warehouses, its head above the reflection of the arc lamps, its front
lit like day, its back in black shadow. A ladder-way led to the top,
luckily on the dark side. Up this Captain Kettle led, laboriously
carrying the portmanteau with him. Holroyd followed. And in due
time the pair of them, sweating and exhausted, lay and panted on the
wooden covering of the tank high up above the area of the light. A
stork's nest, with Madame Stork in possession, occupied one corner of
the roof-space. The intruders apologized for their disturbance and
the lady continued her duties unruffled.
A train of box cars clanked out to the eastward, jolting noisily over
the turntables.
"By James!" said Captain Kettle, pulling himself together. "Every
second we sit idling here means a gain to somebody who is selling
cotton, and a waste of English soldiers' lives. Open your magazine,
and give me one of the guns. You take the bales to the left, and
I'll pelt those to the right. And for the Lord's sake don't make a
noise, or we'll have these swine coming up and wanting to make a
fuss, and we'll have to waste time killing them instead of getting
busy with that cotton."
The two pumped up the reservoirs of their air-guns, inserted the
composite wad of fluxite and slow detonator, took aim at one of the
ragged untidy cotton bales below, and pulled trigger.
In a way it was not exciting work; there were none of the
accompaniments of ordinary shooting; there was no noise beyond an
almost apologetic "click"; there was no flash; there was no movement
on the part of the target to register a hit. Even Madame Stork did
not notice the firing. "The little beasts just quietly imbed
themselves," Holroyd had said, "without so much as a rustle. They
only get about an inch in, and the cotton closes over them, and
there's nothing to see unless you know what to look for. Then a bit
later they go off in a swirling blaze. I tried that on a cotton bale
at Liverpool. I've often wondered whose bale it was. I should like
to have told the owner he was suffering for his country's good."
Men and trucks and cranes were handling many of the bales immediately
beneath them, and loading these into covered box cars. They were
careful not to touch these men, but always shot at bales that were
marked for next handling. Lives, British lives, depended on their
quickness.
"By James!" said Captain Kettle at the end of the first half-hour,
"if this stuff of yours doesn't go off, my lad, I'll wring your neck."
"Go on shooting for another ten minutes," replied the other coolly,
"and I'll show you. You're as bad as young Arthur and the curd
cheesecakes, m'lord; you're too anxious for quick results....
Gee-whiz! I take that back, though. There you are!"
A roman candle of flame spouted suddenly from one of the brown and
white bales beneath them, sending up gouts of burning cotton into the
night for the fingers of the breeze to spread. Here seemed the
commencement of a bonny blaze. But a sharp guttural order barked
out, and men dropped everything and ran, and returned in a matter of
seconds dragging hoses from which the water already spouted.
"Smart, that," commented Captain Kettle with a disciplinarian's
appreciation. "Ah, there you are, my lad, our big German with the
moustaches I dislike, and the manners I'm not going to put up with.
Seems to think he owns this city. Well, he'll probably get taught
otherwise. But I wish I could remember where it was I met that swine
before, and what I did to him."
But no extinguishing appliances were efficient to cope with those
fluxite fires. Bale after bale broke into flame, and spouted
destruction. A train of cars got nervous and pulled out, but the
jolting irritated its simmering combustion, and it fled hooting and
clattering away through the night towards Germany, in a perfect
ribbon of flame.
The bales in the open popped and burned like coals, the warehouses
caught and burst like over-ripe pods, and the vessels in the basin,
despite their hurried casting-off of shore fasts were smitten in
their turn, and burned like torches also.
"I hope you're satisfied," the inventor exulted. "About time we
quitted. Even that blessed stork is getting uneasy."
"Not whilst we've this handful of cartridges left. That man who
doesn't like me is going to save the train over there to the Nor'ard
if we don't look lively. We'll shoot everything we've left at that,
and trust to luck that one of the pellets goes off with a short fuse."
"I'm getting cooked. This tower is made of ferro-concrete, which
they say doesn't burn. So we shall merely cremate. When they're
examining our cinders they'd probably decide we were Parsees. By
gad, Captain, look at your pal. Did you fire the shot that set light
to him, or did I?"
