The Night Land & Other Romances
Page 60
Through all the big, seething square there came a curious silence, and then a kind of ferocious screaming, and a thousand big hill-men rushing on one spot. The big axe swung amid a hail of German rifle-butts, yet the huge sapper was untouched. The porch gave him just room for his weapon, and no more, and not one of the attackers could get in at his side or back. And presently even the hillmen tired of rushing in on that one little spot of certain death, and gave back a while to confer.
Meanwhile, up on the high roof of the barracks, the sergeant was manipulating a piece of broken looking-glass, part of a shaving mirror, and presently, from maybe half a dozen miles away to the north-west, through, the eternal mountain air, there flashed suddenly and burned the blink of an answering helio:
“Coming. Hold on. End.”
Twice more during the next half-hour the hillmen rushed Jell Murphy, and each time the big sapper built him a semicircle of dead round about the stone porch, though by the end of the second attack he was bleeding in a dozen places. After the hillmen had backed away for the second time, there fell a most extraordinary silence upon the square, broken only by a curious low rattling of rude castanets from a native “holy man,” who had begun to walk round and round the small ammunition-house on the stumps of his knees, rattling the little pieces of slate as he went.
“That shows as they think Jell Murphy’s got devils fightin’ with ’im,” said the sergeant, gravely. “Yon bleedin’ fakir is puttin’ a spell on to old Jell. He’ll go round like that for maybe a hour, an’ then them beggars ’ll rush ’im, an’ nothin’ ’ll stop ’em then. I guess old Murphy ’ll have to go. He’s shown hisself a fine lad.”
There came a low growl from the half-dozen men who still lived.
“We ain’t a-going to let ’im go cut like that, sergeant,” said one of them grimly. “We’re going out to fetch ’im in, or bloomin’ well kick it wiv ’im.”
“If you makes a move, boys,” said the sergeant, “ you’ll end ’im and us right off. If only yon chap ’ll keep foolin’ round long enough we’ll be safe, an’ Murphy too; the rigment ’ll be back then, an’ I want to live for that! You can go out then, boys, and kick it as quick as you like, only we has the wimmin now to think of.” .
“Sergeant,” called one of the younger men eagerly from across the barrack-room, “I’ve found some! My God, sergeant, there’s fifty bloomin’ rounds!”
The sergeant’s hands fairly trembled as he took the precious packets from the man.
“Oh, Lord,” he said, in tremulous earnestness, “ let me kill a man wiv each bloomin’ one!”
“Sst!” said one of the men suddenly. “Hark to old Jell. He’s singin’ summat.”
The men craned forward to stare and listen, and so great was the stillness upon the big square that they could clearly catch the words—(blending oddly with the rattling of the fakir’s castanets), that the big sapper was singing softly to himself as he stood leaning on the big axe.
“It’s yon Mary song of his, I’m think-in’,” said a Macdullarg, whose cot lay near Murphy’s. “It’s the fever in him, I doubt not; an’ him been practisin’ for the concert that was to be.”
Murphy continued to croon and sing to himself. And suddenly the Lady Mary, leaning over the bed, white-faced, where Tom Harrison lay, heard it, and shivered a little.
“Look out, boys!” said the sergeant abruptly. “Yon devil ’as finished, an’ now they’m going to rush old Murphy. Shoot slow, an’ send as many to hell as you can.”
The holy man shuffled away from his persistent rounding of the house, and in the same moment a tremendous yell filled the square as a rush was made. For a moment the men in the barracks saw Murphy clearly, from the waist upwards. Below the waist the semicircle of the dead hid him as a wall. Then the enemy were at the porch in a chaos of intended butchery, through which swung the great axe.
“Now!” said the sergeant; and six rifles were fired methodically.
They fired every cartridge they had, and eased some of the fury and deadliness out of the attack on the big sapper, for still the great axe swung.
