The young man invested in a higher collar than any in his now shabby stock, and slept on his best trousers before betaking himself to a Bloomsbury hotel to meet the gentleman with the funny name who had written to make the appointment. The gentleman had rather a funny face as well, dark and sallow, with eyes like chocolates; but there is never much light in Bloomsbury, at any rate in the month of February, and Oswald Alfred was not going to belie his stable upbringing in the matter of a gift-horse; for he had a shrewd suspicion that it was “all right,” from the first funny accents in keeping with the whole personality of the advertiser, and of a piece with the curious locution (which the applicant had not noticed) in his advertisement.
“So Smart is your name, young man! Smart of name and smart of nature, is it not? Mine, as you know, is Ghum; by Ghum it is, like you say in the classic! I am very glad of you to swear by me, young man.”
Oswald Alfred was merely embarrassed by these familiarities, for he had the instincts of a British servant in every vein, and had no desire to be treated otherwise in his new employ. His skin turned a dusky red, which deepened when Mr. Ghum displayed a startling knowledge of the accident which had cost him his last place.
“We spot it in the morning rag,” the dark gentleman explained, with a show of teeth and an increasing air of idiomatic mastery; “we remember your name, and have wonder if we might hear of you. How have come you to meet such serious accident, young man?”
Oswald Alfred leaned forward from the edge of his chair, and stated his case to the lining of his cap as even he had never stated it before.
“It was like this, sir: I’d been to meet my lady and gentleman at Victoria Station (London, Chatham and Dover, sir); and the boat was very late, you see, and they’d brought over a new French maid who’d never been in a car before; an’ that’s ‘ow the ‘ole affair come to ‘appen, sir. It was a limousine, sir, forty-’orse Feeut, an’ that piled up with luggage we was absolutely top-’eavy; but my gentleman, ‘e was always saying ‘is car cost ‘im quite enough without cab-fares over and above. I used to tell ‘im ‘ow it’d be some skiddy night, but he wouldn’t take a word, though he’d a rough enough side to ‘is own tongue, and I’d decided to give ‘im notice when it ‘appened in Sloane Street on the way ‘ome that night. I was coming along at a good pace, but not exceeding, an’ the only other thing in the street was a tradesman’s van same way; ‘im on the near side, sir, and me coming up on the crown, and blowing my horn. Suddenly he pulls right across me without ever ‘olding out ‘is ‘and; right across me into Pont Street, without showing a finger! There was only one thing to be done, and I done it; took the corner myself, instead o’ crashing into ‘im, an’ beat ‘im round it, too! But with all the grease on the road and all that luggage on top we skidded somethink cruel, and took the pavement and smashed our near door against one o’ them posts that are there to smash you. My lady and gentleman weren’t hurt, they can’t say they were, nor yet the worse off anyhow, being insured. But the girl, she’d never been in a car before, an’ there she set beside me in front; it wasn’t ‘ardly right, sir; she didn’t know enough even to ‘old on. Out she went an’ got concussion, and I lost my place for that!”
“A thing you could not help?”
“A thing I could no more help,” declared Oswald Alfred, “than the babe unborn.” The chocolate eyes regarded him with sleepy benevolence. “It was hard on as young a man like you,” said Mr. Ghum. “It was very ‘ard, sir.”
“You deserve another opportunity.”
“I should be very grateful if you could give me one, sir.”
“And you would not find awful traffic our way,” Mr. Ghum added, as though the statement contained a joke; but the subject was no joke to Oswald Alfred.
“I’m not afraid of traffic,” he boasted with perfect truth; “but when ‘orse-van drivers don’t ‘old out their ‘ands they ought to be put in prison.”
“On the other end of the equation,” continued Ghum, soaring high over his hearer’s head, “you would have a very invaluable life committed to your keeping. I would not be your master, but your master would be mine. I am not interviewing with you on my own account, but as the representative of one of the native big-bugs of my country, who is spending a little holidays in your old one.”
Oswald Alfred had pricked up the ears of a keen and catholic sportsman; in fact, the newspaper of that name was even then folded carefully away in the pocket in which it was least likely to spoil the cut of a coat.
