Chapter 20. In Which The Major Learns That No Man Is Necessary

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_ CHAPTER XX. IN WHICH THE MAJOR LEARNS THAT NO MAN IS NECESSARY

For six days Troy continued to rejoice, winding up each day with a dance. We will content ourselves, however, with one last extract from _The Plymouth and Dock Telegraph_:

"At noon on Thursday the town assembled again and escorted its Mayor and Mayoress to the Hymen Hospital, where, in the presence of a distinguished company, Mrs. Hansombody (ward and heiress of the late S. Hymen) unveiled a bust of her gallant kinsman, whose premature heroic death Troy has never ceased to lament. Sir Felix Felix-Williams made eulogistic reference to the deceased, remarking on the number of instances by which the late war had confirmed the truth of the Roman poet's observation that it is pleasant and seemly to die for one's country. The Mayor responded on behalf of his amiable lady, whom Sir Felix's tribute had visibly affected. The sculpture was pronounced to be a lifelike image, reflecting great credit on the artist, Mr. Tipping, R.A. The pedestal, five feet in height, is of polished black Luxulyan granite, and bears name and date with the words 'Take Him for All in All We shall not Look upon his Like again.' The bust, executed in plaster of Paris, will be replaced by marble when funds allow. The crowd dispersed in silence after the ceremony. Dancing in the street followed at 6 p.m., and was kept up with spirit for some hours, during which a large quantity of beer was given away."

The Major lay in the next room--the casualty ward--and stared up at the whitewashed ceiling.

His whole being ached as though, mind and body, he had been set upon and beaten senseless with bladders. And this was the second time! Yes--good heavens, how had he deserved it?--the second time! He remembered, after the disaster off Boulogne--many days after-- awaking to consciousness in his prison bed in the fortress of Givet. Then, as now, he had lain staring, his whole soul sickened by the cruel jar of the jest. Hand of fate, was it? Nay, a jocose and blundering finger, rather, that had flipped him, as a man might flip a beetle, into the night. Then, as now, his soul had welled up in sullen indignation. He blamed no one; for in all the stupid chapter of accidents there was no one to blame. But when the Protestant chaplain in Givet came to his bed he turned his face to the wall.

He refused to give his name. He did not understand this blind malevolence of fate, but he would make no terms with it. He--Solomon Hymen--had a will of his own and a proper pride. If the world chose to use him so, after all his services to mankind, let it go and be damned to it. I tell you, the man had courage.

If his friends at home valued him, let them seek him out. He had given them cause enough for gratitude. If not, he asked nothing of them. In the prison he gave his name as Mr. Solomon.

Yet he had made two attempts to escape. In the first he ran away with two comrades as far as Mezieres. Being pursued by the _gens-d'armes_ there, and called upon to surrender, his companions had given themselves up. Not so our hero; nor was he secured until he lay unconscious with a bullet-hole in the cheek. It was this which ever afterwards affected his speech, the bullet having cut or partially paralysed some string of the tongue.

It had been touch-and-go with him; but he recovered, and, passing henceforward as a desperate character, was drafted south with a dozen other desperate characters to the gloomy fortress of Briancon. There, in a second attempt for liberty, a fall from the ramparts had cost him his leg.

But worse than all his incarceration had been the final tramp through France--right away north to Valenciennes; then left-about-turn, three hundred and fifty miles to Tours; then south-east to Riou; and from Riou south-west to Bordeaux, where the transport took him off--one of six transports for about fifteen hundred released prisoners. All the way, too, on a wooden leg! Heaven knows how bitterly he had come to hate that leg. Yet his heart, hardened though it was by all this long adversity, had melted as the _Romney_ transport beat up closer and closer for England, and at sight of Plymouth heights he had broken into tears.

Troy! Troy! After all, Troy would remember him. Though he knew it brought him nearer to freedom, all that marching through France had been a weariness eating into his soul. Now a free man, along the road from Plymouth to Troy he had almost skipped.

And this had been his homecoming!

They remembered him. Beyond all his hopes they remembered him. In their memory he had grown into a Homeric man, a demi-god. He had only to declare himself. . . .

The Major lay on his hospital bed and stared at the ceiling. It was all very well, but ten years had made a difference--a mighty difference; a difference which beat all his calculations. It was a double difference, too; for all the while that he had been shrinking in self-knowledge, his reputation at home had been expanding like a cucumber.

