The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 by Various
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Various >> The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893
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"I vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," answered the little Frenchman,
humbly.
"You vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," repeated the other bitterly,
as he led him back to his seat. "I shall put yer down in the middle of
the road if I 'ave much more of yer. You stop there till I come and
sling yer out. I ain't likely to let yer go much past yer Sharing Cross,
I shall be too jolly glad to get rid o' yer."
The poor Frenchman subsided, and we jolted on. At "The Angel" we, of
course, stopped. "Charing Cross," shouted the conductor, and up sprang
the Frenchman.
"Oh, my Gawd," said the conductor, taking him by the shoulders and
forcing him down into the corner seat, "wot am I to do? Carnt somebody
sit on 'im?"
[Illustration: "'BLESSED IF I DIDN'T RUN HIM ON TO VICTORIA.'"]
He held him firmly down until the 'bus started, and then released him.
At the top of Chancery Lane the same scene took place, and the poor
little Frenchman became exasperated.
"He keep on saying Sharing Cross, Sharing Cross," he exclaimed, turning
to the other passengers; "and it is _not_ Sharing Cross. He is fool."
"Carnt yer understand," retorted the conductor, equally indignant; "of
course I say Sharing Cross--I mean Charing Cross, but that don't mean
that it _is_ Charing Cross. That means that--" and then perceiving from
the blank look in the Frenchman's face the utter impossibility of ever
making the matter clear to him, he turned to us with an appealing
gesture, and asked:
"Does any gentleman know the French for 'bloomin' idiot'?"
A day or two afterwards, I happened to enter his omnibus again.
"Well," I asked him, "did you get your French friend to Charing Cross
all right?"
"No, sir," he replied, "you'll 'ardly believe it, but I 'ad a bit of a
row with a policeman just before I got to the corner, and it put 'im
clean out o' my 'ead. Blessed if I didn't run 'im on to Victoria."
(_To be continued_.)
* * * * *
THE SKATER.
BY WILLIAM CANTON. ILLUSTRATED BY A. L. BOWLEY.
[Illustration]
O'er glassy levels of the mere
She glides on slanting skate;
She loves in fairy curves to veer
And weave her figure eight.
Bright flower in fur, I would thy feet
Could weave my heart and thine, my sweet,
Thus into one glad life complete!
Harsh winter, rage thy rudest:
Freeze, freeze, thou churlish sky;
Blow, arctic wind, thy shrewdest--
What care my heart and I!
* * * * *
MY SERVANT ANDREAS
BY ARCHIBALD FORBES.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY FREDERIC VILLIERS.
[Illustration: "ANDREAS."]
I think it quite likely that some of my young American friends, about
ten months ago, were burning to have an opportunity of accompanying
General Miles down the Pacific coast, and of describing in glowing
sentences to their countrymen at home how Uncle Sam's young man turned
to flight the Chilian insurrectionists, who were breathing out
threatening and slaughter against the great Northern Republic. There is
an undoubted fascination in the picturesque and adventurous life of the
war correspondent. One must, of course, have a distinct bent for the
avocation, and if he is to succeed he must possess certain salient
attributes. He must expose himself to rather greater risks than fall to
the lot of the average fighting man, without enjoying any of the
happiness of retaliation which stirs the blood of the latter; the
correspondent must sit quietly on his horse in the fire, and, while
watching every turn in the battle, must wear the aspect as if he rather
enjoyed the storm of missiles than otherwise. When the fighting is over,
the soldier, if not killed, generally can eat and sleep; ere the echoes
of it are silent, the correspondent of energy--and if he has not energy
he is not worth his salt--must already be galloping his hardest towards
the nearest telegraph wire, which, as like as not, is a hundred miles
distant. He must "get there," by hook or by crook, in a minimum of time;
and as soon as his message is on the wires, he must be hurrying back to
the army, else he may chance to miss the great battle of the war. The
correspondent must be most things to all men; he must have the sweet,
angelic temper of a woman, be as affable as if he were running for
office, and at the same time be big and ugly enough to impress the
conviction that it would be extremely unwise to take any liberties
with him.
