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The Light that Failed

"What's yon that follows at my side?"
   The foe that ye must fight, my lord. 
"That hirples swift as I can ride?" 
   The shadow of the might, my lord.

"Then wheel my horse against the foe!"
   He's down and overpast, my lord.
Ye war against the sunset glow,
   The darkness gathers fast, my lord.
                The Fight at Heriot's Ford

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‘THIS is a cheerful life,’ said Dick, some days later. ‘Torp’s away; Bessie hates me; I can’t get at the notion of the Melancolia; Maisie’s letters are scrappy; and I believe I have indigestion. What give a man pains across the head and spots before his eyes, Binkie? Shall us take some liver pills?’

Dick had just gone through a lively scene with Bessie. She had for the fiftieth time reproached him for sending Torpenhow away. She explained her enduring hatred for Dick, and made it clear to him that she only sat for the sake of his money. ‘And Mr. Torpenhow’s ten times a better man than you,’ she concluded.

‘He is. That’s why he went away. I should have stayed and made love to you.’

The girl sat with her chin on her hand, scowling. ‘To me! I’d like to catch you! If I wasn’t afraid o’ being hung I’d kill you. That’s what I’d do. D’you believe me?’

Dick smiled wearily. It is not pleasant to live in the company of a notion that will not work out, a fox-terrier that cannot talk, and a woman who talks too much. He would have answered, but at that moment there unrolled itself from one corner of the studio a veil, as it were, of the flimsiest gauze. He rubbed his eyes, but the gray haze would not go.

‘This is disgraceful indigestion. Binkie, we will go to a medicine-man. We can’t have our eyes interfered with, for by these we get our bread; also mutton-chop bones for little dogs.’

The doctor was an affable local practitioner with white hair, and he said nothing till Dick began to describe the gray film in the studio.

‘We all want a little patching and repairing from time to time,’ he chirped. ‘Like a ship, my dear sir,—exactly like a ship. Sometimes the hull is out of order, and we consult the surgeon; sometimes the rigging, and then I advise; sometimes the engines, and we go to the brain-specialist; sometimes the look-out on the bridge is tired, and then we see an oculist. I should recommend you to see an oculist. A little patching and repairing from time to time is all we want. An oculist, by all means.’

Dick sought an oculist,—the best in London. He was certain that the local practitioner did not know anything about his trade, and more certain that Maisie would laugh at him if he were forced to wear spectacles.

‘I’ve neglected the warnings of my lord the stomach too long. Hence these spots before the eyes, Binkie. I can see as well as I ever could.’

As he entered the dark hall that led to the consulting-room a man cannoned against him. Dick saw the face as it hurried out into the street.

‘That’s the writer-type. He has the same modelling of the forehead as Torp. He looks very sick. Probably heard something he didn’t like.’

Even as he thought, a great fear came upon Dick, a fear that made him hold his breath as he walked into the oculist’s waiting room, with the heavy carved furniture, the dark-green paper, and the sober-hued prints on the wall. He recognised a reproduction of one of his own sketches.

Many people were waiting their turn before him. His eye was caught by a flaming red-and-gold Christmas-carol book. Little children came to that eye-doctor, and they needed large-type amusement.

‘That’s idolatrous bad Art,’ he said, drawing the book towards himself. ‘From the anatomy of the angels, it has been made in Germany.’ He opened in mechanically, and there leaped to his eyes a verse printed in red ink—

The next good joy that Mary had,
It was the joy of three,
To see her good Son Jesus Christ
Making the blind to see;
Making the blind to see, good Lord,
And happy we may be.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
To all eternity!

Dick read and re-read the verse till his turn came, and the doctor was bending above him seated in an arm-chair. The blaze of the gas-microscope in his eyes made him wince. The doctor’s hand touched the scar of the sword-cut on Dick’s head, and Dick explained briefly how he had come by it. When the flame was removed, Dick saw the doctor’s face, and the fear came upon him again. The doctor wrapped himself in a mist of words. Dick caught allusions to ‘scar,’ ‘frontal bone,’ ‘optic nerve,’ ‘extreme caution,’ and the ‘avoidance of mental anxiety.’ ‘Verdict?’ he said faintly. ‘My business is painting, and I daren’t waste time. What do you make of it?’ Again the whirl of words, but this time they conveyed a meaning. ‘Can you give me anything to drink?’ Many sentences were pronounced in that darkened room, and the prisoners often needed cheering. Dick found a glass of liqueur brandy in his hand. ‘As far as I can gather,’ he said, coughing above the spirit, ‘you call it decay of the optic nerve, or something, and therefore hopeless. What is my time-limit, avoiding all strain and worry?’ ‘Perhaps one year.’ ‘My God! And if I don’t take care of myself?’ ‘I really could not say. One cannot ascertain the exact amount of injury inflicted by the sword-cut. The scar is an old one, and—exposure to the strong light of the desert, did you say?—with excessive application to fine work? I really could not say?’ ‘I beg your pardon, but it has come without any warning. If you will let me, I’ll sit here for a minute, and then I’ll go. You have been very good in telling me the truth. Without any warning; without any warning. Thanks.’ Dick went into the street, and was rapturously received by Binkie. ‘We’ve got it very badly, little dog! Just as badly as we can get it. We’ll go to the Park to think it out.’ They headed for a certain tree that Dick knew well, and they sat down to thin, because his legs were trembling under him and there was cold fear at the pit of his stomach.

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‘How could it have come without any warning? It’s as sudden as being shot. It’s the living death, Binkie. We’re to be shut up in the dark in one year if we’re careful, and we shan’t see anybody, and we shall never have anything we want, not though we live to be a hundred!’ Binkie wagged his tail joyously. ‘Binkie, we must think. Let’s see how it feels to be blind.’ Dick shut his eyes, and flaming commas and Catherine-wheels floated inside the lids. Yet when he looked across the Park the scope of his vision was not contracted. He could see perfectly, until a procession of slow-wheeling fireworks defiled across his eyeballs. ‘Little dorglums, we aren’t at all well. Let’s go home. If only Torp were back, now!’ But Torpenhow was in the south of England, inspecting dockyards in the company of the Nilghai. His letters were brief and full of mystery. Dick had never asked anybody to help him in his joys or his sorrows. He argued, in the loneliness of his studio, henceforward to be decorated with a film of gray gauze in one corner, that, if his fate were blindness, all the Torpenhows in the world could not save him. ‘I can’t call him off his trip to sit down and sympathise with me. I must pull through this business alone,’ he said. He was lying on the sofa, eating his moustache and wondering what the darkness of the night would be like. Then came to his mind the memory of a quaint scene in the Soudan. A soldier had been nearly hacked in two by a broad-bladed Arab spear. For one instant the man felt no pain. Looking down, he saw that his life-blood was going from him. The stupid bewilderment on his face was so intensely comic that both Dick and Torpenhow, still panting and unstrung from a fight for life, had roared with laughter, in which the man seemed as if he would join, but, as his lips parted in a sheepish grin, the agony of death came upon him, and he pitched grunting at their feet. Dick laughed again, remembering the horror. It seemed so exactly like his own case. ‘But I have a little more time allowed me,’ he said. He paced up and down the room, quietly at first, but afterwards with the hurried feet of fear. It was as though a black shadow stood at his elbow and urged him to go forward; and there were only weaving circles and floating pin-dots before his eyes. ‘We need to be calm, Binkie; we must be calm.’ He talked aloud for the sake of distraction. ‘This isn’t nice at all. What shall we do? We must do something. Our time is short. I shouldn’t have believed that this morning; but now things are different. Binkie, where was Moses when the light went out?’ Binkie smiled from ear to ear, as a well-bred terrier should, but made no suggestion. ‘“Were there but world enough and time, This coyness, Binkie, were not crime. . . . But at my back I always hear——”’ He wiped his forehead, which was unpleasantly damp. ‘What can I do? What can I do? I haven’t any notions left, and I can’t think connectedly, but I must do something, or I shall go off my head.’ The hurried walk recommenced, Dick stopping every now and again to drag forth long-neglected canvases and old note-books; for he turned to his work by instinct, as a thing that could not fail. ‘You won’t do, and you won’t do,’ he said, at each inspection. ‘No more soldiers. I couldn’t paint ’em. Sudden death comes home too nearly, and this is battle and murder for me.’ The day was failing, and Dick thought for a moment that the twilight of the blind had come upon him unaware. ‘Allah Almighty!’ he cried despairingly, ‘help me through the time of waiting, and I won’t whine when my punishment comes. What can I do now, before the light goes?’ There was no answer. Dick waited till he could regain some sort of control over himself. His hands were shaking, and he prided himself on their steadiness; he could feel that his lips were quivering, and the sweat was running down his face. He was lashed by fear, driven forward by the desire to get to work at once and accomplish something, and maddened by the refusal of his brain to do more than repeat the news that he was about to go blind. ‘It’s a humiliating exhibition,’ he thought, ‘and I’m glad Torp isn’t here to see. The doctor said I was to avoid mental worry. Come here and let me pet you, Binkie.’ The little dog yelped because Dick nearly squeezed the bark out of him. Then he heard the man speaking in the twilight, and, doglike, understood that his trouble stood off from him— ‘Allah is good, Binkie. Not quite so gentle as we could wish, but we’ll discuss that later. I think I see my way to it now. All those studies of Bessie’s head were nonsense, and they nearly brought your master into a scrape. I hold the notion now as clear as crystal,—“the Melancolia that transcends all wit.” There shall be Maisie in that head, because I shall never get Maisie; and Bess, of course, because she knows all about Melancolia, though she doesn’t know she knows; and there shall be some drawing in it, and it shall all end up with a laugh. That’s for myself. Shall she giggle or grin? No, she shall laugh right out of the canvas, and every man and woman that ever had a sorrow of their own shall—what is it the poem says?—

Understand the speech and feel a stir 
Of fellowship in all disastrous fight.

“In all disastrous fight”? That’s better than painting the thing merely to pique Maisie. I can do it now because I have it inside me. Binkie, I’m going to hold you up by your tail. You’re an omen. Come here.’ Binkie swung head downward for a moment without speaking. ‘Rather like holding a guinea-pig; but you’re a brave little dog, and you don’t yelp when you’re hung up. It is an omen.’ Binkie went to his own chair, and as often as he looked saw Dick walking up and down, rubbing his hands and chuckling. That night Dick wrote a letter to Maisie full of the tenderest regard for her health, but saying very little about his own, and dreamed of the Melancolia to be born. Not till morning did he remember that something might happen to him in the future. He fell to work, whistling softly, and was swallowed up in the clean, clear joy of creation, which does not come to man too often, lest he should consider himself the equal of his God, and so refuse to die at the appointed time. He forgot Maisie, Torpenhow, and Binkie at his feet, but remembered to stir Bessie, who needed very little stirring, into a tremendous rage, that he might watch the smouldering lights in her eyes. He threw himself without reservation into his work, and did not think of the doom that was to overtake him, for he was possessed with his notion, and the things of this world had no power upon him. ‘You’re pleased to-day,’ said Bessie. Dick waved his mahl-stick in mystic circles and went to the sideboard for a drink. In the evening, when the exaltation of the day had died down, he went to the sideboard again, and after some visits became convinced that the eye-doctor was a liar, since he could still see everything very clearly. He was of opinion that he would even make a home for Maisie, and that whether she liked it or not she should be his wife. The mood passed next morning, but the sideboard and all upon it remained for his comfort. Again he set to work, and his eyes troubled him with spots and dashes and blurs till he had taken counsel with the sideboard, and the Melancolia both on the canvas and in his own mind appeared lovelier than ever. There was a delightful sense of irresponsibility upon him, such as they feel who walking among their fellow-men know that the death-sentence of disease is upon them, and, seeing that fear is but waste of the little time left, are riotously happy. The days passed without

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event. Bessie arrived punctually always, and, though her voice seemed to Dick to come from a distance, her face was always very near. The Melancolia began to flame on the canvas, in the likeness of a woman who had known all the sorrow in the world and was laughing at it. It was true that the corners of the studio draped themselves in gray film and retired into the darkness, that the spots in his eyes and the pains across his head were very troublesome, and that Maisie’s letters were hard to read and harder still to answer. He could not tell her of his trouble, and he could not laugh at her accounts of her own Melancolia which was always going to be finished. But the furious days of toil and the nights of wild dreams made amends for all, and the sideboard was his best friend on earth. Bessie was singularly dull. She used to shriek with rage when Dick stared at her between half-closed eyes. Now she sulked, or watched him with disgust, saying very little. Torpenhow had been absent for six weeks. An incoherent note heralded his return. ‘News! great news!’ he wrote. ‘The Nilghai knows, and so does the Keneu. We’re all back on Thursday. Get lunch and clean your accoutrements.’ Dick showed Bessie the letter, and she abused him for that he had ever sent Torpenhow away and ruined her life. ‘Well,’ said Dick, brutally, ‘you’re better as you are, instead of making love to some drunken beast in the street.’ He felt that he had rescued Torpenhow from great temptation. ‘I don’t know if that’s any worse than sitting to a drunken beast in a studio. You haven’t been sober for three weeks. You’ve been soaking the whole time; and yet you pretend you’re better than me!’ ‘What d’you mean?’ said Dick. ‘Mean! You’ll see when Mr. Torpenhow comes back.’ It was not long to wait. Torpenhow met Bessie on the staircase without a sign of feeling. He had news that was more to him than many Bessies, and the Keneu and the Nilghai were trampling behind him, calling for Dick. ‘Drinking like a fish,’ Bessie whispered. ‘He’s been at it for nearly a month.’ She followed the men stealthily to hear judgment done. They came into the studio, rejoicing, to be welcomed over effusively by a drawn, lined, shrunken, haggard wreck,—unshaven, blue-white about the nostrils, stooping in the shoulders, and peering under his eyebrows nervously. The drink had been at work as steadily as Dick. ‘Is this you?’ said Torpenhow. ‘All that’s left of me. Sit down. Binkie’s quite well, and I’ve been doing some good work.’ He reeled where he stood. ‘You’ve done some of the worst work you’ve ever done in your life. Man alive, you’re——’ Torpenhow turned to his companions appealingly, and they left the room to find lunch elsewhere. Then he spoke; but, since the reproof of a friend is much too sacred and intimate a thing to be printed, and since Torpenhow used figures and metaphors which were unseemly, and contempt untranslatable, it will never be known what was actually said to Dick, who blinked and winked and picked at his hands. After a time the culprit began to feel the need of a little self-respect. He was quite sure that he had not in any way departed from virtue, and there were reasons, too, of which Torpenhow knew nothing. He would explain. He rose, tried to straighten his shoulders, and spoke to the face he could hardly see. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘But I am right, too. After you went away I had some trouble with my eyes. So I went to an oculist, and he turned a gasogene—I mean a gas-engine—into my eye. That was very long ago. He said, “Scar on the head,—sword-cut and optic nerve.” Make a note of that. So I am going blind. I have some work to do before I go blind, and I suppose that I must do it. I cannot see much now, but I can see best when I am drunk. I did not know I was drunk till I was told, but I must go on with my work. If you want to see it, there it is.’ He pointed to the all but finished Melancolia and looked for applause. Torpenhow said nothing, and Dick began to whimper feebly, for joy at seeing Torpenhow again, for grief at misdeeds—if indeed they were misdeeds—that made Torpenhow remote and unsympathetic, and for childish vanity hurt, since Torpenhow had not given a word of praise to his wonderful picture. Bessie looked through the keyhole after a long pause, and saw the two walking up and down as usual, Torpenhow’s hand on Dick’s shoulder. Hereat she said something so improper that it shocked even Binkie, who was dribbling patiently on the landing with the hope of seeing his master again.




			


				





	

					

				
The Light that Failed
			

			
			

				


Then we brought the lances down
—then the trumpets blew—
When we went to Kandahar, 
ridin' two an' two.
Ridin'—ridin'—ridin'—two an'two!
Ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-a!
All the way to Kandahar, 
Ridin' two an' two.
(Barrack-Room Ballad)


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I’M not angry with the British public, but I wish we had a few thousand of them scattered among these rocks. They wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get at their morning papers then. Can’t you imagine the regulation householder—Lover of Justice, Constant Reader, Paterfamilias, and all that lot—frizzling on hot gravel?’


‘With a blue veil over his head, and his clothes in strips. Has any man here a needle? I’ve got a piece of sugar-sack.’


‘I’ll lend you a packing-needle for six square inches of it then. Both my knees are worn through.’


‘Why not six square acres, while you’re about it? But lend me the needle, and I’ll see what I can do with the selvage. I don’t think there’s enough to protect my royal body from the cold blast as it is. What are you doing with that everlasting sketchbook of yours, Dick?’


‘Study of our Special Correspondent repairing his wardrobe,’ said Dick gravely, as the other man kicked off a pair of sorely-worn riding-breeches and began to fit a square of coarse canvas over the most obvious open space. He grunted disconsolately as the vastness of the void developed itself.


‘Sugar-bags, indeed! Hi! you pilot-man there! lend me all the sails of that whale-boat.’


A fez-crowned head bobbed up in the stern-sheets, divided itself into exact halves with one flashing grin, and bobbed down again. The man of the tattered breeches, clad only in a Norfolk jacket and a gray flannel shirt, went on with his clumsy sewing, while Dick chuckled over the sketch.


Some twenty whale-boats were nuzzling a sandbank which was dotted with English soldiery of half a dozen corps, bathing or washing their clothes. A heap of boat-rollers, commissariat-boxes, sugar-bags, and flour- and small-arm-ammunition-cases showed where one of the whaleboats had been compelled to unload hastily; and a regimental carpenter was swearing aloud as he tried, on a wholly insufficient allowance of white lead, to plaster up the sunparched gaping seams of the boat herself.


‘First the bloomin’ rudder snaps,’ said he to the world in general; ‘then the mast goes; an’ then, s’ ’elp me, when she can’t do nothin’ else, she opens ’erself out like a cock-eyed Chinese lotus.’


‘Exactly the case with my breeches, whoever you are,’ said the tailor, without looking up. ‘Dick, I wonder when I shall see a decent shop again.’


There was no answer, save the incessant angry murmur of the Nile as it raced round a basalt-walled bend and foamed across a rock-ridge half a mile up-stream. It was as though the brown weight of the river would drive the white men back to their own country. The indescribable scent of Nile mud in the air told that the stream was falling and that the next few miles would be no light thing for the whale-boats to overpass. The desert ran down almost to the banks, where, among gray, red, and black hillocks, a camel-corps was encamped. No man dared even for a day lose touch of the slow-moving boats; there had been no fighting for weeks past, and throughout all that time the Nile had never spared them. Rapid had followed rapid, rock rock, and island-group island-group, till the rank and file had long since lost all count of direction and very nearly of time. They were moving somewhere, they did not know why, to do something, they did not know what. Before them lay the Nile, and at the other end of it was one Gordon, fighting for the dear life, in a town called Khartoum. There were columns of British troops in the desert, or in one of the many deserts; there were columns on the river; there were yet more columns waiting to embark on the river; there were fresh drafts waiting at Assioot and Assuan; there were lies and rumours running over the face of the hopeless land from Suakin to the Sixth Cataract, and men supposed generally that there must be some one in authority to direct the general scheme, of the many movements. The duty of that particular river-colurizn was to keep the whale-boats afloat in the water, to avoid trampling on the villagers’ crops when the gangs ‘tracked’ the boats with lines thrown from midstream, to get as much sleep and food as was possible, and, above all, to press on without delay in the teeth of the churning Nile.


With the soldiers sweated and toiled the correspondents of the newspapers, and they were almost as ignorant as their companions. But it was above all things necessary that England at breakfast should be amused and thrilled and interested, whether Gordon lived or died, or half the British army went to pieces in the sands. The Soudan campaign was a picturesque one, and lent itself to vivid wordpainting. Now and again a ‘Special’ managed to get slain,—which was not altogether a disadvantage to the paper that employed him,—and more often the hand-to-hand nature of the fighting allowed of miraculous escapes which were worth telegraphing home at eighteenpence the word. There were many correspondents with many corps and columns,—from the veterans who had followed on the heels of the cavalry that occupied Cairo in ’82, what time Arabi Pasha called himself king, who had seen the first miserable work round Suakin when the sentries were cut up nightly and the scrub swarmed with spears, to youngsters jerked into the business at the end of a telegraph-wire to take the place of their betters killed or invalided.


Among the seniors—those who knew every shift and change in the perplexing postal arrangements, the value of the seediest, weediest Egyptian garron offered for sale in Cairo or Alexandria, who could talk a telegraph clerk into amiability and soothe the ruffled vanity of a newly-appointed staff-officer when press regulations became burdensome—was the man in the flannel shirt, the black-browed Torpenhow. He represented the Central Southern Syndicate in the campaign, as he had represented it in the Egyptian war, and elsewhere. The syndicate did not concern itself greatly with criticisms of attack and the like. It supplied the masses, and all it demanded was picturesqueness and abundance of detail; for there is more joy in England over a soldier who insubordinately steps out of square to rescue a comrade than over twenty generals slaving even to baldness at the gross details of transport and commissariat.


He had met at Suakin a young man, sitting on the edge of a recently-abandoned redoubt about the size of a hat-box, sketching a clump of shelltorn bodies on the gravel plain.


‘What are you for?’ said Torpenhow. The greeting of the correspondent is that of the commercial traveller on the road.


‘My own hand,’ said the young man, without looking up. ‘Have you any tobacco?’


Torpenhow waited till the sketch was finished, and when he had looked at it said, ‘What’s your business here?’


‘Nothing; there was a row, so I came. I’m supposed to be doing something down at the painting-slips among the boats, or else I’m in charge of the condenser on one of the water-ships. I’ve forgotten which.’


‘You’ve cheek enough to build a redoubt with,’ said Torpenhow, and took stock of the new acquaintance. ‘Do you always draw like that?’


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The young man produced more sketches. ‘Row on a Chinese pig-boat,’ said he sententiously, showing them one after another.—‘Chief mate dirked by a comprador.—Junk ashore off Hakodate.—Somali muleteer being flogged.—Star-shell bursting over camp at Berbera.—Slave-dhow being chased round Tajurrah Bay.—Soldier lying dead in the moonlight outside Suakin,—throat cut by Fuzzies.’


‘H’m!’ said Torpenhow, ‘can’t say I care for Verestchagin-and-water myself, but there’s no accounting for tastes. Doing anything now, are you?’


‘No. I’m amusing myself here.’


Torpenhow looked at the aching desolation of the place. ‘’Faith, you’ve queer notions of amusement. ’Got any money?’


‘Enough to go on with. Look here: do you want me to do war-work?’


‘I don’t. My syndicate may, though. You can draw more than a little, and I don’t suppose you care much what you get, do you?’


‘Not this time. I want my chance first.’


Torpenhow looked at the sketches again, and nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right to take your first chance when you can get it.’


He rode away swiftly through the Gate of the Two War-Ships, rattled across the causeway into the town, and wired to his syndicate, ‘Got man here, picture-work. Good and cheap. Shall I arrange? Will do letterpress with sketches.’


The man on the redoubt sat swinging his legs and murmuring; ‘I knew the chance would come, sooner or later. By Gad, they’ll have to sweat for it if I come through this business alive!’


In the evening Torpenhow was able to announce to his friend that the Central Southern Agency was willing to take him on trial, paying expenses for three months. ‘And, by the way, what’s your name?’ said Torpenhow.


‘Heldar. Do they give me a free hand?’


‘They’ve taken you on chance. You must justify the choice. You’d better stick to me. I’m going up-country with a column, and I’ll do what I can for you. Give me some of your sketches taken here, and I’ll send ’em along.’ To himself he said, ‘That’s the best bargain the Central Southern has ever made; and they got me cheaply enough.’


So it came to pass that, after some purchase of horse-flesh and arrangements financial and political, Dick was made free of the New and Honourable Fraternity of war correspondents, who all possess the inalienable right of doing as much work as they can and getting as much for it as Providence and their owners shall please. To these things are added in time, if the brother be worthy, the power of glib speech that neither man nor woman can resist when a meal or a bed is in question, the eye of a horse-coper, the skill of a cook, the constitution of a bullock, the digestion of an ostrich, and an infinite adaptability to all circumstances. But many die before they attain to this degree, and the past-masters in the craft appear for the most part in dress-clothes when they are in England, and thus their glory is hidden from the multitude.


Dick followed Torpenhow wherever the latter’s fancy chose to lead him, and between the two they managed to accomplish some work that almost satisfied themselves. It was not an easy life in any way, and under its influence the two were drawn very closely together, for they ate from the same dish, they shared the same water-bottle, and, most binding tie of all, their mails went off together. It was Dick who managed to make gloriously drunk a telegraph-clerk in a palm hut far beyond the Second Cataract, and, while the man lay in bliss on the floor, possessed himself of some laboriously acquired exclusive information, forwarded by a confiding correspondent of an opposition syndicate, made a careful duplicate of the matter, and brought the result to Torpenhow, who said that all was fair in love or war correspondence, and built an excellent descriptive article from his rival’s riotous waste of words. It was Torpenhow who—but the tale of their adventures, together and apart, from Philx to the waste wilderness of Herawi and Muella, would fill many books. They had been penned into a square side by side, in deadly fear of being shot by over-excited soldiers; they had fought with baggage-camels in the chill dawn; they had jogged along in silence under blinding sun on indefatigable little Egyptian horses; and they had floundered on the shallows of the Nile when the whale-boat in which they had found a berth chose to hit a hidden rock and rip out half her bottom-planks.


Now they were sitting on the sand-bank, and the whale-boats were bringing up the remainder of the column.


‘Yes,’ said Torpenhow, as he put the last rude stitches into his over-long-neglected gear, ‘it has been a beautiful business.’


‘The patch or the campaign?’ said Dick. ‘Don’t think much of either, myself.’


‘You want the Eurylas brought up above the Third Cataract, don’t you? and eighty-one-ton guns at Jakdul? Now, I’m quite satisfied with my breeches.’ He turned round gravely to exhibit himself, after the manner of a clown.


‘It’s very pretty. Specially the lettering on the sack. G.B.T. Government Bullock Train. That’s a sack from India.’


‘It’s my initials,—Gilbert Belling Torpenhow. I stole the cloth on purpose. What the mischief are the camel-corps doing yonder?’ Torpenhow shaded his eyes and looked across the scrub-strewn gravel.


A bugle blew furiously, and the men on the bank hurried to their arms and accoutrements.


‘“Pisan soldiery surprised while bathing,”’ remarked Dick calmly. ‘D’you remember the picture? It’s by Michael Angelo; all beginners copy it. That scrub’s alive with enemy.’


The camel-corps on the bank yelled to the infantry to come to them, and a hoarse shouting down the river showed that the remainder of the column had wind of the trouble and was hastening to take share in it. As swiftly as a reach of still water is crisped by the wind, the rock-strewn ridges and scrub-topped hills were troubled and alive with armed men. Mercifully, it occurred to these to stand far off for a time, to shout and gesticulate joyously. One man even delivered himself of a long story. The camel-corps did not fire. They were only too glad of a little breathing-space, until some sort of square could be formed. The men on the sand-bank ran to their side; and the whaleboats, as they toiled up within shouting distance, were thrust into the nearest bank and emptied of all save the sick and a few men to guard them. The Arab orator ceased his outcries, and his friends howled.


‘They look like the Mahdi’s men,’ said Torpenhow, elbowing himself into the crush of the square; ‘but what thousands of ’em there are! The tribes hereabout aren’t against us, I know.’


‘Then the Mahdi’s taken another town,’ said Dick, ‘and set all these yelping devils free to chaw us up. Lend us your glass.’


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‘Our scouts should have told us of this. We’ve been trapped,’ said a subaltern. ‘Aren’t the camel-guns ever going to begin? Hurry up, you men!’


There was no need for any order. The men flung themselves panting against the sides of the square, for they had good reason to know that whoso was left outside when the fighting began would very probably die in an extremely unpleasant fashion. The little hundred-and-fifty-pound camel-guns posted at one corner of the square opened the ball as the square moved forward by its right to get possession of a knoll of rising, ground. All had fought in this manner many times before, and there was no novelty in the entertainment: always the same hot and stifling formation, the smell of dust and leather, the same boltlike rush of the enemy, the same pressure on the weakest side of the square, the few minutes of desperate hand-to-hand scuffle, and then the silence of the desert, broken only by the yells of those whom the handful of cavalry attempted to pursue. They had grown careless. The camel-guns spoke at intervals, and the square slouched forward amid the protests of the camels. Then came the attack of three thousand men who had not learned from books that it is impossible for troops in close order to attack against breechloading fire. A few dropping shots heralded their approach, and a few horsemen led, but the bulk of the force was naked humanity, mad with rage, and armed with the spear and the sword. The instinct of the desert, where there is always much war, told them that the right flank of the square was the weakest, for they swung clear of the front. The camel-guns shelled them as they passed; and opened for an instant lanes through their midst, most like those quick-closing vistas in a Kentish hop-garden seen when the train races by at full speed; and the infantry fire, held till the opportune moment, dropped them in close-packed hundreds. No civilised troops in the world could have endured the hell through which they came, the living leaping high to avoid the dying who clutched at their heels, the wounded cursing and staggering forward, till they fell—a torrent black as the sliding water above a mill-dam—full on the right flank of the square. Then the line of the dusty troops and the faint blue desert sky overhead went out in rolling smoke, and the little stones on the heated ground and the tinder-dry clumps of scrub became matters of surpassing interest, for men measured their agonised retreat and recovery by these things, counting mechanically and hewing their way back to chosen pebble and branch. There was no semblance of any concerted fighting. For aught the men knew, the enemy might be attempting all four sides of the square at once. Their business was to destroy what lay in front of them, to bayonet in the back those who passed over them, and, dying, to drag down the slayer till he could be knocked on the head by some avenging gunbutt. Dick waited quietly with Torpenhow and a young doctor till the stress became unendurable. There was no hope of attending to the wounded till the attack was repulsed, so the three moved forward gingerly towards the weakest side. There was a rush from without, the short hough-hough of the stabbing spears, and a man on a horse, followed by thirty or forty others, dashed through, yelling and hacking. The right flank of the square sucked in after them, and the other sides sent help. The wounded, who knew that they had but a few hours more to live, caught at the enemy’s feet and brought them down, or, staggering to a discarded rifle, fired blindly into the scufe that raged in the centre of the square. Dick was conscious that somebody had cut him violently across his helmet, that he had fired his revolver into a black, foam-flecked face which forthwith ceased to bear any resemblance to a face, and that Torpenhow had gone down under an Arab whom he had tried to ‘collar low,’ and was turning over and over with his captive, feeling for the man’s eyes. The doctor was jabbing at a venture with a bayonet, and a helmetless soldier was firing over Dick’s shoulder: the flying grains of powder stung his cheek. It was to Torpenhow that Dick turned by instinct. The representative of the Central Southern Syndicate had shaken himself clear of his enemy, and rose, wiping his thumb on his trousers. The Arab, both hands to his forehead, screamed aloud, then snatched up his spear and rushed at Torpenhow, who was panting under shelter of Dick’s revolver. Dick fired twice, and the man dropped limply. His upturned face lacked one eye. The musketry-fire redoubled, but cheers mingled with it. The rush had failed, and the enemy were flying. If the heart of the square were shambles, the ground beyond was a butcher’s shop. Dick thrust his way forward between the maddened men. The remnant of the enemy were retiring, as the few—the very few—English cavalry rode down the laggards.


Beyond the lines of the dead, a broad blood-stained Arab spear cast aside in the retreat lay across a stump of scrub, and beyond this again the illimitable dark levels of the desert. The sun caught the steel and turned it into a savage red disc. Some one behind him was saying, ‘Ah, get away, you brute!’ Dick raised his revolver and pointed towards the desert. His eye was held by the red splash in the distance, and the clamour about him seemed to die down to a very far-away whisper, like the whisper of a level sea. There was the revolver and the red light, . . . and the voice of some one scaring something away, exactly as had fallen somewhere before,-probably in a past life. Dick waited for what should happen afterwards. Something seemed to crack inside his head, and for an instant he stood in the dark,—a darkness that stung. He fired at random, and the bullet went out, across the desert as he muttered, ‘Spoilt my aim. There aren’t any more cartridges. We shall have to run home.’ He put his hand to his head and brought it away covered with blood.


‘Old man, you’re cut rather badly,’ said Torpenhow. ‘I owe you something for this business. Thanks. Stand up! I say, you can’t be ill here.’


Dick had fallen stiffly on Torpenhow’s shoulder, and was muttering something about aiming low and to the left. Then he sank to the ground and was silent. Torpenhow dragged him off to a doctor and sat down to work out an account of what he was pleased to call ‘a sanguinary battle, in which our arms had acquitted themselves,’ etc.


All that night, when the troops were encamped by the whale-boats, a black figure danced in the strong moonlight on the sand-bar and shouted that Khartoum the accursed one was dead,—was dead,—was dead,—that two steamers were rock-staked on the Nile outside the city, and that of all their crews there remained not one; and Khartoum was dead,—was dead,—was dead!


But Torpenhow took no heed. He was watching Dick, who was calling aloud to the restless Nile for Maisie,—and again Maisie!


‘Behold a phenomenon,’ said Torpenhow, rearranging the blanket. ‘Here is a man, presumably human, who mentions the name of one woman only. And I’ve seen a good deal of delirium, too.—Dick, here’s some fizzy drink.’


‘Thank you, Maisie,’ said Dick.



			


				





	

					

				
Young Men at the Manor
			

			
			

				


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THEY were fishing, a few days later, in the bed of the brook that for centuries had cut deep into the soft valley soil. The trees closing overhead made long tunnels through which the sunshine worked in blobs and patches. Down in the tunnels were bars of sand and gravel, old roots and trunks covered with moss or painted red by the irony water; foxgloves growing lean and pale towards the light; clumps of fern and thirsty shy flowers who could not live away from moisture and shade. In the pools you could see the wave thrown up by the trouts as they charged hither and yon, and the pools were joined to each other—except in flood time, when all was one brown rush—by sheets of thin broken water that poured themselves chuckling round the darkness of the next bend.


This was one of the children’s most secret hunting-grounds, and their particular friend, old Hobden the hedger, had shown them how to use it. Except for the click of a rod hitting a low willow, or a switch and tussle among the young ash-leaves as a line hung up for the minute, nobody in the hot pasture could have guessed what game was going on among the trouts below the banks.


‘We’ve got half-a-dozen,’ said Dan, after a warm, wet hour. ‘I vote we go up to Stone Bay and try Long Pool.’


Una nodded—most of her talk was by nods—and they crept from the gloom of the tunnels towards the tiny weir that turns the brook into the mill-stream. Here the banks are low and bare, and the glare of the afternoon sun on the Long Pool below the weir makes your eyes ache.


When they were in the open they nearly fell down with astonishment. A huge grey horse, whose tail-hairs crinkled the glassy water, was drinking in the pool, and the ripples about his muzzle flashed like melted gold. On his back sat an old, white-haired man dressed in a loose glimmery gown of chain-mail. He was bareheaded, and a nut-shaped iron helmet hung at his saddle-bow. His reins were of red leather five or six inches deep, scalloped at the edges, and his high padded saddle with its red girths was held fore and aft by a red leather breastband and crupper.


‘Look!’ said Una, as though Dan were not staring his very eyes out. ‘It’s like the picture in your room ’“Sir Isumbras at the Ford.”’


The rider turned towards them, and his thin, long face was just as sweet and gentle as that of the knight who carries the children in that picture.


‘They should be here now, Sir Richard,’ said Puck’s deep voice among the willow-herb.


‘They are here,’ the knight said, and he smiled at Dan with the string of trouts in his hand


‘There seems no great change in boys since mine fished this water.’


‘If your horse has drunk, we shall be more at ease in the Ring,’ said Puck; and he nodded to the children as though he had never magicked away their memories a week before.


The great horse turned and hoisted himself into the pasture with a kick and a scramble that tore the clods down rattling.