Captain Kettle stared down at the train on the northward siding. The
energetic man with the eyeglasses and the upturned moustaches who was
trying to save it, suddenly clutched at his clothes, and then
crumbled into flame. But he did not cry out. He ran quickly round
the corner of the building, and was lost to the watchers' sight, and
there is the end of him as far as this memoir is concerned.
"You aren't shooting any more?" asked Holroyd.
"I've given them my last cartridge."
"So have I. I wonder which of us bagged your pal. What about
catching the last 'bus home?"
"After you, my lad," said Captain Kettle. "By James! I wish I could
remember what I did to that man. Hullo, there goes Mrs. Stork. Now,
quick down that ladder, or we shall cook."
Once more, to avoid custom-house and passport formalities, Captain
Kettle and his friend let the mail-boat take her trip without them,
and crossed to England by another less obvious route. The fare on
board was meagre, and they went to an inn at the unobtrusive port to
which their boat was consigned to supply the void. They found there
an English paper.
"I see," said Mr. Holly Holroyd over his chop, "that there have been
cotton fires at that place where we've been, but they're quite
unimportant and no damage was done."
"I'm not in the least a betting man," said Captain Kettle, "as
betting is a thing the Wharfedale Particular Methodists strongly
disapprove of, but I'll stand you two days' rabbit shooting on my
farm if cotton isn't made contraband before the month's up."
"How's that?"
"At the time I sent that first wire about Arthur and the butterfly
bottle I happened to send another to a British M.P. I knew, telling
him he might expect that the cotton shipment his friends had got
through would be spoiled, and that the dose would be repeated if
needful. I guess that man knows when to come in out of the wet."
"You're a marvel," said Mr. Holroyd. "I was intended for the
diplomatic service myself if I'd passed high enough out of Harrow,
but the good old Governor went phut for two millions in nitrates just
then, and I had to go in for medicine instead. But I should never
have been your equal in diplomacy. Well, there's one thing I bagged
out of this trip and that's an option on a £100,000 parcel of German
dyewares now in----er----, the neutral country where we've been
operating. No trouble at all importing them, and Bradford's aching
for all it can get. I shall make a cool fifty thou'."
"You've a great head on you," said Captain Kettle, "though some of
the things in it are a bit hard to follow. I hope that boy Arthur's
all right, but between ourselves Lady Kettle spoils him dreadfully,
and I expect he'll have a liver on him like a Strasburg goose by the
time I get back."
IV
GUN-RUNNERS
Captain Image prided himself on turning out fine active West African
mates. It is true that a good many officers succumbed to his
treatment, but the survivors were notorious for being able to get
through more work in a given time, and for giving way less to
disease, than any set of mates on the Coast. As the Liverpool office
will testify.
But the new Fourth he had shipped on the _M'poso_ (vice a predecessor
smashed under a surf boat on the beach of the Grand Bassa) frankly
puzzled him.
"The young pup actually asked me this morning if he could do the
navigation for me," he told his purser over their morning refreshment.
"These brass-edged upstarts," said Mr. Balgarnie, "are brought up
that way on some of the other runs now, I believe. Your boy's
overloaded this cocktail with angostura again."
"Much angostura makes easy swizzling. You're quite right: that's a
cocktail only fit for a passenger. Jones, this new Fourth calls
himself, and that makes the third Jones I've got on the _M'poso_ this
minute, and bring the number of Joneses on the Coast up to three
hundred and ninety six. Rum thing is, Balgarnie me man, he isn't
Welsh either."
"Well, you ought to be a judge of that," said the Purser with sly
malice.
Captain Image scowled. His nationality was a sore point with him.
"Look you now, me lad, go steady. I've knocked fellows down for
saying what I know you've got on the edge of your tongue. So let's
get back to business--I mean this Fourth Mate. I put him on to
chipping paint, and watched him start. Believe you me, he'd less
idea of the job than the ordinary Liverpool dock rat. I took him out
of earshot of the man and gave him my views. I said 'You've got to
get quit of a lot of those airs and starched collars before you're
going to be any good to me, me lad,' I said. 'Very good, sir,' says
he as civil as begob. 'Where did you pick up those manners?' I said.
'Are you Royal Naval Reserve?' I said. 'I am not, sir,' says he.
