MR. RAMS
"Women, and wine, and war.
War, and wine, and love!
With a sword to wear and a horse to ride
And a wench to love--give me nought beside,
But a bottle or so at the even-tide!
Women, and wine, and war!
Women, and wine, and war,
War, and wine, and love!
Oh, war's my trade, but wine's my play,
Wine crowns my night, and war my day
With a kiss or so in a casual way!
Women, and wine, and war!
Women, and wine, and war,
War, and wine, and love!
Here's a broken head for a drunken spree
When a blue-eyed wench deserted me!
Go, lecture the hussy, and let me be!
Women, and wine, and war!"
I
If Bandy Jones had not been singing _Old King Cole_--our version--at
the time, my song would have been quite the success of the evening.
All the fellows were gathered at Mother Darkie's buckboard a mile
from camp. We put up the drinks by turn so far as our money went,
and the liquor seemed to be a sort of delicate blend of sulphuric
acid, fusel-oil and petrol flavored with rattlesnake poison,
"Specially imported, Massa Blackguard." I tended bar with an arm
round the wicked little negress, proposing to her at intervals. As
to the entertainment, Bandy beat a bread pan and howled Indian
war-songs while Tubby McImerish talked about an English
tenderfoot--name o' Rams--found bushed at Horsethief Creek. "Calls
me, 'me good man haw,' 'Yes, me deah fellah,' and
'How-d'ye-du-don't-y-know.' Just like old McBugjuice--more side than
a jumped-up viceroy--and the crawler wearing putties and a
helmet--bet you a dollar he did, then shut yer mouth--and don't yawp
as if I was measles and you'd caught 'em. I'm tellin' yous about
thish-yer little gawd-forbid, which I brung him into camp to play
with the officers. He's improvin' their minds at the officers' mess.
If you don't believe me you can see his wet balloon-sleeved pants
hung by the cook fire, and Rich Mixed eating of 'em."
Calamity Smith was spouting anarchism, while Tribulation le Grandeur
told us about his mare, shot at Fort Walsh in 1876. The pair made a
sort of duet: "Abart the pore workin' man _'e call 'im ze abcess_
gettin' a fair show _vot you call strangles, hein?_ I say fair show!
So I say _to ze major Walsh_ Down with the Queen! _I say_ and let
her take in washing _says I she's got ze strangles_ all she's fit
for! Down with the Government! _no! no! no! I no shoot my mare!_
and lynch thim millionaires! _Sacré nom de_--pore workin' man--long
live anarchy! _She no keek any_--Down with everybody! _So I mak
shoot my fusil and--and vot that you say about Queen Victoria, hein?_
Pore workin' man--_I pull your nose, so_. Yow! _You traitor!_
Ur-r-r. _How you lak me keel you, hein?_ Help! Help!"
"Time, boys! Time!" yelled Mutiny, jammed in between these soloists,
and getting killed from both sides.
Enter Rich Mixed with the English tenderfoot's riding breeches, which
he reverently laid at my feet. The trio between Mutiny, Tribulation
and Calamity had become a triangular duel, while Bandy Jones led off
the general salute with hoo-hoo band accompaniment on Mother Darkie's
kitchen utensils.
"Now here comesh the Ge-ne-ran all ve-num and spleen,
And he ridesh like a sack, with a string round the middle-oh.
'S head's full of feathers, an' his heart's all woe,
So 'preshent' while the band plays (hic)-shave the Queen."
Are we condemned? We were all getting beastly drunk and yet I would
not have you denounce my comrades. Calamity was one of the thirty
men who arrested Sitting Bull's victorious army after the Custer
massacre, and handed them as prisoners to the American cavalry.
Tribulation arrested a cannibal lunatic, and single-handed brought
him seven hundred miles through the northern forest in winter. Spud
broke a world record in horsemanship, riding a hundred and thirty-two
miles by sunlight of one summer day, on a horse who bucked him off at
the finish. Mutiny was the very greatest of all our teamsters.
McBugjuice was seven days lost after a blizzard, but won through
alive. All had shared in heroic work for the state, and all alike
were drunk. All lived a monastic life, denied the society of women,
barred from every reasonable amusement, inured to privation and to
self-denial. They belonged to a phase of history not to be measured
by rule of thumb moralities, or judged by the cheap standards of
cities, where men live for money, are plentiful and small.