‘Your Pardon!’ said Sir Richard to Dan. ‘When these lands were mine, I never loved that mounted men should cross the brook except by the paved ford. But my Swallow here was thirsty, and I wished to meet you.’


‘We’re very glad you’ve come, sir,’ said Dan. ‘It doesn’t matter in the least about the banks.’


He trotted across the pasture on the sword side of the mighty horse, and it was a mighty iron-handled sword that swung from Sir Richard’s belt. Una walked behind with Puck. She remembered everything now.


‘I’m sorry about the Leaves,’ he said, but it would never have done if you had gone home and told, would it?’


‘I s’pose not,’ Una answered. ‘But you said that all the fair—People of the Hills had left England.’


‘So they have; but I told you that you should come and go and look and know, didn’t I? The knight isn’t a fairy. He’s Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a very old friend of mine. He came over with William the Conqueror, and he wants

to see you particularly.’


‘What for?’ said Una.


‘On account of your great wisdom and learning,’ Puck replied, without a twinkle.


‘Us?’ said Una. ‘Why, I don’t know my Nine Times—not to say it dodging, and Dan makes the most awful mess of fractions. He can’t mean us!’


‘Una!’ Dan called back. ‘Sir Richard says he is going to tell what happened to Weland’s sword. He’s got it. Isn’t it splendid?’


‘Nay—nay,’ said Sir Richard, dismounting as they reached the Ring, in the bend of the millstream bank. ‘It is you that must tell me, for I hear the youngest child in our England to-day is as wise as our wisest clerk.’ He slipped the bit out of Swallow‘s mouth, dropped the ruby-red reins over his head, and the wise horse moved off to graze.


Sir Richard (they noticed he limped a little) unslung his great sword.


‘That’s it,’ Dan whispered to Una.


‘This is the sword that Brother Hugh had from Wayland-Smith,’ Sir Richard said. ‘Once he gave it me, but I would not take it; but at the last it became mine after such a fight as never christened man fought. See!’ He half drew it from its sheath and turned it before them. On either side just below the handle, where the Runic letters shivered as though they were alive, were two deep gouges in the dull, deadly steel. ‘Now, what Thing made those?’ said he. ‘I know not, but you, perhaps, can say.’


‘Tell them all the tale, Sir Richard,’ said Puck. ‘It concerns their land somewhat.’


‘Yes, from the very beginning,’ Una pleaded, for the knight’s good face and the smile on it more than ever reminded her of ‘Sir Isumbras at the Ford.’


They settled down to listen, Sir Richard bareheaded to the sunshine, dandling the sword in both hands, while the grey horse cropped outside the Ring, and the helmet on the saddle-bow clinged softly each time he jerked his head.


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‘From the beginning, then,’ Sir Richard said, ‘since it concerns your land, I will tell the tale. When our Duke came out of Normandy to take his England, great knights (have ye heard?) came and strove hard to serve the Duke, because he promised them lands here, and small knights followed the great ones. My folk in Normandy were poor; but a great knight, Engerrard of the Eagle—Engenulf De Aquila—who was kin to my father, followed the Earl of Mortain, who followed William the Duke, and I followed De Aquila. Yes, with thirty men-at-arms out of my father’s house and a new sword, I set out to conquer England three days after I was made knight. I did not then know that England would conquer me. We went up to Santlache with the rest—a very great host of us.’


‘Does that mean the Battle of Hastings—Ten Sixty-Six?’ Una whispered, and Puck nodded, so as not to interrupt.


‘At Santlache, over the hill yonder’—he pointed south-eastward towards Fairlight—‘we found Harold’s men. We fought. At the day’s end they ran. My men went with De Aquila’s to chase and plunder, and in that chase Engerrard of the Eagle was slain, and his son Gilbert took his banner and his men forward. This I did not know till after, for Swallow here was cut in the flank, so I stayed to wash the wound at a brook by a thorn. There a single Saxon cried out to me in French, and we fought together. I should have known his voice, but we fought together. For a long time neither had any advantage, till by pure ill-fortune his foot slipped and his sword flew from his hand. Now I had but newly been made knight, and wished, above all, to be courteous and fameworthy, so I forbore to strike and bade him get his sword again. “A plague on my sword,” said he. “It has lost me my first fight. You have spared my life. Take my sword.” He held it out to me, but as I stretched my hand the sword groaned like a stricken man, and I leaped back crying, “Sorcery!”


(The children looked at the sword as though it might speak again.)


‘Suddenly a clump of Saxons ran out upon me and, seeing a Norman alone, would have killed me, but my Saxon cried out that I was his prisoner, and beat them off. Thus, see you, he saved my life. He put me on my horse and led me through the woods ten long miles to this valley.’


‘To here, d’you mean?’ said Una.


‘To this very valley. We came in by the Lower Ford under the King’s Hill yonder’—he pointed eastward where the valley widens.


‘And was that Saxon Hugh the novice?’ Dan asked.


‘Yes, and more than that. He had been for three years at the monastery at Bec by Rouen, where’—Sir Richard chuckled—‘the Abbot Herluin would not suffer me to remain.’


‘Why wouldn’t he?’ said Dan.


‘Because I rode my horse into the refectory, when the scholars were at meat, to show the Saxon boys we Normans were not afraid of an abbot. It was that very Saxon Hugh tempted me to do it, and we had not met since that day. I thought I knew his voice even inside my helmet, and, for all that our Lords fought, we each rejoiced we had not slain the other. He walked by my side, and he told me how a Heathen God, as he believed, had given him his sword, but he said he had never heard it sing before. I remember I warned him to beware of sorcery and quick enchantments.’ Sir Richard smiled to himself. ‘I was very young—very young!’


‘When we came to his house here we had almost forgotten that we had been at blows. It was near midnight, and the Great Hall was full of men and women waiting news. There I first saw his sister, the Lady Ælueva, of whom he had spoken to us in France. She cried out fiercely at me, and would have had me hanged in that hour, but her brother said that I had spared his life—he said not how he saved mine from the Saxons—and that our Duke had won the day; and even while they wrangled over my poor body, of a sudden he fell down in a swoon from his wounds.’


‘“This is thy fault,” said the Lady Elueva to me, and she kneeled above him and called for wine and cloths.


‘“If I had known,” I answered, “he should have ridden and I walked. But he set me on my horse; he made no complaint; he walked beside me and spoke merrily throughout. I pray I have done him no harm.”


‘“Thou hast need to pray,” she said, catching up her underlip. “If he dies, thou shalt hang.”


‘They bore off Hugh to his chamber; but three tall men of the house bound me and set me under the beam of the Great Hall with a rope round my neck. The end of the rope they flung over the beam, and they sat them down by the fire to wait word whether Hugh lived or died. They cracked nuts with their knife-hilts the while.’


‘And how did you feel?’ said Dan.


‘Very weary; but I did heartily pray for my schoolmate Hugh his health. About noon I heard horses in the valley, and the three men loosed my ropes and fled out, and De Aquila’s men rode up. Gilbert de Aquila came with them, for it was his boast that, like his father, he forgot no man that served him. He was little, like his father, but terrible, with a nose like an eagle’s nose and yellow eyes like an eagle. He rode tall warhorses—roans, which he bred himself—and he could never abide to be helped into the saddle. He saw the rope hanging from the beam and laughed, and his men laughed, for I was too stiff to rise.


‘“This is poor entertainment for a Norman knight,” he said, “but, such as it is, let us be grateful. Show me, boy, to whom thou owest most, and we will pay them out of hand.”’


‘What did he mean? To kill ’em?’ said Dan.


‘Assuredly. But I looked at the Lady Ælueva where she stood among her maids, and her brother beside her. De Aquila’s men had driven them all into the Great Hall.’


‘Was she pretty?’ said Una.


‘In all my long life I have never seen woman fit to strew rushes before my Lady Ælueva,’ the knight replied, quite simply and quietly. ‘As I looked at her I thought I might save her and her house by a jest.’


‘“Seeing that I came somewhat hastily and without warning,” said I to De Aquila, “I have no fault to find with the courtesy that these Saxons have shown me.” But my voice shook. It is—it was not good to jest with that little man.


‘All were silent awhile, till De Aquila laughed. “Look, men—a miracle,” said he. “The fight is scarce sped, my father is not yet buried, and here we find our youngest knight already set down in his Manor, while his Saxons—ye can see it in their fat faces—have paid him homage and service! By the Saints,” he said, rubbing his nose, “I never thought England would be so easy won! Surely I can do no less than give the lad what he has taken. This Manor shall be thine, boy,” he said, “till I come again, or till thou art slain. Now, mount, men, and ride. We follow our Duke into Kent to make him King of England.”


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‘He drew me with him to the door while they brought his horse—a lean roan, taller than my Swallow here, but not so well girthed.’


‘“Hark to me,” he said, fretting with his great war-gloves. “I have given thee this Manor, which is a Saxon hornets’ nest, and I think thou wilt be slain in a month—as my father was slain. Yet if thou canst keep the roof on the hall, the thatch on the barn, and the plough in the furrow till I come back, thou shalt hold the Manor from me; for the Duke has promised our Earl Mortain all the lands by Pevensey, and Mortain will give me of them what he would have given my father. God knows if thou or I shall live till England is won; but remember, boy, that here and now fighting is foolishness and”—he reached for the reins—“craft and cunning is all.”


‘“Alas, I have no cunning,” said I.


‘“Not yet,” said he, hopping abroad, foot in stirrup, and poking his horse in the belly with his toe. “Not yet, but I think thou hast a good teacher. Farewell! Hold the Manor and live. Lose the Manor and hang,” he said, and spurred out, his shield-straps squeaking behind him.


‘So, children, here was I, little more than a boy, and Santlache fight not two days old, left alone with my thirty men-at-arms, in a land I knew not, among a people whose tongue I could not speak, to hold down the land which I had taken from them.’


‘And that was here at home?’ said Una.


‘Yes, here. See! From the Upper Ford, Weland’s Ford, to the Lower Ford, by the Belle Allée, west and east it ran half a league. From the Beacon of Brunanburgh behind us here, south and north it ran a full league—and all the woods were full of broken men from Santlache, Saxon thieves, Norman plunderers, robbers, and deer-stealers. A hornets’ nest indeed!’


‘When De Aquila had gone, Hugh would have thanked me for saving their lives; but the Lady Ælueva said that I had done it only for the sake of receiving the Manor.


‘“How could I know that De Aquila would give it me?” I said. “If I had told him I had spent my night in your halter he would have burned the place twice over by now.”


‘“If any man had put my neck in a rope,” she said, “I would have seen his house burned thrice over before I would have made terms.”


‘“But it was a woman,” I said; and I laughed, and she wept and said that I mocked her in her captivity.


‘“Lady,” said I, “there is no captive in this valley except one, and he is not a Saxon.”


At this she cried that I was a Norman thief, who came with false, sweet words, having intended from the first to turn her out in the fields to beg her bread. Into the fields! She had never seen the face of war !


‘I was angry, and answered, “This much at least I can disprove, for I swear”—and on my sword-hilt I swore it in that place—“I swear I will never set foot in the Great Hall till the Lady Ælueva herself shall summon me there.”


‘She went away, saying nothing, and I walked out, and Hugh limped after me, whistling dolorously (that is a custom of the English), and we came upon the three Saxons that had bound me. They were now bound by my men-at-arms, and behind them stood some fifty stark and sullen churls of the House and the Manor, waiting to see what should fall. We heard De Aquila’s trumpets blow thin through the woods Kentward.


‘“Shall we hang these?” said my men.


‘“Then my churls will fight,” said Hugh, beneath his breath; but I bade him ask the three what mercy they hoped for.


‘“None,” said they all. “She bade us hang thee if our master died. And we would have hanged thee. There is no more to it.”


‘As I stood doubting a woman ran down from the oak wood above the King’s Hill yonder, and cried out that some Normans were driving off the swine there.


‘“Norman or Saxon,” said I, “we must beat them back, or they will rob us every day. Out at them with any arms ye have!” So I loosed those three carles and we ran together, my men-at-arms and the Saxons with bills and bows which they had hidden in the thatch of their huts, and Hugh led them. Half-way up the King’s Hill we found a false fellow from Picardy—a sutler that sold wine in the Duke’s camp—with a dead knight’s shield on his arm, a stolen horse under him, and some ten or twelve wastrels at his tail, all cutting and slashing at the pigs. We beat them off, and saved our pork. One hundred and seventy pigs we saved in that great battle.’ Sir Richard laughed.


‘That, then, was our first work together, and I bade Hugh tell his folk that so would I deal with any man, knight or churl, Norman or Saxon, who stole as much as one egg from our valley. Said he to me, riding home: “Thou hast gone far to conquer England this evening.” I answered “England must be thine and mine, then. Help me, Hugh, to deal aright with these people. Make them to know that if they slay me De Aquila will surely send to slay them, and he will put a worse man in my place.” “That may well be true,” said he, and gave me his hand. “Better the devil we know than the devil we know not, till we can pack you Normans home.” And so, too, said his Saxons; and they laughed as we drove the pigs downhill. But I think some of them, even then, began not to hate me.’


‘I like Brother Hugh,’ said Una, softly.


‘Beyond question he was the most perfect, courteous, valiant, tender, and wise knight that ever drew breath,’ said Sir Richard, caressing the sword. ‘ He hung up his sword—this sword—on the wall of the Great Hall, because he said it was fairly mine, and never he took it down till De Aquila returned, as I shall presently show. For three months his men and mine guarded the valley, till all robbers and nightwalkers learned there was nothing to get from us save hard tack and a hanging. Side by side we fought against all who came—thrice a week sometimes we fought—against thieves and landless knights looking for good manors. Then we were in some peace, and I made shift by Hugh’s help to govern the valley—for all this valley of yours was my Manor—as a knight should. I kept the roof on the hall and the thatch on the barn, but . . . the English are a bold people. His Saxons would laugh and jest with Hugh, and Hugh with them, and—this was marvellous to me—if even the meanest of them said that such and such a thing was the Custom of the Manor, then straightway would Hugh and such old men of the Manor as might be near forsake everything else to debate the matter—I have seen them stop the mill with the corn half ground—and if the custom or usage were proven to be as it was said, why, that was the end of it, even though it were flat against Hugh, his wish and command. Wonderful!’


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‘Aye,’ said Puck, breaking in for the first time. ‘The Custom of Old England was here before your Norman knights came, and it outlasted them, though they fought against it cruel.’


‘Not I,’ said Sir Richard. ‘I let the Saxons go their stubborn way, but when my own men-at-arms, Normans not six months in England, stood up and told me what was the custom of the country, then I was angry. Ah, good days! Ah, wonderful people! And I loved them all.’


The knight lifted his arms as though he would hug the whole dear valley, and Swallow, hearing the chink of his chainmail, looked up and whinnied softly.


‘At last,’ he went on, ‘after a year of striving and contriving and some little driving, De Aquila came to the valley, alone and without warning. I saw him first at the Lower Ford, with a swine-herd’s brat on his saddle-bow.


‘“There is no need for thee to give any account of thy stewardship,” said he. “I have it all from the child here.” And he told me how the young thing had stopped his tall horse at the Ford, by waving of a branch, and crying that the way was barred. “And if one bold, bare babe be enough to guard the Ford in these days, thou hast done well,” said he, and puffed and wiped his head.


‘He pinched the child’s cheek, and looked at our cattle in the flat by the river.


‘“Both fat,” said he, rubbing his nose. “This is craft and cunning such as I love. What did I tell thee when I rode away, boy?”


‘“Hold the Manor or hang,” said I. I had never forgotten it.


‘“True. And thou hast held.” He clambered from his saddle and with his sword’s point cut out a turf from the bank and gave it me where I kneeled.’


Dan looked at Una, and Una looked at Dan.


‘That’s seizin,’ said Puck, in a whisper.


‘“Now thou art lawfully seized of the Manor, Sir Richard,” said he—’twas the first time he ever called me that—“ thou and thy heirs for ever. This must serve till the King’s clerks write out thy title on a parchment. England is all oursif we can hold it.”


‘“What service shall I pay?” I asked, and I remember I was proud beyond words.


‘“Knight’s fee, boy, knight’s fee!” said he, hopping round his horse on one foot. (Have I said he was little, and could not endure to be helped to his saddle?) “Six mounted men or twelve archers thou shalt send me whenever I call for them, and—where got you that corn?” said he, for it was near harvest, and our corn stood well. “I have never seen such bright straw. Send me three bags of the same seed yearly, and furthermore, in memory of our last meeting—with the rope round thy neck—entertain me and my men for two days of each year in the Great Hall of thy Manor.”


‘“Alas!” said I, “then my Manor is already forfeit. I am under vow not to enter the Great Hall.” And I told him what I had sworn to the Lady Ælueva.’


‘And hadn’t you ever been into the house since?’ said Una.


‘Never,’ Sir Richard answered smiling. ‘I had made me a little but of wood up the hill, and there I did justice and slept . . . . De Aquila wheeled aside, and his shield shook on his back. “No matter, boy,” said he. “I will remit the homage for a year.”’


‘He meant Sir Richard needn’t give him dinner there the first year,’ Puck explained.


‘De Aquila stayed with me in the hut, and Hugh, who could read and write and cast accounts, showed him the Roll of the Manor, in which were written all the names of our fields and men, and he asked a thousand questions touching the land, the timber, the grazing, the mill, and the fish-ponds, and the worth of every

man in the valley. But never he named the Lady Ælueva’s name, nor went he near the Great Hall. By night he drank with us in the hut. Yes, he sat on the straw like an eagle ruffled in her feathers, his yellow eyes rolling above the cup, and he pounced in his talk like an eagle, swooping from one thing to another, but always binding fast. Yes; he would lie still awhile, and then rustle in the straw, and speak sometimes as though he were King William himself, and anon he would speak in parables and tales, and if at once we saw not his meaning he would yerk us in the ribs with his scabbarded sword.


‘“Look, you, boys,” said he, “I am born out of my due time. Five hundred years ago I would have made all England such an England as neither Dane, Saxon, nor Norman should have conquered. Five hundred years hence I should have been such a counsellor to Kings as the world hath never dreamed of. ’Tis all here,” said he, tapping his big head, “but it hath no play in this black age. Now Hugh here is a better man than thou art, Richard.” He had made his voice harsh and croaking, like a raven’s.


‘“Truth,” said I. “But for Hugh, his help and patience and long-suffering, I could never have kept the Manor.”


‘“Nor thy life either,” said De Aquila. “Hugh has saved thee not once, but a hundred times. Be still, Hugh!” he said. “Dost thou know, Richard, why Hugh slept, and why he still sleeps, among thy Norman men-at-arms?”


‘“To be near me,” said I, for I thought this was truth.


‘“Fool!” said De Aquila. “It is because his Saxons have begged him to rise against thee, and to sweep every Norman out of the valley. No matter how I know. It is truth. Therefore Hugh hath made himself an hostage for thy life, well knowing that if any harm befell thee from his Saxons thy Normans would slay him without remedy. And this his Saxons know. Is it true, Hugh?”


‘“In some sort,” said Hugh, shamefacedly; “at least, it was true half a year ago. My Saxons would not harm Richard now. I think they know him; but I judged it best to make sure.”


‘Look, children, what that man had done—and I had never guessed it! Night after night had he lain down among my men-at-arms, knowing that if one Saxon had lifted knife against me his life would have answered for mine.


‘“Yes,” said De Aquila. “And he is a swordIess man.” He pointed to Hugh’s belt, for Hugh had put away his sword—did I tell you?—the day after it flew from his hand at Santlache. He carried only the short knife and the long-bow. ‘Swordless and landless art thou, Hugh; and they call thee kin to Earl Godwin.” (Hugh was indeed of Godwin’s blood.) “The Manor that was thine is given to this boy and to his children for ever. Sit up and beg, for he can turn thee out like a dog, Hugh.”


‘Hugh said nothing, but I heard his teeth grind, and I bade De Aquila, my own overlord, hold his peace, or I would stuff his words down his throat. Then De Aquila laughed till the tears ran down his face.


page 5




‘“I warned the King,” said he, “what would come of giving England to us Norman thieves. Here art thou, Richard, less than two days confirmed in thy Manor, and already thou hast risen against thy overlord. What shall we do to him, Sir Hugh?”


‘“I am a swordless man,” said Hugh. “Do not jest with me,” and he laid his head on his knees and groaned.


‘“The greater fool thou,” said De Aquila, and all his voice changed; “for I have given thee the Manor of Dallington up the hill this half-hour since,” and he yerked at Hugh with his scabbard across the straw.


‘“To me?” said Hugh. “I am a Saxon, and, except that I love Richard here, I have not sworn fealty to any Norman.”


‘“In God’s good time, which because of my sins I shall not live to see, there will be neither Saxon nor Norman in England,” said De Aquila. “If I know men, thou art more faithful unsworn than a score of Normans I could name. Take Dallington, and join Sir Richard to fight me to-morrow, if it please thee!”


‘“Nay,” said Hugh. “I am no child. Where I take a gift, there I render service”; and he put his hands between De Aquila’s, and swore to be faithful, and, as I remember, I kissed him, and De Aquila kissed us both.


‘We sat afterwards outside the hut while the sun rose, and De Aquila marked our churls going to their work in the fields, and talked of holy things, and how we should govern our manors in time to come, and of hunting and of horse-breeding, and of the King’s wisdom and unwisdom; for he spoke to us as though we were in all sorts now his brothers. Anon a churl stole up to me—he was one of the three I had not hanged a year ago—and he bellowed—which is the Saxon for whispering—that the Lady Ælueva would speak to me at the Great House. She walked abroad daily in the Manor, and it was her custom to send me word whither she went, that I might set an archer or two behind and in front to guard her. Very often I myself lay up in the woods and watched on her also.


‘I went swiftly, and as I passed the great door it opened from within, and there stood my Lady Ælueva, and she said to me: “Sir Richard, will it please you enter your Great Hall?” Then she wept, but we were alone.’


The knight was silent for a long time, his face turned across the valley, smiling.


‘Oh, well done!’ said Una, and clapped her hands very softly. ‘She was sorry, and she said so.’


‘Aye, she was sorry, and she said so,’ said Sir Richard, coming back with a little start. ‘Very soon—but he said it was two full hours later—De Aquila rode to the door, with his shield new scoured (Hugh had cleansed it), and demanded entertainment, and called me a false knight, that would starve his overlord to death. Then Hugh cried out that no man should work in the valley that day, and our Saxons blew horns, and set about feasting and drinking, and running of races, and dancing and singing; and De Aquila climbed upon a horse-block and spoke to them in what he swore was good Saxon, but no man understood it. At night we feasted in the Great Hall, and when the harpers and the singers were gone we four sat late at the high table. As I remember, it was a warm night with a full moon, and De Aquila bade Hugh take down his sword from the wall again, for the honour of the Manor of Dallington, and Hugh took it gladly enough. Dust lay on the hilt, for I saw him blow it off.


‘She and I sat talking a little apart, and at first we thought the harpers had come back, for the Great Hall was filled with a rushing noise of music. De Aquila leaped up; but there was only the moonlight fretty on the floor.


‘“Hearken!” said Hugh. “It is my sword,” and as he belted it on the music ceased.


‘“Over Gods, forbid that I should ever belt blade like that,” said De Aquila. “What does it foretell?”


‘“The Gods that made it may know. Last time it spoke was at Hastings, when I lost all my lands. Belike it sings now that I have new lands and am a man again,” said Hugh.


‘He loosed the blade a little and drove it back happily into the sheath, and the sword answered him low and crooningly, as—as a woman would speak to a man, her head on his shoulder.


‘Now that was the second time in all my life I heard this Sword sing.’ . . .


‘Look!’ said Una. ‘There’s Mother coming down the Long Slip. What will she say to Sir Richard? She can’t help seeing him.’


‘And Puck can’t magic us this time,’ said Dan.


‘Are you sure?’ said Puck; and he leaned forward and whispered to Sir Richard, who, smiling, bowed his head.


‘But what befell the sword and my brother Hugh I will tell on another time,’ said he, rising. ‘Ohé, Swallow!’


The great horse cantered up from the far end of the meadow, close to Mother.

They heard Mother say: ‘Children, Gleason’s old horse has broken into the meadow again. Where did he get through?’


‘Just below Stone Bay,’ said Dan. ‘He tore down simple flobs of the bank! We noticed it just now. And we’ve caught no end of fish. We’ve been at it all the afternoon.’


And they honestly believed that they had. They never noticed the Oak, Ash, and Thorn leaves that Puck had slyly thrown into their laps.



			


				





	

					

				
Yoked with an Unbeliever
			

			
			

				


[a short tale]


I am dying for you, and you are dying for another.

Punjabi Proverb


WHEN the Gravesend tender left the P. & O. steamer for Bombay and went back to catch the train to Town, there were many people in it crying. But the one who wept most, and most openly, was Miss Agnes Laiter. She had reason to cry, because the only man she ever loved—or ever could love, so she said—was going out to India; and India, as every one knows, is divided equally between jungle, tigers, cobras, cholera, and sepoys.


Phil Garron, leaning over the side of the steamer in the rain, felt very unhappy too ; but he did not cry. He was sent out to ‘tea.’ What ‘tea’ meant he had not the vaguest idea, but fancied that he would have to ride on a prancing horse over hills covered with tea-vines, and draw a sumptuous salary for doing so ; and he was very grateful to his uncle for getting him the berth. He was really going to reform all his slack, shiftless ways, save a large proportion of his magnificent salary yearly, and in a very short time return to marry Agnes Laiter. Phil Garron had been lying loose on his friends’ hands for three years, and, as he had nothing to do, he naturally fell in love. He was very nice ; but he was not strong in his views and opinions and principles, and though he never came to actual grief, his friends were thankful when he said good-bye, and went out to this mysterious I ‘tea’ business near Darjiling. They said, ‘God bless you, dear boy! Let us never see your face again,’—or at least that was what Phil was given to understand.


When he sailed, he was very full of a great plan to prove himself several hundred times better than any one had given him credit for—to work like a horse, and triumphantly marry Agnes Laiter. He had many good points besides his good looks ; his only fault being that he was weak, the least little bit in the world weak. He had as much notion of economy as the Morning Sun ; and yet you could not lay your hand on any one item, and say, ‘Herein Phil Garron is extravagant or reckless.’ Nor could you point out any particular vice in his character ; but he was ‘unsatisfactory’ and as workable as putty.


Agnes Laiter went about her duties at home—her family objected to the engagement—with red eyes, while Phil was sailing to Darjiling—a ‘port on the Bengal Ocean,’ as his mother used to tell her friends. He was popular enough on boardship, made many acquaintances and a moderately large liquor-bill, and sent off huge letters to Agnes Laiter at each port. Then he fell to work on his plantation, somewhere between Darjiling and Kangra, and, though the salary and the horse and the work were not quite all he had fancied, he succeeded fairly well, and gave himself much unnecessary credit for his perseverance.


In the course of time, as he settled more into collar, and his work grew fixed before him, the face of Agnes Laiter went out of his mind and only came when he was at leisure, which was not often. He would forget all about her for a fortnight, and remember her with a start, like a schoolboy who has forgotten to learn his lesson. She did not forget Phil, because she was of the kind that never forgets. Only, another man—a really desirable young man—presented himself before Mrs. Laiter ; and the chance of a marriage with Phil was as far off as ever ; and his letters were so unsatisfactory ; and there was a certain amount of domestic pressure brought to bear on the girl ; and the young man really was an eligible person as incomes go ; and the end of all things was that Agnes married him, and wrote a tempestuous whirlwind of a letter to Phil in the wilds of Darjiling, and said she should never know a happy moment all the rest of her life. Which was a true prophecy.


Phil received that letter, and held himself illtreated. This was two years after he had come out ; but by dint of thinking fixedly of Agnes Laiter, and looking at her photograph, and patting himself on the back for being one of the most constant lovers in history, and warming to the work as he went on, he really fancied that he had been very hardly used. He sat down and wrote one final letter—a really pathetic ‘world without end, amen,’ epistle; explaining how he would be true to Eternity, and that all women were very much alike, and he would hide his broken heart, etc. etc. ; but if, at any future time, etc. etc., he could afford to wait, etc. etc., unchanged affections, etc. etc., return to her old love, etc. etc., for eight closely-written pages. From an artistic point of view it was very neat work, but an ordinary Philistine, who knew the state of Phil’s real feelings—not the ones he rose to as he went on writing—would have called it the thoroughly mean and selfish work of a thoroughly mean and selfish weak man. But this verdict would have been incorrect. Phil paid for the postage, and felt every word he had written for at least two days and a half. It was the last flicker before the light went out.


That letter made Agnes Laiter very unhappy, and she cried and put it away in her desk, and became Mrs. Somebody Else for the good of her family. Which is the first duty of every Christian maid.


Phil went his ways, and thought no more of his letter, except as an artist thinks of a neatly touched-in sketch. His ways were not bad, but they were not altogether good until they brought him across Dunmaya, the daughter of a Rajput ex-Subadar-Major of our Native Army. The girl had a strain of Hill blood in her, and like the Hill-women, was not a purdah-nashin or woman who lives behind the veil. Where Phil met her, or how he heard of her, does not matter. She was a good girl and handsome, and, in her way, very clever and shrewd ; though, of course, a little hard. It is to be remembered that Phil was living very comfortably, denying himself no small luxury, never putting by a penny, very satisfied with himself and his good intentions, was dropping all his English correspondents one by one, and beginning more and more to look upon India as his home. Some men fall this way, and they are of no use afterwards. The climate where he was stationed was good, and it really did not seem to him that there was any reason to return to England.


He did what many planters have done before him—that is to say, he made up his mind to marry a Hill-girl and settle down. He was seven-and-twenty then, with a long life before him, but no spirit to go through with it. So he married Dunmaya by the forms of the English Church, and some fellow-planters said he was a fool, and some said he was a wise man. Dunmaya was a thoroughly honest girl, and, in spite of her reverence for an Englishman, had a reasonable estimate of her husband’s weaknesses. She managed him tenderly, and became, in less than a year, a very passable imitation of an English lady in dress and carriage. It is curious to think that a Hill-man after a lifetime’s education is a Hillman still ; but a Hill-woman can in six months master most of the ways of her English sisters. There was a coolie-woman once . . . But that is another story. Dunmaya dressed by preference in black and yellow, and looked well.


Meantime Phil’s letter lay in Agnes Laiter’s desk, and now and again she would think of poor, resolute, hard-working Phil among the cobras and tigers of Darjiling, toiling in the vain hope that she might come back to him. Her husband was worth ten Phils, except that he had rheumatism of the heart. Three years after he was married,—and after he had tried Nice and Algeria for his complaint,—he went to Bombay, where he died, and set Agnes free. Being a devout woman, she looked on his death and the place of it as a direct interposition of Providence, and when she had recovered from the shock, she took out and reread Phil’s letter with the ‘etc. etc.,’ and the big dashes, and the little dashes, and kissed it several times. No one knew her in Bombay ; she had her husband’s income, which was a large one, and Phil was close at hand. It was wrong and improper, of course, but she decided, as heroines do in novels, to find her old lover, to offer him her hand and her gold, and with him spend the rest of her life in some spot far from unsympathetic souls. She sat for two months, alone in Watson’s Hotel, elaborating this decision, and the picture was a pretty one. Then she set out in search of Phil Garron, assistant on a tea plantation with a more than usually unpronounceable name.




.     .     .     .     .




She found him. She spent a month over it, for his plantation was not in the Darjiling district at all, but nearer Kangra. Phil was very little altered, and Dunmaya was very nice to her.


Now the particular sin and shame of the whole business is that Phil, who really is not worth thinking of twice, was and is loved by Dunmaya, and more than loved by Agnes, the whole of whose life he seems to have spoilt.


Worst of all, Dunmaya is making a decent man of him ; and he will ultimately be saved from perdition through her training.


Which is manifestly unfair.



			


				





	

					

				
The Wrong Thing
			

			
			

				


page 1 of 6




DAN had gone in for building model boats; but after he had filled the schoolroom with chips, which he expected Una to clear away, they turned him out of doors and he took all his tools up the hill to Mr Springett’s yard, where he knew he could make as much mess as he chose. Old Mr Springett was a builder, contractor, and sanitary engineer, and his yard, which opened off the village street, was always full of interesting things. At one end of it was a long loft, reached by a ladder, where he kept his iron-bound scaffold-planks, tins of paints, pulleys, and odds and ends he had found in old houses. He would sit here by the hour watching his carts as they loaded or unloaded in the yard below, while Dan gouged and grunted at the carpenter’s bench near the loft window. Mr Springett and Dan had always been particular friends, for Mr Springett was so old he could remember when railways were being made in the southern counties of England, and people were allowed to drive dogs in carts.One hot, still afternoon—the tar-paper on the roof smelt like ships—Dan, in his shirt-sleeves, was smoothing down a new schooner’s bow, and Mr Springett was talking of barns and houses he had built. He said he never forgot any stick or stone he had ever handled, or any man, woman, or child he had ever met. Just then he was very proud of the Village Hall at the entrance of the village, which he had finished a few weeks before.


‘An’ I don’t mind tellin’ you, Mus’ Dan,’ he said, ‘that the Hall will be my last job top of this mortal earth. I didn’t make ten pounds—no, nor yet five—out o’ the whole contrac’, but my name’s lettered on the foundation stone—Ralph Springett, Builder—and the stone she’s bedded on four foot good concrete. If she shifts any time these five hundred years, I’ll sure-ly turn in my grave. I told the Lunnon architec’ so when he come down to oversee my work.’


‘What did he say?’ Dan was sandpapering the schooner’s port bow.


‘Nothing. The Hall ain’t more than one of his small jobs for him, but ’tain’t small to me, an’ my name is cut and lettered, frontin’ the village street, I do hope an’ pray, for time everlastin’. You’ll want the little round file for that holler in her bow. Who’s there?’ Mr Springett turned stiffly in his chair.


A long pile of scaffold-planks ran down the centre of the loft. Dan looked, and saw Hal o’ the Draft’s touzled head beyond them. [See ‘Hal o’ the Draft’ in Puck of Pook’s Hill.]


‘Be you the builder of the Village Hall?’ he asked of Mr Springett.


‘I be,’ was the answer. ‘But if you want a job—’


Hal laughed. ‘No, faith!’he said. ‘Only the Hall is as good and honest a piece of work as I’ve ever run a rule over. So, being born hereabouts, and being reckoned a master among masons, and accepted as a master mason, I made bold to pay my brotherly respects to the builder.’


‘Aa—um!’ Mr Springett looked important. ‘I be a bit rusty, but I’ll try ye!’


He asked Hal several curious questions, and the answers must have pleased him, for he invited Hal to sit down. Hal moved up, always keeping behind the pile of planks so that only his head showed, and sat down on a trestle in the dark corner at the back of Mr Springett’s desk. He took no notice of Dan, but talked at once to Mr Springett about bricks, and cement, and lead and glass, and after a while Dan went on with his work. He knew Mr Springett was pleased, because he tugged his white sandy beard, and smoked his pipe in short puffs. The two men seemed to agree about everything, but when grown-ups agree they interrupt each other almost as much as if they were quarrelling. Hal said something about workmen.


‘Why, that’s what I always say,’ Mr Springett cried. ‘A man who can only do one thing, he’s but next-above-fool to the man that can’t do nothin’. That’s where the Unions make their mistake.’


‘My thought to the very dot.’ Dan heard Hal slap his tight-hosed leg. ‘I’ve suffered in my time from these same Guilds—Unions, d’you call ’em? All their precious talk of the mysteries of their trades—why, what does it come to?’


‘Nothin’! You’ve justabout hit it,’ said Mr Springett, and rammed his hot tobacco with his thumb.


