MANY INVENTIONS
[Illustration]
MANY INVENTIONS
BY
RUDYARD KIPLING
‘Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but
they have sought out many inventions.’--ECCLESIASTES vii. 29.
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1893
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE DISTURBER OF TRAFFIC 1
A CONFERENCE OF THE POWERS 22
MY LORD THE ELEPHANT 41
ONE VIEW OF THE QUESTION 67
‘THE FINEST STORY IN THE WORLD’ 90
HIS PRIVATE HONOUR 129
A MATTER OF FACT 154
THE LOST LEGION 172
IN THE RUKH 189
‘BRUGGLESMITH’ 226
‘LOVE-O’-WOMEN’ 247
THE RECORD OF BADALIA HERODSFOOT 279
JUDSON AND THE EMPIRE 309
THE CHILDREN OF THE ZODIAC 342
TO THE TRUE ROMANCE.
_Thy face is far from this our war,
Our call and counter-cry,
I shall not find Thee quick and kind,
Nor know Thee till I die.
Enough for me in dreams to see
And touch Thy garments’ hem:
Thy feet have trod so near to God
I may not follow them._
Through wantonness if men profess
They weary of Thy parts,
E’en let them die at blasphemy
And perish with their arts;
But we that love, but we that prove
Thine excellence august,
While we adore discover more
Thee perfect, wise, and just.
Since spoken word Man’s spirit stirred
Beyond his belly-need,
What is is Thine of fair design
In thought and craft and deed;
Each stroke aright of toil and fight,
That was and that shall be,
And hope too high wherefore we die,
Has birth and worth in Thee.
Who holds by Thee hath Heaven in fee
To gild his dross thereby,
And knowledge sure that he endure
A child until he die--
For to make plain that man’s disdain
Is but new Beauty’s birth--
For to possess in loneliness
The joy of all the earth.
As Thou didst teach all lovers speech
And Life her mystery,
So shalt Thou rule by every school
Till love and longing die,
Who wast or yet the lights were set,
A whisper in the Void,
Who shalt be sung through planets young
When this is clean destroyed.
Beyond the bounds our staring rounds,
Across the pressing dark,
The children wise of outer skies
Look hitherward and mark
A light that shifts, a glare that drifts,
Rekindling thus and thus,
Not all forlorn, for Thou hast borne
Strange tales to them of us.
Time hath no tide but must abide
The servant of Thy will;
Tide hath no time, for to Thy rhyme
The ranging stars stand still--
Regent of spheres that lock our fears
Our hopes invisible,
Oh ’twas certes at Thy decrees
We fashioned Heaven and Hell!
Pure Wisdom hath no certain path
That lacks thy morning-eyne,
And captains bold by Thee controlled
Most like to Gods design;
Thou art the Voice to kingly boys
To lift them through the fight,
And Comfortress of Unsuccess,
To give the dead good-night--
A veil to draw ’twixt God His Law
And Man’s infirmity,
A shadow kind to dumb and blind
The shambles where we die;
A sum to trick th’ arithmetic
Too base of leaguing odds,
The spur of trust, the curb of lust,
Thou handmaid of the Gods!
Oh Charity, all patiently
Abiding wrack and scaith!
Oh Faith, that meets ten thousand cheats
Yet drops no jot of faith!
Devil and brute Thou dost transmute
To higher, lordlier show,
Who art in sooth that utter Truth
The careless angels know!
_Thy face is far from this our war,
Our call and counter-cry,
I may not find Thee quick and kind,
Nor know Thee till I die._
_Yet may I look with heart unshook
On blow brought home or missed--
Yet may I hear with equal ear
The clarions down the List;
Yet set my lance above mischance
And ride the barriere--
Oh, hit or miss, how little ’tis,
My Lady is not there!_
THE DISTURBER OF TRAFFIC.
From the wheel and the drift of Things
Deliver us, good Lord;
And we will meet the wrath of kings,
The faggot, and the sword.
Lay not Thy toil before our eyes,
Nor vex us with Thy wars,
Lest we should feel the straining skies
O’ertrod by trampling stars.
A veil ’twixt us and Thee, dread Lord,
A veil ’twixt us and Thee:
Lest we should hear too clear, too clear,
And unto madness see!
MIRIAM COHEN.
The Brothers of the Trinity order that none unconnected with their
service shall be found in or on one of their Lights during the hours
of darkness; but their servants can be made to think otherwise. If you
are fair-spoken and take an interest in their duties, they will allow
you to sit with them through the long night and help to scare the ships
into mid-channel.
Of the English south-coast Lights, that of St. Cecilia-under-the-Cliff
is the most powerful, for it guards a very foggy coast. When the
sea-mist veils all, St. Cecilia turns a hooded head to the sea and
sings a song of two words once every minute. From the land that
song resembles the bellowing of a brazen bull; but off-shore they
understand, and the steamers grunt gratefully in answer.
Fenwick, who was on duty one night, lent me a pair of black glass
spectacles, without which no man can look at the Light unblinded, and
busied himself in last touches to the lenses before twilight fell.
The width of the English Channel beneath us lay as smooth and as
many-coloured as the inside of an oyster-shell. A little Sunderland
cargo-boat had made her signal to Lloyd’s Agency, half a mile up the
coast, and was lumbering down to the sunset, her wake lying white
behind her. One star came out over the cliffs, the waters turned to
lead colour, and St. Cecilia’s Light shot out across the sea in eight
long pencils that wheeled slowly from right to left, melted into one
beam of solid light laid down directly in front of the tower, dissolved
again into eight, and passed away. The light-frame of the thousand
lenses circled on its rollers, and the compressed-air engine that drove
it hummed like a bluebottle under a glass. The hand of the indicator
on the wall pulsed from mark to mark. Eight pulse-beats timed one
half-revolution of the Light; neither more nor less.
