Tales – Page 17 – The Kipling Society

To be Filed for Reference

[a short tale]

By the hoof of the Wild Goat up-tossed
From the Cliff where She lay in the Sun,
Fell the Stone
To the Tarn where the daylight is lost;
So She fell from the light of the Sun,
And alone.
Now the fall was ordained from the first,
With the Goat and the Cliff and the Tarn,
But the Stone
Knows only Her life is accursed,
As She sinks in the depths of the Tarn,
And alone.
Oh, Thou who hast builded the world!
Oh, Thou who hast lighted the Sun!
Oh, Thou who hast darkened the Tarn!
Judge Thou
The sin of the Stone that was hurled
By the Goat from the light of the Sun,
As She sinks in the mire of the Tarn,
Even now—even now—even now! 
(From the Unpublished Papers 
of McIntosh Jellaludin)

‘SAY is it dawn, is it dusk in thy Bower,
Thou whom I long for, who longest for me?
Oh, be it night—be it—’

Here he fell over a little camel-colt that was sleeping in the Serai where the horse-traders and the best of the blackguards from Central Asia live; and, because he was very drunk indeed and the night was dark, he could not rise again till I helped him. That was the beginning of my acquaintance with McIntosh Jellaludin. When a loafer, and drunk, sings ‘The Song of the Bower,’ he must be worth cultivating. He got off the camel’s back and said, rather thickly, ‘I—I—I’m a bit screwed, but a dip in Loggerhead will put me right again; and, I say, have you spoken to Symonds about the mare’s knees?’Now Loggerhead was six thousand weary miles away from us, close to Mesopotamia, where you mustn’t fish and poaching is impossible, and Charley Symonds’ stable a half mile farther across the paddocks. It was strange to hear all the old names, on a May night, among the horses and camels of the Sultan Caravanserai. Then the man seemed to remember himself and sober down at the same time. He leaned against the camel and pointed to a corner of the Serai where a lamp was burning.‘I live there,’ said he, ‘and I should be extremely obliged if you would be good enough to help my mutinous feet thither; for I am more than usually drunk—most—most phenomenally tight. But not in respect to my head. “My brain cries out against ”—how does it go? But my head rides on the—rolls on the dunghill I should have said, and controls the qualm.—

I helped him through the gangs of tethered horses, and he collapsed on the edge of the verandah in front of the line of native quarters.

‘Thanks—a thousand thanks! O Moon and little, little Stars! To think that a man should so shamelessly . . . Infamous liquor too. Ovid in exile drank no worse. Better. It was frozen. Alas! I had no ice. Good-night. I would introduce you to my wife were I sober—or she civilised.’

A native woman came out of the darkness of the room and began calling the man names, so I went away. He was the most interesting loafer that I had had the pleasure of knowing for a long time; and later on, he became a friend of mine. He was a tall, well-built, fair man, fearfully shaken with drink, and he looked nearer fifty than the thirty-five which, he said, was his real age. When a man begins to sink in India, and is not sent Home by his friends as soon as may be, he falls very low from a respectable point of view. By the time that he changes his creed, as did McIntosh, he is past redemption.

In most big cities natives will tell you of two or three Sahibs, generally low-caste, who have turned Hindu or Mussulman, and who live more or less as such. But it is not often that you can get to know them. As McIntosh himself used to say, ‘If I change my religion for my stomach’s sake, I do not seek to become a martyr to missionaries, nor am I anxious for notoriety.’

At the outset of acquaintance McIntosh warned me. ‘Remember this. I am not an object for charity. I require neither your money, your food, nor your cast-off raiment. I am that rare animal, a self-supporting drunkard. If you choose, I will smoke with you, for the tobacco of the bazars does not, I admit, suit my palate; and I will borrow any books which you may not specially value. It is more than likely that I shall sell them for bottles of excessively filthy country-liquors. In return, you shall share such hospitality as my house affords. Here is a charpoy on which two can sit, and it is possible that there may, from time to time, be food in that platter. Drink, unfortunately, you will find on the premises at any hour; and thus I make you welcome to all my poor establishment.’

I was admitted to the McIntosh household—I and my good tobacco. But nothing else. Unluckily, one cannot visit a loafer in the Serai by day. Friends buying horses would not understand it. Consequently, I was obliged to see McIntosh after dark. He laughed at this, and said simply, ‘You are perfectly right. When I enjoyed a position in society, rather higher than yours, I should have done exactly the same thing. Good Heavens! I was once’—he spoke as though he had fallen from the Command of a Regiment—‘an Oxford Man!’ This accounted for the reference to Charley Symonds’ stable.

‘You,’ said McIntosh slowly, ‘have not had that advantage; but, to outward appearance, you do not seem possessed of a craving for strong drinks. On the whole, I fancy that you are the luckier of the two. Yet I am not certain. You are—forgive my saying so even while I am smoking your excellent tobacco—painfully ignorant of many things.’

We were sitting together on the edge of his bedstead, for he owned no chairs, watching the horses being watered for the night, while the native woman was preparing dinner. I did not like being patronised by a loafer, but I was his guest for the time being, though he owned only one very torn alpaca coat and a pair of trousers made out of gunny-bags. He took the pipe out of his mouth, and went on judicially, ‘All things considered, I doubt whether you are the luckier. I do not refer to your extremely limited classical attainments, or your excruciating quantities, but to your gross ignorance of matters more immediately under your notice. That, for instance;’ he pointed to a woman cleaning a samovar near the well in the centre of the Serai. She was flicking the water out of the spout in regular cadenced jerks.

There are ways and ways of cleaning samovars. If you knew why she was doing her work in that particular fashion, you would know what the Spanish Monk meant when he said—

I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp—
In three sips the Arian frustrate,
While he drains his at one gulp—

and many other things which now are hidden from your eyes. However, Mrs. McIntosh has prepared dinner. Let us come and eat after the fashion of the people of the country—of whom, by the way, you know nothing.’

The native woman dipped her hand in the dish with us. This was wrong. The wife should always wait until the husband has eaten. McIntosh Jellaludin apologised, saying—

‘It is an English prejudice which I have not been able to overcome; and she loves me. Why, I have never been able to understand. I forgathered with her at Jullundur, three years ago, and she has remained with me ever since. I believe her to be moral, and know her to be skilled in cookery.’

He patted the woman’s head as he spoke, and she cooed softly. She was not pretty to look at.