‘Take the art of wood-carving,’ Hal went on. He reached across the planks, grabbed a wooden mallet, and moved his other hand as though he wanted something. Mr Springett without a word passed him one of Dan’s broad chisels. ‘Ah! Wood-carving, for example. If you can cut wood and have a fair draft of what ye mean to do, a’ Heaven’s name take chisel and maul and let drive at it, say I! You’ll soon find all the mystery, forsooth, of wood- carving under your proper hand!’ Whack, came the mallet on the chisel, and a sliver of wood curled up in front of it. Mr Springett watched like an old raven.


‘All art is one, man—one!’ said Hal between whacks; ’and to wait on another man to finish out—’


‘To finish out your work ain’t no sense,’ Mr Springett cut in. ‘That’s what I’m always sayin’ to the boy here.’ He nodded towards Dan. ‘That’s what I said when I put the new wheel into Brewster’s Mill in Eighteen hundred Seventy-two. I reckoned I was millwright enough for the job ’thout bringin’ a man from Lunnon. An’ besides, dividin’ work eats up profits, no bounds.’


Hal laughed his beautiful deep laugh, and Mr Springett joined in till Dan laughed too.


‘You handle your tools, I can see,’ said Mr Springett. ‘I reckon, if you’re any way like me, you’ve found yourself hindered by those—Guilds, did you call ’em? —Unions, we say.’


‘You may say so!’ Hal pointed to a white scar on his cheekbone. ‘This is a remembrance from the Master watching-Foreman of Masons on Magdalen Tower, because, please you, I dared to carve stone without their leave. They said a stone had slipped from the cornice by accident.’


‘I know them accidents. There’s no way to disprove ’em. An’ stones ain’t the only things that slip,’ Mr Springett grunted. Hal went on:


‘I’ve seen a scaffold-plank keckle and shoot a too-clever workman thirty foot on to the cold chancel floor below. And a rope can break—’


‘Yes, natural as nature; an’ lime’ll fly up in a man’s eyes without any breath o’ wind sometimes,’ said Mr Springett. ‘But who’s to show ‘twasn’t a accident?’


‘Who do these things?’ Dan asked, and straightened his back at the bench as he turned the schooner end-for-end in the vice to get at her counter.


page 2


‘Them which don’t wish other men to work no better nor quicker than they do,’ growled Mr Springett. ‘Don’t pinch her so hard in the vice, Mus’ Dan. Put a piece o’ rag in the jaws, or you’ll bruise her. More than that’—he turned towards Hal—‘if a man has his private spite laid up against you, the Unions give him his excuse for workin’ it off.’


‘Well I know it,’said Hal.


‘They never let you go, them spiteful ones. I knowed a plasterer in Eighteen hundred Sixty-one—down to the wells. He was a Frenchy—a bad enemy he was.’


‘I had mine too. He was an Italian, called Benedetto. I met him first at Oxford on Magdalen Tower when I was learning my trade—or trades, I should say. A bad enemy he was, as you say, but he came to be my singular good friend,’ said Hal as he put down the mallet and settled himself comfortably.


‘What might his trade have been—plastering’ Mr Springett asked.


‘Plastering of a sort. He worked in stucco—fresco we call it. Made pictures on plaster. Not but what he had a fine sweep of the hand in drawing. He’d take the long sides of a cloister, trowel on his stuff, and roll out his great all-abroad pictures of saints and croppy-topped trees quick as a webster unrolling cloth almost. Oh, Benedetto could draw, but ’a was a little-minded man, professing to be full of secrets of colour or plaster—common tricks, all of ’em—and his one single talk was how Tom, Dick or Harry had stole this or t’other secret art from him.’


‘I know that sort,’ said Mr Springett. ‘There’s no keeping peace or making peace with such. An’ they’re mostly born an’ bone idle.’


‘True. Even his fellow-countrymen laughed at his jealousy. We two came to loggerheads early on Magdalen Tower. I was a youngster then. Maybe I spoke my mind about his work.’


‘You shouldn’t never do that.’ Mr Springett shook his head. ‘That sort lay it up against you.’


‘True enough. This Benedetto did most specially. Body o’ me, the man lived to hate me! But I always kept my eyes open on a plank or a scaffold. I was mighty glad to be shut of him when he quarrelled with his Guild foreman, and went off, nose in air, and paints under his arm. But’—Hal leaned forward—‘if you hate a man or a man hates you—’


‘I know. You’re everlastin’ running acrost him,’ Mr Springett interrupted. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ He leaned out of the window, and shouted to a carter who was loading a cart with bricks.


‘Ain’t you no more sense than to heap ’em up that way?’ he said. ‘Take an’ throw a hundred of ’em off. It’s more than the team can compass. Throw ’em off, I tell you, and make another trip for what’s left over. Excuse me, sir. You was sayin’—’


‘I was saying that before the end of the year I went to Bury to strengthen the lead-work in the great Abbey east window there.’


‘Now that’s just one of the things I’ve never done. But I mind there was a cheap excursion to Chichester in Eighteen hundred Seventy-nine, an’ I went an’ watched ’em leadin’ a won’erful fine window in Chichester Cathedral. I stayed watchin’ till ’twas time for us to go back. Dunno as I had two drinks p’raps, all that day.’


Hal smiled. ‘At Bury, then, sure enough, I met my enemy Benedetto. He had painted a picture in plaster on the south wall of the Refectory—a noble place for a noble thing—a picture of Jonah.’


‘Ah! Jonah an’ his whale. I’ve never been as far as Bury. You’ve worked about a lot,’ said Mr Springett, with his eyes on the carter below.


‘No. Not the whale. This was a picture of Jonah and the pompion that withered. But all that Benedetto had shown was a peevish grey-beard huggled up in angle-edged drapery beneath a pompion on a wooden trellis. This last, being a dead thing, he’d drawn it as ’twere to the life. But fierce old Jonah, bared in the sun, angry even to death that his cold prophecy was disproven—Jonah, ashamed, and already hearing the children of Nineveh running to mock him—ah, that was what Benedetto had not drawn!’


‘He better ha’ stuck to his whale, then,’ said Mr Springett.


‘He’d ha’ done no better with that. He draws the damp cloth off the picture, an’ shows it to me. I was a craftsman too, d’ye see?’


‘“Tis good,” I said, “but it goes no deeper than the plaster.”


‘“What?” he said in a whisper.


‘“Be thy own judge, Benedetto,” I answered. “Does it go deeper than the plaster?”


‘He reeled against a piece of dry wall. “No,” he says, “and I know it. I could not hate thee more than I have done these five years, but if I live, I will try, Hal. I will try.” Then he goes away. I pitied him, but I had spoken truth. His picture went no deeper than the plaster.’


‘Ah!’ said Mr Springett, who had turned quite red. ‘You was talkin’ so fast I didn’t understand what you was drivin’ at. I’ve seen men—good workmen they was—try to do more than they could do, and—and they couldn’t compass it. They knowed it, and it nigh broke their hearts like. You was in your right, o’ course, sir, to say what you thought o’ his work; but if you’ll excuse me, was you in your duty?’


‘I was wrong to say it,’ Hal replied. ‘God forgive me—I was young! He was workman enough himself to know where he failed. But it all came evens in the long run. By the same token, did ye ever hear o’ one Torrigiano—Torrisany we called him?’


‘I can’t say I ever did. Was he a Frenchy like?’


‘No, a hectoring, hard-mouthed, long-sworded Italian builder, as vain as a peacock and as strong as a bull, but, mark you, a master workman. More than that—he could get his best work out of the worst men.’


‘Which it’s a gift. I had a foreman-bricklayer like him once,’ said Mr Springett. ‘He used to prod ’em in the back like with a pointing-trowel, and they did wonders.’


page 3




I’ve seen our Torrisany lay a ’prentice down with one buffet and raise him with another—to make a mason of him. I worked under him at building a chapel in London—a chapel and a tomb for the King.’


‘I never knew kings went to chapel much,’ said Mr Springett. ‘But I always hold with a man—don’t care who he be—seein’ about his own grave before he dies. ’Tidn’t the sort of thing to leave to your family after the will’s read. I reckon ’twas a fine vault?’


‘None finer in England. This Torrigiano had the contract for it, as you’d say. He picked master craftsmen from all parts—England, France, Italy, the Low Countries—no odds to him so long as they knew their work, and he drove them like—like pigs at Brightling Fair. He called us English all pigs. We suffered it because he was a master in his craft. If he misliked any work that a man had done, with his own great hands he’d rive it out, and tear it down before us all. “Ah, you pig—you English pig!” he’d scream in the dumb wretch’s face. “You answer me? You look at me? You think at me? Come out with me into the cloisters. I will teach you carving myself. I will gild you all over!” But when his passion had blown out, he’d slip his arm round the man’s neck, and impart knowledge worth gold. ’Twould have done your heart good, Mus’ Springett, to see the two hundred of us masons, jewellers, carvers, gilders, iron-workers and the rest—all toiling like cock-angels, and this mad Italian hornet fleeing one to next up and down the chapel. Done your heart good, it would!’


‘I believe you,’ said Mr Springett. ‘In Eighteen hundred Fifty-four, I mind, the railway was bein’ made into Hastin’s. There was two thousand navvies on it—all young—all strong—an’ I was one of ’em. Oh, dearie me! Excuse me, sir, but was your enemy workin’ with you?’


‘Benedetto? Be sure he was. He followed me like a lover. He painted pictures on the chapel ceiling—slung from a chair. Torrigiano made us promise not to fight till the work should be finished. We were both master craftsmen, do ye see, and he needed us. None the less, I never went aloft to carve ’thout testing all my ropes and knots each morning. We were never far from each other. Benedetto ’ud sharpen his knife on his sole while he waited for his plaster to dry—wheet, wheet, wheet. I’d hear it where I hung chipping round a pillar-head, and we’d nod to each other friendly-like. Oh, he was a craftsman, was Benedetto, but his hate spoiled his eye and his hand. I mind the night I had finished the models for the bronze saints round the tomb; Torrigiano embraced me before all the chapel, and bade me to supper. I met Benedetto when I came out. He was slavering in the porch Like a mad dog.’


‘Workin’ himself up to it?’ said Mr Springett. ‘Did he have it in at ye that night?’


‘No, no. That time he kept his oath to Torrigiano. But I pitied him. Eh, well! Now I come to my own follies. I had never thought too little of myself; but after Torrisany had put his arm round my neck, I—I’—Hal broke into a laugh—‘I lay there was not much odds ’twixt me and a cock-sparrow in his pride.’


‘I was pretty middlin’ young once on a time,’ said Mr Springett.


‘Then ye know that a man can’t drink and dice and dress fine, and keep company above his station, but his work suffers for it, Mus’ Springett.’


‘I never held much with dressin’ up, but—you’re right! The worst mistakes I ever made they was made of a Monday morning,’ Mr Springett answered. ‘We’ve all been one sort of fool or t’other. Mus’ Dan, Mus’ Dan, take the smallest gouge, or you’ll be spluttin’ her stem works clean out. Can’t ye see the grain of the wood don’t favour a chisel?’


‘I’ll spare you some of my follies. But there was a man called Brygandyne—Bob Brygandyne—Clerk of the King’s Ships, a little, smooth, bustling atomy, as clever as a woman to get work done for nothin’—a won’erful smooth-tongued pleader. He made much o’ me, and asked me to draft him out a drawing, a piece of carved and gilt scroll-work for the bows of one of the King’s Ships—the Sovereign was her name.’


‘Was she a man-of-war?’asked Dan.


‘She was a warship, and a woman called Catherine of Castile desired the King to give her the ship for a pleasure-ship of her own. I did not know at the time, but she’d been at Bob to get this scroll-work done and fitted that the King might see it. I made him the picture, in an hour, all of a heat after supper—one great heaving play of dolphins and a Neptune or so reining in webby-footed sea-horses, and Arion with his harp high atop of them. It was twenty-three foot long, and maybe nine foot deep—painted and gilt.’


‘It must ha’ justabout looked fine,’ said Mr Springett.


‘That’s the curiosity of it. ’Twas bad—rank bad. In my conceit I must needs show it to Torrigiano, in the chapel. He straddles his legs, hunches his knife behind him, and whistles like a storm-cock through a sleet-shower. Benedetto was behind him. We were never far apart, I’ve told you.


‘“That is pig’s work,” says our Master. “Swine’s work. You make any more such things, even after your fine Court suppers, and you shall be sent away.”


‘Benedetto licks his lips like a cat. “It is so bad then, Master?” he says. “What a pity!”


‘”Yes,” says Torrigiano. “Scarcely you could do things so bad. I will condescend to show.”


‘He talks to me then and there. No shouting, no swearing (it was too bad for that); but good, memorable counsel, bitten in slowly. Then he sets me to draft out a pair of iron gates, to take, as he said, the taste of my naughty dolphins out of my mouth. Iron’s sweet stuff if you don’t torture her, and hammered work is all pure, truthful line, with a reason and a support for every curve and bar of it. A week at that settled my stomach handsomely, and the Master let me put the work through the smithy, where I sweated out more of my foolish pride.’


‘Good stuff is good iron,’ said Mr Springett. ‘I done a pair of lodge gates once in Eighteen hundred Sixty-three.’


‘Oh, I forgot to say that Bob Brygandyne whipped away my draft of the ship’s scroll-work, and would not give it back to me to re-draw. He said ’twould do well enough. Howsoever, my lawful work kept me too busied to remember him. Body o’ me, but I worked that winter upon the gates and the bronzes for the tomb as I’d never worked before! I was leaner than a lath, but I lived—I lived then!’ Hal looked at Mr Springett with his wise, crinkled-up eyes, and the old man smiled back.


page 4




‘Ouch!’ Dan cried. He had been hollowing out the schooner’s after-deck, the little gouge had slipped and gashed the ball of his left thumb,—an ugly, triangular tear.


‘That came of not steadying your wrist,’ said Hal calmly. ‘Don’t bleed over the wood. Do your work with your heart’s blood, but no need to let it show.’ He rose and peered into a corner of the loft.


Mr Springett had risen too, and swept down a ball of cobwebs from a rafter.


‘Clap that on,’ was all he said, ’and put your handkerchief atop. ’Twill cake over in a minute. It don’t hurt now, do it?’


‘No,’ said Dan indignantly. ‘You know it has happened lots of times. I’ll tie it up myself. Go on, sir.’


‘And it’ll happen hundreds of times more,’ said Hal with a friendly nod as he sat down again. But he did not go on till Dan’s hand was tied up properly. Then he said:


‘One dark December day—too dark to judge colour—we was all sitting and talking round the fires in the chapel (you heard good talk there), when Bob Brygandyne bustles in and—“Hal, you’re sent for,” he squeals. I was at Torrigiano’s feet on a pile of put-locks, as I might be here, toasting a herring on my knife’s point. ’Twas the one English thing our Master liked—salt herring.


‘“I’m busy, about my art,” I calls.


‘“Art?” says Bob. “What’s Art compared to your scroll-work for the Sovereign? Come.”


‘“Be sure your sins will find you out,” says Torrigiano. “Go with him and see.” As I followed Bob out I was aware of Benedetto, like a black spot when the eyes are tired, sliddering up behind me.


‘Bob hurries through the streets in the raw fog, slips into a doorway, up stairs, along passages, and at last thrusts me into a little cold room vilely hung with Flemish tapestries, and no furnishing except a table and my draft of the Sovereign’s scrollwork. Here he leaves me. Presently comes in a dark, long-nosed man in a fur cap.


‘“Master Harry Dawe?” said he.


‘“The same,” I says. “Where a plague has Bob Brygandyne gone?”


‘His thin eyebrows surged up in a piece and come down again in a stiff bar. “He went to the King,” he says.


‘“All one. Where’s your pleasure with me?” I says, shivering, for it was mortal cold.


‘He lays his hand flat on my draft. “Master Dawe,” he says, “do you know the present price of gold leaf for all this wicked gilding of yours?”


‘By that I guessed he was some cheese-paring clerk or other of the King’s Ships, so I gave him the price. I forget it now, but it worked out to thirty pounds—carved, gilt, and fitted in place.


‘“Thirty pounds!” he said, as though I had pulled a tooth of him. “You talk as though thirty pounds was to be had for the asking. None the less,” he says, “your draft’s a fine piece of work.”


‘I’d been looking at it ever since I came in, and ’twas viler even than I judged it at first. My eye and hand had been purified the past months, d’ye see, by my iron work.


‘“I could do it better now,” I said. The more I studied my squabby Neptunes the less I liked ’em; and Arion was a pure flaming shame atop of the unbalanced dolphins.


‘“I doubt it will be fresh expense to draft it again,” he says.


‘“Bob never paid me for the first draft. I lay he’ll never pay me for the second. ’Twill cost the King nothing if I re-draw it,” I says.


‘“There’s a woman wishes it to be done quickly,” he says. “We’ll stick to your first drawing, Master Dawe. But thirty pounds is thirty pounds. You must make it less.’


‘And all the while the faults in my draft fair leaped out and hit me between the eyes. At any cost, I thinks to myself, I must get it back and re-draft it. He grunts at me impatiently, and a splendid thought comes to me, which shall save me. By the same token, It was quite honest.’


‘They ain’t always,’ says Mr Springett. ‘How did you get out of it?’


‘By the truth. I says to Master Fur Cap, as I might to you here, I says, “I’ll tell you something, since you seem a knowledgeable man. Is the Sovereign to lie in Thames river all her days, or will she take the high seas?”


‘“Oh,” he says quickly, “the King keeps no cats that don’t catch mice. She must sail the seas, Master Dawe. She’ll be hired to merchants for the trade. She’ll be out in all shapes o’ weathers. Does that make any odds?”


‘“Why, then,” says I, “the first heavy sea she sticks her nose into’ll claw off half that scroll-work, and the next will finish it. If she’s meant for a pleasure-ship give me my draft again, and I’ll porture you a pretty, light piece of scroll-work, good cheap. If she’s meant for the open-sea, pitch the draft into the fire. She can never carry that weight on her bows.


‘He looks at me squintlings and plucks his under-lip.


‘“Is this your honest, unswayed opinion?” he says.


‘”Body o’ me! Ask about!” I says. “Any seaman could tell you ’tis true. I’m advising you against my own profit, but why I do so is my own concern.


‘“Not altogether”, he says. “It’s some of mine. You’ve saved me thirty pounds, Master Dawe, and you’ve given me good arguments to use against a willful woman that wants my fine new ship for her own toy. We’ll not have any scroll-work.” His face shined with pure joy.


page 5




‘“Then see that the thirty pounds you’ve saved on it are honestly paid the King,” I says, “and keep clear o’ women-folk.” I gathered up my draft and crumpled it under my arm. “If that’s all you need of me I’ll be gone,” I says. “I’m pressed.”


‘He turns him round and fumbles in a corner. “Too pressed to be made a knight, Sir Harry?” he says, and comes at me smiling, with three-quarters of a rusty sword.


‘I pledge you my Mark I never guessed it was the King till that moment. I kneeled, and he tapped me on the shoulder.


‘“Rise up, Sir Harry Dawe,” he says, and, in the same breath, “I’m pressed, too,” and slips through the tapestries, leaving me like a stuck calf.


‘It come over me, in a bitter wave like, that here was I, a master craftsman, who had worked no bounds, soul or body, to make the King’s tomb and chapel a triumph and a glory for all time; and here, d’ye see, I was made knight, not for anything I’d slaved over, or given my heart and guts to, but expressedly because I’d saved him thirty pounds and a tongue-lashing from Catherine of Castille—she that had asked for the ship. That thought shrivelled me with insides while I was folding away my draft. On the heels of it—maybe you’ll see why—I began to grin to myself. I thought of the earnest simplicity of the man—the King, I should say—because I’d saved him the money; his smile as though he’d won half France! I thought of my own silly pride and foolish expectations that some day he’d honour me as a master craftsman. I thought of the broken-tipped sword he’d found behind the hangings; the dirt of the cold room, and his cold eye, wrapped up in his own concerns, scarcely resting on me. Then I remembered the solemn chapel roof and the bronzes about the stately tomb he’d lie in, and—d’ye see? —the unreason of it all—the mad high humour of it all—took hold on me till I sat me down on a dark stair-head in a passage, and laughed till I could laugh no more. What else could I have done?


‘I never heard his feet behind me—he always walked like a cat—but his arm slid round my neck, pulling me back where I sat, till my head lay on his chest, and his left hand held the knife plumb over my heart—Benedetto! Even so I laughed—the fit was beyond my holding—laughed while he ground his teeth in my ear. He was stark crazed for the time.


‘“Laugh,” he said. “Finish the laughter. I’ll not cut ye short. Tell me now”—he wrenched at my head—“why the King chose to honour you,—you—you—you lickspittle Englishman? I am full of patience now. I have waited so long.” Then he was off at score about his Jonah in Bury Refectory, and what I’d said of it, and his pictures in the chapel which all men praised and none looked at twice (as if that was my fault!), and a whole parcel of words and looks treasured up against me through years.


‘“Ease off your arm a little,” I said. “I cannot die by choking, for I am just dubbed knight, Benedetto.”


‘“Tell me, and I’ll confess ye, Sir Harry Dawe, Knight. There’s a long night before ye. Tell,” says he.


‘So I told him—his chin on my crown—told him all; told it as well and with as many words as I have ever told a tale at a supper with Torrigiano. I knew Benedetto would understand, for, mad or sad, he was a craftsman. I believed it to be the last tale I’d ever tell top of mortal earth, and I would not put out bad work before I left the Lodge. All art’s one art, as I said. I bore Benedetto no malice. My spirits, d’ye see, were catched up in a high, solemn exaltation, and I saw all earth’s vanities foreshortened and little, laid out below me like a town from a cathedral scaffolding. I told him what befell, and what I thought of it. I gave him the King’s very voice at “Master Dawe, you’ve saved me thirty pounds!”; his peevish grunt while he looked for the sword; and how the badger-eyed figures of Glory and Victory leered at me from the Flemish hangings. Body o’ me, ’twas a fine, noble tale, and, as I thought, my last work on earth.


‘“That is how I was honoured by the King,” I said. “They’ll hang ye for killing me, Benedetto. And, since you’ve killed in the King’s Palace, they’ll draw and quarter you; but you’re too mad to care. Grant me, though, ye never heard a better tale.” ‘He said nothing, but I felt him shake. My head on his chest shook; his right arm fell away, his left dropped the knife, and he leaned with both hands on my shoulder—shaking—shaking! I turned me round. No need to put my foot on his knife. The man was speechless with laughter—honest craftsman’s mirth. The first time I’d ever seen him laugh. You know the mirth that cuts off the very breath, while ye stamp and snatch at the short ribs? That was Benedetto’s case.


‘When he began to roar and bay and whoop in the passage, I haled him out into the street, and there we leaned against the wall and had it all over again—waving our hands and wagging our heads—till the watch came to know if we were drunk.


‘Benedetto says to ’em, solemn as an owl: “You have saved me thirty pounds, Mus’ Dawe,” and off he pealed. In some sort we were mad-drunk—I because dear life had been given back to me, and he because, as he said afterwards, because the old crust of hatred round his heart was broke up and carried away by laughter. His very face had changed too.


‘“Hal,” he cries, “I forgive thee. Forgive me too, Hal. Oh, you English, you English! Did it gall thee, Hal, to see the rust on the dirty sword? Tell me again, Hal, how the King grunted with joy. Oh, let us tell the Master.”


‘So we reeled back to the chapel, arms round each other’s necks, and when we could speak—he thought we’d been fighting—we told the Master. Yes, we told Torrigiano, and he laughed till he rolled on the new cold pavement. Then he knocked our heads together.


‘“Ah, you English!” he cried. “You are more than pigs. You are English. Now you are well punished for your dirty fishes. Put the draft in the fire, and never do so any more. You are a fool, Hal, and you are a fool, Benedetto, but I need your works to please this beautiful English King.”


‘“And I meant to kill Hal,” says Benedetto. “Master, I meant to kill him because the English King had made him a knight.”


‘“Ah!” says the Master, shaking his finger. “Benedetto, if you had killed my Hal, I should have killed you—in the cloister. But you are a craftsman too, so I should have killed you like a craftsman, very, very slowly—in an hour, if I could spare the time!” That was Torrigiano—the Master!’


Mr Springett sat quite still for some time after Hal had finished. Then he turned dark red; then he rocked to and fro; then he coughed and wheezed till the tears ran down his face. Dan knew by this that he was laughing, but it surprised Hal at first.


‘Excuse me, sir,’ said Mr Springett, ‘but I was thinkin’ of some stables I built for a gentleman in Eighteen hundred Seventy-four. They was stables in blue brick—very particular work. Dunno as they weren’t the best job which ever I’d done. But the gentleman’s lady—she’d come from Lunnon, new married—she was all for buildin’ what was called a haw-haw—what you an’ me ’ud call a dik—right acrost his park. A middlin’ big job which I’d have had the contract of, for she spoke to me in the library about it. But I told her there was a line o’ springs just where she wanted to dig her ditch, an’ she’d flood the park if she went on.’


page 6




‘Were there any springs at all?’ said Hal.


‘Bound to be springs everywhere if you dig deep enough, ain’t there? But what I said about the springs put her out o’ conceit o’ diggin’ haw-haws, an’ she took an’ built a white tile dairy instead. But when I sent in my last bill for the stables, the gentleman he paid it ’thout even lookin’ at it, and I hadn’t forgotten nothin’, I do assure you. More than that, he slips two five-pound notes into my hand in the library, an’ “Ralph, he says—he allers called me by name—“Ralph,” he says, “you’ve saved me a heap of expense an’ trouble this autumn.” I didn’t say nothin’, o’ course. I knowed he didn’t want any haws-haws digged acrost his park no more’n I did, but I never said nothin’. No more he didn’t say nothin’ about my blue-brick stables, which was really the best an’ honestest piece o’ work I’d done in quite a while. He give me ten pounds for savin’ him a hem of a deal o’ trouble at home. I reckon things are pretty much alike, all times, in all places.’


Hal and he laughed together. Dan couldn’t quite understand what they thought so funny, and went on with his work for some time without speaking.


When he looked up, Mr Springett, alone, was wiping his eyes with his green-and-yellow pocket-handkerchief.


‘Bless me, Mus’ Dan, I’ve been asleep,’ he said. ‘An’ I’ve dreamed a dream which has made me laugh—laugh as I ain’t laughed in a long day. I can’t remember what ’twas all about, but they do say that when old men take to laughin’ in their sleep, they’re middlin’ ripe for the next world. Have you been workin’ honest, Mus’ Dan?’


‘Ra-ather,’ said Dan, unclamping the schooner from the vice. ‘And look how I’ve cut myself with the small gouge.’


‘Ye-es. You want a lump o’ cobwebs to that,’ said Mr Springett. ‘Oh, I see you’ve put it on already. That’s right, Mus’ Dan.’



			


				





	

					

				
Wressley of the Foreign Office
			

			
			

				
[a short tale]


I closed and drew for my Love’s sake,
That now is false to me,
And I slew the Riever of Tarrant Moss,
And set Dumeny free.

And ever they give me praise and gold,
And ever I moan my loss;
For I struck the blow for my false Love’s sake,
And not for the men of the Moss!
(Tarrant Moss)


ONE of the many curses of our life in India is the want of atmosphere in the painter’s sense. There are no half-tints worth noticing. Men stand out all crude and raw, with nothing to tone them down, and nothing to scale them against. They do their work, and grow to think that there is nothing but their work, and nothing like their work, and that they are the real pivots on which the Administration turns. Here is an instance of this feeling. A half-caste clerk was ruling forms in a Pay Office. He said to me, ‘Do you know what would happen if I added or took away one single line on this sheet?’ Then, with the air of a conspirator, ‘It would disorganise the whole of the Treasury payments throughout the whole of the Presidency Circle! Think of that!’


If men had not this delusion as to the ultra-importance of their own particular employments, I suppose that they would sit down and kill themselves. But their weakness is wearisome, particularly when the listener knows that he himself commits exactly the same sin.


Even the Secretariat believes that it does good when it asks an over-driven Executive Officer to take a census of wheat-weevils through a district of five thousand square miles.


There was a man once in the Foreign Office—a man who had grown middle-aged in the Department, and was commonly said, by irreverent juniors, to be able to repeat Aitchison’s Treaties and Sunnuds backwards in his sleep. What he did with his stored knowledge only the Secretary knew; and he, naturally, would not publish the news abroad. This man’s name was Wressley, and it was the Shibboleth, in those days, to say—‘Wressley knows more about the Central Indian States than any living man.’ If you did not say this, you were considered one of mean understanding.


Nowadays, the man who says that he knows the ravel of the inter-tribal complications across the Border is of more use; but, in Wressley’s time, much attention was paid to the Central Indian States. They were called ‘foci’ and ‘factors,’ and all manner of imposing names.


And here the curse of Anglo-Indian life fell heavily. When Wressley lifted up his voice, and spoke about such-and-such a succession to such and-such a throne, the Foreign Office were silent, and Heads of Departments repeated the last two or three words of Wressley’s sentences, and tacked ‘yes, yes,’ on to them, and knew that they were assisting the Empire to grapple with serious political contingencies. In most big undertakings one or two men do the work, while the rest sit near and talk till the ripe decorations begin to fall.


Wressley was the working-member of the Foreign Office firm, and, to keep him up to his duties when he showed signs of flagging, he was made much of by his superiors and told what a fine fellow he was. He did not require coaxing because he was of tough build, but what he received confirmed him in the belief that there was no one quite so absolutely and imperatively necessary to the stability of India as Wressley of the Foreign Office. There might be other good men, but the known, honoured, and trusted man among men was Wressley of the Foreign Office. We had a Viceroy in those days who knew exactly when to ‘gentle’ a fractious big man, and to hearten-up a collar-galled little one, and so keep all his team level. He conveyed to Wressley the impression which I have just set down; and even tough men are apt to be disorganised by a Viceroy’s praise. There was a case once — but that is another story.


All India knew Wressley’s name and office—it was in Thacker and Spink’s Directory—but who he was personally, or what he did, or what his special merits were, not fifty men knew or cared. His work filled all his time, and he found no leisure to cultivate acquaintances beyond those of dead Rajput chiefs with Ahir blots in their scutcheons. Wressley would have made a very good Clerk in the Herald’s College had he not been a Bengal Civilian.


Upon a day, between office and office, great trouble came to Wressley — overwhelmed him, knocked him down, and left him gasping as though he had been a little schoolboy. Without reason, against prudence, and at a moment’s notice, he fell in love with a frivolous, golden-haired girl who used to tear about Simla Mall on a high, rough waler, with a blue velvet jockey-cap crammed over her eyes. Her name was Venner—Tillie Venner — and she was delightful. She took Wressley’s heart at a hand-gallop, and Wressley found that it was not good for man to live alone; even with half the Foreign Office Records in his presses.


Then Simla laughed, for Wressley in love was slightly ridiculous. He did his best to interest the girl in himself—that is to say, his work—and she, after the manner of women, did her best to appear interested in what, behind his back, she called ‘Mr. W’essley’s Wajahs’; for she lisped very prettily. She did not understand one little thing about them, but she acted as if she did. Men have married on that sort of error before now.


Providence, however, had care of Wressley. He was immensely struck with Miss Venner’s intelligence. He would have been more impressed had he heard her private and confidential accounts of his calls. He held peculiar notions as to the wooing of girls. He said that the best work of a man’s career should be laid reverently at their feet. Ruskin writes something like this somewhere, I think; but in ordinary life a few kisses are better and save time.


About a month after he had lost his heart to Miss Venner, and had been doing his work vilely in consequence, the first idea of his Native Rule in Central India struck Wressley and filled him with joy. It was, as he sketched it, a great thing—the work of his life—a really comprehensive survey of a most fascinating subject—to be written with all the special and laboriously acquired knowledge of Wressley of the Foreign Office—a gift fit for an Empress.


He told Miss Venner that he was going to take leave, and hoped, on his return, to bring her a present worthy of her acceptance. Would she wait? Certainly she would. Wressley drew seventeen hundred rupees a month. She would wait a year for that. Her Mamma would help her to wait.


So Wressley took one year’s leave and all the available documents, about a truck-load, that he could lay hands on, and went down to Central India with his notion hot in his head. He began his book in the land he was writing of. Too much official correspondence had made him a frigid workman, and he must have guessed that he needed the white light of local colour on his palette. This is a dangerous paint for amateurs to play with.


Heavens, how that man worked! He caught his Rajahs, analysed his Rajahs, and traced them up into the mists of Time and beyond, with their queens and their concubines. He dated and cross-dated, pedigreed and triple-pedigreed, compared, noted, connoted, wove, strung, sorted, selected, inferred, calendared and counter-calendared for ten hours a day. And, because this sudden and new light of Love was upon him, he turned those dry bones of history and dirty records of misdeeds into things to weep or to laugh over as he pleased. His heart and soul were at the end of his pen, and they got into the ink. He was dowered with sympathy, insight, humour, and style for two hundred and thirty days and nights; and his book was a Book. He had his vast special knowledge with him, so to speak; but the spirit, the woven-in human Touch, the poetry and the power of the output, were beyond all special knowledge. But I doubt whether he knew the gift that was in him then, and thus he may have lost some happiness. He was toiling for Tillie Venner, not for himself. Men often do their best work blind, for some one else’s sake.


Also, though this has nothing to do with the story, in India, where every one knows every one else, you can watch men being driven, by the women who govern them, out of the rank-and-file and sent to take up points alone. A good man, once started, goes forward; but an average man, so soon as the woman loses interest in his success as a tribute to her power, comes back to the battalion and is no more heard of.


Wressley bore the first copy of his book to Simla, and, blushing and stammering, presented it to Miss Venner. She read a little of it. I give her review verbatim—‘Oh, your book? It’s all about those howwid Wajahs. I didn’t understand it.’




.     .     .     .     .




Wressley of the Foreign Office was broken, smashed,—I am not exaggerating—by this one frivolous little girl. All that he could say feebly was—‘But—but it’s my magnum opus! The work of my life.’ Miss Venner did not know what magnum opus meant; but she knew that Captain Kerrington had won three races at the last Gymkhana. Wressley didn’t press her to wait for him any longer. He had sense enough for that.


Then came the reaction after the year’s strain, and Wressley went back to the Foreign Office and his ‘Wajahs,’ a compiling, gazetteering, repor-twriting hack, who would have been dear at three hundred rupees a month. He abided by Miss Venner’s review; which proves that the inspiration in the book was purely temporary and unconnected with himself. Nevertheless, he had no right to sink, in a hill-tarn, five packing-cases, brought up at enormous expense from Bombay, of the best book of Indian history ever written.


When he sold off before retiring, some years later, I was turning over his shelves, and came across the only existing copy of Native Rule in Central India—the copy that Miss Venner could not understand. I read it, sitting on his mule trunks, as long as the light lasted, and offered him his own price for it. He looked over my shoulder for a few pages and said to himself drearily—


‘Now, how in the world did I come to write such damned good stuff as that ?’


Then to me—


‘Take it and keep it. Write one of your penny-farthing yarns about its birth. Perhaps—perhaps—the whole business may have been ordained to that end.’


Which, knowing what Wressley of the Foreign Office was once, struck me as about the bitterest thing that I had ever heard a man say of his own work.

			


				





	

					

				
The Woman in his Life
			

			
			

				


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FROM his boyhood John Marden had a genius for improvising or improving small labour-saving gadgets about his father’s house and premises. So, when the War came, shortly after he had been apprenticed to a tool-making firm in the Midlands, he chose the Engineers, and eventually found himself at a place called Messines, where he worked underground, many months, among interesting devices. There he met a Cockney named Burnea, who diagnosed sick machinery by touch—with his eyes shut. Between them, and a few fellow-workers, Messines Ridge went up.After the War, the two men joined forces on four thousand pounds capital; a dozen young veterans of Messines; a lease of some sheds in a London suburb, and a collection of second-hand lathes and stampers. They gave out that they were ready to make anything for anybody.


