“You know her?” cries he, and he was pink to the gills, and right out of countenance for once. “I have never had the honour of meeting her,” he went on, in a hushed, stuffed way, “but I have long admired her, for her enlightened opinions, and unsparing championship of worthy causes.” He looked at the miniature like a contemplative frog. “Tell me – is she as … as … well – ah – as her portrait suggests?”
“She’s a stunner, if that’s what you mean,” says I, for like every other grown male in London I, too, had admired little Angie, though not entirely for her enlightened opinions – more for the fact that she had a superb complexion, tits like footballs, and two million in the bank, really. I’d taken a loving fumble at her myself, during blind-man’s-buff at a party in Stratton Street, but she’d simply stared straight ahead of her and dislocated my thumb. Wasteful little prude.20
“Perhaps, one of these days, when I return to England, you will present me,” says he, gulping, and shovelled her picture into a drawer. Well, well, thinks I, who’d have thought it: the mad pirate-killer and rose-fancier, spoony on Angie Coutts’s picture – I’ll bet that every time he contemplates it the local Dyak lasses have to scamper for cover.
I must have said something to this effect, in my tasteful way, that same evening to Stuart, no doubt with my lewd Flashy nudge and leer, but he was such an innocent that he just shook his head and sighed deeply.
“Miss Burdett-Coutts?” says he. “Poor old J.B. He has told me of his deep regard for her, although he’s a very secret man about such things. I dare say they’d make a splendid match, but it can’t be, of course – even if he realized his ambition to meet her.”
“Why not?” says I. “He’s a likely chap, and just the kind to fire a romantic piece like young Angie. Why, they’d go like duck and green peas.” Kindly old match-maker Flash, you see.
“Impossible,” says Stuart, and then he went red in the face and hesitated. “You see – it’s a shocking thing – but J.B. can never marry – it wouldn’t do, at all.”
Hollo, thinks I, he ain’t one of the Dick’s hatband brigade, surely? – I’d not have thought it.
“It is never mentioned, of course,” says Stuart, uncomfortably, “but it is as well you should know – in case, in conversation, you unwittingly made any reference that might … well, be wounding. It was in Burma, you see, when he was in the army. He received an … incapacitating injury in battle. It was put about that it was a bullet in the lung … but in fact … well, it wasn’t.”
“Good G-d, you don’t mean to say,” cries I, genuinely appalled, “that he got his knocker shot off?”
“Let’s not think about it,” says he, but I can tell you I went about wincing for the rest of the evening. Poor old White Raja – I mean, I’m a callous chap enough, but there are some tragedies that truly wring the heart. Mad about that delectable little bouncer Angie Coutts, despot of a country abounding with the juiciest of dusky flashtails just itching for him to exercise the droit de seigneur, and there he was with a broken firing-pin. I don’t know when I’ve been more deeply moved. Still, if J.B. was the first man in to rescue Elspeth, she’d be safe enough.21
It was an appropriate thought, for that same evening, after dinner at The Grove, we held the council at which Brooke announced his plan of operations. It followed a dinner as formal in its way as any I’ve ever attended – but that was Brooke all over: when we had our pegs on the verandah beforehand he was laughing and sky-larking, playing leap-frog with Stuart and Crimble and even the dour Paitingi, the bet being that he could jump over them one after another with a glass in one hand, and not spill a drop – but when the bell sounded, everyone quieted down, and filed silently into his great room.
I can still see it, Brooke at the head of the table in his big armchair, stiff in his white collar and carefully-tied black neckercher, with black coat and ruffled cuffs, the eager brown face grave for once, and the only thing out of place his untidy black curls – he could never get ’em to lie straight. On one side of him was Keppel, in full fig of uniform dress coat and epaulette, with his best black cravat, looking sleepy and solemn; Stuart and I in the cleanest ducks we could find; Charlie Wade, Keppel’s lieutenant; Paitingi Ali, very brave in a tunic of dark plaid trimmed with gold and with a great crimson sash, and Crimble, another of Brooke’s lieutenants, who absolutely had a frock coat and fancy weskit. There was a Malay steward behind each chair, and over in the corner, silent but missing nothing, the squint-faced Jingo; even he had exchanged his loin-cloth for a silver sarong, with hornbill feathers in his hair and decorating the shaft of his sumpitanb standing handy against the wall. I never saw him without it, or the little bamboo quiver of his beastly darts.
