pirates prove their courage? Aye, run to the jungle, ye Port Said pimp, you! By the Seven Heroes, I shall give thy head to my Lingas yet, thou uncircumcised carrion! Ach! Burn his grandmither - he's awa' wi' it, so he is!'
By this time the fort was taken,30 and we left it burning, and the dead unburied, for it had been discovered from a prisoner that our principal quarry, Suleiman Usman, with the Sulu Queen - and presumably my errant wife- had taken refuge up the Skrang river with a force of praus. So it was back down the Undup again, a good deal faster than we had come up, to the mainstream, where Phlegethon was guarding the junction.
'You can't run much farther now, Usman, my son,' says Brooke. 'Skrang's navigable for a few miles at most; if he takes Sulu Queen any distance up he'll ground her. He's bound to stand and fight - why, he's still got more men and keels than we have, and while we've been chasing Muller he's had time to put 'em in order. He must know we're pretty used up and thinned out, too.'
That was no lie, either. The faces round the table in Phlegethon's tiny ward-room were puffy and hollow-eyed with fatigue; Keppel, the spruce naval officer of a week ago, looked like a scarecrow with his unshaven cheeks and matted hair, his uniform coat cut and torn and the epaulette burned away; Charlie Johnson, with his arm in a blood-stained sling, was dozing and waking like a clockwork doll; even Stuart, normally the liveliest of fellows, was sitting tuckered out, with his head in his hands, his half-cleaned revolver on the table before him. (I can see it now, with the little brass ram-rod sticking out of the barrel, and a big black moth perched on the foresight, rubbing its feelers.) Only Brooke was still as offensively chipper as ever, clean-shaven and alert, for all that his eyes looked like streaky bacon; he glanced round at us, and I could guess that he was thinking: this pack can't follow much longer.
'However,' says he, grinning slyly, 'we ain't as used up as all that, are we? I reckon there's three days' energy left in every man here - and four in me. I tell you what … ' he squared his elbows on the table ' … I'm going to give a dinner-party tomorrow night - full dress for everyone, of course - on the eve of what is going to be our last fight against these rascals—'
'Bismillah! I'd like tae believe that,' says Paitingi.
'Well, our last on this expedition, anyway,' cries Brooke. 'It's bound to be - either we wipe them up or they finish us - but that ain't going to happen, not after the drubbings we've given 'em already. I've got a dozen of champagne down below, and we'll crack 'em to our crowning success, eh?'
'Wouldn't it be better to keep 'em for afterwards?' says Keppel, but at this Stuart raised his head and shook it, smiling wearily.
'Might not all be here by then. This way, everyone's sure of a share beforehand - that's what you said the night before we went in against the Lingas in the old Royalist, ain't it, J.B.? Remember - the nineteen of us, five years ago? 'There's no drinking after death.' By Jove, though - there ain't many of the nineteen left …
'Plenty of new chums, though,' says Brooke quickly, 'and they're going to sing for their supper, just the way we did then, and have done ever since.' He shoved Charlie Johnson's nodding head to and fro. 'Wake up, Charlie! It's singing night, if you want your dinner tomorrow! Come on, or I'll shove a wet sponge down your back! Sing, laddie, sing! George has given you the lead!'
Johnson blinked and stammered, but Brooke gave tongue with 'Here's a health to the King, and a lasting peace', thumping the table, and Charlie came in, croaking, on the lines 'So let us drink while we have breath For there's no drinking after death' and carried on solo to the end, goggling like an owl, while Brooke beat the table and cried, good boy, Charlie, sick 'em, pup. The others looked embarrassed, but Brooke rounded on Keppel, badgering him to sing; Keppel didn't want to, at first, and sat looking annoyed and sheepish, but Brooke worked away at him, full of high spirits, and what else was the chap to do? So he sang 'Spanish Ladies'— he sang well, I'm bound to say, in a rolling bass - and by this time even the tiredest round the table were grinning and joining in the chorus, with Brooke encouraging and keeping time, and watching us like a hawk. He sang 'The Arethusa' himself, and even coaxed Paitingi, who gave us a psalm, at which Charlie giggled hysterically, but Keppel joined in like thunder, and then Brooke glanced at me, nodding quietly, so I found myself giving 'em 'Drink, puppy, drink', and they stamped and thumped to make the cabin shiver.
It was a shameful performance - so forced and false it was disgusting, this jolly lunatic putting heart into his men by making 'em sing, and everyone hating it. But they sang, you'll notice, and me along with 'em, and at the finish Brooke jumps up and cries:
'Come, that's none so bad! We'll have a choir yet. Spy-boats will lead tomorrow - 5 a.m. sharp, then Dido's pinnace, the two cutters, gig, Jolly Bachelor, then the small boats. Dinner at seven, prompt. Good night, gentlemen!'