A South African mine-manager asked about a detachable arrangement on a drill-head, which he could not buy in open market for less than four shillings and sevenpence wholesale. Marden considered the drawings, cut down the moving parts a half. Burnea made an astonished machine undertake strange duties, and by the time he had racked it to bits, they were delivering the article at one shilling and tenpence. A newly opened mine on a crest of the Andes, where llamas were, for the moment, cheaper than lorries, needed metal stiffenings and clips for pack-saddles (drawing enclosed). The first model went back in a month. In another fortnight the order was filled, with improvements. At the end of their first year, an Orinoco dredging concern, worried over some barges which did not handle auriferous sludge as they ought; and a wild-cat proposition on a New Guinea beach where natives treated detonating capsules with contempt; were writing their friends that you could send Burnea and Marden the roughest sketches of what you wanted, because they understood them.


So the firm flourished. The young veterans drove the shifts ten hours a day; the versatile but demoralised machinery was displaced by sterner stuff; and their third year’s profits ran into five figures. Then Burnea, who had the financial head, died of pulmonary trouble, a by-product of gas-poison, and left Marden his share of the Works, plus thirty-six thousand pounds all on fixed deposit in a Bank, because the head of one of its branches had once been friendly with him in a trench. The Works were promptly enlarged, and Marden worked fourteen hours a day instead of twelve, and, to save time, followed Burnea’s habit of pushing money which he did not need into the same Bank at the same meek rate of interest. But, for the look of the thing, he hired a genuine financial secretary, who was violently affected when John explained the firm’s theory of investments, and recommended some alterations which Marden was too busy to attend to. Six months later, there fell on him three big contracts, which surpassed his dreams of avarice. At this point he took what sleep was forced on him in a cot in Burnea’s old office. At this point, too, Jerry Floyd, ex-Sergeant of Sappers at Messines, and drawing eighteen pounds a week with irregular bonuses, struck loudly.


‘What’s the matter with your job, Jerry?’ John asked.


‘‘Tain’t a job—that’s all. My machines do everything for me except strike. I’ve got to do that,’ said Jerry with reproach.


‘Soft job. Stick to it,’ John counselled.


‘Stick to bloomin’ what? Turnin’ two taps and fiddlin’ three levers? Get a girl to do it for you. Repetition-work! I’m fed up!’


‘Take ten days’ leave, you fool,’ said John; which Jerry did, and was arrested for exceeding the speed-limit through angry gipsies at Brough horse-fair. John Marden went to bed behind his office as usual, and—without warning—suffered a night so memorable that he looked up the nearest doctor in the Directory, and went to see him. Being inarticulate, except where the Works were concerned, he explained that he felt as though he had got the hump—was stale, fed-up, and so forth. He thought, perhaps, he might have been working a bit too hard; but he said not a word of the horror, the blackness, the loss of the meaning of things, the collapses at the end, the recovery and retraversing of the circle of that night’s Inferno; nor how it had waked up a certain secret dread which he had held off him since demobilisation.


‘Can’t you rest a bit?’ asked the doctor, whose real interests were renal calculi.


‘I’ve never tried.’


‘Haven’t you any hobbies or—friends, then?’


‘Except the Works, none.’


‘Nothing—more important in your life?’


John’s face was answer enough. ‘No! No! But what’ll I do? What’ll I do?’ he asked wildly. ‘I—I have never been like this before!’


‘I’ll give you a sedative, but you must slack off, and divert your mind. Yes! That’s it. Divert your mind.’


John went back to the Works, and strove to tell his secretary something about the verdict. The man was perfunctorily sympathetic, but what he wanted John to understand (he seemed at the other end of the world as he spoke) was that, owing to John’s ignorance of finance, the whole of the Works stood as John’s personal property. So that, if John died, they would be valued and taxed thirty or forty ’er cent for death-duties, and that would cripple things badly. Not a minute should be lost before turning the concern into a chain of companies. He had the scheme drafted. It would need but a couple of days’ study. John looked at the papers, listened to the explanation, stared at a calendar on the wall, and heard himself speaking as from the bottom of a black, cold crater:


‘It don’t mean anything—half a million or three quarters or—or—or anything. Oh sorry! It’s gone up like the Ridge, and I’m a dud, you know.’


Then he returned to his expensive flat, which the same secretary had taken for him a year before, and prepared to do nothing for a month except to think upon the night he had passed in Burnea’s old office, and to expect, and get, others like it. A few men came—once each—grinned at him, told him to buck up, and went on to their own concerns. He was ministered to by his ex-batman, Corporal Vincent Shingle, systematically a peculator, intermittently a drunkard, and emphatically a liar. Twice—once underground, where he had penetrated with a thermos full of hot coffee, and a piece of gallery had sat down on him; and once at Bailleul, when the lunatics of the local asylum were let out, and he was chased by a homicidal maniac with a thigh-bone—Marden had saved Shingle’s life. Twice—once out of the crumbling rim of a crater; and once by the slack of his breeches, when a whiff of gas dropped him over the mouth of a shaft—he had saved Marden’s. Therefore, he came along with the rest of the Messines’ veterans to the Works, whence Jerry Floyd kicked him into space at the end of the first month. Upon this, he returned to John Marden’s personal service and the study of John’s private correspondence and most intimate possessions. As he explained to Probert, the janitor of the flats, the night after the doctor had spoken


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‘The ’ole game of gettin’-on is to save your bloke trouble. ’E don’t know it, but I do ’is ’ome work for ’im while ’e makes money for me at ’is office. Na-o! ’E don’t spend it on me. That I ’ave to do meself. But I don’t grudge the labour.’


‘Then what’s ’e been seein’ the doctor about?’ said Probert, who had an impure mind.


‘’Cause ’e’s got what Jerry Floyd ’ad. ’E’s fed up with repetition-work and richness. I’ve watched it comin’ on. It’s the same as we used to ’ave it in the War—but t’other way round. You can’t mistake.’


‘What’s goin’ to ’appen?’


‘Gawd knows! I’m standin’ to. The doctor ’as told ’im to lie off everythin’ for a month—in one motion. If you stop runnin’ machinery without slowin’ ’er down, she’ll lift ’erself off the bedplate. I’ve seen so with pumps.’


But machinery suddenly arrested has no resources in itself. Human mechanism under strain finds comfort in a drink or two. Running about in cars with no definite object bored John Marden as much as drumming under the clouds in aeroplanes; theatres made him think impotently of new gadgets for handling the scenery, or extracting opera-glasses from their clips; cards and golf ended in his counting the pips in his hand, or the paces between shot and shot; whereas drinks softened the outlines of things, if not at once, then after a little repetition-work.


The result came when a Fear leaped out of the goose-fleshed streets of London between the icy shop-fronts, and drove John to his flat. He argued that it must have been a chill, and fortified himself against it so resolutely that an advertisement, which had caught the tail-end of his eye, stood up before him in the shape of a full-sized red and white bullock, dancing in a tea-cup. It was succeeded a few days later by a small dog, pressed against the skirting-board of his room—an inky, fat horror with a pink tongue, crouched in the attitude of a little beast he had often watched at Mr. William’s fashionable West End pet-shop, where dogs lived in excelsior-floored cubicles, appealing to the passers-by. It began. as a spreading blurr, which morning after morning became more definite. It was better than the ox in the tea-cup, till it was borne in on John Marden one dawn that, if It crawled out into the centre of the room, the Universe would crash down on him. He wondered till he sweated, dried and broke out again, what would happen to him then, and how suicides were judged. After a drink or two, he became cunning and diplomatic with—of all experts in the world—his batman, to whom he told the tale of a friend who ‘saw things.’ The result was tabulated that afternoon in the basement, where Shingle and Probert were drinking his whisky.


‘Well,—now we’re arrivin’ at objective A,’ said Shingle. ‘I knew last week ’e’d begun seein’ ’em, ’cause ’e couldn’t turn ’is eyes out o’ corners. O’ course, ’e says it’s overtook a friend of ’is.’


‘Reasonable enough,’ said Probert. ‘We all keep that friend.’


‘Let’s get down to figures,’ Shingle went on. ‘Two bottles is ’is week’s whack. An’ we know ’e don’t use cocktails. Well; that don’t make much more’n four drinks a day. You can’t get nothin’ special on that issue—not in nature.’


‘Women also?,’ Probert suggested.


‘Be-e damned! I know there ain’t. No. It’s a black dawg. That’s neither ’ere nor there. But, if it comes out into the room, ‘is pore friend ’ll go off ’is rocker. That is objective B.’


‘Ye-es,’ said Probert. ‘I’ve ’ad ’em too. What about it?’


‘I’m askin’ you if reel dawgs are allowed in the flats. Are they?’ said Shingle.


Probert dismissed the matter loftily.


‘As between us!’ he began. ‘Don’t stay awake for it! I’ve sanctioned kittens in two flats this spring. What’s the game?’


‘’Air o’ the dog that bit ’im,’ Shingle answered. ‘I mean ’is pore friend!’


‘What about small-arms in ’is possession,’ said Probert. ‘You know.’


‘On’y ’is pistol, an’ ’e’ll ’ave a proper ’unt for that. Now mind you don’t go back on what you said about keepin’ dawgs ’ere.’


Shingle went off, dressed in most items out of his master’s wardrobe, with the pawnticket for his master’s revolver in his pocket.


John’s state was less gracious. He was walking till he should tire himself out and his brain would cease to flinch at every face that looked so closely at him because he was going mad. If he walked for two hours and a half without halt, round and round the Parks, he might drug his mind by counting his paces till the rush of numbers would carry on awhile after he finished. At seven o’clock he re-entered the flat, and stared at his feet, while he raced through numbers from eleven thousand up. When he lifted his eyes, the black Thing he expected was pressed against the skirting-board. The tonic the doctor had prescribed stood on a table. He drew the cork with his teeth, and gulped down to the first mark on the glass. He fancied he heard small, thumping sounds. Turning, it seemed to him that the Thing by the wall was working outwards.


Then there were two John Mardens—one dissolved by terror; the other, a long way off, detached, but as much in charge of him as he used to be of his underground shift at Messines.


‘It’s coming out into the room,’ roared the first. ‘Now you’ve got to go mad! Your pistol—before you make an exhibition of yourself!’


‘Call it, you fool! Call it! ‘ the other commanded.


‘Come along! Good dog! Come along!’ John whispered.


Slowly, ears pressed to head, the inky blurr crawled across the parquet on to the rug.


‘Go-ood doggie. Come along, then!’ John held out a clenched fist and felt, he thought, a touch of hell-fire that would have sent him through the window, except for the second John, who said:—


‘Right! All right! A cold nose is the sign of a well dog. It’s all right! It’s alive!’


‘No. It’s come alive!’ shouted the first. ‘It’ll grow like the bullock in the cup! Pistol, you!’


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‘No—no—alive! Quite alive!’ the other interrupted. ‘It’s licking your fist, and—nff!—it’s made a mess in the corner—on the polished three-eighth-inch oak-parquet, set on cement with brick archings. Shovel!—Not pistol! Get the shovel, you ass!’


Then, John Marden repeated aloud:


‘Yes. It’s made a mess. I’ll get the shovel—shovel—steel—nickel-handled—one. Oh, you filthy little beast!’


He reached among the fire-irons and did what was necessary. The small thing, flat, almost, as a postage-stamp, crawled after him. It was sorry, it whimpered. Indeed, it had been properly brought up, but circumstances had been too much for it, and it apologised—on its back. John stirred it with a toe. Feeling its amends had been accepted, it first licked and then rapturously bit his shoe.


‘It’s a dog right enough,’ said John. He lifted a cracked voice and called aloud:


‘There is a dog here! I mean there’s a dog here.’


As he remembered himself and leaned towards the bell-push, Shingle entered from the bedroom, where he had been laying out dinner-kit, with a story of some badly washed shirts that seemed on his mind.


‘But there’s a dog—’ said John.


Oh, yes! Now that John mentioned it, a pup had arrived at 5.15 P.M.—brought over from the dog-shop by Mr. Wilham himself who, having observed Captain Marden’s interest in his windows, had taken the liberty of sending on approval—price fifteen guineas—one Dinah, jet black Aberdeen of the dwarf type, aged five months and a fortnight, with pedigree attached to Mr. Wilham’s letter (on the mantelpiece, left when Mr. Wilham found Captain Marden was not at home, sir) and which would confirm all the above statements. Shingle took his time to make everything clear, speaking in a tone that no man of his acquaintance had ever heard. He broke back often to the badly washed shirts, which somehow. John found comforting. The pup ceased to grovel.


‘Wilham was right about ’er breedin’. Not a white ’air on ’er! An’ look at ’er boo-som frills!’ said Shingle voluptuously.


Dinah, ears just prickable, sat on the floor between them, looking like a bandy-legged bat.


‘But one can’t keep dogs in these flats. It’s forbidden, isn’t it?’ John asked.


‘Me an’ the janitor ’ll arrange that. Probert’ll come in ’andy to take ’er walks, too.’ Shingle mused aloud.


‘But I don’t know anything about dogs.’


‘She’ll look after all that. She’s a bitch, you see, sir. An’ so that’ll be all right.’


Shingle went back to the evening-kit.


John and Dinah faced each other before the fire. His feet, as he sat, were crossed at the ankles. Dinah moved forward to the crotch thus presented, jammed her boat-nosed head into it up to the gullet, pressed down her chin till she found the exact angle that suited her, tucked her forelegs beneath her, grunted, and went to sleep, warm and alive. When John moved, she rebuked him, and Shingle, ten minutes later, found him thus immobilised.


‘H’sh!’ said John.


But Dinah was awake and said so.


‘Oh! That’s it, is it?’ Shingle grinned. ‘She knows ’oo’s what already.’


‘How d’you mean?’ John asked.


‘She knows where I come in. She’s yours. I’ve got to look after ’er. That’s all. ’Tisn’t as if she was a dog-pup.’


‘Yes, but what am I to do about her?’


‘We-ell, o’ course, you must be careful you don’t mix up with others. She’s just the right age for distemper. She’ll ’ave to be took out on the lead. An’ then there’ll be ’er basket an’ sundries.’


John Marden did not attend, because in the corner, close to the skirting-board, lay That Other, who had borne him company for the past few days.


‘She—looks like a good ratter,’ he stammered.


‘I’d forgot that. ’Ere! Young lady!’ said Shingle, following the line of John’s eye. ‘’Ave you ever ’eard anything about rats?’


Dinah rose at once and signified that she had—lots.


‘That’s it, then! Rrrats! Rrats, ducky! Rrrout ’em out! ‘


She in turn followed the hint of Shingle’s hand, scuttled to the corner indicated, and said what she would have done had enemies been present. When she trotted back, That Other took shape again behind her, but John felt relieved.


‘Now about dinner, sir!’ said Shingle. ‘It’s ’er first night at ’ome. ’Twouldn’t do to disappoint ’er, would it?’


‘Bring something up here then,’ said John. ‘I’ll dress now.’


On Shingle’s departure he rose and, followed by an interested Dinah, trod, not for the first time, firmly in the corners of his room. Then he went to dress. Dinah backed against the bath, the wisdom of centuries in her little solemn mask, till John’s fluttering shirt-tails broke it all up. She leaped, grabbed them, and swung into John’s calves. John kicked back. She retired under the bulge of the porcelain and told him what she thought of him. He sat down and laughed. She scolded till he dropped a stud, and the two hunted for it round the cork mat, and he was just able to retrieve it from between her teeth. Both sat down to meat, a little warm and dishevelled. That Other watched them, but did not insist, though Dinah backed into him twice.


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‘I’ve made a temp’ry collar and lead off Probert. I’ll take ’er for ’er last walk,’ Shingle announced when he had cleared away.


‘You will not,’ said John. ‘Give ’em to me.’


The upshot was some strenuous exercise in the Mall, when Dinah, to whom night and London were new, lassoed John twice and a stranger once, besides nearly choking when she was snatched from under the wheels of a car. This so saddened her that she sat down, and had to be brought home, languidly affectionate, in a taxi. As John said, the adventure showed she would not be afraid of cars.


‘There’s nothin’ that young woman’s afraid of, ’cept not bein’ made much of,’ Shingle replied. ‘Green ’ud suit ’er better than red in collars. But I expect you’ll do your own buyin’, sir.’


‘I will. You get the dog-biscuit,’ said John.


‘Puppy-biscuit!’ said Shingle, deeply shocked, and he mentioned the only brand. ‘A pup’s like a child—all stummick.’


Going to bed was a riot. Dinah had no intention of being left out, and when John moved a foot, tried to chew down to it through the blankets till she was admitted. Shingle, with the shaving-water, would have given her her walk before breakfast next morning; but John took the duty, and she got muddy and had to be cleaned and dried on her return. Then, at Shingle’s reminder, came the shopping expedition. John bought a green collar for Sunday, and a red for weekdays; two ditto leads; one wicker basket with green baize squab; two brushes; one toothed comb and one curry; and—Shingle sent him out again for these—pills, alterative, tonic, and antithelmintic. Ungrateful Dinah chewed the basket’s varnished rim, ripped the bowels out of the squab, nipped Marden’s inexperienced fingers as he gave her her first pill, and utterly refused to be brushed.


‘Gawd!’ said the agile Shingle, who was helping. ‘Mother used to say a child was a noosance. Twins ain’t in it with you, Dinah. An’ now I suppose you’ll ’ave to show ’em all off in your car.’


John’s idea had been a walk down the Mall, but Shingle dwelt on the dangers of distemper and advised Richmond Park in, since rain was likely, the limousine. Dinah condescended a little when it came round, but hopped up into the right-hand seat, and gave leave to get under way. When they reached the Park she was so delighted that she clean forgot her name, and John chivvied her, shouting till she remembered. Shingle had put up a lunch, for fear, he explained, of hotels where ladies brought infectious Pekes, flown over for them by reprobate lovers in the Air Service; and after a couple of hours bounding through bracken, John appreciated the half-bottle of Burgundy that went with it. On their return, all Dinah’s wordly pose dropped. ‘I am,’ she sniffed, ‘but a small pup with a large nose. Let me rest it on your breast and don’t you stop loving me for one minute.’ So John slept too, and the chauffeur trundled them back at five o’clock.


‘Pubs?’ Probert demanded out of a corner of his mouth when John had gone indoors.


‘Not in ther least,’ said Shingle. ‘Accordin’ to our taxi-man’—(Shingle did not love John’s chauffeur)—‘Women and Song was ’is game. ’E says you ought to ’ave ’eard ’im ’owling after ’er. ’E’ll be out in his own Hizzer-Swizzer in a week.’


‘That’s your business. But what about my commission on the price? You don’t expect me to sanction dawgs ’ere for nothin’? Come on! It’s all found money for you.’


John went drowsily up in the lift and finished his doze. When he waked, That Other was in his corner, but Shingle had found two tennis balls, with which Dinah was playing the Eton Wall Game by herself up and down the skirting-board—pushing one with her nose, patting the other along with her paws, right through That Other’s profiles.


‘That shows she’s been kitten-trained,’ said Shingle. ‘I’ll bring up the janitor’s and make sure.’


But the janitor’s kitten had not been pup-trained and leaped on the table, to make sure. Dinah followed. It took all hands ten minutes to clear up the smashed glass of siphon, tumbler, and decanter, in case she cut her feet. The aftermath was reaped by a palpitating vacuum-cleaner, which Dinah insisted was hostile.


When she and John and That Other in the corner sat it out after dinner, she discovered gifts of conversation. In the intervals of gossip she would seek and nose both balls about the room, then return to John’s foot, lay her chin over it, and pick up where she had left off, in eloquent whimperings.


‘Does she want anything?’ he asked Shingle.


‘Nothin’, excep’ not to be out of your mind for a minute. ’Ow about a bone now, Dinah?’ Out came her little pink tongue, sideways, there was a grunt and a sneeze, and she pirouetted gaily before the serving-man.


‘Come downstairs, then,’ he said.


‘Bring it up here!’ said John, sweeping aside Shingle’s views on Bokhara rugs. This was messy—till Dinah understood that bones must be attended to on newspapers spread for that purpose.


These things were prelude to a month of revelations, in which Dinah showed herself all that she was, and more, since she developed senses and moods for John only. She was by turns, and in places, arrogant, imbecile, coy, forthcoming, jealous, exacting, abject, humourous, or, apparently, stone-cold, but in every manifestation adorable, and to be attended to before drinks. Shingle, as necessary to her comfort, stood on the fringe of her favours, but John was her Universe. And for her, after four weeks, he found himself doing what he had never done since Messines. He sang sentimental ditties—on his awful topnotes Dinah would join in—such as:—


‘Oh, show me a liddle where to find a rose

To give to ma honey chi-ile!

Oh, show me a liddle where my love goes

An’ I’ll follow her all de while!’


At which she would caper, one ear up and one a quarter down. Then:—


‘Ma love she gave me a kiss on de mouf,

An’ how can I let her go-o?

And I’ll follow her norf, and I’ll follow her souf

Because I love her so!’


‘’Oo-ooo I Oooo!’ Dinah would wail to the ceiling.


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And then came calamity, after a walk in the Green Park, and Shingle said:—‘I told you so.’ Dinah went off her feed, shivered, stared, ran at the nose, grew gummy round the eyes, and coughed.


‘Ye-es,’ said Shingle, rubbing his chin above her. ‘The better the breed, the worse they cop it. Oh, damn the ’ole Air Force! It’ll be a day-and-night job, I’m thinkin’. Look up a Vet in the Directory? Gawd! No! This is distemper. I know a Canine Specialist and——’


He went to the telephone without asking leave.


The Canine Specialist was duly impressed by John and his wealth, and more effectively by Shingle. He laid down rules of nursing and diet which the two noted in duplicate, and split into watches round the clock.


‘She ’as worked like a charm ’itherto,’ Shingle confided to Probert, whose wife cooked for Dinah’s poor appetite. ‘She’s jerked ’im out of ’isself proper. But if anythin’ ’appens to ’er now, it’ll be all Messines over again for ’im.’


‘Did ’e cop it bad there, then?’


‘Once, to my knowledge. I ’eard ’im before ’e went underground prayin’ that ’is cup might parse. It ’ad come over ’im in an ’eap. Ye-es! It ’appens—it ’appens, as mother used to say when we was young.’


‘Then it’s up to you to see nothing happens this time.’


“Looks it! But she’s as jealous as a school teacher over ’im. Pore little bitch! Ain’t it odd, though? She knows ’ow to play Weepin’ Agnes with ’im as well as a woman! But she’s cured ’im of lookin’ in corners, an’ ’e’s been damnin’ me something like ’olesome.’


John, indeed, was unendurably irritable while Dinah’s trouble was increasing. He slept badly at first, then too heavily, between watches, and fussed so much that Shingle suggested Turkish baths to recover his tone. But Dinah grew steadily worse, till there was one double watch which Shingle reported to Probert as a ‘fair curiosity.’ ‘I ’eard ’im Our Fatherin’ in the bath-room when ’e come off watch and she ’adn’t conked out.’


Presently there was improvement, followed by relapse, and grave talk of possible pneumonia. That passed, too, but left a dreadful whimpering weakness, till one day she chose to patter back to life with her scimitar tail going like an egg-whisk. During her convalescence she had discovered that her sole concern was to love John Marden unlimitedly; to follow him pace by pace when he moved; to sit still and worship him when he stopped; to flee to his foot when he took a chair; to defend him loudly against enemies, such as cats and callers; to confide in, cherish, pet, cuddle, and deify without cease; and, failing that, to mount guard over his belongings. Shingle bore it very well.


‘Yes, I know you!’ he observed to her one morning when she was daring him to displace John’s pyjamas from their bed. ‘I’d be no good to you unless I was a puppy-biscuit. An’ yet I did ’ave an’ ’and in pullin’ you through, you pukka little bitch, you.’


For some while she preferred cars to her own feet, and her wishes were gratified, especially in the Hizzer-Swizzer which, with John at the wheel—you do not drink when you drive Hizzer-Swizzers—suited her. Her place was at his left elbow, nose touching his sleeve, until the needle reached fifty, when she had to throw it up and sing aloud. Thus, she saw much of summer England, but somehow did not recover her old form, in spite of Shingle’s little doses of black coffee and sherry.


John felt the drag of the dull, warm days too and went back to the Works for half a week, where he sincerely tried to find out what his secretary meant by plans for reorganisation. It sounded exactly like words, but conveyed nothing. Then he spent a night like that first one after Jerry Floyd had struck, and tried to deal with it by the same means; but found himself dizzily drunk almost before he began.


‘The fuse was advanced,’ Shingle chuckled to Probert. ‘’E was like a boy with ’is first pipe. An’ a virgin’s ’ead in the mornin’! That shows the success of me treatment. But a man ’as to think of ’is own interests once-awhile. It’s time for me Bank ’Oliday.’


‘You an’ your ’olidays. Ain’t your bloke got any will of ’is own?’


‘Not yet. ’E’s still on the dole. ’Urry your Mrs. P. up with our medical comforts.’


That was Dinah’s beef-tea, and very good. But if you mix with it a few grains of a certain stuff, little dogs won’t touch it.


‘She’s off ’er feed again,’ said Shingle despairingly to John, whose coaxings were of no avail.


‘Change is what you want,’ said Shingle to her under his breath. ‘’Tain’t fair to keep a dawg in town in summer. I ain’t sayin’ anythin’ against the flat.’


‘What’s all that?’ said John. Shingle’s back was towards him.


‘I said I wasn’t sayin’ anythin’ against the flat, sir. A man can doss down anywhere——’


‘Doss? I pay eight hundred a year for the thing!’


‘But it’s different with dawgs, sir, was all I was going to remark. Furniture’s no treat to them.’


‘She stays with me,’ John snapped, while Dinah tried to explain how she had been defrauded of her soup.


‘Of course she stays—till she conks out.’ Shingle removed the bowl funereally. . . .


‘No, I ’ave not pulled it off at one go,’ he said to Probert. ‘If you ’ad jest finished with seein’ dawgs in corners, you wouldn’t want to crash into society at a minute’s notice, either. You’d think a bit before’and an’ look round for a dry dug-out. That’s what we’re doin’.’


Two days later, he dropped a word that he had a sister in the country, married to a cowkeeper, who took in approved lodgers. If anyone doubted the merits of the establishment, the Hizzer-Swizzer could get there in two hours, and make sure. It did so, and orders were given for the caravan to start next day, that not a moment might be lost in restoring Dinah.


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She hopped out into a world of fields full of red and white bullocks, who made her (and John) flinch a little; and rabbits always on the edge of being run down. There was, too, a cat called Ginger, evidently used to dogs; and a dusty old collie, Jock, whom she snapped into line after five abject minutes.


‘It suits ’er,’ Shingle pronounced. ‘The worst she’ll catch off Jock is fleas. Fairy Anne! I’ve brought the Keatings.’


Dinah left Jock alone. Ginger, who knew all about rats and rabbits, was more to her mind, and those two ladies would work together along the brookside on fine, and through the barns on wet, mornings, chaperoned by John and a nobby stick. She was bitten through the nose at her first attempt, but said nothing about it at the time, nor when she laid out the disinterred corpse in his bedroom—till she was introduced to iodine.


The afternoons were given to walks which began with a mighty huntress before her lord, standing on hind legs at every third bound to overlook the tall September grass, and ended with a trailing pup, who talked to John till he picked her up, laid her across his neck, a pair of small feet in each hand, and carried her drowsily licking his right cheek.


For evenings, there were great games. Dinah had invented a form of ‘footer’ with her tennis ball. John would roll it to her, and she returned it with her nose, as straight as a die, till she thought she had lulled him into confidence. Then angle and pace would change, and John had to scramble across the room to recover and shoot it back, if possible past her guard. Or she would hide (cheating like a child, the while) till he threw it into a corner, and she stormed after it, slipped, fetched up against the skirting-board and swore. Last of all came the battle for the centre of the bed; the ferocious growling onsets; the kisses on the nose; the grunt of affectionate defeat and the soft jowl stretched out on his shoulder.


With all these preoccupations and demands, John’s days slipped away like blanks beneath a stamping-machine. But, somehow, he picked up a slight cold one Sunday, and Shingle, who had been given the evening off with a friend, had reduced the neglected whisky to a quarter bottle. John eked it out with hot water, sugar, and three aspirins, and told Dinah that she might play with Ginger while he kept himself housed.


He was comfortably perspiring at 7 P.M., when he dozed on the sofa, and only woke for Sunday cold supper at eight. Dinah did not enter with it, and Shingle’s sister, who had small time-sense, said that she had seen her with Ginger mousing in the wash-house ‘just now.’ So he did not draw the house for her till past nine; nor finish his search of the barns, flashing his torch in all corners, till later. Then he hurried to the kitchen and told his tale.


‘She’ve been wired,’ said the cowman. ‘She’ve been poaching along with Ginger, an’ she’ve been caught in a rabbit-wire. Ginger wouldn’t never be caught—twice. It’s different with dogs as cats. That’s it. Wired.’


‘Where, think you?’


‘All about the woods somewhere—same’s Jock did when ’e were young. But ’e give tongue, so I dug ’im out.’


At the sound of his name, the old ruffian pushed his head knee-high into the talk.


‘She’d answer me from anywhere,’ said John.


‘Then you’d best look for her. I’d go with ’e, but it’s foot-washin’s for me to-night. An’ take you a graf’ along. I’ll tell Shingle to sit up till you come back. ’E ain’t ’ome yet.’


Shingle’s sister passed him a rabbiting-spade out of the wash-house, and John went forth with three aspirins and some whisky inside him, and all the woods and fields under the stars to make choice of. He felt Jock’s nose in his hand and appealed to him desperately.


‘It’s Dinah! Go seek, boy! It’s Dinah! Seek!’


Jock seemed unconcerned, but he slouched towards the brook, and turned through wet grasses while John, calling and calling, followed him towards a line of hanging woods that clothed one side of the valley. Stumps presently tripped him, and John fell several times but Jock waited. Last, for a long while, they quartered a full-grown wood, with the spotlight of his torch making the fallen stuff look like coils of half-buried wire between the Lines. He heard a church clock strike eleven as he drew breath under the top of the rise, and wondered a little why a spire should still be standing. Then he remembered that this was England, and strained his ears to make sure that his calls were not answered. The collie nosed ground and moved on, evidently interested. John thought he heard a reply at last; plunged forward without using his torch, fell, and rolled down a steep bank, breathless and battered, into a darkness deeper than that of the woods. Jock followed him whimpering. He called. He heard Dinah’s smothered whine—switched on the light and discovered a small cliff of sandstone ribbed with tree-roots. He moved along the cliff towards the sound, till his light showed him a miniature canon in its face, which he entered. In a few yards the cleft became a tunnel, but—he was calling softly now—there was no doubt that Dinah lay somewhere at the end. He held on till the lowering roof forced him to knees and elbows and, presently, stomach. Dinah’s whimper continued. He wriggled forward again, and his shoulders brushed either side of the downward-sloping way. Then every forgotten or hardly-held-back horror of his two years’ underground-work returned on him with the imagined weight of all earth overhead.


A handful of sand dropped from the roof and crumbled between his neck and coat-collar. He had but to retire an inch or two and the pressure would be relieved, and he could widen the bottlenecked passage with his spade; but terror beyond all terrors froze him, even though Dinah was appealing somewhere a little ahead. Release came in a spasm and a wrench that drove him backward six feet like a prawn. Then he realised that it would be all to do again, and shook as with fever.


At last his jerking hand steadied on the handle of the spade. He poked it ahead of him, at halfarm’s length, and gingerly pared the sides of the tunnel, raking the sand out with his hands, and passing it under his body in the old way of the old work, till he estimated, by torchlight, that he might move up a little without being pinned again. By some special mercy the tunnel beyond the section he had enlarged grew wider. He followed on, flashed once more, and saw Dinah, her head pressed close to the right-hand side of it, her white-rimmed eyes green and set.


He pushed himself forward over a last pit of terror, and touched her. There was no wire, but a tough, thumb-shaped root, sticking out of the sand-wall, had hooked itself into her collar, sprung backwards and upwards, and locked her helplessly by the neck. His fingers trembled so at first that he could not follow the kinks of it. He shut his eyes, and humoured it out by touch, as he had done with wires and cables deep down under the Ridge; grabbed Dinah, and pushed himself back to the free air outside.


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There he was sick as never he had been in all his days or nights. When he was faintly restored, he saw Dinah sitting beside Jock, wondering why her Lover—King—and God did all these noisy things.


On his feet at last, he crawled out of the sandpit that had been a warren, badger’s holt, and foxes’ larder for generations, and wavered homeward, empty as a drum, cut, bruised, bleeding, streaked with dirt and raffle that had caked where the sweat had dried on him, knees bending both ways, and eyes unable to judge distance. Nothing in his working past had searched him to these depths. But Dinah was in his arms, and it was she who announced their return to the stilllighted farm at the hour of 1 A.M.


Shingle opened the door, and without a word steered him into the wash-house, where the copper was lit. He began to explain, but was pushed into a tub of very hot water, with a blanket that came to his chin, and a drink of something or other at his lips. Afterwards he was helped upstairs to a bed with hot bricks in it, and there all the world, and Dinah licking his nose, passed from him for the rest of the night and well into the next day again. But Shingle’s sister was shocked when she saw his torn and filthy clothing thrown down in the wash-house.


‘’Looks as if ’e’d been spending a night between the Lines, don’t it?’ her brother commented. ‘’Asn’t ’alf sweated either. Three hours of it, Marg’ret, an’ rainin’ on an’ off. Must ’ave been all Messines with ’im till ’e found ’er.’


‘An’ ’e done it for ’is dog! What wouldn’t ’e do for ’is woman!’ said she.


‘Yes. You would take it that way. I’m thinkin’ about ’im.’


‘Ooh! Look at the blood. ’E must ’ave cut ’isself proper.’


‘I went over ’im for scratches before breakfast. Even the iodine didn’t wake ’im. ’Got ’is tray ready?’


Shingle bore it up, and Dinah’s impenitent greeting of him roused her master.


‘She wasn’t wired. She knew too much for that,’ were John’s first words. ‘She was hung up by her collar in an old bury. Jock showed me, an’ I got her out. I fell about a bit, though. It was pitch-black; quite like old times.’


He went into details between mouthfuls, and Dinah between mouthfuls corroborated.


‘So, you see, it wasn’t her fault,’ John concluded.


‘That’s what they all say,’ Shingle broke in unguardedly.


‘Do they? That shows they know Ginger. Dinah, you aren’t to play with Ginger any more. Do you hear me?’


She knew it was reproof, as she flattened beneath the hand that caressed it away.


‘Oh, and look here, Shingle,’ John sat up and stretched himself. ‘It’s about, time we went to work again. Perhaps you’ve noticed I have not been quite fit lately?’


‘What with Dinah and all?—ye-es, sir—a bit,’ Shingle assented.


‘Anyhow, I’ve got it off the books now. It’s behind me.’


‘Very glad to ’ear it. Shall I fill the bath?’


‘No. We’ll make our last night’s boil do for to-day. Lay out some sort of town-kit while I shave. I expect my last night’s rig is pretty well expended, isn’t it?’


‘There ain’t one complete scarecrow in the ’ole entire aggregate.’


‘’Don’t wonder. Look here, Shingle, I was underground a full half-hour before I could get at her. I should have said there wasn’t enough money ’top of earth to make me do that over again. But I did. Damn it—I did! Didn’t I, Dinah? “Oh, show me a liddle where to find a rose.” Get off the bed and fetch my slippers, young woman! “To give to ma honey chi-ile.” No; put ’em down; don’t play with ’em!’


He began to strop his razor, always a mystery to Dinah. ‘Shingle, this is the most damnable Government that was ever pupped. Look here! If I die to-morrow, they take about a third of the cash out of the Works for Death-duties, counting four per cent. interest on the money from the time I begin to set. That means one-third of our working capital, which is doing something, will be dug out from under us, so’s these dam’ politicians can buy more dole-votes with it. An’ I’ve got to waste my thinkin’ time, which means making more employment—(I say, this razor pulls like a road-scraper)—I’ve got to knock off my payin’ work and spend Heaven knows how many days reorganising into companies, so that we shan’t have our business knocked out if I go under. It’s the time I grudge, Shingle. And we’ve got to make that up too, Dinah!’


