Полная версия
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 70, No. 431, September 1851
The Hallengas, amongst whom the expedition now found itself, were far more frank and friendly, and much less wild, than the Haddendas and some other tribes, and they might probably have been converted into useful allies by a less cruel and capricious invader than the Bascha. But conciliation was no part of his scheme; if he one day caressed a tribe or a chief, it was only to betray them the next. Mr Werne was on good terms with some of the Hallenga sheiks, and went to visit the village of Hauathi, about three miles from camp, to see the birds of paradise which abounded there. On his road he saw from afar a great tree covered with those beautiful birds, and which glistened in the sunshine with all the colours of the rainbow. Some days later he and his brother went to drink merissa, a slightly intoxicating liquor, with one of the Fakis or priests of the country. The two Germans got very jovial, drinking to each other, student-fashion; and the faki, attempting to keep pace with them, got crying-drunk, and disclosed a well-matured plan for blowing up their powder-magazine. The ammunition had been stored in the village of Kadmin, which was a holy village, entirely inhabited by fakis. The Bascha had made sure that none of the natives would risk blowing up these holy men, even for the sake of destroying his ammunition, and he was unwilling to keep so large a quantity of powder amidst his numerous camp-fires and reckless soldiery. But the fakis had made their arrangements. On a certain night they were to depart, carrying away all their property into the great caverns of Mount Kassela, and fire was to be applied to the house that held the powder. Had the plot succeeded, the whole army was lost, isolated as it was in the midst of unfriendly tribes, embittered by its excesses, and by the aggressions and treachery of its chief, and who, stimulated by their priests, would in all probability have exterminated it to the last man, when it no longer had cartridges for its defence. The drunken faki's indiscretion saved Achmet and his troops; the village was forthwith surrounded, and the next day the ammunition was transferred to camp. Not to rouse the whole population against him, the Bascha abstained for the moment from punishing the conspirators, but he was not the man to let them escape altogether; and some time afterwards, Mr Werne, who had returned to Chartum, received a letter from his brother, informing him that nine fakis had been hung on palm-trees just outside the camp, and that the magnanimous Achmet proposed treating forty more in the same way.
A mighty liar was Effendina Achmet Bascha, as ever ensnared a foe or broke faith with a friend. Greedy and cruel was he also, as only a Turkish despot can be. One of his most active and unscrupulous agents was a bloodsucker named Hassan Effendi, whom he sent to the country of the Beni-Amers to collect three thousand five hundred cows and thirteen hundred camels, the complement of their tribute. Although this tribe had upon the whole behaved very peaceably, Hassan's first act was to shoot down a couple of hundred of them like wild beasts. Then he seized a large number of camels belonging to the Haddendas, although the tribe was at that very time in friendly negotiation with the Bascha. The Haddendas revenged themselves by burning Gos-Rajeb. In proof of their valour, Hassan's men cut off the ears of the murdered Beni-Amers, and took them to Achmet, who gave them money for the trophies. "They had forced a slave to cut off the ears; yonder now lies the man – raving mad, and bound with cords. Camel-thieves, too – no matter to what tribe they belong – if caught in flagranti, lose their ears, for which the Bascha gives a reward. That many a man who never dreamed of committing a theft loses his ears in this way, is easy to understand, for the operation is performed on the spot." Dawson Borrer, in his Campaign in the Kabylie, mentions a very similar practice as prevailing in Marshal Bugeaud's camp, where ten francs was the fixed price for the head of a horse-stealer, it being left to the soldiers who severed the heads and received the money to discriminate between horse-stealers and honest men. Whether Bugeaud took a hint from the Bascha, or the Bascha was an admiring imitator of Bugeaud, remains a matter of doubt. "Besides many handsome women and children, Hassan Effendi brought in two thousand nine hundred cows, and seven thousand sheep." He might have been a French prince returning from a razzia. "For himself he kept eighty camels, which he said he had bought." A droll dog, this Hassan Effendi, but withal rather covetous – given to sell his soldier's rations, and to starve his servants, a single piastre – about twopence halfpenny – being his whole daily outlay for meat for his entire household, who lived for the most part upon durra and water. If his servants asked for wages, they received the bastinado. "The Bascha had given the poor camel-drivers sixteen cows. The vampire (Hassan) took upon himself to appropriate thirteen of them." Mr Werne reported this robbery to the Bascha, but Achmet merely replied "malluch" – signifying, "it matters not." When inferior officers received horses as their share of booty, Hassan bought them of them, but always forgot to pay, and the poor subalterns feared to complain to the Bascha, who favoured the rogue, and recommended him to the authorities at Cairo for promotion to the rank of Bey, because, as he told Mr Werne with an ironical smile, Hassan was getting very old and infirm, and when he died the Divan would bring charges against him, and inherit his wealth. Thus are things managed in Egypt. No wonder that, where such injustice and rascality prevail, many are found to rejoice at the prospect of a change of rulers. "News from Souakim (on the Red Sea) of the probable landing of the English, excite great interest in camp; from all sides they come to ask questions of us, thinking that we, as Franks, must know the intentions of the invaders. Upon the whole, they would not be displeased at such a change of government, particularly when we tell them of the good pay and treatment customary amongst the English; and that with them no officer has to endure indignities from his superiors in rank."