“He’s done now!” said the sergeant, fingering his useless trigger. “An’ we carn’t do nothin’. My Gawd, what’s ’appening? He’s chargin’ them!”
It was true. They saw the gigantic form of the big sapper leap up suddenly into sight over the barrier of the dead, and hurl himself into the enormous mass of surging hillmen.
“He’d got to do it,” said one of the men, in a husky voice. “Hark to him! He’s singing again. Hark to him!”
They saw the gigantic sapper, head and shoulders bigger than any man in the square, driving through the heart of the natives, the big axe swinging and circling and dripping. And as he swung the great axe, in a voice that could be heard above all the roar of the fight they could hear him chanting a curious medley of words:
“Ha, ha! Gentle is she,
Mary, my darling!”
And with each chanted word the four-foot axe swung and circled and struck—a dripping baton beating a melody of death.
“It’s the fever,” the sergeant kept muttering under his breath, yet without knowing that he said anything, as he stared so tensely with his men.
Still the big sapper went forward, and still across the square there came the strange “Ha, ha! Gentle is she, Mary, my darling!” and the eternal swing and circle of the great axe.
But inside the big barrack-room Lady Mary was not even aware of what was happening. She was holding Captain Harrison’s head against her breast, and crying tearlessly, for the young officer lay so everlastingly quiet that she began to feel sure he was dead. As for Maggie, mercifully she had stayed tending her mistress in the cubicle, and so knew nothing of the immediate happenings.
“They’ve stopped him!” said a man’s voice abruptly, dry and toneless. “He’s done! My God!”
They saw the great shoulders of big Murphy sink out of sight under a thousand rifle-butts; then he hove himself upright, and swung the great axe round once more, striking madly to right and left. There came just three shouted words:
“Ha, ha! Gentle—”
And he disappeared, finally, and the four-foot axe ceased to strike.
And so, as it seems to me, I see big-hearted, big-bodied Jell Murphy swinging, his axe of victory, and stepping great and fine and wholesome and unafraid out of that pasture of death into the Pastures of the Eternal, still singing in his spirit the words that held for his particular soul no single trace of irony:
“Ha, ha! Gentle is she,
Mary, my darling!”
* * *
It was just upon the evening as Jell Murphy died, and, almost as if it had been the fitting signal of so momentous a dying, there came the crash of a thousand Service rifles. The regiment had returned.
Little Tripe Jones it was who got first to where his big comrade had died. With ferocious energy, and sobbing brutal oaths out of his throat, he attacked the great circle of dead hillmen that lay all around that last stand. Body after body he swung clear by main strength until a score of his comrades were working only a shade less furiously to the same end. And so at last they had him clear. As they lifted him an undersized Cockney voiced his epitaph, standing there in the midst of that quiet but infinitely eloquent circle of the dead: “My word!” said the little man, in an awed voice, “him was sure a bloody man!”
* * *
Three months later Lady Mary married Captain Harrison.
At breakfast, a few mornings after the wedding, Captain Harrison remarked:
“I see the men still keep Murphy’s grave covered with flowers.”
“I’m glad of that,” replied Lady Mary. “He deserved it. Is your coffee right, dear?”
A Timely Escape
Madge Jackson disliked Mr. George Vivian, B.Sc, with an intense and thorough dislike. This feeling was conceivably strengthened by the considerations that Mr. Vivian was something of a rival; though, indeed, this sounds a queer thing to say when the saying conc
erns a man and woman.
But it is correct; for Dicky Temple, her young lover, appeared to consider Mr. Vivian a veritable intellectual god upon earth, upholding his belief with all the generous vigour and blind hero-worship of which a young and boyishly-dispositioned man can be capable.
Against his “guide, philosopher, and friend,” Dicky would hear no word—not even from the pretty lips of his pretty Madge. Moreover, he was developing a way of “laying-down-the-law” to his fiancee, which might have been permissable and possibly even pleasant to her, had the said law been “Dicky.” But it was not; it was Vivian in structure and utterance. And the woman in the maid rebelled.
