Corporal Sam and Other Stories Part 19

He had it all to himself. For me, as I, too, received the paper of supplementary cases, my first thought was of simple astonishment at the length of the list. Then my gaze stiffened upon certain names, and by degrees as I recognised them, my whole body grew rigid in my chair. Samuel Sleeman--this was the Superintendent's name--appellant against Isaac Adamson, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Duncan McPhae, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Henry James Walters, drunk and disorderly; Ditto against Selina Mary Wilkins, drunk on licensed premises; Ditto against Mary Curtis, drunk on licensed premises; Ditto against Solomon Tregaskis, drunk on highway. . . .

There were no less than twenty-four names on the list; and each was the name of a retainer or pensioner of Sir Felix--those aged Arcadians of Kirris-vean.

I glanced along the table and winced as I met Sir Felix's eyes.

He was inclining towards me. 'Five shillings and costs will meet this case, eh?' he was asking. I nodded, though without a notion of what case we were hearing. (It turned out to be one of cattle-straying, so no great harm was done.) Beyond him I saw Lord Rattley covering an infernally wicked grin with his arched palm; beyond Lord Rattley two estimable magistrates staring at that fatal supplementary paper as though they had dined and this was a bill they found themselves wholly unable to meet.

Sir Felix from time to time finds his awards of justice gently disputed. No one disputed them to-day. Lord Rattley, whose language is younger than his years, declared afterwards--between explosions of indecent mirth--that we left the floor to the old man, and he waltzed. He fined three parents for not sending their children to school, made out an attendance order upon another, mulcted a youth in five shillings for riding a bicycle without a light, charged a navvy ten shillings and costs for use of indelicate language (total, seventeen and sixpence), and threatened, but did not punish, a farmer with imprisonment for working a horse 'when,' as the charge put it ambiguously, 'in an unfit state.' He wound up by transferring an alehouse licence, still in his stride, beamed around and observed 'That concludes our business, I think--eh, Mr Clerk?'

'Supplementary cases, y'r Worship,' murmured the Clerk. 'If I may remind--paper handed to y'r Worship--'

'Eh? Yes, to be sure--'

'Number of cases, drunk and disorderly: arising--as I understand--out of Regatta held yesterday at Kirris-vean.'

The Superintendent arose. He is an amazingly tall man, and it seemed to me that he took an amazingly long time in arising to his full height.

'Impossible to accommodate them all in the cells, y'r Worship.

If I may say so, the police were hard worked all night.

Mercifully'--the Superintendent laid stress on the word, and I shall always, when I think of it, remember to thank him--'the most of 'em were _blind_. We laid 'em out on the floor of the charge-room, and with scarcely an exception, as I am credibly informed, they've come to, more or less.'

'Kirris-vean?' I saw Sir Felix's hands grip the arms of his chair.

Then he put them out and fumbled with his papers. Lord Rattley obligingly pushed forward his copy of the list.

'Shall I have the defendants brought into Court at once?' asked the Superintendent. 'The constables tell me that they are--er--mostly, by this time, in a condition to understand, for all practical purposes, the meaning of an oath.'

Sir Felix has--as I have hinted--his foibles. But he is an English gentleman and a man of courage. He gasped, waved a hand, and sat up firmly.

He must have needed courage indeed, as the sorry culprits filed into Court: for I verily believe he felt more shame than they, though their appearance might be held to prove this impossible. The police at about eleven o'clock had raided the booth of that respectable landlord, Mr Bates ('Which,' observed the Superintendent, stonily, 'we may 'ave somethink to say to 'im, as it were, by-and-by') and had culled some of them--even as one picks the unresisting primrose, others not without recourse to persuasion. 'Many of 'em,' the Superintendent explained, 'showed a liveliness you wouldn't believe.

It was, in a manner of speaking, beyond anythink y'r Worships would expect.' He paused a moment, cleared his throat, and achieved this really fine phrase: 'It was, for their united ages, in a manner of speaking, a knock-out.'

I see them now as they filed into court--yellow in the gills, shaking between present fear and the ebb of excess. But I see Sir Felix also, a trifle red in the face, gripping the arms of his chair, bending forward and confronting them.

For a moment I imagined he meant to address them as a crowd. But his fine sense of business prevailed, and he signed to the Clerk to read the first charge.

He dealt with the charges, one by one, and in detail. Alone he inflicted the fines, while we sat and listened with eyes glued upon the baize table. And the fines were heavy--too heavy. It was not for us to interfere.

At the end I expected some few words of general rebuke. I believe the culprits themselves would have been glad of a tongue-lashing.

But he uttered none. To the end he dealt out justice, none aiding him; and when the business was over, pushed back his chair.

We filed out after him. I believe that he has paid all the fines out of his own pocket.

And Troy laughs. But I believe it is safe to say that, while Sir Felix lives, Kirris-vean will not hold a second Regatta.

COLONEL BAIGENT'S CHRISTMAS.

Outside the railway station Colonel Baigent handed his carpet-bag to the conductor of the hotel omnibus, and stood for a moment peering about in the dusk, as if to take his bearings.

'For The Dragon, sir?' asked the conductor.

'The Dragon?' Yes, certainly,' echoed Colonel Baigent, aroused by the name from the beginnings of a brown study. 'So The Dragon is still standing, eh?'

''Twas standing all right when I left it, twenty minutes ago,' the man answered flippantly; for to-night was Christmas Eve, and English hotel servants do not welcome guests who stay over Christmas.