“Kind of Jam, or something?” he inquired with interest.
“Exactly! Quite! You hit it on the nail! His Highness the Jam Sahib of Boavista — my royal master and yours who is to be!” -
An ill-concealed levity rather spoilt the effect of this descriptive mouthful on Oswald Alfred, but was soon forgotten in his joy over the terms that he succeeded in making for himself. It was wonderful how amenable Mr. Ghum proved to reason and Oswald Alfred’s best smile. The lad had been getting fifty shillings in his last place, but of course keeping himself; in the new one he was promised forty and all found. It was not perhaps quite the kind of arrangement that a more independent chauffeur would have been so ready to entertain, but the financial improvement was such that he would soon be in a position to pick and choose again, unless he went and got into fresh trouble through the criminal negligence of others on the road. He was determined it should be through no fault of his own; and the old coachman himself could not have excelled his son in distrust of other drivers on the day that Mr. Ghum called for him with the car in Shepherd’s Bush.
The car, a sound second-hand Cleland-Talboys, had been driven thus far by a chauffeur from the works in Notting Dale, where it had been some days undergoing repairs. Oswald Alfred very properly sought particulars, and the works’ chauffeur was saying that so far as he knew there had been nothing at all the matter with her, when Mr. Ghum closed a promising discussion by inquiring if Smart could find his way to the Portsmouth Road.
“Then the sooner the better we are on it,” he said curtly on getting an affirmative reply. “The car has been tune up for you, like they say in the classic; let me hear her melody without delay. Straight along the Portsmouth Road — but mind you traps — and when we arrive near Guildford I will give you direction.”
It was one of those bitter afternoons which make the early spring for, days together as cold as the depths of winter, and even colder to the eye. There was no sun in the bleak sky, and no rain in the clouds that flew there, but the trees looked black and brittle against both, and ploughed fields cold as new graves behind the trees. Telegraph posts stood along the side-strips of bleached grass, like sentinels frozen at attention, but here and there a live scout saluted with his reassuring grin. Mr. Ghum sat and shivered behind the windscreen in a coat like a dancing bear’s; and the warm young blood at his side did dance with the delight of rattling along an open road again, and that without interference or complaint. Mr. Ghum raised no objection to thirty-five miles on the speedometer, nor yet to taking a corner on the wrong side or bucketing over patches of new metal, all of which were old tricks of the new chauffeur. If the Jam himself was as sensible it might be a pleasant place both on and off the car.
And a pleasant place it proved, at all events in the way of creature comforts and letting a man alone at his job; but Oswald Alfred did speedily find himself lonelier at other times than suited his habit as he liked to live. This again was a mere effect of causes in themselves both strange and disagreeable. There wasn’t a female in the house, for instance; dusky heathen shuffled about the kitchen, and the newcomer’s was the one white skin on the premises. Dusky heathen jabbered and guzzled in drawing-room and dining-room, and fresh relays were always being taken to the station or met there by the car. So it all seemed to Oswald Alfred. There was room for any number of the savages, as he himself was savage enough to call them in his heart; for the house had been formerly a preparatory school, and there were beds still in the dormitories, whither and whence th
e chauffeur was too often prevailed upon to carry weird bits of baggage. There were empty class-rooms, too, that gave him a chill when he passed their neglected windows. Yet it was a pretty house when the sun shone on its red brick and tiles, and its modern leaded casements, all so racy of the Surrey soil that surrounded it with sombre cedars and with yew hedges no longer of rectangular cut. The chief drawback was that it was a long way down a lane, which was a longer way down another lane; in fact, a more precious-spoken Oswald Alfred might have characterized the place as an oasis of bricks and timber in a wilderness of bracken and gorse..
Our Oswald Alfred confined himself to phrases like “the back of beyond,” except on the subject of his never being allowed out anywhere alone, which moved him to the ruder eloquence of his old stable days. He never knew when his car might not be wanted, and was always expected to be on the spot himself in case of emergency. Of course he would never have stood it, had it not meant a steady saving of two pounds a week, and a “chit” (which was Mr. Ghum’s synonym for a “character”) whensoever he elected to leave of his own accord. But the youth was so well boarded and lodged (in what had been the sick-house of the departed school), and such was the consideration shown him in smaller matters, that he wisely resisted any inclination to make another change before the summer.
