Merry-Garden and Other Stories Part 14

So much--and also that her own name was Meliar-Ann and her mother kept a sailor's lodging-house--the small creature told us, still trotting by our side, until we found ourselves walking alongside a low wall over which we inhaled strong odours of the sea and of longsh.o.r.e sewage, and spied the riding-lights of the harbour looming through the fog. At the end of this we came to the high walls of a row of houses, all very quiet and black to the eye, except that here and there a c.h.i.n.k of light showed through a window-shutter or the sill of a street-door. Throughout that long walk I had an uncanny sensation as of being led through a town bewitched, hushed, but wakeful and expectant of something. . . . I can get no nearer to explaining. We must have pa.s.sed a score of taverns at least; of that I have a.s.sured myself by many a later exploration of Portsmouth: and in those days a Portsmouth tavern never closed day or night, save for the death of a landlord, nor always for that. But to-night a murmur at most distinguished it from the other houses in the street.

Meliar-Ann solved the puzzle for us, with a wise nod of the head--

"There's a press out; or elst they're expecting one," she said.

I heard a distant clock chiming for midnight as we followed her along this row of houses. Ahead of us a door opened, throwing a thin line of light upon the roadway, and was closed again softly, after the person within had stood listening (as it seemed to me) for five seconds or so.

Meliar-Ann started suddenly in front of us, spreading her arms out, then slowly backwards, and so motioning us to halt under the shadow of the wall. Obeying, we saw her tiptoe forwards, till, coming to the door which had just been closed, she crept close and tapped on it softly, yet in a way that struck me as being deliberate. Afterwards, thinking it over, I felt pretty sure that the child knocked by code.

At all events the door opened again, almost at once and as noiselessly as before. Hartnoll and I squeezed our bodies back in the foggy shadow, and I heard a voice ask, "Is that Smithers?" To this Meliar-Ann made some response which I could not catch, but its effect was to make the voice--a woman's--break out in a string of querulous cursings. "Drat the child!"

it said (or rather, it said something much stronger which I won't repeat before the Rector. Eh, Rector--what's that you say? _Maxima debetur pueris_--oh, make yourself easy: I won't corrupt their morals).

"Drat the child!" it said, then, or words to that effect. "Bothering here at this time of night, when Bill's been a-bed this hour and a half, and time you was the same." To this Meliar-Ann made, and audibly, the briefest possible answer. She said, "You lie." "Strike me dead!"

replied the woman's voice in the doorway. "You lie," repeated the child; "and you'd best belay to that. Bill's been stealin' and got himself into trouble . . . a midshipman's dirk, it was, and he was seen taking it.

I've run all this way to warn him. . . ." The two voices fell to muttering. "You can slip inside if you like and tell him quietly," said the woman after a while. "He's upstairs and asleep too, for all I know.

If he brought any such thing home with him _I_ never saw it, and to that I'll take my oath."

But here another and still angrier voice--a virago's--broke in from the pa.s.sage behind, demanding to know if the door was being kept open to invite the whole town. The child stood her ground on the doorstep.

An instant later a hand reached out, clutched her--it seemed by the hair-- and dragged her inside. Then followed a strangling sob and the thud of heavy blows--

"Rodd, I can't stand this," whispered Hartnoll.

I answered, "Nor I;" and together we made a spring for it and hurled into the pa.s.sage, bearing back the woman who tried to hold the door against us.

At the rush of our footsteps the virago dropped Meliar-Ann and fled down the pa.s.sage towards a doorway, through which she burst, screaming.

The child, borne forward by our combined weight, tottered and fell almost across the threshold of this room, where a flight of stairs, lit by a dingy lamp, led up into obscure darkness. On the third stair under the lamp I caught a momentary vision of a dirty, half-naked boy standing with a drawn dirk in his hand, and with that, my foot catching against Meliar-Ann's body, I pitched past, head foremost, into the lighted room.

As I fell I heard, or seemed to hear, a scuffle of feet, followed by a shout from Hartnoll behind us--"My dirk! You dirty young villain!"--and another stampede, this time upon the stairway. Then, all of a sudden, the room was quiet, and I picked myself up and fell back against the door-post, face to face with half a dozen women.

