Part 59
The tramp of eight miles through knee-deep, sometimes waist-deep slough would have been no joke to men full-fed and in hard condition. They were muddy to the hair, weary and sore-footed, when they passed the camps of the Four British Divisions--lying under the Argus-eyes and iron mouths of the French Artillery, whose breastworks crowned the line of cliffs along their rear and flank. For the Red Snake lay coiled about the grim fortress-city of Tsar Nicholas, and the Blue Snakes had lapped themselves between the Red Snake and retreat.
To the eye of Hector Dunoisse that disposition of the Allied Forces would have spoken volumes. To the uninstructed glance of young Mortimer Jowell it merely suggested a barely-possible contingency. He said to himself:
“My eye! Suppose the Emperor of the French and that pasty chap, the Sultan, were to turn those whacking big guns on us one of these fine mornin’s! Gaw! I wonder where we should all be then?”
It was the most brilliant thing the Ensign had ever said in the whole of his life, but he was not conscious that he was being clever. He was only glad that he had got his draggled party of muddy scarecrows safely into Balaklava. He was inhaling almost with relief the smells of that ramshackle, rag-and-bone town.
They went down into her by the Kadikoi Road that skirts the top of the retort-shaped, jug-mouthed harbor, presided over by the Star Fort and the Mortar Batteries. Stacks of sleepers and rusty lengths of rail marked the site of the proposed railway between the Front and Balaklava. A living-wagon, reversed upon the summit of a mountain of mud, bore upon its canvas tilt the pithy inscription:
“NO PAI FOR 6 MUNTHS AND HARDLY ENNY VITTALS.
PRESHUS SIK OF THE HOLE JOBB.”
A forest of masts fringed the harbor. You saw vessels of every imaginable class, from the stately Indiaman to the paddle-wheeled gunboat, tied up in tiers like the mackerel-boats of a Cornish fishing-village. Upon the oily pewter-colored waters bobbed and wallowed innumerable carcasses--canine, porcine, equine, and bovine.
“Hair-trunks” the sailors called these unpleasantly-inflated objects; and as every ship was supposed to tow those in her immediate vicinity, she naturally left her neighbors to carry the business out.
One bottle-nosed Commander of a screw line-of-battle-ship, putting by the desire for promotion, earned the gratitude of his fellow-men, and a deathless name in History, by an appreciation of the peculiar sanitary demands of the situation, that was at least sixty years in advance of the age.
Said he, in effect: “These carcasses, ignored by the Executive Heads of the Army, the Harbor-Master and the Port Captains, are as perilous to the life of man as effective shelling.... Let others serve their country after their own fashion. I tow dead cows henceforth.”
So his boats were sent regularly to collect the bobbing hair-trunks packed with fetid odors, and tow them out of the roadstead crowded with shipping of three nations, away to the open sea.... And the Fleet and the Army gave their benefactor the Chinese-sounding appellation of “Commander Tow Cow.” And the nickname adhered to him to his dying day.
* * * * *
Suppose that you see the Ensign, with his sergeant and section, tramping down the miry main street of the South-Crimean coast-town, between villas that had been clean and dapper and habitable when the Allied Armies rolled down from the North.
An endless procession of men on foot, men on horseback, men driving beasts or charioteering vehicles of various descriptions, passed up and down that swarming thoroughfare, all day and nearly all night. Lean dogs and ownerless swine routed in piles of offal and garbage. And--for Death constantly dropped in in the shape of shell or round-shot--and dysentery and cholera were always with the Army--human refuse lay sprawled or huddled in strange fashion, waiting for the burial which did not always come....
* * * * *
Shrieking stenches saluted young Jowell’s nose, the din of voices mingled with the distant bellow of the Lancasters, and the fainter answer of the great brass sixty-two pounders from the batteries of Sevastopol.... Faces he knew nodded cheerily to him from windows of improvised Clubs and temporary restaurants. Hands waved, voices shouted hospitable invitations. He shook his head and passed on.
Dreadful women beckoned with ringed chalked hands and leered at him with painted faces, from the upper balconies of abominable houses where the business of vice went on ceaselessly by day as by night. Roulette-balls clicked--occasionally revolvers cracked, and knives were used--under the canvas of gambling-booths where French and German, Greek and Italian and British gamesters crowded about the green-covered trestle-board.