The career, no doubt, has some incidental drawbacks. No fewer than five
British correspondents were killed in the recent campaigns in the
Soudan. General Sherman threatened to hang all the correspondents found
in his camp after a certain day, and General Sherman was the kind of man
to fulfil any threat he made. I suppose there was no correspondent
taking part in the Franco-German and Russo-Turkish wars who was not in
custody over and over again on suspicion of being a spy. I have been a
prisoner myself in France, Spain, Servia, Germany, Austria, Hungary,
Russia, Roumania and Bulgaria; and I may perhaps venture to remark in
passing that I cannot recommend any of these countries from this point
of view. But the casual confinements, half irritating, half comic, to
which he may be subjected, do not bother the war correspondent of the
old world nearly as much as do the foreign languages which, if he is not
a good linguist, hamper him every hour of every day. He really should
possess the gift of tongues--be conversant with all European languages,
a neat assortment of the Asiatic languages, and a few of the African
tongues, such as Abyssinian, Ashantee, Zulu, and Soudanese. But how few
in the nature of things can approximate this polyglot versatility. Often
in Eastern Europe, and in Afghanistan, I have envied Messrs. Swinton,
Smalley, Whitelaw Reed, and the other notable war correspondents of the
American Civil War, in that they had not the difficulties of outlandish
tongues to contend with. I own myself to be a poor linguist, and have
many and many a time suffered for my dullness of what the Scotch call
"up-take." It is true that I was fairly conversant with French and
German, and could express my wants in Russian, Roumanian, Bulgarian,
Spanish, Turkish, Hindustanee, Pushtoo, and Burmese, every word of which
smatterings I have long since forgotten. But the truth is that the
poorest peoples in the world in acquiring foreign languages are the
English and the French; the readiest are the Russians and Americans. It
was, after a fashion, a liberal education to listen to the fluency in
some half-dozen languages of Poor McGahan, the "Ohio boy," who graduated
from the plough to be perhaps the most brilliant war correspondent of
modern times. His compatriot and colleague, Frank Millet, who has fallen
away from glory as a war correspondent, and has taken to the inferior
trade of painting, seemed to pick up a language by the mere accident of
finding himself on the soil where it was spoken. In the first three
days, after crossing the Danube into Bulgaria, Millet went about with
book in hand, gathering in the names of things at which he pointed, and
jotting down each acquisition in the book. On the fourth day he could
swear in Bulgarian, copiously, fervently, and with a measure of
intelligibility. Within a week he had conquered the uncouth tongue. As
he voyaged lately down the Danube from source to mouth, charmingly
describing the scenic panorama of the great river in the pages of
_Harper_, those of you who have read those sketches will not have failed
to notice how Millet talked to German, Hungarian, Servian, Bulgarian,
Roumanian, and Turkish, each in his own tongue, those diverse languages
having been acquired by him during the few months of the
Russo-Turkish war.
[Illustration: "MACGAHAN AND FRANK MILLET."]
By this time, you may be wondering just where "Andreas" comes in.
Perhaps I have been over long in getting to my specific subject; but I
will not be discursive any more. It was at the _table d'hote_ in the
Serbische Krone Hotel, in Belgrade, where I first set eyes on Andreas.
In the year 1876, Servia had thought proper to throw off the yoke of her
Turkish suzerain, and to attempt to assert her independence by force of
arms. But for very irregularly paid tribute she was virtually
independent already, and probably in all Servia there were not two
hundred Turks. But she ambitiously desired to have the name of as well
as the actuality of being independent; the Russians helped her with
arms, officers, and volunteer soldiers; and when I reached Belgrade, in
May of the year named, there had already been fighting, in which the
Servians had by no means got the worst. No word of the Servian tongue
had I, and it was the reverse of pleasant for a war correspondent in
such plight to learn that outside of Belgrade nobody, or at least hardly
anybody, knew a word of any other language than the native Servian. As I
ate, I was being attended by a very assiduous waiter, whose alertness
and anxiety to please were very conspicuous. He was smart with quite
un-Oriental smartness; he whisked about the tables with deftness; he
spoke to me in German, to the Russian officers over against me in what I
assumed was Russian, to the Servians dining behind me in what I took to
be Servian. I liked the look of the man; there was intelligence in his
aspect. One could not call him handsome, but there was character in the
keen black eye, the high features and the pronounced chin, fringed on
either side by bushy black whiskers.
[Illustration: "ANDREAS AS A FORAGER."]
