suddenness, "I have lost my bimbashi--Bimbashi Jones!"
Explanations revealed that the man had, in truth, started from Berber in
company with an English bimbashi, and that the bimbashi's camel had
certainly arrived, but not the bimbashi.
A search-party was therefore sent back without delay, but unfortunately
a high wind had risen during the morning, and a dust storm was now in
full blast, so that though the party thoroughly searched the road on
both sides as far as Berber, taking two or three days over the job, and
duly execrating the object of their search for possibly losing them the
chance of being present at the big event--namely, the battle with
Mahmoud, now expected daily--they found no trace of poor Bimbashi Jones.
They returned, therefore, empty-handed, and returned, as it chanced,
just in time to have a hand in certain great events which were about to
take place on Atbara River.
Meanwhile Bimbashi Jones slept very soundly and dreamed very absurdly.
He dreamed that he had arrived at Atbara in the nick of time. A terrific
battle had raged for many hours, and the result up to the moment of his
arrival had been most disastrous to the Anglo-Egyptian forces. The
Khalifa himself and two of his emirs, hearing of the bimbashi's
approach, had personally pursued the hero almost up to the muzzles of
the British guns, in order to prevent the great disaster to their hosts
which his arrival among the British and Egyptian forces would be sure to
entail. He would lead them, the Khalifa knew, to victory, once he placed
himself at their head, and triumph would at the last moment be snatched
from his hand. For, indeed, every English officer from the Sirdar to the
youngest subaltern of a British regiment was already either killed or
incapacitated. Our troops were on the point of collapsing. Already the
Soudanese and Egyptian regiments were throwing down their rifles and
looking over their shoulders for the safest point of the compass, with
an eye to successful flight. Far away on the left a long line of hussars
disappeared in the dim distance, pursued by countless hosts of Bagghara
horsemen, shouting "Allah," and shaking spears like leaves in the
south-west wind. English sergeants went along the lines with tears in
their eyes, crying like babies, entreating, imploring, threatening; the
Sirdar sat with his back to a gun-carriage, badly wounded.
[Illustration: "_The Khalifa himself and two of his emirs pursued the
hero._" Page 87.]
"Is that you, Bimbashi Jones?" he cried faintly. "Thank Heaven! hurrah!
We shall save the show yet.--Orderly, ride round and spread the news
quickly; say Bimbashi Jones is here and about to take the field. Let the
enemy know it too; let Mahmoud know it--the rascal! He would attack us
before Jones could arrive, would he?"
The effect of the news was electric--nay, magic! From company to
company, from regiment to regiment, from brigade to brigade, the word
went round. Then a low murmur began to spread; it grew and grew; like
the sound of the wind in the tree-tops it widened and thickened, until
the whole air was cleft and shivered with the mighty roar that spread
from end to end of the battle plain. "Bimbashi Jones has arrived! The
bimbashi has taken the field! Die, Dervishes, like dogs!"
And a wail, like the cry of a million souls in torment, rose from the
Dervish ranks. "The bimbashi has come! We are lost! Run for your lives,
ye servants of Mohammed, for your lives!"
The Khalifa heard it as he sat and trembled in his palace at Omdurman,
to which he had quickly returned, seeing that the bimbashi had escaped
him. (Jones, it will be observed, had, like most dreamers, annihilated
time and space.) The Khalifa ordered his best white Arab steed, and
mounted it, and rode forth to learn what the noise was about. Jones met
him as he and his troops chased the Dervish host towards Khartoum, and
shouted to him to yield.
"I surrender to no one but the Sirdar or Bimbashi Jones!" cried
Abdullah, who, during the late pursuit, had not caught sight of the
hero's face.
"You are too young to be either of these great men.--Allah! Allah! Turn
and strike, sons of the Prophet! down with the dogs!"
His followers whispered to the Khalifa.
As when rude Boreas, suddenly remembering that he is due in another
portion of the globe, ceases abruptly to beat the tortured sea into
foam, and a beauteous calm overspreads the waters of the storm-tossed
ocean, so suddenly the countenance of the Khalifa changed from rage and
defiance to an expression of timorous incredulity.
"Impossible!" he muttered--"so young, and so great a general!"
