LXXVIII
You are to imagine how Morty’s mother sobbed and kissed and blessed him, over and over at parting; and how earnestly the poor woman begged of her darling never to forget his prayers, or go out fasting in the chill morning air, and always to wear flannel next to his skin—and you are to learn that the big young man had left the poor soul shut up in the biggest of her suite of gilded drawing-rooms, and was in the act of clanking down the doorstepsto the brougham that was to convey him with his father to the railway station, when he suddenly turned—and galloped clattering back.
He strode through the hall—burst into the drawing-room—sending all the crystal dillywangles on the vases and chandeliers into tinkling fits of agitation—called with the old, old voice of the child to the woman sitting there in stony, despairing silence:
“Mummy!”
—and fell down at her trembling knees; butted his bullet-head against her thin, aching bosom, and hugged her again and again.... She thanked her Maker all her life afterwards for that unexpected burst of love and tenderness.... Her boy was to call her once more—out of the jaws of Death—and she was to hear him—even though thousands of miles of dry land and bitter water separated mother and son....
As for Thompson Jowell, that fond parent traveled down with his boy to Southampton, and benefited him with parental advice and fatherly counsel by the way. He repeated over and over again that Morty was to be sure and win distinction; and trust to his old Governor to back him up. And the young man, touched to melting by the evident solicitude and affection—responded in his characteristic vein of clumsy raillery, punctuated by heavy pats on the back, and filial pokes in the fleshy ribs that were covered with a waistcoat of gorgeousness even more pronounced than usual, made of an embroidered Turkish shawl. He told Thompson Jowell that he was a regular Out-and-Outer, a capital Brick, a Rare old File, and a stunning old Nailer, and Jowell never guessed that Morty’s habitually-stated conviction that his parent was the devil—the very devil!—was not forthcoming because Morty had once felt it to be so nearly true.
Later on—in that new-born sensitiveness of his—Morty found himself wishing that he were the son of a man several sizes smaller. As, for instance, when Thompson Jowell stood with his short legs wide apart on the hearthrug of the Officers’ Mess Cabin on the poop-deck, and rattled the big tills in his trousers-pockets, and patronized the Colonel and the half-dozen officers of Her Majesty’s Hundredth Lancers who were going out with this draft.
It hideously irked Morty—not ordinarily thin skinned—tofind that, as in the case of the Admiralty Agent the HonorableMr.Skiffington—who was going out in theBritish Queento watch over the maritime interests of Britannia at Constantinople, two of the after-cabin staterooms had been, by the removal of the bulkhead between them, knocked into one for his reception; and that in consequence, some of the ladies—as several of the male cabin passengers—were grievously incommoded and squeezed.
Nor was this the least objectionable of the many ways in which Jowell’s paternal tenderness for his boy manifested itself. Consignments of special luxuries had been provided for the after-cabin table. Nay, every one of the rank-and-file upon the troop-deck was to be allowed per day, throughout the voyage, and at the Good Fairy Jowell’s expense, an extra half-pint of porter. In addition to this, Jowell explained to the Colonel, he had taken the liberty of augmenting the Mess wine-list with twelve dozen of the tawny port, from his own cellars. And he caused shudders to course down the spine of his son, by calling the steward, and ordering bottles of this precious vintage to be uncorked there and then, that all might taste of his bounty. And, as his oppressive patronage and condescending geniality extended to the ladies present—as he counseled those who were parting from their husbands, fathers, or brothers, to drink of his liquor that they might be nerved to bear the ordeal; and pressed yet others who were going out with the regiment to partake that they might face the trials of the voyage with a better heart—he seemed to Morty to swell and grow so that his upright hair appeared shooting through the cabin skylight, and the shadow of his bloated body banished the bright spring sunshine from the place.
One ought to love and honor one’s father, it was the duty of a Christian as well as of a gentleman, but—Gaw!—when the Governor was facetious with the Colonel’s wife—and when he tipped the company a speech—and was alternately patriotic and pathetic—it made at least one person present go hot and cold.