The rasp of the blade on the chin set her tail thumping as usual. When he was dressed, she went out to patronise Jock and Ginger by the barn, where Shingle picked her up later, with orders to jump into the Hizzer-Swizzer at once and return to duty. She made her regulation walk round him, one foot crossing the other, and her tongue out sideways.


‘Yes, that’s all right, Dinah! You’re a bitch You’re all the bitch that ever was, but you’re a useful bitch. That’s where you ain’t like some of ’em. Now come and say good-bye to your friends.’


He took her to the kitchen to bid farewell to the cowman and his wife. The woman looked at her coldly as she coquetted with the man.


‘She’ll get ’er come-uppance one of these days,’ she said when the car was reported.


‘What for? She’s as good a little thing as ever was. ’Twas Ginger’s fault,’ said the cowman.


‘I ain’t thinkin’ of her,’ she replied. ‘I’m thinkin’ she may ’ave started a fire that someone else’ll warm at some fine day. It ’appens—it ’appens—as mother used to say when we was all young.’



			


				





	

					

				
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I




‘BUT if it be a girl?’‘Lord of my life, it cannot be. I have prayed for so many nights, and sent gifts to Sheikh Badl’s shrine so often, that I know God will give us a son—a man-child that shall grow into a man. Think of this and be glad. My mother shall be his mother till I can take him again, and the mullah of the Pattan mosque shall cast his nativity—God send he be born in an auspicious hour!—and then, and then thou wilt never weary of me, thy slave.’


‘Since when hast thou been a slave, my queen?’


‘Since the beginning—till this mercy came to me. How could I be sure of thy love when I knew that I

had been bought with silver?’


‘Nay, that was the dowry. I paid it to thy mother.’


‘And she has buried it, and sits upon it all day long like a hen. What talk is yours of dower! I was bought

as though I had been a Lucknow dancing-girl instead of a child.’


‘Art thou sorry for the sale?’


‘I have sorrowed; but to-day I am glad. Thou wilt never cease to love me now?—answer, my king.’


‘Never—never. No.’


‘Not even though the mem-log—the white women of thy own blood—love thee? And remember, I have

watched them driving in the evening; they are very fair.’


‘I have seen fire-balloons by the hundred. I have seen the moon, and—then I saw no more fire-balloons.’


Ameera clapped her hands and laughed. ‘Very good talk,’ she said. Then with an assumption of great statelines, ‘It is enough. Thou hast my permission to depart,—if thou wilt.’


The man did not move. He was sitting on a low red-lacquered couch in a room furnished only with a blue and white floor-cloth, some rugs, and a very complete collection of native cushions. At his feet sat a woman of sixteen, and she was all but all the world in his eyes. By every rule and law she should have been otherwise, for he was an Englishman, and she a Mussulman’s daughter bought two years before from her mother, who, being left without money, would have sold Ameera shrieking to the Prince of Darkness if the price had been sufficient.


It was a contract entered into with a light heart; but even before the girl had reached her bloom she came to fill the greater portion of John Holden’s life. For her, and the withered hag her mother, he had taken a little house overlooking the great red-walled city, and found,—when the marigolds had sprung up by the well in the court-yard, and Ameera had established herself according to her own ideas of comfort, and her mother had ceased grumbling at the inadequacy of the cooking-places, the distance from the daily market, and at matters of house-keeping in general,—that the house was to him his home. Any one could enter his bachelor’s bungalow by day or night, and the life that he led there was an unlovely one. In the house in the city his feet only could pass beyond the outer courtyard to the women’s rooms; and when the big wooden gate was bolted behind him he was king in his own territory, with Ameera for queen. And there was going to be added to this kingdom a third person whose arrival Holden felt inclined to resent. It interfered with his perfect happiness. It disarranged the orderly peace of the house that was his own. But Ameera was wild with delight at the thought of it, and her mother not less so. The love of a man, and particularly a white man, was at the best an inconstant affair, but it might, both women argued, be held fast by a baby’s hands. ‘And then,’ Ameera would always say, ‘then he will never care for the white mem-log. I hate them all—I hate them all.’


‘He will go back to his own people in time,’ said the mother; ‘but by the blessing of God that time is yet afar off.’


Holden sat silent on the couch thinking of the future, and his thoughts were not pleasant. The drawbacks of a double life are manifold. The Government, with singular care, had ordered him out of the station for a fortnight on special duty in the place of a man who was watching by the bedside of a sick wife. The verbal notification of the transfer had been edged by a cheerful remark that Holden ought to think himself lucky in being a bachelor and a free man. He came to break the news to Ameera.


‘It is not good,’ she said slowly, ‘but it is not all bad. There is my mother here, and no harm will come to me—unless indeed I die of pure joy. Go thou to thy work and think no troublesome thoughts. When the days are done I believe…nay, I am sure. And—and then I shall lay him in thy arms, and thou wilt love me for ever. The train goes to-night, at midnight is it not? Go now, and do not let thy heart be heavy by cause of me. But thou wilt not delay in returning? Thou wilt not stay on the road to talk to the bold white mem-log. Come back to me swiftly, my life.’


As he left the courtyard to reach his horse that was tethered to the gate-post, Holden spoke to the white-haired old watchman who guarded the house, and bade him under certain contingencies despatch the filled-up telegraph-form that Holden gave him. It was all that could be done, and with the sensations of a man who has attended his own funeral Holden went away by the night mail to his exile. Every hour of the day he dreaded the arrival of the telegram, and every hour of the night he pictured to himself the death of Ameera. In consequence his work for the State was not of first-rate quality, nor was his temper towards his colleagues of the most amiable. The fortnight ended without a sign from his home, and, torn to pieces by his anxieties, Holden returned to be swallowed up for two precious hours by a dinner at the club, wherein he heard, as a man hears in a swoon, voices telling him how execrably he had performed the other man’s duties, and how he had endeared himself to all his associates. Then he fled on horseback through the night with his heart in his mouth. There was no answer at first to his blows on the gate, and he had just wheeled his horse round to kick it in when Pir Khan appeared with a lantern and held his stirrup.


‘Has aught occurred?’ said Holden.


‘The news does not come from my mouth, Protector of the Poor, but—’ He held out his shaking hand as befitted the bearer of good news who is entitled to a reward.


Holden hurried through the courtyard. A light burned in the upper room. His horse neighed in the gateway, and he heard a shrill little wail that sent all the blood into the apple of his throat. It was a new voice, but it did not prove that Ameera was alive.


‘Who is there?’ he called up the narrow brick staircase.


There was a cry of delight from Ameera, and then the voice of the mother, tremulous with old age and pride—‘We be two women and—the—man—thy—son.’text-align: center


page 2


On the threshold of the room Holden stepped on a naked dagger, that was laid there to avert ill-luck, and it broke at the hilt under his impatient heel.


‘God is great!’ cooed Ameera in the half-light. ‘Thou hast taken his misfortunes on thy head.’


‘Ay, but how is it with thee, life of my life? Old woman, how is it with her?’


‘She has forgotten her sufferings for joy that the child is born. There is no harm; but speak softly,’ said the mother.


‘It only needed thy presence to make me all well,’ said Ameera. ‘My king, thou hast been very long away. What gifts hast thou for me? Ah, ah! It is I that bring gifts this time. Look, my life, look. Was there ever such a babe? Nay, I am too weak even to clear my arm from him.’


‘Rest then, and do not talk. I am here, bachari [little woman].’


‘Well said, for there is a bond and a heel-rope [peecharee] between us now that nothing can break. Look—canst thou see in this light? He is without spot or blemish. Never was such a man-child. Ya illah! he shall be a pundit—no, a trooper of the Queen. And, my life, dost thou love me as well as ever, though I am faint and sick and worn? Answer truly.’


‘Yea. I love as I have loved, with all my soul. Lie still, pearl, and rest.’


‘Then do not go. Sit by my side here—so. Mother, the lord of this house needs a cushion. Bring it.’ There was an almost imperceptible movement on the part of the new life that lay in the hollow of Ameera’s arm. ‘Aho!’ she said, her voice breaking with love. ‘The babe is a champion from his birth. He is kicking me in the side with mighty kicks. Was there ever such a babe! And he is ours to us—thine and mine. Put thy hand on his head, but carefully, for he is very young, and men are unskilled in such matters.’


Very cautiously Holden touched with the tips of his fingers the downy head.


‘He is of the Faith,’ said Ameera; ‘for lying here in the night-watches I whispered the call to prayer and the profession of faith into his ears. And it is most marvellous that he was born upon a Friday, as I was born. Be careful of him, my life; but he can almost grip with his hands.’


Holden found one helpless little hand that closed feebly on his finger. And the clutch ran through his body till it settled about his heart. Till then his sole thought had been for Ameera. He began to realise that there was some one else in the world, but he could not feel that it was a veritable son with a soul. He sat down to think, and Ameera dozed lightly.


‘Get hence, sahib,’ said her mother under her breath. ‘It is not good that she should find you here on waking. She must be still.’


‘I go,’ said Holden submissively. ‘Here be rupees. See that my baba gets fat and finds all that he needs.’


The chink of the silver roused Ameera. ‘I am his mother, and no hireling,’ she said weakly. ‘Shall I look to him more or less for the sake of money? Mother, give it back. I have borne my lord a son.’


The deep sleep of weakness came upon her almost before the sentence was completed. Holden went down to the courtyard very softly with his heart at ease. Pir Khan, the old watchman, was chuckling with delight. ‘This house is now complete,’ he said, and without further comment thrust into Holden’s hands the hilt of a sabre worn many years ago when he, Pir Khan, served the Queen in the police. The bleat of a tethered goat came from the well-kerb.


‘There be two,’ said Pir Khan, ‘two goats of the best. I bought them, and they cost much money; and since there is no birth-party assembled their flesh will be all mine. Strike craftily, sahib! ’Tis an ill-balanced sabre at the best. Wait till they raise their heads from cropping the marigolds.’


‘And why?’ said Holden, bewildered.


‘For the birth-sacrifice. What else? Otherwise the child being unguarded from fate may die. The Protector of the Poor knows the fitting words to be said.’


Holden had learned them once with little thought that he would ever speak them in earnest. The touch of the cold sabre-hilt in his palm turned suddenly to the clinging grip of the child up-stairs—the child that was his own son—and a dread of loss filled him.


‘Strike!’ said Pir Khan. ‘Never life came into the world but life was paid for it. See, the goats have raised

their heads. Now! With a drawing cut!’


Hardly knowing what he did, Holden cut twice as he muttered the Mahomedan prayer that runs: ‘Almighty! In place of this my son I offer life for life, blood for blood, head for head, bone for bone, hair for hair, skin for skin.’ The waiting horse snorted and bounded in his pickets at the smell of the raw blood that spirted over Holden’s riding-boots.


‘Well smitten!’ said Pir Khan wiping the sabre. ‘A swordsman was lost in thee. Go with a light heart, Heaven-born. I am thy servant, and the servant of thy son. May the Presence live a thousand years and…the flesh of the goats is all mine?’ Pir Khan drew back richer by a month’s pay. Holden swung himself into the saddle and rode off through the low-hanging wood-smoke of the evening. He was full of riotous exultation, alternating with a vast vague tenderness directed towards no particular object, that made him choke as he bent over the neck of his uneasy horse. ‘I never felt like this in my life,’ he thought. ‘I’ll go to the club and pull myself together.’


A game of pool was beginning, and the room was full of men. Holden entered, eager to get to the light and the company of his fellows, singing at the top of his voice—


In Baltimore a-walking, a lady I did meet!


‘Did you?’ said the club-secretary from his corner. ‘Did she happen to tell you that your boots were wringing wet? Great goodness, man, it’s blood!’


page 3




‘Bosh!’ said Holden, picking his cue from the rack. ‘May I cut in? It’s dew. I’ve been riding through high crops. My faith! my boots are in a mess though!


‘And if it be a girl she shall wear a wedding-ring,

And if it be a boy he shall fight for his king,

With his dirk, and his cap, and his little jacket blue,

He shall walk the quarter-deck—’


‘Yellow on blue—green next player,’ said the marker monotonously.


‘He shall walk the quarter-deck,—Am I green, marker? He shall walk the quarter-deck,—eh! that’s a bad shot,—As his daddy used to do!’


‘I don’t see that you have anything to crow about,’ said a zealous junior civilian acidly. ‘The Government

is not exactly pleased with your work when you relieved Sanders.’


‘Does that mean a wigging from headquarters?’ said Holden with an abstracted smile. ‘I think I can stand it.’


The talk beat up round the ever-fresh subject of each man’s work, and steadied Holden till it was time to go to his dark empty bungalow, where his butler received him as one who knew all his affairs. Holden remained awake for the greater part of the night, and his dreams were pleasant ones.




II




‘How old is he now?’


‘Ya illah! What a man’s question! He is all but six weeks old; and on this night I go up to the house-top with thee, my life, to count the stars. For that is auspicious. And he was born on a Friday under the sign of the Sun, and it has been told to me that he will outlive us both and get wealth. Can we wish for aught better, be-loved?’


‘There is nothing better. Let us go up to the roof, and thou shalt count the stars—but a few only, for the sky is heavy with cloud.’


‘The winter rains are late, and maybe they come out of season. Come, before all the stars are hid. I have put on my richest jewels.’


‘Thou hast forgotten the best of all.’


‘Ai! Ours. He comes also. He has never yet seen the skies.’


Ameera climbed the narrow staircase that led to the flat roof. The child, placid and unwinking, lay in the hollow of her right arm, gorgeous in silver-fringed muslin with a small skull-cap on his head. Ameera wore all that she valued most. The diamond nose-stud that takes the place of the Western patch in drawing attention to the curve of the nostril, the gold ornament in the centre of the forehead studded with tallow-drop emeralds and flawed rubies, the heavy circlet of beaten gold that was fastened round her neck by the softness of the pure metal, and the chinking curb-patterned silver anklets hanging low over the rosy ankle-bone. She was dressed in jade-green muslin as befitted a daughter of the Faith, and from shoulder to elbow and elbow to wrist ran bracelets of silver tied with floss silk, frail glass bangles slipped over the wrist in proof of the slenderness of the hand, and certain heavy gold bracelets that had no part in her country’s ornaments, but, since they were Holden’s gift and fastened with a cunning European snap, delighted her immensely.


They sat down by the low white parapet of the roof, overlooking the city and its lights.


‘They are happy down there,’ said Ameera. ‘But I do not think that they are as happy as we. Nor do I think the white mem-log are as happy. And thou?’


‘I know they are not.’


‘How dost thou know?’


‘They give their children over to the nurses.’


‘I have never seen that,’ said Ameera with a sigh, ‘nor do I wish to see. Ahi!’—she dropped her head on Holden’s shoulder,—‘I have counted forty stars, and I am tired. Look at the child, love of my life, he is counting too.’


The baby was staring with round eyes at the dark of the heavens. Ameera placed him in Holden’s arms, and he lay there without a cry.


‘What shall we call him among ourselves?’ she said. ‘Look! Art thou ever tired of looking? He carries thy very eyes. But the mouth—’


‘Is thine, most dear. Who should know better than I?’


‘’Tis such a feeble mouth. Oh, so small! And yet it holds my heart between its lips. Give him to me now. He has been too long away.’


‘Nay, let him lie; he has not yet begun to cry.’


‘When he cries thou wilt give him back—eh? What a man of mankind thou art! If he cried he were only the dearer to me. But, my life, what little name shall we give him?’


The small body lay close to Holden’s heart. It was utterly helpless and very soft. He scarcely dared to breathe for fear of crushing it. The caged green parrot that is regarded as a sort of guardian-spirit in most native households moved on its perch and fluttered a drowsy wing.


‘There is the answer,’ said Holden. ‘Mian Mittu has spoken. He shall be the parrot. When he is ready he will talk mightily and run about. Mian Mittu is the parrot in thy—in the Mussulman tongue, is it not?’


‘Why put me so far off?’ said Ameera fretfully. ‘Let it be like unto some English name—but not wholly. For he is mine.’


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‘Then call him Tota, for that is likest English.’


‘Ay, Tota, and that is still the parrot. Forgive me, my lord, for a minute ago, but in truth he is too little to wear all the weight of Mian Mittu for name. He shall be Tota—our Tota to us. Hearest thou, oh, small one? Littlest, thou art Tota.’ She touched the child’s cheek, and he waking wailed, and it was necessary to return him to his mother, who soothed him with the wonderful rhyme of Aré koko, Faré koko! which says—


‘Oh crow! Go crow! Baby’s sleeping sound,

And the wild plums grow in the jungle, only a penny a pound.

Only a penny a pound, baba, only a penny a pound.’


Reassured many times as to the price of those plums, Tota cuddled himself down to sleep. The two sleek, white well-bullocks in the courtyard were steadily chewing the cud of their evening meal; old Pir Khan squatted at the head of Holden’s horse, his police sabre across his knees, pulling drowsily at a big water-pipe that croaked like a bull-frog in a pond. Ameera’s mother sat spinning in the lower verandah, and the wooden gate was shut and barred. The music of a marriage-procession came to the roof above the gentle hum of the city, and a string of flying-foxes crossed the face of the low moon.


‘I have prayed,’ said Ameera after a long pause, ‘I have prayed for two things. First, that I may die in thy stead if thy death is demanded, and in the second, that I may die in the place of the child. I have prayed to the Prophet and to Beebee Miriam. Thinkest thou either will hear?’


‘From thy lips who would not hear the lightest word?’


‘I asked for straight talk, and thou hast given me sweet talk. Will my prayers be heard?’


‘How can I say? God is very good.’


‘Of that I am not sure. Listen now. When I die, or the child dies, what is thy fate? Living, thou wilt return to the bold white mem-log, for kind calls to kind.’


‘Not always.’


‘With a woman, no; with a man it is otherwise. Thou wilt in this life, later on, go back to thine own folk. That I could almost endure, for I should be dead. But in thy very death thou wilt be taken away to a strange place and a paradise that I do not know.’


‘Will it be paradise?’


‘Surely, for who would harm thee? But we two—I and the child—shall be elsewhere, and we cannot come to thee, nor canst thou come to us. In the old days, before the child was born, I did not think of these things; but now I think of them always. It is very hard talk.’


‘It will fall as it will fall. To-morrow we do not know, but to-day and love we know well. Surely we are happy now.’


‘So happy that it were well to make our happiness assured. And thy Beebee Miriam should listen to me; for she is also a woman. But then she would envy me! It is not seemly for men to worship a woman.’


Holden laughed aloud at Ameera’s little spasm of jealousy.


‘Is it not seemly? Why didst thou not turn me from worship of thee, then?’


‘Thou a worshipper! And of me? My king, for all thy sweet words, well I know that I am thy servant and thy slave, and the dust under thy feet. And I would not have it otherwise. See!’


Before Holden could prevent her she stooped forward and touched his feet; recovering herself with a little laugh hugged Tota closer to her bosom. Then, almost savagely—


‘Is it true that the bold white mem-log live for three times the length of my life? Is it true that they make their marriages not before they are old women?’


‘They marry as do others—when they are women.’


‘That I know, but they wed when they are twenty-five. Is that true?’


‘That is true.’


‘Ya illah! At twenty-five! Who would of his own will take a wife even of eighteen? She is a woman—aging every hour. Twenty-five! I shall be an old woman at that age, and—Those mem-log remain young for ever. How I hate them!’


‘What have they to do with us?’


‘I cannot tell. I know only that there may now be alive on this earth a woman ten years older than I who may come to thee and take thy love ten years after I am an old woman, gray-headed, and the nurse of Tota’s son. That is unjust and evil. They should die too.’


‘Now, for all thy years thou art a child, and shalt be picked up and carried down the staircase.’


‘Tota! Have a care for Tota, my lord! Thou at least art as foolish as any babe!’ Ameera tucked Tota out of harm’s way in the hollow of her neck, and was carried downstairs laughing in Holden’s arms, while Tota opened his eyes and smiled after the manner of the lesser angels.


He was a silent infant, and, almost before Holden could realise that he was in the world, developed into a small gold-coloured little god and unquestioned despot of the house overlooking the city. Those were months of absolute happiness to Holden and Ameera—happiness withdrawn from the world, shut in behind the wooden gate that Pir Khan guarded. By day Holden did his work with an immense pity for such as were not so fortunate as himself, and a sympathy for small children that amazed and amused many mothers at the little station-gatherings. At nightfall he returned to Ameera,—Ameera, full of the wondrous doings of Tota; how he had been seen to clap his hands together and move his fingers with intention and purpose—which was manifestly a miracle—how later, he had of his own initiative crawled out of his low bedstead on to the floor and swayed on both feet for the space of three breaths.


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‘And they were long breaths, for my heart stood still with delight,’ said Ameera.


Then Tota took the beasts into his councils—the well-bullocks, the little gray squirrels, the mongoose that lived in a hole near the well, and especially Mian Mittu, the parrot, whose tail he grievously pulled, and Mian Mittu screamed till Ameera and Holden arrived.


‘Oh villain! Child of strength! This to thy brother on the house-top! Tobah, tobah! Fie! Fie! But I know a charm to make him wise as Suleiman and Aflatoun. Now look,’ said Ameera. She drew from an embroidered bag a handful of almonds. ‘See! we count seven. In the name of God!’


She placed Mian Mittu, very angry and rumpled, on the top of his cage, and seating herself between the babe and the bird she cracked and peeled an almond less white than her teeth. ‘This is a true charm, my life, and do not laugh. See! I give the parrot one-half and Tota the other.’ Mian Mittu with careful beak took his share from between Ameera’s lips, and she kissed the other half into the mouth of the child, who ate it slowly with wondering eyes. ‘This I will do each day of seven, and without doubt he who is ours will be a bold speaker and wise. Eh, Tota, what wilt thou be when thou art a man and I am gray-headed?’ Tota tucked his fat legs into adorable creases. He could crawl, but he was not going to waste the spring of his youth in idle speech. He wanted Mian Mittu’s tail to tweak.


When he was advanced to the dignity of a silver belt—which, with a magic square engraved on silver and hung round his neck, made up the greater part of his clothing—he staggered on a perilous journey down the garden to Pir Khan, and proffered him all his jewels in exchange for one little ride on Holden’s horse, having seen his mother’s mother chaffering with pedlars in the verandah. Pir Khan wept and set the untried feet on his own gray head in sign of fealty, and brought the bold adventurer to his mother’s arms, vowing that Tota would be a leader of men ere his beard was grown.


One hot evening, while he sat on the roof between his father and mother watching the never ending warfare of the kites that the city boys flew, he demanded a kite of his own with Pir Khan to fly it, because he had a fear of dealing with anything larger than himself, and when Holden called him a ‘spark,’ he rose to his feet and answered slowly in defence of his new-found individuality, ‘Hum’park nahin hai. Hum admi hai [I am no spark, but a man.]’


The protest made Holden choke and devote himself very seriously to a consideration of Tota’s future. He need hardly have taken the trouble. The delight of that life was too perfect to endure. Therefore it was taken away as many things are taken away in India—suddenly and without warning. The little lord of the house, as Pir Khan called him, grew sorrowful and complained of pains who had never known the meaning of pain. Ameera, wild with terror, watched him through the night, and in the dawning of the second day the life was shaken out of him by fever—the seasonal autumn fever. It seemed altogether impossible that he could die, and neither Ameera nor Holden at first believed the evidence of the little body on the bedstead. Then Ameera beat her head against the wall and would have flung herself down the well in the garden had Holden not restrained her by main force.


One mercy only was granted to Holden. He rode to his office in broad daylight and found waiting him an unusually heavy mail that demanded concentrated attention and hard work. He was not, however, alive to this kindness of the gods.




III




The first shock of a bullet is no more than a brisk pinch. The wrecked body does not send in its protest to the soul till ten or fifteen seconds later. Holden realised his pain slowly, exactly as he had realised his happiness, and with the same imperious necessity for hiding all trace of it. In the beginning he only felt that there had been a loss, and that Ameera needed comforting, where she sat with her head on her knees shivering as Mian Mittu from the house-top called, Tota! Tota! Tota! Later all his world and the daily life of it rose up to hurt him. It was an outrage that any one of the children at the band-stand in the evening should be alive and clamorous, when his own child lay dead. It was more than mere pain when one of them touched him, and stories told by over-fond fathers of their children’s latest performances cut him to the quick. He could not declare his pain. He had neither help, comfort, nor sympathy; and Ameera at the end of each weary day would lead him through the hell of self-questioning reproach which is reserved for those who have lost a child, and believe that with a little—just a little more care—it might have been saved.


‘Perhaps,’ Ameera would say, ‘I did not take sufficient heed. Did I, or did I not? The sun on the roof that day when he played so long alone and I was—ahi! braiding my hair—it may be that the sun then bred the fever. If I had warned him from the sun he might have lived. But, oh my life, say that I am guiltless! Thou knowest that I loved him as I love thee. Say that there is no blame on me, or I shall die—I shall die!’


‘There is no blame,—before God, none. It was written, and how could we do aught to save? What has been, has been. Let it go, beloved.’


‘He was all my heart to me. How can I let the thought go when my arm tells me every night that he is not here? Ahi! Ahi! Oh, Tota, come back to me—come back again, and let us be all together as it was before!’


‘Peace, peace! For thine own sake, and for mine also, if thou lovest me—rest.’


‘By this I know thou dost not care; and how shouldst thou? The white men have hearts of stone and souls of iron. Oh, that I had married a man of mine own people—though he beat me—and had never eaten the bread of an alien!’


‘Am I an alien—mother of my son?’


‘What else—Sahib?…Oh, forgive me—forgive! The death has driven me mad. Thou art the life of my heart, and the light of my eyes, and the breath of my life, and—and I have put thee from me, though it was but for a moment. If thou goest away, to whom shall I look for help? Do not be angry. Indeed, it was the pain that spoke and not thy slave.’


‘I know, I know. We be two who were three. The greater need therefore that we should be one.’


They were sitting on the roof as of custom. The night was a warm one in early spring, and sheet-lightning was dancing on the horizon to a broken tune played by far-off thunder. Ameera settled herself in Holden’s

arms.


‘The dry earth is lowing like a cow for the rain, and I—I am afraid. It was not like this when we counted the stars. But thou lovest me as much as before, though a bond is taken away? Answer!’


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‘I love more because a new bond has come out of the sorrow that we have eaten together, and that thou knowest.’


‘Yea, I knew,’ said Ameera in a very small whisper. ‘But it is good to hear thee say so, my life, who art so strong to help. I will be a child no more, but a woman and an aid to thee. Listen! Give me my sitar and I will sing bravely.’


She took the light silver-studded sitar and began a song of the great hero Rajah Rasalu. The hand failed on the strings, the tune halted, checked, and at a low note turned off to the poor little nursery- rhyme about the wicked crow—


‘And the wild plums grow in the jungle, only a penny a pound.

Only a penny a pound, baba—only’


Then came the tears, and the piteous rebellion against fate till she slept, moaning a little in her sleep, with the right arm thrown clear of the body as though it protected something that was not there. It was after this night that life became a little easier for Holden. The ever-present pain of loss drove him into his work, and the work repaid him by filling up his mind for nine or ten hours a day. Ameera sat alone in the house and brooded, but grew happier when she understood that Holden was more at ease, according to the custom of women. They touched happiness again, but this time with caution.


‘It was because we loved Tota that he died. The jealousy of God was upon us,’ said Ameera. ‘I have hung up a large black jar before our window to turn the evil eye from us, and we must make no protestations of delight, but go softly underneath the stars, lest God find us out. Is that not good talk, worthless one?’


She had shifted the accent on the word that means ‘beloved,’ in proof of the sincerity of her purpose. But the kiss that followed the new christening was a thing that any deity might have envied. They went about henceforward saying, ‘It is naught, it is naught;’ and hoping that all the Powers heard.


The Powers were busy on other things. They had allowed thirty million people four years of plenty, wherein men fed well and the crops were certain, and the birth-rate rose year by year; the districts reported a purely agricultural population varying from nine hundred to two thousand to the square mile of the overburdened earth; and the Member for Lower Tooting, wandering about India in top-hat and frock-coat, talked largely of the benefits of British rule, and suggested as the one thing needful the establishment of a duly qualified electoral system and a general bestowal of the franchise. His long-suffering hosts smiled and made him welcome, and when he paused to admire, with pretty picked words, the blossom of the blood-red dhak-tree that had flowered untimely for a sign of what was coming, they smiled more than ever.


It was the Deputy Commissioner of Kot-Kumharsen, staying at the club for a day, who lightly told a tale that made Holden’s blood run cold as he overheard the end.


‘He won’t bother any one any more. Never saw a man so astonished in my life. By Jove, I thought he meant to ask a question in the House about it. Fellow-passenger in his ship—dined next him—bowled over by cholera and died in eighteen hours. You needn’t laugh, you fellows. The Member for Lower Tooting is awfully angry about it; but he’s more scared. I think he’s going to take his enlightened self out of India.’


‘I’d give a good deal if he were knocked over. It might keep a few vestrymen of his kidney to their own parish. But what’s this about cholera? It’s full early for anything of that kind,’ said the warden of an unprofitable salt-lick.


‘Don’t know,’ said the Deputy Commissioner reflectively. ‘We’ve got locusts with us. There’s sporadic cholera all along the north—at least we’re calling it sporadic for decency’s sake. The spring crops are short in five districts, and nobody seems to know where the rains are. It’s nearly March now. I don’t want to scare anybody, but it seems to me that Nature’s going to audit her accounts with a big red pencil this summer.’


‘Just when I wanted to take leave, too!’ said a voice across the room.


‘There won’t be much leave this year, but there ought to be a great deal of promotion. I’ve come in to persuade the Government to put my pet canal on the list of famine-relief works. It’s an ill-wind that blows no good. I shall get that canal finished at last.’


‘Is it the old programme then,’ said Holden; ‘famine, fever, and cholera?’


‘Oh no. Only local scarcity and an unusual prevalence of seasonal sickness. You’ll find it all in the reports if you live till next year. You’re a lucky chap. You haven’t got a wife to send out of harm’s way. The hill-stations ought to be full of women this year.’


‘I think you’re inclined to exaggerate the talk in the bazars,’ said a young civilian in the Secretariat. ‘Now I have observed—’


‘I daresay you have,’ said the Deputy Commissioner, ‘but you’ve a great deal more to observe, my son. In the meantime, I wish to observe to you—’ and he drew him aside to discuss the construction of the canal that was so dear to his heart. Holden went to his bungalow and began to understand that he was not alone in the world, and also that he was afraid for the sake of another,—which is the most soul-satisfying fear known to man.


Two months later, as the Deputy had foretold, Nature began to audit her accounts with a red pencil. On the heels of the spring-reapings came a cry for bread, and the Government, which had decreed that no man should die of want, sent wheat. Then came the cholera from all four quarters of the compass. It struck a pilgrim-gathering of half a million at a sacred shrine. Many died at the feet of their god; the others broke and ran over the face of the land carrying the pestilence with them. It smote a walled city and killed two hundred a day. The people crowded the trains, hanging on to the footboards and squatting on the roofs of the carriages, and the cholera followed them, for at each station they dragged out the dead and the dying. They died by the roadside, and the horses of the Englishmen shied at the corpses in the grass. The rains did not come, and the earth turned to iron lest man should escape death by hiding in her. The English sent their wives away to the hills and went about their work, coming forward as they were bidden to fill the gaps in the fighting-line. Holden, sick with fear of losing his chiefest treasure on earth, had done his best to persuade Ameera to go away with her mother to the Himalayas.


‘Why should I go?’ said she one evening on the roof.


‘There is sickness, and people are dying, and all the white mem-log have gone.’


‘All of them?’


page 7




‘All—unless perhaps there remain some old scald-head who vexes her husband’s heart by running risk of death.’


‘Nay; who stays is my sister, and thou must not abuse her, for I will be a scald-head too. I am glad all the bold mem-log are gone.’


‘Do I speak to a woman or a babe? Go to the hills, and I will see to it that thou goest like a queen’s daughter. Think, child. In a red-lacquered bullock cart, veiled and curtained, with brass peacocks upon the pole and red cloth hangings. I will send two orderlies for guard and—’


‘Peace! Thou art the babe in speaking thus. What use are those toys to me? He would have patted the bullocks and played with the housings. For his sake, perhaps,—thou hast made me very English—I might have gone. Now, I will not. Let the mem-log run.’


‘Their husbands are sending them, beloved.’


‘Very good talk. Since when hast thou been my husband to tell me what to do? I have but borne thee a son. Thou art only all the desire of my soul to me. How shall I depart when I know that if evil befall thee by the breadth of so much as my littlest finger-nail—is that not small?—I should be aware of it though I were in paradise. And here, this summer thou mayest die—ai, janee, die! and in dying they might call to tend thee a white woman, and she would rob me in the last of thy love!’


‘But love is not born in a moment or on a death-bed!’


‘What dost thou know of love, stoneheart? She would take thy thanks at least and, by God and the Prophet and Beebee Miriam the mother of thy Prophet, that I will never endure. My lord and my love, let there be no more foolish talk of going away. Where thou art, I am. It is enough.’ She put an arm round his neck and a hand on his mouth.


There are not many happinesses so complete as those that are snatched under the shadow of the sword. They sat together and laughed, calling each other openly by every pet name that could move the wrath of the gods. The city below them was locked up in its own torments. Sulphur fires blazed in the streets; the conches in the Hindu temples screamed and bellowed, for the gods were inattentive in those days. There was a service in the great Mahomedan shrine, and the call to prayer from the minarets was almost unceasing. They heard the wailing in the houses of the dead, and once the shriek of a mother who had lost a child and was calling for its return. In the gray dawn they saw the dead borne out through the city gates, each litter with its own little knot of mourners. Wherefore they kissed each other and shivered.


It was a red and heavy audit, for the land was very sick and needed a little breathing-space ere the torrent of cheap life should flood it anew. The children of immature fathers and undeveloped mothers made no resistance. They were cowed and sat still, waiting till the sword should be sheathed in November if it were so willed. There were gaps among the English, but the gaps were filled. The work of superintending famine-relief, cholera-sheds, medicine-distribution, and what little sanitation was possible, went forward because it was so ordered.


Holden had been told to keep himself in readiness to move to replace the next man who should fall. There were twelve hours in each day when he could not see Ameera, and she might die in three. He was considering what his pain would be if he could not see her for three months, or if she died out of his sight. He was absolutely certain that her death would be demanded—so certain, that when he looked up from the telegram and saw Pir Khan breathless in the doorway, he laughed aloud. ‘And?’ said he,—


‘When there is a cry in the night and the spirit flutters into the throat, who has a charm that will restore? Come swiftly, Heaven-born! It is the black cholera.’


Holden galloped to his home. The sky was heavy with clouds, for the long-deferred rains were near and the heat was stifling. Ameera’s mother met him in the courtyard, whimpering, ‘She is dying. She is nursing herself into death. She is all but dead. What shall I do, sahib?’


Ameera was lying in the room in which Tota had been born. She made no sign when Holden entered, because the human soul is a very lonely thing and, when it is getting ready to go away, hides itself in a misty borderland where the living may not follow. The black cholera does its work quietly and without explanation. Ameera was being thrust out of life as though the Angel of Death had himself put his hand upon her. The quick breathing seemed to show that she was either afraid or in pain, but neither eyes nor mouth gave any answer to Holden’s kisses. There was nothing to be said or done. Holden could only wait and suffer. The first drops of the rain began to fall on the roof and he could hear shouts of joy in the parched city.


