“Ja, ja,” replied a comrade, who was lolling back in his chair with a pair of very dirty legs on the table, and one of poor Travers’s best cigars in his mouth; “Sie so gat laufen können.”
“Ja wohl,” responded the first speaker; “aber sind nicht eben so schnell wie die Französischen Mobloten.”
“Gewiss,” grunted a hulking lout from the floor, leaning on his elbow, and sending out a cloud of smoke from his ugly jaws; “und da sind hier etwas gute Schützen.”
“Hast recht, lange Peter,” answered number one; “wenn die Schurken so gut exerciren wie schützen könnten, so waren wir heute nicht hier!”
“Recht! Recht!” said the second; “Das exerciren macht den guten Soldaten.”
What more criticisms on the shortcomings of our unfortunate volunteers might have passed I did not stop to hear, being interrupted by a sound on the stairs. Mrs. Travers was standing on the landing-place; I limped up the stairs to meet her. Among the many pictures of those fatal days engraven on my memory, I remember none more clearly than the mournful aspect of my poor friend, widowed and childless within a few moments, as she stood there in her white dress, coming forth like a ghost from the chamber of the dead, the candle she held lighting up her face, and contrasting its pallor with the dark hair that fell disordered round it, its beauty radiant even through features worn with fatigue and sorrow. She was calm and even tearless, though the trembling lip told of the effort to restrain the emotion she felt.
“Dear friend,” she said, taking my hand, “I was coming to seek you; forgive my selfishness in neglecting you so long; but you will understand” – glancing at the door above – “how occupied I have been.”
“Where,” I began, “is –” “My boy?” she answered, anticipating my question. “I have laid him by his father. But now your wounds must be cared for; how pale and faint you look! – Rest here a moment,” – and, descending to the dining-room, she returned with some wine, which I gratefully drank, and then, making me sit down on the top step of the stairs, she brought water and linen, and cutting off the sleeve of my coat, bathed and bandaged my wounds.
’Twas I who felt selfish for thus adding to her troubles; but in truth I was too weak to have much will left, and stood in need of the help which she forced me to accept; and the dressing of my wounds afforded indescribable relief. While thus tending me, she explained in broken sentences how matters stood. Every room but her own, and the little parlour into which with Wood’s help she had carried me, was full of soldiers. Wood had been taken away to work at repairing the railroad, and Lucy had run off from fright; but the cook had stopped at her post, and had served up supper and opened the cellar for the soldiers’ use: she herself did not understand what they said, and they were rough and boorish, but not uncivil. I should now go, she said, when my wounds were dressed, to look after my own home, where I might be wanted; for herself, she wished only to be allowed to remain watching there – glancing at the room where lay the bodies of her husband and child – where she would not be molested.
I felt that her advice was good. I could be of no use as protection, and I had an anxious longing to know what had become of my sick mother and sister; besides, some arrangement must be made for the burial. I therefore limped away. There was no need to express thanks on either side, and the grief was too deep to be reached by any outward show of sympathy.
Outside the house there was a good deal of movement and bustle; many carts going along, the waggoners, from Sussex and Surrey, evidently impressed and guarded by soldiers; and although no gas was burning, the road towards Kingston was well lighted by torches held by persons standing at short intervals in line, who had been seized for the duty, some of them the tenants of neighbouring villas. Almost the first of these torch-bearers I came to was an old gentleman whose face I was well acquainted with, from having frequently travelled up and down in the same train with him. He was a senior clerk in a Government office, I believe, and was a mild-looking old man with a prim face and a long neck, which he used to wrap in a white double neckcloth, a thing even in those days seldom seen. Even in that moment of bitterness I could not help being amused by the absurd figure this poor old fellow presented, with his solemn face and long cravat doing penance with a torch in front of his own gate, to light up the path of our conquerors. But a more serious object now presented itself, a corporal’s guard passing by, with two English volunteers in charge, their hands tied behind their backs. They cast an imploring glance at me, and I stepped into the road to ask the corporal what was the matter, and even ventured, as he was passing on, to lay my hand on his sleeve.
“Auf dem Wege, Spitzbube!” cried the brute, lifting his rifle as if to knock me down. “Must one prisoners who fire at us let shoot,” he went on to add; and shot the poor fellows would have been, I suppose, if I had not interceded with an officer, who happened to be riding by.
“Herr Hauptmann,” I cried, as loud as I could, “is this your discipline, to let unarmed prisoners be shot without orders?”
The officer, thus appealed to, reined in his horse, and halted the guard till he heard what I had to say. My knowledge of other languages here stood me in good stead, for the prisoners, northcountry factory hands apparently, were of course utterly unable to make themselves understood, and did not even know in what they had offended. I therefore interpreted their explanation: they had been left behind while skirmishing near Ditton, in a barn, and coming out of their hiding-place in the midst of a party of the enemy, with their rifles in their hands, the latter thought they were going to fire at them from behind. It was a wonder they were not shot down on the spot. The captain heard the tale, and then told the guard to let them go, and they slunk off at once into a by-road. He was a fine soldier-like man, but nothing could exceed the insolence of his manner, which was perhaps all the greater because it seemed not intentional, but to arise from a sense of immeasurable superiority.