Fenwick checked the first few revolutions carefully; he opened the
engine’s feed-pipe a trifle, looked at the racing governor, and again
at the indicator, and said: ‘She’ll do for the next few hours. We’ve
just sent our regular engine to London, and this spare one’s not by any
manner so accurate.’
‘And what would happen if the compressed air gave out?’ I asked.
‘We’d have to turn the flash by hand, keeping an eye on the indicator.
There’s a regular crank for that. But it hasn’t happened yet. We’ll
need all our compressed air to-night.’
‘Why?’ said I. I had been watching him for not more than a minute.
‘Look,’ he answered, and I saw that the dead sea-mist had risen out
of the lifeless sea and wrapped us while my back had been turned. The
pencils of the Light marched staggeringly across tilted floors of white
cloud. From the balcony round the light-room the white walls of the
lighthouse ran down into swirling, smoking space. The noise of the tide
coming in very lazily over the rocks was choked down to a thick drawl.
‘That’s the way our sea-fogs come,’ said Fenwick, with an air of
ownership. ‘Hark, now, to that little fool calling out ’fore he’s hurt.’
Something in the mist was bleating like an indignant calf; it might
have been half a mile or half a hundred miles away.
‘Does he suppose we’ve gone to bed?’ continued Fenwick. ‘You’ll hear
us talk to him in a minute. He knows puffickly where he is, and he’s
carrying on to be told like if he was insured.’
‘Who is “he”?’
‘That Sunderland boat, o’ course. Ah!’
I could hear a steam-engine hiss down below in the mist where the
dynamos that fed the Light were clacking together. Then there came a
roar that split the fog and shook the lighthouse.
‘GIT-_toot_!’ blared the fog-horn of St. Cecilia. The bleating ceased.
‘Little fool!’ Fenwick repeated. Then, listening: ‘Blest if that
aren’t another of them! Well, well, they always say that a fog do draw
the ships of the sea together. They’ll be calling all night, and so’ll
the siren. We’re expecting some tea-ships up-Channel.... If you put my
coat on that chair, you’ll feel more so-fash, sir.’
It is no pleasant thing to thrust your company upon a man for the
night. I looked at Fenwick, and Fenwick looked at me; each gauging the
other’s capacities for boring and being bored. Fenwick was an old,
clean-shaven, gray-haired man who had followed the sea for thirty
years, and knew nothing of the land except the lighthouse in which he
served. He fenced cautiously to find out the little that I knew, and
talked down to my level till it came out that I had met a captain in
the merchant service who had once commanded a ship in which Fenwick’s
son had served; and further, that I had seen some places that Fenwick
had touched at. He began with a dissertation on pilotage in the Hugli.
I had been privileged to know a Hugli pilot intimately. Fenwick had
only seen the imposing and masterful breed from a ship’s chains, and
his intercourse had been cut down to ‘Quarter less five,’ and remarks
of a strictly business-like nature. Hereupon he ceased to talk down
to me, and became so amazingly technical that I was forced to beg him
to explain every other sentence. This set him fully at his ease; and
then we spoke as men together, each too interested to think of anything
except the subject in hand. And that subject was wrecks, and voyages,
and old-time trading, and ships cast away in desolate seas, steamers
we both had known, their merits and demerits, lading, Lloyd’s, and,
above all, Lights. The talk always came back to Lights: Lights of
the Channel; Lights on forgotten islands, and men forgotten on them;
Light-ships--two months’ duty and one month’s leave--tossing on kinked
cables in ever-troubled tideways; and Lights that men had seen where
never lighthouse was marked on the charts.
Omitting all those stories, and omitting also the wonderful ways by
which he arrived at them, I tell here, from Fenwick’s mouth, one that
was not the least amazing. It was delivered in pieces between the
roller-skate rattle of the revolving lenses, the bellowing of the
fog-horn below, the answering calls from the sea, and the sharp tap of
reckless night-birds that flung themselves at the glasses. It concerned
a man called Dowse, once an intimate friend of Fenwick, now a waterman
at Portsmouth, believing that the guilt of blood is on his head, and
finding no rest either at Portsmouth or Gosport Hard.
* * * * *
... ‘And if anybody was to come to you and say, “I know the Javva
currents,” don’t you listen to him; for those currents is never yet
known to mortal man. Sometimes they’re here, sometimes they’re there,
but they never runs less than five knots an hour through and among
those islands of the Eastern Archipelagus. There’s reverse currents
in the Gulf of Boni--and that’s up north in Celebes--that no man can
explain; and through all those Javva passages from the Bali Narrows,
Dutch Gut, and Ombay, which I take it is the safest, they chop and they
change, and they banks the tides fust on one shore and then on another,
till your ship’s tore in two. I’ve come through the Bali Narrows, stern
first, in the heart o’ the south-east monsoon, with a sou’-sou’-west
wind blowing atop of the northerly flood, and our skipper said he
wouldn’t do it again, not for all Jamrach’s. You’ve heard o’ Jamrach’s,
sir?’
‘Yes; and was Dowse stationed in the Bali Narrows?’ I said.
‘No; he was not at Bali, but much more east o’ them passages, and
that’s Flores Strait, at the east end o’ Flores. It’s all on the
way south to Australia when you’re running through that Eastern
Archipelagus. Sometimes you go through Bali Narrows if you’re
full-powered, and sometimes through Flores Strait, so as to stand south
at once, and fetch round Timor, keeping well clear o’ the Sahul Bank.