For where men do the work of giants, the overstrain has always its
reaction, and if they can not get drunk they will go mad. So I could
name a dozen of our best men, the heroes of the force who went mad
and shot themselves. The drunken times of the vikings, the
conquistadors, the Elizabethans, the British conquerors, the American
pioneers and those of Western Canada, are ages of energy and power,
of genius and glory, while the sober epochs may well be those of
weakness, fatigue, decay.
It is a comfort that we shall not be judged by Christians, but by
Christ, with the Saviour's large, merciful understanding, His
humorous toleration and sweet charity.
II
Soldier! Soldier! where are your breeches, pray?
Soldier! Soldier! Git up an' dust!
Where the deuce have yer hidden yer brains away?
Soldier! Soldier! Hustle or bust!
Busted the Bugler? Send him to Hawspital
Can't ye shut up that confounded row?
Show a leg, and no damned profanity--
Get up an' sweat for a shillin' a day.
Strident brazen reveillé, insulting the holy calm of dawn, lifted me
broad awake. The moon-shadows were running to cover under scented
firs, the air was a thin white ecstasy of perfume, the sky a rhapsody
of tremulous, quickening splendor. The blue devils of the evening
had run to cover. Who had such friends as mine, such great-hearted
comrades? What other trooper in the world was secretly a marquis,
knight of the noblest of all chivalric orders? As for the Burrows
woman, let the wench go hang!
The bugler, crouched by the guard fire, was boiling his morning
coffee. The picket, riding drowsily homeward, were driving the herd
to the horse lines. From all the tents came sleepy execrations,
"Show a leg there! Get a move on! Rise and shine, you cripples!
Who told you to tread on my face, eh? Oh, give us a rest, you
chaps--who said reveillé?"
"Dress!" cried the bugle, and the day's procedure took on its ordered
course through stables, breakfast, fatigues, guard mounting--all that
ritual of the service which has for soldiers the flavor of a
religion. The bugle calls are sacred as one thinks of the "Reveille"
in captured Delhi where Nicholson sahib, God of the Sikhs lay dead,
of "Parade" on the listing deck of the _Birkenhead_, of the "General
Salute" as Nelson hoisted his flag on board the _Victory_, or the
"Roll-call" which followed, Balaklava, or "Lights Out!" throbbing
through stricken silence on the field of Waterloo. The ritual,
familiar to us as mass to monks, gives dignity to all our humble
duties, preparing us to face death that the state may live.
That morning Buckie put me under arrest, and, the call for
"Defaulters" found me howling for my solicitor. When any unusual
outrage had occurred, I was always arrested on general principles.
This time, when I appeared before the officer commanding, I learned
that the tent occupied by a certain Mr. Rams, a civilian guest, had
been invaded during the night by an alleged buffalo bull. _Item_,
the said animal bit the aforesaid Rams who was now under surgical
treatment. _Item_, said buffalo was really a sheep. _Item_, the
teeth of the above-mentioned sheep, being examined, showed no traces
either of blood or trousers. _Item_, the alleged trousers were
missing.
Prisoner being charged with divers crimes worthy of capital
punishment.
I briefly outlined an alibi with regard to the trousers. Hearing
that one Rams was detained in custody, I had borrowed the cook's lamb
and introduced it. The pair appeared to have fallen out, which was
no affair of mine, although it ought to interest naturalists. I
hoped that Mr. Rams would not occur again because he was too tempting.
I could only appeal to the gravity of the court.
Severely reprimanded.
So I went back to my tent, and when Orderly-Corporal Buckie followed
he found me packing. I told him I should resign, but even then he
kept his official countenance. Jolly good luck for me, he said, that
Sam was pleased with my ax work--averring it looked like the gnawings
of remorse. As to the monstrous cheek of my defense--Sam nearly had
an apoplectic fit. If he had been able to keep his countenance he
would have ordered me off to instant death. As it was, he had asked
the sergeant-major if I could be spared for three days' absence.
Sergeant-major said he could spare me permanently, but even three
days' rest for the troop would be a blessing. So I was to saddle
Gentle Annie, and my horse, get grub for two from the cook tent, and
four feeds of grain in gunny sacks; then to report.
What for?
"You're to escort Mr. Rams to the Throne Mine before the men get at
him."
The match never knows how great a fire it kindles.
"Them pants," added Buckie, as he turned away, "is found."