I had brought no servant with me; the average British servant is worse
than useless in a foreign country, and the dubiously-polyglot courier is
a snare and a deception on campaign. I had my eye on Andreas for a
couple of days, during which he was of immense service to me. He seemed
to know and stand well with everyone in Belgrade; it was he, indeed, who
presented me in the restaurant to the Prime Minister and the Minister
for War, who got together for me my field necessaries, who helped me to
buy my horses, and who narrated to me the progress of the campaign so
far as it had gone. On the third day I had him in my room and asked
whether he would like to come with me into the field as my servant. He
accepted the offer with effusion; we struck hands on the compact; he
tendered me credentials which I ascertained to be extremely
satisfactory; and then he gave me a little sketch of himself. It was
somewhat mixed, as indeed was his origin. Primarily he was a Servian,
but his maternal grandmother had been a Bosniak, an earlier ancestress
had been in a Turkish harem, there was a strain in his blood of the
Hungarian zinganee--the gipsy of Eastern Europe, and one could not look
at his profile without a suspicion that there was a Jewish element in
his pedigree. "A pure mongrel," was what a gentleman of the British
Legation termed Andreas, and this self-contradictory epithet was
scarcely out of place.
Andreas turned out well. He was as hardy as a hill-goat, careless how
and when he ate, or where he slept, which, indeed, was mostly in the
open. It seemed to me that he had cousins all over Servia, chiefly of
the female persuasion, and I am morally certain that the Turkish strain
in his blood had in Andreas its natural development in a species of
_fin-de-siecle_ polygamy. Sherman's prize "bummer" was not in it with
Andreas as a forager. At first, indeed, I suspected him of actual
plundering, so copiously did he bring in supplies, and so little had I
to pay for them; but I was not long in discovering that all kinds of
produce were dirt cheap in Servia, and that as I could myself buy a lamb
for a quarter, it was not surprising that Andreas, to the manner born,
could easily obtain one for half the money. He was an excellent
horsemaster, and the stern vigour with which he chastised the occasional
neglect of the cousin whom he had brought into my service as groom, was
borne in upon me by the frequent howls which were audible from the rear
of my tent. There was not a road in all Servia with whose every winding
Andreas was not conversant, and this "extensive and peculiar" knowledge
of his was often of great service to me. He was a light-weight and an
excellent rider; I have sent him off to Belgrade with a telegram at
dusk, and he was back again by breakfast time next morning, after a
gallop of quite a hundred miles.
No exertion fatigued him; I never saw the man out of humour; there was
but one matter in regard to which I ever had to chide him, and in that I
had perforce to let him have his own way, because I do not believe that
he could restrain himself. He had served the term in the army which is,
or was then, obligatory on all Servians; and on the road or in camp he
was rather more of a "peace at any price" man than ever was the late Mr.
John Bright himself. When the first fight occurred, Andreas claimed to
be allowed to witness it along with me. I demurred; he might get hit;
and if anything should happen to him, what should I do for a servant? At
length I gave him the firm order to remain in camp, and started myself
with the groom behind me on my second horse. The fighting occurred eight
miles from camp, and in the course of it, leaving the groom in the rear,
I had accompanied the Russian General Dochtouroff into a most
unpleasantly hot place, where a storm of Turkish shells were falling in
the effort to hinder the withdrawal of a disabled Servian battery. I
happened to glance over my shoulder, and lo! Andreas on foot was at my
horse's tail, obviously in a state of ecstatic enjoyment of the
situation. I peremptorily ordered him back, and he departed sullenly,
calmly strolling along the line of Turkish fire. Just then, Tchernaieff,
the Servian Commander-in-Chief, had, it seemed, ordered a detachment of
infantry to take in flank the Turkish guns. From where we stood I could
discern the Servian soldiers hurrying forward close under the fringe of
a wood near the line of retirement along which Andreas was sulking.
Andreas saw them too, and retreated no step further, but cut across to
them, snatching up a gun as he ran, and the last I saw of him was while
he was waving on the militiamen with his billycock, and loosing off an
occasional bullet, while he emitted yells of defiance against the Turks,
which might well have struck terror into their very marrow. Andreas came
into camp at night very streaky with powder stains, minus the lobe of
one ear, uneasy as he caught my eye, yet with a certain elateness of
mien. I sacked him that night, and he said he didn't care, and that he
was not ashamed of himself. Next morning, as I was rising, he rushed
into the tent, knelt down, clasped my knees, and bedewed my ankles with
his tears. Of course I reinstated him; I couldn't do without him, and I
think he knew it.
[Illustration: "SNATCHING UP A GUN AS HE RAN."]
But I had yielded too easily. Andreas had established a precedent. He
insisted, in a quiet, positive manner, on accompanying me to every
subsequent battle; and I had to consent, always taking his pledge that
he would obey the injunctions I might lay upon him. And, as a matter of
course, he punctually and invariably violated that pledge when the
crisis of the fighting was drawing to a head, and just when this "peace
at any price" man could not control the bloodthirst that was
parching him.
