He scraped a few hundred francs together and sent them to poor old
Smithwick, and received another letter of disproportionately-measured
gratitude for the meager gift that might so easily have been a rich
one, if....
He learned from a very little paragraph at the end of the grateful
letter that his faithful old friend had broken down in health. That
she had been seriously ill “from the effects of over-anxiety and
_a too strenuous battle_ with adversity,” ending with pious thanks
to Providence--Smithwick was always curiously anxious to avoid
references of a more sacred nature--that, “through the introduction and
recommendation of a _most generous friend_,” she had obtained admission
as an inmate of the Hospice for Sick Governesses in Cavendish Street,
London, West, “_a noble charity_ conducted upon the _purest Christian
principles_, where I hope, D. V., to spend _my closing days in peace_.”
Were they so near, those closing days of the simple, honorable, upright
life? Gratitude, respect, old association, a chivalrous pity for the
woman, sick, and poor, and old, conspired to make the first step on
the Road Perilous easier than her pupil would have imagined. He got
upon his iron-gray Arab, Djelma, dearest and most valuable of the few
possessions owned by this son of a millionaire, and rode to the Rue
d’Artois with the leveled brows and cold, set face of a man who rides
to dishonor.
Upon the very steps of Rothschild’s, a brother-officer of the Regiment
of Line to which our young sprig of the Staff was attached in the
capacity of Assistant-Adjutant, met and repaid Dunoisse an ancient,
moss-grown, long-forgotten debt of three thousand francs.
“You come _fort à propos_--for you, that is! Here, catch hold! Sorry
I met you! You’re not, I’ll bet you this whacking lump!” Monsieur the
Captain joyfully flourished the stout roll of _billets de banque_,
from which he had stripped the notes he now thrust under Dunoisse’s
nose. “Wonder where I got ’em? Inside there”--a thumb clothed in
lemon-colored kid jerked over the shoulder--“from one of those powdered
old cocks behind the gilt balusters. My old girl has stumped with a
vengeance this time. I told her my tailor was a Chevalier of the
Legion of Honor, and had sent me a _cartel_ because I hadn’t paid his
bill.” One is sorry to record that Monsieur the Captain’s “old girl”
was no less stately a person than Madame la Comtesse de Kerouatte, of
the Château de Pigandel, Ploubanou, La Bretagne. “She swallowed the
story, and see the result. Don’t shy at taking the plasters. You can
lend me again when I’m broke! Pouch! and _va te promener_!”
So Dunoisse gratefully took the tendered banknotes and with one of
them an outside place on the blue Havre diligence, rattling out of
Paris, next morning, behind its four bony bays, ere the milkwomen, and
postmen, and newspaper-carts began their rounds.
The salt fresh wind stinging his red-brown skin, the salter spray
upon his lips, the veiled and shawled and muffled ladies, and cloaked
and greatcoated gentlemen, already extended on the deck-seats and
deck-chairs of the steam-packet _Britannia_ of Southampton--patiently
waiting to be dreadfully indisposed in little basins that were dealt
out by the brisk, hurrying, gilt-buttoned stewards as cards are dealt
at whist; the glasses of brandy-and-water being called for by robust
Britons, champing ham sandwiches with mustard on their upper lips,
and good-fellowship beaming out of their large pink, whiskered faces;
the tumblers of _eau sucrée_ being ordered by French travelers, who
invariably got toast-and-water instead; the swaying crates of luggage,
the man-traps made by coils of rope on wet and slippery decks, the
crash of waves hitting bows or paddle-wheels, the shrieks of scared
females, convinced their last hour had come,--recalled to Dunoisse his
boyish visit to what poor Smithwick had invariably termed “the shores
of Albion.”
He remembered with gratitude the self-denying hospitality of the poor
sisters: the little home at Hampstead, the golden-blossomed furze of
the Heath, came back to him with extraordinary vividness. Down to the
piping bullfinch, whose cage hung in the little front parlor-window,
and whose _répertoire_, consisting of the first bar of “Home, Sweet
Home,” the boy had endeavored to enlarge with the melodies of “_Partant
Pour La Syrie_” and “_Jeanette et Jeannot_,” every detail stood clear.
And here was England, upon a pale gray February morning, under skies
that wept cold heavy tears of partly-melted snow. Black fungus-growths
of umbrellas were clustered on the quay; the thick air smelled of
oilskins and wet mackintoshes. And so across a dripping gangway to a
splashy paved incline that ended in a Railway Station, for instead
of coaching through Hants and Surrey to Middlesex by the scarlet
“Defiance” or the yellow “Tally-Ho!” you traveled by the Iron Road all
the way to London.