Cracked pianos vamped accompaniments to villainous songs, screeched by red-tighted sirens in _soi-disant_ music-halls. Barrel-organs ground out popular waltzes for the revelers in crazy dancing-saloons, where shadows of revolving couples passed and re-passed, thrown on the crimson blinds by flaring naphtha-lamps. Next door to a house of this type was another that was an hospital; a single-storied, mud-walled, windowless and doorless building that stood close upon the thoroughfare. A lean hog shambled over the threshold as Mortimer Jowell passed. He looked in, and saw green men, blue men, yellow men and black men lying upon the bare earth floor in rows, side by side....
* * * * *
Many had been dead for days. The silence of the others rivaled that of Death itself, for the most part. But sometimes a thready voice cried on God or Our Lady, or faintly cursed, or asked in vain for drink. And Mortimer Jowell halted his men; and went in and drove out the hog, and barricaded the threshold with a broken shutter. As he left the dreadful place a man came in.
He was a priest, tall, broad-shouldered and sufficiently clean-shaven to be remarkable, where nineteen men out of twenty were hairy-faced. He wore a rusty biretta and a thin, torn cassock, and had no other protection against the piercing cold. He had a canvas wallet slung about him, and moved with his hands crossed upon his breast as though something were hidden there.... He glanced at Mortimer Jowell as he stepped aside to make room for him in passing--and his hard blue eyes and jutting underlip and long, powerful chin were features distinctive of a man we have met before.
His name was known to no one in Balaklava. He came over three or four times a week from the French base at Kamiesch--where he wrought with many others among the wounded in the hospitals--to minister to the dying Catholic soldiers in this and similar places of misery and woe. Their dull and glassy eyes flickered a little at the sight of him. He made the sign of the Cross, drew out the purple stole--passed it round his neck--and knelt down by one of the prostrate bodies, murmuring a Latin benediction. And, too ignorant of his high, awful function to be conscious of intrusiveness, the Ensign watched and listened to him as he drew a silver pyx from the bosom of his cassock and fed the starving with the Bread of Life.
The ex-State official, diplomat and _viveur_ who had become a priest, and the bullet-headed young English subaltern were never to exchange one word, never again to meet--and yet there was a link between them.... Both were--one quite unconsciously--seeking the Peace that is only gained by the Way of Expiation. And one of them was to find it before the sun went down.
Ignorant of this, the Ensign tramped on, and, having dropped his party at the Commissariat Stores--a row of sheet-iron roofed sheds that had sprung up, with many other buildings of the same kind, on the offal-strewn beach, above high-water mark--was free to wander where he would.
So he strolled along the muddy foreshore among the huge stacks of planking for stables and huts, and the great mountains of food and forage that lay piled up and rotting--rendered useless by lack of transport and plenitude of Red Tape--doomed never to supply the needs of perishing beasts and starving men.
A store-ship sent out many months previously had just unloaded a cargo of Showell’s Army boots by the simple process of digging them out from the hold with shovels, filling boats with them, and emptying the boats on the beach close to low-water mark. And a half-company of Fusiliers, bare-footed, and several degrees more ragged than those of Morty’s fatigue-party, had been marched down and directed to take what they needed from the pile.
The boots were all too small. You saw men eagerly turning over the heaps, sorting and comparing, pitching away and swearing, sitting down and trying in vain to force the ridiculously inadequate coverings on their swollen, bleeding feet. A minority succeeded in getting shod--after a fashion. But upon the hairy faces of the muddy, ragged, hunger-bitten majority, anger and disgust and disappointment were vividly painted; and presently found vent in words.
Their N.C.O’s--in like case with them--vainly endeavored to cast oil upon the troubled waters. Then the officer in command of the party emerged from a low-browed beach _café_, built of mud, mules’ bones and Army Mess-tins, where a red-fezzed Greek sold coffee, vodka, rum, and Crimean wine. He said--shouldering a net of potatoes, tucking the head of a dead fowl under his sword-belt, and Sucking his mustache, gemmed with ruby drops of generous liquor:
“Whass this, Rathkeales? Sergeant-Major Lonergan, bring these mutinous divvies up before me! Can’t get the boots on, is that whass the matter wit’ you? And whoever thought you could?--and your feet swelled to the size of pontoons with chilblains and frostbite! Whass that you’re saying, Private Biles? ‘Women’s and children’s sizes’? Get to the divvle with your women and children! Do you suppose the Government’s a fool?”
