Part 34 (1/2)
Salt turned instinctively. A man in sailor's dress, with the guns and star of his grade upon his sleeve, had climbed along the arch of the railings with a sailor's resourcefulness, and had reached his ear. Salt remembered him quite well, but he did not speak a word.
”Ah, sir, I thought that warn't no other voice in the world, although the smoke befogged my eyes a bit. Keep back, you gutter rats!” he roared above every other sound, rising up in his commanding position and balancing himself by a stanchion of the gate; ”d'ye think you know who you're standing up before, you toggle-chested galley-sharks! Salt? Aye, he's _salt_ enough! 'Tis Capt'n Stobalt of the old _Ulysses_.
_Stobalt of Salaveira!_”
Three years before, the moment would have found Salt cold, as cold as ice, and as unresponsive, but he had learned many things since then, and sacrificed his pride and reticence on many altars.
He saw before him a phalanx of humanity startled into one common expression of awe and incredulity; he saw the hostile wave that was to overwhelm him spend itself in a sharp recoil. By a miracle the fierce l.u.s.t of triumphant savagery had died out of the starved, pathetic faces now turned eagerly to him; by a miracle the gathering roar for vengeance had sunk into an expectant hush, broken by nothing but the whispered repet.i.tion of his name on ten thousand lips. He saw in a flash a hundred details of the magic of that name; he knew that if ever in his life he must throw restraint and moderation to the winds and paint his role in broad and lurid colours, that moment had arrived, and at the call he took his destiny between his hands.
They saw him toss his weapon through the railings into the s.p.a.ce beneath, marked him come to the edge of the step and stand with folded arms defenceless there before them, and the very whispers died away in breathless antic.i.p.ation.
”Yes,” he cried with a pa.s.sionate vehemence that held their breath and stirred their hearts, ”I am Stobalt of Salaveira, the man who brought you victory when you were trembling in despair. I saved England for you then, but that was when men loved their country, and did not think it a disgraceful thing to draw a sword and die for her. What is that to you to-day, you who have been taught to forget what glory means; and what is England to you to-day, you whose leaders have sold her splendour for a higher wage?”
”No! No!” cried a thousand voices, frantic to appease the man for whose blood they had been howling scarcely a minute before. ”You shall be our leader! We will follow you to death! Stobalt of Salaveira! Stobalt for ever! Stobalt of Salaveira! Stobalt and England!”
The frenzied roar of welcome, the waving hands, the hats flung high, the mingled cries caught from lip to lip went rolling up the street, kindling by a name and an imperishable memory other streets and other crowds into a tumult of mad enthusiasm. Along Pall Mall, through Trafalgar Square, into the Strand and Whitehall, north by Regent Street and the Haymarket to Piccadilly, running east and west, splitting north and south, twisting and leaping from group to group and mouth to mouth, ran the strange but stirring cry, carrying wonder and concern on its wing, but always pa.s.sing with a cheer.
Seven years had pa.s.sed since the day of Salaveira, and the memory of it was still enough to stir a crowd to madness. For there had been no Salaveiras since to dim its splendour. Seven years ago the name of Salaveira had brought pallor to the cheek, and the thought of what was happening there stole like an icy cramp round the heart of every Englishman. The nation had grown accustomed to accept defeat on land with the comfortable a.s.surance that nothing could avert a final victory.
Its pride was in its navy: invincible!...
The war that came had been of no one's seeking, but it came, and the nation called upon its navy to sweep the presumptuous enemy from off the seas. Then came a pause: a rumour, doubted, disbelieved, but growing stronger every hour. The English fleets, not so well placed as they might have been, ”owing to political reasons that made mobilisation inadvisable while there was still a chance of peace being maintained,”
were unable to effect a junction immediately, and were falling back before the united power of the New Alliance. Hour after hour, day after day, night after night, crowds stood hopefully, doubtfully, incredulously, in front of the newspaper office windows, waiting for the news that never came. The fleets had not yet combined. The truth first leaked, then blazed: they were unable to combine! Desperately placed on the outer line they were falling back, ever falling back into a more appalling isolation. A coaling station had been abandoned just where its presence proved to have been vital; a few battles.h.i.+ps had been dropped from the programme, and the loss of their weight in the chain just proved fatal.
Men did not linger much at Fleet Street windows then; they slunk to and fro singly a hundred times a day, read behind the empty bulletins with poignant intuition, and turned silently away. In the mourning Capital they led nightmare lives from which they could only awake to a more definite despair, and the first word of the hurrying newsboy's raucous shout sent a sickening wave of dread to every heart. There was everything to fear, and nothing at all to hope. Could peace be made--not a glorious, but a decent, living peace? Was--was even London safe? Kind friends abroad threw back the answers in the fewest, crudest words.
England would have to sue for peace on bended knees and bringing heavy tribute in her hands. London lay helpless at the mercy of the foe to seize at any moment when it suited him.