Between the lame freiwilliger pleading for his comrades, and the captain of the conquering army, there was, in his view, an infinite gulf. Had the two men been dogs, their fate could not have been decided more contemptuously. They were let go simply because they were not worth keeping as prisoners, and perhaps to kill any living thing without cause went against the hauptmann’s sense of justice. But why speak of this insult in particular? Had not every man who lived then his tale to tell of humiliation and degradation? For it was the same story everywhere. After the first stand in line, and when once they had got us on the march, the enemy laughed at us. Our handful of regular troops was sacrificed almost to a man in a vain conflict with numbers; our volunteers and militia, with officers who did not know their work, without ammunition or equipment, or staff to superintend, starving in the midst of plenty, we had soon become a helpless mob, fighting desperately here and there, but with whom, as a manoeuvring army, the disciplined invaders did just what they pleased.
Happy those whose bones whitened the fields of Surrey; they at least were spared the disgrace we lived to endure. Even you, who have never known what it is to live otherwise than on sufferance, even your cheeks burn when we talk of these days; think, then, what those endured who, like your grandfather, had been citizens of the proudest nation on earth, which had never known disgrace or defeat, and whose boast it used to be that they bore a flag on which the sun never set! We had heard of generosity in war; we found none; the war was made by us, it was said, and we must take the consequences. London and our only arsenal captured, we were at the mercy of our captors, and right heavily did they tread on our necks.
Need I tell you the rest? – Of the ransom we had to pay, and the taxes raised to cover it, which keep us paupers to this day? – The brutal frankness that announced we must give place to a new naval Power, and be made harmless for revenge? – The victorious troops living at free quarters, the yoke they put on us made the more galling that their requisitions had a semblance of method and legality? Better have been robbed at first han
d by the soldiery themselves, than through our own magistrates made the instruments for extortion. How we lived through the degradation we daily and hourly underwent, I hardly even now understand. And what was there left to us to live for? Stripped of our colonies; Canada and the West Indies gone to America; Australia forced to separate; India lost for ever, after the English there had all been destroyed, vainly trying to hold the country when cut off from aid by their countrymen; Gibraltar and Malta ceded to the new naval Power; Ireland independent and in perpetual anarchy and revolution.
When I look at my country as it is now – its trade gone, its factories silent, its harbours empty, a prey to pauperism and decay – when I see all this, and think what Great Britain was in my youth, I ask myself whether I have really a heart or any sense of patriotism that I should have witnessed such degradation and still care to live!
France was different. There, too, they had to eat the bread of tribulation under the yoke of the conqueror! Their fall was hardly more sudden or violent than ours; but war could not take away their rich soil; they had no colonies to lose; their broad lands, which made their wealth, remained to them; and they rose again from the blow. But our people could not be got to see how artificial our prosperity was – that it all rested on foreign trade and financial credit; that the course of trade once turned away from us, even for a time, it might never return; and that our credit once shaken might never be restored. To hear men talk in those days, you would have thought that Providence had ordained that our Government should always borrow at three per cent, and that trade came to us because we lived in a foggy little island set in a boisterous sea.
They could not be got to see that the wealth heaped up on every side was not created in the country, but in India and China, and other parts of the world; and that it would be quite possible for the people who made money by buying and selling the natural treasures of the earth, to go and live in other places, and take their profits with them. Nor would men believe that there could ever be an end to our coal and iron, or that they would get to be so much dearer than the coal and iron of America that it would no longer be worth while to work them, and that therefore we ought to insure against the loss of our artificial position as the great centre of trade, by making ourselves secure and strong and respected. We thought we were living in a commercial millennium, which must last for a thousand years at least.
After all the bitterest part of our reflection is, that all this misery and decay might have been so easily prevented, and that we brought it about ourselves by our own shortsighted recklessness. There, across the narrow Straits, was the writing on the wall, but we would not choose to read it. The warnings of the few were drowned in the voice of the multitude. Power was then passing away from the class which had been used to rule, and to face political dangers, and which had brought the nation with honour unsullied through former struggles, into the hands of the lower classes, uneducated, untrained to the use of political rights, and swayed by demagogues; and the few who were wise in their generation were denounced as alarmists, or as aristocrats who sought their own aggrandisement by wasting public money on bloated armaments. The rich were idle and luxurious; the poor grudged the cost of defence. Politics had become a mere bidding for Radical votes, and those who should have led the nation stooped rather to pander to the selfishness of the day, and humoured the popular cry which denounced those who would secure the defence of the nation by enforced arming of its manhood, as interfering with the liberties of the people.
Truly the nation was ripe for a fall; but when I reflect how a little firmness and self-denial, or political courage and foresight, might have averted the disaster, I feel that the judgment must have really been deserved. A nation too selfish to defend its liberty, could not have been fit to retain it. To you, my grandchildren, who are now going to seek a new home in a more prosperous land, let not this bitter lesson be lost upon you in the country of your adoption. For me, I am too old to begin life again in a strange country; and hard and evil as have been my days, it is not much to await in solitude the time which cannot now be far off, when my old bones will be laid to rest in the soil I have loved so well, and whose happiness and honour I have so long survived.