"I have now," says Mr Werne, (page 256,) "been more than half a year away from Chartum, continually in the field, and not once have I enjoyed the great comfort of reposing, undressed, between clean white sheets, but have invariably slept in my clothes, on the ground, or on the short but practical angarèb. All clean linen disappears, for the constant perspiration and chalky dust burns everything; and the servants do not understand washing, inasmuch as, contrasted with their black hides, everything appears white to them, and for the last three months no soap has been obtainable. And in the midst of this dirty existence, which drags itself along like a slow fever, suddenly 'Julla!' is the word, and one hangs for four or five days, eighty or a hundred leagues, upon the camel's back, every bone bruised by the rough motion, – the broiling sun, thirst, hunger, and cold, for constant companions. Man can endure much: I have gone through far more than I ever thought I could, – vomiting and in a raging fever on the back of a dromedary, under a midday sun, more dead than alive, held upon my saddle by others, and yet I recovered. To have remained behind would have been to encounter certain death from the enemy, or from wild beasts. We have seen what a man can bear, under the pressure of necessity; in my present uniform and monotonous life I compare myself to the camels tied before my tent, which sometimes stand up, sometimes slowly stretch themselves on the ground, careless whether crows or ravens walk over their backs, constantly moving their jaws, looking up at the sun, and then, by way of a change, taking a mouthful of grass, but giving no signs of joy or curiosity."
From this state of languid indifference Mr Werne was suddenly and pleasurably roused by intelligence that a second expedition was fitting out for the White Nile. He and his brother immediately petitioned the Bascha for leave to accompany it. The desired permission was granted to him, but refused to his brother. There was too much sickness in the camp, the Bascha said; he could not spare his doctor, and lacked confidence in the Italian, Bellotti. The fondly-attached brothers were thus placed in a painful dilemma: they had hoped to pursue their wanderings hand in hand, and to pass their lives together, and loth indeed were they to sunder in those sickly and perilous regions. At last they made up their minds to the parting. It has been already recorded in Mr Werne's former work, how, within ten days of their next meeting, his beloved brother's eyes were closed in death.
In various respects, Mr Werne's Feldzug is one of the most curious books of travel and adventure that, for a very long time, has appeared. It has three points of particular attraction and originality. In the first place, the author wanders in a region previously unexplored by Christian and educated travellers, and amongst tribes whose bare names have reached the ears of but few Europeans. Secondly, he campaigns as officer in such an army as we can hardly realise in these days of high civilisation and strict military discipline, – so wild, motley, and grotesque are its customs, composition, and equipment, – an army whose savage warriors, strange practices, and barbarous cruelties, make us fancy ourselves in presence of some fierce Moslem horde of the middle ages, marching to the assault of Italy or Hungary. Thirdly, during his long sojourn in camp he had opportunities such as few ordinary travellers enjoy, and of which he diligently profited, to study and note down the characteristics and social habits of many of the races of men that make up the heterogeneous population of the Ottoman empire. Some of the physiological and medical details with which he favours us, would certainly have been more in their place in his brother's professional journal, than in a book intended for the public at large; and passages are not wanting at which the squeamish will be apt to lay down the volume in disgust. For such persons Mr Werne does not write; and his occasional indelicacy and too crude details are compensated, to our thinking, by his manly honest tone, and by the extraordinary amount of useful and curious information he has managed to pack into two hundred and seventy pages. As a whole, the Expedition to the White Nile, which contains a vast deal of dry meteorological and geographical detail, is decidedly far less attractive than the present book, which is as amusing as any romance. We have read it with absorbing interest, well pleased with the hint its author throws out at its close, that the records of his African wanderings are not yet all exhausted.
MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE
"What is courage?" said my uncle Roland, rousing himself from a reverie into which he had fallen after the Sixth Book in this history had been read to our family circle.
"What is courage?" he repeated more earnestly. "Is it insensibility to fear? That may be the mere accident of constitution; and, if so, there is no more merit in being courageous than in being this table."
"I am very glad to hear you speak thus," observed Mr Caxton, "for I should not like to consider myself a coward; yet I am very sensible to fear in all dangers, bodily and moral."
"La, Austin, how can you say so?" cried my mother, firing up; "was it not only last week that you faced the great bull that was rushing after Blanche and the children?"
Blanche at that recollection stole to my father's chair, and, hanging over his shoulder, kissed his forehead.
Mr Caxton, (sublimely unmoved by these flatteries.) – "I don't deny that I faced the bull, but I assert that I was horribly frightened."
Roland. – "The sense of honour which conquers fear is the true courage of chivalry: you could not run away when others were looking on – no gentleman could."
Mr Caxton. – "Fiddledee! It was not on my gentility that I stood, Captain. I should have run fast enough, if it had done any good. I stood upon my understanding. As the bull could run faster than I could, the only chance of escape was to make the brute as frightened as myself."
Blanche. – "Ah, you did not think of that; your only thought was to save me and the children."
Mr Caxton. – "Possibly, my dear – very possibly I might have been afraid for you too; – but I was very much afraid for myself. However, luckily I had the umbrella, and I sprang it up and spread it forth in the animal's stupid eyes, hurling at him simultaneously the biggest lines I could think of in the First Chorus of the 'Seven against Thebes.' I began with Eledemnas pedioploktupos; and when I came to the grand howl of Ἰὼ, ἰὼ, ἰὼ, ἰὼ – the beast stood appalled as at the roar of a lion. I shall never forget his amazed snort at the Greek. Then he kicked up his hind legs, and went bolt through the gap in the hedge. Thus, armed with Æschylus and the umbrella, I remained master of the field; but (continued Mr Caxton, ingenuously,) I should not like to go through that half minute again."
"No man would," said the Captain kindly. "I should be very sorry to face a bull myself, even with a bigger umbrella than yours, and even though I had Æschylus, and Homer to boot, at my fingers' ends."
Mr Caxton. – "You would not have minded if it had been a Frenchman with a sword in his hand?"
Captain. – "Of course not. Rather liked it than otherwise," he added grimly.
Mr Caxton. – "Yet many a Spanish matador, who doesn't care a button for a bull, would take to his heels at the first lunge en carte from a Frenchman. Therefore, in fact, if courage be a matter of constitution, it is also a matter of custom. We face calmly the dangers we are habituated to, and recoil from those of which we have no familiar experience. I doubt if Marshal Turenne himself would have been quite at his ease on the tight-rope; and a rope-dancer, who seems disposed to scale the heavens with Titanic temerity, might possibly object to charge on a cannon."
Captain Roland. – "Still, either this is not the courage I mean, or there is another kind of it. I mean by courage that which is the especial force and dignity of the human character, without which there is no reliance on principle, no constancy in virtue – a something," continued my uncle gallantly, and with a half bow towards my mother, "which your sex shares with our own. When the lover, for instance, clasps the hand of his betrothed, and says, 'Wilt thou be true to me, in spite of absence and time, in spite of hazard and fortune, though my foes malign me, though thy friends may dissuade thee, and our lot in life may be rough and rude?' and when the betrothed answers, 'I will be true,' does not the lover trust to her courage as well as her love?"
