nature.
So now I learned that he was in the diplomatic, which didn’t surprise me, for he was a born toad-eater with a great gift of genteel sponging and an aversion to work. He was full of woe because, as you’ll already have gathered, he’d brought this fortune in silver down from Vienna for shipment to Abyssinia, and lo! the appointed escort had fallen by the way and he was at his wit’s end to find another—couldn’t go himself, diplomatic duty bound him to Austrian soil, etc., etc…. It was at that point that it dawned on him that here was good old Harry, knight of the realm, hero of Crimea and the Mutiny, darling of Horse Guards, and just the chap who could be trusted with a vital mission in his country’s service. Why, I was heaven-sent and no mistake, dear old lad that I was!
There wasn’t a hope of touching him for a loan to see me home, for coming of nabob wealth he was as mean as Solomon Levi, but by pretending interest I was able to take a decent dinner off him at the Locanda Granda before telling him, fairly politely, for one hates to offend, what he could do with his cargo of dollars. He howled a bit, but didn’t press me, for he hadn’t really expected me to agree, and we parted on fair terms, he to visit the station to see that his minions were taking care of the doubloons, I to find a cheap bed for the night. And I hadn’t turned the corner before I saw some thing that had me skipping for the nearest alleyway with my un digested dinner in sudden turmoil. Not twenty yards away across the street, the Austrian lout who’d slapped my face and hurled his chal lenge at my feet was conferring with two uniformed constables and a bearded villain in a billycock hat with plain-clothes peeler written all over him. And there were two armed troopers in tow as well.
Even as I watched them disperse, the officer mounting the steps to the Locanda which I’d just left, the fearful truth was dawning -Tegethoff had left this swine behind to track me down and either hale me to justice as a ravisher of youth (squareheads have the most primitive views about this, as I’d discovered in Munich in ’47 when Bismarck’s bullies interrupted my dalliance with that blubbery slut Baroness Pechmann), or more likely cut me up in a sabre duel. Trieste had suddenly become too hot to hold me—so now you know why a couple of hours later I was in Speedicut’s room at the Victoria, clamouring to be allowed to remove his bullion for him, to Abyssinia or Timbuctoo or any damned place away from Austrian vengeance.
In my funk I even conjured up the nightmare thought that if Tegethoff got his hands on me and instituted inquiries, he might easily discover I was a Legion deserter and hand me over to the bloody Frogs, in which case I’d end my days as a slave in their penal battalion in the Sahara. A groundless fear, looking back, but I’m a great one for starting at shadows, as you may know. I didn’t mention this particular phantasm to Speed, but I did tell him all about Gertrude, ’cos that sort of thing was nuts to him, and he was lost in admiration of my behaviour both as amorist and fugitive.
“How the blazes you always contrive to slide out o’ harm’s way beats me—aye, often as not with some charmer languishin’ after you! Well, ’twas dam’ lucky for you I was here this time!”
“Lucky for both of us. So, now that you know all about my guilty past, d’you still feel like trusting me with your half-million? No fears that I might tool along the coast to Monte Carlo and blue the lot at the wheel?”
Put like that, with a wink and a grin, he didn’t care for it above half, but common sense told him I wasn’t going to levant, (* To steal away, abscond.) and he’d no choice, anyway. So a couple of hours after midnight, there I was at the Klutsch mole, watching Speed’s clerk settle up with the skipper of a neat little smack or yawl or whatever they call ’em, while its crew of Antonios chattered and loafed on the hatches—even in those days Trieste was more Italian than Austrian—and here came Speed in haste across the deserted plaza from the station, with a squad of Royal Marines from his Embassy wheeling the goods on a hand-cart: scores of little strong-boxes with the locks sealed with the royal arms. [7] There were four of the Bootnecks [8] under a sergeant with a jaw like a pike, all very trim with their Sniders slung; Speed’s dollars would be safe from sea pirates and land banditti with this lot on hand.
It may have been my jest about Monte or his natural fear at seeing his precious cargo pass out of his ken, but now that the die was cast Speed had a fit of the doubtfuls; earlier he’d been begging me to come to his rescue, but now he was chewing his lip as they swung the boxes down to the deck with the Eyeties jabbering and the sergeant giving ’em Billingsgate, while I took an easy cheroot at the rail, trying my Italian pidgin on the skipper.
