Sergeant Nelson of the Guards by Gerald Kersh Read Free Book Online Page A

about him—a swarthy skin, white teeth, glittering eyes of a hard hot brown, and a big hooked nose. Yet he, and his father, and his father’s father, lived in the West of England all their lives, and no Penrowe ever was anything but a good English-man . A Penrowe was among the first of the Englishmen who looked through a warm dawn and saw the New World loom on the western horizon. Sir Francis—they called him Franky—Drake knew the Penrowes .A Penrowe went out with Grenville off Flores, in 1591. A Penrowe terrified his fellow villagers by smoking one of the first pipes of Elizabethan Cut Plug; and a Penrowe got a Spanish ball in his head when the Great Fleet Invincible, the hundred and twenty-nine ships of the Armada, sailed against the eighty ships of England. Eighty ships, and Admiral the Northwest Wind. “God blew and they were scattered .” But Penrowe helped, the black Cornishman; moody, calculating, proud, quarrelsome, hard man of the sea.
    The sea is in his blood, and has been since the beginning of history. The sea washes its sons inland sometimes: our Penrowe comes from some messy hole in the ground where they get china clay. He has two brothers in the Merchant Service, at present engaged in the stout old Cornish sport of harassing the modern equivalent of the Dons on the high seas.
    But what dark stranger left that complexion and that profile in England? Who left the name of Marazion in the West? The very first of all the sea-rovers, the Phœnicians; dark, Hebraic-looking gentlemen, out to do business, as usual. They called at Britain to barter trade goods for tin, before the Romans came, before the Three Wise Men cut their first teeth. The remote, forgotten grandmother of Penrowe saw the coloured sails of their great galleys, and saw them land—very dark, very suave, very well dressed, and smelling of perfume, with dress-lengths of exclusive materials and all kinds of household goods. They had come out of the Great Sea, over as rough a piece of water as anybody could wish to struggle against, right over the rim of the world, just to trade … the eternal, wandering Semites with their eyes that itched for new prospects. They were the first mariners. They came and went in Britain, always on friendly terms. The time came when Ancient Briton women brought forth dark, curly-headed boys and girls in the far West of this country. And then, no doubt, there slunk into the blood a restlessness and a yearning … a craving for the unknown seas.
    And here is Penrowe, English as Land’s End but dark as highBarbary, with his hairy torso and high square shoulders, holding up his trousers and waiting for the M.O. to listen to the strange strong blood pumping through his powerful heart….
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    Penrowe, swarthy Phœnician; Hodge, Bates, straight clear Saxon, fair as corn; Thurstan, black Gael. These are three rough, stinging, formidable elements in the Blend of Blood. What a devil of an island this is—this mixing-bowl of all that is most fierce and enduring in man, stirred by war in its beginnings and matured in its iron-bound cask of tradition in the rat-infested cellar of the centuries! Ancient Briton…. Ancient Roman—look at Allan of Cumberland, an English yeoman from the Pennine Chain, the Backbone of England—with the high-bridged nose and fine-drawn face of one of the Roman gentlemen who lived here, and laid the Great Wall, and Watling Street, and Uxbridge Road so long ago. The Romans were in Britain for four hundred and sixty-six years: they left blood, too! The red-headed monsters of Arthurian legend, the Saxons, came after them; and then the Norsemen cracked through. Johansen and Holm have been Yorkshiremen for centuries; yet there are no two between Heligoland and Hammerfest whom you could more easily visualise in a longboat under a ragged sail on a grey sea. And the Normans came, with a dash of Baltic madness and a dash of Gallic finesse; and we hated their guts, but assimilated all they had. Angle, Jute,