"Undoubtedly it is Bimbashi Jones!" said an emir.
Jones heard him quite distinctly.
"Yes, I am Bimbashi Jones," he said; "yield, Abdullah; there is no other
course. Yield or perish!"
"You will not cut off my right hand and ear?" asked the Khalifa.
"Certainly not, richly though you deserve it," said Jones.
"Nor my left?" added the Khalifa quickly, glancing cunningly in Jones's
face.
The bimbashi disclaimed any such intention.
Then the Khalifa surrendered, placing his sword in Jones's hands with
the inimitable grace of a cavalier of olden time; which circumstance,
however, did not strike the bimbashi as in any degree strange, but only
highly decorous and proper.
And now telegrams of congratulation poured in. Every one of the wounded
British officers quickly recovered; even several whom the bimbashi knew
to have been killed turned up again (without causing him any surprise)
to shake the hero by the hand. In the gilded halls of Omdurman he was
the admired of all beholders. The ladies vied to dance with him, though
none of them explained how they got there; while the men spoke of
impending promotions, peerages, and what not.
As for the Khalifa, he sat next to Bimbashi Jones at supper, and did
his very best to convert the young man to Mohammedanism; and to
everything that the Khalifa advanced, the Sirdar, sitting on Jones's
left, would remark,--
"There's a good deal in what the old boy says."
There was indeed, Jones thought, for--and this was the only circumstance
in the whole affair that caused him some surprise--the Khalifa simply
preached at him a sermon which Jones's own father (Vicar of Stoke
Netherby, Yorkshire, and certainly not a follower of the Prophet) had
delivered from his own pulpit on the very last Sunday that the bimbashi
had spent in the old home.
"Why," he remarked, when the Khalifa had quite finished, "you are a
pious fraud, my good man. Are you aware that you have stolen that
sermon, word for word, from my own father, who preached it--"
"Bimbashi Jones--Alaric, my boy--don't you know me?" said the Khalifa
very gushingly; and Jones was just about to recognize his parent, whom
indeed the Khalifa promptly declared himself to be in very flesh, and to
rush to his arms, when he awoke, and the whole thing was spoiled, the
dream ending and the curtain falling upon a highly-dramatic situation,
somewhat mysterious withal, and left entirely unexplained. Poor
Bimbashi Jones was now no longer the victorious preserver of the honour
of England and the safety of Egypt; he was but his own unfortunate self,
a forlorn piece of jetsam cast ashore upon the sand-ocean of the Soudan,
with sand-scud flying like solid sea-spray, and filling his eyes and
nose and mouth and clothes, blotting out tracks and directions, and
reducing poor Jones to a condition of great misery and wretchedness. He
would have felt even more wretched had he realized that, by falling off
his camel and sleeping on while it walked away, he had landed himself in
a very serious position indeed. He was in the midst of a sand-storm.
The bimbashi stood and raged, shouting for his servant Ali, upon whose
head he showered many useless abuses and sundry flowers of speech.
But Ali was far away by this time, and so was Jones's camel; and after
waiting for half an hour or more, the lost youth decided that he must
make a guess at the direction to be pursued, and at any rate keep
moving, even though he followed a wrong course; better that than be
buried alive in the abominable moving desert of flying and stinging
sand.
It was only natural that Jones's guess as to the direction in which lay
Atbara should be somewhat out; it would have been strange indeed if he
had guessed right. As a matter of fact, his attempt to do so was by no
means a bad one; for, had he directed his steps but a point or two less
towards the east, he would have hit off the English position nicely, and
would soon have encountered the search-party which presently came out to
find him, or have been overtaken by some other friendly company hurrying
forward from Berber towards the scene of operations at the junction of
Atbara and Nile.
Luckily Jones had sandwiches in his pocket, though he would rather have
had a gallon or two of water. The drop or so of whisky in his flask did
nothing to assuage his thirst. His throat was parched with the sand, his
tongue dry and hot and gritty. He could scarcely see; his ears were
clogged. Jones plodded along, now praying for help in his most serious
plight--he knew that it was serious, though he scarcely realized perhaps
_how_ serious; now recalling his dream and laughing at it; now thinking
of every conceivable thing that would serve to blot out the disagreeable
present, if but for a few minutes.