McIntosh never told me what position he had held before his fall. He was, when sober, a scholar and a gentleman. When drunk, he was rather more of the first than the second. He used to get drunk about once a week for two days. On those occasions the native woman tended him while he raved in all tongues except his own. One day, indeed, he began reciting Atalanta in Calydon, and went through it to the end, beating time to the swing of the verse with a bedstead-leg. But he did most of his ravings in Greek or German. The man’s mind was a perfect rag-bag of useless things. Once, when he was beginning to get sober, he told me that I was the only rational being in the Inferno into which he had descended—a Virgil in the Shades, he said—and that, in return for my tobacco, he would, before he died, give me the materials of a new Inferno that should make me greater than Dante. Then he fell asleep on a horse-blanket and woke up quite calm.

‘Man,’ said he, ‘when you have reached the utter-most depths of degradation, little incidents which would vex a higher life are to you of no consequence. Last night my soul was among the Gods; but I make no doubt that my bestial body was writhing down here in the garbage.’

‘You were abominably drunk, if that’s what you mean,’ I said.

‘I was drunk—filthily drunk. I who am the son of a man with whom you have no concern—I who was once Fellow of a College whose buttery-hatch you have not seen — I was loathsomely drunk. But consider how lightly I am touched. It is nothing to me—less than nothing; for I do not even feel the headache which should be my portion. Now, in a higher life, how ghastly would have been my punishment, how bitter my repentance! Believe me, my friend with the neglected education, the highest is as the lowest—always supposing each degree extreme.’

He turned round on the blanket, put his head between his fists and continued—

‘On the Soul which I have lost and on the Conscience which I have killed, I tell you that I cannot feel! I am as the Gods, knowing good and evil, but untouched by either. Is this enviable or is it not?’

When a man has lost the warning of ‘next morning’s head’ he must be in a bad state. I answered, looking at McIntosh on the blanket, with his hair over his eyes and his lips blue-white, that I did not think the insensibility good enough.

‘For pity’s sake, don’t say that! I tell you it is good and most enviable. Think of my consolations!’

‘Have you so many, then, McIntosh?’

‘Certainly; your attempts at sarcasm, which is essentially the weapon of a cultured man, are crude. First, my attainments, my classical and literary knowledge, blurred, perhaps, by immoderate drinking—which reminds me that before my soul went to the Gods last night I sold the Dickering Horace you so kindly lent me. Ditta Mull the clothesman has it. It fetched ten annas, and may be redeemed for a rupee—but still infinitely superior to yours. Secondly, the abiding affection of Mrs. McIntosh, best of wives. Thirdly, a monument, more enduring than brass, which I have built up in the seven years of my degradation.’

He stopped here, and crawled across the room for a drink of water. He was very shaky and sick.

He referred several times to his ‘treasure’—some great possession that he owned—but I held this to be the raving of drink. He was as poor and as proud as he could be. His manner was not pleasant, but he knew enough about the natives, among whom seven years of his life had been spent, to make his acquaintance worth having. He used actually to laugh at Strickland as an ignorant man—‘ignorant West and East’—he said. His boast was, first, that he was an Oxford Man of rare and shining parts, which may or may not have been true—I did not know enough to check his statements; and, secondly, that he ‘had his hand on the pulse of native life’—which was a fact. As an Oxford man, he struck me as a prig: he was always throwing his education about. As a Mahommedan faquir—as McIntosh Jellaludin—he was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked several pounds of my tobacco, and taught me several ounces of things worth knowing; but he would never accept any gifts, not even when the cold weather came, and gripped the poor thin chest under the poor thin alpaca coat. He grew very angry, and said that I had insulted him, and that he was not going into hospital. He had lived like a beast and he would die rationally, like a man.

As a matter of fact, he died of pneumonia; and on the night of his death sent over a grubby note asking me to come and help him to die.

The native woman was weeping by the side of the bed. McIntosh, wrapped in a cotton cloth, was too weak to resent a fur coat being thrown over him. He was very active as far as his mind was concerned, and his eyes were blazing. When he had abused the Doctor who came with me so foully that the indignant old fellow left, he cursed me for a few minutes and calmed down.

Then he told his wife to fetch out ‘The Book’ from a hole in the wall. She brought out a big bundle, wrapped in the tail of a petticoat, of old sheets of miscellaneous notepaper, all numbered and covered with fine cramped writing. McIntosh ploughed his hand through the rubbish and stirred it up lovingly.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is my work—the Book of McIntosh Jellaludin, showing what he saw and how he lived, and what befell him and others; being also an account of the life and sins and death of Mother Maturin. What Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s book is to all other books on native life, will my work be to Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s!’

This, as will be conceded by any one who knows Mirza Murad Ali Beg’s book, was a sweeping statement. The papers did not look specially valuable; but McIntosh handled them as if they were currency-notes. Then said he slowly—

‘In despite the many weaknesses of your education, you have been good to me. I will speak of your tobacco when I reach the Gods. I owe you much thanks for many kindnesses. But I abominate indebtedness. For this reason I bequeath to you now the monument more enduring than brass—my one book—rude and imperfect in parts, but oh, how rare in others! I wonder if you will understand it. It is a gift more honourable than . . . Bah! where is my brain rambling to? You will mutilate it horribly. You will knock out the gems you call Latin quotations, you Philistine, and you will butcher the style to carve into your own jerky jargon; but you cannot destroy the whole of it. I bequeath it to you. Ethel . . . My brain again! . . . Mrs. McIntosh, bear witness that I give the Sahib all these papers. They would be of no use to you, Heart of my Heart; and I lay it upon you,’ he turned to me here, ‘that you do not let my book die in its present form. It is yours unconditionally—the story of McIntosh Jellaludin, which is not the story of McIntosh Jellaludin, but of a greater man than he, and of a far greater woman. Listen now! I am neither mad nor drunk! That book will make you famous.’

I said, ‘Thank you,’ as the native woman put the bundle into my arms.

‘My only baby!’ said McIntosh, with a smile. He was sinking fast, but he continued to talk as long as breath remained. I waited for the end; knowing that, in six cases out of ten, a dying man calls for his mother. He turned on his side and said—

‘Say how it came into your possession. No one will believe you, but my name, at least, will live. You will treat it brutally, I know you will. Some of it must go; the public are fools and prudish fools. I was their servant once. But do your mangling gently—very gently. It is a great work, and I have paid for it in seven years’ damnation.’

His voice stopped for ten or twelve breaths, and then he began mumbling a prayer of some kind in Greek. The native woman cried very bitterly. Lastly, he rose in bed and said, as loudly as slowly—‘Not guilty, my Lord!’

Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he died. The native woman ran into the Serai among the horses, and screamed and beat her breasts; for she had loved him.

Perhaps his last sentence in life told what McIntosh had once gone through; but, saving the big bundle of old sheets in the cloth, there was nothing in his room to say who or what he had been.