You are to picture the splay-wheeled, giraffe-necked locomotive of
the time, with the top of the funnel nicked like the cut paper round
a cutlet-bone; the high-bodied carriages, with little windows and
hard hair-cloth cushions; the gentlemen passengers in shaggy hats
with curly brims, high-waisted coats, with immense roll-collars, and
full-hipped trousers strapped down over shiny boots; assisting ladies
in coal-scuttle bonnets, and pelerines trimmed with fur, worn over
gored skirts, swelled out by a multiplicity of starched, embroidered
petticoats, affording peeps of pantalettes and sandals, to alight or to
ascend....
Pray understand that there was no jumping. Violent movement was not
considered genteel. Supposing you to be of the softer sex--it was
softer in those days than it is now!--you were swanlike or sprightly,
according to your height, figure, and the shape of your nose, and your
name almost invariably ended in “anna” or “ina” or “etta.”
My Aunt Julietta was sprightly. She had a nose ever so slightly turned
up at the end, and a dimple in her left cheek. Her elder sister, one
of her elder sisters--Aunt Julietta was the youngest of six--her
elder, Marietta, was swanlike, with a long neck and champagne-bottle
shoulders, and the most elegant Early Victorian figure you can
conceive; a fiddle of the old pattern has such a waist and hips.
Both my aunts traveled by this very train, in the same first-class
compartment as the Assistant-Adjutant of the 999th Regiment of the
Line. The young ladies were, in fact, returning from a visit to the
elegant and hospitable family mansion of Sir Tackton Wackton, Baronet,
of Wops Hall, Hants; whose elder daughter had been their schoolfellow
and bosom-friend at the Misses Squeezers’ Select Boarding-School
for young ladies at Backboard House, Selina Parade, Brighton. It was
the first occasion upon which they had braved the dangers of the
Iron Road unprotected by a member of the sterner sex. Consequently,
when, in the act of picking up and handing to my Aunt Julietta a
sweet green velvet reticule she had accidentally dropped upon the
platform, the black-eyed, dark-complexioned, military-looking young
foreign gentleman, in a gray traveling cloak and cap, who performed
this act of gallantry, peeped up the tunnel of her coal-scuttle
bonnet, with evident appreciation of the wholesome apple-cheeked,
bright-eyed English girl-face looking out from amongst the ringlets
and frills and flowers at the end, both the young ladies were
extremely fluttered. And as they passed on, Aunt Marietta whispered
haughtily, “How presumptuous!” and Aunt Julietta responded: “Oh, I
_don’t_ think he meant to be _that_, my dear! And _how_ handsome and
distinguished-looking!” To which my Aunt Marietta only responded, with
the disdainful curl of the lip that went with her Roman nose: “For a
foreigner, passably so!”
Later on, by one of the oddest accidents you could conceive possible,
my aunts found themselves in the same first-class compartment as the
foreign-looking gentleman; and as the Southampton to London Express
clanked and jolted and rattled upon its metal way (rail-carriages being
unprovided at that early date with springs, pneumatic brakes, and other
mechanical inventions for the better ease of the public), the courtesy
and consideration of their well-bred fellow-traveler, who spoke
excellent English--combined with his undeniable good looks--created an
impression upon my Aunt Julietta, which by the time the Express had
rattled and jolted and clanked into the junction of the provincial
garrison town of Dullingstoke (near which was situated the family
mansion of my grandparents), had developed into an attachment of the
early, hapless, unreciprocated order.
“If only,” thought my sentimental Aunt, “the train could go on for
ever!”
But the train stopped; and there was the family chariot, with the
purple-nosed coachman on the box; there was the boy who had cleaned
the knives, now promoted to page’s livery, at the noses of Chestnut
and Browney, waiting to convey my aunts to the shelter of the
paternal roof. They collected muffs, reticules, and parcels.... The
military-looking young foreign gentleman handed them out, one after the
other, and bowed over their respective hands with a grace that caused
Aunt Marietta to exclaim, “My dear!” and Aunt Julietta to return, “Did
you ever?” as the family chariot drove away, and the Express, with much
preliminary snorting, prepared to start again, and did in fact start;
but brought up with a jerk, and clanked back to the platform to pick up
a passenger of importance, who had arrived behind time.