Meanwhile the sun had come out, and was blazing away in a manner which
made life under its direct rays an unpleasant and almost impossible
function. Soon it became unbearable. The wind had dropped, and the sand
ceased to fly--a mercy for which Jones felt devoutly grateful. But the
heat! The poor lost bimbashi scooped a hole in the ground, piling the
displaced sand as high as he could, and lying behind it, in order to get
a little shade for his face; and there he lay and sweltered until the
sun climbed too high, and drove him out of his shelter. Then he
travelled on, his brain on fire, until the burning disc above him had
sunk sufficiently to allow him to repeat his expedient of earlier in the
day; and now he lay half asleep, half comatose, until the cool of
evening revived him, and he rose and plodded forward once more.
"I shall go on till I drop, anyway!" soliloquized Bimbashi Jones, like
the brave man he was; and then, because he was still a very young man,
and because he felt, as any one justly might do under the circumstances,
extremely sorry for himself, he shed a few tears of pity over the
melancholy fate which impended. "I might have done rather well," he
reflected. "I had made a good start--every one said so; but misfortune
dogs me wherever I go!" and Jones thought of his disappointment in
England, of his illness at Cairo, of this crowning disaster; and he shed
a few more consoling tears.
That night Jones, plodding obstinately forward, stumbling, weary, only
half conscious, nearly dead with thirst, struck suddenly into country of
a different character from the unbroken sand plain through which he had
been travelling up to this moment. There was scrub to be pushed through,
mimosa bushes, and other greenery.
"Thanks be to God!" exclaimed the bimbashi, for even his baked brain was
able to comprehend the significance of the change. "I am coming to the
Nile!"
It was not the Nile but the Atbara which Jones had struck well above the
Anglo-Egyptian portion; but, oh! the joy of that first big drink of
nasty water, and the long-continued, delicious sluicing of the burning
head, wherein the fire had raged without ceasing for a twelve-hour
round, and would scarcely now be extinguished even though Jones would
bring the whole flood of the Atbara to bear upon it.
Then Jones finished his sandwiches and felt a man once more, though a
weary one. He thanked Heaven for mercies received, and lay down to sleep
until wakened by--yes, actually by the cold. He must move on.
How different the travelling was now! He would not leave the river
again, the wanderer wisely resolved. He would follow it until the
British position was reached; it could not be far now.
Poor bimbashi! The British fort lay behind him, and he was speeding away
in the wrong direction--into the arms, indeed, of Mahmoud, had he only
known it.
Part of the night he pushed forward, and part of it he rested and slept.
"It's a ghastly long journey when one does it on foot," thought the lost
bimbashi. "However, I shall be in camp by breakfast time;" and his mouth
watered over imaginary repasts of tinned meats and tea and other
delights.
Morning came, and the sun, and still there were no signs of the camp.
Jones was very hungry, but the tinned delicacies were still the fair
offspring of imagination, which filleth not the stomach.
He travelled on, in despite of the sun, for the camp _could_ not now be
far off; and he would have continued to plod forward until he dropped,
but that he received before noon a terrible fright, which sent him into
cover for many hours of dangerous daylight.
There were sounds of hoofs, and the soul of the bimbashi rejoiced. "It
is some of our fellows doing a cavalry reconnoitre," he reflected; and
when they came, as he judged by the sound, within earshot, he treated
them to a "coo-ee," and stood up to look out for a view and to hear
their reply.
Presently the troop passed across an open patch between mimosa bushes,
and Jones saw, not hussars or lancers, but a number of Bagghara horsemen
pushing rapidly upstream, and evidently looking about for the owner of
the voice lately upraised.
Down bobbed Jones behind a mimosa bush, his heart beating loudly. He
drew his revolver in case of accidents. Would they see him? if so--
There were ten men, dirty, savage-looking fellows. They wore white,
patched, linen garments, which fluttered behind them, and carried
spears. They passed within twenty paces, peering about, and repassed
again fifty yards away, talking together and arguing; then they
disappeared.
"Thank God for that!" thought the bimbashi. "One wouldn't care to be
chewed up by a set of such forsaken-looking fellows at close quarters!"
