Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy, Stephen Leacock [best mobile ebook reader TXT] 📗
- Author: Stephen Leacock
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“Right at the station?” I asked.
“No, at a hotel. We got the trunks later. They telegraphed to Vienna for them and managed to get them through somehow,—in a baggage car, I believe.”
“And after that, I suppose, you had no more trouble.”
“Trouble,” said Parkins, “I should say we had. Couldn’t get a steamer! They said there was none sailing out of Genoa for New York for three days! All cancelled, I guess, or else rigged up as cruisers.”
“What on earth did you do?”
“Stuck it out as best we could: stayed right there in the hotel. Poor old Jones was pretty well collapsed! Couldn’t do anything but sleep and eat, and sit on the piazza of the hotel.”
“But you got your steamer at last?” I asked.
“Yes,” he admitted, “we got it. But I never want to go through another voyage like that again, no sir!”
“What was wrong with it?” I asked, “bad weather?”
“No, calm, but a peculiar calm, glassy, with little ripples on the water,—uncanny sort of feeling.”
“What was wrong with the voyage?”
“Oh, just the feeling of it,—everything under strict rule you know—no lights anywhere except just the electric lights,—smoking-room closed tight at eleven o’clock,—decks all washed down every night—officers up on the bridge all day looking out over the sea,—no, sir, I want no more of it. Poor old Loo Jones, I guess he’s quite used up: he can’t speak of it at all: just sits and broods, in fact I doubt...”
At this moment Parkins’s conversation was interrupted by the entry of two newcomers into the room. One of them had on a little Hungarian suit like the one Parkins wore, and was talking loudly as they came in.
“Yes,” he was saying, “we were caught there fair and square right in the war zone. We were at Izzl in the Carpathians, poor old Parkins and I—”
We looked round.
It was Loo Jones, describing his escape from Europe.
7.—The War Mania of Mr. Jinks and Mr. Blinks
They were sitting face to face at a lunch table at the club so near to me that I couldn’t avoid hearing what they said. In any case they are both stout men with gurgling voices which carry.
“What Kitchener ought to do,”—Jinks was saying in a loud voice.
So I knew at once that he had the prevailing hallucination. He thought he was commanding armies in Europe.
After which I watched him show with three bits of bread and two olives and a dessert knife the way in which the German army could be destroyed.
Blinks looked at Jinks’ diagram with a stern impassive face, modelled on the Sunday supplement photogravures of Lord Kitchener.
“Your flank would be too much exposed,” he said, pointing to Jinks’ bread. He spoke with the hard taciturnity of a Joffre.
“My reserves cover it,” said Jinks, moving two pepper pots to the support of the bread.
“Mind you,” Jinks went on, “I don’t say Kitchener WILL do this: I say this is what he OUGHT to do: it’s exactly the tactics of Kuropatkin outside of Mukden and it’s precisely the same turning movement that Grant used before Richmond.”
Blinks nodded gravely. Anybody who has seen the Grand Duke Nicholoevitch quietly accepting the advice of General Ruski under heavy artillery fire, will realize Blinks’ manner to a nicety.
And, oddly enough, neither of them, I am certain, has ever had any larger ideas about the history of the Civil War than what can be got from reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin and seeing Gillette play Secret Service. But this is part of the mania. Jinks and Blinks had suddenly developed the hallucination that they knew the history of all wars by a sort of instinct.
They rose soon after that, dusted off their waistcoats with their napkins and waddled heavily towards the door. I could hear them as they went talking eagerly of the need of keeping the troops in hard training. They were almost brutal in their severity. As they passed out of the door,—one at a time to avoid crowding,—they were still talking about it. Jinks was saying that our whole generation is overfed and soft. If he had his way he would take every man in the United States up to forty- seven years of age (Jinks is forty-eight) and train him to a shadow. Blinks went further. He said they should be trained hard up to fifty. He is fifty-one.
After that I used to notice Jinks and Blinks always together in the club, and always carrying on the European War.
I never knew which side they were on. They seemed to be on both. One day they commanded huge armies of Russians, and there was one week when Blinks and Jinks at the head of vast levies of Cossacks threatened to overrun the whole of Western Europe. It was dreadful to watch them burning churches and monasteries and to see Jinks throw whole convents full of white robed nuns into the flames like so much waste paper.
For a time I feared they would obliterate civilization itself. Then suddenly Blinks decided that Jinks’ Cossacks were no good, not properly trained. He converted himself on the spot into a Prussian Field Marshal, declared himself organised to a pitch of organisation of which Jinks could form no idea, and swept Jinks’ army off the earth, without using any men at all, by sheer organisation.
In this way they moved to and fro all winter over the map of Europe, carrying death and destruction everywhere and revelling in it.
But I think I liked best the wild excitement of their naval battles.
Jinks generally fancied himself a submarine and Blinks acted the part of a first-class battleship. Jinks would pop his periscope out of the water, take a look at Blinks merely for the fraction of a second, and then, like a flash, would dive under water again and start firing his torpedoes. He explained that he carried six.
But he was never quick enough for Blinks. One glimpse of his periscope miles and miles away was enough. Blinks landed him a contact shell in the side, sunk him with all hands, and then lined his yards with men and cheered. I have known Blinks sink Jinks at two miles, six miles—and once—in the club billiard room just after the battle of the Falkland Islands,—he got him fair and square at ten nautical miles.
Jinks of course claimed that he was not sunk. He had dived. He was two hundred feet under water quietly smiling at Blinks through his periscope.
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