The papers were in a hopeless muddle.

Strickland helped me to sort them, and he said that the writer was either an extreme liar or a most wonderful person. He thought the former. One of these days you may be able to judge for yourselves. The bundle needed much expurgation, and was full of Greek nonsense at the head of the chapters, which has all been cut out.

If the thing is ever published, some one may perhaps remember this story, now printed as a safeguard to prove that McIntosh Jellaludin and not I myself wrote the Book of Mother Maturin.

I don’t want the Giant’s Robe to come true in my case.

Tiger! Tiger!

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What of the hunting, hunter bold?
        Brother, the watch was long and cold.
What of the quarry ye went to kill?
        Brother, he crops in the Jungle still.
Where is the power that made your pride?
        Brother, it ebbs from my flank and side.
Where is the haste that ye hurry by?
        Brother, I go to my lair—to die!

NOW we must go back to the first tale. When Mowgli left the wolf’s cave after the fight with the Pack at the Council Rock, he went down to the ploughed lands where the villagers lived, but he would not stop there because it was too near to the Jungle, and he knew that he had made at least one bad enemy at the Council. So he hurried on, keeping to the rough road that ran down the valley, and followed it at a steady jog-trot for nearly twenty miles, till he came to a country that he did not know. The valley opened out into a great plain dotted over with rocks and cut up by ravines. At one end stood a little village, and at the other the thick Jungle came down in a sweep to the grazing-grounds, and stopped there as though it had been cut off with a hoe. All over the plain, cattle and buffaloes were grazing, and when the little boys in charge of the herds saw Mowgli they shouted and ran away, and the yellow pariah dogs that hang about every Indian village barked. Mowgli walked on, for he was feeling hungry, and when he came to the village gate he saw the big thorn-bush that was drawn up before the gate at twilight pushed to one side.

‘Umph!’ he said, for he had come across more than one such barricade in his night rambles after things to eat. ‘So men are afraid of the People of the Jungle here also.’ He sat down by the gate, and when a man came out he stood up, opened his mouth, and pointed down it to show that he wanted food. The man stared, and ran back up the one street of the village shouting for the priest, who was a big, fat man dressed in white, with a red-and-yellow mark on his forehead. The priest came to the gate, and with him at least a hundred people, who stared and talked and shouted and pointed at Mowgli.

‘They have no manners, these Men-Folk,’ said Mowgli to himself. ‘Only the grey ape would behave as they do.’ So he threw back his long hair and frowned at the crowd.

‘What is there to be afraid of?’ said the priest. ‘Look at the marks on his arms and legs. They are the bites of wolves. He is but a wolf-child run away from the Jungle.’

Of course, in playing together, the cubs had often nipped Mowgli harder than they intended, and there were white scars all over his arms and legs. But he would have been the last person in the world to call these bites, for he knew what real biting meant.

‘Arré! Arré!’ said two or three women together. ‘To be bitten by wolves, poor child! He is a handsome boy. He has eyes like red fire. By my honour, Messua, he is not unlike thy boy that was taken by the tiger.’

‘Let me look,’ said a woman with heavy copper rings on her wrists and ankles, and she peered at Mowgli under the palm of her hand. ‘Indeed he is not. He is thinner, but he has the very look of my boy.’

The priest was a clever man, and he knew that Messua was wife to the richest villager in the place. So he looked up at the sky for a minute, and said solemnly: . ‘What the Jungle has taken the Jungle has restored. Take the boy into thy house, my sister, and forget not to honour the priest who sees so far into the lives of men.’

‘By the Bull that bought me,’ said Mowgli to himself, ‘but all this talking is like another looking-over by the Pack! Well, if I am a man, a man I must become.’

The crowd parted as the woman beckoned Mowgli to her hut, where there was a red-lacquered bedstead, a great earthen grain-chest with curious raised patterns on it, half-a-dozen copper cooking-pots, an image of a Hindu god in a little alcove, and on the wall a real looking-glass, such as they sell at the country fairs.

She gave him a long drink of milk and some bread, and then she laid her hand on his head and looked into his eyes; for she thought that perhaps he might be her real son come back from the Jungle where the tiger had taken him. So she said: ‘Nathoo, O Nathoo!’ Mowgli did not show that he knew the name. ‘Dost thou not remember the day when I gave thee thy new shoes?’ She touched his foot, and it was almost as hard as horn. ‘No,’ she said sorrowfully, ‘those feet have never worn shoes, but thou art very like my Nathoo, and thou shalt be my son.’

Mowgli was uneasy, because he had never been under a roof before; but as he looked at the thatch, he saw that he could tear it out any time if he wanted to get away, and that the window had no fastenings. ‘What is the good of a man,’ he said to himself at last, ‘if he does not understand man’s talk? Now I am as silly and dumb as a man would be with us in the Jungle. I must learn their talk.’

It was not for fun that he had learned while he was with the wolves to imitate the challenge of bucks in the Jungle and the grunt of the little wild pig. So as soon as Messua pronounced a word Mowgli would imitate it almost perfectly, and before dark he had learned the names of many things in the hut.

There was a difficulty at bedtime, because Mowgli would not sleep under anything that looked so like a panther-trap as that hut, and when they shut the door he went through the window. ‘Give him his will,’ said Messua’s husband. ‘Remember he can never till now have slept on a bed. If he is indeed sent in the place of our son he will not run away.’

So Mowgli stretched himself in some long, clean grass at the edge of the field, but before he had closed his eyes a soft grey nose poked him under the chin.

‘Phew!’ said Grey Brother (he was the eldest of Mother Wolf’s cubs). ‘This is a poor reward for following thee twenty miles. Thou smellest of wood-smoke and cattle—altogether like a man already. Wake, Little Brother; I bring news.’

‘Are all well in the Jungle?’ said Mowgli, hugging him.

‘All except the wolves that were burned with the Red Flower. Now, listen. Shere Khan has gone away to hunt far off till his coat grows again, for he is badly singed. When he returns he swears that he will lay thy bones in the Waingunga.’

‘There are two words to that. I also have made a little promise. But news is always good. I am tired to-night,—very tired with new things, Grey Brother,—but bring me the news always.’

‘Thou wilt not forget that thou art a wolf? Men will not make thee forget?’ said Grey Brother anxiously.

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‘Never. I will always remember that I love thee and all in our cave; but also I will always remember that I have been cast out of the Pack.’

‘And that thou mayest be cast out of another pack. Men are only men, Little Brother, and their talk is like the talk of frogs in a pond. When I come down here again, I will wait for thee in the bamboos at the edge of the grazing-ground.’