But the production of a bundle of elastic-sided foot-coverings of unmistakably feminine proportions reduced even the Captain to silence; and a pair of little clump-soled shoes brandished in a gaunt and grimy hand, put a clincher on the case.
“Who says they’re not child’s sizes now?” shouted the owner of the grimy hand hoarsely. “Are these men’s boots? Maybe you’ll look and say!” He added: “And may the feet o’ them that has palmed ’em off on us march naked over Hell’s red-hot floor, come the Day o’ Judgment! If there’s a God in Heaven, He’ll grant that prayer!”
He threw down the little hobnailed shoes, and went over, muttering, and scowling, and staggering in his gait, to where the stark body of a long-booted navvy lay in the shadow of a pyramid of Commissariat crates.
His comrades and officers and Mortimer Jowell watched in silence, as he sat himself down opposite the dead man, and measured the soles of his feet against the rigid feet. They were of a size. He nodded at the livid blue face of their late owner, and said grimly:
“You and me, matey, seem about the same size in corn-boxes. Maybe you’ll not grudge to part with your boots to a covey who’ll be in your shoes next week or to-night!”
Mortimer Jowell sickened as the ghastly process of removal was completed, but the ugly fascination of the scene held him as it did other men. Nobody had noticed the blue haze creeping in from the sea, pushed by a wind that had veered suddenly. As the soldier stood up in the dead navvy’s boots, the gale yelled, and broke....
XCVII
It came from the southwest with hail and blizzards of snow in it. Tents scattered at its breath like autumn leaves--iron roofs of Army store-sheds took wing like flights of frightened rooks. Thunder cracked and rolled incessantly--fierce blue lightnings cleft the mirk with jagged yataghans of electric fire. Huge waves beat upon the narrow beaches, and leaped upon the towering cliffs, dragging mouthfuls of acres down. Ships and steamers, large and small, crowding the Harbor, were jumbled in wild confusion. The smashing of bowsprits and cutwaters, bulwarks, paddle-boxes and stern-boats may be better imagined than described. Outside in the Bay, Hemp, Iron, and Steam waged war with the unleashed elements of Wind and Water. And through all, the siege-batteries of the Allies went on bellowing; and from the wonderful array of Defense Works that had sprung up as by magic since the Army of the South rolled away on the road to Simferopol--Sevastopol answered, with canister, and round-shot, and shell.
As store-ships and troop-ships beached, and pivot-gun war-steamers foundered--and great line-of-battle ships staggered out to sea--_The Realm_ set herself to ride out the gale with full steam up and both anchors out. But as red sparks and black smoke weltered out of her funnels, and the great iron cables rolled off her capstan-drums--one after the other those port and starboard anchors went to the bottom with a roar. And the gale took the brand-new two-thousand-six-hundred-ton Government transport, twisted her round, lifted her up and broke her, as a child breaks a sugar ship that has come off the top of a birthday-cake.
A petty officer of artificers--his rating is unknown, but he ranks as Second-Class Scoundrel--had been bribed with the sum of fifty pounds not to clinch the cable-ends. When the great stern-wave lifted the doomed ship, this man, with another, was on the poop. He shrieked to his mate to dive, but the heart of the poor wretch failed him. And the Second-Class Scoundrel dived--and, looking down into an awful gulf of sliding black-green water, his mate saw him swimming like a frog, far down below the surface, straight for the open sea.... And then _The Realm_ bumped thrice--and broke into barrel-staves and flinders. And her cargo of good goods and bad goods--bogus goods and no goods--and nearly every living soul aboard her--went to the bottom of the Euxine. And young Mortimer Jowell, who had skirted the Harbor on its windward side, and climbed the towering wall of rock that gates it from the Bay, shut up the Dollond telescope through which he had witnessed the tragedy--and sat down upon the hailstone carpeted ground behind a big boulder of pudding-stone to recover and think over things....
