Merry-Garden and Other Stories Part 8

He ran towards them. Almost as he started, in one of the figures he recognised Sir John. The other had him by the shoulders, and seemed to be dragging him by main force towards the boat. Mr. Molesworth shouted as he rushed up to the fray. The a.s.sailant turned--turned with a loud hissing sound--and, releasing Sir John, swung up a hand with something in it that flashed in the sun as he struck at the newcomer: and as Mr. Molesworth fell, he saw a fierce brown face and a cage of white, gleaming teeth bared in a savage grin. . . .

He picked himself up, the blood running warm over his eyes, and, as he stood erect for a moment, down over his white waistcoat. But the dusky face of his antagonist had vanished, and, with it, the whole scene.

In place of the foresh.o.r.e with its flat grey stones, his eye travelled down a steep green slope. The hissing sound continued in his ears, louder than ever, but it came with violent jets of steam from a locomotive, grotesquely overturned some twenty yards below him. Fainting, he saw and sank across the body of Sir John Crang, which lay with face upturned among the June gra.s.ses, staring at the sky.

III.

STATEMENT BY W. PITT FERGUSON, M.D., OF LOCKYER STREET, PLYMOUTH.

The foregoing narrative has been submitted to me by the writer, who was well acquainted with the late Mr. Molesworth. In my opinion it conveys a correct impression of that gentleman's temperament and character: and I can testify that in the details of his psychical adventures on the valley road leading to St. A--'s Church it adheres strictly to the account given me by Mr. Molesworth himself shortly after the accident on the M---- viaduct, and repeated by him several times with insistence during the illness which terminated mortally some four months later. The manner in which the narrative is presented may be open to criticism: but of this, as one who has for some years eschewed the reading of fiction, I am not a fair judge. It adds, at any rate, nothing in the way of 'sensation' to the story as Mr. Molesworth told it: and of its improbability I should be the last to complain, who am to add, of my own positive observation, some evidence which will make it appear yet more startling, if not wholly incredible.

The accident was actually witnessed by two men, cattle-jobbers, who were driving down the valley road in a light cart or 'trap,' and were within two hundred yards of the viaduct when they saw the train crash through the parapet over the second span (counting from the west), and strike and plunge down the slope. In their evidence at the inquest, and again at the Board of Trade inquiry, these men agree that it took them from five to eight minutes only to alight, run down and across the valley (fording the stream on their way), and scramble up to the scene of the disaster: and they further agree that one of the first sad objects on which their eyes fell was the dead body of Sir John Crang with Mr. Molesworth, alive but sadly injured and bleeding, stretched across it. Apparently they had managed to crawl from the wreck of the carriage before Sir John succ.u.mbed, or Mr. Molesworth had managed to drag his companion out--whether dead or alive cannot be told--before himself fainting from loss of blood.

The toll of the disaster, as is generally known, amounted to twelve killed and seventeen more or less seriously injured. Help having been summoned from M---- Station, the injured--or as many of them as could be removed-- were conveyed in an ambulance train to Plymouth. Among them was Mr.

Molesworth, whose apparent injuries were a broken hip, a laceration of the thigh, and an ugly, jagged scalp-wound. Of all these he made, in time, a fair recovery: but what brought him under my care was the nervous shock from which his brain, even while his body healed, never made any promising attempt to rally. For some time after the surgeon had p.r.o.nounced him cured he lingered on, a visibly dying man, and died in the end of utter nervous collapse.

Yet even within a few days of the end his brain kept an astonishing clearness: and to me, as well as to the friends who visited him in hospital and afterwards in his Plymouth lodgings--for he never returned home again, being unable to face another railway journey--he would maintain, and with astonishing vigour and lucidity of description, that he had actually in very truth travelled down the valley in company with Sir John Crang, and seen with his own eyes everything related in the foregoing paper. Now, as a record of what did undeniably pa.s.s through the brain of a cultivated man in some catastrophic moments, I found these recollections of his exceedingly interesting. As no evidence is harder to collect, so almost none can be of higher importance, than that of man's sensations at the exact moment when he pa.s.ses, naturally or violently, out of this present life into whatever may be beyond. Partly because Mr. Molesworth's story, which he persisted in, had this scientific value; partly in the hope of diverting his mind from the lethargy into which I perceived it to be sinking; I once begged him to write the whole story down. To this, however, he was unequal. His will betrayed him as soon as he took pen and paper.