"Admirably put, Roland," said my father. "But apropos of what do you puzzle us with these queries on courage?"
Captain Roland, (with a slight blush.) – "I was led to the inquiry (though, perhaps, it may be frivolous to take so much thought of what, no doubt, costs Pisistratus so little) by the last chapters in my nephew's story. I see this poor boy, Leonard, alone with his fallen hopes, (though very irrational they were,) and his sense of shame. And I read his heart, I dare say, better than Pisistratus does, for I could feel like that boy if I had been in the same position; and, conjecturing what he and thousands like him must go through, I asked myself, 'What can save him and them?' I answered, as a soldier would answer, 'Courage!' Very well. But pray, Austin, what is courage?"
Mr Caxton, (prudently backing out of a reply.) – "Papæ! Brother, since you have just complimented the ladies on that quality, you had better address your question to them."
Blanche here leant both hands on my father's chair, and said, looking down at first bashfully, but afterwards warming with the subject, "Do you not think, sir, that little Helen has already suggested, if not what is courage, what at least is the real essence of all courage that endures and conquers, that ennobles, and hallows, and redeems? Is it not Patience, father? – and that is why we women have a courage of our own. Patience does not affect to be superior to fear, but at least it never admits despair."
Pisistratus. – "Kiss me, my Blanche, for you have come near to the truth which perplexed the soldier and puzzled the sage."
Mr Caxton, (tartly.) – "If you mean me by the sage, I was not puzzled at all. Heaven knows you do right to inculcate patience – it is a virtue very much required in your readers. Nevertheless," added my father, softening with the enjoyment of his joke – "nevertheless Blanche and Helen are quite right. Patience is the courage of the conqueror; it is the virtue, par excellence, of Man against Destiny – of the One against the World, and of the Soul against Matter. Therefore this is the courage of the Gospel; and its importance, in a social view – its importance to races and institutions – cannot be too earnestly inculcated. What is it that distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon from all other branches of the human family, peoples deserts with his children, and consigns to them the heritage of rising worlds? What but his faculty to brave, to suffer, to endure – the patience that resists firmly, and innovates slowly. Compare him with the Frenchman. The Frenchman has plenty of valour – that there is no denying; but as for fortitude, he has not enough to cover the point of a pin. He is ready to rush out of the world if he is bit by a flea."
Captain Roland. – "There was a case in the papers the other day, Austin, of a Frenchman who actually did destroy himself because he was so teased by the little creatures you speak of. He left a paper on his table, saying that 'life was not worth having at the price of such torments.'"5
Mr Caxton, (solemnly.) – "Sir, their whole political history, since the great meeting of the Tiers Etat, has been the history of men who would rather go to the devil than be bit by a flea. It is the record of human impatience, that seeks to force time, and expects to grow forests from the spawn of a mushroom. Wherefore, running through all extremes of constitutional experiment, when they are nearest to democracy they are next door to a despot; and all they have really done is to destroy whatever constitutes the foundation of every tolerable government. A constitutional monarchy cannot exist without aristocracy, nor a healthful republic endure with corruption of manners. The cry of Equality is incompatible with Civilisation, which, of necessity, contrasts poverty with wealth – and, in short, whether it be an emperor or a mob that is to rule, Force is the sole hope of order, and the government is but an army.
"Impress, O Pisistratus! impress the value of patience as regards man and men. You touch there on the kernel of the social system – the secret that fortifies the individual and disciplines the million. I care not, for my part, if you are tedious so long as you are earnest. Be minute and detailed. Let the real human life, in its war with Circumstance, stand out. Never mind if one can read you but slowly – better chance of being less quickly forgotten. Patience, patience! By the soul of Epictetus, your readers shall set you an example!"
