Captain Jinks, Hero by Ernest Howard Crosby (story read aloud txt) 📕

“By Jove! it’s the Emperor,” cried Cleary. “He’s got on his admiral’s uniform, and now he’s passing his own fleet that Balderdash brought with him.”

They looked at the striking scene for some minutes, and the crowds on the wharves and shores murmured with surprise.

“Bless my soul! he has disappeared,” said Cleary again.

Sure enough, he had suddenly passed out of sight, and as suddenly the flashlight went out and the lights on the masts reappeared. In another moment these lights were extinguished, and the flashlight revealed a form standing in the same place in a theatrical attitude with raised sword and uplifted face.

“I believe it’s he again,” said Cleary. “He must have a trap-door. He’s got on another uniform. I think it’s a Frank admiral’s uniform. There go the Frank guns. He’s passing their fleet.”

“Yes, it is a Frank naval uniform,” said a foreign officer near them, as he scrutinized the deck with his glasses.

Before each of the fleets the same maneuvre was carried out. As their guns fired, the Emperor would disappear for a few moments, and in an incalculably short time he would appear again in the uniform of an admiral of the fleet in question. When he had passed the last fleet he disappeared once more, and came back to sight clad in the white and silver armor of a general officer of his own army, with helmet and plume. The flashlight now changed colors through the whole gamut of the rainbow, and the Emperor knelt in the attitude of Columbus discovering America.

Sam was immensely impressed.

“Oh, Cleary!” he said, “if we only had an Emperor.”

“The President is doing his best,” said Cleary. “Don’t blame him.”

“Oh, but what can he do? Why haven’t we someone like that to embody the ideal of the State, to picture us to ourselves, to realize our aspirations?”

As he said this a strange noise arose from the crowd near the landing-stage where the Emperor was about to alight. The far greater part of this crowd was composed of natives, and they had been entirely taken aback by the exhibition. They were just beginning to understand it, and as the warlord moved about the deck followed by the glare of the flashlight, and again struck an attitude before descending into the gig which was to take him ashore, some one of the Porsslanese in the crowd laughed. His neighbor laughed too, then another and then another, until the whole native multitude was laughing. The laugh rippled along the shore through the long stretch of natives collected there like the swells from a passing steamer. It seemed to extend back from the shore through the whole town, and, though it was undoubtedly fancy, Sam thought he heard it spreading, like the rings from a stone thrown into the water, over the entire land. The foreigners stood aghast. The Porsslanese are not a laughing people. They had never been known to laugh before except in the most feeble manner. The events of the past year had not been especially humorous, and the coming of the great warlord was far from being a laughing matter. Yet with the perversity of heathen they had selected this impressive occasion for showing their incurable barbarism and bad taste. Sam fairly shuddered.

“It’s a sacrilege,” he cried. “I believe that nothing short of extermination will reclaim this unhappy land. They are calling down the vengeance of heaven upon them.”

They walked back to town with the foreign officer.

“He’s a wonderful man, the Emperor,” said he, in indifferent English. “How quickly he changed his clothes, and what a compliment it was!”

“A sort of lightning-change artist,” said Cleary. “He could make his fortune at a continuous performance.”

In the dark Sam blushed for his friend, but fortunately their companion did not understand the allusion.

“You should have seen him when he visited our Queen,” he said. “She came to meet him in the uniform of a Tutonian hussar, breeches and all. You can imagine how he was touched by it. That very afternoon he called upon her dressed in the costume of one of our royal princesses with a long satin train. It made him wonderfully popular. Our Queen responded at once by making his infant daughters colonels of several of our regiments. One of them is colonel of mine,” he added proudly.

“What would you do if you went to war with Tutonia, and one of the kids should order you to shoot on your own army?” asked Cleary. “It might be embarrassing.”

But the foreigner did not understand this either.

“And to think that these Porsslanese dogs have received him with laughter!” said he.

At eleven o’clock on the same evening the Emperor was closeted with his aged field-marshal, von Balderdash, in a handsomely furnished sitting-room. A Turk’s head had been set up in the middle of the room, and His Majesty, dressed in the uniform of a cavalry general, was engaged in making passes at it with a saber. He had already taken a ride on horseback with his staff. The field-marshal stood wearily leaning against the wall at the side of a desk piled up with papers.

“We have avenged the death of our ambassador,” Balderdash was saying. “We have sent out five punitive expeditions in all. Our quarter of the imperial city shows the power of arms more completely than any other. We have set the highest standard, and our army is the admiration of all.”

The count watched the face of his master as he spoke, but there was no sign of satisfaction in it. The Emperor was out of humor.

“We have not done enough,” he said. “If we had, those pagans would not have ventured to laugh⁠—yes, actually to laugh⁠—in our imperial presence. Balderdash, you have not done your duty. I shall take command myself at once. We must have a real punitive expedition, and not one of your imitations. If they want war, let them have it.”

“We can not have war, Your Majesty, without an enemy,