The soul came back a little and the lips moved. Holden bent down to listen. ‘Keep nothing of mine,’said Ameera. ‘Take no hair from my head. She would make thee burn it later on. That flame I should feel. Lower! Stoop lower! Remember only that I was thine and bore thee a son. Though thou wed a white woman to-morrow, the pleasure of receiving in thy arms thy first son is taken from thee for ever. Remember me when thy son is born—the one that shall carry thy name before all men. His misfortunes be on my head. I bear witness—I bear witness’—the lips were forming the words on his ear—‘that there is no God but—thee, beloved!’


Then she died. Holden sat still, and all thought was taken from him,—till he heard Ameera’s mother lift the curtain.


‘Is she dead, sahib?’


‘She is dead.’


‘Then I will mourn, and afterwards take an inventory of the furniture in this house. For that will be mine. The sahib does not mean to resume it? It is so little, so very little, sahib, and I am an old woman. I would like to lie softly.’


‘For the mercy of God be silent a while. Go out and mourn where I cannot hear.’


‘Sahib, she will be buried in four hours.’


‘I know the custom. I shall go ere she is taken away. That matter is in thy hands. Look to it, that the bed on which—on which she lies—’


‘Aha! That beautiful red-lacquered bed. I have long desired—’


page 8




‘That the bed is left here untouched for my disposal. All else in the house is thine. Hire a cart, take everything, go hence, and before sunrise let there be nothing in this house but that which I have ordered thee to respect.’


‘I am an old woman. I would stay at least for the days of mourning, and the rains have just broken. Whither shall I go?’


‘What is that to me? My order is that there is a going. The house-gear is worth a thousand rupees and my orderly shall bring thee a hundred rupees to-night.’


‘That is very little. Think of the cart-hire.’


‘It shall be nothing unless thou goest, and with speed. O woman, get hence and leave me with my dead!’


The mother shuffled down the staircase, and in her anxiety to take stock of the house-fittings forgot to mourn. Holden stayed by Ameera’s side and the rain roared on the roof. He could not think connectedly by reason of the noise, though he made many attempts to do so. Then four sheeted ghosts glided dripping into the room and stared at him through their veils. They were the washers of the dead. Holden left the room and went out to his horse. He had come in a dead, stifling calm through ankle-deep dust. He found the courtyard a rain-lashed pond alive with frogs; a torrent of yellow water ran under the gate, and a roaring wind drove the bolts of the rain like buckshot against the mud-walls. Pir Khan was shivering in his little hut by the gate, and the horse was stamping uneasily in the water.


‘I have been told the sahib’s order,’ said Pir Khan. ‘It is well. This house is now desolate. I go also, for my monkey-face would be a reminder of that which has been. Concerning the bed, I will bring that to thy house yonder in the morning; but remember, sahib, it will be to thee a knife turning in a green wound. I go upon a pilgrimage, and I will take no money. I have grown fat in the protection of the Presence whose sorrow is my sorrow. For the last time I hold his stirrup.’


He touched Holden’s foot with both hands and the horse sprang out into the road, where the creaking bamboos were whipping the sky and all the frogs were chuckling. Holden could not see for the rain in his face. He put his hands before his eyes and muttered—


‘Oh you brute! You utter brute!’


The news of his trouble was already in his bungalow. He read the knowledge in his butler’s eyes when Ahmed Khan brought in food, and for the first and last time in his life laid a hand upon his master’s shoulder, saying, ‘Eat, sahib, eat. Meat is good against sorrow. I also have known. Moreover the shadows come and go, sahib; the shadows come and go. These be curried eggs.’


Holden could neither eat nor sleep. The heavens sent down eight inches of rain in that night and washed the earth clean. The waters tore down walls, broke roads, and scoured open the shallow graves on the Mahomedan burying-ground. All next day it rained, and Holden sat still in his house considering his sorrow. On the morning of the third day he received a telegram which said only, ‘Ricketts, Myndonie. Dying. Holden relieve. Immediate.’ Then he thought that before he departed he would look at the house wherein he had been master and lord. There was a break in the weather, and the rank earth steamed with vapour.


He found that the rains had torn down the mud pillars of the gateway, and the heavy wooden gate that had guarded his life hung lazily from one hinge. There was grass three inches high in the courtyard; Pir Khan’s lodge was empty, and the sodden thatch sagged between the beams. A gray squirrel was in possession of the verandah, as if the house had been untenanted for thirty years instead of three days. Ameera’s mother had removed everything except some mildewed matting. The tick-tick of the little scorpions as they hurried across the floor was the only sound in the house. Ameera’s room and the other one where Tota had lived were heavy with mildew; and the narrow staircase leading to the roof was streaked and stained with rain-borne mud. Holden saw all these things, and came out again to meet in the road Durga Dass, his landlord,—portly, affable, clothed in white muslin, and driving a Cee-spring buggy. He was overlooking his property to see how the roofs stood the stress of the first rains.


‘I have heard,’ said he, ‘you will not take this place any more, sahib?’


‘What are you going to do with it?’


‘Perhaps I shall let it again.’


‘Then I will keep it on while I am away.’


Durga Dass was silent for some time. ‘You shall not take it on, sahib,’ he said. ‘When I was a young man I also—, but to-day I am a member of the Municipality. Ho! Ho! No. When the birds have gone what need to keep the nest? I will have it pulled down—the timber will sell for something always. It shall be pulled down, and the Municipality shall make a road across, as they desire, from the burning-ghaut to the city wall, so that no man may say where this house stood.’



			


				





	

					

				
With the Night Mail
			

			
			

				
page 1 of 15




A NINE O’CLOCK of a gusty winter night I stood on the lower stages of one of the G.P.O. outward mail towers. My purpose was a run to Quebec in “Postal Packet 162 or such other as may be appointed”; and the Postmaster-General himself countersigned the order. This talisman opened all doors, even those in the despatching-caisson at the foot of the tower, where they were delivering the sorted Continental mail. The bags lay packed close as herrings in the long grey underbodies which our G.P.O. still calls “coaches.” Five such coaches were filled as I watched, and were shot up the guides to be locked on to their waiting packets three hundred feet nearer the stars.


From the despatching-caisson I was conducted by a courteous and wonderfully learned official Mr. L.L. Geary, Second Despatcher of the Western Route—to the Captains’ Room (this wakes an echo of old romance), where the mail captains come on for their turn of duty. He introduces me to the captain of “162”—Captain Purnall, and his relief, Captain Hodgson. The one is small and dark; the other large and red; but each has the brooding sheathed glance characteristic of eagles and aeronauts. You can see it in the pictures of our racing professionals, from L.V. Rautsch to little Ada Warrleigh—that fathomless abstraction of eyes habitually turned through naked space.


On the notice-board in the Captains’ Room, the pulsing arrows of some twenty indicators register, degree by geographical degree, the progress of as many homeward-bound packets. The word “Cape” rises across the face of a dial; a gong strikes: the South African mid-weekly mail is in at the Highgate Receiving Towers. That is all. It reminds one comically of the traitorous little bell which in pigeon-fanciers’, lofts notifies the return of a homer.


“Time for us to be on the move,” says Captain Purnall, and we are shot up by the passenger-lift to the top of the despatch-towers. “Our coach will lock on when it is filled and the clerks are aboard.”


“No. 162” waits for us in Slip E of the topmost stage. The great curve of her back shines frostily under the lights, and some minute alteration of trim makes her rock a little in her holding-down slips.


Captain Purnall frowns and dives inside. Hissing softly, “162” comes to rest as level as a rule. From her North Atlantic Winter nose-cap (worn bright as diamond with boring through uncounted leagues of hail, snow, and ice) to the inset of her three built out propeller-shafts is some two hundred and forty feet. Her extreme diameter, carried well forward, is thirty-seven. Contrast this with the nine hundred by ninety-five of any crack liner, and you will realize the power that must drive a hull through all weathers at more than the emergency speed of the Cyclonic!


The eye detects no joint in her skin plating save the sweeping hair-crack of the bow-rudder—Magniac’s rudder that assured us the dominion of the unstable air and left its inventor penniless and half-blind. It is calculated to Castelli’s “gullwing” curve. Raise a few feet of that all but invisible plate three-eighths of an inch and she will yaw five miles to port or starboard ere she is under control again. Give her full helm and she returns on her track like a whip-lash. Cant the whole forward—a touch on the wheel will suffice—and she sweeps at your good direction up or down. Open the complete circle and she presents to the air a mushroom-head that will bring her up all standing within a half mile.


“Yes,” says Captain Hodgson, answering my thought, “Castelli thought he’d discovered the secret of controlling aeroplanes when he’d only found out how to steer dirigible balloons. Magniac invented his rudder to help war-boats ram each other; and war went out of fashion and Magniac he went out of his mind because he said he couldn’t serve his country any more. I wonder if any of us ever know what we’re really doing.”


“If you want to see the coach locked you’d better go aboard. It’s due now,” says Mr. Geary. I enter through the door amidships. There is nothing here for display. The inner skin of the gas-tanks comes down to within a foot or two of my head and turns over just short of the turn of the bilges. Liners and yachts disguise their tanks with decoration, but the G.P.O. serves them raw under a lick of grey official paint. The inner skin shuts off fifty feet of the bow and as much of the stern, but the bow-bulkhead is recessed for the lift-shunting apparatus as the stern is pierced for the shaft-tunnels. The engine-room lies almost amidships. Forward of it, extending to the turn of the bow tanks, is an aperture—a bottomless hatch at present—into which our coach will be locked. One looks down over the coamings three hundred feet to the despatching-caisson whence voices boom upward. The light below is obscured to a sound of thunder, as our coach rises on its guides. It enlarges rapidly from a postage-stamp to a playing-card; to a punt and last a pontoon. The two clerks, its crew, do not even look up as it comes into place. The Quebec letters fly under their fingers and leap into the docketed racks, while both captains and Mr. Geary satisfy them selves that the coach is locked home. A clerk passes the way-bill over the hatch coaming. Captain Purnall thumb-marks and passes it to Mr. Geary. Receipt has been given and taken. “Pleasant run,” says Mr. Geary, and disappears through the door which a foot high pneumatic compressor locks after him.


“A-ah!” sighs the compressor released. Our holding-down clips part with a tang. We are clear.


Captain Hodgson opens the great colloid underbody porthole through which I watch over-lighted London slide eastward as the gale gets hold of us. The first of the low winter clouds cuts off the well-known view and darkens Middlesex. On the south edge of it I can see a postal packet’s light ploughing through the white fleece. For an instant she gleams like a star ere she drops toward the Highgate Receiving Towers. “The Bombay Mail,” says Captain Hodgson, and looks at his watch. “She’s forty minutes late.”


“What’s our level?” I ask.


“Four thousand. Aren’t you coming up on the bridge?”


The bridge (let us ever praise the G.P.O. as a repository of ancientest tradition!) is represented by a view of Captain Hodgson’s legs where he stands on the Control Platform that runs thwart-ships overhead. The bow colloid is unshuttered and Captain Purnall, one hand on the wheel, is feeling for a fair slant. The dial shows 4300 feet. “It’s steep to-night,” he mutters, as tier on tier of cloud drops under. “We generally pick up an easterly draught below three thousand at this time o’ the year. I hate slathering through fluff.”


“So does Van Cutsem. Look at him huntin’ for a slant!” says Captain Hodgson. A foglight breaks cloud a hundred fathoms below. The Antwerp Night Mail makes her signal and rises between two racing clouds far to port, her flanks blood-red in the glare of Sheerness Double Light. The gale will have us over the North Sea in half-an-hour, but Captain Purnall lets her go composedly—nosing to every point of the compass as she rises.


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“Five thousand-six, six thousand eight hundred”—the dip-dial reads ere we find the easterly drift, heralded by a flurry of snow at the thousand fathom level. Captain Purnall rings up the engines and keys down the governor on the switch before him. There is no sense in urging machinery when Eolus himself gives you good knots for nothing. We are away in earnest now—our nose notched home on our chosen star. At this level the lower clouds are laid out, all neatly combed by the dry fingers of the East. Below that again is the strong westerly blow through which we rose. Overhead, a film of southerly drifting mist draws a theatrical gauze across the firmament. The moonlight turns the lower strata to silver without a stain except where our shadow underruns us. Bristol and Cardiff Double Lights (those statelily inclined beams over Severnmouth) are dead ahead of us; for we keep the Southern Winter Route. Coventry Central, the pivot of the English system, stabs upward once in ten seconds its spear of diamond light to the north; and a point or two off our starboard bow The Leek, the great cloud-breaker of Saint David’s Head, swings its unmistakable green beam twenty-five degrees each way. There must be half a mile of fluff over it in this weather, but it does not affect The Leek.


“Our planet’s over-lighted if anything,” says Captain Purnall at the wheel, as Cardiff-Bristol slides under. “I remember the old days of common white verticals that ’ud show two or three hundred feet up in a mist, if you knew where to look for ’em. In really fluffy weather they might as well have been under your hat. One could get lost coming home then, an’ have some fun. Now, it’s like driving down Piccadilly.”


He points to the pillars of light where the cloud-breakers bore through the cloud-floor. We see nothing of England’s outlines: only a white pavement pierced in all directions by these manholes of variously coloured fire—Holy Island’s white and red—St. Bee’s interrupted white, and so on as far as the eye can reach. Blessed be Sargent, Ahrens, and the Dubois brothers, who invented the cloud-breakers of the world whereby we travel in security!


“Are you going to lift for The Shamrock?” asks Captain Hodgson. Cork Light (green, fixed) enlarges as we rush to it. Captain Purnall nods. There is heavy traffic hereabouts—the cloud-bank beneath us is streaked. with running fissures of flame where the Atlantic boats are hurrying Londonward just clear of the fluff. Mail-packets are supposed, under the Conference rules, to have the five-thousand-foot lanes to themselves, but the foreigner in a hurry is apt to take liberties with English air. “No. 162” lifts to a long-drawn wail of the breeze in the fore-flange of the rudder and we make Valencia (white, green, white) at a safe 7000 feet, dipping our beam to an incoming Washington packet.


There is no cloud on the Atlantic, and faint streaks of cream round Dingle Bay show where the driven seas hammer the coast. A big S.A.T.A. liner (Societe Anonyme des Transports Aeriens) is diving and lifting half a mile below us in search of some break in the solid west wind. Lower still lies a disabled Dane she is telling the liner all about it in International. Our General Communication dial has caught her talk and begins to eavesdrop. Captain Hodgson makes a motion to shut it off but checks himself. “Perhaps you’d like to listen,” he says.


“Argol of St. Thomas,” the Dane whimpers. “Report owners three starboard shaft collar-bearings fused. Can make Flores as we are, but impossible further. Shall we buy spares at Fayal?”


The liner acknowledges and recommends inverting the bearings. The Argol answers that she has already done so without effect, and begins to relieve her mind about cheap German enamels for collar-bearings. The Frenchman assents cordially, cries “Courage, mon ami,” and switches off.


Then lights sink under the curve of the ocean.


“That’s one of Lundt & Bleamers’ boats,” says Captain Hodgson. “Serves ’em right for putting German compos in their thrust-blocks. She won’t be in Fayal to-night! By the way, wouldn’t you like to look round the engine-room?”


I have been waiting eagerly for this invitation and I follow Captain Hodgson from the control-platform, stooping low to avoid the bulge of the tanks. We know that Fleury’s gas can lift anything, as the world-famous trials of ’89 showed, but its almost indefinite powers of expansion necessitate vast tank room. Even in this thin air the lift-shunts are busy taking out one-third of its normal lift, and still “162” must be checked by an occasional downdraw of the rudder or our flight would become a climb to the stars. Captain Purnall prefers an overlifted to an underlifted ship; but no two captains trim ship alike. “When I take the bridge,” says Captain Hodgson, “you’ll see me shunt forty per cent of the lift out of the gas and run her on the upper rudder. With a swoop upward instead of a swoop downward, as you say. Either way will do. It’s only habit. Watch our dip-dial! Tim fetches her down once every thirty knots as regularly as breathing.”


So is it shown on the dip-dial. For five or six minutes the arrow creeps from 6700 to 7300. There is the faint “szgee” of the rudder, and back slides the arrow to 6000 on a falling slant of ten or fifteen knots.


“In heavy weather you jockey her with the screws as well,” says Captain Hodgson, and, unclipping the jointed bar which divides the engine-room from the bare deck, he leads me on to the floor. Here we find Fleury’s Paradox of the Bulk-headed Vacuum—which we accept now without thought—literally in full blast. The three engines are H.T.&T. assisted-vacuo Fleury turbines running from 3000 to the Limit—that is to say, up to the point when the blades make the air “bell”—cut out a vacuum for themselves precisely as over-driven marine propellers used to do. “162’s” Limit is low on account of the small size of her nine screws, which, though handier than the old colloid Thelussons, “bell” sooner. The midships engine, generally used as a reinforce, is not running; so the port and starboard turbine vacuum-chambers draw direct into the return-mains.


The turbines whistle reflectively. From the low-arched expansion-tanks on either side the valves descend pillarwise to the turbine-chests, and thence the obedient gas whirls through the spirals of blades with a force that would whip the teeth out of a power saw. Behind, is its own pressure held in leash of spurred on by the lift-shunts; before it, the vacuum where Fleury’s Ray dances in violet-green bands and whirled turbillons of flame. The jointed U-tubes of the vacuum-chamber are pressure-tempered colloid (no glass would endure the strain for an instant) and a junior engineer with tinted spectacles watches the Ray intently. It is the very heart of the machine—a mystery to this day. Even Fleury who begat it and, unlike Magniac, died a multi-millionaire, could not explain how the restless little imp shuddering in the U-tube can, in the fractional fraction of a second, strike the furious blast of gas into a chill greyish-green liquid that drains (you can hear it trickle) from the far end of the vacuum through the eduction-pipes and the mains back to the bilges. Here it returns to its gaseous, one had almost written sagacious, state and climbs to work afresh. Bilge-tank, upper tank, dorsal-tank, expansion-chamber, vacuum, main-return (as a liquid), and bilge-tank once more is the ordained cycle. Fleury’s Ray sees to that; and the engineer with the tinted spectacles sees to Fleury’s Ray. If a speck of oil, if even the natural grease of the human finger touch the hooded terminals, Fleury’s Ray will wink and disappear and must be laboriously built up again. This means half a day’s work for all hands and an expense of, one hundred and seventy-odd pounds to the G.P.O. for radium-salts and such trifles.


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“Now look at our thrust-collars. You won’t find much German compo there. Full-jewelled, you see,” says Captain Hodgson as the engineer shunts open the top of a cap. Our shaft-bearings are C.M.C. (Commercial Minerals Company) stones, ground with as much care as the lens of a telescope. They cost £837 apiece. So far we have not arrived at their term of life. These bearings came from “No. 97,” which took them over from the old Dominion of Light which had them out of the wreck of the Persew aeroplane in the years when men still flew wooden kites over oil engines!


They are a shining reproof to all low-grade German “ruby” enamels, so-called “boort” facings, and the dangerous and unsatisfactory alumina compounds which please dividend-hunting owners and turn skippers crazy. The rudder-gear and the gas lift-shunt, seated side by side under the engine-room dials, are the only machines in visible motion. The former sighs from time to time as the oil plunger rises and falls half an inch. The latter, cased and guarded like the U-tube aft, exhibits another Fleury Ray, but inverted and more green than violet. Its function is to shunt the lift out of the gas, and this it will do without watching. That is all! A tiny pump-rod wheezing and whining to itself beside a sputtering green lamp. A hundred and fifty feet aft down the flat-topped tunnel of the tanks a violet light, restless and irresolute. Between the two, three white-painted turbine-trunks, like eel-baskets laid on their side, accentuate the empty perspectives. You can hear the trickle of the liquefied gas flowing from the vacuum into the bilge-tanks and the soft gluck-glock of gaslocks closing as Captain Purnall brings “162” down by the head. The hum of the turbines and the boom of the air on our skin is no more than a cotton-wool wrapping to the universal stillness. And we are running an eighteen-second mile.


I peer from the fore end of the engine-room over the hatch-coamings into the coach. The mail-clerks are sorting the Winnipeg, Calgary, and Medicine Hat bags; but there is a pack of cards ready on the table.


Suddenly a bell thrills; the engineers run to the turbine-valves and stand by; but the spectacled slave of the Ray in the U-tube never lifts his head. He must watch where he is. We are hard-braked and going astern; there is language from the Control Platform.


“Tim’s sparking badly about something,” says the unruffled Captain Hodgson. “Let’s look.”


Captain Purnall is not the suave man we left half an hour since, but the embodied authority of the G.P.O. Ahead of us floats an ancient, aluminum-patched, twin-screw tramp of the dingiest, with no more right to the 5000-foot lane than has a horse-cart to a modern road. She carries an obsolete “barbette” conning tower—a six-foot affair with railed platform forward—and our warning beam plays on the top of it as a policeman’s lantern flashes on the area sneak. Like a sneak-thief, too, emerges a shock-headed navigator in his shirt-sleeves. Captain Purnall wrenches open the colloid to talk with him man to man. There are times when Science does not satisfy.


“What under the stars are you doing here, you sky-scraping chimney-sweep?” he shouts as we two drift side by side. “Do you know this is a Mail-lane? You call yourself a sailor, sir? You ain’t fit to peddle toy balloons to an Esquimaux. Your name and number! Report and get down, and be—!”


“I’ve been blown up once,” the shock-headed man cries, hoarsely, as a dog barking. “I don’t care two flips of a contact for anything you can do, Postey.”


“Don’t you, sir? But I’ll make you care. I’ll have you towed stern first to Disko and broke up. You can’t recover insurance if you’re broke for obstruction. Do you understand that?”


Then the stranger bellows: “Look at my propellers! There’s been a wulli-wa down below that has knocked us into umbrella-frames! We’ve been blown up about forty thousand feet! We’re all one conjuror’s watch inside! My mate’s arm’s broke; my engineer’s head’s cut open; my Ray went out when the engines smashed; and … and … for pity’s sake give me my height, Captain! We doubt we’re dropping.”


“Six thousand eight hundred. Can you hold it?” Captain Purnall overlooks all insults, and leans half out of the colloid, staring and snuffing. The stranger leaks pungently.


“We ought to blow into St. John’s with luck. We’re trying to plug the fore-tank now, but she’s simply whistling it away,” her captain wails.


“She’s sinking like a log,” says Captain Purnall in an undertone. “Call up the Banks Mark Boat, George.” Our dip-dial shows that we, keeping abreast the tramp, have dropped five hundred feet the last few minutes.


Captain Purnall presses a switch and our signal beam begins to swing through the night, twizzling spokes of light across infinity.


“That’ll fetch something,” he says, while Captain Hodgson watches the General Communicator. He has called up the North Banks Mark Boat, a few hundred miles west, and is reporting the case.


“I’ll stand by you,” Captain Purnall roars to the lone figure on the conning-tower.


“Is it as bad as that?” comes the answer. “She isn’t insured. She’s mine.”


“Might have guessed as much,” mutters Hodgson. “Owner’s risk is the worst risk of all!”


“Can’t I fetch St. John’s—not even with this breeze?” the voice quavers.


“Stand by to abandon ship. Haven’t you any lift in you, fore or aft?”


“Nothing but the midship tanks, and they’re none too tight. You see, my Ray gave out and—” he coughs in the reek of the escaping gas.


“You poor devil!” This does not reach our friend. “What does the Mark Boat say, George?”


“Wants to know if there’s any danger to traffic. Says she’s in a bit of weather herself, and can’t quit station. I’ve turned in a General Call, so even if they don’t see our beam some one’s bound to help—or else we must. Shall I clear our slings? Hold on! Here we are! A Planet liner, too! She’ll be up in a tick!”


“Tell her to have her slings ready,” cries his brother captain. “There won’t be much time to spare … Tie up your mate,” he roars to the tramp.


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“My mate’s all right. It’s my engineer. He’s gone crazy.”


“Shunt the lift out of him with a spanner. Hurry!”


“But I can make St. John’s if you’ll stand by.”


“You’ll make the deep, wet Atlantic in twenty minutes. You’re less than fifty-eight hundred now. Get your papers.”


A Planet liner, east bound, heaves up in a superb spiral and takes the air of us humming. Her underbody colloid is open land her transporter-slings hang down like tentacles. We shut off our beam as she adjusts herself—steering to a hair—over the tramp’s conning-tower. The mate comes up, his arm strapped to his side, and stumbles into the cradle. A man with a ghastly scarlet head follows, shouting that he must go back and build up his Ray. The mate assures him that he will find a nice new Ray all ready in the liner’s engine-room. The bandaged head goes up wagging excitedly. A youth and a woman follow. The liner cheers hollowly above us, and we see the passengers’ faces at the saloon colloid.


“That’s a pretty girl. What’s the fool waiting for now?” says Captain Purnall.


The skipper comes up, still appealing to us to stand by and see him fetch St. John’s. He dives below and returns—at which we little human beings in the void cheer louder than ever—with the ship’s kitten. Up fly the liner’s hissing slings; her underbody crashes home and she hurtles away again. The dial shows less than 3000 feet. The Mark Boat signals we must attend to the derelict, now whistling her death-song, as she falls beneath us in long sick zigzags.


“Keep our beam on her and send out a General Warning,” says Captain Purnall, following her down. There is no need. Not a liner in air but knows the meaning of that vertical beam and gives us and our quarry a wide berth.


“But she’ll drown in the water, won’t she?” I ask. “Not always,” is his answer. “I’ve known a derelict up-end and sift her engines out of herself and flicker round the Lower Lanes for three weeks on her forward tanks only. We’ll run no risks. Pith her, George, and look sharp. There’s weather ahead.”


Captain Hodgson opens the underbody colloid, swings the heavy pithing-iron out of its rack which in liners is generally cased as a smoking-room settee, and at two hundred feet releases the catch. We hear the whir of the crescent-shaped arms opening as they descend. The derelict’s forehead is punched in, starred across, and rent diagonally. She falls stern first, our beam upon her; slides like a lost soul down that pitiless ladder of light, and the Atlantic takes her.


“A filthy business,” says Hodgson. “I wonder what it must have been like in the old days?”


The thought had crossed my mind, too. What if that wavering carcass had been filled with the men of the old days, each one of them taught (that is the horror of it!) that, after death he would very possibly go for ever to unspeakable torment?


And scarcely a generation ago, we (one knows now that we are only our fathers re-enlarged upon the earth), we, I say, ripped and rammed and pithed to admiration.


Here Tim, from the Control Platform, shouts that we are to get into our inflators and to bring him his at once.


We hurry into the heavy rubber suits—the engineers are already dressed—and inflate at the air-pump taps. G.P.O. inflators are thrice as thick as a racing man’s “flickers,” and chafe abominably under the armpits. George takes the wheel until Tim has blown himself up to the extreme of rotundity. If you kicked him off the c. p. to the deck he would bounce back. But it is “162” that will do the kicking.


“The Mark Boat’s mad—stark ravin’ crazy,” he snorts, returning to command. “She says there’s a bad blow-out ahead and wants me to pull over to Greenland. I’ll see her pithed first! We wasted half an hour fussing over that dead duck down under, and now I’m expected to go rubbin’ my back all round the Pole. What does she think a Postal packet’s made of? Gummed silk? Tell her we’re coming on straight, George.”


George buckles him into the Frame and switches on the Direct Control. Now under Tim’s left toe lies the port-engine Accelerator; under his left heel the Reverse, and so with the other foot. The lift-shunt stops stand out on the rim of the steering-wheel where the fingers of his left hand can play on them. At his right hand is the midships engine lever ready to be thrown into gear at a moment’s notice. He leans forward in his belt, eyes glued to the colloid, and one ear cocked toward the General Communicator. Henceforth he is the strength and direction of “162,” through whatever may befall.


The Banks Mark Boat is reeling out pages of A.B.C. Directions to the traffic at large. We are to secure all “loose objects”; hood up our Fleury Rays; and “on no account to attempt to clear snow from our conning-towers till the weather abates.” Under-powered craft, we are told, can ascend to the limit of their lift, mail-packets to look out for them accordingly; the lower lanes westward are pitting very badly, “with frequent blow-outs, vortices, laterals, etc.”


Still the clear dark holds up unblemished. The only warning is the electric skin-tension (I feel as though I were a lace-maker’s pillow) and an irritability which the gibbering of the General Communicator increases almost to hysteria.


We have made eight thousand feet since we pithed the tramp and our turbines are giving us an honest two hundred and ten knots.


Very far to the west an elongated blur of red, low down, shows us the North Banks Mark Boat. There are specks of fire round her rising and falling—bewildered planets about an unstable sun—helpless shipping hanging on to her light for company’s sake. No wonder she could not quit station.


She warns us to look out for the back-wash of the bad vortex in which (her beam shows it) she is even now reeling.


The pits of gloom about us begin to fill with very faintly luminous films—wreathing and uneasy shapes. One forms itself into a globe of pale flame that waits shivering with eagerness till we sweep by. It leaps monstrously across the blackness, alights on the precise tip of our nose, pirouettes there an instant, and swings off. Our roaring bow sinks as though that light were lead—sinks and recovers to lurch and stumble again beneath the next blow-out. Tim’s fingers on the lift-shunt strike chords of numbers—1:4:7:—2:4:6:—7:5:3, and so on; for he is running by his tanks only, lifting or lowering her against the uneasy air. All three engines are at work, for the sooner we have skated over this thin ice the better. Higher we dare not go. The whole upper vault is charged with pale krypton vapours, which our skin friction may excite to unholy manifestations. Between the upper and lower levels—5000 and 7000, hints the Mark Boat—we may perhaps bolt through if … Our bow clothes itself in blue flame and falls like a sword. No human skill can keep pace with the changing tensions. A vortex has us by the beak and we dive down a two-thousand foot slant at an angle (the dip-dial and my bouncing body record it) of thirty-five. Our turbines scream shrilly; the propellers cannot bite on the thin air; Tim shunts the lift out of five tanks at once and by sheer weight drives her bullet wise through the maelstrom till she cushions with jar on an up-gust, three thousand feet below.


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“Now we’ve done it,” says George in my ear: “Our skin-friction, that last slide, has played Old Harry with the tensions! Look out for laterals, Tim; she’ll want some holding.”


“I’ve got her,” is the answer. “Come up, old woman.”


She comes up nobly, but the laterals buffet her left and right like the pinions of angry angels. She is jolted off her course four ways at once, and cuffed into place again, only to be swung aside and dropped into a new chaos. We are never without a corposant grinning on our bows or rolling head over heels from nose to midships, and to the crackle of electricity around and within us is added once or twice the rattle of hail—hail that will never fall on any sea. Slow we must or we may break our back, pitch-poling.


“Air’s a perfectly elastic fluid,” roars George above the tumult. “About as elastic as a head sea off the Fastnet, ain’t it?”


He is less than just to the good element. If one intrudes on the Heavens when they are balancing their volt-accounts; if one disturbs the High Gods’ market-rates by hurling steel hulls at ninety knots across tremblingly adjusted electric tensions, one must not complain of any rudeness in the reception. Tim met it with an unmoved countenance, one corner of his under lip caught up on a tooth, his eyes fleeting into the blackness twenty miles ahead, and the fierce sparks flying from his knuckles at every turn of the hand. Now and again he shook his head to clear the sweat trickling from his eyebrows, and it was then that George, watching his chance, would slide down the life-rail and swab his face quickly with a big red handkerchief. I never imagined that a human being could so continuously labour and so collectedly think as did Tim through that Hell’s half-hour when the flurry was at its worst. We were dragged hither and yon by warm or, frozen suctions, belched up on the tops of wulii-was, spun down by vortices and clubbed aside by laterals under a dizzying rush of stars in the, company of a drunken moon.


I heard the rushing click of the midship-engine-lever sliding in and out, the low growl of the lift-shunts, and, louder than the yelling winds without, the scream of the bow-rudder gouging into any lull that promised hold for an instant. At last we began to claw up on a cant, bow-rudder and port-propeller together; only the nicest balancing of tanks saved us from spinning like the rifle-bullet of the old days.


“We’ve got to hitch to windward of that Mark Boat somehow,” George cried.


“There’s no windward,” I protested feebly, where I swung shackled to a stanchion. “How can there be?”


He laughed—as we pitched into a thousand foot blow-out—that red man laughed beneath his inflated hood!


“Look!” he said. “We must clear those refugees with a high lift.”


The Mark Boat was below and a little to the sou’west of us, fluctuating in the centre of her distraught galaxy. The air was thick with moving lights at every level. I take it most of them were trying to lie head to wind, but, not being hydras, they failed. An under-tanked Moghrabi boat had risen to the limit of her lift, and, finding no improvement, had dropped a couple of thousand. There she met a superb wulli-wa, and was blown up spinning like a dead leaf. Instead of shutting off she went astern and, naturally, rebounded as from a wall almost into the Mark Boat, whose language (our G.C. took it in) was humanly simple.


“If they’d only ride it out quietly it ’ud be better,” said George in a calm, while we climbed like a bat above them all. “But some skippers will navigate without enough lift. What does that Tad-boat think she is doing, Tim?”


“Playin’ kiss in the ring,” was Tim’s unmoved reply. A Trans-Asiatic Direct liner had found a smooth and butted into it full power. But there was a vortex at the tail of that smooth, so the T.A.D. was flipped out like a pea from off a finger-nail, braking madly as she fled down and all but over-ending.


“Now I hope she’s satisfied,” said Tim. “I’m glad I’m not a Mark Boat . . . Do I want help?” The General Communicator dial had caught his ear. “George, you may tell that gentleman with my love—love, remember, George—that I do not want help. Who is the officious sardine-tin?”


“A Rimouski drogher on the look-out for a tow.”


“Very kind of the Rimouski drogher. This postal packet isn’t being towed at present.”


“Those droghers will go anywhere on a chance of salvage,” George explained. “We call’ em kittiwakes.”


A long-beaked, bright steel ninety-footer floated at ease for one instant within hail of us, her slings coiled ready for rescues, and a single hand in her open tower. He was smoking. Surrendered to the insurrection of the airs through which we tore our way, he lay in absolute peace. I saw the smoke of his pipe ascend untroubled ere his boat dropped, it seemed, like a stone in a well.


We had just cleared the Mark Boat and her disorderly neighbours when the storm ended as suddenly as it had begun. A shooting-star to northward filled the sky with the green blink of a meteorite dissipating itself in our atmosphere.


Said George: “That may iron out all the tensions.” Even as he spoke, the conflicting winds came to rest; the levels filled; the laterals died out in long, easy swells; the air-ways were smoothed before us. In less than three minutes the covey round the Mark Boat had shipped their power-lights and whirred away upon their businesses.


“What’s happened?” I gasped. The nerve-store within and the volt-tingle without had passed: my inflators weighed like lead.


“God, He knows!” said Captain George soberly “That old shooting-star’s skin-friction has discharged the different levels. I’ve seen it happen before. Phew: What a relief!”


We dropped from ten to six thousand and got rid of our clammy suits. Tim shut off and stepped out of the Frame. The Mark Boat was coming up behind us. He opened the colloid in that heavenly stillness and mopped his face.


“Hello, Williams!” he cried. “A degree or two out o’ station, ain’t you?”


“May be,” was the answer from the Mark Boat. “I’ve had some company this evening.”


“So I noticed. Wasn’t that quite a little draught?”


“I warned you. Why didn’t you pull out north? The east-bound packets have.”


“Me? Not till I’m running a Polar consumptives’ sanatorium boat. I was squinting through a colloid before you were out of your cradle, my son.”


page 6




“I’d be the last man to deny it,” the captain of the Mark Boat replies softly. “The way you handled her just now—I’m a pretty fair judge of traffic in a volt-hurry—it was a thousand revolutions beyond anything even I’ve ever seen.”


Tim’s back supples visibly to this oiling. Captain George on the c.p. winks and points to the portrait of a singularly attractive maiden pinned up on Tim’s telescope bracket above the steering-wheel.


I see. Wholly and entirely do I see!