“By Gosh! ladies and gentlemen, if these Roosians think they can beat us, let them try it!” he said, over and over. He became intolerable in his looseness and prodigality of words. His son, whom he had so often assured that he should never find cause to be ashamed of his father, foundit now; and was dyed in crimson blushes to the roots of his hair, as Jowell addressed his fair hearers and his gallant friends.
He told them that this here War was a War of Right and Justice—a War about to be fought by Old England shoulder to shoulder with her Natural Allies. And that Heaven—Thompson Jowell confidently answered for Heaven—would not fail to nerve the arms of those who were taking the part of the weak against the strong. Talk of Uncle Tom—Cousin Turk being a-many shades nearer the true British color, ought to be as many degrees nearer the true-born Briton’s heart.... Thompson Jowell laid a podgy paw upon his own, and dropped the “h” as he enunciated the word. If anybody told him otherwise, he added—his name being Peter Plain—he wouldn’t believe him, by Gosh! he wouldn’t. But all present were Englishmen and also gentlemen. And—Britannia—Thompson Jowell had answered for Heaven and now he answered for Britannia—Britannia confidently looked to all his gallant friends—might the speaker call them his dear and gallant friends?—somebody said “Oh Lord, yes!” to this, and Thompson Jowell thanked him in a stately way, and lumbered on to his peroration. Britannia looked to every one of his dear and gallant friends here present to uphold the reputation of British Arms. England, he added, was not absolutely ignorant of the name of Jowell. He bowed his tier of chins, above their stiff frill of gray whiskers, in the direction of the sarcastic voice that cried “Hear, hear!” And ended, with overflowing eyes turned upon his boy, and real emotion surging behind his magnificent Turkish-shawl waistcoat:
“May she hear more of it before this War is done!”
Jowell hugged and kissed his boy at parting, ignorant of the secret shrinking with which Morty received these caresses—bade God bless him and take care of him! and the tears rolled openly down his large whiskered face as he thrust a bulky roll of banknotes into his hand.
And then he tore himself away, and Morty—conscience-stricken in the realization of his own unfilial relief at the sight—saw the bulky back of him—topped with a low-crowned curly-brimmed hat that was of straw in deference to the hot May weather—waddle down the bouncing gangway—sawthe great red face slewed midway for a last glance, and a clumsy farewell flourish of a big gross hand that gripped a gold-topped stick. And then the Great Man was lost in the huge crowd surging and roaring at the quay-edge as completely as though the grave had swallowed him up.
And with much churning of oily-looking salt water and vomitings of sooty-black coal-smoke and cindery flavored white steam by an excited paddle-wheel tug-steamer; amidst waving of male hats and feminine handkerchiefs, cheers and good-byes from the throngs upon the quays—with a return of hurrahs from the troopers crowding at her bulwarks and thrusting their faces through the ports of her main troop-deck—with chorusing of “Auld Lang Syne” and “Cheer, Boys, Cheer, Old Russia’s All Before Us!”—the second line having been adapted by an anonymous genius to fit the case—The British Queendropped her moorings, and was towed away down the River on her watery way to Gallipoli,via—why on earthviaGibraltar?—receiving the customary compliment of eighteen guns from the Platform, and leaving the usual deposit of red-eyed, shabbily-clothed soldier’s wives and children, crying on the sunshiny, cheerful quay.
Had Moggy Geogehagan been numbered among those disconsolate women left weeping on the quayside, she would have had no tale to tell me in Ballymullet Workhouse, where her days were ended. But, indeed, had “the lots gone agin’ her,” she declared—and it was not possible to doubt her, for there was fire in the glance of her eye, and energy in the thump of her staff-end on the tiled floor, even at eighty-nine—she would have made her way out to where Jems was fighting with the Ridgimint—on her own four bones.