This was bad. But worse than this and the curb of silence which Dicky’s rather intolerant partisanship put upon the girl’s speech, was the actuality that he was passing more and more of his time in George Vivian’s luxurious rooms, even to the extent of encroaching very considerably upon certain hours that had been hitherto considered devoted to their daily worship at the altar of love. And this, as all will agree, suggested the base of a proposition, if not in Euclid then in Cupid, which was not likely to end in an exposition of the angles of their natures and tempers, which might conclude at a tangent.
Now, Mr. George Vivian was a writer—to be exact, a novelist and an essayist; and not very wonderful as a literary workman, if we are to believe Miss Jackson. Dicky, on the contrary, would have assured you earnestly of the converse. He would have insisted upon the grace and beauty of his style, and the delicacy and subtle point of his thoughts; and all the while he would have been totally unconscious of the paucity of ideas, and the general threadbareness and commonplaceness of the material that his older friend was wont to dress up with so much “grace and beauty” of style.
Yet his “style” which so impressed the younger man was considerably less than he imagined it to be. Indeed, when one day Madge epigrammatically described Vivian’s work as ancient knuckle-bones dressed in new paper frills, she did that worthy litterateur less injustice than the vehement Dicky could have conceived possible.
The immediate result of this cruel ticketing had been a very decided row between the two young people, which had not yet ended; for the very real reason that Master Dicky Temple was being a thorough young fool, and showing his independence by purposely neglecting his pretty sweetheart, the while that he proved his unwavering loyalty to George Vivian by putting in all his spare time with him.
So far as a labelled worker goes, Dicky was nothing— that is to say he possessed a private income and, incidentally, a vivid and peculiar imagination, seeming to be truly bubbling over with ideas.
He had written some exceedingly good stuff of a somewhat fantastic nature; so that one would be inclined to suppose that the very plenitude of his ideas and natural ability would have enabled him to feel the pretentious glitter of the work that came from Vivian’s pen. But, as is so readily the case in the callow years, he mistook the finnicking smartness and re-dressed “mouton” of his friend for something that indicated powers far beyond his own; not realizing that such can be readily attained by some labor, a good memory, and the purposeful cultivation of eccentricity in the telling.
His own abilities he conceived to be of a crude and inferior order—”blood-and-thunder” he was inclined to label them when talking to Vivian; and it is to be noted that Vivian never took earnest means to suggest that they might be otherwise, but would sit in stately content, submitting to the constant adulation of the young man who would be his disciple.
In reality, Dick’s gifts were the true gold of imagination, and Vivian was a sufficiently acute man to recognize this fact; though at no time, as I have remarked, did he ever hint that such was or might be the case.
It is a regrettable thing, yet the truth, that Dicky managed to neglect Madge for a full week after their row. What is even more to be regretted is that Dicky achieved this without any personal distress at the separation. It was as if the elder man had really a power to compensate him temporarily for the loss of his sweetheart; and the thought arises, to what extent might this compensation of attraction have carried the youth? Possibly to a point at which the girl and he would achieve that tangential divergence aforementioned, which might result in their separation through all this life and the eternities to be.
This, to say the least, has a lamentable sound about it, and therefore I join with Madge Jackson in heartily disliking Vivian; for the man knew exactly the condition of affairs between Dicky and his pretty fiancée, and had sufficient experience and general sanity to know that such behavior as Dicky’s must lead to a definite and final break way from the girl, unless he altered very speedily. And knowing this, he should, as an older man and one having a wider outlook, have packed Dicky out of his rooms with a little sensible masculine advice.
For her part, Madge had her own ideas. She loved Dicky thoroughly and honestly, and she meant to try to break this friendship; being convinced by intuition rather than by reasoning, that it was undesirable for her love. And this conviction I conceive to have been bred apart from her natural anger and jealousy in connection with Temple’s idiotic uplooking to his man friend, and his neglect of her.