I don’t remember much of the meal, except that the food was good and the wine execrable, and that conversation consisted of Brooke lecturing interminably; like most active men, he had all the makings of a thoroughgoing bore.
“There shan’t be a missionary in Borneo if I can help it,” I remember him saying, “for there are only two kinds, bad ones and Americans. The bad ones ram Christianity down the natives’ throats and tell them their own gods are false—”
“Which they are,” says Keppel quietly.
“Of course, but a gentleman doesn’t tell ’em so,” says Brooke. “The Yankees have the right notion; they devote themselves to medicine and education, and don’t talk religion or politics. And they don’t treat natives as inferiors – that’s where we’ve gone wrong in India,” says he, wagging his finger at me, as though I had framed British policy. “We’ve made them conscious of their inferiority, which is a great folly. After all, if you’ve a weaker younger brother, you encourage him to think he can run as fast as you can, or jump as far without a race, don’t you? He knows he can’t, but that don’t matter. In the same way, natives know they’re inferior, but they’ll love you all the better if they think you are unconscious of it.”
“Well, you may be right,” says Charlie Wade, who was Irish, “but I don’t for the life of me see how you can ever expect ’em to grow up, at that rate, or achieve any self-respect at all.”
“You can’t,” says Brooke briskly. “No Asiatic is fit to govern, anyway.”
“And Europeans are?” says Paitingi, snorting.
“Only to govern Asiatics,” says Brooke. “A glass of wine with you, Flashman. But I’ll give you this, Paitingi – you can rule Asiatics only by living among them. You cannot govern them from London, or Paris, or Lisbon—”
“Aye, but Dundee, now?” says Paitingi, stroking his red beard, and when the roar of laughter had died down Brooke cries:
“Why, you old heathen, you have never been nearer to Dundee than Port Said! Observe,” says he to me, “that in old Paitingi you have the ultimate flowering of a mixture of east and west – an Arab-Malay father and a Caledonian mother. Ah, the cruel fate of the half-caste – he has spent fifty years trying to reconcile the Kirk with the Koran.”
“They’re no’ that different,” says Paitingi, “an’ at least they’re baith highly superior tae the Book o’ Common Prayer.”
I was interested to see the way they railed at each other, as only very close friends do. Brooke obviously had an immense respect for Paitingi Ali; however, now that the talk had touched on religion, he began to hold forth again on an interminable prose about how he had recently written a treatise against Article 90 of the “Oxford Tracts”, whatever they were, which lasted to the end of the meal. Then, with due solemnity, he proposed the Queen, which was drunk sitting down, Navy fashion, and while the rest of us talked and smoked, Brooke went through a peculiar little ceremony which, I suppose, explained better than anything else the hold he had on his native subjects.
All through the meal, a most curious thing had been happening. While the courses and wine had come with all due ceremony, and we had been buffing in, I’d noticed that every few minutes a Malay, or Dyak, or half-breed would come into the room, touch Brooke’s hand as they passed his chair, and th
en go to squat near the wall by Jingo. No one paid them any notice; they seemed to be all sorts, from a near-naked beggarly rascal to a well-dressed Malay in gold sarong and cap, but they were all armed – I learned later that it was a great insult to come into the White Raja’s presence without your krees, which is the strange, wavy-bladed knife of the people.
In any event, while the rest of us gassed, Brooke turned his chair, beckoned each suppliant in turn, and talked with him quietly in Malay. One after another they came to hunker down beside him, putting their cases or telling their tales, while he listened, leaning forward with elbows on knees, nodding attentively. Then he would pronounce, quietly, and they would touch hands again and go; the rest of us might as well not have been there. When I asked Stuart about it later, he said: “Oh, that’s J.B. ruling Sarawak. Simple, ain’t it?”22
When the last native had gone Brooke sat in a reverie for a moment or two, and then swung abruptly to the table.
“No singing tonight,” says he. “Business. Let’s have that map, Crimble.” We crowded round, the lamps were turned up, shining on the ring of sunburned faces under the wreath of cigar smoke, and Brooke tapped the table. I felt my belly muscles tightening.
