"There's a press out; or elst they're expecting one," she said.
I heard a distant clock chiming for midnight as we followed her along this
row of houses. Ahead of us a door opened, throwing a thin line of light
upon the roadway, and was closed again softly, after the person within had
stood listening (as it seemed to me) for five seconds or so.
Meliar-Ann started suddenly in front of us, spreading her arms out, then
slowly backwards, and so motioning us to halt under the shadow of the
wall. Obeying, we saw her tiptoe forwards, till, coming to the door which
had just been closed, she crept close and tapped on it softly, yet in a
way that struck me as being deliberate. Afterwards, thinking it over, I
felt pretty sure that the child knocked by code.
At all events the door opened again, almost at once and as noiselessly as
before. Hartnoll and I squeezed our bodies back in the foggy shadow, and
I heard a voice ask, "Is that Smithers?" To this Meliar-Ann made some
response which I could not catch, but its effect was to make the voice--a
woman's--break out in a string of querulous cursings. "Drat the child!"
it said (or rather, it said something much stronger which I won't repeat
before the Rector. Eh, Rector--what's that you say? _Maxima debetur
pueris_--oh, make yourself easy: I won't corrupt their morals).
"Drat the child!" it said, then, or words to that effect. "Bothering here
at this time of night, when Bill's been a-bed this hour and a half, and
time you was the same." To this Meliar-Ann made, and audibly, the
briefest possible answer. She said, "You lie." "Strike me dead!"
replied the woman's voice in the doorway. "You lie," repeated the child;
"and you'd best belay to that. Bill's been stealin' and got himself into
trouble . . . a midshipman's dirk, it was, and he was seen taking it.
I've run all this way to warn him. . . ." The two voices fell to
muttering. "You can slip inside if you like and tell him quietly," said
the woman after a while. "He's upstairs and asleep too, for all I know.
If he brought any such thing home with him _I_ never saw it, and to that
I'll take my oath."
But here another and still angrier voice--a virago's--broke in from the
passage behind, demanding to know if the door was being kept open to
invite the whole town. The child stood her ground on the doorstep.
An instant later a hand reached out, clutched her--it seemed by the hair--
and dragged her inside. Then followed a strangling sob and the thud of
heavy blows--
"Rodd, I can't stand this," whispered Hartnoll.
I answered, "Nor I;" and together we made a spring for it and hurled into
the passage, bearing back the woman who tried to hold the door against us.
At the rush of our footsteps the virago dropped Meliar-Ann and fled down
the passage towards a doorway, through which she burst, screaming.
The child, borne forward by our combined weight, tottered and fell almost
across the threshold of this room, where a flight of stairs, lit by a
dingy lamp, led up into obscure darkness. On the third stair under the
lamp I caught a momentary vision of a dirty, half-naked boy standing with
a drawn dirk in his hand, and with that, my foot catching against
Meliar-Ann's body, I pitched past, head foremost, into the lighted room.
As I fell I heard, or seemed to hear, a scuffle of feet, followed by a
shout from Hartnoll behind us--"My dirk! You dirty young villain!"--and
another stampede, this time upon the stairway. Then, all of a sudden, the
room was quiet, and I picked myself up and fell back against the
door-post, face to face with half a dozen women.
They were assuredly the strangest set of females I had ever set eyes on,
and the tallest-grown: nor did it relieve my astonishment to note that
they wore bonnets and shawls, as if for a journey, and that two or three
were smoking long clay pipes. The room, in fact, was thick with
tobacco-smoke, through the reek of which my eyes travelled to a disorderly
table crowded with glasses and bottles of strong waters, in the midst of
which two tallow dips illuminated the fog; and beyond the table to the
figure of a man stooping over a couple of half-packed valises; an
enormously stout man swathed in greatcoats--a red-faced, clean-shaven man,
with small piggish eyes which twinkled at me wickedly as I picked myself
up, and he, too, stood erect to regard me.
"Press-gang be d--d!" he growled, answering the virago's call of warning.
"More likely a spree ashore. And where might _you_ come from, young
gentleman? And what might be _your_ business to-night, breakin' into a
private house?"
I cast a wild look over the bevy of forbidding females and temporised,
backing a little until my shoulder felt the door-post behind me.
"I was trying to find my way to the Blue Posts," said I.
"Then," said the stout man with obvious truth, "you ain't found it yet."
"No, sir," said I.
"And that bein' the case, you'll march out and close the door behind you.