For three months after that night Mowgli hardly ever left the village gate, he was so busy learning the ways and customs of men. First he had to wear a cloth round him, which annoyed him horribly; and then he had to learn about money, which he did not in the least understand, and about ploughing, of which he did not see the use. Then the little children in the village made him very angry. Luckily, the Law of the Jungle had taught him to keep his temper, for in the Jungle life and food depend on keeping your temper; but when they made fun of him because he would not play games or fly kites, or because he mispronounced some word, only the knowledge that it was unsportsmanlike to kill little naked cubs kept him from picking them up and breaking them in two.

He did not know his own strength in the least. In the Jungle he knew he was weak compared with the beasts, but in the village people said that he was as strong as a bull.

And Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that caste makes between man and man. When the potter’s donkey slipped in the clay-pit, Mowgli hauled it out by the tail, and helped to stack the pots for their journey to the market at Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for the potter is a low-caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priest scolded him, Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey, too, and the priest told Messua’s husband that Mowgli had better be set to work as soon as possible; and the village head-man told Mowgli that he would have to go out with the buffaloes next day, and herd them while they grazed. No one was more pleased than Mowgli; and that night, because he had been appointed, as it were, a servant of the village, he went off to a circle that met every evening on a masonry platform under a great fig-tree. It was the village club, and the head-man and the watchman and the barber (who knew all the gossip of the village), and old Buldeo, the village hunter, who owned a Tower musket, met and smoked. The monkeys sat and talked in the upper branches, and there was a hole under the platform where a cobra lived, and he had his little platter of milk every night because he was sacred; and the old men sat around the tree and talked, and pulled at the big hookahs [waterpipes], till far into the night. They told wonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts; and Buldeo told even more wonderful ones of the ways of beasts in the jungle, till the eyes of the children sitting outside the circle bulged out of their heads. Most of the tales were about animals, for the jungle was always at their door. The deer and the wild pig grubbed up their crops, and now and again the tiger carried off a man at twilight, within sight of the village gates.

Mowgli, who, naturally, knew something about what they were talking of, had to cover his face not to show that he was laughing, while Buldeo, the Tower musket across his knees, climbed on from one wonderful story to another, and Mowgli’s shoulders shook.

Buldeo was explaining how the tiger that had carried away Messua’s son was a ghost-tiger, and his body was inhabited by the ghost of a wicked old money-lender, who had died some years ago. ‘And I know that this is true,’ he said, ‘because Purun Dass always limped from the blow that he got in a riot when his account-books were burned, and the tiger that I speak of, he limps, too, for the tracks of his pads are unequal.’

‘True, true; that must be the truth,’ said the greybeards, nodding together.

‘Are all these tales such cobwebs and moon talk?’ said Mowgli. ‘That tiger limps because he was born lame, as every one knows. To talk of the soul of a money-lender in a beast that never had the courage of a jackal is child’s talk.’

Buldeo was speechless with surprise for a moment, and the head-man stared.

‘Oho! It is the Jungle brat, is it?’ said Buldeo. ‘If thou art so wise, better bring his hide to Khanhiwara, for the Government has set a hundred rupees on his life. Better still, do not talk when thy elders speak.’

Mowgli rose to go. ‘All the evening I have lain here listening,’ he called back over his shoulder, ‘and, except once or twice, Buldeo has not said one word of truth concerning the Jungle, which is at his very doors. How, then, shall I believe the tales of ghosts and gods and goblins which he says he has seen?’

‘It is full time that boy went to herding,’ said the head-man, while Buldeo puffed and snorted at Mowgli’s impertinence.

The custom of most Indian villages is for a few boys to take the cattle and buffaloes out to graze in the early morning, and bring them back at night; and the very cattle that would trample a white man to death allow themselves to be banged and bullied and shouted at by children that hardly come up to their noses. So long as the boys keep with the herds they are safe, for not even the tiger will charge a mob of cattle. But if they straggle to pick flowers or hunt lizards, they are sometimes carried off. Mowgli went through the village street in the dawn, sitting on the back of Rama, the great herd bull; and the slaty-blue buffaloes, with their long, backward-sweeping horns and savage eyes, rose out of their byres, one by one, and followed him, and Mowgli made it very clear to the children with him that he was the master. He beat the buffaloes with a long, polished bamboo, and told Kamya, one of the boys, to graze the cattle by themselves, while he went on with the buffaloes, and to be very careful not to stray away from the herd.

An Indian grazing-ground is all rocks and scrub and tussocks and little ravines, among which the herds scatter and disappear. The buffaloes generally keep to the pools and muddy places, where they lie wallowing or basking in the warm mud for hours. Mowgli drove them on to the edge of the plain where the Waingunga River came out of the Jungle; then he dropped from Rama’s neck, trotted off to a bamboo clump, and found Grey Brother. ‘Ah!’ said Grey Brother. ‘I have waited here very many days. What is the meaning of this cattle-herding work?’

‘It is an order,’ said Mowgli. ‘I am a village herd for a while. What news of Shere Khan?’

‘He has come back to this country, and has waited here a long time for thee. Now he has gone off again, for the game is scarce. But he means to kill thee.’

‘Very good,’ said Mowgli. ‘So long as he is away do thou or one of the four brothers sit on that rock, so that I can see thee as I come out of the village. When he comes back wait for me in the ravine by the dhâk-tree in the centre of the plain. We need not walk into Shere Khan’s mouth.’

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Then Mowgli picked out a shady place, and lay down and slept while the buffaloes grazed round him. Herding in India is one of the laziest things in the world. The cattle move and crunch, and lie down, and move on again, and they do not even low. They only grunt, and the buffaloes very seldom say anything, but get down into the muddy pools one after another, and work their way into the mud till only their noses and staring china-blue eyes show above the surface, and there they lie like logs. The sun makes the rocks dance in the heat, and the herd-children hear one kite (never any more) whistling almost out of sight overhead, and they know that if they died, or a cow died, that kite would sweep down, and the next kite miles away would see him drop and would follow, and the next, and the next, and almost before they were dead there would be a score of hungry kites come out of nowhere. Then they sleep and wake and sleep again, and weave little baskets of dried grass and put grasshoppers in them; or catch two praying-mantises and make them fight; or string a necklace of red and black jungle-nuts; or watch a lizard basking on a rock, or a snake hunting a frog near the wallows. Then they sing long, long songs with odd native quavers at the end of them, and the day seems longer than most people’s whole lives, and perhaps they make a mud castle with mud figures of men and horses and buffaloes, and put reeds into the men’s hands, and pretend that they are kings and the figures are their armies, or that they are gods to be worshipped. Then evening comes, and the children call, and the buffaloes lumber up out of the sticky mud with noises like gunshots going off one after the other, and they all string across the grey plain back to the twinkling village lights.

