Spring-heeled Jack and the President's Ring

Chapter 17 ~ Magnetron and the General

"I was greeted by a pair of luridly inebriated sentries who… permitted my passage with disinterested shrugs and whooping horse laughs."

The Remarkable Myrmidons field army headquarters was a sprawling plantation-styled affair with rows of barracks surrounding a massive manor house in scandalous disrepair.  During the day, the fields typically buzzed with activity as General Southwick oversaw his ludicrously top-heavy command directing subordinates through innumerable drills and military games.  Upon our arrival, it was evening and all was quiet.  Nevertheless, I was certain there were at least one hundred men in their bunks ready to be called to action at the least provocation.

Southwick arranged his men into squadrons of two men each, with each squad commanded by a sergeant.  Each lieutenant commanded two sergeants, and each captain commanded two lieutenants, and so on it went, upward through layers of company captains and major generals and so forth.  Southwick thus perched atop a dizzying pyramid of some thirteen dozen officers who presided over—and often outnumbered—a disreputable army of battle-scarred lunatics with an unquenchable thirst for liquor and disorderly conduct.

Southwick and his officers were true believers who believed there was a war yet to be won.  His soldiers were debased and demoralized huns who knew that the war had already been lost.

We set the Luftigel down in a secluded field east of the Myrmidon headquarters and prepared to disembark.  It was agreed I would feign a social visit and exploit my uneasy rapport with Southwick to retrieve the stolen items.  Failing that, I was to signal for the Hogalum Society to engage our supplementary strategy.

At the front gate, I was greeted by a pair of luridly inebriated sentries who insisted I join them in their intemperate revel.  I declined politely, and they permitted my passage with disinterested shrugs and whooping horse laughs.  I approached the soaring mansion, ascended a flight of stairs leading to a capacious veranda, and crossed that vast expanse to a pair of ornately carved doors.  I grasped the weighty brass knocker to announce my presence, but before I could raise it, the door swung open, and Southwick greeted me dressed in his civilian butler garb.

Southwick, ever the Southern gentleman, insisted on maintaining the grace and dignity of a proper estate, replete with a butler to attend to such duties as receiving callers.  He could not afford a butler, however, and had therefore adopted the pretense of donning false facial hair and a coat with tails before answering a knock at the door.  He then saw visitors to a drawing room, bidding them to wait until the General would see them.  Then he ducked into a nearby closet, removing his guise and reappearing as General Southwick.

I had once made the mistake of calling him by his true name when he answered the door so appareled, whereupon he flew into a rage, defaming both my intellect and visual acuity for mistaking a mere servant for the legendary General Southwick, and rebuking me for the insult of presuming that a man of the General's stature should be reduced to the indignity of answering his own door.

This time, I meekly requested an audience with the general.  The butler/general nodded and led me to a dusty but sumptuously upholstered settee as he had on so many prior occasions.  I remained standing, drew back a tattered drapery, and displayed my upwardly pointed thumb in the window.  When I returned my attentions to the interior of the drawing room, the general appeared—or rather, reappeared.  He swaggered toward me in full military regalia, his one hand resting on the hilt of a sheathed saber and the other cradling a cherrywood pipe.  This too was a costume, a fact made all the more obvious by his inadvertent failure to remove the bushy false moustache of his butler disguise.

He eyed me suspiciously and one of his shoulders began to convulse.  He gripped his saber more tightly to steady himself and let out one of his involuntary grunts.  "Hrrrnt!"  His face twitched and his false moustache fluttered as he spoke.  "Good evening, Mr. Magnetron.  Hrrrnt!"

"Good evening, General," I replied.

A sudden fit of rage blossomed in his ruddy face, and he began to shout and approach menacingly.  "You, sir, are a coward!"  He unsheathed his saber and held it aloft.  "I will have your head, you gutless, yellow-bellied, lily-livered, spineless, milksoppy pantywaist!"