'In fact very much the reverse,' he says. 'But I hope, sir,' he
says, 'that after I've shaken down to the ways of the ship you'll
find I can carry on as well as any officer you've got.'"
"H'm," said Mr. Balgarnie. "'Carry on.'"
"Precisely," said Captain Image, signing to his Krooboy to hand the
second cocktails. "Plain Navy talk."
"May have been sheer frills."
"When we get down to the Coast, I'll sweat the frills off him, the
young pup. Thinks he's going to lib for top deck and run the tally
desk, I expect. Well, he'll learn what it is to be down in a hold
breaking out cargo with the thermometer at fifty above par."
"You promised to call at the Dutchman's factory up the Brass River
this time."
"And if there's water enough for the old packet, I'll go. The
Dutchman should have a hundred mahogany logs ready for me. If the
fever's been good to him he may have as many as a hundred and twenty.
It will be Mr. Fourth Mate's job to hook those five-ton logs on to
our winch chains, and after he's stood for a couple of days up to his
chin in that stinking mud off the Dutchman's beach, I'll give you
further news of him--the smooth-faced young pup."
Now from the Steamboat Company's point of view the spheres of
interest along the West African seaboard are clearly demarcated, and
seldom interlap. London boats work the North West coast from Tangier
to Mogador, and go no further south now that Agadir is a closed port.
The Germans and the French compete with them to a certain extent, and
as they are helped and the British are hindered by their respective
Home Governments, they are likely to get more of the trade. Then
comes a gap: there is no regular service to the Saharan seaboard.
But occasional French steamers do the bulk of the shipping from
Senegal, and from there onwards, past Sierra Leone, Liberia, the
Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast and the Bight, down to the Oil Rivers,
Liverpool steamcraft carry trade, traders, and missionaries, soldiers
and administrators, with weekly regularity. British steamers under
the Belgian flag serve the Congo. And there are other arrangements,
also clearly defined, for Portuguese Angola, British Walfish Bay
(which is the entry port for German South West Africa), and of course
for Cape Town.
The main point to carry in mind, however, during the reading of this
memoir is that the West African seaboard is by no means all British;
the ownership is shared also by French, Spaniards, Moors, Portuguese,
Liberians and Germans; so that when hereafter I speak of The Other
Power, there is enough geographical vagueness to avoid international
trouble. The reason for this will appear later.
The _M'poso_ was a Black-Funnel boat, and with decent luck should
have come to her end some ten years ago. But no bar on the Coast
could break in both of her bottoms (though all had tried), and
Captain Image stuck to her, though promotion was often offered to
him. A bigger boat of course meant more passengers; but the slow old
_M'poso_ putting into half-forgotten creeks up the rivers, or rolling
her rails under off surf-smitten beaches where no decent steamer dare
risk her anchors always staggered home loaded to her marks. A mail
steamer may be decorative, but there are heavy fines for loss of
time, and mail-boat passengers on the West Coast expect to drink like
fish at the skipper's expense, and entertainment allowances are
always inadequate. Moreover, it is a solid commercial fact that the
Black Funnel Co. pay a big commission to their Masters on cargo
secured. And that is where Captain Image really scored. He was
known to have a nose for cargo second to none on the Coast, and the
grey-headed owner with the imperial who ran the Line gave him a free
hand to hunt for cargo anywhere he liked along that unhealthy
seaboard....
"The Old Man seems down on you," said Mr. Price the Third Mate to Mr.
Jones the Fourth, with whom he shared a room above the boilers.
"Well, he hates frills and he expects his mates to work nine days a
week and twenty-eight hours a day, and you don't look cut out for
that. I guess he spotted you were an R.N.R."
"But I'm not."
The old Third raised his dyed eyebrows. "Oh, well, if you tell me
you are not, there's an end of it. Don't talk. Look you: I want a
bit of sleep."
The Fourth Mate inspected himself in the glass. "If only I'd had
sense enough to grow a moustache," he told himself humorously, "I
should have steered to windward of a lot of trouble. As it is, that
old palm oil ruffian of a skipper seems to sniff Navy Pattern
somewhere. However, thank the Lord for a thick hide: I guess I shall
need it. They might have the decency to give officers separate rooms
on these tanks, or else provide them with efficient exhaust silencers
for when they're asleep. My Christian Aunt! How that Welshman
snores. Well, it's one comfort to know he will be quite unconscious
of the fact of my absence, so I'll just trot off to Number Three Hold
and get on with my forgeries..."