Day after day Mowgli would lead the buffaloes out to their wallows, and day after day he would see Grey Brother’s back a mile and a half away across the plain (so he knew that Shere Khan had not come back), and day after day he would lie on the grass listening to the noises round him, and dreaming of old days in the Jungle. If Shere Khan had made a false step with his lame paw up in the Jungles by the Waingunga, Mowgli would have heard him in those long, still mornings.

At last a day came when he did not see Grey Brother at the signal-place, and he laughed and headed the buffaloes for the ravine by the dhâk-tree, which was all covered with golden-red flowers. There sat Grey Brother, every bristle on his back lifted.

‘He has hidden for a month to throw thee off thy guard. He crossed the ranges last night with Tabaqui, hot-foot on thy trail,’ said the wolf, panting.

Mowgli frowned. ‘I am not afraid of Shere Khan, but Tabaqui is very cunning.’

‘Have no fear,’ said Grey Brother, licking his lips a little. ‘I met Tabaqui in the dawn. Now he is telling all his wisdom to the kites, but he told me everything before I broke his back. Shere Khan’s plan is to wait for thee at the village gate this evening—for thee and for no one else. He is lying up now in the big dry ravine of the Waingunga.’

‘Has he eaten to-day, or does he hunt empty?’ said Mowgli, for the answer meant life or death to him.

‘He killed at dawn,—a pig,—and he has drunk too. Remember, Shere Khan could never fast, even for the sake of revenge.’

‘Oh! Fool, fool! What a cub’s cub it is! Eaten and drunk too, and he thinks that I shall wait till he has slept! Now, where does he lie up? If there were but ten of us we might pull him down as he lies. These buffaloes will not charge unless they wind him, and I cannot speak their language. Can we get behind his track so that they may smell it?’

‘He swam far down the Waingunga to cut that off,’ said Grey Brother.

‘Tabaqui told him that, I know. He would never have thought of it alone.’ Mowgli stood with his finger in his mouth, thinking. ‘The big ravine of the Waingunga. That opens out on the plain not half a mile from here. I can take the herd round through the Jungle to the head of the ravine and then sweep down—but he would slink out at the foot. We must block that end. Grey Brother, canst thou cut the herd in two for me?’

‘Not I, perhaps—but I have brought a wise helper.’ Grey Brother trotted off and dropped into a hole. Then there lifted up a huge grey head that Mowgli knew well, and the hot air was filled with the most desolate cry of all the Jungle—the hunting-howl of a wolf at midday.

‘Akela! Akela!’ said Mowgli, clapping his hands. ‘I might have known that thou wouldst not forget me. We have a big work in hand. Cut the herd in two, Akela. Keep the cows and calves together, and the bulls and the plough-buffaloes by themselves.’

The two wolves ran, ladies’-chain fashion, in and out of the herd, which snorted and threw up its head, and separated into two clumps. In one the cow-buffaloes stood, with their calves in the centre, and glared and pawed, ready, if a wolf would only stay still, to charge down and trample the life out of him. In the other the bulls and the young bulls snorted and stamped; but, though they looked more imposing, they were much less dangerous, for they had no calves to protect. No six men could have divided the herd so neatly.

‘What orders?’ panted Akela. ‘They are trying to join again.’

Mowgli slipped on to Rama’s back. ‘Drive the bulls away to the left, Akela. Grey Brother, when we are gone, hold the cows together, and drive them into the foot of the ravine.’

‘How far?’ said Grey Brother, panting and snapping.

‘Till the sides are higher than Shere Khan can jump,’ shouted Mowgli. ‘Keep them there till we come down.’ The bulls swept off as Akela bayed, and Grey Brother stopped in front of the cows. They charged down on him, and he ran just before them to the foot of the ravine, as Akela drove the bulls far to the left.

‘Well done! Another charge and they are fairly started. Careful, now—careful, Akela. A snap too much, and the bulls will charge. Huyah! This is wilder work than driving black-buck. Didst thou think these creatures could move so swiftly?’ Mowgli called.

‘I have—have hunted these too in my time,’ gasped Akela in the dust. ‘Shall I turn them into the Jungle?’

‘Ay, turn! Swiftly turn them! Rama is mad with rage. Oh, if I could only tell him what I need of him to-day!’

The bulls were turned to the right this time, and crashed into the standing thicket. The other herd-children, watching with the cattle half a mile away, hurried to the village as fast as their legs could carry them, crying that the buffaloes had gone mad and run away.

But Mowgli’s plan was simple enough. All he wanted to do was to make a big circle uphill and get at the head of the ravine, and then take the bulls down it and catch Shere Khan between the bulls and the cows; for he knew that after a meal and a full drink Shere Khan would not be in any condition to fight or to clamber up the sides of the ravine. He was soothing the buffaloes now by voice, and Akela had dropped far to the rear, only whimpering once or twice to hurry the rear-guard. It was a long, long circle, for they did not wish to get too near the ravine and give Shere Khan warning. At last Mowgli rounded up the bewildered herd at the head of the ravine

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on a grassy patch that sloped steeply down to the ravine itself. From that height you could see across the tops of the trees down to the plain below; but what Mowgli looked at was the sides of the ravine, and he saw with a great deal of satisfaction that they ran nearly straight up and down, while the vines and creepers that hung over them would give no foothold to a tiger who wanted to get out.

‘Let them breathe, Akela,’ he said, holding up his hand. ‘They have not winded him yet. Let them breathe. I must tell Shere Khan who comes. We have him in the trap.’

He put his hands to his mouth and shouted down the ravine,—it was almost like shouting down a , tunnel,—and the echoes jumped from rock to rock.

After a long time there came back the drawling, sleepy snarl of a full-fed tiger just wakened.

‘Who calls?’ said Shere Khan, and a splendid peacock fluttered up out of the ravine screeching.

‘I, Mowgli. Cattle thief, it is time to come to the Council Rock! Down—hurry them down, Akela! Down, Rama, down!’

The herd paused for an instant at the edge of the slope, but Akela gave tongue in the full hunting-yell, and they pitched over one after the other, just as steamers shoot rapids, the sand and stones spurting up round them. Once started, there was no chance of stopping, and before they were fairly in the bed of the ravine Rama winded Shere Khan and bellowed.