All this time Commander Stobalt, in command of the _Ulysses_ by the vicissitudes of unexpected war and separated from his squadron on detached service, was supposed to be in Cura Bay, a thousand miles away from Salaveira, flung there with the destroyers _Limpet_ and _Dabfish_ by the mere backwash of the triumphant allied fleet. According to the rules of naval warfare he _ought_ to have been a thousand miles away; according to the report of the allies' scouts he _was_ a thousand miles away. But miraculously one foggy night the _Ulysses_ loomed spectrally through the s.h.i.+fting mist that drifted uncertainly from off the land and rammed the first leviathan that crossed her path, while the two destroyers torpedoed her next neighbour. Then, before leviathans 3 and 4 had begun to learn from each other what the matter was, the _Ulysses_ was between them, sprinkling their decks and tops with small sh.e.l.l, and perforating their water-line and vital parts with large sh.e.l.l from a range closer than that at which any engagement had been fought out since the day when the Treasury had begun to implore the Admiralty to impress upon her admirals what a battles.h.i.+p really cost before they sent her into action. For the _Ulysses_ had everything to gain and nothing but herself to lose, and when morning broke over Salaveira's untidy bay, she had gained everything, and lost so little that even the New Alliance took no pride in mentioning it in the cross account.
It was, of course, as every naval expert could have demonstrated on the war-game board, an impossible thing to do. Steam, searchlights, wireless telegraphy, quick-firing guns, and a hundred other innovations had effaced the man; and the spirit of the Elizabethan age was at a discount. What Drake would have done, or Hawkins, what would have been a sweet and pleasing adventure to Sir Richard Grenville, or another Santa Cruz to Blake, would have been in their heirs unmitigated suicide by the verdict of any orthodox court martial. Largely imbued with the Elizabethan spirit--the genius of ensuring everything that was possible, and then throwing into the scale a splendid belief in much that seemed impossible--Stobalt succeeded in doing what perhaps no one else would have succeeded in doing, merely because perhaps no one else would have tried.
”Stobalt of Salaveira! Come down and lead us!” The wild enthusiasm, the strange unusual cries, went echoing to the sky and reverberating down every street and byway. Behind barred doors men listened to the shout, and wondered; crouching in alleys, tramping the road with no further hope in life, beggars and out-casts heard the name and dimly a.s.sociated it with something pleasant in the past. It met the force of special constables hastening from the west; it fell on the ears of Mr Strummery, driving by unfrequented ways towards the House. ”Stobalt and England!
Stobalt for us! Stobalt and the Navy!” It was like another Salaveira night with Stobalt there among them--the man who was too modest to be feted, the man whose very features were unknown at home, Stobalt of Salaveira!
Imagine it. Measure by the fading but not yet quite forgotten memory of another time of direful humiliation and despair what Salaveira must have been. They had pa.s.sed a week of fervent exaltation, a week of calm a.s.surance, a week of rather tremulous hope, and for the last quarter a long dumb misery that conveyed no other sense of time in later years than that of formless night. They were waiting for the stroke of doom.
Then at midnight came the sudden tumult from afar, sounding to those who listened in painful silence strangely unlike the note of defeat, the frantic, mingled shouts, the tearing feet in the road beneath, the wild bells pealing out, the guns and rockets to add to the delirium of the night, and the incredible burden of the intoxicating news: ”Great Victory! Salaveira Relieved!! Utter Annihilation of the Blockading Fleet!!!”
The Philosopher might withdraw to solitude and moralise; the Friend of Humanity stand aside, pained that his countrymen should possess so much human nature, but to the great primitive emotional heart of the community the choice lay between going out and shouting and staying in and going mad. Never before in history had there been a victory that so irresistibly carried the nation off its feet. To the populace it had seemed from beginning to end to contain just those qualities of daredevilry and fortuitous ease that appeal to the imagination. They were quite mistaken; the conception had been desperate, but beyond that the details of the relief of Salaveira had been as methodical, as painstaking, and as far-seeing as those which had marked the civil campaign now drawing to a close.
That was why a famished, starving mob remembered Salaveira. They would have stoned a duke or burned a bishop with very little compunction, but Stobalt ranked among their immortals. They did not even seem to question the mystery of Salt's ident.i.ty. As the flames began to lap out of the lower windows of Trafalgar Chambers, and it became evident that their work there was done, a stalwart bodyguard ranged themselves about his person and headed the procession. Hurriedly committing Irene to the loyal sailor's charge, Stobalt resigned himself good-humouredly to his position until he could seize an opportunity discreetly to withdraw.
Not without some form of orderliness the great concourse marched into the broader streets. Stobalt had no idea of their destination; possibly there was no preconcerted plan, but--as such things happen--a single voice raised in a pause gave the note. It did not fall on barren ground, and the next minute the countless trampling feet moved to a brisker step, and the new cry went rolling ominously ahead to add another terror to the shadowy phantasmagoria of the ill-lit streets.
”To Westminster! Down with the Government! To Westminster!”
CHAPTER XXI
THE BARGAIN OF FAMINE