But here she was, onThe British Queen—and near her Mrs. Joshua Horrotian. When the Call was sounded for the drawing, and the folded slips of official paper that had an inky scrawl of “Go” inside them, or a blank more eloquent still, were tossed—as was the ancient custom in this Regiment—upon the sheepskin of the kettledrums yet vibrating from the Charge—Nelly had waited her turn in a mounting fever of anxiety that had melted the last icicles away from her poor heart. Joshua Horrotian had hardly known the bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked creature, who had runto him, panting and trembling, and thrown glad arms about his neck, and shed tears of bliss upon his bosom, crying, “I’m to go!—I’m to go!” For until you are about to lose the last remaining joy, you never realize how rich you are, or how poor you may yet live to be if God takes that also.
After dinner that evening, while the light airs from the nor’-west were pushingThe British Queen—long since parted from her tug—towards the Bay of Biscay, and glowing cigar-ends were patroling the quarter-deck singly and in couples; and the tinkle of a piano-played waltz came cheerfully from the Officers’ Mess Cabin, and the strains of “Annie Laurie” and “A Life on the Ocean Wave” proceeded from the troop-deck as the forecastle—where troopers and tars fraternized in high accord—Morty heard one semi-visible stroller say, in answer to some remark of a companion:
“By Jove no! But with me it’s like this!—I don’t object to a man who smells of Money—but a man who stinks of it, I simply can’t stand!”
It was the male voice that had cynically cried “Oh Lord, yes!” and “Hear, Hear!” when Jowell was speechifying. And a feminine voice responded:
“Hemeantwell, dear, I’msure! Butwhata dreadful man!”
Morty knew whom the officer’s wife was discussing with her husband. And whilst he burned and smarted, he admitted perforce the truth of their utterances. His father did stink of Money. His father undoubtedly must appear to persons of any breeding and refinement a really dreadful man. Why, his own son—
Later, when Morty was in bed in the comfortable lower berth of the state-room that had been expanded, to the compression of the young man’s fellow-passengers—andThe British Queen, having left the glassy Solent far behind her, was beginning to roll amidst the restless surges of the Atlantic so that cabin doors banged, cabin crockery rattled, timbers groaned and creaked—and heavy rushes of footsteps on the deck were followed by the flumping of tightened canvas and the noisy coiling away of ropes—Jowell’s son—who, like his great parent, was of queasy sea-stomach—found this question cropping up again.
The Governor stank of Money. That was why his son,who had learned since he joined the Cut Red Feathers to refrain from quenching his thirst with brandy-and-water early in the morning, and to eschew cravats and waistcoats of violently contrasting hues—who had left off sleeking the stiff brown hair upon his bullet-head with perfumed bear’s grease and besprinkling his person with the combined essences of Frangipani and Jockey Club—found respiration difficult in his father’s company. But—was it only Money the Governor stank of?... The air of the big dining-room at Hanover Square had been heavy with the odor of roguery on that night when Thompson Jowell had laid his cards, as he had said, upon the table, and owned up to playing—from first to last, an infernal dirty game!...
“I’m a bit of a Cabbager myself!” Morty could hear him saying it. And—“The bad with the good—the rotten with the sound—that’s the secret of successful Contracting!”
It was jolly—confounded jolly to be a British Guardsman and know yourself the son of a father who had become a millionaire—and meant to become yet richer—by diddling the British Army. It was enough to drive sleep from any honest, decent pillow, and this is a feeble pen if it has not conveyed that Morty Jowell was an honest, decent young man. Vulgar and dull and clumsy perhaps—but sound at the core, and wholesome-natured, as his mother’s son could hardly fail to be.
The rolling of the vessel increased, and, from the adjoining cabin, occupied by the HonorableMr.Skiffington, the Admiralty Agent—whose experience of the ocean had been gathered in the course of two or three Naval Reviews at Spithead and half-a-dozen trips across the English Channel—groans of the most piteous description now began to be heard. So Morty sat up, hugging his knees and frowning at the pale eye of the state-room port-light—which, sometimes hidden by its short green velvet curtain, or revealed—as the drapery swung aside with the ship’s rolling—seemed to wink in a derisive way.