His Highness the Jam Sahib of Boa vista (a name painted, curiously enough, on the garden gate) was the only member of the strange establishment to whom the new chauffeur took a real dislike; and it was not justifiable, inasmuch as the Jam never vouchsafed a word to him in praise or blame. He had a lean, mean face and figure, in striking contrast to his courtier Ghum, who was gross and genial; but it was the subdued ferocity with which his Highness would let his followers have it, in their own lingo, that made Oswald Alfred bustle before the ruthless lips had time to open fire on him. He gathered from Ghum that the potentate was leading his present quiet and modest life under doctor’s orders and the sympathetic ægis of the Imperial Government.
Motoring was stated to be part of the treatment, and yet they did not motor daily, nor on the likeliest days, nor yet always when the chosen day was at its best. Often it would be the latter part of a dismal afternoon before Oswald Alfred went skidding through the muddy lanes with the burly Ghum beside him, his Highness and minor satellites abreast behind, and the acetylene head-lamps duly primed by order; for the Jam and his suite, did not dissemble a natural kindness for dusk and darkness. Neither did the white youth object to either, or even to the crew, he drove, when he was driving them; for they none of them interfered with him any more than Mr. Ghum had done, but let him go like the wind in the shortest of clear spaces, and cram on the brakes to his heart’s content at the corner; so refreshing was their freedom from the little knowledge which is the abominable thing from a chauffeur’s point of view. Ghum, however, was by way of acquiring some, but only from Oswald Alfred, who gave him indifferent driving lessons with little method and less regularity.
The party usually drove one way; but it was the most obvious way in the geographical circumstances. Guildford and Godalming ought to have been able to pick out the second-hand Cleland-Talboys even from the band of cars that flows over the flywheels of their main streets from dawn to dark; it was never quite dark when they clattered through to fly Hindhead like a hurdle;. but they always lit up about the same place, just off the Portsmouth Road in the neighbourhood of Liphook. Here may be found, one of those impressively extravagant, because solid and interminable walls, which are by no means such a feature of the home counties as of the shires. Yet there was a point of this noble circle which was no great distance from the worthy pile within; the drive was not a long one; and a side gate, which came first, afforded a still shorter cut to the house.
It was through this gate that the motorists, on foot for the purpose, were peeping, one lighting-up-time at the beginning of March; and Oswald Alfred, attending to his own business with a box of matches, was taking as little interest as usual in theirs. He had gathered, from remarks dropped in Ghum’s English, that H.H. had his royal eye on the place as a more fitting English seat than the deserted school; but he had no idea to whom it belonged. Suddenly a bicycle bell rang out between him and the peeping gentry at the gate, startling them more than himself, and causing an obsequious pantomime on their part in honor of the elderly gentleman who had jumped off the bicycle. Oswald Alfred was particularly impressed to see the Jam Sahib -making as deep an obeisance as the youngest of his followers; he could only suppose they had been surprised by some very great personage indeed.
“Good evening, my friends!” cried the cyclist in a rich, kind voice. “Come to have another look at my kangaroo, have you?”
“Sir,” replied the Jam, bowing lower than before, “some of these gentlemen had not the felicity of being present on the occasion to which you graciously refer. I was therefore taking the audacious liberty-”
“Nonsense!” interposed the cyclist, heartily. “You take ‘em in and show ‘em anything you can by this light, and I’ll trundle on to the lodge and join you at the sub-tropical kennels with the keeper. My poor beasts have felt the winter as much as you and I have, I’m afraid; but we shall go back to the sun refreshed, and they never will, poor devils! Hurry up, or I’ll be there before you!”
This in a genial crescendo as the four forms debouched through the gate and melted fast into the gloaming. Meanwhile Oswald Alfred was marvelling to find that after all his Highness could speak better English, when it suited him, than any of his retinue, and yet that his tone did not sweeten with his words. His tone had been bitter and truculent in some curiously subtle degree, which incurred no snub yet could penetrate the patriotic hide of a British coachman’s son, and inject the virus of a vague resentment. Next moment the cyclist was giving his natural enemy the chauffeur a kindly word as well, and in the twin cones of acetylene gaslight the chauffeur recognized his great man at a glance.