“This ain’t a joke, Flash!” says Speed. “It’s bloody serious! You’re carryin’ my career along with those dollars—my good name, dammit!” As if he had one. “Jesus, if anything should go wrong! You will take care, old chap, won’t you? I mean, you’ll do nothin’ wild… you know, like… like…” He broke off, not caring to say “like buggering off to Pago Pago with the loot'. Instead he concluded glumly: 'Tain’t insured, you know—not a penny of it!”
I assured him that his specie would reach Napier safely in less than four weeks, but he still looked blue and none too eager to hand over the Embassy passport requesting and requiring H.M. ser vants, civil and military, to speed me on my way, and a letter for Napier, asking him to give me a warrant and funds for my passage home. I shook hands briskly before he could change his mind, and as we shoved off and the skipper spun the wheel and his crew dragged the sail aloft, damned if he wasn’t here again, running along the mole, waving and hollering:
“I say, Flash, I forgot to ask you for a receipt!”
I told him to forge my signature if it would make him sleep sounder, and his bleating faded on the warm night air as we stood out from the mole, the little vessel heeling over suddenly as the wind cracked in her sail; the skipper bawled commands as the hands scampered barefoot to tail on to the lines, and I looked back at the great brightly lit crescent of the Trieste waterfront and felt a mighty relief, thinking, well, Flashy my boy, that’s another town you’re glad to say goodbye to on short acquaintance, and here’s to a jolly holiday cruise to a new horizon and an old friend, and then hey! for a swift passage home, and Elspeth waiting. Strange, little Gertrude was fading from memory already, but I found myself reflecting that thanks to my tuition her princeling husband would be either delighted or scandalised on his wedding night—possibly both, the lucky fellow.
You gather from this that I was in a tranquil, optimistic mood as I set off on my Abyssinian odyssey, ass that I was. You’d ha’ thought, after all I’d seen and suffered in my time, that I’d have remembered all the occasions when I’d set off carefree and unsuspecting along some seemingly primrose path only to go head first into the pit of damnation at t’sother end. But you never can tell.
I couldn’t foresee, as I stood content in the bow, watching the green fire foaming up from the forefoot, feeling the soft Adriatic breeze on my face, hearing the oaths and laughter of the Jollies and the strangled wailing of some frenzied tenor in the crew—I couldn’t foresee the screaming charge of long-haired warriors swinging their hideous sickle-blades against the Sikh bayonets, or the huge mound of rotting corpses under the precipice at Islamgee, or the ghastly forest of crucifixes at Gondar, or feel the agonising bite of steel bars against my body as I swung caged in the freezing gale above a yawning void, or imagine the ghastly transformation of an urbane, cultivated monarch into a murderous tyrant shrieking with hysterical glee as he slashed and hacked at his bound victims.
No, I foresaw none of those horrors, or that amazing unknown country, Prester John’s fabled land of inaccessible mountain barriers and bottomless chasms, and wild, war-loving beautiful folk, into which Napier was to lead such an expedition as had not been seen since Cortes and Pisarro (so Henty says), through impossible hazards and hopeless odds—and somehow lead it out again. A land of mystery and terror and cruelty, and the loveliest women in all Africa… a smiling golden nymph in her little leather tunic, teasing me as she sat by a woodland stream plaiting her braids… a gaudy barbarian queen lounging on cushions surrounded by her tame lions… a tawny young beauty remarking to my captors: “If we feed him into the fire, little by little, he will speak…” Aye, it’s an interesting country, Abyssinia.
If you’ve read my previous memoirs you’ll know me better than Speedicut did, and won’t share his misgivings about trusting me with a cool half million in silver. Old Flash may be a model of the best vices—lechery, treachery, poltroonery, deceit, and dereliction of duty, all present and correct, as you know, and they’re not the half of it—but larceny ain’t his style at all. Oh, stern necessity may have led to my lifting this and that on occasion, but nothing on the grand scale—why, you may remember I once had the chance to make away with the great Koh-i-noor diamond, (* See
Speed had spoken lightly of a quick trip to Alexandria, but with that pack of dilatory dagoes tacking to and fro and putting about between the heel of Italy and Crete, we must have covered all of two thousand miles, and half the time allotted me to reach Napier had gone before we sighted Egypt. It’s a sand-blown dunghill at any time, but I