‘Ha! Ha!’ said Mowgli, on his back. ‘Now thou knowest!’ and the torrent of black horns, foaming muzzles, and staring eyes whirled down the ravine like boulders in flood-time; the weaker buffaloes being shouldered out to the sides of the ravine, where they tore through the creepers. They knew what the business was before them—the terrible charge of the buffalo-herd, against which no tiger can hope to stand. Shere Khan heard the thunder of their hoofs, picked himself up, and lumbered down the ravine, looking from side to side for some way of escape; but the walls of the ravine were straight, and he had to keep on, heavy with his dinner and his drink, willing to do anything rather than fight. The herd splashed through the pool he had just left, bellowing till the narrow cut rang. Mowgli heard an answering bellow from the foot of the ravine, saw Shere Khan turn (the tiger knew if the worst came to the worst it was better to meet the bulls than the cows with their calves), and then Rama tripped, stumbled, and went on again over something soft, and, with the bulls at his heels, crashed full into the other herd, while the weaker buffaloes were lifted clean off their feet by the shock of the meeting. That charge carried both herds out into the plain, goring and stamping and snorting. Mowgli watched his time, and slipped off Rama’s neck, laying about him right and left with his stick.

‘Quick, Akela! Break them up. Scatter them, or they will be fighting one another. Drive them away, Akela. Hai, Rama! Hai! hai! hai! my children. Softly now, softly! It is all over.’

Akela and Grey Brother ran to and fro nipping the buffaloes’ legs, and though the herd wheeled once to charge up the ravine again, Mowgli managed to turn Rama, and the others followed him to the wallows.

Shere Khan needed no more trampling. He was dead, and the kites were coming for him already.

‘Brothers, that was a dog’s death,’ said Mowgli, feeling for the knife he always carried in a sheath round his neck now that he lived with men. ‘But he would never have shown fight. His hide will look well on the Council Rock. We must get to work swiftly.’

A boy trained among men would never have dreamed of skinning a ten-foot tiger alone, but Mowgli knew better than any one else how an animal’s skin is fitted on, and how it can be taken off. But it was hard work, and Mowgli slashed and tore and grunted for an hour, while the wolves lolled out their tongues, or came forward and tugged as he ordered them.

Presently a hand fell on his shoulder, and looking up he saw Buldeo with the Tower musket. The children had told the village about the buffalo stampede, and Buldeo went out angrily, only too anxious to correct Mowgli for not taking better care of the herd. The wolves dropped out of sight as soon as they saw the man coming.

‘What is this folly?’ said Buldeo angrily. ‘To think that thou canst skin a tiger! Where did the buffaloes kill him? It is the Lame Tiger, too, and there is a hundred rupees on his head. Well, well, we will overlook thy letting the herd run off, and perhaps I will give thee one of the rupees of the reward when I have taken the skin to Khanhiwara.’ He fumbled in his waist-cloth for flint and steel, and stooped down to singe Shere Khan’s whiskers. Most native hunters singe a tiger’s whiskers to prevent his ghost haunting them.

‘Hum!’ said Mowgli, half to himself as he ripped back the skin of a fore-paw. ‘So thou wilt take the hide to Khanhiwara for the reward, and perhaps give me one rupee? Now it is in my mind that I need the skin for my own use. Heh! old man, take away that fire!’

‘What talk is this to the chief hunter of the village? Thy luck and the stupidity of thy buffaloes have helped thee to this kill. The tiger has just fed, or he would have gone twenty miles by this time. Thou canst not even skin him properly, little beggar-brat, and forsooth I, Buldeo, must be told not to singe his whiskers. Mowgli, I will not give thee one anna of the reward, but only a very big beating. Leave the carcass!’

‘By the Bull that bought me,’ said Mowgli, who was trying to get at the shoulder, ‘must I stay babbling to an old ape all noon? Here, Akela, this man plagues me.’

Buldeo, who was still stooping over Shere Khan’s head, found himself sprawling on the grass, with a grey wolf standing over him, while Mowgli went on skinning as though he were alone in all India.

‘Ye-es,’ he said, between his teeth. ‘Thou art altogether right, Buldeo. Thou wilt never give me one anna of the reward. There is an old war between this lame tiger and myself—a very old war, and—I have won.’

To do Buldeo justice, if he had been ten years younger he would have taken his chance with Akela had he met the wolf in the woods; but a wolf who obeyed the orders of this boy who had private wars with man-eating tigers was not a common animal. It was sorcery, magic of the worst kind, thought Buldeo, and he wondered whether the amulet round his neck would protect him. He lay as still as still, expecting every minute to see Mowgli turn into a tiger, too.

‘Maharaj! Great King!’ he said at last, in a husky whisper.

‘Yes,’ said Mowgli, without turning his head, chuckling a little.

‘I am an old man. I did not know that thou wast anything more than a herd-boy. May I rise up and go away, or will thy servant tear me to pieces?’

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‘Go, and peace go with thee. Only, another time do not meddle with my game. Let him go, Akela.’

Buldeo hobbled away to the village as fast as he could, looking back over his shoulder in case Mowgli should change into something terrible. When he got to the village he told a tale of magic and enchantment and sorcery that made the priest look very grave.

Mowgli went on with his work, but it was nearly twilight before he and the wolves had drawn the great gay skin clear of the body.

‘Now we must hide this and take the buffaloes home! Help me to herd them, Akela.’

The herd rounded up in the misty twilight, and when they got near the village Mowgli saw lights, and heard the conches and bells blowing and banging. Half the village seemed to be waiting for him by the gate. ‘That is because I have killed Shere Khan,’ he said to himself; but a shower of stones whistled about his ears, and the villagers shouted: ‘Sorcerer! Wolf’s brat Jungle-demon! Go away! Get hence quickly, or the priest will turn thee into a wolf again. Shoot, Buldeo, shoot!’

The old Tower musket went off with a bang, and a young buffalo bellowed in pain.

‘More sorcery!’ shouted the villagers. ‘He can turn bullets. Buldeo, that was thy buffalo.’

‘Now what is this?’ said Mowgli, bewildered, as the stones flew thicker.

‘They are not unlike the Pack, these brothers of thine,’ said Akela, sitting down composedly. ‘It is in my head that, if bullets mean anything, they would cast thee out.’

‘Wolf! Wolf’s cub! Go away!’ shouted the priest, waving a sprig of the sacred tulsi plant.

‘Again? Last time it was because I was a man. This time it is because I am a wolf. Let us go, Akela.’

A woman—it was Messua—ran across to the herd, and cried: ‘Oh, my son, my son! They say thou art a sorcerer who can turn himself into a beast at will. I do not believe, but go away or they will kill thee. Buldeo says thou art a wizard, but I know thou hast avenged Nathoo’s death.’