Not,"--he went on more kindly--"that I'd be inhospitable to his Majesty's
uniform, 'specially when borne by a man of your inches; and to prove it
I'll offer you a drink before parting."
He reached out a hand towards one of the black bottles. I was about to
thank him and decline, withdrawing my eyes from a black-bonneted female
with (unless the shadow of her bonnet played me false) a stiff two-days'
beard on her massive chin, when a noise of feet moving over the boards
above, and of a scuffle, followed by loud whimpering, reminded me of
Hartnoll.
"I don't go without my mate," I answered defiantly enough.
"And what the '--' have I to do with your mate?" demanded the stout man.
"I tell you," said he, losing his temper and striding to the stairway, as
the sounds of a struggle recommenced overhead, "if your mate don't hold
the noise he's kicking up this instant, bringing trouble on respectable
folks, I'll cut his liver out and fling it arter you into the street."
He would have threatened more, though he could hardly have threatened
worse, but at this moment a door opened in the back of the room and a
bullet-head thrust itself forward, followed by a pair of shoulders naked
and magnificently shaped.
"Time to start, is it?" demanded the apparition. "Or elst what in
thunder's the meanin' o' this racket, when I was just a-gettin' of my
beauty sleep?"
The stout man let out a murderous oath, and, rushing back, thrust the door
close upon the vision; but not before I had caught a glimpse of a woman's
skirt enwrapping it from the waist down. The next moment one of the
females had caught me up: I was propelled down the passage at a speed and
with a force that made the blood sing in my ears, and shot forth into the
darkness; where, as I picked myself up, half-stunned, I heard the
house-door slammed behind me.
I take no credit for what I did next. No doubt I remembered that Hartnoll
was still inside; but for aught I know it was mere shame and rage, and the
thought of my insulted uniform, that made me rush back at the door and
batter it with fists and feet. I battered until windows went up in the
houses to right and left. Voices from them called to me; still I
battered: and still I was battering blindly when a rush of footsteps came
down the street and a hand, gripping me by the collar, swung me round into
the blinding ray of a dark lantern.
"Hands off!" I gasped, half-choked, but fighting to break away.
"All right, my game-cock!" A man's knuckles pressed themselves firmly
into the nape of my neck. "Hullo! By gosh, sir, if it ain't a
midshipman!"
"A midshipman?" said a voice of command. "Slew him round here. . . .
So it is, by George! . . . and a nice time of night! Hold him up,
bo'sun--you needn't be choking the lad. Now then, boy, what's your name
and ship?"
"Rodd, sir--of the _Melpomene_--and there's another inside--" I began.
"The _Melpomene!_"
"Yes, sir: and there's my friend inside, and for all I know they're
murdering him. . . . A lot of men dressed up as women. . . . His name's
Hartnoll--" I struggled to make away for another rush at the door, and
had my heel against it, when it gave way and Hartnoll came flying out into
the night. The officer, springing past me, very cleverly thrust in a foot
before it could be closed again.
"Men dressed as women, you say?"
"It's an old trick, sir," panted the bo'sun, pushing forward.
"I've knowed it played ever since I served on a press. If you'll let the
boys draw covert, sir . . . they've had a blank night, an' their
tempers'll be the better for it."
He planted his shoulder against the door, begging for the signal, and the
crew closed up around the step with a growl.
"My dirk!" pleaded Hartnoll. "I was getting it away, but one of 'em
half-broke my arm and I dropped it again in the passage."
"Hey? Stolen your dirk--have they? That's excuse enough. . . . Right you
are, men, and in you go!"
He waved his cocked hat to them as a huntsman lays on his hounds. In went
the door with a crash, and in two twos I was swept up and across the
threshold and surging with them down the passage. By reason of my inches
I could see nothing of what was happening ahead. I heard a struggle, and
in the midst of it a hand went up and smashed the lamp over the stairway,
plunging us all in total darkness. But the lieutenant had his lantern
ready, and by the rays of it the sailors burst open the locked door at the
end and flung themselves upon the Amazons before the candles could be
extinguished. At the same moment the lieutenant called back an order over
my head to his whippers-in, to find their way around and take the house in
the rear.
The women, though overmatched, fought like cats--or like bull-dogs rather.
They were borne down to the floor, but even here for a while the struggle
heaved and swayed this way and that, and I had barely time to snatch up
one of the candles before table, bottles, glasses, went over in a general
ruin. Above the clatter of it and the cursing, as I turned to stick the
candle upright in a bottle on the dresser, I heard a cheer raised from
somewhere in the back premises, and two men came rushing from the inner
room--two men in feminine skirts, the one naked to the waist, the other
clad about his chest and neck with a loose flannel shirt and a knotted
Belcher handkerchief.