One never knows how events are to fall out. It happened that this
resolution on the part of Andreas to accompany me into the fights once
assuredly saved my life. It was on the day of Djunis, the last battle
fought by the Servians. In the early part of the day there was a good
deal of scattered woodland fighting in front of the entrenched line,
which they abandoned when the Turks came on in earnest. Andreas and I
were among the trees trying to find a position from which something was
to be seen, when all of a sudden I, who was in advance, plumped right
into the centre of a small scouting party of Turks. They tore me out of
the saddle, and I had given myself up for lost--for the Turks took no
prisoners, their cheerful practice being to slaughter first and then
abominably to mutilate--when suddenly Andreas dashed in among my
captors, shouting aloud in a language which I took to be Turkish, since
he bellowed "Effendi" as he pointed to me. He had thrown away his
billycock and substituted a fez, which he afterwards told me he always
carried in case of accidents, and in one hand he waved a dingy piece of
parchment with a seal dangling from it, which I assumed was some
obsolete firman. The result was truly amazing, and the scene had some
real humour in it. With profound salaams, the Turks unhanded me, helped
me to mount, and, as I rode off at a tangent with Andreas at my horse's
head, called after me what sounded like friendly farewells. When we were
back among the Russians--I don't remember seeing much of the Servians
later on that day--Andreas explained that he had passed himself for the
Turkish dragoman of a British correspondent whom the Padishah delighted
to honour, and that, after expressing a burning desire to defile the
graves of their collective female ancestry, he had assured my captors
that they might count themselves as dead men if they did not immediately
release me. To his ready-witted conduct I undoubtedly owe the ability to
write now this record of a man of curiously complicated nature.
When the campaign ended with the Servian defeat at Djunis, Andreas went
back to his headwaitership at the Serbische Krone in Belgrade. Before
leaving that capital I had the honour of being present at his nuptials,
a ceremony the amenity of which was somewhat disturbed by the violent
incursion into the sacred edifice of sundry ladies all claiming to have
prior claims on the bridegroom of the hour. They were, however,
placated, and subsequently joined the marriage feast in the great arbour
behind the Krone. Andreas faithfully promised to come to me to the ends
of the earth on receipt of a telegram, if I should require his services,
and he were alive.
[Illustration: "ANDREAS DASHED IN AMONG MY CAPTORS."]
Next spring the Russo-Turkish war broke out, and I hurried eastward in
time to see the first Cossack cross the Pruth. I had telegraphed to
Andreas from England to meet me at Bazias on the Danube below Belgrade.
Bazias is the place where the railway used to end, and where we took
steamer for the Lower Danube. Andreas was duly on hand, ready and
serviceable as of old, a little fatter, and a trifle more consequential
than when we had last parted. He was, if possible, rather more at home
in Bucharest than he had been in Belgrade, and recommended me to
Brofft's Hotel, in comparison with which the charges of the Brunswick in
New York are infinitesimal. He bought my wagon and team, he found riding
horses when they were said to be unprocurable, he constructed a most
ingenious tent, of which the wagon was, so to speak, the roof-tree, he
laid in stores, arranged for relays of couriers, and furnished me with a
coachman in the person of a Roumanian Jew who he one day owned was a
distant connection, and whose leading attribute was, that he could
survive more sleep than any other human being I have ever known. We took
the field auspiciously, Mr. Frederic Villiers, the war artist of the
London _Graphic_, being my campaigning comrade. Thus early I discerned a
slight rift in the lute. Andreas did not like Villiers, which showed his
bad taste, or rather, perhaps, the narrowness of his capacity of
affection; and I fear Villiers did not much like Andreas, whom he
thought too familiar. This was true, and it was my fault; but really it
was with difficulty that I could bring myself to treat Andreas as a
servant. He was more, in my estimation, in the nature of the
confidential major-domo, and to me he was simply invaluable. Villiers
had to chew his moustache, and glower discontentedly at Andreas.