Elseways, if you aren’t full-powered, why it stands to reason you go
round by the Ombay Passage, keeping careful to the north side. You
understand that, sir?’
I was not full-powered, and judged it safer to keep to the north
side--of Silence.
‘And on Flores Strait, in the fairway between Adonare Island and the
mainland, they put Dowse in charge of a screw-pile Light called the
Wurlee Light. It’s less than a mile across the head of Flores Strait.
Then it opens out to ten or twelve mile for Solor Strait, and then it
narrows again to a three-mile gut, with a topplin’ flamin’ volcano
by it. That’s old Loby Toby by Loby Toby Strait, and if you keep his
Light and the Wurlee Light in a line you won’t take much harm, not on
the darkest night. That’s what Dowse told me, and I can well believe
him, knowing these seas myself; but you must ever be mindful of the
currents. And there they put Dowse, since he was the only man that that
Dutch government which owns Flores could find that would go to Wurlee
and tend a fixed Light. Mostly they uses Dutch and Italians; Englishmen
being said to drink when alone. I never could rightly find out what
made Dowse accept of that position, but accept he did, and used to sit
for to watch the tigers come out of the forests to hunt for crabs and
such like round about the lighthouse at low tide. The water was always
warm in those parts, as I know well, and uncommon sticky, and it ran
with the tides as thick and smooth as hogwash in a trough. There was
another man along with Dowse in the Light, but he wasn’t rightly a
man. He was a Kling. No, nor yet a Kling he wasn’t, but his skin was
in little flakes and cracks all over, from living so much in the salt
water as was his usual custom. His hands was all webby-foot, too. He
was called, I remember Dowse saying now, an Orange-Lord, on account of
his habits. You’ve heard of an Orange-Lord, sir?’
‘Orang-Laut?’ I suggested.
‘That’s the name,’ said Fenwick, smacking his knee. ‘An Orang-Laut, of
course, and his name was Challong; what they call a sea-gypsy. Dowse
told me that that man, long hair and all, would go swimming up and down
the straits just for something to do; running down on one tide and
back again with the other, swimming side-stroke, and the tides going
tremenjus strong. Elseways he’d be skipping about the beach along with
the tigers at low tide, for he was most part a beast; or he’d sit in
a little boat praying to old Loby Toby of an evening when the volcano
was spitting red at the south end of the strait. Dowse told me that he
wasn’t a companionable man, like you and me might have been to Dowse.
‘Now I can never rightly come at what it was that began to ail Dowse
after he had been there a year or something less. He was saving of all
his pay and tending to his Light, and now and again he’d have a fight
with Challong and tip him off the Light into the sea. Then, he told me,
his head began to feel streaky from looking at the tide so long. He
said there was long streaks of white running inside it; like wall-paper
that hadn’t been properly pasted up, he said. The streaks, they would
run with the tides, north and south, twice a day, accordin’ to them
currents, and he’d lie down on the planking--it was a screw-pile
Light--with his eye to a crack and watch the water streaking through
the piles just so quiet as hogwash. He said the only comfort he got
was at slack water. Then the streaks in his head went round and round
like a sampan in a tide-rip; but that was heaven, he said, to the
other kind of streaks,--the straight ones that looked like arrows on a
wind-chart, but much more regular, and that was the trouble of it. No
more he couldn’t ever keep his eyes off the tides that ran up and down
so strong, but as soon as ever he looked at the high hills standing
all along Flores Strait for rest and comfort his eyes would be pulled
down like to the nesty streaky water; and when they once got there he
couldn’t pull them away again till the tide changed. He told me all
this himself, speaking just as though he was talking of somebody else.’
‘Where did you meet him?’ I asked.
‘In Portsmouth harbour, a-cleaning the brasses of a Ryde boat, but I’d
known him off and on through following the sea for many years. Yes, he
spoke about himself very curious, and all as if he was in the next
room laying there dead. Those streaks, they preyed upon his intellecks,
he said; and he made up his mind, every time that the Dutch gunboat
that attends to the Lights in those parts come along, that he’d ask to
be took off. But as soon as she did come something went click in his
throat, and he was so took up with watching her masts, because they
ran longways, in the contrary direction to his streaks, that he could
never say a word until she was gone away and her masts was under sea
again. Then, he said, he’d cry by the hour; and Challong swum round
and round the Light, laughin’ at him and splashin’ water with his
webby-foot hands. At last he took it into his pore sick head that the
ships, and particularly the steamers that came by,--there wasn’t many
of them,--made the streaks, instead of the tides as was natural. He
used to sit, he told me, cursing every boat that come along,--sometimes
a junk, sometimes a Dutch brig, and now and again a steamer rounding
Flores Head and poking about in the mouth of the strait. Or there’d
come a boat from Australia running north past old Loby Toby hunting for
a fair current, but never throwing out any papers that Challong might
pick up for Dowse to read. Generally speaking, the steamers kept more
westerly, but now and again they came looking for Timor and the west
coast of Australia. Dowse used to shout to them to go round by the
Ombay Passage, and not to come streaking past him, making the water all
streaky, but it wasn’t likely they’d hear. He says to himself after a
month, “I’ll give them one more chance,” he says. “If the next boat
don’t attend to my just representations,”--he says he remembers using
those very words to Challong,--“I’ll stop the fairway.”