Her first step towards achieving her object was a letter sent to Dicky to his rooms, on the eighth day of his absenting himself.
She asked him to call. He replied, with almost childish folly, that he was engaged to spend the next three nights with Vivian; but that he would call on the fourth. She, as of course was most natural, considering the circumstances, allowed him to call; but instructed the servant to tell Master Dicky Temple that she was not at home.
Dicky perceived the rightness of the snub and stood a while upon the step—as it were—fighting a strange, horrid hurt with anger and pride. The latter gained the battle, being aided to victory by his knowledge that he need not endure the evening alone; but might have a good time at George Vivian’s rooms.
He turned away from the door and passed on up the street, his head held very high and his heart full of the ready and uncounting foolishness of blind and undeveloped youth. And even as his footsteps sounded under her window, poor little Madge burst into crying, repenting her natural and almost justified pride.
A fortnight passed after this, during which she saw him twice in the street; but he, if he were aware of her, gave no sign to show that he had seen her; but went on his way without so much as a look in her direction.
On each occasion he had been on the opposite pavement; but even at this distance it had seemed to her that he was looking unwell, rather pallid, and that there was a certain listlessness in his step. At home she had reasoned with herself that she might be mistaken, and that even if he did look unwell, it was because he was fretting to be back with her on the old happy footing. Yet, she did not believe her reasonings. She was convinced in her heart that things were going wrong with Dicky in some way; and no amount of commonsense reasonings would be likely to move her from this state of intuition.
She wrote to him once more at his rooms, asking him to call and explain his continued absence. He replied with a curiously incoherent letter that frightened her, and left her just as lacking in definite knowledge as before; but he made no call.
Ten days later, when she was out with her sister, she saw Dicky again. He was walking slowly down the opposite side of the street; and scarcely knowing what she was doing, she pulled Gertrude to a standstill, while she watched him.
Dicky came on slowly down the street, his step utterly lacking in its old firm briskness, and his face seeming peculiarly white and almost gaunt, so far as she could judge at that distance. He was almost opposite to her, when suddenly she tugged her arm free from her sister’s and walked swiftly across the road, so as to meet him diagonally. She reached the opposite pavement and met him face to face.
“Dicky!” she said. “Dicky! What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” and she stood there breathlessly facing him.
He, for his part, had come to a halt, and stood looking down at h
er with a peculiar vacant stare, holding out his hand automatically, and smiling almost as though she were some person he could only half recollect.
“Dicky!” she cried again, passionately, staring up into his eyes which were dull and unrecognizing. “Dicky, what is the matter?”
As she spoke, she noticed afresh with shocked feelings how dead white and spiritless was his face, and the utter slackness of his whole attitude.
“Dicky,” she said, once more. “What is the matter?”
The young man ceased to hold out his hand in that mechanical fashion and passed it across his forehead hesitatingly, and still looking at her in that blank way that was so dreadful. Then a definite expression took the place of his vacancy. He lifted his chin absurdly, with the queerest little assumption of offended pride, and raising his hat, turned from her murmuring: “Good day, Miss Jackson.”
And with that, he went on up the road at a fairly brisk pace.
Madge stood, staring dumbly after him. It was all so strange and terrible to her. It was as if she had been talking to an automaton that was yet half human, and which had recollected in some queer passionless way, some forgotten anger which it must put on and wear as a garment, rather than that it had exhibited the normal reflex of a natural emotion. She stared after him blindly, because of the unshed tears that made a mist of everything, and all unaware that her white face and intense attitude were attracting attention from passers-by.
Gertrude had followed her slowly across the road, and now she touched Madge on the arm.
“Whatever is wrong with Dicky?” she asked in a puzzled voice, and glancing quickly at Madge’s white face. “He looks a perfect wreck. Has—has he been drinking or something?”