So he lay low till dark, and then pushed on once more--desperately
hungry now, nearly starving. Would that breakfast never come? Could he
have made some mistake? Ought he to have gone downstream?
Reason said no--upstream undoubtedly. But, you see, the bimbashi's
geography was imperfect, and he was not aware of the existence of the
Atbara, as a river, or he had forgotten it. He only knew of Fort Atbara;
he thought he was following the Nile.
So Jones tried to satisfy the cravings of his appetite by chewing leaves
and grasses, failing utterly; and long before morning came he sank
exhausted to the ground, assuring himself that he could not possibly
walk another yard.
Then, or soon after, a wonderful thing happened.
The dozing bimbashi heard in his dreams the droning of bagpipes, the
sharp notes of the bugle, the dull booming of guns. His old dream began
to flutter vaguely through his brain. He was the conquering hero again;
he had put the Dervishes to flight; he had--but the noise was too loud
for dozing and dreaming, and he awoke with a start.
"Good Heavens!" said poor Jones, half demented with weakness, "it is
really the battle; my dream is coming true."
[Illustration: "_It is really the battle._" Page 98.]
The firing increased; it became almost continuous; it could scarcely be
more than a mile or two away. The noise deafened and bewildered the
youth, who was, as a matter of fact, _in extremis_.
Jones listened a little while. Then he started to his feet and rushed
madly towards the din.
"I must have a hand in it!" he cried; "they may want me!"
A mile and a second mile the bimbashi covered, now running, now forcing
his way through dense scrub, now stopping a moment to recover breath. He
was very near the scene of operations now; the din was deafening. He had
come up, though he guessed it not, behind Mahmoud's position. The entire
Dervish host lay between him and the Sirdar's men. Already the British
storm of lead was pouring over his head; already bodies of flying,
frightened creatures, camp followers of the Dervish army, dashed by him,
some close, some more distant. A party of these nearly ran over him,
rushing blindly forward, jabbering to one another.
Jones fired his revolver in their faces. One of them, as he passed,
swung some weapon at him, striking the bimbashi flat-wise on the
shoulder. The thing was blunt, and made no wound, but it needed only a
touch to send the scarcely animate youth upon his nose in the sand; and
straightway upon his nose he went, dead as a log for the time being; and
in the sand, half hidden by a mimosa bush, he lay, while the subsequent
proceedings, to quote a great poem familiar to most of my readers,
interested him no more.
When the bimbashi returned to conscious existence, the battle of Atbara,
or Nakheila, was over. A great flood of escaping humanity had passed
over and around him, fleeing for dear life, but he had known nothing of
it. He was roused by English voices. A sergeant was directing his men.
"Look out there, Bill," said the sergeant; "see that chap doesn't let
out at you as you pass."
"I'll cook him if he does," said Bill, blood-hot and savage. He had been
struck at by wounded Dervishes, and was not disposed to treat treachery
with loving-kindness. "Why," he continued, "darn me if it isn't an
Englishman--an orficer, too. See here, Joe!"
The sergeant came and looked. Jones had opened his eyes, and looked
mildly around.
"Good Lord!" said the sergeant; "you're right; badly wounded, too. Go
back for an ambulance, Bill.--Hold up, sir; he won't be long. Are you
badly hurt?"
"I want something to eat. I haven't had anything for three days,"
murmured poor Jones.
The sergeant was too amazed to reply.
"I'm Bimbashi Jones," continued the officer, "and I want my breakfast."
[Illustration: "_I'm Bimbashi Jones, and I want my breakfast._"
Page 102.]
Then the bimbashi fainted.
The name of Alaric Jones, bimbashi, 20th Egyptian Regiment, was
included among those entitled to receive a medal for the battle of
Atbara. Jones had qualms of conscience as to accepting this, but his
friends said, "Rot, my good man; you fired your revolver during the
fight, and perhaps wounded an enemy; it's all right." And Jones admitted
that he had certainly taken this share in the hostilities.
Later on, at the battle of Omdurman, the bimbashi, having recovered now,
and a stronger man by many breakfasts and other meals, did well. He was
mentioned in the dispatches, as all may see for themselves. He is still
a bimbashi, of course, and will not be a bey for a long while; but there
is an old man in Stoke Netherby who is proud indeed to be the father of
Bimbashi Jones. His mess-fellows in the old "Clodshires" often drink his
health as of one of their most distinguished companions; indeed "our
bimbashi" is quite a favourite toast on guest days, when the
explanation, "Bimbashi Jones, of ours, you know," is added for the
information of the ignorant.