‘The next boat was a Two-streak cargo-boat very anxious to make her
northing. She waddled through under old Loby Toby at the south end of
the strait, and she passed within a quarter of a mile of the Wurlee
Light at the north end, in seventeen fathom o’ water, the tide against
her. Dowse took the trouble to come out with Challong in a little prow
that they had,--all bamboos and leakage,--and he lay in the fairway
waving a palm branch, and, so he told me, wondering why and what for he
was making this fool of himself. Up come the Two-streak boat, and Dowse
shouts: “Don’t you come this way again, making my head all streaky!
Go round by Ombay, and leave me alone.” Some one looks over the port
bulwarks and shies a banana at Dowse, and that’s all. Dowse sits down
in the bottom of the boat and cries fit to break his heart. Then he
says, “Challong, what am I a-crying for?” and they fetches up by the
Wurlee Light on the half-flood.
‘“Challong,” he says, “there’s too much traffic here, and that’s why
the water’s so streaky as it is. It’s the junks and the brigs and
the steamers that do it,” he says; and all the time he was speaking
he was thinking, “Lord, Lord, what a crazy fool I am!” Challong said
nothing, because he couldn’t speak a word of English except say “dam,”
and he said that where you or me would say “yes.” Dowse lay down on
the planking of the Light with his eye to the crack, and he saw the
muddy water streaking below, and he never said a word till slack water,
because the streaks kept him tongue-tied at such times. At slack water
he says, “Challong, we must buoy this fairway for wrecks,” and he holds
up his hands several times, showing that dozens of wrecks had come
about in the fairway; and Challong says, “Dam.”
‘That very afternoon he and Challong rows to Wurlee, the village in
the woods that the Light was named after, and buys canes,--stacks and
stacks of canes, and coir rope thick and fine, all sorts,--and they
sets to work making square floats by lashing of the canes together.
Dowse said he took longer over those floats than might have been
needed, because he rejoiced in the corners, they being square, and
the streaks in his head all running longways. He lashed the canes
together, criss-cross and thwartways,--any way but longways,--and
they made up twelve-foot-square floats, like rafts. Then he stepped
a twelve-foot bamboo or a bundle of canes in the centre, and to the
head of that he lashed a big six-foot W letter, all made of canes, and
painted the float dark green and the W white, as a wreck-buoy should be
painted. Between them two they makes a round dozen of these new kind of
wreck-buoys, and it was a two months’ job. There was no big traffic,
owing to it being on the turn of the monsoon, but what there was Dowse
cursed at, and the streaks in his head, they ran with the tides, as
usual.
‘Day after day, so soon as a buoy was ready, Challong would take it
out, with a big rock that half sunk the prow and a bamboo grapnel, and
drop it dead in the fairway. He did this day or night, and Dowse could
see him of a clear night, when the sea brimed, climbing about the buoys
with the sea-fire dripping off him. They was all put into place, twelve
of them, in seventeen-fathom water; not in a straight line, on account
of a well-known shoal there, but slantways, and two, one behind the
other, mostly in the centre of the fairway. You must keep the centre
of those Javva currents, for currents at the side is different, and in
narrow water, before you can turn a spoke, you get your nose took round
and rubbed upon the rocks and the woods. Dowse knew that just as well
as any skipper. Likeways he knew that no skipper daren’t run through
uncharted wrecks in a six-knot current. He told me he used to lie
outside the Light watching his buoys ducking and dipping so friendly
with the tide; and the motion was comforting to him on account of its
being different from the run of the streaks in his head.
‘Three weeks after he’d done his business up comes a steamer through
Loby Toby Straits, thinking she’d run into Flores Sea before night. He
saw her slow down; then she backed. Then one man and another come up
on the bridge, and he could see there was a regular powwow, and the
flood was driving her right on to Dowse’s wreck-buoys. After that she
spun round and went back south, and Dowse nearly killed himself with
laughing. But a few weeks after that a couple of junks came shouldering
through from the north, arm in arm, like junks go. It takes a good
deal to make a Chinaman understand danger. They junks set well in the
current, and went down the fairway, right among the buoys, ten knots
an hour, blowing horns and banging tin pots all the time. That made
Dowse very angry; he having taken so much trouble to stop the fairway.
No boats run Flores Straits by night, but it seemed to Dowse that if
junks’d do that in the day, the Lord knew but what a steamer might
trip over his buoys at night; and he sent Challong to run a coir rope
between three of the buoys in the middle of the fairway, and he fixed
naked lights of coir steeped in oil to that rope. The tides was the
only things that moved in those seas, for the airs was dead still
till they began to blow, and _then_ they would blow your hair off.
Challong tended those lights every night after the junks had been so
impident,--four lights in about a quarter of a mile hung up in iron
skillets on the rope; and when they was alight,--and coir burns well,
very like a lamp wick,--the fairway seemed more madder than anything
else in the world. First there was the Wurlee Light, then these four
queer lights, that couldn’t be riding-lights, almost flush with the
water, and behind them, twenty mile off, but the biggest light of all,
there was the red top of old Loby Toby volcano. Dowse told me that he
used to go out in the prow and look at his handiwork, and it made him
scared, being like no lights that ever was fixed.
‘By and by some more steamers came along, snorting and snifting at
the buoys, but never going through, and Dowse says to himself: “Thank
goodness I’ve taught them not to come streaking through my water. Ombay
Passage is good enough for them and the like of them.” But he didn’t
remember how quick that sort of news spreads among the shipping. Every
steamer that fetched up by those buoys told another steamer and all the
port officers concerned in those seas that there was something wrong
with Flores Straits that hadn’t been charted yet. It was block-buoyed
for wrecks in the fairway, they said, and no sort of passage to use.