I had some good couriers for the conveyance of despatches back across
the Danube to Bucharest, whence everything was telegraphed to London;
but they were essentially fair-weather men. The casual courier may be
alert, loyal, and trustworthy; he may be relied on to try his honest
best, but it is not to be expected of him that he will greatly dare and
count his life but as dross when his incentive to enterprise is merely
filthy lucre. But I could trust Andreas to dare and to endure--to
overcome obstacles, and, if man could, to "get there," where, in the
base-quarters in Bucharest, the amanuenses were waiting to copy out in
round hand for the foreign telegraphist the rapid script of the
correspondent scribbling for life in the saddle or the cleft of a
commanding tree while the shells were whistling past. We missed him
dreadfully when he was gone--even Villiers, who liked good cooking,
owned to thinking long for his return. For, in addition to his other
virtues, Andreas was a capital cook. It is true that his courses had a
habit of arriving at long and uncertain intervals. After a dish of
pungent stew, no other viands appearing to loom in the near future,
Villiers and myself would betake ourselves to smoking, and perhaps on a
quiet day would lapse into slumber. From this we would be aroused by
Andreas to partake of a second course of roast chicken, the bird having
been alive and unconscious of its impending fate when the first course
had been served. No man is perfect, and as regarded Andreas there were
some petty spots on the sun. He had, for instance, a mania for the
purchase of irrelevant poultry, and for accommodating the fowls in our
wagon, tied by the legs, against the day of starvation, which he always,
but causelessly, apprehended. I do not suppose any reader has ever had
any experience of domestic poultry as bedfellows, and I may caution him
earnestly against making any such experiment.
I do not know whether it is a detraction from Andreas's worth to mention
that another characteristic of his was the habit of awaking us in the
still watches of the night, for the purpose of imparting his views on
recondite phases of the great Eastern question. But how trivial were
such peccadilloes in a man who was so resolute not to be beaten in
getting my despatch to the telegraph wire, that once, when three
pontoons of the bridge across the Danube were sunk, he crossed the gap
hand over hand by the hand-rope, sloshing down with the current as the
slack of the rope gave to his weight! Andreas became quite an
institution in the Russian camp. When Ignatieff, the Tsar's intimate,
the great diplomatist who has now curiously fizzled out, would honour us
by partaking sometimes of afternoon tea in our tent, he would call
Andreas by his name and call him "Molodetz"--the Russian for "brave
fellow." In the Servian campaign Dochtouroff had got him the Takova
cross, which Andreas sported with great pride, and Ignatieff used to
tell him that the Tsar was seriously thinking of conferring on him the
Cross of St. George, badinage which Andreas took as dead earnest.
MacGahan used gravely to entreat him to take greater care of his
invaluable life, and hint that if any calamity occurred to him, the
campaign would _ipso facto_ come to an end. Andreas knew that MacGahan
was quizzing him, but it was exceedingly droll how he purred and bridled
under the light touch of that genial humourist, whose merits his own
countrymen, to my thinking, have never adequately recognised. The old
story of a prophet having scant honour in his own country.
[Illustration: "CROSSED THE GAP HAND OVER HAND."]
After the long strain of the desperate but futile attack made by the
Russians on Plevna in the early part of the September of the war, I fell
a victim to the malarial fever of the Lower Danube, and had to be
invalided back to Bucharest. The illness grew upon me, and my condition
became very serious. Worthy Andreas nursed me with great tenderness and
assiduity in the lodgings to which I had been brought, since they would
not accept a fever patient at Brofft's. After some days of wretchedness
I became delirious, and, of course, lost consciousness; my last
recollection was of Andreas wetting my parched lips with lemonade. When
I recovered my senses, and looked out feebly, there was nobody in the
room. How long I had been unconscious I had no idea. I lay there in a
half stupor till evening, unable from weakness to summon any assistance.
In the dusk came the English doctor who had been attending me. "Where is
Andreas?" he asked. I could not tell him. "He was here last night," he
said; "you have been delirious for seven days." The woman of the house
was summoned. She had not seen Andreas since the previous night, but,
busy about her own domestic affairs, had no suspicion until she entered
the room that Andreas was not with me still.
Andreas never returned. It appeared that he had taken away all his
belongings. One day, when gradually mending, I put my hand under the
pillow with intent to find my watch, which was an heirloom, and wind it
up. I could find no watch. No more could I find the bag of ducats which
was alongside the watch before I lost my senses. Search was made
throughout the room without success, and, with whatever reluctance to
believe a thing so utterly unlikely, I could not refrain from the
conviction that Andreas must have carried off both money and watch.
The thought caused a relapse, but at length I attained convalescence,
and was able to drive out. But the doctor was firm that during the now
imminent winter I was not to return to the field. Fortunately, my able
colleagues, MacGahan and Millet, were there; and I was therefore the
less distressed by Dr. ----'s peremptory sentence on me. I was
condemned to return to England as soon as I should be strong enough to
travel.
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