“We know what’s to do, gentlemen,” cries he, “and I’ll answer that the task is one that strikes a spark in the heart of every one of us. A fair and gentle lady, the beloved wife of one here, is in the hands of a bloody pirate; she is to be saved, and he destroyed. By God’s grace, we know where the quarry lies, not sixty miles from where we sit, on the Batang Lupar, the greatest lair of robbers in these Islands, save Mindanao itself. Look at it” – his finger stabbed the map – “first, Sharif Jaffir and his slaver fleet, at Fort Linga; beyond him, the great stronghold of Sharif Sahib at Patusan; farther on, at Undup, the toughest nut of all – the fortress of the Skrang pirates under Sharif Muller. Was ever a choicer collection of villains on one river? Add to ’em now the arch-d---l, Suleiman Usman, who has stolen away Mrs Flashman in dastardly fashion. She is the key to his vile plan, gentlemen, for he knows we cannot leave her in his clutches an hour longer than we must.” He gave my shoulder a manly squeeze; everyone else was carefully avoiding my eye. “He realizes that chivalry will not permit us to wait. You know him, Flashman; is this not how his scheming mind will reason?”
I didn’t doubt it, and said so. “He’s made a fortune in the City, too, and plays a d----d dirty game of single-wicket,” I added, and Brooke nodded sympathetically.
“He knows I dare not delay, even if it means going after him with only the piecemeal force I have here – fifty praus and two thousand men, a third of which I must leave to garrison Kuching. Even so, Usman knows I must take at least a week to prepare – a week in which he can muster his praus and savages, outnumbering us ten to one, and make ready his ambushes along the Lupar, confident that we’ll stumble into them half-armed and ill-prepared—”
“Stop it, before I start wishin’ I was on their side,” mutters Wade, and Brooke laughed in his conceited fashion and threw back his black curls.
“Why, he’ll wipe us out to the last man!” cries he. “That’s his beastly scheme. That,” he smiled complacently round at us, “is what Suleiman Usman thinks.”
Paitingi sighed. “But, of course, he’s wrong, the puir heathen,” says he with heavy sarcasm. “Ye’ll tell us how.”
“You may wager the Bank to a tinker’s dam he’s wrong!” cries Brooke, his face alive with swank and excitement. “He expects us in a week – he shall have us in two days! He expects us with two-thirds of our strength – well, we’ll show him all of it! I’ll strip Kuching of every man and gun and leave it defenceless – I’ll stake everything on this throw!” He beamed at us, bursting with confidence. “Surprise, gentlemen – that’s the thing! I’ll catch the rascal napping before he’s laid his infernal toils! What d’you say?”
I know what I’d have said, if I’d been talking just then. I’d never heard such lunacy in my life, and neither had the others by the look of them. Paitingi snorted.
“Ye’re mad! It’ll no’ do.”
“I know, old fellow,” grins Brooke. “What then?”
“Ye’ve said it yersel’! There’s a hundred mile o’ river between Skrang creek and the sea, every yard o’ it hotchin’ wi’ pirates, slavers, nata-hutan,c an’ heid-hunters by the thousand, every side-stream crawlin’ wi’ war-praus an’ bankongs, tae say nothin’ o’ the forts! Surprise, says you? By Eblis, I ken who’ll be surprised! We’ve done oor share o’ river-fightin’, but this—” he waved a great red hand. “Withoot a well-fitted expedition in strength – man, it’s fatal folly.”
“He’s right, J.B.,” says Keppel. “Anyway, even the poor force we’ve got couldn’t be ready in two days—”
“Yes, it can, though. In one, if necessary.”
“Well, even then – you might catch Fort Linga unprepared, but after that they’ll be ready for you upriver.”
“Not at the speed I’ll move!” cries Brooke. “The messenger of disaster from Linga to Patusan will have us on his heels! We’ll carry all before us, all the way to Skrang if need be!”
“But Kuching?” Stuart protested. “Why, the Balagnini or those beastly Lanun could sweep it up while our back was turned.”
