G.A. Henty - With Kitchener in the Soudan - a story of Atbara and Omdurman

As he left his hut he said to Zaki, " I shall not want you again this evening, but mind, we must be on the move at daylight."

"You did not say whether we were to take the horses, master; but I suppose you will do sol"

"Oh, I forgot to tell you that we are going to have camels; they are to be put on board for us to-night. They are fast camels, and as the distance from the point where we shall land to the Atbara will not be more than seventy or eighty miles, we shall be able to do it in a day."

"That will be very good, master; camels are much bettei than horses for the desert. I have got everything else ready."

After dinner was over, the party broke up quickly, as many of the officers had preparations to make. Gregory went off to the tent of the officer with whom he was best acquainted in the Soudanese regiment.

" I thought that I would come and have a chat with you if you happened to be in."

" I shall be very glad, but I bar Fashoda; one is quite sick of the name."

"No, it was not Fashoda that I was going to talk to you about; I want to ask you something about England. I know really nothing about it, for I was born in Alexandria shortly after my parents came out from England. Is it easy for anyone who has been well educated, and who is a gentleman, to get employment there? I mean some sort of appointment, say, in India or the West Indies."

" Easy! My dear Hilliard, the camel in the eye of a needle is a joke to it. If a fellow is eighteen and has had a first-rate education and a good private coach, that is, a tutor, he may pass through his examination either for the army, or the civil service, or the Indian service. There are about five hundred go up to each examination, and seventy or eighty at the outside get in; the other four hundred or so are chucked. Some examinations are for fellows under nineteen, others are open for a year or two longer. Suppose, finally, you don't get in; that is to say, when you are two-and-twenty, your chance of getting any appointment whatever in the public service is at an end."

"Then interest has nothing to do with it?"

"Well, yes. There are a few berths in the Foreign Office, for example, in which a man has to get a nomination before going in for the exam.; but of course the age limit tells there as well as in any other."

"And if a man fails altogether what is there open to him?"

The other shrugged his shoulders. "Well, as far as I know, if he hasn't capital he can emigrate, that is what numbers of fellows do. If he has interest he can get a commission in the militia, and from that possibly into the line, or he can enlist as a private for the same object. There is a third alternative, he can hang himself. Of course, if he happens to have a relation in the city he can get a clerkship, but that alternative, I should say, is worse than the third."

"But I suppose he might be a doctor, a clergyman, or a lawyer?"

" I don't know much about those matters, but I do know that it takes about five years' grinding, and what is calledwalking the hospitals', that is, going round the wards with the surgeons, before one is licensed to kill. I think, but I am not sure, that three years at the bar would admit you to practice, and usually another seven or eight years are spent before you earn a penny. As for the Church, you have to go through the university or one of the places we call training colleges; and when at last you are ordained you may reckon, unless you have great family interest, on remaining a curate, with perhaps one hundred or one hundred and fifty pounds per annum for eighteen or twenty years."

" And no amount of energy will enable a man of, say, four-and-twenty, without a profession, to obtain a post on which he could live with some degree of comfort?"

" I don't think energy would have anything to do with it. You cannot drop into a merchant's office and say 'I want a

snug berth out in China', orI should like an agency in Mesopotamia'. If you have luck, anything is possible; if you haven't luck, you ought to fall back on my three alternatives—emigrate, enlist, or hang yourself. Of course you can sponge on your friends for a year or two if you are mean enough to do so, but there is an end to that sort of thing in time. May I ask why you put the question, Hilliard? You have really a splendid opening here; you are surely not going to be foolish enough to chuck it, with the idea of returning to England and taking anything that may turn up?"

"No, I am not so foolish as that. I have had, as you say, luck—extraordinary luck, and I have quite made up my mind to stay in the service. No, I am really asking you because I know so little of England that I wondered how men who had a fair education but no family interest did get on."

" They very rarely do get on," the other said. " Of course if they are inventive geniuses they may discover something— an engine, for example, that will do twice the work with half the consumption of fuel that any other engine will do; or, if chemically inclined, they may discover something that will revolutionize dyeing, for example: but not one man in a thousand is a genius, and as a rule the man you are speaking of, the ordinary public-school and varsity man, if he has no interest and is not bent upon entering the army, even as a private, emigrates if he hasn't sufficient income to live upon at home."

"Thank you! I had no idea it was so difficult to make a living in England, or to obtain employment, for a well-educated man of two- or three-and-twenty."

" My dear Hilliard, that is the problem that is exercising the minds of the whole of the middle class of England with sons growing up. Of course men of business can take their sons into their own offices and train them to their own profession; but after all, if a man has four or five sons he cannot take them all into his office with a view to partnership. He may take one, but the others have to make their own way somehow."

They chatted now upon the war, the dates upon which the various regiments would go down, and the chance of the Khalifa collecting another army and trying conclusions with the invaders again. At last Gregory got up and went back to his hut. He could now understand why his father, having quarrelled with his family, might have found himself obliged to take the first post that was offered, however humble, in order to obtain the advantage of a warm climate for his wife.

" He must have felt it awfully," he mused. " If he had been the sort of man I had always thought him, he could have settled down to the life. But now I know him better I can understand that it must have been terrible for him, and he would be glad to exchange it for the interpretership, where he would have some chance of distinguishing himself, or at any rate of taking part in exciting events. I will open that packet, but from what my mother said I do not think it will be of any interest to me now. I fancy, by what she said, that it contained simply my father's instructions as to what she was to do in the event of his death during the campaign. I don't see what else it can be."

He drew the curtains he had rigged up at the doorway and window to keep out insects, lighted his lantern, and then, sitting down on the ground by his bed, opened the packet his mother had given him. The outer cover was in her handwriting.

My dearest boy,

I have, as I told you, kept the enclosed packet, which is not to be opened until I have certain news of your father's death. This news I trust you will some day obtain. As you see, the enclosed packet is directed to me. I do not think that you will find in it anything of importance to yourself. It probably contains only directions and advice for my guidance in case I should determine to return to England. I have been the less anxious to open it because I have been convinced that it is so; for of course I know the circumstances