! how you pile it on,” responded the young man, who was not at all inclined to underestimate his own capacity for heroism. “You ambitious old Codger,” he elegantly pursued, “Military Knight Commanderships of the Bath don’t grow on every gooseberry-bush.... Why,” said Morty, opening his round brown eyes and shaking his bullet head at his parent, “even a first-class tip-top hero like our C.O.”--the young man referred to the gallant Colonel of the Cut Red Feathers--“hasn’t got that yet! And perhaps he don’t deserve it?... Oh, no!... Certainly not!” said Morty in a tone of sarcasm. “Not by no manner of means!...”
“And why hasn’t he got it? Not because he ain’t brave enough, or enough of a tip-top swell,” Jowell wagged his bristly head of upright gray hair sagely at his heir-apparent, and punctuated his periods by sips of the tawny port, “but because he hasn’t Money enough to back him. And whose fault is that but his own? Look at his position--think of his chances and opportunities!--and tell me whether he mightn’t be as rich as a Jew if he made use of ’em? Don’t you go to tell me he couldn’t--because I know best!”
“And so do I!--and hang me, if it don’t do him honor! I mean,” said Mortimer in a tone of disdain that mingled verjuice with the bumper Jowell was in the act of emptying, “his refusin’ to cabbage from the men’s rations, and firing, and clothing, and uniforms.... Everybody knows it’s done, and Government winks at it,” pursued the Ensign, getting very red about the gills, but looking straight out of the eyes that were so oddly clear and honest for a son of Jowell’s, into the muddier, more prominent orbs that goggled back at him. “But I’m confounded glad _he_ sets that fine old face of his against it! and in his place I’m dam’ if I shouldn’t do the same myself!”
Jowell hastily set down his glass, and fell back in his armchair with a hot and clammy dew breaking out upon his large, and just now queerly-mottled countenance. He puffed and blew like a stout, shaven walrus for some moments before he could speak. Then he said--and the short, thick hand that held a choice cigar he had just taken from a chased casket of precious metal emblazoned with the large and ornate coat-of-arms that had been bought at Heralds’ College, shook as he said it:
“But if he had a son, he’d alter his notions about Cabbaging. Not to tell you a lie, my boy!--and my name’s Jack Candid--and has been all my life long--I’m a Cabbager myself! Lord!--if I hadn’t made use o’ my opportunities for Cabbaging--you’d be a private in the ranks, or serving out flour and treacle in an apron behind a chandler’s counter, and your mother’d be at the washtub--or charing for a livelihood at eighteenpence a day....”