Now at Abadah, which is the chief port of entry of a certain Third
Class British Colony, the Colonial Secretary, who was acting Governor
for the time being, vice the proper Governor invalided home, was in a
state of considerable anxiety. He tapped a cigarette paper full of
quinine, rolled it up, and washed it down with a wineglass of weak
whisky and water, and irritably waved away the black house boy who
came to announce dinner.
"I no fit for chop."
"But I am," said Craigie, the Commandant of the Hausa Constabulary.
He scratched himself because he was suffering from prickly heat, and
nodded to the house boy, who took the hint and vanished. "Look here,
old man. I know you're worried, and I know also that your head's
ringing like a bell with that infernal quinine, but if you don't eat
you'll crack up, and that's a thing that can't be allowed."
"Barring suicide, getting decently invalided home seems the only way
out of my particular mess just now. And," the Acting-Governor nodded
significantly, "I'm not the only man who has faced those two
alternatives and made his choice."
The Commandant quite understood the reference to His Excellency the
late Governor, and nodded agreement. "But," said he, "you're not
that kind of jellyfish. It isn't your fault that we've another
slackback at the Colonial Office at home, and you get neither backing
nor encouragement, and are left to hold the dog. If the--the Other
Power mops up the hinterland and ruins the Colony, you'll be held up
to infamy as the rascal responsible, and if you back Great Britain
and do your duty, the odds are you get recalled for spoiling the game
of some trumpery politician at home. It's a sweet choice, but
there's not the smallest doubt as to what you must do."
"I know that," snapped the Acting-Governor, "and of course I'm going
to see the thing through. You needn't reel out any more of your
platitudes, and I suppose you're hungry if I am not, so we may as
well have chop. Curse this heat. The thermometer's been steadily
going up for three days now, and if that threatened tornado doesn't
come along soon to clear the air, I believe I shall go out in an
apoplexy."
Now in that no man's country, the Abadah hinterland, there was
chronic war, and so far as local history travelled backward there
always had been chronic war. In theory every one deplored this, and
successive Governors had reported strongly in favour of annexation,
and presenting the troubled area with the Pax Britannica.
Incidentally, as all the trade of the Colony came from the
hinterland, commerce would be assisted, but this fact was kept in the
background of late, as the Hypocritical Party was in power at home,
and as they were mostly traders themselves or came of trading stock,
they always assumed an unctuous pose of righteousness, and refused to
countenance any annexation that was not first proposed by the
missionaries of their particular denominations.
As a glaring alternative it was pointed out that the Other Power was
aching to annex. The Other Power worked the Press in its usual way,
and protested that it could not afford to have a bear garden on its
doorstep. It clamoured aloud that its interests suffered, that the
cause of humanity was being neglected, and so on. And once the Other
Power seized that hinterland, of course it would clap on its usual
tariffs to divert trade to its own port, and Abadah would be ruined.
"And the utmost the present Hypocrites at home can rise to," the
Acting-Governor summed up, "is that I should try moral influence on
these hinterland tribes. One might as well try to shift the Equator
with a hymn tune. And they're cutting down the Colonial forces every
half-year. As a point of fact, what is the total of the Hausa
Constabulary now? My head's so full of quinine I can't remember the
simplest figures."
"Two hundred and thirty-eight effectives. By the way, you remember
that eminent politician who called us butcher mercenaries in the
House of Commons the other day? That pretty phrase has been copied
into the local rag here, and improved upon, and my native officers
tell me the men are beginning to kick."
"I don't see why they shouldn't. By the way, d'you know the Abadah
_Times and Echo_ has changed proprietors?"
"I didn't. I thought that snuff-and-butter-coloured barrister chap,
Quablah Smith owned it."
"He's just sold out to Schmaltz."
The Commandant scratched himself thoughtfully and whistled. "Who
owns, or is said to own, or at any rate who manages, that big new
Dutch factory at the head of the town where they sell under cost (so
I hear) and buy above the market, and live like fighting cocks on
what must be a very heavy net loss per annum. I suppose Schmaltz has
been sent by those blighters who are trying to bag our hinterland.