There is some talk overhead of “coming round to tea on Friday,” a brief report of the derelict’s fate, and Tim volunteers as he descends: “For an A.B.C. man young Williams is less of a high-tension fool than some. Were you thinking of taking her on, George? Then I’ll just have a look round that port-thrust seems to me it’s a trifle warm—and we’ll jog along.”


The Mark Boat hums off joyously and hangs herself up in her appointed eyrie. Here she will stay a shutterless observatory; a life-boat station; a salvage tug; a court of ultimate appeal-cum-meteorological bureau for three hundred miles in all directions, till Wednesday next when her relief slides across the stars to take her buffeted place. Her black hull, double conning-tower, and ever-ready slings represent all that remains to the planet of that odd old word authority. She is responsible only to the Aerial Board of Control the A.B.C. of which Tim speaks so flippantly. But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score of persons of both sexes, controls this planet. “Transportation is Civilisation,” our motto runs. Theoretically, we do what we please so long as we do not interfere with the traffic and all it implies. Practically , the A.B.C. confirms or annuls all international arrangements and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders.


I discuss this with Tim, sipping mate on the c.p. while George fans her along over the white blur of the Banks in beautiful upward curves of fifty miles each. The dip-dial translates them on the tape in flowing freehand.


Tim gathers up a skein of it and surveys the last few feet, which record “162’s” path through the volt-flurry.


“I haven’t had a fever-chart like this to show up in five years,” he says ruefully.


A postal packet’s dip-dial records every yard of every run. The tapes then go to the A.B.C., which collates and makes composite photographs of them for the instruction of captains. Tim studies his irrevocable past, shaking his head.


“Hello! Here’s a fifteen-hundred-foot drop at fifty-five degrees! We must have been standing on our heads then, George.”


“You don’t say so,” George answers. “I fancied I noticed it at the time.”


George may not have Captain Purnall’s catlike swiftness, but he is all an artist to the tips of the broad fingers that play on the shunt-stops. The delicious flight-curves come away on the tape with never a waver. The Mark Boat’s vertical spindle of light lies down to eastward, setting in the face of the following stars. Westward, where no planet should rise, the triple verticals of Trinity Bay (we keep still to the Southern route) make a low-lifting haze. We seem the only thing at rest under all the heavens; floating at ease till the earth’s revolution shall turn up our landing-towers.


And minute by minute our silent clock gives us a sixteen-second mile.


“Some fine night,” says Tim, “we’ll be even with that clock’s Master.”


“He’s coming now,” says George, over his shoulder. “I’m chasing the night west.”


The stars ahead dim no more than if a film of mist had been drawn under unobserved, but the deep airboom on our skin changes to a joyful shout.


“The dawn-gust,” says Tim. “It’ll go on to meet the Sun. Look! Look! There’s the dark being crammed back over our bows! Come to the after-colloid. I’ll show you something.”


The engine-room is hot and stuffy; the clerks in the coach are asleep, and the Slave of the Ray is ready to follow them. Tim slides open the aft colloid and reveals the curve of the world—the ocean’s deepest purple—edged with fuming and intolerable gold.


Then the Sun rises and through the colloid strikes out our lamps. Tim scowls in his face.


“Squirrels in a cage,” he mutters. “That’s all we are. Squirrels in a cage! He’s going twice as fast as us. Just you wait a few years, my shining friend, and we’ll take steps that will amaze you. We’ll Joshua you!”


Yes, that is our dream: to turn all earth into the Yale of Ajalon at our pleasure. So far, we can drag out the dawn to twice its normal length in these latitudes. But some day—even on the Equator—we shall hold the Sun level in his full stride.


Now we look down on a sea thronged with heavy traffic. A big submersible breaks water suddenly. Another and another follows with a swash and a suck and a savage bubbling of relieved pressures. The deep-sea freighters are rising to lung up after the long night, and the leisurely ocean is all patterned with peacock’s eyes of foam.


“We’ll lung up, too,” says Tim, and when we return to the c.p. George shuts off, the colloids are opened, and the fresh air sweeps her out. There is no hurry. The old contracts (they will be revised at the end of the year) allow twelve hours for a run which any packet can put behind her in ten. So we breakfast in the arms of an easterly slant which pushes us along at a languid twenty.


To enjoy life, and tobacco, begin both on a sunny morning half a mile or so above the dappled Atlantic cloud-belts and after a volt-flurry which has cleared and tempered your nerves. While we discussed the thickening traffic with the superiority that comes of having a high level reserved to ourselves, we heard (and I for the first time) the morning hymn on a Hospital boat.


She was cloaked by a skein of ravelled fluff beneath us and we caught the chant before she rose into the sunlight. “Oh, ye Winds of God,” sang the unseen voices: “bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him for ever!”


We slid off our caps and joined in. When our shadow fell across her great open platforms they looked up and stretched out their hands neighbourly while they sang. We could see the doctors and the nurses and the white-button-like faces of the cot-patients. She passed slowly beneath us, heading northward, her hull, wet with the dews of the night, all ablaze in the sunshine. So took she the shadow of a cloud and vanished, her song continuing. “Oh, ye holy and humble men of heart, bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him for ever.”


page 7




“She’s a public lunger or she wouldn’t have been singing the Benedicite; and she’s a Greenlander or she wouldn’t have snow-blinds over her colloids,” said George at last. “She’ll be bound for Frederikshavn or one of the Glacier sanatoriums for a month. If she was an accident ward she’d be hung up at the eight-thousand-foot level. Yes—consumptives.”


“Funny how the new things are the old thing I’ve read in books,” Tim answered, “that savages used to haul their sick and wounded up to the tops of hills because microbes were fewer there. We hoist ’em in sterilized air for a while. Same idea. How much do the doctors say we’ve added to the average life of man?”


“Thirty years,” says George with a twinkle in his eye. “Are we going to spend ’em all up here, Tim?”


“Flap ahead, then. Flap ahead. Who’s hindering?” the senior captain laughed, as we went in.


We held a good lift to clear the coastwise and Continental shipping; and we had need of it. Though our route is in no sense a populated one, there is a steady trickle of traffic this way along. We met Hudson Bay furriers out of the Great Preserve, hurrying to make their departure from Bonavista with sable and black fox for the insatiable markets. We overcossed Keewatin liners, small and cramped; but their captains, who see no land between Trepassy and Lanco, know what gold they bring back from West Erica. Trans-Asiatic Directs we met, soberly ringing the world round the Fiftieth Meridian at an honest seventy knots; and white-painted Ackroyd & Hunt fruiters out of the south fled beneath us, their ventilated hulls whistling like Chinese kites. Their market is in the North among the northern sanatoria where you can smell their grape-fruit and bananas across the cold snows. Argentine beef boats we sighted too, of enormous capacity and unlovely outline. They, too, feed the northern health stations in icebound ports where submersibles dare not rise.


Yellow-bellied ore-flats and Ungava petrol-tanks punted down leisurely out of the north, like strings of unfrightened wild duck. It does not pay to “fly” minerals and oil a mile farther than is necessary; but the risks of transhipping to submersibles in the ice pack off Nain or Hebron are so great that these heavy freighters fly down to Halifax direct, and scent the air as they go. They are the biggest tramps aloft except the Athabasca grain-tubs. But these last, now that the wheat is moved, are busy, over the world’s shoulder, timber-lifting in Siberia.


We held to the St. Lawrence (it is astonishing how the old water-ways still pull us children of the air), and followed his broad line of black between its drifting iceblocks, all down the Park that the wisdom of our fathers—but every one knows the Quebec run.


We dropped to the Heights Receiving Towers twenty minutes ahead of time, and there hung at ease till the Yokohama Intermediate Packet could pull out and give us our proper slip. It was curious to watch the action of the holding-down clips all along the frosty river front as the boats cleared or came to rest. A big Hamburger was leaving Pont Levis and her crew, unshipping the platform railings, began to sing “Elsinore”—the oldest of our chanteys. You know it of course:


Mother Rugen’s tea-house on the Baltic

Forty couple waltzing on the floor!

And you can watch my Ray,

For I must go away

And dance with Ella Sweyn at Elsinore!


Then, while they sweated home the covering-plates:


Nor-Nor-Nor-Nor

West from Sourabaya to the Baltic—

Ninety knot an hour to the Skaw!

Mother Rugen’s tea-house on the Baltic

And a dance with Ella Sweyn at Elsinore!


The clips parted with a gesture of indignant dismissal, as though Quebec, glittering under her snows, were casting out these light and unworthy lovers. Our signal came from the Heights. Tim turned and floated up, but surely then it was with passionate appeal that the great tower arms flung open—or did I think so because on the upper staging a little hooded figure also opened her arms wide toward her father?


In ten seconds the coach with its clerks clashed down to the receiving-caisson; the hostlers displaced the engineers at the idle turbines, and Tim, prouder of this than all, introduced me to the maiden of the photograph on the shelf. “And by the way,” said he to her, stepping forth in sunshine under the hat of civil life, “I saw young Williams in the Mark Boat. I’ve asked him to tea on Friday.”


page 8




Aerial Board of Control




LIGHTS


No changes in English Inland lights for week ending Dec. 18th.


Cape Verde—Week ending Dec. 18. Verde inclined guide-light changes from 1st proximo to triple flash—green white green—in place of occulting red as heretofore. The warning light for Harmattan winds will be continuous vertical glare (white) on all oases of trans-Saharan N. E. by E. Main Routes.


Invercargil (N.Z.)—From 1st prox.: extreme southerly light (double red) will exhibit white beam inclined 45 degrees on approach of Southerly Buster. Traffic flies high off this coast between April and October.


Table Bay—Devil’s Peak Glare removed to Simonsberg. Traffic making Table Mountain coastwise keep all lights from Three Anchor Bay at least two thousand feet under, and do not round to till East of E. shoulder Devil’s Peak.


Sandheads Light -Green triple vertical marks new private landing-stage for Bay and Burma traffic only.


Snaefell Jokul—White occulting light withdrawn for winter.


Patagonia—No summer light south Cape Pilar. This includes Staten Island and Port Stanley.


C. Navarin—Quadruple fog flash (white), one minute intervals (new).


East Cape—Fog—flash -single white with single bomb, 30 sec. intervals (new).


Malayan Archipelago—Lights unreliable owing eruptions. Lay from Cape Somerset to Singapore direct, keeping highest levels.


For the Board:






Catterthun
}





St. Just
}
      Lights.




Van Hedder
}







CASUALTIES


Week ending Dec. 18th.


Sable Island—Green single barbette-tower freighter, number indistinguishable, up-ended, and fore-tank pierced after collision, passed 300-ft. level Q P. as. Dec. 15th. Watched to water and pithed by Mark Boat.


N. F. Banks—Postal Packet 162 reports Halma freighter (Fowey—St. John’s) abandoned, leaking after weather, 46 151 N. 50 15’ W. Crew rescued by Planet liner Asteroid. Watched to water and pithed by Postal Packet, Dec. 14th.


Kerguelen, Mark Boat reports last call from Cymena freighter (Gayer Tong Huk & Co.) taking water and sinking in snow-storm South McDonald Islands. No wreckage recovered. Messages and wills of crew at all A. B. C. offices.


Fezzan—T.A.D. freighter Ulema taken ground during Harmattan on Akakus Range. Under plates strained. Crew at Ghat where repairing Dec. 13th.


Biscay, Mark Boat reports Caducci (Valandingham Line) slightly spiked in western gorge Point de Benasdue. Passengers transferred Andorra (Fulton Line). Barcelona Mark Boat salving cargo Dec. 12th.


Ascension, Mark Boat—Wreck of unknown racing-plane, Parden rudder, wire-stiffened xylonite vans, and Harliss engine-seating, sighted and salved 7 20’ S. 18 41’ W. Dec. 15th. Photos at all A.B.C. offices.


MISSING


No answer to General Call having been received during the last week from following overdues, they are posted as missing:


Atlantis, W.17630 . Canton—Valparaiso

Audhumla W. 889 . Stockholm—Odessa

Berenice, W. 2206 .. . Riga—Vladivostock

Draw, E. 446 . . Coventry—Pontes

Arenas Tontine, E. 5068 . C. Wrath—Ungava

Wu-Sung, E. 41776 . . Hankow—Lobito Bay


General Call (all Mark Boats) out for:


Jane Eyre, W. 6990 . Port Rupert—City of Mexico

Santander, W. 6514 . . Gobi Desert—Manila

Y. Edmundsun, E. 9690 . . Kandahar—Fiume


page 9


Broke for Obstruction, and Quitting Levels


Valkyrie (racing plane), A. J. Hartley owner, New York (twice warned).

Geisha (racing plane), S. van Cott owner, Philadelphia (twice warned).

Marvel of Peru (racing plane), J. X. Peixoto owner, Rio de Janeiro (twice warned).


For the Board:






Lazareff
}





McKeough
}
Traffic




Goldbratt
}







NOTES


 


High-Level Sleet


The Northern weather so far shows no sign of improvement. From all quarters come complaints of the unusual prevalence of sleet at the higher levels. Racing planes and digs alike have suffered severely—the former from unequal deposits of half-frozen slush on their vans (and only those who have “held up” a badly balanced plane in a cross-wind know what that means), and the latter from loaded bows and snow-cased bodies. As a consequence, the Northern and North-western upper levels have been practically abandoned, and the high fliers have returned to the ignoble security of the Three, Five, and Six hundred foot levels. But there remain a few undaunted sun-hunters who, in spite of frozen stays and ice-jammed connecting-rods, still haunt the blue empyrean.


Bat-Boat Racing


The scandals of the past few years have at last moved the yachting world to concerted action in regard to “bat” boat racing. We have been treated to the spectacle of what are practically keeled racing-planes driven a clear five foot or more above the water, and only eased down to touch their so-called “native element” as they near the line. Judges and starters have been conveniently blind to this absurdity, but the public demonstration off St. Catherine’s Light at the Autumn Regattas has borne ample, if tardy, fruit. In the future the “bat” is to be a boat, and the long-unheeded demand of the true sportsman for “no daylight under mid-keel in smooth water” is in a fair way to be conceded. The new rule severely restricts plane area and lift alike. The gas compartments are permitted both fore and aft, as in the old type, but the water-ballast central tank is rendered obligatory. These things work, if not for perfection, at least for the evolution of a sane and wholesome waterborne cruiser. The type of rudder is unaffected by the new rules, so we may expect to see the Long-Davidson make (the patent on which has just expired) come largely into use henceforward, though the strain on the sternpost in turning at speeds over forty miles an hour is admittedly very severe. But bat-boat racing has a great future before it.


Crete and the A.B.C.


The story of the recent Cretan crisis, as told in the A.B.C. Monthly Report, is not without humour. Till the 25th October Crete, as all our planet knows, was the sole surviving European repository of “autonomous institutions,” “local self-government,” and the rest of the archaic lumber devised in the past for the confusion of human affairs. She has lived practically on the tourist traffic attracted by her annual pageants of Parliaments, Boards, Municipal Councils, etc., etc. Last summer the islanders grew wearied, as their premier explained, of “playing at being savages for pennies,” and proceeded to pull down all the landing-towers on the island and shut off general communication till such time as the A.B.C. should annex them. For side-splitting comedy we would refer our readers to the correspondence between the Board of Control and the Cretan premier during the “war.” However, all’s well that ends well. The A.B.C. have taken over the administration of Crete on normal lines; and tourists must go elsewhere to witness the “debates,” “resolutions,” and “popular movements” of the old days. The only people to suffer will be the Board of Control, which is grievously overworked already. It is easy enough to condemn the Cretans for their laziness; but when one recalls the large, prosperous, and presumably public-spirited communities which during the last few years have deliberately thrown themselves into the hands of the A.B.C., one, cannot be too hard upon St. Paul’s old friends.


CORRESPONDENCE


 


Skylarking on the Equator


To the Editor: Only last week, while crossing the Equator (W. 26-15), I became aware of a furious and irregular cannonading some fifteen or twenty knots S. 4 E. Descending to the 500 ft. level, I found a party of Transylvanian tourists engaged in exploding scores of the largest pattern atmospheric bombs (A.B.C. standard) and, in the intervals of their pleasing labours, firing bow and stern smoke-ring swivels. This orgie—I can give it no other name—went on for at least two hours, and naturally produced violent electric derangements. My compasses, of course, were thrown out, my bow was struck twice, and I received two brisk shocks from the lower platform-rail. On remonstrating, I was told that these “professors” were engaged in scientific experiments. The extent of their “scientific” knowledge, may be judged by the fact that they expected to produce (I give their own words) “a little blue sky” if “they went on long enough.” This in the heart of the Doldrums at 450 feet! I have no objection to any amount of blue sky in its proper place (it can be found at the 4000 level for practically twelve months out of the year), but I submit, with all deference to the educational needs of Transylvania, that “skylarking” in the centre of a main-travelled road where, at the best of times, electricity literally drips off one’s stanchions and screw blades, is unnecessary. When my friends had finished, the road was seared, and blown, and pitted with unequal pressure layers, spirals, vortices, and readjustments for at least an hour. I pitched badly twice in an upward rush—solely due to these diabolical throw-downs—that came near to wrecking my propeller. Equatorial work at low levels is trying enough in all conscience without the added terrors of scientific hooliganism in the Doldrums.

Rhyl. J. Vincent Mathen.


page 10




[We entirely sympathize with Professor Mathen’s views, but till the Board sees fit to further regulate the Southern areas in which scientific experiments may be conducted, we shall always be exposed to the risk which our correspondent describes. Unfortunately, a chimera bombinating in a vacuum is, nowadays, only too capable of producing secondary causes.- Editor.]


Answers to Correspondents


Vigilans—The Laws of Auroral Derangements are still imperfectly understood. Any overheated motor may of course “seize” without warning; but so many complaints have reached us of accidents similar to yours while shooting the Aurora that we are inclined to believe with Lavalle that the upper strata of the Aurora Borealis are practically one big electric “leak,” and that the paralysis of your engines was due to complete magnetization of all metallic parts. Low-flying planes often “glue up” when near the Magnetic Pole, and there is no reason in science why the same disability should not be experienced at higher levels when the Auroras are “delivering” strongly.


Indignant—On your own showing, you were not under control. That you could not hoist the necessary N.U.C. lights on approaching a traffic-lane because your electrics had short-circuited is a misfortune which might befall any one. The A.B.C., being responsible for the planet’s traffic, cannot, however, make allowance for this kind of misfortune. A reference to the Code will show that you were fined on the lower scale.


Planiston—(1) The Five Thousand Kilometre (overland) was won last year by L. V. Rautsch; R. M. Rautsch, his brother, in the same week pulling off the Ten Thousand (oversea). R. M.’s average worked out at a fraction over 500 kilometres per hour, thus constituting a record. (2) Theoretically, there is no limit to the lift of a dirigible. For commercial and practical purposes 15,000 tons is accepted as the most manageable.


Paterfamilias—None whatever. He is liable for direct damage both to your chimneys and any collateral damage caused by fall of bricks into garden, etc., etc. Bodily inconvenience and mental anguish may be included, but the average courts are not, as a rule, swayed by sentiment. If you can prove that his grapnel removed any portion of your roof, you had better rest your case on decoverture of domicile (see Parkins v. Duboulay). We sympathize with your position, but the night of the 14th was stormy and confused, and—you may have to anchor on a stranger’s chimney yourself some night. Verbum sap!


Aldebaran—(1) war, as a paying concern, ceased in 1987. (2) The Convention of London expressly reserves to every nation the right of waging war so long as it does not interfere with the traffic and all that implies. (3) The A.B.C. was constituted in 1949.


L.M.P.—(1) Keep her full head-on at half power, taking advantage of the lulls to speed up and creep into it. She will strain much less this way than in quartering across a gale. (2) Nothing is to be gained by reversing into a following gale, and there is always risk of a turnover. (3) The formulae for stun’sle brakes are uniformly unreliable, and will continue to be so as long as air is compressible.


Pegamoid—(1) Personally we prefer glass or flux compounds to any other material for winter work nose-caps as being absolutely non-hygroscopic. (2) We cannot recommend any particular make.


Pulmonar—(1) For the symptoms you describe, try the Gobi Desert Sanatoria. The low levels of most of the Saharan Sanatoria are against them except at the outset of the disease. (2) We do not recommend boarding-houses or hotels in this column.


Beginner—On still days the air above a large inhabited city being slightly warmer—i.e., thinner—than the atmosphere of the surrounding country, a plane drops a little on entering the rarefied area, precisely as a ship sinks a little in fresh water. Hence the phenomena of “jolt” and your “inexplicable collisions” with factory chimneys. In air, as on earth, it is safest to fly high.


Emergency—There is only one rule of the road in air, earth, and water. Do you want the firmament to yourself?


Picciola—Both Poles have been overdone in Art and Literature. Leave them to Science for the next twenty years. You did not send a stamp with your verses.


North Nigeria—The Mark Boat was within her right in warning you off the Reserve. The shadow of a low-flying dirigible scares the game. You can buy all the photos you need at Sokoto.


New Era—It is not etiquette to overcross an A.B.C. official’s boat without asking permission. He is one of the body responsible for the planet’s traffic, and for that reason must not be interfered with. You, presumably, are out on your own business or pleasure, and must leave him alone. For humanity’s sake don’t try to be “democratic.”


Excoriated—All inflators chafe sooner or later. You must go on till your skin hardens by practice. Meantime vaseline.


REVIEW


 


The Life of Xavier Lavalle

(Reviewed by Rene Talland. Ecole Aeronautique, Paris)


Ten years ago Lavalle, “that imperturbable dreamer of the heavens,” as Lazareff hailed him, gathered together the fruits of a lifetime’s labour, and gave it, with well-justified contempt, to a world bound hand and foot to Barald’s Theory of Vertices and “compensating electric nodes.” “They shall see,” he wrote—in that immortal postscript to The Heart of the Cyclone—“the Laws whose existence they derided written in fire beneath them.”


“But even here,” he continues, “there is no finality. Better a thousand times my conclusions should be discredited than that my dead name should lie across the threshold of the temple of Science—a bar to further inquiry.”


So died Lavalle—a prince of the Powers of the Air, and even at his funeral Collier jested at “him who had gone to discover the secrets of the Aurora Borealis.”


page 11




If I choose thus to be banal, it is only to remind you that Collier’s theories are today as exploded as the ludicrous deductions of the Spanish school. In the place of their fugitive and warring dreams we have, definitely, Lavalle’s Law of the Cyclone which he surprised in darkness and cold at the foot of the overarching throne of the Aurora Borealis. It is there that I, intent on my own investigations, have passed and re-passed a hundred times the worn leonine face, white as the snow beneath him, furrowed with wrinkles like the seams and gashes upon the North Cape; the nervous hand, integrally a part of the mechanism of his flighter; and above all, the wonderful lambent eyes turned to the zenith.


“Master,” I would cry as I moved respectfully beneath him, “what is it you seek today?” and always the answer, clear and without doubt, from above: “The old secret, my son!”


The immense egotism of youth forced me on my own path, but (cry of the human always!) had I known—if I had known—I would many times have bartered my poor laurels for the privilege, such as Tinsley and Herrera possess, of having aided him in his monumental researches.


It is to the filial piety of Victor Lavalle that we owe the two volumes consecrated to the ground-life of his father, so full of the holy intimacies of the domestic hearth. Once returned from the abysms of the utter North to that little house upon the outskirts of Meudon, it was not the philosopher, the daring observer, the man of iron energy that imposed himself on his family, but a fat and even plaintive jester, a farceur incarnate and kindly, the co-equal of his children, and, it must be written, not seldom the comic despair of Madame Lavalle, who, as she writes five years after the marriage, to her venerable mother, found “in this unequalled intellect whose name I bear the abandon of a large and very untidy boy.” Here is her letter:






“Xavier returned from I do not know where at midnight, absorbed in calculations on the eternal question of his Aurora—la belle Aurore, whom I begin to hate. Instead of anchoring,—I had set out the guide-light above our roof, so he had but to descend and fasten the plane—he wandered, profoundly distracted, above the town with his anchor down! Figure to yourself, dear mother, it is the roof of the mayor’s house that the grapnel first engages! That I do not regret, for the mayor’s wife and I are not sympathetic; but when Xavier uproots my pet araucaria and bears it across the garden into the conservatory I protest at the top of my voice. Little Victor in his night-clothes runs to the window, enormously amused at the parabolic flight without reason, for it is too dark to see the grapnel, of my prized tree. The Mayor of Meudon, thunders at our door in the name of the Law, demanding, I suppose, my husband’s head. Here is the conversation through the megaphone—Xavier is two hundred feet above us:“’Mons. Lavalle, descend and make reparation for outrage of domicile. Descend, Mons. Lavalle!’


“No one answers.


“’Xavier Lavalle, in the name of the Law, descend and submit to process for outrage of domicile.’


“Xavier, roused from his calculations, comprehending only the last words: ‘Outrage of domicile? My dear mayor, who is the man that has corrupted thy Julie?’


“The mayor, furious, ‘Xavier Lavalle—’


“Xavier, interrupting: ‘I have not that felicity. I am only a dealer in cyclones!’


“My faith, he raised one then! All Meudon attended in the streets, and my Xavier, after a long time comprehending what he had done, excused himself in a thousand apologies. At last the reconciliation was effected in our house over a supper at two in the morning—Julie in a wonderful costume of compromises, and I have her and the mayor pacified in bed in the blue room.”







And on the next day, while the mayor rebuilds his roof, her Xavier departs anew for the Aurora Borealis, there to commence his life’s work. M. Victor Lavalle tells us of that historic collision (en plane) on the flank of Hecla between Herrera, then a pillar of the Spanish school, and the man destined to confute his theories and lead him intellectually captive. Even through the years, the immense laugh of Lavalle as he sustains the Spaniard’s wrecked plane, and cries: “Courage! I shall not fall till I have found Truth, and I hold you fast!” rings like the call of trumpets. This is that Lavalle whom the world, immersed in speculations of immediate gain, did not know nor suspect—the Lavalle whom they adjudged to the last a pedant and a theorist.


The human, as apart from the scientific, side (developed in his own volumes) of his epoch-making discoveries is marked with a simplicity, clarity, and good sense beyond praise. I would specially refer such as doubt the sustaining influence of ancestral faith upon character and will to the eleventh and nineteenth chapters, in which are contained the opening and consummation of the Tellurionical Records extending over nine years. Of their tremendous significance be sure that the modest house at Meudon knew as little as that the Records would one day be the planet’s standard in all official meteorology. It was enough for them that their Xavier—this son, this father, this husband—ascended periodically to commune with powers, it might be angelic, beyond their comprehension, and that they united daily in prayers for his safety.


“Pray for me,” he says upon the eve of each of his excursions, and returning, with an equal simplicity, he renders thanks “after supper in the little room where he kept his barometers.”


To the last Lavalle was a Catholic of the old school, accepting—he who had looked into the very heart of the lightnings—the dogmas of papal infallibility, of absolution, of confession—of relics great and small. Marvellous—enviable contradiction!


The completion of the Tellurionical Records closed what Lavalle himself was pleased to call the theoretical side of his labours—labours from which the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well have shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of the oceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, league by league, patiently, unweariedly, remorselessly, from their ever-shifting cradle under the magnetic pole to their exalted death-bed in the utmost ether of the upper atmosphere each one of the Isoconical Tellurions Lavalle’s Curves, as we call them today. He had disentangled the nodes of their intersections, assigning to each its regulated period of flux and reflux. Thus equipped, he summons Herrera and Tinsley, his pupils, to the final demonstration as calmly as though he were ordering his flighter for some mid-day journey to Marseilles.


page 12




“I have proved my thesis,” he writes. “It remains now only that you should witness the proof. We go to Manila to-morrow. A cyclone will form off the Pescadores S. 17 E. in four days, and will reach its maximum intensity twenty-seven hours after inception. It is there I will show you the Truth.”


A letter heretofore unpublished from Herrera to Madame Lavalle tells us how the Master’s prophecy was verified.


I will not destroy its simplicity or its significance by any attempt to quote. Note well, though, that Herrera’s preoccupation throughout that day and night of superhuman strain is always for the Master’s bodily health and comfort.


“At such a time,” he writes, “I forced the Master to take the broth”; or “I made him put on the fur coat as you told me.” Nor is Tinsley (see pp. 184, 85) less concerned. He prepares the nourishment. He cooks eternally, imperturbably, suspended in the chaos of which the Master interprets the meaning. Tinsley, bowed down with the laurels of both hemispheres, raises himself to yet nobler heights in his capacity of a devoted chef. It is almost unbelievable! And yet men write of the Master as cold, aloof, self-contained. Such characters do not elicit the joyous and unswerving devotion which Lavalle commanded throughout life. Truly, we have changed very little in the course of the ages! The secrets of earth and sky and the links that bind them, we felicitate ourselves we are on the road to discover; but our neighbours’ heart and mind we misread, we misjudge, we condemn now as ever. Let all, then, who love a man read these most human, tender, and wise volumes.


——————————




MISCELLANEOUS

[ WANTS ]


REQUIRED IMMEDIATELY, FOR East Africa, a thoroughly competent Plane and Dirigible Driver, acquainted with Petrol Radium and Helium motors and generators. Low-level work only, but must understand heavy-weight digs.

MOSSAMEDES TRANSPORT ASSOC.

84 Palestine Buildings, E. C.


——————————


MAN WANTED-DIG DRIVER for Southern Alps with Saharan summer trips. High levels, high speed. high wages:

Apply M. SIDNEY

Hotel San Stefano. Monte Carlo.


——————————


FAMILY DIRIGIBLE. A COMPETENT, steady man wanted for slow speed, low level Tangye dirigible. No night work, no sea trips. Must be member of the Church of England, and make himself useful in the garden.

M. R.

The Rectory, Gray’s Barton, Wilts.


——————————


COMMERCIAL DIG, CENTRAL and Southern Europe. A smart, active man for a L.M.T. Dig. Night work only. Headquarters London and Cairo. A linguist preferred.

BAGMAN

Charing Cross Hotel, W. C. (urgent.)


——————————


FOR SALE—A BARGAIN—Single Plane, narrow-gauge vans, Pinke motor. Restayed this autumn. Hansen air-kit, 58 in. chest, 153 collar. Can be seen by appointment.

N. 2650 This office.


——————————


 


The BEE-LINE BOOKSHOP


BELT’S WAY-BOOKS, giving town lights for all towns over 4,000 pop. as laid down by A.B.C.

THE WORLD. Complete 2 vols. Thin Oxford, limp back. 12£ 6d.

BELT’S COASTAL ITINERARY. Short Lights of the World. 7s. 6d.

THE TRANSATLANTIC AND MEDITERRANEAN TRAFFIC LINES.

(By authority of the A.B.C.) Paper,

1s. 6d.; cloth. 2s. 6d. Ready, Jan. 16.

ARCTIC AEROPLANING. Siemens and Gait. Cloth, bds. 5s. 6d.

LAVALLE’S HEART OF THE CYCLONE, with supplementary charts. 4s. 6d.

RIMINGTON’S PITFALLS IN THE AIR, and Table of Comparative Densities 3s. 6d.

ANGELO’S DESERT IN A DIRIGIBLE. New edition, revised. 5s. 9d.

VAUGHAN’S PLANE RACING IN CALM AND STORM. 2s. 6d.

VAUGHAN’S HINTS TO THE AIRMATEUR 1s.

HOFMAN’S LAWS OF LIFT AND VELOCITY. With diagrams, 3s. 6d.

DE VITRE’S THEORY OF SHIFTING BALLAST IN DIRIGIBLES. 2s. 6d.

SANGERS WEATHERS OF THE WORLD. 4s.

SANGER’S TEMPERATURES AT HIGH ALTITUDES. 4s.

HAWKIN’S FOG AND HOW To AVOID IT. 3s.

VAN ZUYLAN’S SECONDARY EFFECTS OF THUNDERSTORMS. 4s. 6d.

DAHLGREN’S AIR CURRENTS AND EPIDEMIC DISEASES. 5s. 6d.

REDMAYNE’S DISEASE AND THE BAROMETER. 7s. 6d.

WALTON’S HEALTH RESORTS OF THE GOBI AND SHAMO. 3s. 6d.

WALTON’S THE POLE AND PULMONARY COMPLAINTS. 7s. ad.

MUTLOWS HIGH LEVEL BACTERIOLOGY. 7s. 6d.

HALLIWELL’S ILLUMINATED STAR MAP, with clockwork attachment, giving apparent motion of heavens, boxed, complete with clamps for binnacle, 36 inch size, only £2. 2. 0. Invaluable for night work.) With A.B.C. certificate. £3. 10s. 0d.

Zalinski’s Standard Works:

PASSES OF THE HIMALAYAS, 5s.

PASSES OF THE SIERRAS, 5s.

PASSES OF THE ROOKIES. 5s.

PASSES OF THE URALS, 5s.

The four boxed, limp cloth, with charts, 15s.

GRAY’S AIR CURRENTS at MOUNTAIN GORGES, 7s. 6d.




A. C. BELT & SON, READING


page 13






——————————


SAFETY WEAR FOR AERONAUTS


——————————






Fickers!
Flickers!
Flickers!






HIGH LEVEL FLICKERS






“He that is down need fear no fall,”

Fear not! You will fall lightly as down!




Hansen’s air-kits are down in all respects. Tremendous reductions in prices previous to winter stocking. Pure para kit with cellulose seat and shoulder-pads, weighted to balance. Unequalled for all drop-work.


Our trebly resilient heavy kit is the ne plus ultra of comfort and safety.


Gas-buoyed, waterproof, hail-proof, nonconducting Flickers with pipe and nozzle fitting all types of generator. Graduated tap on left hip.


Hansen’s Flickers Lead the Aerial Flight

197 Oxford Street


The new weighted Flicker with tweed or cheviot surface cannot be distinguished from the ordinary suit till inflated.






Fickers!
Flickers!
Flickers!






——————————


APPLIANCES FOR AIR PLANES


——————————


What

“SKID”

was to our forefathers on the ground,

“PITCH”

is to their sons in the air.


The popularity of the large, unwieldy, slow, expensive Dirigible over the light swift, Plane is mainly due to the former’s immunity from pitch.


Collison’s forward-socketed Air Van renders it impossible for any plane to pitch. The C.F.S. is automatic, simple as a shutter, certain as a power hammer, safe as oxygen. Fitted to any make of plane.


COLLISON

186 Brompton Road

Workshops, Chiswick




LUNDIE do MATTERS

Sole Agts for East’n Hemisphere


 


——————————


STARTERS AND GUIDES


Hotel, club, and private house plane-starters, slips and guides affixed by skilled workmen in accordance with local building laws.


Rackstraww’s forty-foot collapsible steel starters with automatic release at end of travel—prices per foot run, clamps and crampons included. The safest on the market.


Weaver & Denison

Middleboro


——————————


AIR PLANES AND DIRIGIBLE GOODS


——————————


REMEMBER




Planes are swift—so is Death

Planes are cheap—so is Life




Why does the plane builder insist on the safety of his machines?

Methinks the gentleman protests too much.






The Standard Dig Construction Company do not build kites.They build, equip and guarantee dirigibles.


Standard Dig construction Co.

Millwall and Buenos Ayres




——————————


HOVERS




POWELL’S

Wind Hovers


for ’planes lying-to in heavy weather, save the motor and strain on the forebody. Will not send to leeward. “Albatross” wind-hovers, rigid-ribbed; according to h.p. and weight.


We fit and test free to

40 east of Greenwich Village




L. & W. POWELL

196 Victoria Street, W.


 


page 14




——————————


REMEMBER


We shall always be pleased to see you.


We build and test and guarantee our dirigibles or all purposes. They go up when you please and they do not come down till you please.


You can please yourself, but—you might as well choose a dirigible.


STANDARD DIRIGIBLE CONSTRUCTION CO.

Millwall and Buenos Ayres


——————————






GAYER AND HUNT




Birmingham
 and
 Birmingham




Eng.

Ala.