The Thing from – ‘Outside’
George Allan England
They sat about their camp-fire, that little party of Americans retreating southward from Hudson Bay before the on-coming menace of the great cold. Sat there, stolid under the awe of the North, under the uneasiness that the day’s trek had laid upon their souls. The three men smoked. The two women huddled close to each other. Fireglow picked their faces from the gloom of night among the dwarf firs. A splashing murmur told of the Albany River’s haste to escape from the wilderness, and reach the Bay.
“I don’t see what there was in a mere circular print on a rock-ledge to make our guides desert,” said Professor Thorburn. His voice was as dry as his whole personality. “Most extraordinary.”
“They knew what it was, all right,” answered Jandron, geologist of the party. “So do I.” He rubbed his cropped mustache. His eyes glinted grayly. I’ve seen prints like that before. That was on the Labrador. And I’ve seen things happen, where they were.”
“Something surely happened to our guides, before they’d got a mile into the bush,” put in the Professor’s wife; while Vivian, her sister, gazed into the fire that revealed her as a beauty, not to be spoiled even by a tam and a rough-knit sweater. “Men don’t shoot wildly, and scream like that, unless –”
“They’re all three dead now, anyhow,” put in Jandron. “So they’re out of harm’s way. While we – well, we’re two hundred and fifty wicked miles from the C.P.R. rails.”
“Forget it, Jandy!” said Marr, the journalist. “We’re just suffering from an attack of nerves, that’s all. Give me a fill of ‘baccy. Thanks. We’ll all be better in the morning. Ho-hum! Now, speaking of spooks and such –”
He launched into an account of how he had once exposed a fraudulent spiritualist, thus proving – to his own satisfaction – that nothing existed beyond the scope of mankind’s everyday life. But nobody gave him much heed. And silence fell upon the little night-encampment in the wilds; a silence that was ominous.
Pale, cold stars watched down from spaces infinitely far beyond man’s trivial world.
Next day, stopping for chow on a ledge miles upstream, Jandron discovered another of the prints. He cautiously summoned the other two men. They examined the print, while the women-folk were busy by the fire. A harmless thing the marking seemed; only a ring about four inches in diameter, a kind of cup-shaped depression with a raised center. A sort of glaze coated it, as if the granite had been fused by heat.
Jandron knelt, a well-knit figure in bright mackinaw and canvas leggings, and with a shaking finger explored the smooth curve of the print in the rock. His brows contracted as he studied it.
“We’d better get along out of this as quick as we can,” said he in an unnatural voice. “You’ve got your wife to protect, Thorburn, and I – well, I’ve got Vivian. And –”
“You have?” nipped Marr. The light of an evil jealously gleamed in his heavy-lidded look. “What you need is an alienist.”
“Really, Jandron,” the Professor admonished, “you mustn’t let your imagination run away with you.”
“I suppose it’s imagination that keeps this print cold!” the geologist retorted. His breath made faint, swirling coils of vapor above it.
“Nothing but a pot-hole,” judged Thorburn, bending his spare, angular body to examine the print. The Professor’s vitality all seemed centered in his big-bulged skull that sheltered a marvellous thinking machine. Now he put his lean hand to the base of his brain, rubbing the back of his head as if it ached. Then, under what seemed some powerful compulsion, he ran his bony finger around the print in the rock.
“By Jove, but it is cold!” he admitted. “And looks as if it had been stamped right out of the
stone. Extraordinary!”
“Dissolved out, you mean,” corrected the geologist. “By cold.”
The journalist laughed mockingly.
“Wait till I write this up!” he sneered. “Noted Geologist Declares Frigid Ghost Dissolves Granite!”
Jandron ignored him. He fetched a little water from the river and poured it into the print.
“Ice!” ejaculated the Professor. “Solid ice!”
“Frozen in a second,” added Jandron, while Marr frankly stared. “And it’ll never melt, either. I tell you, I’ve seen some of these rings before; and every time, horrible things have happened. Incredible things! Something burned this ring out of the stone – burned it out with the cold interstellar space. Something that can import cold as a permanent quality of matter. Something that can kill matter, and totally remove it.”
“Of course that’s all sheer poppycock,” the journalist tried to laugh, but his brain felt numb.
“This something, this Thing,” continued Jandron, “is a Thing that can’t be killed by bullets. It’s what caught our guides on the barrens, as they ran away – poor fools!”
A shadow fell across the print in the rock. Mrs. Thorburn had come up, was standing there. She had overheard a little of what Jandron had been saying.
“Nonsense!” she tried to exclaim, but she was shivering so she could hardly speak.
That night, after a long afternoon of paddling and portaging – laboring against inhibitions like those in a nightmare – they camped on shelving rocks that slanted to the river.
“After all,” said the Professor, when supper was done, “we mustn’t get into a panic. I know extraordinary things are reported from the wilderness, and more than one man has come out, raving. But we, by Jove! with our superior brains – we aren’t going to let Nature play us any tricks!”
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