Good Lord! How could he live up to it now? To obey his impulses and declare himself was simple enough, perhaps; but afterwards--

He had nearly betrayed himself when Cai Tamblyn--in a queer straight-cut frock-coat of livery, blue with brass buttons, but otherwise looking much the same as ever--thrust his head in at the door.

In the first shock of astonishment the Major had almost cried out on him by name.

"Why--eh?--what are _you_ doing here?" he stammered. Hitherto he had been waited on by a strange doctor (Hansombody's new partner) and a nurse whom he had assisted twelve years ago, when she was left a widow, to set up as a midwife.

"Might ask the same question of you," said Cai Tamblyn. "I'm the kew-rator, havin' been Hymen's servant in the old days, and shows around the visitors, besides dustin' the mementoes--locks of his bloomin' 'air and the rest of the trash, I looked in to see how you was a-gettin' on after the palaver. If I'm not wanted I'll go."

"Don't go."

"Very well, then, I won't." Mr. Tamblyn took a seat on the edge of an unoccupied bed, drew from his pocket a knife and a screw of pig-tail tobacco, sliced off a portion and rubbed it meditatively between his hands. "I done you a good turn just now," he continued. "Some o' the company--the womenkind especially--wanted to come in and make a fuss over you before leavin'."

"Why should they want to make a fuss over me?"

"Well you may ask," said Mr. Tamblyn, candidly. "'Tain't a question of looks, though. There's a kind of female--an' 'tis the commonest kind, too--can't hear of a man bein' hurt an' put to bed but she wants to see for herself. 'Tis like the game a female child plays with a dollies' house. Here they've got a nice little orspital to amuse 'em, with nice clean blankets an' sheets, an' texteses 'pon the walls, an' a cupboard full o' real medicines an' splints, and along comes a real live patient to be put to bed, an' the thing's complete. Hows'ever, they didn' get no fun out of 'ee to-day, for I told 'em you was sleepin' peaceful an' not to be disturbed."

"Thank you." Under pretence of settling down more comfortably against the pillow, the Major turned his head aside. "Then it seems you knew this--this--"

"Hymen? Knew him intimate."

"What--what sort of man was he?"

Cai Tamblyn transferred the shreds of tobacco to a pouch made of pig's bladder, pocketed it, and rubbed his two palms together, chuckling softly.

"Look here, I'll show you the bust of 'en if you like; that is"--he checked himself and added dubiously--"if you're sure it won't excite you."

"Excite me?"

"Sure it won't give you a relapse or something o' the sort? The woman Snell has stepped down to the Mayor's to wash up after the light refreshments, and I'm in charge. Prettily she'll blow me up if she comes back an' finds I've been an' gone an' excited you." He cleared a space on the wash-stand. "I've no business to be in here at all, really, talkin' wi' the pashent; but damme, you can't think what 'tis like, sittin' by yourself in a museum. I wish sometimes they'd take an' stuff me!"

He hobbled out and returned grunting under the weight of the bust, which he set down upon the wash-stand, turning it so that the Major might have a full view of its features.

"There!" he exclaimed, drawing back and panting a little.

"Good heavens!" The Major drew the bed-clothes hurriedly up to his chin. "Was he--was he like _that_?"

"I thank the Lord he was not," Mr. Tamblyn answered, slowly and piously. "Leavin' out the question o' colour and the material, which is plaster pallis and terrible crips, and the shortage, which is no more than the head an' henge of 'en, so to speak, 'tis no more like the man than _you_ be. And I say again that I thank the Lord for it. For to have the old feller stuck up in the corner an' glazin' at me nat'rel as life every time I turned my head would be more than nerves could stand."

"You wouldn't wish him back, then, in the flesh?"

Cai Tamblyn turned around smartly and gazed at the patient, whose face, however, rested in shadow.

"Look 'ee here. You've a-been in a French war prison, I hear, but that's no excuse for talkin' irreligious. The man was blowed to pieces, I tell you, by a thing called a catamaran, off the coast o' France; not so much left of 'en as would cover a half-crown piece. And you ask me if I want 'en back in the flesh!"

"But suppose that should turn out to be a mistake?" muttered the Major.