Well, the Dutch, of course they didn’t know anything about it. They
thought our Admiralty Survey had been there, and they thought it very
queer but neighbourly. You understand us English are always looking up
marks and lighting sea-ways all the world over, never asking with your
leave or by your leave, seeing that the sea concerns us more than any
one else. So the news went to and back from Flores to Bali, and Bali
to Probolingo, where the railway is that runs to Batavia. All through
the Javva seas everybody got the word to keep clear o’ Flores Straits,
and Dowse, he was left alone except for such steamers and small craft
as didn’t know. They’d come up and look at the straits like a bull
over a gate, but those nodding wreck-buoys scared them away. By and by
the Admiralty Survey ship--the _Britomarte_ I think she was--lay in
Macassar Roads off Fort Rotterdam, alongside of the _Amboina_, a dirty
little Dutch gunboat that used to clean there; and the Dutch captain
says to our captain, “What’s wrong with Flores Straits?” he says.
‘“Blowed if I know,” says our captain, who’d just come up from the
Angelica Shoal.
‘“Then why did you go and buoy it?” says the Dutchman.
‘“Blowed if I have,” says our captain. “That’s your lookout.”
‘“Buoyed it is,” says the Dutch captain, “according to what they tell
me; and a whole fleet of wreck-buoys, too.”
‘“Gummy!” says our captain. “It’s a dorg’s life at sea, any way. I must
have a look at this. You come along after me as soon as you can;”
and down he skimmed that very night, round the heel of Celebes, three
days’ steam to Flores Head, and he met a Two-streak liner, very angry,
backing out of the head of the strait; and the merchant captain gave
our Survey ship something of his mind for leaving wrecks uncharted in
those narrow waters and wasting his company’s coal.
‘“It’s no fault o’ mine,” says our captain.
‘“I don’t care whose fault it is,” says the merchant captain, who had
come aboard to speak to him just at dusk. “The fairway’s choked with
wreck enough to knock a hole through a dock-gate. I saw their big ugly
masts sticking up just under my forefoot. Lord ha’ mercy on us!” he
says, spinning round. “The place is like Regent Street of a hot summer
night.”
‘And so it was. They two looked at Flores Straits, and they saw lights
one after the other stringing across the fairway. Dowse, he had seen
the steamers hanging there before dark, and he said to Challong: “We’ll
give ’em something to remember. Get all the skillets and iron pots you
can and hang them up alongside o’ the regular four lights. We must
teach ’em to go round by the Ombay Passage, or they’ll be streaking
up our water again!” Challong took a header off the lighthouse, got
aboard the little leaking prow, with his coir soaked in oil and all
the skillets he could muster, and he began to show his lights, four
regulation ones and half-a-dozen new lights hung on that rope which
was a little above the water. Then he went to all the spare buoys with
all his spare coir, and hung a skillet-flare on every pole that he
could get at,--about seven poles. So you see, taking one with another,
there was the Wurlee Light, four lights on the rope between the three
centre fairway wreck-buoys that was hung out as a usual custom, six or
eight extry ones that Challong had hung up on the same rope, and seven
dancing flares that belonged to seven wreck-buoys,--eighteen or twenty
lights in all crowded into a mile of seventeen-fathom water, where no
tide ’d ever let a wreck rest for three weeks, let alone ten or twelve
wrecks, as the flares showed.
‘The Admiralty captain, he saw the lights come out one after another,
same as the merchant skipper did who was standing at his side, and he
said:--
‘“There’s been an international cata-strophe here or elseways,” and
then he whistled. “I’m going to stand on and off all night till the
Dutchman comes,” he says.
‘“I’m off,” says the merchant skipper. “My owners don’t wish for me to
watch illuminations. That strait’s choked with wreck, and I shouldn’t
wonder if a typhoon hadn’t driven half the junks o’ China there.”
With that he went away; but the Survey ship, she stayed all night at
the head o’ Flores Strait, and the men admired of the lights till the
lights was burning out, and then they admired more than ever.
‘A little bit before morning the Dutch gunboat come flustering up, and
the two ships stood together watching the lights burn out and out, till
there was nothing left ’cept Flores Straits, all green and wet, and a
dozen wreck-buoys, and Wurlee Light.
‘Dowse had slept very quiet that night, and got rid of his streaks by
means of thinking of the angry steamers outside. Challong was busy,
and didn’t come back to his bunk till late. In the gray early morning
Dowse looked out to sea, being, as he said, in torment, and saw all
the navies of the world riding outside Flores Strait fairway in a
half-moon, seven miles from wing to wing, most wonderful to behold.
Those were the words he used to me time and again in telling the tale.
‘Then, he says, he heard a gun fired with a most tremenjus explosion,
and all them great navies crumbled to little pieces of clouds, and
there was only two ships remaining, and a man-o’-war’s boat rowing to
the Light, with the oars going sideways instead o’ longways as the
morning tides, ebb or flow, would continually run.
‘“What the devil’s wrong with this strait?” says a man in the boat as
soon as they was in hailing distance. “Has the whole English Navy sunk
here, or what?”
‘“There’s nothing wrong,” says Dowse, sitting on the platform outside
the Light, and keeping one eye very watchful on the streakiness of the
tide, which he always hated, ’specially in the mornings. “You leave
me alone and I’ll leave you alone. Go round by the Ombay Passage,
and don’t cut up my water. You’re making it streaky.” All the time
he was saying that he kept on thinking to himself, “Now that’s
foolishness,--now that’s nothing but foolishness;” and all the time he
was holding tight to the edge of the platform in case the streakiness
of the tide should carry him away.
‘Somebody answers from the boat, very soft and quiet, “We’re going
round by Ombay in a minute, if you’ll just come and speak to our
captain and give him his bearings.”