They were a.s.suredly the strangest set of females I had ever set eyes on, and the tallest-grown: nor did it relieve my astonishment to note that they wore bonnets and shawls, as if for a journey, and that two or three were smoking long clay pipes. The room, in fact, was thick with tobacco-smoke, through the reek of which my eyes travelled to a disorderly table crowded with gla.s.ses and bottles of strong waters, in the midst of which two tallow dips illuminated the fog; and beyond the table to the figure of a man stooping over a couple of half-packed valises; an enormously stout man swathed in greatcoats--a red-faced, clean-shaven man, with small piggish eyes which twinkled at me wickedly as I picked myself up, and he, too, stood erect to regard me.

"Press-gang be d--d!" he growled, answering the virago's call of warning.

"More likely a spree ash.o.r.e. And where might _you_ come from, young gentleman? And what might be _your_ business to-night, breakin' into a private house?"

I cast a wild look over the bevy of forbidding females and temporised, backing a little until my shoulder felt the door-post behind me.

"I was trying to find my way to the Blue Posts," said I.

"Then," said the stout man with obvious truth, "you ain't found it yet."

"No, sir," said I.

"And that bein' the case, you'll march out and close the door behind you.

Not,"--he went on more kindly--"that I'd be inhospitable to his Majesty's uniform, 'specially when borne by a man of your inches; and to prove it I'll offer you a drink before parting."

He reached out a hand towards one of the black bottles. I was about to thank him and decline, withdrawing my eyes from a black-bonneted female with (unless the shadow of her bonnet played me false) a stiff two-days'

beard on her ma.s.sive chin, when a noise of feet moving over the boards above, and of a scuffle, followed by loud whimpering, reminded me of Hartnoll.

"I don't go without my mate," I answered defiantly enough.

"And what the '--' have I to do with your mate?" demanded the stout man.

"I tell you," said he, losing his temper and striding to the stairway, as the sounds of a struggle recommenced overhead, "if your mate don't hold the noise he's kicking up this instant, bringing trouble on respectable folks, I'll cut his liver out and fling it arter you into the street."

He would have threatened more, though he could hardly have threatened worse, but at this moment a door opened in the back of the room and a bullet-head thrust itself forward, followed by a pair of shoulders naked and magnificently shaped.

"Time to start, is it?" demanded the apparition. "Or elst what in thunder's the meanin' o' this racket, when I was just a-gettin' of my beauty sleep?"

The stout man let out a murderous oath, and, rushing back, thrust the door close upon the vision; but not before I had caught a glimpse of a woman's skirt enwrapping it from the waist down. The next moment one of the females had caught me up: I was propelled down the pa.s.sage at a speed and with a force that made the blood sing in my ears, and shot forth into the darkness; where, as I picked myself up, half-stunned, I heard the house-door slammed behind me.

I take no credit for what I did next. No doubt I remembered that Hartnoll was still inside; but for aught I know it was mere shame and rage, and the thought of my insulted uniform, that made me rush back at the door and batter it with fists and feet. I battered until windows went up in the houses to right and left. Voices from them called to me; still I battered: and still I was battering blindly when a rush of footsteps came down the street and a hand, gripping me by the collar, swung me round into the blinding ray of a dark lantern.

"Hands off!" I gasped, half-choked, but fighting to break away.

"All right, my game-c.o.c.k!" A man's knuckles pressed themselves firmly into the nape of my neck. "Hullo! By gosh, sir, if it ain't a midshipman!"

"A midshipman?" said a voice of command. "Slew him round here. . . .

So it is, by George! . . . and a nice time of night! Hold him up, bo'sun--you needn't be choking the lad. Now then, boy, what's your name and ship?"

"Rodd, sir--of the _Melpomene_--and there's another inside--" I began.

"The _Melpomene!_"

"Yes, sir: and there's my friend inside, and for all I know they're murdering him. . . . A lot of men dressed up as women. . . . His name's Hartnoll--" I struggled to make away for another rush at the door, and had my heel against it, when it gave way and Hartnoll came flying out into the night. The officer, springing past me, very cleverly thrust in a foot before it could be closed again.

"Men dressed as women, you say?"

"It's an old trick, sir," panted the bo'sun, pushing forward.

"I've knowed it played ever since I served on a press. If you'll let the boys draw covert, sir . . . they've had a blank night, an' their tempers'll be the better for it."