III
In English-speaking books and plays the Spaniard is a villain, and
comes to a bad end. Same here.
But, villain as I am, I do assure you that none of your saints could
have been with Mr. Rams for a minute without the loss of his halo.
When I had warned him that Gentle Annie's name was Satan, I held her
head while he tried to mount on the off side facing her tail. She
meekly held the seat of his riding breeches between her clenched
teeth, and waited to see what would happen. With inexpressible joy
the troop looked on.
"I say, bloomers!" said Mutiny, "they're pontoons."
"Bet you a dollar," Bandy growled, "that he's a Roosian spy."
"Them pants is a checker-board for checker tournaminks," said the
troop cook.
"_In pantibus infidelium_," quoth an unfrocked priest, one of our
teamsters, "_requiescat in pantis. E pantibus cockalorum, gorlia in
pantissimus Piccadilliensis._"
For a half a mile out from camp, Mr. Rams was thoughtful, then in the
most sportsmanlike manner called, "I say, Blackguard--"
"If you want to call me," said I, "just whistle--_so_."
At the whistle, my dog came bounding after us. But as troop dog
commanding the bobbery pack in camp he had to take the dinner parade,
and keep proper discipline. Alas, regardless of duty, reckless of
consequences, he romped ahead, leading my procession, for once
forgetting his rank and dignity. The most exciting smells bobbed up
all round him. "Rabbits!" he barked. "Badger!" he shrieked. "Oh,
snakes!"
"My good man," said Rams with a jolt, determined to put me in my
proper place as a common soldier. "Two days ago I'd never been on a
horse."
"So I see."
"If this was the city, you'd be the tenderfoot, scared at our
traffic. What the hell do you know about me? Whatever you think,
I'm no coward, facing this beastly expedition."
"All alone, too," said I. "Sure sign of the thoroughbred. No nurse.
Now if you picked up my dog by the tail, he wouldn't even whimper."
Rich Mixed had no tail, not even a bud. That member had lately been
lost in mortal combat.
"Ought to be in a dog's home," said Rams, surveying the patch of
sealing-wax which marked the site of the departed tail.
I said I should be incapable of any such outrage as a dog's home.
"Hybrids are never sent to dogs' homes."
"Hybrid, eh? He does look a rum'un."
"They're frightfully infectious," I told him. "Rich Mixed is a
hybrid between an old Billy-goat and a she-bear."
"Impossible!"
"We thought so. Billy-goat was such a very respectable dog."
"Oh, I see, a dog."
"Troop dog at Battleford."
"But, if a she-bear--"
"She was the bear in the hymn, and her name was Gladly. You must
remember Gladly the cross-eyed bear in the hymn. That's why my dog
has such an appalling squint. Of course, though, that's only when
he's cross. Besides, he eats bats, and so contracts bad habits."
"Fine day," said Rams, in his most freezing manner.
"You see," I spoke with utter sincerity, "he catches nocturnal habits
from eating bats, and mixes up the nocturnal habits with the
hibernating bear habits of his mother, and also with the climbing
instincts of old Billy-goat who used to mountaineer on the barrack
roofs. Now you must realize that you can't be a nocturnal
hibernating climbing dog especially in winter. He's dismembered by
his passions. It isn't natural."
"Should think not, indeed."
"Makes him so delicate. Inflammation of the squeam, you know. Hence
the sealing-wax. It stays on better than sticking-plaster. He eats
off the plaster."
Trotting on three legs, ears cocked, smirking with affection, Rich
Mixed enjoyed being praised. But now he heard the bugle far away
astern, crying out "Officer's wives," and with a pang of remorse,
knew he'd be late when the call came, "Love o' God." He bolted to
his duties.
As to Rams, at the risk of a dangerous fall, he lighted a cigar. I
dismounted to stamp out the flame from his dropped match in the
grass, then mounting again set off at a racking trot, which smashed
the cigar in his hand and left the remains smoldering on the trail.
Without breaking pace, I swung down, trampled the sparks and vaulted
back to watch Rams having his vital organs torn adrift and pounded to
a haggis during an hour of vengeance. Never again would he smoke
selfishly, or while he lived would drop a lighted match. But would
he live?
I was angry at losing my dinner, and being sent to Mrs. Sarde's--into
temptation. Worse than that, the presence of Rams profaned a
landscape ineffably pure and sacred in its wild beauty. The hot air
quivered with perfume under the fir trees of that open forest, the
birds rang out ecstatic little songs, canaries flaunted their topaz
from tree to tree, and humming-birds, each like an emerald in a mist,
hovered among the flowers.