‘Dowse, he felt very highly flattered, and he slipped into the boat,
not paying any attention to Challong. But Challong swum along to the
ship after the boat. When Dowse was in the boat, he found, so he says,
he couldn’t speak to the sailors ’cept to call them “white mice with
chains about their neck,” and Lord knows he hadn’t seen or thought
o’ white mice since he was a little bit of a boy with them in his
hankerchief. So he kept himself quiet, and so they come to the Survey
ship; and the man in the boat hails the quarter-deck with something
that Dowse could not rightly understand, but there was one word he
spelt out again and again,--m-a-d, mad,--and he heard some one behind
him saying of it backwards. So he had two words,--m-a-d, mad, d-a-m,
dam; and he put they two words together as he come on the quarter-deck,
and he says to the captain very slowly, “I be damned if I am mad,” but
all the time his eye was held like by the coils of rope on the belaying
pins, and he followed those ropes up and up with his eye till he was
quite lost and comfortable among the rigging, which ran criss-cross,
and slopeways, and up and down, and any way but straight along under
his feet north and south. The deck-seams, they ran _that_ way, and
Dowse daresn’t look at them. They was the same as the streaks of the
water under the planking of the lighthouse.
‘Then he heard the captain talking to him very kind, and for the life
of him he couldn’t tell why; and what he wanted to tell the captain was
that Flores Strait was too streaky, like bacon, and the steamers only
made it worse; but all he could do was to keep his eye very careful on
the rigging and sing:--
“I saw a ship a-sailing,
A-sailing on the sea;
And oh, it was all lading
With pretty things for me!”
Then he remembered that was foolishness, and he started off to say
about the Ombay Passage, but all he said was: “The captain was a
duck,--meaning no offence to you, sir,--but there was something on his
back that I’ve forgotten.
“And when the ship began to move
The captain says, ‘Quack-quack!’”
‘He notices the captain turns very red and angry, and he says to
himself, “My foolish tongue’s run away with me again. I’ll go
forward;” and he went forward, and catched the reflection of himself
in the binnacle brasses; and he saw that he was standing there and
talking mother-naked in front of all them sailors, and he ran into
the fo’c’s’le howling most grievous. He must ha’ gone naked for weeks
on the Light, and Challong o’ course never noticed it. Challong was
swimmin’ round and round the ship, sayin’ “dam” for to please the men
and to be took aboard, because he didn’t know any better.
‘Dowse didn’t tell what happened after this, but seemingly our Survey
ship lowered two boats and went over to Dowse’s buoys. They took one
sounding, and then finding it was all correct they cut the buoys that
Dowse and Challong had made, and let the tide carry ’em out through the
Loby Toby end of the strait; and the Dutch gunboat, she sent two men
ashore to take care o’ the Wurlee Light, and the _Britomarte_, she went
away with Dowse, leaving Challong to try to follow them, a-calling
“dam--dam” all among the wake of the screw, and half heaving himself
out of water and joining his webby-foot hands together. He dropped
astern in five minutes, and I suppose he went back to the Wurlee Light.
You can’t drown an Orange-Lord, not even in Flores Strait on flood-tide.
‘Dowse come across me when he came to England with the Survey ship,
after being more than six months in her, and cured of his streaks by
working hard and not looking over the side more than he could help.
He told me what I’ve told you, sir, and he was very much ashamed of
himself; but the trouble on his mind was to know whether he hadn’t sent
something or other to the bottom with his buoyings and his lightings
and such like. He put it to me many times, and each time more and more
sure he was that something had happened in the straits because of him.
I think that distructed him, because I found him up at Fratton one
day, in a red jersey, a-praying before the Salvation Army, which had
produced him in their papers as a Reformed Pirate. They knew from his
mouth that he had committed evil on the deep waters,--that was what
he told them,--and piracy, which no one does now except Chineses, was
all they knew of. I says to him: “Dowse, don’t be a fool. Take off
that jersey and come along with me.” He says: “Fenwick, I’m a-saving
of my soul; for I do believe that I have killed more men in Flores
Strait than Trafalgar.” I says: “A man that thought he’d seen all the
navies of the earth standing round in a ring to watch his foolish false
wreck-buoys” (those was my very words I used) “ain’t fit to have a
soul, and if he did he couldn’t kill a louse with it. John Dowse, you
was mad then, but you are a damn sight madder now. Take off that there
jersey!”
‘He took it off and come along with me, but he never got rid o’ that
suspicion that he’d sunk some ships a-cause of his foolishnesses at
Flores Straits; and now he’s a wherryman from Portsmouth to Gosport,
where the tides run crossways and you can’t row straight for ten
strokes together.... So late as all this! Look!’
* * * * *
Fenwick left his chair, passed to the Light, touched something that
clicked, and the glare ceased with a suddenness that was pain. Day had
come, and the Channel needed St. Cecilia no longer. The sea-fog rolled
back from the cliffs in trailed wreaths and dragged patches, as the sun
rose and made the dead sea alive and splendid. The stillness of the
morning held us both silent as we stepped on the balcony. A lark went
up from the cliffs behind St. Cecilia, and we smelt a smell of cows in
the lighthouse pastures below.
Then we were both at liberty to thank the Lord for another day of clean
and wholesome life.
A CONFERENCE OF THE POWERS.
Life liveth but in life, and doth not roam
To other lands if all be well at home:
‘Solid as ocean foam,’ quoth ocean foam.