He planted his shoulder against the door, begging for the signal, and the crew closed up around the step with a growl.

"My dirk!" pleaded Hartnoll. "I was getting it away, but one of 'em half-broke my arm and I dropped it again in the pa.s.sage."

"Hey? Stolen your dirk--have they? That's excuse enough. . . . Right you are, men, and in you go!"

He waved his c.o.c.ked hat to them as a huntsman lays on his hounds. In went the door with a crash, and in two twos I was swept up and across the threshold and surging with them down the pa.s.sage. By reason of my inches I could see nothing of what was happening ahead. I heard a struggle, and in the midst of it a hand went up and smashed the lamp over the stairway, plunging us all in total darkness. But the lieutenant had his lantern ready, and by the rays of it the sailors burst open the locked door at the end and flung themselves upon the Amazons before the candles could be extinguished. At the same moment the lieutenant called back an order over my head to his whippers-in, to find their way around and take the house in the rear.

The women, though overmatched, fought like cats--or like bull-dogs rather.

They were borne down to the floor, but even here for a while the struggle heaved and swayed this way and that, and I had barely time to s.n.a.t.c.h up one of the candles before table, bottles, gla.s.ses, went over in a general ruin. Above the clatter of it and the cursing, as I turned to stick the candle upright in a bottle on the dresser, I heard a cheer raised from somewhere in the back premises, and two men came rushing from the inner room--two men in feminine skirts, the one naked to the waist, the other clad about his chest and neck with a loose flannel shirt and a knotted Belcher handkerchief.

They paused for just about the time it would take you to count five; paused while they drew themselves up for the charge; and the lieutenant, reading the battle in their faces--and no ordinary battle either--shouted to close the door. He shouted none too soon. In a flash the pair were upon us, and at the first blow two sailors went down like skittles.

There must have been at least twenty sailors in the room, and all of them willing, yet in that superb charge the pair drove them like sheep, and the naked man had even time to drag the dresser from the clamps fastening it to the wall and hurl it down between himself and three seamen running to take him in flank. The candle went down with it: but the lieutenant, skipping back to the closed door, very pluckily held up his lantern and called on his men, in the same breath forbidding them to use their cutla.s.ses yet. In the circ.u.mstances this was generous, and I verily believe he would have been killed for it--the pair being close upon him and their fists going like hammers--had not one of the seamen whipped out a piece of rope and, ducking low, dived under the naked man's guard and la.s.soed him by the ankles. Two others, who had been stretched on the floor, simultaneously grabbed his companion by the skirts and wound their arms about his knees: and so in a trice both heroes were brought to ground. Even so they fought on until quieted by two judicious taps with the hilt of the boatswain's cutla.s.s. I honestly thought he had killed them, but was a.s.sured they were merely stunned for the time.

The boatswain, it appeared, was an expert, and had already administered the same soothing medicine to two or three of the more violent among the ladies; though loath to do so (he explained), because it sometimes gave the crowd a wrong impression when the bodies in this temporary state of inanition were carried out.

The small crowd in the street, however, seemed in no mind to hinder us.

Possibly experience had taught them composure. At any rate they were apathetic, though curious enough to follow us down to the quay and stand watching whilst we embarked our unconscious burdens. A lamp burned foggily at the head of the steps by which we descended to the waterside, and looking up I saw the child who had called herself Meliar-Ann standing in the circle of it, and gazing down upon the embarkation with dark unemotional eyes. Hartnoll spied her too, and waved his recovered dirk triumphantly. She paid him no heed at all.

"But look here," said the lieutenant, turning on me, "we can't take you on board to-night--and without your chests. Oh yes--I have your names; Rodd and Hartnoll . . . and a deuced lucky thing for you we tumbled upon you as we did. But Captain Suckling's orders were--and I heard him give 'em, with my own ears--to fetch you off to-morrow morning. From the Blue Posts, eh? Well, just you run back, or Blue Billy,"--by this irreverent name, as I learned later, the executive officers of his Majesty's Navy had agreed to know Mr. Benjamin Sheppard, proprietor of the Blue Posts: a solid man, who died worth sixty thousand pounds--"or Blue Billy will be sending round the crier."

"But, sir, we don't know where to find the Blue Posts!"