CHAPTER II
Leonard had written twice to Mrs Fairfield, twice to Riccabocca, and once to Mr Dale; and the poor proud boy could not bear to betray his humiliation. He wrote as with cheerful spirits – as if perfectly satisfied with his prospects. He said that he was well employed, in the midst of books, and that he had found kind friends. Then he turned from himself to write about those whom he addressed, and the affairs and interests of the quiet world wherein they lived. He did not give his own address, nor that of Mr Prickett. He dated his letters from a small coffeehouse near the bookseller, to which he occasionally went for his simple meals. He had a motive in this. He did not desire to be found out. Mr Dale replied for himself and for Mrs Fairfield, to the epistles addressed to these two. Riccabocca wrote also. Nothing could be more kind than the replies of both. They came to Leonard in a very dark period in his life, and they strengthened him in the noiseless battle with despair.
If there be a good in the world that we do without knowing it, without conjecturing the effect it may have upon a human soul, it is when we show kindness to the young in the first barren footpath up the mountain of life.
Leonard's face resumed its serenity in his intercourse with his employer; but he did not recover his boyish ingenuous frankness. The under-currents flowed again pure from the turbid soil and the splintered fragments uptorn from the deep; but they were still too strong and too rapid to allow transparency to the surface. And now he stood in the sublime world of books, still and earnest as a seer who invokes the dead. And thus, face to face with knowledge, hourly he discovered how little he knew. Mr Prickett lent him such works as he selected and asked to take home with him. He spent whole nights in reading; and no longer desultorily. He read no more poetry, no more Lives of Poets. He read what poets must read if they desire to be great —Sapere principium et fons– strict reasonings on the human mind; the relations between motive and conduct, thought and action; the grave and solemn truths of the past world; antiquities, history, philosophy. He was taken out of himself. He was carried along the ocean of the universe. In that ocean, O seeker, study the law of the tides; and seeing Chance nowhere – Thought presiding over all – Fate, that dread phantom, shall vanish from creation, and Providence alone be visible in heaven and on earth!
CHAPTER III
There was to be a considerable book-sale at a country house one day's journey from London. Mr Prickett meant to have attended it on his own behalf, and that of several gentlemen who had given him commissions for purchase; but, on the morning fixed for his departure, he was seized with a severe return of his old foe the rheumatism. He requested Leonard to attend instead of himself. Leonard went, and was absent for the three days during which the sale lasted. He returned late in the evening, and went at once to Mr Prickett's house. The shop was closed; he knocked at the private entrance; a strange person opened the door to him, and, in reply to his question if Mr Prickett was at home, said with a long and funereal face – "Young man, Mr Prickett senior is gone to his long home, but Mr Richard Prickett will see you."
At this moment a very grave-looking man, with lank hair, looked forth from the side-door communicating between the shop and the passage, land then, stepped forward – "Come in, sir; you are my late uncle's assistant, Mr Fairfield, I suppose?"
"Your late uncle! Heavens, sir, do I understand aright – can Mr Prickett be dead since I left London?"
"Died, sir, suddenly last night. It was an affection of the heart; the Doctor thinks the rheumatism attacked that organ. He had small time to provide for his departure, and his account-books seem in sad disorder: I am his nephew and executor."
Leonard had now followed the nephew into the shop. There, still burned the gas-lamp. The place seemed more dingy and cavernous than before. Death always makes its presence felt in the house it visits.
Leonard was greatly affected – and yet more, perhaps, by the utter want of feeling which the nephew exhibited. In fact, the deceased had not been on friendly terms with this person, his nearest relative and heir-at-law, who was also a bookseller.
"You were engaged but by the week I find, young man, on reference to my late uncle's papers. He gave you £1 a week – a monstrous sum! I shall not require your services any further. I shall move these books to my own house. You will be good enough to send me a list of those you bought at the sale, and your account of travelling-expenses, &c. What may be due to you shall be sent to your address. Good evening."
Leonard went home, shocked and saddened at the sudden death of his kind employer. He did not think much of himself that night; but, when he rose the next day, he suddenly felt that the world of London lay before him, without a friend, without a calling, without an occupation for bread.
This time it was no fancied sorrow, no poetic dream disappointed. Before him, gaunt and palpable, stood Famine.