We Spaniards make an art of living, quick in every fiber to live, to
love, to worship, to sin, to suffer; but, alas, so many are
religious, monks and nuns mewed up in convents instead of breeding
children. These Anglo-Saxons have no time to live, let life itself
drop lost out of their grasping hands because they are sires and
mothers fending for their homes, begetters of nations, piling wealth
on wealth, ruling the sea, taming the wilderness, filling the
continents with their endless, meaningless clamor for more and more.
This brutal creature I rode with could see timber by the thousand
feet per acre, real estate by sections and town sites, minerals by
the ton, the horse-power of cataracts, but not the delicious valley,
the aged hills bowed with their weight of years. My people came to
worship, his to destroy.
It must have been ninety-five degrees in the shade as we dropped down
the white bluffs, and splashed across the Columbia just by the outlet
of Lake Windermere. I took the sandwiches from my wallets, and we
had lunch in the saddle, walked our horses through enchanted
woodlands where trotting would seem profane. With a wry smile, my
tenderfoot avowed that he must have a squeam after all. It ached, he
said mournfully. "And yet," he asked, "what's the usual name for it?"
"Oh, it's only the thing you get squeamish with," said I. "Among my
mother's people they cut the _Squaminosa Invertibitis_ in infancy,
just like your doctors cut out the vermiform appendix, and as they do
the killing they ought to know."
He gulped the bait. "Your mother's people?" he asked, and offered a
cigar, which I declined with thanks. Havana wrappers covered a
multitude of wrong 'uns.
"My mother's people? Oh, yes," I remembered. "She's from the New
Hebrides. Married my father when he was a Methodist missionary. But
then he took to preaching against the black-birders, slavers, you
know--so the traders ran him out. He was fed up with the missions,
anyway."
Rams was hooked good and hard, so I played him.
"If only," I sighed, "he had caught the mission schooner!"
"What happened?"
"You see, it's never safe in canoes along the New Guinea coast. Poor
father was caught, and--well, I can just remember the smell--cooking,
you know."
"Horrible! But you escaped?"
I couldn't really convince him unless I owned to that. "Yes, mother
and I escaped--swam Torres Straits, got to the pearling station on
Thursday Island."
He swallowed that thirty-mile swim, not to mention sharks, and said
he had heard a lot about Thursday Island.
I thought best to skip the island.
"After we got home," said I, "we were dreadfully poor. Mother had a
perfectly awful time in London, starving. Then she met Madame
Tussaud."
"But she was in the French Revolution. It says so in the guide-book."
"Yes, the waxwork business went to her son, you remember, and this
was the grandson's second wife, I think--a perfect angel, anyway.
Mother got a job as charwoman at the waxworks. How I remember
sitting in a corner all alone behind those weird dead figures! They
frightened me horribly at first--in the dark, you know, after closing
time--and mother scrubbing the floor down in the Chamber of Horrors."
"Awful place that. Scared me."
"In short frocks," I added by way of local color. "I was only five.
And then came the trouble--fingers missing from the statues, and ears
and things from the sit-down figures. The management found out that
mother was a Kanaka, from the New Hebrides. They shoved her in jail."
"But, why?"
"And mother a Methodist!" I wiped my eyes with my shirt-sleeve,
deeply moved, then gulped, and went on bravely. "She'd given up
eating such things, but there it was, the suspicion, the
doubt--fingers missing, and ears--and the nose of Marie
Antionette--the highest I ever reached. You see, it wasn't mother.
It was me. It was hereditary." I choked back a sob. "That's why my
name's Lemuncher."
Rams became very uneasy. He was broke dead gentle to ride or drive,
but shied at cannibals.
From the Columbia crossing up Toby Creek to Paradise Flat we climbed
about fourteen miles and, scared as I was of night catching us on
that dim trail in the mountains, our horses needed rest. We found a
Mexican packer camped with his bunch of burros, keen for a gossip in
Spanish, insisting that we share his venison stew. I slacked cinches
and introduced Mr. Rams to "a Kanaka friend from the New Hebrides."
"But fancy Kanakas here! What next!"