Towers. Landing Stages,

Slips and Lifts

public and private




Contractors to the A. B. C., South-Western European Postal

Construction Dept. Sole patentees and owners of the

Collison anti-quake diagonal tower-tie. Only gold medal Kyoto

Exhibition of Aerial Appliances, 1997.




——————————


AIR PLANES AND DIRIGIBLES


——————————


C.M.C.

Our Synthetical Mineral

BEARINGS


are chemically and crystal logically identical with the minerals whose names they bear. Any size, any surface. Diamond, Rock-Crystal, Agate and Ruby Bearings-cups, caps and collars for the higher speeds. For tractor bearings and spindles-Imperative. For rear propellers-Indispensable. For all working parts-Advisable.


Commercial Minerals Co.

107 Minories


——————————




RESURGAM!If you have not Clothed YOURSELF in a


NORMANDIE RESURGAM


YOU WILL PROBABLY NOT BE INTERESTED IN OUR NEXT WEEK’S LIST OF AIR-KIT.


RESURGAM AIR-KIT EMPORIUM


HYMANS & GRAHAM

1198 Lower Broadway, New York




——————————


REMEMBER!


——————————


* It is now nearly, a generation since the Plane was to

supersede the Dirigible for all purposes.

* TO-DAY none of the Planet’s freight is carried en plane.

Less than two per cent of the Planet’s passengers are carried en plane.We design, equip guarantee Dirigibles for all purposes.Standard Dig Construction Company

MILLWALL and BUENOS AYRES


——————————


BAT-BOATS


——————————


FLINT & MANTEL

SOUTHAMPTON

FOR SALE


at the end of Season the following Bat-Boats:


GRISELDA, 65 knt., 42 ft., 430(nom.) Maginnis Motor, under-rake rudder.

MABELLE, 50 knt., 40 ft., 310 Hargreaves Motor, Douglas’ lock-steering gear.

IVEMONA, 50 knt., 35 ft., 300 Hargreaves (Radium accelerator), Miller keel and rudder.


The above are well known on the South Coast as sound, wholesome knockabout boats, with ample cruising accommodation. Griselda carries spare set of Hofman racing vans and can be lied three foot clear in smooth water with ballast-tank swung aft. The others do not lift, clear of water, and are recommended for beginners.


Also, by private treaty, racing B.B. Tarpon (76 winning flags) 120 knt., 60 ft.; Long-Davidson double under-rake rudder, new this season and unstrained. 850 nom. Maginnis motor, Radium relays and Pond generator. Bronze breakwater forward, and treble reinforced forefoot and entry. Talfourd rockered keel: Triple set of Hofman vans, giving maximum lifting surface of 5327 sq. ft.


Tarpon-has been lifted and held seven feet for two miles between touch and touch.


page 15




Our Autumn List of racing and family Bats ready on the 9th January.


——————————


AIR PLANES AND STARTERS


——————————


HINKS MODERATORMonorail overhead starter

for family and private planes

up to twenty-five foot over allAbsolutely SafeHinks & Co.. Birmingham


——————————


J. D. ARDAGH


I AM NOT CONCERNED WITH YOUR PLANE I AFTER IT LEAVES MY GUIDES, BUT TILL THEN I HOLD MYSELF PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR LIFE, SAFETY, AND COMFORT. MY HYDRAULIC BUFFER-STOP CANNOT RELEASE TILL THE MOTORS ARE WORKING UP TO BEARING SPEED, THUS SECURING A SAFE AND GRACEFUL FLIGHT WITHOUT PITCHING.


Remember our motto, “Upward and Outward,”

and do not trust yourself to so-called “rigid” guide-bars




J. D. ARDAGH, BELFAST AND TURIN




——————————


ACCESSORIES AND SPARES


——————————




CHRISTIAN WRIGHT & OLDIS

ESTABLISHED 1924ACCESSORIES and SPARESHooded Binnacles with dip-dials automatically recording

change of level (illuminated face).


All heights from 50 to 15,000 feet    £2 10 0

With Aerial Board of Control certificate    £3 11 0

Foot and Hand Foghoms; Sirens toned to any club note; with air-chest belt-driven horn motor    £6 8 0

Wireless installations syntonised to A.B.C. requirements, in neat mahogany case, hundred mile range    £3 3 0


Grapnels, mushroom—anchors, pithing-irons, winches, hawsers, snaps, shackles and mooring ropes, for lawn, city, and public installations.


Detachable under-cars, aluminum or stamped steel.


Keeled under-cars for planes: single-action detaching-gear, turning car into boat with one motion of the wrist. Invaluable for sea trips.


Head, side, and riding lights (by size) Nos.00 to 20 A.B.C. Standard. Rockets and fog-bombs in colours and tones of the principal clubs (boxed).

A selection of twenty            £2 17 6

International night-signals (boxed)            £1 11 6


Spare generators guaranteed to lifting power marked on cover (prices according to power).


Wind-noses for dirigibles—Pegamoid, cane-stiffened, lacquered cane or aluminum and flux for winter work.


Smoke-ring cannon for hail storms, swivel mounted, bow or stern.


Propeller blades: metal, tungsten backed; paper-mache wire stiffened; ribbed Xylonite (Nickson’s patent); all razor-edged (price by pitch and diameter).


Compressed steel bow-screws for winter work.


Fused Ruby or Commercial Mineral Co. bearings and collars. Agate-mounted thrust-blocks up to 4 inch.


Magniac’s bow-rudders—(Lavales patent grooving).


Wove steel beltings for outboard motors (nonmagnetic).


Radium batteries, all powers to 150 h.p. (in pairs).


Helium batteries, all powers to 300 h.p. (tandem).


Stun’sle brakes worked from upper or lower platform.


Direct plunge-brakes worked from lower platform only, loaded silk or fibre, wind-tight.


 


CATALOGUES FREE THROUGHOUT THE PLANET

			


				





	

					

				
With the Main Guard
			

			
			

				


page 1 of 5




‘MARY, Mother av Mercy, fwhat the divil possist us to take an’ kape this melancolious counthry? Answer me that, sorr.’It was Mulvaney who was speaking. The time was one o’clock of a stifling June night, and the place was the main gate of Fort Amara, most desolate and least desirable of all fortresses in India. What I was doing there at that hour is a question which only concerns M’Grath the Sergeant of the Guard, and the men on the gate.


‘Slape,’ said Mulvaney, ‘is a shuparfluous necessity. This Gyard’ll shtay lively till relieved.’ He himself was stripped to the waist; Learoyd on the next bedstead was dripping from the skinful of water which Ortheris, clad only in white trousers, had just sluiced over his shoulders; and a fourth private was muttering uneasily as he dozed open-mouthed in the glare of the great guard-lantern. The heat under the bricked archway was terrifying.


‘The worrst night that iver I remimber. Eyah! Is all Hell loose this tide?’said Mulvaney. A puff of burning wind lashed through the wicket-gate like a wave of the sea, and Ortheris swore.


‘Are ye more heasy, Jock?’ he said to Learoyd. ‘Put yer ’ead between your legs. It’ll go orf in a minute.’


‘Ah doan’t care. Ah would not care, but ma heart is plaayin’ tivvy-tivvy on ma ribs. Let ma die! Oh, leave ma die!’ groaned the huge Yorkshireman, who was feeling the heat acutely, being of fleshy build.


The sleeper under the lantern roused for a moment and raised himself on his elbow. ‘Die and be damned then!’ he said. ‘I’m damned and I can’t die!’


‘Who’s that?’ I whispered, for the voice was new to me.


‘Gentleman born,’ said Mulvaney; ‘Corp’ril wan year, Sargint nex’. Red-hot on his C’mission, but dhrinks like a fish. He’ll be gone before the cowld weather’s here. So!’


He slipped his boot, and with the naked toe just touched the trigger of his Martini. Ortheris misunderstood the movement, and the next instant the Irishman’s rifle was dashed aside, while Ortheris stood before him, his eyes blazing with reproof.


‘You!’ said Ortheris. ‘My Gawd, you! If it was you, wot would we do?’


‘Kape quiet, little man,’ said Mulvaney, putting him aside, but very gently; ‘’Tis not me, nor will ut be me whoile Dinah Shadd’s here. I was but showin’ somethin’.’


Learoyd, bowed on his bedstead, groaned, and the gentleman-ranker sighed in his sleep. Ortheris took Mulvaney’s tendered pouch, and we three smoked gravely for a space while the dust-devils danced on the glacis and scoured the red-hot plain.


‘Pop?’ said Ortheris, wiping his forehead.


‘Don’t tantalise wid talkin’ av dhrink, or I’ll shtuff you into your own breech-block an’—fire you off!’ grunted Mulvaney.


Ortheris chuckled, and from a niche in the veranda produced six bottles of gingerade.


‘Where did ye get ut, ye Machiavel?’ said Mulvaney. ‘’Tis no bazar pop.’


‘’Ow do I know wot the orf’cers drink?’ answered Ortheris. ‘Arst the mess-man.’


‘Ye’ll have a Disthrict Coort-Martial settin’ on ye yet, me son,’ said Mulvaney, ‘but’—he opened a bottle—‘I will not report ye this time. Fwhat’s in the mess-kid is mint for the belly, as they say, ’specially whin that mate is dhrink. Here’s luck! A bloody war or a—no, we’ve got the sickly season. War, thin!’—he waved the innocent ‘pop’ to the four quarters of heaven. ‘Bloody war! North, East, South, an’ West Jock, ye quakin’ hayrick, come an’ dhrink.’


But Learoyd, half mad with the fear of death presaged in the swelling veins of his neck, was begging his Maker to strike him dead, and fighting for more air between his prayers. A second time Ortheris drenched the quivering body with water, and the giant revived.


‘An’ Ah divn’t see thot a mon is i’ fettle for gooin’ on to live; an’ Ah divn’t see thot there is owt for t’ livin’ for. Hear now, lads I Ah’m tired—tired. There’s nobbut watter i’ ma bones. Leave ma die!’


The hollow of the arch gave back Learoyd’s broken whisper in a bass boom. Mulvaney looked at me hopelessly, but I remembered how the madness of despair had once fallen upon Ortheris, that weary, weary afternoon on the banks of the Khemi River, and how it had been exorcised by the skilful magician Mulvaney.


‘Talk, Terence!’ I said, ‘or we shall have Learoyd slinging loose, and he’ll be worse than Ortheris was. Talk! He’ll answer to your voice.’


Almost before Ortheris had deftly thrown all the rifles of the guard on Mulvaney’s bedstead, the Irishman’s voice was uplifted as that of one in the middle of a story, and, turning to me, he said:—


‘In barricks or out av it, as you say, sorr, an Irish rig’mint is the divil an’ more. ’Tis only fit for a young man wid eddicated fisteses. Oh, the crame av disrupshin is an Irish rig’mint, an’ rippin’, tearin’, ragin’ scattherers in the field av war! My first rig’mint was Irish—Faynians an’ rebils to the heart av their marrow was they, an’ so they fought for the Widdy betther than most, bein’ contrairy—Irish. They was the Black Tyrone. You’ve heard av thim, sorr?’


Heard of them! I knew the Black Tyrone for the choicest collection of unmitigated blackguards, dog-stealers, robbers of hen-roosts, assaulters of innocent citizens, and recklessly daring heroes in the Army List. Half Europe and half Asia has had cause to know the Black Tyrone—good luck be with their tattered Colours as Glory has ever been


‘They was hot pickils an’ ginger! I cut a man’s head to deep wid me belt in the days av me youth, an’, afther some circumstances which I will oblitherate, I came to the Ould Rig’mint, bearin’ the character av a man wid hands an’ feet. But, as I was goin’ to tell you, I fell acrost the Black Tyrone agin wan day whin we wanted thim powerful bad. Orth’ris, me son, fwhat was the name av that place where they sint wan comp’ny av us an’ wan av the Tyrone roun’ a hill an’ down agin, all for to tache the Paythans something they’d niver learned before? Afther Ghuzni ’twas.’


‘Don’t know what the bloomin’ Paythans called it. We called it Silver’s Theayter. You know that, sure!’


page 2


‘Silver’s Theatre—so ’twas. A gut betwix’ two hills, as black as a bucket, an’ as thin as a gurl’s waist. There was over-many Paythans for our convaynience in the gut, an’ begad they called thimsilves a Reserve—bein’ impident by natur’! Our Scotchies an’ lashin’s av Gurkys was poundin’ into some Paythan rig’mints, I think ’Twas. Scotchies an’ Gurkys are twins bekaze they’re so onlike, an’ they get dhrunk together whin God plazes. As I was sayin’, they sint wan comp’ny av the Ould an’ wan av the Tyrone to double up the hill an’ clane out the Paythan Reserve. Orf’cers was scarce in thim days, fwhat wid dysint’ry an’ not takin’ care av thimsilves, an’ we was sint out wid only wan orf’cer for the comp’ny; but he was a Man that had his feet beneath him an’ all his teeth in their sockuts.’


‘Who was he?’ I asked.


‘Captain O’Neil—Old Crook—Cruik-na-bul-leen—him that I tould ye that tale av whin he was in Burma. Hah! He was a Man. The Tyrone tuk a little orf’cer bhoy, but divil a bit was he in command, as I’ll dimonsthrate prisintly. We an’ they came over the brow av the hill, wan on each side av the gut, an’ there was that ondacint Reserve waitin’ down below like rats in a pit.


‘“Howld on, men,” sez Crook, who tuk a mother’s care av us always. “Rowl some rocks on thim by way av visitin’-kyards.” We hadn’t rowled more than twinty bowlders, an’ the Paythans was beginnin’ to swear tremenjus, whin the little orf’cer bhoy av the Tyrone shqueaks out acrost the valley: “Fwhat the divil an’ all are you doin’, shpoilin’ the fun for my men? Do ye not see they’ll stand?”


‘“Faith, that’s a rare pluckt wan!” sez Crook. “Niver mind the rocks, men. Come along down an’ take tay wid thim!”


‘“There’s damned little sugar in ut!” sez my rear-rank man; but Crook heard.


‘“Have ye not all got spoons?” he sez, laughin’, an’ down we wint as fast as we cud. Learoyd bein’ sick at the Base, he, av coorse, was not there.’


‘Thot’s a lie!’ said Learoyd, dragging his bedstead nearer. ‘Ah gotten thot theer, an’ you knaw it, Mulvaaney.’ He threw up his arms, and from the right armpit ran, diagonally through the fell of his chest, a thin white line terminating near the fourth left rib.


‘My mind’s goin’,’ said Mulvaney, the unabashed. ‘Ye were there. Fwhat was I thinkin’ av? ’Twas another man, av coorse. Well, you’ll remimber thin, Jock, how we an’ the Tyrone met wid a bang at the bottom an’ got jammed past all movin’ among the Paythans?’


‘Ow! It was a tight ’ole. I was squeezed till I thought I’d bloomin’ well bust,’ said Ortheris, rubbing his stomach meditatively.


‘’Twas no place for a little man, but wan little man’—Mulvaney put his hand on Ortheris’s shoulder—‘saved the life av me. There we shtuck, for divil a bit did the Paythans flinch, an’ divil a bit dare we; our business bein’ to clear ’em out. An’ the most exthryordinar’ thing av all was that we an’ they just rushed into each other’s arrums, an’ there was no firin’ for a long time. Nothin’ but knife an’ bay’nit when we cud get our hands free: an’ that was not often. We was breast-on to thim, an’ the Tyrone was yelpin’ behind av us in a way I didn’t see the lean av at first. But I knew later, an’ so did the Paythans.


‘“Knee to knee!” sings out Crook, wid a laugh whin the rush av our comin’ into the gut shtopped, an’ he was huggin’ a hairy great Paythan, neither bein’ able to do anything to the other, tho’ both was wishful.


‘“Breast to breast!” he sez, as the Tyrone was pushin’ us forward closer an’ closer.


‘“An’ hand over back!” sez a Sargint that was behin’. I saw a sword lick out past Crook’s ear, an’ the Paythan was tuk in the apple av his throat like a pig at Dromeen Fair.


‘“Thank ye, Brother Inner Guard,” sez Crook, cool as a cucumber widout salt. “I wanted that room.” An’ he went forward by the thickness av a man’s body, havin’ turned the Paythan undher him. The man bit the heel off Crook’s boot in his death-bite.


‘“Push, men!” sez Crook. “Push, ye paper-backed beggars!” he sez. “Am I to pull ye through?” So we pushed, an’ we kicked, an’ we swung, an’ we swore, an’ the grass bein’ slippery, our heels wudn’t bite, an’ God help the front-rank man that wint down that day!’


‘’Ave you ever bin in the Pit hentrance o’ the Vic. on a thick night?’ interrupted Ortheris. ‘It was worse nor that, for they was goin’ one way, an’ we wouldn’t ’ave it. Leastaways, I ’adn’t much to say.’


‘Faith, me son, ye said ut, thin. I kep’ this little man betune my knees as long as I cud, but he was pokin’ roun’ wid his bay’nit, blindin’ an’ stiffen’ feroshus. The divil of a man is Orth’ris in a ruction—aren’t ye?’ said Mulvaney.


‘Don’t make game!’ said the Cockney. ‘I knowed I wasn’t no good then, but I guv ’em compot from the lef’ flank when we opened out. No!’ he said, bringing down his hand with a thump on the bedstead, ‘a bay’nit ain’t no good to a little man—might as well ’ave a bloomin’ fishin’-rod! I ’ate a clawin’, maulin’ mess, but gimme a breech that’s wore out a bit an’ hamminition one year in store, to let the powder kiss the bullet, an’ put me somewheres where I ain’t trod on by ’ulking swine like you, an’ s’elp me Gawd, I could bowl you over five times outer seven at height ’undred. Would yer try, you lumberin’ Hirishman?’


‘No, ye wasp. I’ve seen ye do ut. I say there’s nothin’ better than the bay’nit, wid a long reach, a double twist av ye can, an’ a slow recover.’


‘Dom the bay’nit,’ said Learoyd, who had been listening intently. ‘Look a-here!’ He picked up a rifle an inch below the foresight with an underhanded action, and used it exactly as a man would use a dagger.


‘Sitha,’ said he softly, ‘thot’s better than owt, for a mon can bash t’ faace wi’ thot, an’, if he divn’t, he can breeak t’ forearm o’ t’ guaard. ’Tis nut i’ t’ books, though. Gie me t’ butt.’


‘Each does ut his own way, like makin’ love,’ said Mulvaney quietly; ‘the butt or the bay’nit or the bullet accordin’ to the natur’ av the man. Well, as I was sayin’, we shtuck there breathin’ in each other’s faces an’ swearin’ powerful; Orth’ris cursin’ the mother that bore him bekaze he was not three inches taller.


‘Prisintly he sez: “Duck, ye lump, an’ I can get at a man over your shoulther!”


‘“You’ll blow me head off,” I sez, throwin’ my arrum clear; “go through under my arrumpit, ye bloodthirsty little scutt,” sez I, “but don’t shtick me or I’ll wring your ears round.”


page 3




‘Fwhat was ut ye gave the Paythan man forninst me, him that cut at me whin I cudn’t move hand or foot? Hot or cowld was ut?’


‘Cold,’ said Ortheris, ‘up an’ under the rib-jints. ’E come down flat. Best for you ’e did.’


‘Thrue, me son! This jam thing that I’m talkin’ about lasted for five minut’s good, an’ thin we got our arrums clear an’ wint in. I misremimber exactly fwhat I did, but I didn’t want Dinah to be a widdy at the depot. Thin, afther some promishcuous hackin’ we shtuck agin, an’ the Tyrone behin’ was callin’ us dogs an’ cowards an’ all manner av names; we barrin’ their way.


‘“Fwhat ails the Tyrone?” thinks I. “They’ve the makin’s av a most convanient fight here.”


A man behind me sez beseechful an’ in a whisper: “Let me get at thim! For the love av Mary, give me room beside ye, ye tall man!”


‘“An’ who are you that’s so anxious to be kilt?” sez I, widout turnin’ my head, for the long knives was dancin’ in front like the sun on Donegal Bay whin ut’s rough.


‘“We’ve seen our. dead,” he sez, squeezin’ into me; “our dead that was men two days gone! An’ me that was his cousin by blood cud not bring Tim Coulan off! Let me get on,” he sez, “let me get to thim or I’ll run ye through the back!”


‘“My troth,” thinks I, “if the Tyrone have seen their dead, God help the Paythans this day!” An’ thin I knew why the Tyrone was ragin’ behind us as they was.


‘I gave room to the man, an’ he ran forward wid the Haymakers’ Lift on his bay’nit an’ swung a Paythan clear off his feet by the belly-band av the brute, an’ the iron bruk at the lockin’-ring.


‘“Tim Coulan ‘ll slape aisy to-night,” sez he wid a grin; an’ the next minut’ his head was in two halves and he wint down grinnin’ by sections.


‘The Tyrone was pushin’ an’ pushin’ in, an’ our men was swearin’ at thim, an’ Crook was workin’ away in front av us all, his sword-arrum swingin’ like a pump-handle an’ his revolver spittin’ like a cat. But the strange thing av ut was the quiet that lay upon. ’Twas like a fight in a drame—excipt for thim that was dead.


‘Whin I gave room to the Irishman I was expinded an’ forlorn in my inside. ’Tis a way I have, savin’ your presince, sorr, in action. “Let me out, bhoys,” sez I, backin’ in among thim. “I’m goin’ to be onwell!” Faith, they gave me room at the wurrud, though they wud not ha’ given room for all Hell wid the chill off. When I got clear, I was, savin’ your presince, sorr, outrajis sick bekaze I had dhrunk heavy that day.


‘Well an’ far out av harm was a Sargint av the Tyrone sittin’ on the little orf’cer bhoy who had stopped Crook from rowlin’ the rocks. Oh, he was a beautiful bhoy, an’ the long black curses was slidin’ out av his innocint mouth like mornin’jew from a rose!


‘“Fwhat have you got there?” sez I to the Sargint.


‘“Wan av Her Majesty’s bantams wid his spurs up,” sez he. “He’s goin’ to Coort-Martial me.”


‘“Let me go!” sez the little orf’cer bhoy. “Let me go and command me men!” manin’ thereby the Black Tyrone which was beyond any command—even av they had made the Divil Field-Orf’cer.


‘“His father howlds my mother’s cow-feed in Clonmel,” sez the man that was sittin’ on him. “Will I go back to his mother an’ tell her that I’ve let him throw himsilf away? Lie still, ye little pinch of dynamite, an’ Coort-Martial me aftherwards.”


‘“Good,” sez I; “’Tis the likes av him makes the likes av the Commandher-in-Chief, but we must presarve thim. Fwhat d’you want to do, sorr.?” sez I, very politeful.


‘“Kill the beggars—kill the beggars!” he shqueaks, his big blue eyes brimmin’ wid tears.


‘“An’ how’ll ye do that?” sez I. “You’ve shquibbed off your revolver like a child wid a cracker; you can make no play wid that fine large sword av yours; an’ your hand’s shakin’ like an asp on a leaf. Lie still and grow,” sez I.


‘“Get back to your comp’ny,” sez he; “ you’re insolint! “


‘“All in good time,” sez I, “but I’ll have a dhrink first.”


‘Just thin Crook comes up, blue an’ white all over where he wasn’t red.


‘“Wather!” sez he; “I’m dead wid drouth! Oh, but it’s a gran’ day!”


‘He dhrank half a skinful, and the rest he tilts into his chest, an’ it fair hissed on the hairy hide av him. He sees the little orf’cer bhoy undher the Sargint.


‘“Fwhat’s yonder?” sez he.


‘“Mutiny, sorr,” sez the Sargint, an’ the orf’cer bhoy begins pleadin’ pitiful to Crook to be let go; but divil a bit wud Crook budge.


‘“Kape him there,” he sez; “’Tis no child’s work this day. By the same token,” sez he, “I’ll confishcate that iligant nickel-plated scent-sprinkler av yours, for my own has been vomitin’ dishgraceful!”


‘The fork av his hand was black wid the backspit av the machine. So he tuk the orf’cer bhoy’s revolver. Ye may look, sorr, but, by my faith, there’s a dale more done in the field than iver gets into Field Ordhers!


‘“Come on, Mulvaney,” sez Crook; “is this a Coort-Martial?” The two av us wint back together into the mess an’ the Paythans was still standin’ up. They was not too impart’nint though, for the Tyrone was callin’ wan to another to remimber Tim Coulan.


‘Crook holted outside av the strife an’ looked anxious, his eyes rowlin’ roun’.


‘“Fwhat is ut, sorr?” sez I; “can I get ye anything?”


‘“Where’s a bugler?” sez he.


‘I wint into the crowd—our men was dhrawin’ breath behin’ the Tyrone, who was fightin’ like sowls in tormint—an’ prisintly I came acrost little Frehan, our bugler bhoy, pokin’ roun’ among the best wid a rifle an’ bay’nit.


page 4




‘“Is amusin’ yoursilf fwhat you’re paid for, ye limb?” sez I, catchin’ him by the scruff. “Come out av that an’ attind to your jooty,” I sez; but the bhoy was not plazed.


‘“I’ve got wan,” sez he, grinnin’, “big as you, Mulvaney, an’ fair half as ugly. Let me go get another.”


‘I was dishplazed at the personability av that remark, so I tucks him under my arrum an’ carries him to Crook, who was watchin’ how the fight wint. Crook cuffs him till the bhoy cries, an’ thin sez nothin’ for a whoile.


‘The Paythans began to flicker onaisy, an’ our men roared. “Opin ordher! Double!” sez Crook. “Blow, child, blow for the honour av the British Arrmy!”


‘That bhoy blew like a typhoon, an’ the Tyrone an’ we opind out as the Paythans bruk, an’ I saw that fwhat had gone before wud be kissin’ an’ huggin’ to fwhat was to come. We’d dhruv thim into a broad part av the gut whin they gave, an’ thin we opind out an’ fair danced down the valley, dhrivin’ thim before us. Oh, ’twas lovely, an’ stiddy, too! There was the Sargints on the flanks av what was left av us, kapin’ touch, an’ the fire was runnin’ from flank to flank, an’ the Paythans was dhroppin’. We opind out wid the widenin’ av the valley, an’ whin the valley narrowed we closed agin like the shticks on a lady’s fan, an’ at the far ind av the gut where they thried to stand, we fair blew them off their feet, for we had expinded very little ammunition by reason av the knife-work.’


‘I used thirty rounds goin’ down that valley,’ said Ortheris, ‘an’ it was gentleman’s work. Might ’a’ done it in a white ’andkerchief an’ pink silk stockin’s, that part. Hi was on in that piece.’


‘You cud ha’ heard the Tyrone yellin’ a mile away,’ said Mulvaney, ‘an’ ’twas all their Sargints cud do to get thim off. They was mad—mad—mad! Crook sits down in the quiet that fell whin we had gone down the valley, an’ covers his face wid his hands. Prisintly we all came back agin accordin’ to our natur’s and disposishins, for they, mark you, show through the hide av a man in that hour.


‘“Bhoys I bhoys!”sez Crook to himsilf. “I misdoubt we cud ha’ engaged at long range an’ saved betther men than me.” He looked at our dead an’ said no more.


‘“Captain dear,” sez a man av the Tyrone, comin’ up wid his mouth bigger than iver his mother kissed ut, spittin’ blood like a whale; “Captain dear,” sez he, “if wan or two in the shtalls have been dishcommoded, the gallery have enjoyed the performinces av a Roshus.”


‘Thin I knew that man for the Dublin dockrat he was—wan av the bhoys that made the lessee av Silver’s Theatre grey before his time wid tearin’ out the bowils av the benches an’ throwin’ thim into the pit. So I passed the wurrud that I knew whin I was in the Tyrone an’ we lay in Dublin. “I don’t know who ’twas,” I whishpers, “ an’ I don’t care, but anyways I’ll knock the face av you, Tim Kelly.”


‘“Eyah!” sez the man, “was you there too? We’ll call ut Silver’s Theatre.” Half the Tyrone, knowin’ the ould place, tuk ut up: so we called ut Silver’s Theatre.


‘The little orf’cer bhoy av the Tyrone was thremblin’ an’ cryin’. He had no heart for the Coort-Martials that he talked so big upon. “Ye’ll do well later,” sez Crook, very quiet, “for not bein’ allowed to kill yoursilf for amusemint.”


‘“I’m a dishgraced man!” sez the little orf’cer bhoy.


‘“Put me undher arrest, sorr, if you will, but, by my sowl, I’d do ut agin sooner than face your mother wid you dead,” sez the Sargint that had sat on his head, standin’ to attenshin an’ salutin’. But the young wan only cried as tho’ his little heart was breakin’.


‘Thin another man av the Tyrone came up, wid the fog av fightin’ on him.’


‘The what, Mulvaney?’


‘Fog av fightin’. You know, sorr, that, like makin’ love, ut takes each man diff’rint. Now, I can’t help bein’ powerful sick whin I’m in action. Orth’ris, here, niver stops swearin’ from ind to ind, an’ the only time that Learoyd opins his mouth to sing is whin he is messin’ wid other people’s heads; for he’s a dhirty fighter is jock. Recruities sometime cry, an’ sometime they don’t know fwhat they do, an’ sometime they are all for cuttin’ throats an’ such-like dhirtiness; but some men get heavy-dead-dhrunk on the fightin’. This man was. He was staggerin’, an’ his eyes were half shut, an’ we cud hear him dhraw breath twinty yards away. He sees the little orf’cer bhoy, an’ comes up, talkin’ thick an’ drowsy to himsilf. “Blood the young whelp!” he sez; “Blood the young whelp”; an’ wid that he threw up his arrums, shpun roun’, an’ dropped at our feet, dead as a Paythan, an’ there was niver sign or scratch on him. They said ’twas his heart was rotten, but oh, ’twas a quare thing to see!


‘Thin we wint to bury our dead, for we wud not lave thim to the Paythans, an’ in movin’ among the haythen we nearly lost that little orf’cer bhoy. He was for givin’ wan divil wather and layin’ him aisy against a rock. “Be careful, sorr,” sez I; “a wounded Paythan’s worse than a live wan.” My troth, before the words was out av me mouth, the man on the ground fires at the orf’cer bhoy lanin’ over him, an’ I saw the helmit fly. I dropped the butt on the face av the man an’ tuk his pistol. The little orf’cer bhoy turned very white, for the hair av half his head was singed away.


‘“I tould you so, sorr I” sez I; an’, afther that, whin he wanted to help a Paythan I stud wid the muzzle contagious to the ear. They dared not do anythin’ but curse. The Tyrone was growlin’ like dogs over a bone that has been taken away too soon, for they had seen their dead an’ they wanted to kill ivry sowl on the ground. Crook tould thim that he’d blow the hide off any man that misconducted himsilf; but, seeing that ut was the first time the Tyrone had iver seen their dead, I do not wondher they was on the sharp. ’Tis a shameful sight! Whin I first saw ut I wud niver ha’ given quarter to any man north of the Khyber—no, nor woman either, for the wimmen used to come out afther dhark—Auggrh!


‘Well, evenshually we buried our dead an’ tuk away our wounded, an’ come over the brow av the hills to see the Scotchies an’ the Gurkys takin’ tay with the Paythans in bucketsfuls. We were a gang av dissolute ruffians, for the blood had caked the dust, an’ the sweat had cut the cake, an’ our bay’nits was hangin’ like butchers’ steels betune our legs, an’ most av us was marked one way or another.


‘A Staff Orf’cer man, clane as a new rifle, rides up an’ sez: “What damned scarecrows are you?”


page 5




‘“A comp’ny av Her Majesty’s Black Tyrone an’ wan av the Ould Rig’mint,” sez Crook very quiet, givin’ our visitors the flure as ’twas.


‘“Oh!” sez the Staff Orf’cer. “Did you dislodge that Reserve?”


‘“No!” sez Crook, an’ the Tyrone laughed.


‘“Thin fwhat the divil have ye done?”


‘“Disthroyed ut,” sez Crook, an’ he took us on, but not before Toomey that was in the Tyrone sez aloud, his voice somewhere in his stummick “Fwhat in the name av misfortune does this parrit widout a tail mane by shtoppin’ the road av his betthers?”


The Staff Orf’cer wint blue, an’ Toomey makes him pink by changin’ to the voice av a minowdherin’ woman an’ sayin’: “Come an’ kiss me, Major dear, for me husband’s at the wars an’ I’m all alone at the depot.”


‘The Staff Orf’cer wint away, an’ I cud see Crook’s shoulthers shakin’.


‘His Corp’ril checks Toomey. “Lave me alone,” sez Toomey, widout a wink. “I was his batman before he was married an’ he knows fwhat I mane, av you don’t. There’s nothin’ like livin’ in the hoight av society.” D’you remimber that, Orth’ris?’


‘Yuss. Toomey, ’e died in ’orspital, next week it was, ’cause I bought ’arf his kit; an’ I remember after that——’


‘GUARRD, TURN OUT!’


The Relief had come; it was four o’clock. ‘I’ll catch a kyart for you, sorr,’ said Mulvaney, diving hastily into his accoutrements. ‘Come up to the top av the Fort an’ we’ll pershue our invistigations into M’Grath’s shtable.’ The relieved guard strolled round the main bastion on its way to the swimming-bath, and Learoyd grew almost talkative. Ortheris looked into the Fort Ditch and across the plain. ‘Ho! it’s weary waitin’ for Ma-ary!’ he hummed; ‘but I’d like to kill some more bloomin’ Paythans before my time’s up. War! Bloody war! North, East, South, and West.’


‘Amen,’ said Learoyd slowly.


‘Fwhat’s here?’ said Mulvaney, checking at a blur of white by the foot of the old sentry-box. He stooped and touched it. ‘It’s Norah—Norah M‘Taggart! Why, Nonie darlin’, fwhat are ye doin’ out av your mother’s bed at this time?’


The two-year-old child of Sergeant M‘Taggart must have wandered for a breath of cool air to the very verge of the parapet of the Fort Ditch. Her tiny nightshift was gathered into a wisp round her neck and she moaned in her sleep. ‘See there!’ said Mulvaney; ‘poor lamb! Look at the heatrash on the innocint shkin av her. ’Tis hard—crool hard even for us. Fwhat must it be for these? Wake up, Nonie, your mother will be woild about you. Begad, the child might ha’ fallen into the Ditch!’


He picked her up in the growing light, and set her on his shoulder, and her fair curls touched the grizzled stubble of his temples. Ortheris and Learoyd followed snapping their fingers, while Norah smiled at them a sleepy smile. Then carolled Mulvaney, clear as a lark, dancing the baby on his arm:—


‘If any young man should marry you,

Say nothin’ about the joke;

That aver ye slep’ in a sinthry-box,

Wrapped up in a soldier’s cloak.’


‘Though, on my sowl, Nonie,’ he said gravely, ‘there was not much cloak about you. Niver mind, you won’t dhress like this ten years to come. Kiss your frinds an’ run along to your mother.’


Nonie, set down close to the Married Quarters, nodded with the quiet obedience of the soldier’s child, but, ere she pattered off over the flagged path, held up her lips to be kissed by the Three Musketeers. Ortheris wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and swore sentimentally! Learoyd turned pink; and the two walked away together. The Yorkshireman lifted up his voice and gave in thunder the chorus of The Sentry-Box, while Ortheris piped at his side.


‘Bin to a bloomin’ sing-song, you two?’ said the Artilleryman, who was taking his cartridge down to the Morning Gun. ‘You’re over merry for these dashed days.’


‘I bid ye take care o’ the brat, said he,

For it comes of a noble race,’


Learoyd bellowed. The voices died out in the swimming-bath.


‘Oh, Terence!’ I said, dropping into Mulvaney’s speech, when we were alone, ‘it’s you that have the Tongue! ‘


He looked at me wearily; his eyes were sunk in his head, and his face was drawn and white. ‘Eyah!’ said he; ‘I’ve blandandhered thim through the night somehow, but can thim that helps others help thimsilves? Answer me that, sorr!’


And over the bastions of Fort Amara broke the pitiless day.