“O God, save those poor beggars!” he had groaned out over and over, as the little red and black specks that were men bobbed about in the boiling surf. It was quite clear to him that they were shrieking, though the howl of the sleety gale had drowned their cries.
“Damn the old man! He’s done it, as he said he would!” he muttered, hugging his knees and blinking as the stinging tears came crowding, and a sob stuck in his throat. “And I used to chaff him for being such a thundering old Dodger! Gaw!” He shuddered and dropped his haggard young face into his grimy, chilblained hands.
* * * * *
He knew he could never again face his brother-officers. He knew he could never, never again go home. He roused himself out of a giddy stupor presently at the sound of voices. Two officers of the Fleet had taken refuge from the blizzard in a buttress-angle of the Fort wall, not far distant. They were talking about the wreck of _The Realm_, and, sheltered as they were from the wind, their voices reached the ear of Jowell’s son.
“It’s a gey guid thing for the Contractors,” said one man. “They’ve saved their bacon by letting the Army salt-pork and junk go to Davy Jones’s locker, ye ken!”
And his companion answered significantly:
“Supposing it ever was aboard!”
“Ay!--now I come to think of it,” said the first man, who had a North of the Tweed accent, “that was varra odd the way the port and starboard cables went ripping oot o’ her. Will we be getting any explanation of that circumstance, do ye suppose, later on?”
“Undoubtedly, if we wait until the Day of Judgment,” said the second speaker, who seemed a bit of a cynic. “And meanwhile--I’ll bet you a sovereign that more stuff will be proved to have gone down in her than ever could have been got into her holds. She’ll be the scapegoat of the Commissariat--and by Gad! they want one!”
Said the other man:
“Ay! do they--gey and badly! Come, let’s be ganging doon. I’m sorely wanting a nip!”
And their figures crossed the threshold of the broken doorway, and Mortimer Jowell heard the pebbles rolling under their sliding feet as they negotiated the downward path.
“If I were the kind of man I’d like to be, I wouldn’t even take the twenty-five thousand pounds _he_ settled on me when I got my Commission,” he muttered. “No, sir! I’d send it back--and send in my papers--and get a berth in the Sultan’s pay. Turn Bashi, perhaps, though I hate Turks, filthy beggars! Still.... Gaw!... that ain’t half a bad idea!”
Momentarily he forgot his keen unhappiness in contemplation of a glowing portrait of Mortimer--not Jowell Pasha--riding to war upon an Arab charger of dazzling beauty, presented by his royal master in conjunction with a gold and jeweled scimitar--in recognition of His Excellency’s distinguished services as Commander of an Imperial Order.
He saw the Pasha, followed by a lengthy train of aide-de-camps, orderlies, and pipe-bearers, returning to his luxurious tent at nightfall, to be welcomed by his mother--an English lady of pleasant but dowdy appearance--and His Excellency’s young and lovely bride. And he put his hand into his breast and pulled out a note-case--and took from this the oddest little scrawly letter--that had been brought to him at the camp of the First Division before he went to the Front.
“HONORED SIR,
“I am told it is thus one begins a letter to a gentleman of Ingiland. Pardon me if I am wrong! When my nurse binds the pencil to my wrist with a ribbon I can write as the Ingliz ladies at the school at Pera taught me, though it is not so well as I speak.
“I have much heard of your deeds at the Alma Battle, and of your noble answer to the false messenger of the English Emir, and I am proud to the bottom of my heart! For so brave a man has told me that he loves me. Honored Sir, you have given me what I thought to have never! I pray Our Lord Isa and the Lady Maryam to bless and guard you! Do we, I wonder, meet again?
“Honored Sir,
“I am yours respectfully,
“ZORA, “Of the House of Jones.”
The Ensign folded up the funny little letter and kissed it--and put it back in his note-case, and stowed the note-case away. And then he remembered the sergeant and section, waiting at what was left of the Commissariat-Sheds, and hoisted himself by that rope of Duty, up upon his stiff and aching legs.
* * * * *
He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. The storm that had brewed and burst with the diabolical suddenness peculiar to Black Sea hurricanes had begun to pass over. Tears in the pall of sooty vapor rushing north-east showed patches of chill blue sky and blinks of frosty-pale sunshine. The batteries had never for an instant ceased bellowing and growling. Now men who had left off work, or play--to stare from the cliffs at the sight of war-steamers buckling up, and transports smashing like matchwood--went back to play or work again.