THE WOLFMAN.
There was weeping and wailing at the village of Dubina, in northern
Russia. Women went about with red eyes, and men with grave faces; for a
dreadful calamity had happened upon this quiet summer afternoon, and the
hearts of all were heavy with grief and sympathy. But loudest of all
rose the lamentation from the house of the widow Fedosia, a widow of but
six months' standing, and the mother of four small children, the
youngest of whom, a child of eight months, had this day met with a
terrible fate.
No wonder the poor mother lifted her voice in lamentations which the
whole village could hear, for the little chap she had just lost had been
a splendid specimen of baby humanity, and the wise woman of the village
had prophesied great things for him; and now!
Let me explain what had happened. Fedosia, being a house-serf at the
mansion of the manor-lord--for all this happened towards the close of
the fourth decade of this century, and in the days of serfdom--and being
busy up at the big house, had permitted her eldest daughter, a child of
twelve, to wander away into the woods mushroom-hunting, and to take the
baby Petka for an airing. She had often been entrusted with her little
brother before, so that, the mother thought, there was no risk in
allowing her this responsibility. But Katinka came back alone, and told
a terrible tale. The poor child could scarcely speak for fright and
horror; but when the distracted mother had succeeded in persuading her
to find her tongue, the tale she told was sufficient to horrify the
whole village, as indeed it did. The children had been some little
distance from home, Katinka said--perhaps a mile and a half from the
beginning of the forest, but quite close to the path, so that they were
perfectly safe, as she thought; and Katinka had laid the child down
while she filled her basket with the beautiful mushrooms which abound in
that spot. The baby fell asleep, and Katinka wandered about from place
to place, but always, as she believed, remaining within a few yards of
the child. Suddenly, on looking up from the ground, she was horrified to
hear a savage growl, and to see just in front of her, glaring at her
with big eyes, and showing its large white teeth, a huge wolf,
accompanied by seven or eight little ones. She could not, of course, be
sure of the number, and there might have been fewer. Katinka rushed back
to where she imagined little Petka was lying asleep, but to her horror
she found that he was no longer there. Either he had crawled away, or
she had mistaken the place. Frantically she rushed from spot to spot,
calling to the boy, and peering under every tree; but all in vain. He
was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, the big wolf and the little ones
stood and looked after her, following her with their eyes wherever she
went, and the mother growled and showed her teeth, so that Katinka,
after a time, became so frightened that she was obliged to give up hope
of finding the baby, and ran away homewards as fast as she could,
leaving the wolves behind--for they did not follow her--and reaching
home more dead than alive, to tell her mother the terrible story of her
adventure and poor little Petka's dreadful end. Of course no one could
for a moment doubt that the wolf family had made a meal of him by this
time, even supposing that the poor little man had not already been torn
to pieces and bolted while Katinka was still looking for him in the
forest.
On learning the news, a party of men had immediately set out to search
the place for any evidence they might find as to the child's fate, but
they had returned without having obtained the slightest clue. The wolves
had disappeared, naturally enough, and so had the baby. There was no use
to hope any longer. Poor Fedosia must resign herself to the inevitable:
little Petka was dead, eaten by the wolves. Of this there could no
longer be the slightest doubt. Enough that it was God's will, and He
knew best what was good for the child; but for all that, the poor,
bereaved mother was inconsolable. Petka had been her favourite, her baby
boy, and she should never see his bright face and his splendid limbs
again! No wonder she wept, and that her lamentations were to be heard by
the whole village, or that she cried incessantly over the needlework
that her mistress gave her to do next day up at the big house, thereby
incurring the wrath of the lady, and bringing upon her head sundry
bracing but heartless truisms, such as the following:--
"What are you crying about, fool? Are you so rich that it is not a true
blessing to have got rid of one of your brats? It is I who have a right
to weep, for by your carelessness I have lost a future serf. Stop crying
at once, or you shall be fined for spoiling my dress-stuff."