‘Come back, Messua!’ shouted the crowd. ‘Come back, or we will stone thee.’

Mowgli laughed a little short ugly laugh, for a stone had hit him in the mouth. ‘Run back, Messua. This is one of the foolish tales they tell under the big tree at dusk. I have at least paid for thy son’s life. Farewell; and run quickly, for I shall send the herd in more swiftly than their brickbats. I am no wizard, Messua. Farewell!’

‘Now, once more, Akela,’ he cried. ‘Bring the herd in.’

The buffaloes were anxious enough to get to the village. They hardly needed Akela’s yell, but charged through the gate like a whirlwind, scattering the crowd right and left.

‘Keep count!’ shouted Mowgli scornfully. ‘It may be that I have stolen one of them. Keep count, for I will do your herding no more. Fare you well, children of men, and thank Messua that I do not come in with my wolves and hunt you up and down your street.’

He turned on his heel and walked away with the Lone Wolf; and as he looked up at the stars he felt happy. ‘No more sleeping in traps for me, Akela. Let us get Shere Khan’s skin and go away. No; we will not hurt the village, for Messua was kind to me.’

When the moon rose over the plain, making it look all milky, the horrified villagers saw Mowgli, with two wolves at his heels and a bundle on his head, trotting across at the steady wolf’s trot that eats up the long miles like fire. Then they banged the temple bells and blew the conches louder than ever; and Messua cried, and Buldeo embroidered the story of his adventures in the jungle, till he ended by saying that Akela stood up on his hind legs and talked like a man.

The moon was just going down when Mowgli and the two wolves came to the hill of the Council Rock, and they stopped at Mother Wolf’s cave.

‘They have cast me out from the Man-Pack, Mother,’ shouted Mowgli, ‘but I come with the hide of Shere Khan to keep my word.’ Mother Wolf walked stiffly from the cave with the cubs behind her, and her eyes glowed as she saw the skin.

‘I told him on that day, when he crammed his head and shoulders into this cave, hunting for thy life, Little Frog—I told him that the hunter would be the hunted. It is well done.’

‘Little Brother, it is well done,’ said a deep voice in the thicket. ‘We were lonely in the jungle without thee,’ and Bagheera came running to Mowgli’s bare feet. They clambered up the Council Rock together, and Mowgli spread the skin out on the flat stone where Akela used to sit, and pegged it down with four slivers of bamboo and Akela lay down upon it, and called the old call to the Council, ‘Look—look well, O Wolves!’ exactly as he had called when Mowgli was first brought there.

Ever since Akela had been deposed, the Pack had been without a leader, hunting and fighting at their own pleasure. But they answered the call from habit, and some of them were lame from the traps they had fallen into, and some limped from shot-wounds, and some were mangy from eating bad food, and many were missing; but they came to the Council Rock, all that were left of them, and saw Shere Khan’s striped hide on the rock, and the huge claws dangling at the end of the empty, dangling feet. It was then that Mowgli made up a song without any rhymes, a song that came up into his throat all by itself, and he shouted it aloud, leaping up and down on the rattling skin, and beating time with his heels till he had no more breath left, while Grey Brother and Akela howled between the verses.

‘Look well, O Wolves! Have I kept my word?’ said Mowgli when he had finished; and the wolves bayed, ‘Yes,’ and one tattered wolf howled:—

‘Lead us again, O Akela. Lead us again, O Man-cub, for we be sick of this lawlessness, and we would be the Free People once more.’

‘Nay,’ purred Bagheera, ‘that may not be. When ye are full-fed, the madness may come upon ye again. Not for nothing are ye called the Free People. Ye fought for freedom, and it is. yours. Eat it, O Wolves.’

‘Man-Pack and Wolf-Pack have cast me out,’ said Mowgli. ‘Now I will hunt alone in the jungle.’

‘And we will hunt with thee,’ said the four cubs.

So Mowgli went away and hunted with the four cubs in the Jungle from that day on. But he was not always alone, because years afterward he became a man and married.

But that is a story for grown-ups.

The Tie

[a short tale]

This tale was written so long ago that I have honestly forgotten how much of it, if any, may be my own and how much is in Christopher Mervyn’s own words. But it is certain that Mervyn is dead, with Blore and Warrender. Macworth died ten years ago of tubercle after gas. Morrison Haylock’s father is a Peer of the Realm, and every trace of the 26th Battalion (Birdfanciers), Welland and Withan Rifles, has vanished. Nothing, unless some sort of useless moral, remains of a tale of 1915.

MEN, in war, will instinctively act as they have been taught to do in peace—for a certain time. The wise man is he who knows when that time is up. Mr. Morrison Haylock (Vertue and Pavey, Contractors, E.C.) did not know. But I give the tale, with a few omissions for decency’s sake, from the pen of Christopher Mervyn, anciently a schoolmaster of an ancient foundation, and later Lieutenant in the 26th (Birdfanciers) Battalion, Welland and Withan Rifles, quartered at Blagstowe. He wrote, being then second Lieutenant:—. . . We older men have learned most. It is hard for anyone over thirty, with what he was used to think the rudiments of a mind, to absorb the mechanics of militarism. My Lieutenant, aged twenty-two, says to me:—‘The more civilian rot a man has in his head, the less use he is as a subaltern.’ He is quite right. I make mistakes which, a year ago, I should have called a child of sixteen a congenital idiot for perpetrating. I am told so with oaths and curses and that sort of sarcasm (I recognise it now) which I used to launch at the heads of junior forms. So I die daily, but, I believe, am being slowly reborn… .

Macworth tells me he has told you of our little affair with Haylock, the unjust caterer, and that you propose to dress it up in the public interest. Don’t! The undraped facts, as I shall give them to you, are far beyond anything in the range of your art. I suppose I ought to be ashamed of my share in the row, but I have dug up the remnant of my civilian conscience. It is quite impenitent.

. . . The awful food for which the officers’ mess pays six shillings a head! You say things are as bad in other messes under other contractors, but that is Satan’s own argument—the arch-excuse for inefficiency. You are wise enough never to break bread with us, so I can’t make you realise the extraordinary and composite vileness of our meals nor the ‘knotted horrors of the AngloParisienne’ menus—Jambons à la Grecque, for instance, which are clods of rancid bacon on pats of green dirt, supposed to be spinach; or our deep yellow blancmange, daubed with pink sauce that tastes of cat. Food is the vital necessity to men in hard work. One comes to lunch and dinner—breakfast is always a farce—with the primitive emotions, and when, week after week, the food is not only uneatable but actively poisonous, as our sardine savouries are, one’s emotions become more than primitive. I’m prepared to suffer for my country, but ptomaine poisoning isn’t cricket!

