Part 30 (2/2)
”Joe! Tell the genneman how you boarded that Spanish s.h.i.+p, and cut the throats of them there swarthy Spaniards.”
At this Old Joe seems to be smitten with a sudden frenzy. I have never seen anything like it. After a preliminary canter in the laughing line he suddenly makes taut his body; his eyes bulge from his head; his face becomes crimson and his nose blue; then, with his mouth open, while he hisses like a steam-saw and roars like a bull and sends the most extraordinary imitation of throat-cutting spluttering wetly from his distended lips, he waves his right arm madly and frantically in the air, makes imaginary stabs in front of him, draws imaginary knives across his throat, and brings down the b.u.t.t ends of imaginary carbines on the supposit.i.tious heads of the swarthy crew unkindly resurrected to be slain again.
It is plain that the poor old paralysed fellow is lost to the Present.
He is back in the Past--or in one of his novelettes; and in front of him, begging for mercy, as he slits their throats, or cracks open their skulls, are, indeed, hundreds of real and living men. His acting is superb. It is only made comical by the hanging legs, the fixture of the body to the seat of the chair, and the furious spluttering of his frenzied mouth.
When he has quite finished, thoroughly exhausted, he leans back in his chair, sticks his pipe into his face, strikes a match with his shaking hands, and covers his laughing face in a wreath of tobacco-smoke.
”Arst him,” whispers Mr. Wells, ”how many he killed? Go on; you arst him.”
So you lean across to Old Joe, who shoots forward to meet your lips half-way with his left ear, and you calmly, and without dread or horror, ask the gurgling and chuckling veteran how many men he has killed.
As soon as he has caught your question he bursts out laughing, flings himself suddenly back, and exclaims, with a splutter: ”How many ha' I killed? How many? I couldn't say. Too many on 'em. Hundreds! Hundreds!
Hundreds of 'em!” Back goes the pipe, and, wreathed in proud smiles, his shoulders twitching, his hands never still for a moment, he sits square back in his chair and looks at you proudly, as much as to say:
”Ain't I a devil of a feller? Ain't I a monster? Ho, I've had a terrible life. You just arst me another!”
Well, I know not how true is the story told by Old Joe of his own wickedness.
But, however this may be--and it is not the province of Old Joe's humble historian to speculate--let us be content with the picture of these two old pensioners from the high seas, living together in the evening of their days in a narrow court in a London slum, the one paralysed and the other blind; the one a most brilliant and imaginative story-teller, the other a most cautious, modest, tentative, and genial critic. And let us sit between their two chairs for a moment and listen to the moving story of Old Joe, believing it with all the simplicity, if not with all the stupefied, admiration of the little slum children who gaze at the pirate when his chair is moved out into the court that he may warm his old bones in the sun.
[In brackets, let me say that I have come upon Old Joe literally posing in the court as a most ferocious pirate before an audience of toddling infants not more than four years of age.]
Eighty-two years ago Old Joe, surnamed Ridley, was born in the neighbourhood of the Barbican. He remembers how murderers and highwaymen used to come and hide in the court where he was born, ”because, don't you see, the police daren't come where we was living.” He went to a school in Charterhouse-square. ”Charterhouse School,” he says. But Mr.
Wells nudges us with his pipe hand. ”That's a mistake,” he says. ”There wasn't never no _school_ in Charterhouse Square, in those days. But never mind; let him go on. Only you must make allowance, you know.”
His father was a carman who could drink porter by the two-gallon, and had an arm like a leg of mutton. But this great, l.u.s.ty carman found himself ruled with a rod of iron by the little spitfire he took for his second wife. She managed the carman, and she managed his brats of children. She particularly managed Joe because he particularly disliked being managed.
So it came about that Joe found the streets pleasanter than his home, and took to slouching about with his hands in his pockets, feeling hungry and sometimes a little concerned, perhaps, as to what was to become of him. One day, as he was wasting time at a street-corner in Aldersgate, there came up to him a broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man in a blue reefer suit, who showed all his teeth when he smiled and whose voice had a sharp rattle in it like a bag full of gold coins. This noticeable man hailed Joe as a fine fellow, and asked the fine fellow whether he wouldn't step with him into a convenient tavern and wet his whistle with a gla.s.s of the best brandy.
The broad-shouldered, easy-smiling gentleman in the reefer suit told Joe, over a gla.s.s of brandy in the sanded-floor parlour of a neat tavern, that he was a rich man, with a hobby on which he spent a great deal of money. ”It's a hobby of mine,” he said, laughing, ”to put down the slave-trade. I don't like it, and so I put it down. Now, a fine young likely fellow, such as you, is just the man I want for my s.h.i.+p.
How would you like to go sailing the lovely seas catching slave-dealers, and giving them what-for with the best steel and gunpowder that money can buy?”
Joe said he could put up with it if the money was all right. And, being a.s.sured that the money was more than all right, he agreed to go down to Plymouth with a party of the gentleman's friends and try his hand for a year or two at laying pirates by the heel.
But when our Joe got out to sea and awoke from a terrible bout of intoxication on the schooner sailed by the gentleman with a hobby, he discovered that, instead of being on the ocean to catch pirates, he was there as a pirate himself. The boy had run away from home to make a fortune catching wicked men; he now found that his bread and b.u.t.ter depended upon his ability in cracking the heads of perfectly honest men.
Some of the new hands wanted to be put back when the situation was explained to them, but Joe was among those who felt respect for the villainous seamen on board (the s.h.i.+p carried 130 men, he says,) who declared that they had as lief be pirates as catch pirates, and it was no odds to them what flag they sailed under or for what purpose.
”On board,” splutters Joe, striking another match, ”there was a turr'ble fellow--Jack Armstrong--six foot five in socks, strong's a lion, brave's a tiger. He and me use to fight--every day, pretty near. Bang! crack!
g-r-r-r-r-r! I used to beat him--easy! I was turr'bly strong. Make's nose bleed--bung's eyes up--split's lips. Ess! And there was a mulatto aboard. Metsi-metsi-metsi-can, he was.”
”He means Mexican,” whispers Mr. Wells behind his hand. ”That's what Joe means. A Mexican.” And then he gets up from his chair and shouts into Joe's ear, ”You mean a Mex-i-can, Joe.”
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