They paused for just about the time it would take you to count five;
paused while they drew themselves up for the charge; and the lieutenant,
reading the battle in their faces--and no ordinary battle either--shouted
to close the door. He shouted none too soon. In a flash the pair were
upon us, and at the first blow two sailors went down like skittles.
There must have been at least twenty sailors in the room, and all of them
willing, yet in that superb charge the pair drove them like sheep, and the
naked man had even time to drag the dresser from the clamps fastening it
to the wall and hurl it down between himself and three seamen running to
take him in flank. The candle went down with it: but the lieutenant,
skipping back to the closed door, very pluckily held up his lantern and
called on his men, in the same breath forbidding them to use their
cutlasses yet. In the circumstances this was generous, and I verily
believe he would have been killed for it--the pair being close upon him
and their fists going like hammers--had not one of the seamen whipped out
a piece of rope and, ducking low, dived under the naked man's guard and
lassoed him by the ankles. Two others, who had been stretched on the
floor, simultaneously grabbed his companion by the skirts and wound their
arms about his knees: and so in a trice both heroes were brought to
ground. Even so they fought on until quieted by two judicious taps with
the hilt of the boatswain's cutlass. I honestly thought he had killed
them, but was assured they were merely stunned for the time.
The boatswain, it appeared, was an expert, and had already administered
the same soothing medicine to two or three of the more violent among the
ladies; though loath to do so (he explained), because it sometimes gave
the crowd a wrong impression when the bodies in this temporary state of
inanition were carried out.
The small crowd in the street, however, seemed in no mind to hinder us.
Possibly experience had taught them composure. At any rate they were
apathetic, though curious enough to follow us down to the quay and stand
watching whilst we embarked our unconscious burdens. A lamp burned
foggily at the head of the steps by which we descended to the waterside,
and looking up I saw the child who had called herself Meliar-Ann standing
in the circle of it, and gazing down upon the embarkation with dark
unemotional eyes. Hartnoll spied her too, and waved his recovered dirk
triumphantly. She paid him no heed at all.
"But look here," said the lieutenant, turning on me, "we can't take you on
board to-night--and without your chests. Oh yes--I have your names; Rodd
and Hartnoll . . . and a deuced lucky thing for you we tumbled upon you as
we did. But Captain Suckling's orders were--and I heard him give 'em,
with my own ears--to fetch you off to-morrow morning. From the Blue
Posts, eh? Well, just you run back, or Blue Billy,"--by this irreverent
name, as I learned later, the executive officers of his Majesty's Navy had
agreed to know Mr. Benjamin Sheppard, proprietor of the Blue Posts: a
solid man, who died worth sixty thousand pounds--"or Blue Billy will be
sending round the crier."
"But, sir, we don't know where to find the Blue Posts!"
He stared at me, turning with his foot on the boat's gunwale. "Why, God
bless the boy! you've only to turn to your left and follow your innocent
nose for a hundred and fifty yards, and you'll run your heads against the
doorway."
We watched the boat as it pushed off. A few of the crowd still lingered
on the quay's edge, and it has since occurred to me to wonder that, as
Hartnoll and I turned and ascended the steps, no violence was offered to
us. We had come out to flaunt our small selves in his Majesty's uniform.
Here, if ever, was proof of the respect it commanded; and we failed to
notice it. Meliar-Ann had disappeared. The loungers on the quay-head let
us pass unmolested, and, following the lieutenant's directions, sure
enough within five minutes we found ourselves under the lamp of the Blue
Posts!
The night-porter eyed us suspiciously before admitting us. "A man might
say that you've made a pretty fair beginning," he ventured; but I had
warned Hartnoll to keep his chin up, and we passed in with a fine show of
haughty indifference.
At eight o'clock next morning Hartnoll and I were eating our breakfast
when the waiter brought a visitor to our box--a tallish midshipman about
three years our senior, with a face of the colour of brickdust and a frame
that had outgrown his uniform.
"Good-morning, gentlemen," said he; "and I daresay you guess my business.
I'm to take you on board as soon as you can have your boxes ready."
We asked him if he would do us the honour to share our breakfast:
whereupon he nodded.
"To tell you the truth, I was about to suggest it myself. Eh? What have
we? Grilled kidneys? Good."