"Hey?" Cai Tamblyn gave a start. "Oh, I see; you're just puttin' it so for the sake of argyment. Well, then,"--the old man turned his quid deliberately--"did you ever hear tell what old Sammy Mennear said when his wife died an' left him a widow-man? 'I wouldn' ha' lost my dear Sarah for a hundred pound,' said he; 'an' I dunno as I'd have her back for five hundred.' That's about the size o't with Hymen, I reckon--though, mind you, I bear en no grudge. He left me fifty pound by will, and a hundred an' fifty to a heathen nigger; and how that can be reconciled with Christian principle I leave you to answer. But I bear 'en no grudge."

"What? They proved his will?" The Major stared at his portrait and shivered.

"_In_ course they did. The man was blowed to pieces, I tell you. 'Tis written up on the pedestal. 'Take 'en for all in all'--or piece by piece, they might ha' said, for that matter--'we shall not look upon his like agen.' No, nor they don't want to, for all their speechifyin'. I ain't what the parson calls a _pessimist_; I thinks poorly o' most things, that's all; _and_ folks; and I say they don't want to. Why, one way and another, he left close on twelve thousand pound!"

The Major drew the bed-clothes maybe an inch farther over his chin and so lay still, answering nothing, his eyes fastened on the bust. Beneath its hyacinthine curls it beamed on him with a fixed benevolent smile.

"Not that Hymen hadn't decent qualities, mind you," Cai Tamblyn continued. "The fellow was plucky, and well-meanin', too, in his way; and a better master you wouldn't find in a day's march. What he suffered from was wind in his stomach. With all the women settin' their caps at him he couldn't help it: but so 'twas. And the men were a'most as bad. Just you hearken to this--"

Cai seated himself on the edge of the bed again, felt in his breast-pocket and drew out a spectacle-case and a folded pocket-book; adjusted the spectacles on his nose, slapped the pocket-book viciously, spread it on his knee, cleared his throat, and began to read:

"'As a boy he was studious in his habits, shy in company, unflinchingly truthful, and fond of animals. For obvious reasons these pets of his childhood are unrepresented among the memorials so piously preserved in the Hymen Museum; but through the kindness of our esteemed townswoman, Mrs. (or, as she is commonly called, 'Mother') Hancock, aged ninety-one, we are able to include in our collection a marble of the kind known as 'glass-alley,' with which she avers that, at the age of ten or thereabouts, our future hero disported himself. It must have been by some premonition that the venerable lady cherished it, having received it originally, as she remembers, in barter for a pennyworth of saffron cake, a species of delicacy to which the youthful Solomon was pardonably addicted. . . .'

"I got to show that damned glass-alley," interjected Mr. Tamblyn. "Why? Because a man past work can't stay his belly on the interest o' fifty pound. Oh, but there's more about it:

"'The cobble-stones with which the streets of Troy are paved do not lend themselves readily to expertness in shooting with marbles. But the subject of this memoir was ever one who, adapting himself to difficulties, rose superior to them. The glass material of which the relic is composed shows numerous indentations in its spherical outline, eloquent testimony to the character which had already begun to learn the lesson of greatness and by perseverance to bend circumstances to its will. In the case containing this relic, and beside it, reposes a horn-book, used for many generations in the Troy Infant School, conducted A.D. 1739-1782 by Miss Sleeman, schoolmistress. Although we have no positive evidence, there is every reason to believe that the youthful Solomon--'

"Ain't it enough to make a man sick?" demanded Cai Tamblyn, looking up. "And I got to speak this truck, day in an' day out."

"Who wrote it?"

"Hansombody. Oh, I ain't denyin' he was well paid. But when I see'd Miss Marty this very afternoon, unwrappin' the bust with tears in her eyes, an' her husband standin' by as modest as Moll at a christenin', and him the richer by thousands--"

"WHAT?"

The Major, despite his hurt, had risen on his elbow. Cai Tamblyn, too, bounced up.

"The Mayor, I'm talkin' of--Dr. Hansombody," he stammered, gating into the invalid's face in dismay.

So, for ten slow seconds or so, they eyed one another. Speech began to work in Cai Tamblyn's throat, but none came. He cast one bewildered, incredulous, horror-stricken glance back from the face on the bed to the fatuously smiling face on the washhand stand, and with that--for the Major had picked up his pillow and was poising to hurl it--flung his person between them, cast both arms about the bust, lifted it, and tottered from the room. _

Read next: Chapter 21. Faces In Water

Read previous: Chapter 19. The Return

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