And off he went, leaving us gawking at each other; then Keppel shook his head, smiling, and sighed, and we dispersed, feeling pretty foolish, I dare say. I found myself wondering why they tolerated Brooke and his schoolboy antics, which were patently pathetic; why did they humour him? - for that is what it was. It wasn't fear, or love, or even respect; I suspect they felt it would somehow be mean to disappoint him, and so they fell in with every folly, whether it was charging a pirate prau in a jolly-boat or singing shanties when they ought to have been nursing their wounds or crawling away to sink into an exhausted sleep. Yes, they did humour him - God only knows why. Mind you, mad and dangerous as he was, I'm bound to say he was difficult to refuse, in anything.
I managed it later that night, though, admittedly not to his face. I was snug under the Jolly Bachelor's ladder when the pirates came sneaking silently out of the mist in sampans and tried to take us by surprise. They were on the deck and murdering our lookouts before we were any the wiser, and if it hadn't been that the deck was littered with tacks to catch their bare feet, that would have been the end of the ship, and everyone aboard, including me. As it was, there was the deuce of a scrap in the dark, with Brooke yelling for everyone to pitch in - I burrowed closer into cover myself, clutching my pistol, until the hurroosh had died down, when I scuttled up quickly and blundered about, glaring and letting on that I'd been there all the time. I did yeoman work helping to heave dead pirates overside, and then we stood to until daylight, but they didn't trouble us again.
Next day it began to rain like fury, and we set off up the Skrang into a perfect sheet of water which cut visibility almost to nothing and pitted the river like small-shot. All day we toiled slowly into the murk, with the river narrowing until it was a bare furlong wide, and devil an enemy did we see. I sat sodden in Paitingi's spy-boat, reduced to the nadir of misery, baling constantly until my whole body cried out with one great ache; by dark I was dropping with fatigue - and then, when we anchored, damn my skin if we didn't have to shave and wash and dig out clean duds for Brooke's dinner-party on the Jolly Bachelor. Looking back, I can't imagine why I put up with it - I don't attempt to fathom the minds of the others; they all dressed in their best, soaking wet, and I couldn't show unwilling, could I? We assembled in the Jolly Bachelor's cabin, steaming and dripping, and there was the table laid for dinner, silver, glass, and all, with Brooke in his blue swallow-tail and brass buttons, welcoming us like a bloody governor-general, taking wine with Keppel, waving us to our seats, and frowning because the turtle soup was cold.
I don't believe this is happening, thinks I; it's all a terrible nightmare, and Stuart isn't sitting opposite me in his black broadcloth with his string-cravat tied in a fancy bow, and this ain't real champagne I'm drinking by the light of reeking slush-lamps, with everyone crowded round the board in the tiny cabin, and they're not listening breathlessly while I tell 'em about getting Alfred Mynn leg-before at Lord's. There aren't any pirates, really, and we're not miles up some stinking creek in Borneo, drinking the loyal toast with the thunder bellowing outside and the rain gushing down the companion, and Brooke clipping cigars and passing them round while the Malay steward puts the port on the table. I couldn't bring myself to believe that all round us was a fleet of sampans and spy-boats, loaded with Dyaks and blue jackets and other assorted savages, and that tomorrow we would be reliving the horror of Patusan all over again; it was all too wild and confused and unreal, and although I must have accounted for a bottle of warm champagne, and about a pint of port, I got up from that table as sober as I sat down.
It was real enough in the morning, though - the morning of that last dreadful day on the Skrang river. The weather had cleared like magic just before dawn, and the narrow waterway ahead was gleaming brown and oily in the sunlight between its olive walls of jungle. It was deathly hot, and for once the forest was comparatively silent, but there was an excitement through the fleet that you could almost feel beating in waves through the muggy air; it wasn't only that Brooke had predicted that this would be the last battle - I believe there was a realization too that if we didn't reach conclusions with the pirates lurking some-where ahead, our expedition would come to a halt through sheer exhaustion, and there would be nothing for it but to turn downriver again. It bred a kind of wild desperation in the others; Stuart was shivering with impatience as he dropped beside me into Paitingi's spy-boat, drawing his pistol and shoving it back in his belt, then doing the same thing over again; even Paitingi, in the bow, was taut as a fiddle-string, snapping at the Lingas and twitching at his red beard. My own condition I leave you to