But the colonel remarked nothing amiss in his tone. In fact, he was not listening. He stared out into the mirk beyond the flare of gas in the entrance-way, slowly bringing his mind to bear on the city at his feet, with its maze of dotted lights. The afternoon had been cold and gusty, with now and then a squall of hail from the north-west. The ma.s.s of the station buildings behind him blotted out whatever of daylight yet lingered. Eastward a sullen retreating cloud backed the luminous haze thrown up from hundreds of street-lamps and shop-windows--a haze that faintly silhouetted the cl.u.s.tered roofs. The roofs were wet. The roadway, narrowing as it descended the hill, shone with recent rain.

'You may carry down my bag,' said the colonel. 'I will walk.

Somewhere to the right here should be a road leading to Westgate, eh?'

'Tisn't the shortest way,' the conductor objected.

'I have plenty of time,' said the colonel mildly.

Indeed, a milder-looking man for a hero--he had earned and won his V.C.--or a gentler of address, could scarcely be conceived; or an older-fashioned. His voice, to be sure, had a latent tone of command. But the patient face, with its drooping moustache and long gray side-whiskers; the short yet attenuated figure, in a tweed suit of no particular cut; the round felt hat, cheap tie, and elastic-sided boots--all these failed very signally to impress the conductor, who flung the carpet-bag inside the omnibus with small ceremony, and banged the door.

'Right, Bill!' he called.

''Oo is it?' asked the driver, slewing round in the light of his near-side lamp.

'Might be a commercial--if 'twasn't for his bag, and his way of speakin'.'

The omnibus rattled off and down the hill. Colonel Baigent gazed after it, alone beneath the gas-lamp; for the few pa.s.sengers who had alighted from his train had jostled past him and gone their ways, and his porter had turned back wearily into the station, where express and excursion trains had all day been running the Christmas traffic down to its last lees.

Colonel Baigent gazed after the omnibus, then back through the pa.s.sage-way leading past the booking-office to the platform.

All this was new to him. There had been no such thing as railway or railway station thirty-five years ago, when, a boy of seventeen just emanc.i.p.ated from school, he had climbed to the box-seat of the then famous 'Highflyer' coach, and been driven homewards to a Christmas in which the old sense of holiday mingled and confused itself with a new and wonderful feeling that school was over and done with for ever.

During his Indian exile he had nursed a long affection for the city; had collected and pored over books relating to it and its antiquities; and now, as he left the station and struck boldly into the footway on the right, he found himself surprisingly at home.

The path led him over a footbridge, and along between high garden walls. But it led him surely enough to Westgate, and the spot occupied in Norman times (as he recalled) by five bordels or shanties, where any belated traveller ('such as I to-night,' thought the colonel) arriving after the gates were shut, might find hospitality for the love of G.o.d. The suburb here lay deserted.

He halted, and listened to a footfall that died away into the darkness on his right. He felt at home again--here, wrapped around by the ghostly centuries as by the folds of a mantle, and warm within the folds.

Strange to say, the chill came on him as he pa.s.sed under the arch of Westgate, and into view of the busy High Street, the lit shops, the pa.s.sers-by jostling upon the pavements, the running newsboys, the hawkers with their barrows, the soldiers strolling five abreast down the middle of the roadway. Here was the whole city coming and going.

Here, precisely as he had left it thirty-five years ago, it sprang back into life again, like an illuminated clockwork. No; he was wrong, of course. It had been working all the while, and without intermission, absorbed in its own business--buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage. He had dropped out, that was all.

The Christmas decorations, the jollity in the voices exchanging Christmas salutations, aggravated the poor colonel's sense of homelessness, and seemed to mock it. One window displayed a huge boar's head, grinning, with a lemon in its mouth. The proprietor of another had hung his seasonable wares on a small spruce fir, and lit it all over with coloured candles. A poulterer, three doors away, had draped his house-front, from the third story down, with what at first glance appeared to be a single heavy curtain of furs and feathers--string upon string of hares, of pheasants, of turkeys, fat geese, wild ducks.

This prevailing superabundant good cheer did not, however, extend to the visitor, as the colonel discovered, within the doorway of The Dragon. Nor was that doorway the old hospitable entrance through which the stage-coaches had rattled into a paved court lined with red-windowed offices. The new proprietor had blocked all this up with a flight of steps, and an arrangement of mahogany and plate-gla.s.s. There remained but the arch under which, these years ago, the stout coachman, as he swung his leaders sharp round to the entry, had warned pa.s.sengers to duck their heads. The colonel was staring up at it when he became aware of a liveried boots holding the mahogany door open for him at the head of the steps, and with an expression that did not include 'Welcome!' among the many things that it said.

The boots too plainly was sullen, the young lady in the office curt and off-hand, the second and only waiter as nearly as possible mutinous. 'All his blooming companions,' he explained (though not precisely in these words), had departed to spend Christmas in the bosom of their families. He spoke c.o.c.kney English, and, in reply to a question (for the colonel tried hard to draw him into conversation and dissipate his gloom), confessed that he came from Brixton.

Further than this he would not go. In a mortuary silence, the colonel, seated beneath a gasalier adorned (the mockery of it!) with a sprig of mistletoe, sipped his half-pint of sherry, and ate his way through three courses of a sufficiently good dinner. But better, says Solomon, is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.

Every time he raised his eyes they rested on the table at which he had dined with his father on the eve of being entered at school.

The same table, the same heavy mahogany chairs--he recalled the scroll pattern on their backs. He could see himself there in the corner--a small boy, white in the face and weary with travel, divided between surmise of the morrow and tears for the home left behind.

He could see his father seated there in profile, the iron-gray hair, the remembered stoop. Well, they were all gone now--all, missing whom that night he had come so near to breaking down and weeping.

. . . Mother, sisters, brother, gone one by one during the years of his Indian exile, and himself now left the last of his race, unmarried, and never likely to marry. Why had he come? To revisit his old school? But the school would be closed for the Christmas holidays, the children dispersed to their homes and happy.

Limen amabile Matris et oscula . . .