By Jove, Crawford, aren't they thorough? Actually nobbling the local
Press in our own twopenny capital."
"Oh, they're thorough enough," said the Acting-Governor grimly, "and
plodding, and systematic. They've had the whole scheme cut and dried
and docketed in their Colonial Office any time this past twenty
years, and my distinguished predecessors in office have tumbled to it
for ten, and have reported strongly. As a total result the Colonial
Office has now woke up to the fact that they've been sending our
official letters here by a round-about route for the past century,
and now post them by the direct boat. Looks as if one of these new
chaps they've got into the Cabinet had bought an atlas."
Now as it happened, the Other Power, which had set up a new
diplomatic doctrine of doing things first and explaining them
afterwards, had made a far more comprehensive network of preparations
than even the men on the spot guessed at. All the world knew that
Dr. Carl Josephs was one of the great modern authorities on West
African lepidoptera. But no one apparently worried about where the
bearded and be-spectacled Dr. Carl found the money to finance his
beautifully equipped expeditions. At the end of each trip he issued
a sumptuous volume, lavishly illustrated by the three-colour blocks
(London: Schünemann Gebruden. £5 5s. net); but as moneyed butterfly
hunters are few, one concludes that the circulation was limited, and
probably did not meet the cost of publication.
It was perfectly true that the Herr Doctor had brought home several
butterflies hitherto unknown to science, and if one were in a
scoffing mood one might point out that any other earnest student who
cares to hunt through any little-known section of West Africa can do
the same. But the expense of such an expedition is heavy, and I can
recommend Dr. Carl Josephs' plan of getting a government subsidy to
cover it. Especially is it handy to have a subsidy that is not
reported in any parliamentary return, and so is beyond lewd
criticism. That is the great advantage of having one's income
provided for under the secret service estimates.
The smart new Colonial Secretary of the Other Power has been
adversely criticised for many of his appointments, but he made no
mistake when he picked Dr. Carl Josephs as his missionary of empire
in the Abadah hinterland. The man had health, and he had prudence;
his genius for entomology was the most perfect of disguises; moreover
he had a gift of tongues, no conscience whatever, and a talent for
gaining the friendship of savages such as is only possessed by the
one man in the million. He could promise and he could perform. He
gave gramophones, magnetic shocking coils, and patent leather sword
belts. He did a lot of very lucky doctoring in a smallpox district,
and he scored with the biggest headman of the lot by the prediction
of an eclipse.
Nautical almanacs are not common currency in the bush at the back of
Abadah, and when the sun was shut out at the prophesied hour, the
whole tribe admitted the miracle. But the headman stuck out for
further bounty. He had a repeating rifle--an early pattern
Winchester. He must have a thousand more. He would not sell his
country for less. Dr. Josephs knew the trouble of smuggling arms of
precision into Africa in the teeth of international law, and offered
two thousand gaspipe flint-locks with cherry red stocks and nickelled
heel-plates. Quoth the headman, "I can get those myself if I choose
to make my people collect rubber. Either the Winchesters, or I sit
tight."
"Then the Winchesters you shall have," said Dr. Carl Josephs. "On my
head be it. And when they come you shall use them against those
cursed British who have spoiled your slave trade, and want to cut
down your crucifixion tree, and will not even give you a good price
for your palm oil and kernels. And to show the generosity of my
master, the great Emperor, who will come in to protect your country,
I will give you above and beyond the rifles, cartridges in number
past thinking, which you have not even asked for. Then you can drive
the British into the sea, and loot Abadah."
"Yes," said the headman doubtfully. "But I couldn't stay there.
Their ships would come with cannon that shoot a thousand miles." He
was a travelled headman. He had served once in the stokehold of a
West Coast gunboat, and remembered wistfully the range of a four
point seven gun.
"When you had looted the place, and got their gin, and their
concertinas, and their tinned salmon, and that skew-eyed billiard
table at Government House, and--and those big French hats the
Colonial Secretary's wife does such a line in, why then my dark
friend you can retreat on your ancestral middens here, and--I'll
guarantee you'll find them strongly held."
The headman licked his big lips. "Is there much gin now in Abadah?"
"Just oceans," said Dr. Carl Josephs.
* * * * *