But, where the cliff lowered to a saddleback below the Fortress, a rescue-party of men of both Services--with lifebuoys and lines and a rocket-apparatus--were energetically busy--and the Ensign joined them and asked the reason why? When they pointed to the brink of the cliff, he crawled on his hands and knees, and, craning his neck over--saw that shipwrecked mortals no bigger than swarming bees were clinging to a fragment of wreckage--jammed amidst jagged rocks and boiling surges, a sheer three hundred feet below.
The question argued was, who should be lowered down and make fast a line, by which these perishing wretches might be hauled into safety? They would have settled the thing by drawing of lots. But Fate stepped in in the person of the bullet-headed young subaltern of the Cut Red Feathers, who shouted as he unbuckled his sword-belt, untied his sash, and threw off his mud-stained fur-coat.
“I’m the owner’s son, and this is my affair, I’m blest if it ain’t! I’m dam’ if anybody goes down that cliff but me!”
He had not the least desire to die, but it had suddenly been revealed to him as by a mental lightning-flash, that there was but one way to cleanse the tarnished name of Jowell. Not by discarding it--but by good deeds purifying it, and sweetening it in the nostrils of honest men.
As they made fast the line about him, he fumbled in his breast and pulled out a little note-case, calling out:
“I want some fellow to take charge of this!”
No one volunteering, he scanned the faces of the throng about him--and lighted on one that, despite a shag of crimson beard--he knew. He said, moving over to the owner, a tall, broad-shouldered, ragged soldier, in the tatters of a Lancer uniform, and holding out his hand to him:
“You’re the man who saved me in the wreck of _The British Queen_, and wouldn’t tip me your fist afterwards. Have you any objection to doing it now?” He added, as Joshua Horrotian complied shamefacedly: “And as you’re a kind of cousin, you might look after this ’ere note-case. There are some flimsies in it, and two letters that are to be posted, supposing I don’t come up from down there! You can keep the tin in the event I’ve mentioned, and spend it as you choose! Do you twig? And have my sword and sash sent to my mother! Now, ain’t you beggars about ready to lower away?”
And they lowered away--swimmingly for a hundred-and-fifty feet or so, and then the gale--that had been crouching and holding its breath--roared and leaped. And the hope of the house of Jowell was beaten into a red rag against the face of those stupendous precipices of pudding-stone, in less time than it takes to write these lines.
He sobbed out “Mummy!” as the life went out of him, and something plucked at the vitals of a dowdy woman, separated from him by thousands of miles of dry land and bitter water, and she cried out: “My boy!...” And then there was nothing left for those on the cliff-top, but to haul the limp and broken body up again.
XCVIII
Upon the morning that saw the wreck of _The Realm_ in Balaklava Bay, Thompson Jowell traveled up to London, big with the determination that what he had planned should not be carried out. It would be difficult to arrest the hand of his hired Fate, but with tact and promptitude it could be managed. He eased his mind by saying that it could, as the London Express carried him to Paddington at the Providence-defying speed of thirty miles an hour.
Even as he composed his cautiously-worded cablegram a wire from the Admiralty was lying on his office-desk. But he felt happier than he had done for months, and correspondingly virtuous as he chartered a hackney cab and drove to the City--and got out at the paved entrance to the narrow alley of squalid houses in the shade of the Banking House of Lubbock and Son.
It was a moist, foggy November forenoon, and the yellow gas-jets made islands of light in the prevailing murkiness.... Broadsheets papered the gutters, advertising the Latest Intelligence from the Crimea. Fate had arranged that Jowell’s newspaper should not be delivered at his country seat that morning, and that--absorbed in the composition of his message--he should have omitted to buy one at the railway station. It occurred to him that he would buy one now.
He thrust his big hand in his trousers-pocket and wagged his umbrella at a scudding newsboy. The boy darted on, and Jowell condemned him for a young fool. Then a coatless, shivering misery, with wild eyes staring through a tangle of matted hair--padded up on blue and naked feet and thrust a paper under the nose of the Contractor, saying:
“Buy it, sir! It’s the last I have!”