"Yes," I confessed, "a lot of my mother's people settled here to get
away from the missionaries. You see, they eat salt, and it spoils
their flavor. We'll stop for dinner and try Kanaka cooking."
Mr. Rams was at his second helping when a sudden thought drove all
the blood from his clerkly visage. "What food is this?" he gasped.
"An Indian girl," I told him, "dear little papoose our friend shot
yesterday."
Rams broke for the woods.
The Mexican warned me to make the Throne Mine by daylight, but when I
led the mare to my poor tenderfoot he seemed in a state of collapse.
And yet I tapped the manhood which underlies the English character,
for ill as he was, and believing me to be a thrice confessed
cannibal, insane and armed, he faced me like a hero. "Clear out!" he
shouted, pointing me down the trail. "I'll walk to the Throne.
Clear out!"
"I'm to deliver you," said I, "in good repair, and take a receipt for
you."
His sparring attitude was in quite excellent form, but I told him to
lower the right fist just an inch, and wade right in for blood.
The blow on my solar plexus made me reel, but of course I stood to
attention. He had to be delivered in good repair, not damaged, at
the Throne. His second made my nose bleed.
"Defend yourself," he howled, and poured in all he had until his
breath was gone.
"When you're done being peevish," said I, "we'll hit the trail."
"I don't understand," answered my tenderfoot.
"That's the trouble," said I, while I stanched my nose. "You don't
understand. You mount on the off-side, drop matches to set the
country all ablaze, foul the stream where my horse drinks, believe
all that you're told, and don't know venison from human flesh. So
you have tantrums like a teething baby."
"Then you're not--a--"
"Cannibal? No. But you're a silly ass."
"Perhaps you're right," said Rams, as I hoisted him into the saddle.
Dense forest filled Paradise Cañon and from its head a switch-back
trail climbed up the flank of a gigantic ridge. Along its spine we
climbed for many a weary mile until even the midsummer length Of the
day began to fail us and twilight was closing in.
Rams talked with a slight twitching of his large, seductively ugly
ears--the kind one longs to stroke--and a faint snuffle of the nose,
pinched red by wearing glasses, which looked quite convivial. He
talked down to me, using nice simple words for me to understand about
the London where he had been warped. This London of his was not my
glittering City of Joy, and it was quite unlike Red Saunders' bleak
manufacturing seaport. It was the London of the white Babu which had
given him his uneducated body, his trained unquiet mind, and his
opinions to which he attached no end of importance, giving them
plenty of air and exercise. He was but one of millions of clerks and
students who lived in suburbs, worked in offices. They improved
their minds--poor things--of an evening at enormous universities
called the Polytechnics where they make prigs. They spent their
Saturday afternoons like sportsmen watching the games they could not
afford to play. On their direful Sundays, they had their souls
exorcised at Bigotarian chapels contemplating hell, and they cycled
or walked in the parks to give the girls a treat.
Rams senior was a shiny Baptist millionaire who had bought a
knighthood, and sat in the Commons on the Liberal side, a vegetarian,
anti- most things, and pro- everything else, with no nonsense about
him or any Christian mercy. His daughters were frumps on all sorts
of committees, his sons were slaves, and this one was a mining
engineer. To-day he rode over his first real rock, so different from
the cabinet specimens, to see his first real mine, not like the
show-case model. The swampy slopes of Alpine flowers told him
nothing about the jagged schists underneath. The granite spires
ahead sent him no message about God's ice-mills out of their purple
bloom against the orange sky.
When I told him I had lots of relations in town, the weary man
flickered up to this last expiring effort as he asked for their
names, and where they lived.
"All over the place," I told him. "You know them by their
coat-of-arms, the Medici Arms--three golden globes and a side door.
They are my uncles."
Poor Rams!
"Look!" I shouted as some small animals leaped across the trail. "A
chiffon!"
"A what?" He would not even look.
"A chiffon. It's a sort of four-legged burrowing bird which inhabits
mines. We must be near the Throne."
Black clumps of torch-like pines scattered down, far down a slope of
Alpine flowers on which we groped. Ahead was a spire peak of pansy
bloom on a field of lilac snow against the gloaming. Astern and a
little above our trail a small log cabin nestled among the rocks, and
a candle glowed in its doorway. Then ahead, quite near, a nook of
the hillside revealed more cabins in the frosty murk. A lamp gleamed
in a window, to guide us up the rock steps and fields of dusty snow.
Here was the Throne.