“Gaw! how this dam’ ship rolls!—and, talkin’ of stinks—how smelly she is!... Horses and soger-men and tar and bilge—piff!—and somethin’ else to top up.” He sniffed, becoming more and more sensible of having inherited the queasy paternal stomach.... “Somethin’I’ve smelt at those kilns at Little Milding—where the Governor dries his sprouted oats and mildewed hay.” He added, in an aggrieved tone:
“My forage ’ud taste a deal sweeter if it had been bought with cleaner money. That’s what I say, and to that I shall stick. And I’m ready to lay any fellow ten to one in tenners—and the Governor’s given me a hundred of ’em!—I shall come across that core of cow-parsley in every truss I get!”
Here Morty succumbed to the malady of the ocean, groaning just as dismally as the Admiralty Agent. You may imagine corresponding sounds breaking out in neighboring cabins—indeed, for some hours the stuffy, crowded troop-deck had been littered with the bodies of those who had fallen victims to this insidious complaint.
And as the weather worsened, and hatchways, companions, and even scuttles were kept closed, that smell that Morty Jowell had said “Piff!” at—and that was reminiscent of the kilns at Little Milding, where fermenting hay was dried—mingled more potently in the hotch-potch of weird smells that distinguishes a troopship full of seasick soldiers.
It came in overpowering gusts from the fore-hold, that was close-packed with the Government forage-trusses. It came in blasts more overpowering still—being mingled with an appalling equine odor—through a square black hole in the lower deck—a yawning hole that had not been padded with sacks of straw like the corresponding aperture in the deck above it—when by means of canvas slings and tackle from the mainyard, the horses had been lowered into the after-hold.
Descending into the stifling blackness of this place, you presently made out by the significantly-haloed light of a couple of wire-guarded ship’s lanterns, rows of frightened hairy faces ranged along the sides of the hold, and looking at you across the spars that kept their owners—slung in canvas belts from hooks in the over-deck beams—in the stalls that were padded with straw and bundles of tow.
The central space between the rows of frightened hairy faces was packed to the upper-deck with more of Jowell’s forage-trusses. Dunnage was beneath the hoofs of these unlucky four-legged passengers, and layers of Cowell’sbeef-barrels were underneath this. And when the ship rolled in stress of heavy weather, and the barrels shifted, the legs that got between them were frequently mashed to jelly, adding to the deadly qualms of nauseau torments more cruel still.
Sire my Friend accommodated the horses of his Cavalry, Artillery and Transport on the spar-decks of troop-ships—or at worst in the ’tween decks; sheltering them in the first instance beneath canvas, or housing them under temporary sheds of planks. But Britannia, at the instance of her evil genius Jowell, stowed—in nine cases out of ten—these luckless brutes upon the ballast.
Every day on boardThe British Queen—as on board those other transports speeding in the cause of Humanity to the East with men and horses—shots were heard far down in these submarine hells; and every night hairy bodies—sometimes dreadfully disfigured and distorted—were hauled up with rope-tackle and hove overboard. For your horse, whose anatomical structure renders it next to impossible to vomit, is capable of going mad; and does it under given circumstances, with conspicuous thoroughness. Therefore the faces of the men who went down into these places, looking pale or red as the case might be, came up again livid or purple; and the oaths they swore grew more sulphurous every day. For between good men and good horses there is love.
What timeThe British Queenwas staggering, close-hauled, through the shattering yellow-green seas of the Bay of Biscay O! two hundred miles from England—and it blew a great gale through heavy squalls of rain—and the hatches were battened down, and every soul on the troop-decks, and every military officer in the poop cabin and several of the ship’s officers and crew, were dog-sick and helpless; even stout Blueberry nearly gave up hope of seeing the light of day again, and breathing something sweeter than the atmosphere of the after-hold.
For the comrade on his off-side was screaming in the convulsions of tetanus; and the mare on his near-side was dead like many another, with her long neck and helpless head banging him, flail-fashion, whenever the smelly, stifling stable you were pent up in stood on its front end—or swinging the other way and banging Corporal Geogehagan’s horse—and even the sailors who had come downat intervals to pump the tainted water from the tanks and serve out the musty hay had left off coming.
Then, in the middle of one unforgettable, fateful night, was heard aboardThe British Queen, and heard in every conceivable tone of human and animal terror, fear, and anguish—the dreadful cry of Fire!