The room was blue with the smoke of three pipes and a cigar. The
leave-season had opened in India, and the firstfruits on this side of
the water were ‘Tick’ Boileau, of the 45th Bengal Cavalry, who called
on me, after three years’ absence, to discuss old things which had
happened. Fate, who always does her work handsomely, sent up the same
staircase within the same hour The Infant, fresh from Upper Burma,
and he and Boileau looking out of my window saw walking in the street
one Nevin, late in a Gurkha regiment which had been through the Black
Mountain Expedition. They yelled to him to come up, and the whole
street was aware that they desired him to come up, and he came up, and
there followed Pandemonium in my room because we had foregathered from
the ends of the earth, and three of us were on a holiday, and none of
us were twenty-five, and all the delights of all London lay waiting our
pleasure.
Boileau took the only other chair, The Infant, by right of his bulk,
the sofa; and Nevin, being a little man, sat cross-legged on the top of
the revolving bookcase, and we all said, ‘Who’d ha’ thought it!’ and
‘What are you doing here?’ till speculation was exhausted and the talk
went over to inevitable ‘shop.’ Boileau was full of a great scheme for
winning a military _attaché_-ship at St. Petersburg; Nevin had hopes of
the Staff College, and The Infant had been moving heaven and earth and
the Horse Guards for a commission in the Egyptian army.
‘What’s the use o’ that?’ said Nevin, twirling round on the bookcase.
‘Oh, heaps! ’Course, if you get stuck with a Fellaheen regiment, you’re
sold; but if you are appointed to a Soudanese lot, you’re in clover.
They are first-class fighting-men--and just think of the eligible
central position of Egypt in the next row.’
This was putting the match to a magazine. We all began to explain the
Central Asian question off-hand, flinging army corps from the Helmund
to Kashmir with more than Russian recklessness. Each of the boys made
for himself a war to his own liking, and when we had settled all
the details of Armageddon, killed all our senior officers, handled
a division apiece, and nearly torn the atlas in two in attempts to
explain our theories, Boileau needs must lift up his voice above the
clamour, and cry, ‘Anyhow it’ll be the Hell of a row!’ in tones that
carried conviction far down the staircase.
Entered, unperceived in the smoke, William the Silent. ‘Gen’elman to
see you, sir,’ said he, and disappeared, leaving in his stead none
other than Mr. Eustace Cleever. William would have introduced the
Dragon of Wantley with equal disregard of present company.
‘I--I beg your pardon. I didn’t know that there was anybody--with you.
I----’
But it was not seemly to allow Mr. Cleever to depart: he was a great
man. The boys remained where they were, for any movement would have
choked up the little room. Only when they saw his gray hairs they stood
on their feet, and when The Infant caught the name, he said:
‘Are you--did you write that book called _As it was in the Beginning_?’
Mr. Cleever admitted that he had written the book.
‘Then--then I don’t know how to thank you, sir,’ said The Infant,
flushing pink. ‘I was brought up in the country you wrote about--all my
people live there; and I read the book in camp on the Hlinedatalone,
and I knew every stick and stone, and the dialect too; and, by Jove! it
was just like being at home and hearing the country-people talk. Nevin,
you know _As it was in the Beginning_? So does Ti--Boileau.’
Mr. Cleever has tasted as much praise, public and private, as one man
may safely swallow; but it seemed to me that the out-spoken admiration
in The Infant’s eyes and the little stir in the little company came
home to him very nearly indeed.
‘Won’t you take the sofa?’ said The Infant. ‘I’ll sit on Boileau’s
chair, and----’ here he looked at me to spur me to my duties as a host;
but I was watching the novelist’s face. Cleever had not the least
intention of going away, but settled himself on the sofa.
Following the first great law of the Army, which says ‘all property is
common except money, and you’ve only got to ask the next man for that,’
The Infant offered tobacco and drink. It was the least he could do; but
not the most lavish praise in the world held half as much appreciation
and reverence as The Infant’s simple ‘Say when, sir,’ above the long
glass.
Cleever said ‘when,’ and more thereto, for he was a golden talker,
and he sat in the midst of hero-worship devoid of all taint of
self-interest. The boys asked him of the birth of his book and
whether it was hard to write, and how his notions came to him; and
he answered with the same absolute simplicity as he was questioned.
His big eyes twinkled, he dug his long thin hands into his gray beard
and tugged it as he grew animated. He dropped little by little from
the peculiar pinching of the broader vowels--the indefinable ‘Euh,’
that runs through the speech of the pundit caste--and the elaborate
choice of words, to freely-mouthed ‘ows’ and ‘ois,’ and, for him at
least, unfettered colloquialisms. He could not altogether understand
the boys, who hung upon his words so reverently. The line of the
chin-strap, that still showed white and untanned on cheek-bone and
jaw, the steadfast young eyes puckered at the corners of the lids with
much staring through red-hot sunshine, the slow, untroubled breathing,
and the curious, crisp, curt speech seemed to puzzle him equally. He
could create men and women, and send them to the uttermost ends of the
earth, to help delight and comfort; he knew every mood of the fields,
and could interpret them to the cities, and he knew the hearts of many
in city and the country, but he had hardly, in forty years, come into
contact with the thing which is called a Subaltern of the Line. He told
the boys this in his own way.
‘Well, how should you?’ said The Infant. ‘You--you’re quite different,
y’ see, sir.’
The Infant expressed his ideas in his tone rather than his words, but
Cleever understood the compliment.
‘We’re only Subs,’ said Nevin, ‘and we aren’t exactly the sort of men
you’d meet much in your life, I s’pose.’
‘That’s true,’ said Cleever. ‘I live chiefly among men who write,
and paint, and sculp, and so forth. We have our own talk and our own
interests, and the outer world doesn’t trouble us much.’