“Never!” Brooke was exultant. “They won’t know it’s naked! And suppose they did – why, we’d just have to begin all over again, wouldn’t we? You talk about the odds against us on the Lupar – were they a whit better at Seribas, or Murdu? Were they any better when you and I, George, took all Sarawak with six guns and a leaky pleasure-yacht? I tell you, gentlemen, I can have this thing over and done in a fortnight! D’you doubt me? Have I ever failed, and will I fail now, when there is a poor, weak creature crying out for rescue, and I, a Briton, hear that cry? When I have the stout hearts and good keels that will do the thing, and crush this swarm of hornets, too, before they can scatter on their accursed errands? What? I tell you, all the Queen’s ships and all the Queen’s men could not bring such a chance together again,23 and I mean to take it!”
I’d never seen it before, although I’ve seen it more times than I care to count since – one man, mad as a hatter and drunk with pride, sweeping sane heads away against their better judgement. Chinese Gordon could do it, and Yakub Beg the Kirghiz; so could J. E. B. Stuart, and that almighty maniac George Custer. They and Brooke could have formed a club. I can see him still; erect, head thrown back, eyes blazing, like the worst kind of actor mouthing the Agincourt speech to a crowd of yokels in a tent theatre in the backwoods. I don’t believe he convinced them – Stuart and Crimble, perhaps, but not Keppel and the others; certainly not Paitingi. But they couldn’t resist him, or the force that beat out of him. He was going to have his way, and they knew it. They stood silent; Keppel, I think, was embarrassed. And then Paitingi says:
“Aye. Ye’ll want me to have charge o’ the spy-boats, I suppose?”
That settled it, and at once Brooke quieted down, and they set to earnestly to discuss ways and means, while I sat back contemplating the horror of the whole thing, and wondering how I could weasel out of it. Plainly they were going to catastrophe, lugging me along with them, and not a thing to be done about it. I turned over a dozen schemes in my mind, from feigning insanity to running away; finally, when all but Brooke had hurried off to begin the preparations which were to take them all night and the following day, I had a feeble shot at turning him from his hare-brained purpose. Perhaps, I suggested diffidently, it might be possible to ransom Elspeth; I’d heard of such things being done among the Oriental pirates, and old Morrison was stiff with blunt which he’d be glad …
“What?” cries Brooke, his brow darkening. “Treat with these scoundrels? Never! I should not contemplate such – ah, but I see what it is!” He came over all compassionate, and laid a hand on my arm. “You are fearful for your dear one’s safety, when battle is joined. You need have no such fear, old fellow; no harm will come to her.”
Well, it was beyond me h
ow he could guarantee that, but then he explained, and I give you my word that this is what he said. He sat me down in my chair and poured me a glass of arrack first.
“It is natural enough, Flashman, that you should believe this pirate’s motives to be of the darkest kind … where your wife is concerned. Indeed, from what I have heard of her grace and charm of person, they are such as might well excite … ah, that is, they might awaken – well, unworthy passion – in an unworthy person, that is.” He floundered a bit, and took a pull at his glass, wondering how to discuss the likelihood of her being rogered without causing me undue distress. At last he burst out:
“He won’t do it! – I mean, that is – I cannot believe she will be … ill-used, in any way, if you follow me. I am confident that she is but a pawn in a game which he has planned with Machiavellian cunning, using her as a bait to destroy me. That,” says this swollen-headed lunatic smugly, “is his true purpose, for he and his kind can know no safety while I live. His design is not principally against her, of that I am certain. For one thing, he is married already, you know. Oh, yes, I have gleaned much information in the past few days, and it’s true – five years ago he took to wife the daughter of the Sultan of Sulu, and while Muslims are not, of course, monogamous,” he went on earnestly, “there is no reason to suppose that their union was not a … a happy one.” He took a turn round the room, while I gaped, stricken speechless. “So I’m sure your dear lady is perfectly safe from any … any … anything like that. Anything …” he waved his glass, sloshing arrack broadcast “… anything awful, you know.”
Well, that is what he said, as I hope to die. I couldn’t credit my ears. For a moment I wondered if having his love-muscle shot off had affected his brain; then I realized that, in his utterly daft way, he was simply talking all this rubbish to reassure me. Possibly he thought I was so distraught that I’d be ready to believe anything, even that a chap with one wife would never think of bulling another. Maybe he even believed it himself.
Flashman Papers Omnibus Page 75