“Good evening, my lord!” returned Oswald Alfred, with ready salute and the smile which had lain fallow at Boavista.
“Have we met before?” inquired the other in a tone both puzzled and amused.
“No, my lord, but I see it was Lord Amyott as soon as ever you come in front of, the lamps. I seen your lordship’s portrait many a time when you was out at the war.”
There was genuine enthusiasm in this speech, for Oswald Alfred had a nice capacity for discriminating respect, inherited from the parent who had insisted on so christening him after the master. Lord Amyott, however, did not seem particularly flattered, and his wiry white moustache looked closer-cropped than before on its granite pedestal of chin.
“Ah, well, I’m in another part of the empire now,” said he, “and only home for a few weeks, like our friends from the same place.” He jerked his head toward the gate through which they had gone, and then stared harder at Oswald Alfred. “You ain’t the chauffeur they had the other day?” he added.
“I’ve been in my situation a fortnight, my lord,” was the considered reply.
“Do you know what happened to the other fellow?”
“I never ‘eard, my lord.”
“No more did I, and I should like to know. Nice -lad, I thought him.” Lord Amyott stepped up nearer to the bonnet, and lowered his voice. “Do they ever let you out of their sight?” he asked, grimly, but as though it were rather a joke as well; “Never off the premises, my lord,” -”They never let him! I suppose he couldn’t stand it. But I should like to know.”
Oswald Alfred was not to be outdone in dramatic undertones. “It’s all the Jam!” said he sepulchrally.
“All the what?”
“‘Im that spoke to your lordship; his Royal Highness the Jam Sahib,” explained Oswald Alfred, feeling that he was indeed moving in exalted circles, and unconsciously adding to the altitude. But Lord Amyott only burst out laughing under his breath, after catching it in sheer surprise.
“Does he really call himself that?”
“Only in fun, my lordship, only in fu
n!” urged a silky voice; and the oleaginous Ghum stood fawning between the speakers in the acetylene rays; how he had returned without a sound, or whether he had ever gone off with the rest, neither knew.
He was the man, however, for an awkward moment, with his sleek and supple tact, and his engaging idiosyncrasies of speech. Oswald Alfred, for one, was easily convinced that the whole concoction of the title, unwittingly suggested by himself, as he was bound to admit, had been all along an elaborate joke at his own expense. Perhaps, however, it was Lord Amyott’s laughter that carried most conviction, despite a grim note of its own; but when he really had mounted his bicycle, and disappeared round the bend in the direction of the main gates and the keeper’s lodge, the unhappy young man was quickly and quietly informed of the enormity he had committed in speaking of the Jam as such.
“Did you not know,” cried Ghum, “that he was in this country incogs? If I should tell him how you have given away, you go same way as last chauffeur without moment’s hesitation.”
“And what way was that?” asked Oswald Alfred, remembering Lord Amyott’s inquiries; but the question made Ghum angrier than anything else.
“Never mind you!” said he. “You know what happens to servants who do not take satisfaction; let him be a warning to you. I will not tell his Highness what you have done. I dare not. It is more than I am worth.”
“But is he ‘is ‘ighness?” demanded the young man. “First you say it’s all a cod, and then you talk as if it wasn’t.”
“Of course it isn’t!” the other declared in all solemnity. “He is exactly what I said him; the title is not invention or beastly lie. It is the whole truth, and nothing but the whole, only his Highness want it kept up the sleeve.”
This was not quite good enough for the young man; he had heard Lord Amyott’s first and loudest laugh; and his faith was shaken to its base. His imagination was stimulated, which was worse; it fastened on the last chauffeur and his fate, in which even a world’s hero like Lord Amyott V.C. (and ever so many less popular letters of the alphabet) had shown such interest. Oswald Alfred was in fact a good deal disturbed by his conversation with his lordship; but it was an experience that left him still more proud, and he was seriously thinking of drilling a hole through the sovereign a noble hand had slipped into his.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 521