‘That must be awfully jolly,’ said Boileau, at a venture. ‘We have our
own shop, too, but ’tisn’t half as interesting as yours, of course. You
know all the men who’ve ever done anything; and we only knock about
from place to place, and we do nothing.’
‘The Army’s a very lazy profession if you choose to make it so,’ said
Nevin. ‘When there’s nothing going on, there is nothing going on, and
you lie up.’
‘Or try to get a billet somewhere, to be ready for the next show,’ said
The Infant with a chuckle.
‘To me,’ said Cleever softly, ‘the whole idea of warfare seems so
foreign and unnatural, so essentially vulgar, if I may say so, that I
can hardly appreciate your sensations. Of course, though, any change
from life in garrison towns must be a godsend to you.’
Like many home-staying Englishmen, Cleever believed that the newspaper
phrase he quoted covered the whole duty of the Army whose toils enabled
him to enjoy his many-sided life in peace. The remark was not a happy
one, for Boileau had just come off the Frontier, The Infant had been on
the warpath for nearly eighteen months, and the little red man Nevin
two months before had been sleeping under the stars at the peril of
his life. But none of them tried to explain, till I ventured to point
out that they had all seen service and were not used to idling. Cleever
took in the idea slowly.
‘Seen service?’ said he. Then, as a child might ask, ‘Tell me. Tell me
everything about everything.’
‘How do you mean?’ said The Infant, delighted at being directly
appealed to by the great man.
‘Good Heavens! How am I to make you understand, if you can’t see. In
the first place, what is your age?’
‘Twenty-three next July,’ said The Infant promptly.
Cleever questioned the others with his eyes.
‘I’m twenty-four,’ said Nevin.
‘And I’m twenty-two,’ said Boileau.
‘And you’ve all seen service?’
‘We’ve all knocked about a little bit, sir, but The Infant’s the
war-worn veteran. He’s had two years’ work in Upper Burma,’ said Nevin.
‘When you say work, what do you mean, you extraordinary creatures?’
‘Explain it, Infant,’ said Nevin.
‘Oh, keeping things in order generally, and running about after little
_dakus_--that’s dacoits--and so on. There’s nothing to explain.’
‘Make that young Leviathan speak,’ said Cleever impatiently, above his
glass.
‘How can he speak?’ said I. ‘He’s done the work. The two don’t go
together. But, Infant, you’re ordered to _bukh_.’
‘What about? I’ll try.’
‘_Bukh_ about a _daur_. You’ve been on heaps of ’em,’ said Nevin.
‘What in the world does that mean? Has the Army a language of its own?’
The Infant turned very red. He was afraid he was being laughed at, and
he detested talking before outsiders; but it was the author of _As it
was in the Beginning_ who waited.
‘It’s all so new to me,’ pleaded Cleever; ‘and--and you said you liked
my book.’
This was a direct appeal that The Infant could understand, and he began
rather flurriedly, with much slang bred of nervousness--
‘Pull me up, sir, if I say anything you don’t follow. About six months
before I took my leave out of Burma, I was on the Hlinedatalone,
up near the Shan States, with sixty Tommies--private soldiers,
that is--and another subaltern, a year senior to me. The Burmese
business was a subaltern’s war, and our forces were split up into
little detachments, all running about the country and trying to keep
the dacoits quiet. The dacoits were having a first-class time, y’
know--filling women up with kerosine and setting ’em alight, and
burning villages, and crucifying people.’
The wonder in Eustace Cleever’s eyes deepened. He could not quite
realise that the cross still existed in any form.
‘Have you ever seen a crucifixion?’ said he.
‘Of course not. ’Shouldn’t have allowed it if I had; but I’ve seen the
corpses. The dacoits had a trick of sending a crucified corpse down
the river on a raft, just to show they were keeping their tail up and
enjoying themselves. Well, that was the kind of people I had to deal
with.’
‘Alone?’ said Cleever. Solitude of the soul he could understand--none
better--but he had never in the body moved ten miles from his fellows.
‘I had my men, but the rest of it was pretty much alone. The nearest
post that could give me orders was fifteen miles away, and we used to
heliograph to them, and they used to give us orders same way--too many
orders.’
‘Who was your C. O.?’ said Boileau.
‘Bounderby--Major. _Pukka_ Bounderby; more Bounder than _pukka_. He
went out up Bhamo way. Shot, or cut down, last year,’ said The Infant.
‘What are these interludes in a strange tongue?’ said Cleever to me.
‘Professional information--like the Mississippi pilots’ talk,’ said
I. ‘He did not approve of his major, who died a violent death. Go on,
Infant.’
‘Far too many orders. You couldn’t take the Tommies out for a two days’
_daur_--that’s expedition--without being blown up for not asking leave.
And the whole country was humming with dacoits. I used to send out
spies, and act on their information. As soon as a man came in and told
me of a gang in hiding, I’d take thirty men with some grub, and go out
and look for them, while the other subaltern lay doggo in camp.’
‘Lay! Pardon me, but _how_ did he lie?’ said Cleever.
‘Lay doggo--lay quiet, with the other thirty men. When I came back,
he’d take out his half of the men, and have a good time of his own.’
‘Who was he?’ said Boileau.
‘Carter-Deecey, of the Aurungabadis. Good chap, but too _zubberdusty_,
and went _bokhar_ four days out of seven. He’s gone out, too. Don’t
interrupt a man.’
Cleever looked helplessly at me.
‘The other subaltern,’ I translated swiftly, ‘came from a native
regiment, and was overbearing in his demeanour. He suffered much from
the fever of the country, and is now dead. Go on, Infant.’