A dazzling scarlet mail-phaeton, pulled by a pair of high-spirited,
sweating, chestnut trotters, had brought him to the junction, sitting,
enveloped in a huge shaggy box-coat with buttons as large as Abernethy
biscuits; covered with a curly-brimmed, low-crowned shiny beaver
hat that might have belonged to a Broad Church parson of sporting
proclivities, by the side of the smart groom who drove.... Another
groom in the little seat behind sheltered him from the rain with a
vast green silk gig-umbrella, just as though he had been any common,
ordinary landholder of means and position, with a stake in the Borough
Elections, a seat on the local Bench, and the right to put J.P. after
his name; and commit local poachers caught by his own gamekeepers
in his own plantations, then and there, in his own library, to the
District Lock Up for trial at the Weekly Sessions.
* * * * *
But the guard,--a functionary in the absurdest uniform, a cross between
a penny-postman’s and a military pensioner’s, knew better. So did the
porters, encased in green velveteen corduroy, as worn by the porters
of to-day; so did the station-master, crowned with the gilt-banded
top-hat of a bank-messenger and sporting the crimson waistcoat of a
beadle. With a Parliamentary Down-train waiting outside and shrieking
to come through, while a Composite of horse-boxes and cattle-trucks
and coal-trucks bumped and jolted over the Main Line metals; with the
Up-Express from Southampton panting to be green-flagged and belled
upon its metal road to London, he waited, his gilt-banded top-hat
respectfully in hand, to receive the distinguished passenger, who
did not hurry, possibly in virtue of his bulk, but waddled down the
platform with a gait you felt to be peculiarly his own, involving a
short turn to the right as he stepped out with the right foot (encased
in the largest size of shiny patent-leather boot), and a short turn
to the left as he set down the left one, as though inviting the whole
world to take a comprehensive, satisfactory stare at a great and good
man, and be the better for it.
Impatient passengers, projecting the upper halves of their bodies
from the carriage-windows, saw nothing much in him. But to these,
awed porters and reverent officials whispered behind their expectant
palms,--on being conjured to say what the deuce the delay was
about?--that the gentleman who had caused it was a Government
Contractor, tremendous influential and uncommon rich; so much so as to
be able to break the Bank of England by the simple process of drawing
a whacking check upon it. When the hearer laughed heartily at this, or
snorted indignantly, the officials and porters amended that, perhaps to
say the Bank of England was a bit too strong, but that everybody knew
the gentleman was a Millionaire, and regularly rolling in his thousands.
He rolled now towards the compartment of which the foreign gentleman
who had assisted my aunts to alight was now the only occupant; and
allowed himself to be respectfully hoisted in, and tenderly placed
in a corner seat, with his valise and hat-box beside him. He filled
up the compartment--compartments were narrower in those days than
they are now--as completely as a large, shaggy bear might have done,
when he got upon his legs again, and stood at the window, beaming so
benevolently upon the admiring crowd assembled on the platform that the
station-master, upon whom had not fallen one drop of gold or silver
manna out of the smiler’s jingling trousers-pockets, felt impelled to
say: “Lord bless you, Mr. Thompson Jowell, sir! A safe journey up to
London and back! Guard, be extra careful this trip!” And the guard, who
had not been tipped, touched his tall hat respectfully; and the porter,
who had reaped nothing but honor from carrying Mr. Thompson Jowell’s
hat-box and valise; and the other porter, who had rammed scalding
hot-water tins into the carriage, that the large feet of the popular
idol might be warmed thereby, threw up each his muffin-shaped cap, and
cried “Hooray!” And the train started,--so suddenly, in the mistaken
zeal of the engine-driver, that Thompson Jowell was shot with violence
into a distant corner of the carriage, and so violently bonneted by
collision with the rack above, that only his large, red, projecting
ears saved him from being completely extinguished by the low-crowned,
curly-brimmed, shiny beaver hat, that might have been a sporting
parson’s of the jovial Broad Church brand.
He took the hat off after that, revealing his little pear-shaped head
of upright, bristly gray hair, and his forehead that slanted like the
lid of a Noah’s Ark over all the jumbled beasts inside, and goggled
with his large, moist, circular brown eyes upon his fellow-traveler
over the voluminous crimson silk handkerchief with which he mopped his
damp and shining face. He unbuttoned his greatcoat and threw his long
bulky body back in his corner with a “whoof!” of relief, and put up
his short, thick legs upon the seat, saying to Dunoisse, with a jerky,
patronizing nod:
“Plenty of room, sir, if you’re inclined to do the same. These
new-fangled hot-water tins draw a man’s corns consumedly!” Adding, a
moment after Dunoisse’s smiling refusal: “Please yourself, and you’ll
please me. ‘Hang manners! Give me comfort!’ says Mister John Bull....
You’re French yourself, I take it?”
“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.