The entire veracity of his recollection he none the less affirmed again and again, and with something like pa.s.sion, although aware that his friends were but humouring him while they listened and made pretence to believe. The strong card--if I may so term it--in his evidence was undoubtedly Sir John Crang's cigar-case. It was found in Mr. Molesworth's breast-pocket when they undressed him at the hospital, and how it came there I confess I cannot explain. It may be that it had dropped on the gra.s.s from Sir John's pocket, and that Mr. Molesworth, under the hallucination which undoubtedly possessed him, picked it up, and pocketed it before the two cattle-drovers found him. It is an unlikely hypothesis, but I cannot suggest a likelier.

A fortnight before his death he sent for a lawyer and made his will, the sanity of which no one can challenge. At the end he directed that his body should be interred in the parish churchyard of St. A--, 'as close as may be to the cross by the church porch.' As a last challenge to scepticism this surely was defiant enough.

It was my duty to attend the funeral. The coffin, conveyed by train to M---- Station, was there transferred to a hea.r.s.e, and the procession followed the valley road. I forget at what point it began to be impressed upon me, who had never travelled the road before, that Mr. Molesworth's 'recollections' of it had been so exact that they compelled a choice between the impossibility of accepting his story and the impossibility of doubting the a.s.surance of so entirely honourable a man that he had never travelled the road in his life. At first I tried to believe that his recollections of it--detailed as they were--might one by one have been suggested by the view from the viaduct. But, honestly, I was soon obliged to give this up: and when we arrived at the creek's head and the small churchyard beside it, I confessed myself confounded. Point by point, and at every point, the actual scene reproduced Mr. Molesworth's description.

I prefer to make no comment on my last discovery. After the funeral, being curious to satisfy myself in every particular, I walked across the track to the inn--The Saracen's Head--which again answered Mr.

Molesworth's description to the last detail. The house was kept by a widow and her daughter: and the girl--an extremely good-looking young person--made me welcome. I concluded she must be the original of Mr.

Molesworth's illusion--perhaps the strangest of all his illusions--and took occasion to ask her (I confess not without a touch of trepidation) if she remembered the day of the accident. She answered that she remembered it well. I asked if she remembered any visitor, or visitors, coming to the inn on that day. She answered, None: but that now I happened to speak of it, somebody must have come that day while she was absent on an errand to the Vicarage (which lies some way along the sh.o.r.e to the westward): for on returning she found a fishing-rod and creel on the settle of the inn-kitchen.

The creel had a luggage-label tied to it, and on the label was written 'Sir W. Moyle.' She had written to Sir Warwick about it more than a month ago, but had not heard from him in answer. [It turned out that Sir Warwick had left England, three days after the accident, on a yachting excursion to Norway.]

"And a cigar-case?" I asked. "You don't remember seeing a cigar-case?"

She shook her head, evidently puzzled. "I know nothing about a cigar-case," she said. "But you shall see the rod and fishing-basket."

She ran at once and fetched them. Now that rod and that creel (and the fly-book within it) have since been restored to Sir Warwick Moyle. He had left them in care of the station-master at M----, whence they had been missing since the day of the accident. It was suspected that they had been stolen, in the confusion that day prevailing at the little station, by some ganger on the relief-train.

The girl, I am convinced, was honest, and had no notion how they found their way to the kitchen of The Saracen's Head: nor--to be equally honest--have I.

HI-SPY-HI!

AN EPISODE IN THE HISTORY OF THE LOOE DIE-HARDS.

Maybe you have never heard of the East and West Looe Volunteer Artillery-- the famous Looe Die-hards? "The iniquity of oblivion," says Sir Thomas Browne, "blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity."

"Time," writes Dr. Isaac Watts--

"Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away!"

And this fine hymn was a favourite with Captain AEneas Pond, the commanding-officer of the Die-hards. Yet am I sure that while singing it Captain Pond in his heart excepted his own renowned corps. For were not the Die-hards an exception to every rule?

In the spring of the year 1803, when King George had to tell his faithful subjects that the Treaty of Amiens was no better than waste-paper, and Bonaparte began to a.s.semble his troops and flat-bottomed boats in the camp and off the coast by Boulogne with intent to invade us, public excitement in the twin towns of East and West Looe rose to a very painful pitch.

Of this excitement was begotten the East and West Looe Volunteer Artillery, which the Government kept in pay for six years and then reluctantly disbanded. The company on an average numbered sixty or seventy men, commanded by a Captain and two Lieutenants of their own choosing. They learned the exercise of the great guns and of small arms; they wore a uniform consisting of blue coat and pantaloons, with scarlet facings and yellow wings and ta.s.sels, and a white waistcoat; and the ladies of Looe embroidered two flags for them, with an inscription on each--'_Death or Victory_' on the one--on the other, '_We Choose the Latter._'

They meant it, too. If the course of events between 1803 and 1809 denied them the chance of achieving victory, 'tis at least remarkable how they avoided the alternative. Indeed it was their tenacity in keeping death at arm's length which won for them their famous sobriquet.

The Doctor invented it. (He was surgeon to the corps as well as to its senior Lieutenant.) The Doctor made the great discovery, and imparted it to Captain Pond on a memorable evening in the late summer of 1808 as the two strolled homeward from parade--the Captain moodily, as became a soldier who for five years had carried a sword engraved with the motto, '_My Life's Blood for the Two Looes,_' and as yet had been granted no opportunity to flesh it.

"But look here, Pond," said the Doctor. "Has it ever occurred to you to reflect that in all these five years since you first enlisted your company, not a single man of it has died?"

"Why the devil should he?" asked Captain Pond.

"Why? Why, by every law of probability!" answered the Doctor.

"Take any collection of seventy men the sum of whose ages divided by seventy gives an average age of thirty-four--which is the mean age of our corps, for I've worked it out: then by the most favourable rates of mortality three at least should die every year."

"War is a fearful thing!" commented Captain Pond.

"But, dammit, I'm putting the argument on a _civilian_ basis! I say that even in time of peace, if you take any seventy men the sum of whose ages divided by seventy gives thirty-four, you ought in five years to average a loss of fifteen men."

"Then," murmured Captain Pond, "all I can say is that peace is a fearful thing too."

"Yes, yes, Pond! But my point is that in all these five years _we_ have not yet lost a single man."

"Good Lord!" exclaimed Captain Pond, after a moment's thought. "How do you account for it?"

Professionally the Doctor was the most modest of men. "I do not seek to account for it," said he. "I only know that you, my old friend, well deserve the distinction which you have characteristically overlooked--that of commanding the most remarkable company in the Duchy; nay, I will venture to say, in the whole of England."

They had reached the brow of the hill overlooking the town. Captain Pond halted and gazed for a moment on the veil of smoke above the peaceful chimneys, then into the sunset fading far down the Channel. A sudden moisture clouded his gaze, but in the moisture quivered a new-born light of pride.

Yes, it was true. He--he in five years' command--had never lost a man!

The discovery elated and yet humbled him. His was a simple soul, and took its responsibilities seriously. He sought not to inquire for what high purpose Providence had so signally intervened to stave off from the East and West Looe Artillery the doom of common men. He only prayed to be equal to it. The Doctor's statistics had, in fact, scared him a little.

I am positive that he never boasted.

And yet--I will say this for the credit of us Cornishmen, that we rejoice one in another's good fortune. Captain Pond might walk humbly and 'touch wood' to avert Nemesis: he could not prevent the whisper spreading, nor, as it spread, could he silence the congratulations of his fellow-townsmen. 'One and All' is our motto, and Looe quickly made Captain Pond's singular distinction its own--

_There's Horse, there's Foot, there's Artiller-y, Yet none comes up with Looe; For the rest of the Army never says die, But our chaps never_ do!

You may realise something of the public enthusiasm when I tell you that it gave an entirely new trend to the small-talk on the Town Quay.

Hitherto, the male population which resorted there had admitted but four subjects as worthy of sensible men's discussion--the weather, the shipping intelligence, religion, and politics: but in a few days the health of the 'Die-hards' took precedence of all these, and even threatened to monopolise public gossip. Captain Pond, as the first reward of notoriety, found himself severely criticised for having at the outset enlisted a dozen gunners of ripe age, although he had chosen them for no worse reason than that they had served in his Majesty's Navy and were by consequence the best marksmen in the two towns. Not even this excuse, however, could be pleaded on behalf of Gunner Israel Spettigew (commonly known as Uncle Issy), a septuagenarian who owed his inclusion entirely to the jokes he cracked. They had been greatly relished on parade: as indeed they had made him for forty years past the one indispensable man at Mayor-choosings, Church-feasts, Carol-practices, Guise-dancings, and all public occasions; and because they varied little with the years, no one had taken the trouble to remark until now that Uncle Issy himself was ageing. But now the poor old fellow found himself the object of a solicitude which (as he grumbled) made the Town Quay as melancholy as a house in a warren.

The change in the public att.i.tude came on him with a sudden shock.

"Good-mornin', Uncle," said Sergeant Pengelly of the Sloop Inn, as the veteran joined the usual group on the Quay for the usual 'crack' after breakfast. "There was a touch o' frost in the air this mornin'. I hope it didn't affect you."

"What?" said Uncle Issy.