As you know, our battalion is quartered in Blagstowe Gaol, a vast improvement on huts. We should have been quite content had they only given us prisoners’ food. We tried every remedy our civilian minds could suggest. We threatened our mess-steward, who was merely insolent. We pleaded and implored. We tried to write to the papers, but here the law of libel interfered. My platoon sergeant (he’s a partner in Healey and Butts, solicitors) expounded it to us. The C.O. wrote officially to the directors of that infernal tripeshop, Haylock, Vertue, and Pavey. The rest of us weighed in with a round-robin. I composed it. Not half a bad bit of English either. We begged to have our army rations given us, ‘simple of themselves,’ but by some devilish chicane they were all mixed up, we were told, in the Jambons à la Grecque and the catty blancmange and couldn’t be dissected out. . . .

If a man is not properly fed, he automatically takes to drink. I didn’t know this till I did. I steadily overdrank for a fortnight out of pure hunger. I can hold my liquor, but it isn’t fair on the youngsters, my seniors. . . .

On account of some scare or other, we had to furnish pickets to hold up all cars on the London road, take owners’ names and addresses, and check drivers’ licences. My picket was at the south entrance to the town, close to the main gate of the Gaol, and out of pure zeal and bad temper, I had put up a barricade made of a scaffold-pole resting on a baker’s cart at one end and on a cement barrel at the other. About nine o’clock a natty little grey and black self-driven coupe came from Brighton way at the rate of knots. It didn’t brake soon enough after the outlying sentry had warned it of my barricade, and so knocked my scaffoldingpole down. Very good dependence for a quarrel, even before the driver gave me his name, which he did at the top of his voice. He sat in the glare of his own electrics with an Old E.H.W. School tie on his false bosom, bawling: ‘I’m Haylock. Carry on, you men! I tell you, I’m Haylock.’ He is one of the push-and-go type—with a lot of rib-fat—not semitic, but the flower of the Higher Counterjumpery, by Transatlantic out of Top-Hat. He was in a hurry; ‘hustling’ I presume. I was monolithically military and—glory be!—he hadn’t his licence on him. My duty as second Lieutenant was clear. No licence, no passage, and ‘Come to the guard-room for examination.’ Then, to put it coarsely, he broke loose. In his pauses, Private Gillock, who poses as a wit, was stage-whispering me for leave to ‘put a shot into his radiator.’ (The New Armies are horrid quick on the trigger.) I dismounted him from his wheel, detailed Gillock to drive—he mangled the gears consumedly—and ran the whole confection into the guard-room, which, when the Gaol we inhabit is at work, is the condemned cell. I was perfectly sober at the time—no thanks to Haylock and his minions. I was savage, though not murderous, from semi-starvation and indigestion. I was glad to have some means of honourably annoying him, but I assure you that not till the lock of the condemned cell clicked, and I realised that this purveyor of filthy delicatessen was at my mercy, did my real self wake up and sing. I went to the anteroom and told them that God had delivered to us Morrison Haylock. We all ran out to the condemned cell. No one spoke a word. That is how revolutions are made. I unlocked the door and—condemned cells are remorselessly lighted—there sat Haylock on the cot behind his flaming O.E.H.W. tie. At least, that was our united impression afterwards. As you know, it’s the deuce and all of a tie, invented to match that school’s attitude towards life and taste and the Eternal Verities.

Anyhow, it fetched us up dead. We all looked at Mackworth, who’s an O.E.H.W., though a very junior lieutenant. The door was shut; and it’s sound-tight for reasons connected with the last nights of the condemned. Mackworth took charge. He began ‘What was your House at school?’ Haylock gave it with a smile. He thought—but he couldn’t have really—that he’d fallen among friends. ‘What’s your name?’ Mackworth went on in the prefectorial, which is the orderly-room, voice. Haylock gave that too, quite perkily. I expect his suborned press would call him ‘breezy’ and ‘genial.’

‘Is it?’ said Mackworth. ‘Then take that!’ and he smacked the brute’s head—a full open handed smite, just as one smacks a chap who isn’t big enough to beat. It was sudden, I admit, but as inevitable as the highest art, and it carried conviction and atmosphere at once, for Haylock yapped and his hand went up to the hurt place absolutely on the old school lines. Then Norgate, who is a corn-factor in a solid way and my very rude Company Captain, pulled the hand down, and gave him another slap on the chops. Warrender and Blore, boys under twenty-two, but my seniors, followed, and I finished up with a judicial stinger. Someone said, ‘There!’ in the very tone of virtuous youth (forgive the alliteration), and everyone felt that justice had been done. Even Haylock did, for all the grown-man dropped from him too, and he snuffled: ‘What’s that for?’ Fat Norgate, who is forty if a day, stood in front of him with a ready hand and shouted: ‘You jolly well know what it’s for.’

To him, Haylock trying to put his tie and collar straight (how well one remembers the attitude!) ‘No, I don’t. And, anyhow, I can’t be supposed to look after ’em all.’

Norgate (triumphantly to the rest of us): ‘That proves him a liar. He said he doesn’t know what it’s for.’ Not one of us by the way had uttered a word about our grievance till then.

Me (ferociously clutching my sword in lieu of a cane): ‘Haylock, you’re a dirty little thief.’ I wasn’t a second Lieutenant. I wasn’t even a beak any more. I was just starving, outraged Boy.

Haylock (with equal directness): ‘Ugh! That’s what you think, you big brute! I don’t get much out of it. I wish to God I had never touched the rotten contracts.’

‘That’s confession and avoidance,’ said my platoon sergeant, of Healey and Butts. He’d slipped in with us, professionally and gratuitously as he explained, to give legal colour to the proceedings. But we weren’t legal for the moment. Then Mackworth, whom we all regarded as head prefect in the matter, went on: ‘Nobody asked you to touch ’em. You did it for your own beastly profits, and you’ve got to look after our grub properly or you’ll be toed all round the parade-ground.’

I give the exact words. Then we all began to talk at once, each man recalling fragments of dreadful menus and what followed on ’em. Silence is the Mother of Revolution, but Speech is the Father of Atrocities. The more we dwelt on our wrongs, the redder we saw, but—I stick to it—that flaming Old E.H.W. tie saved and steadied us.

Haylock, who was blue-scared, backed into a corner. His knuckles weren’t in his eyes, but that was the effect he produced. He still had enough rags of speech left to assure us that he was on his way down to investigate our complaints when I arrested him. I said—I mean, I roared—‘What a deliberate lie! You were bunking up to town as hard as you could go when I collared you.’

Omnes (diverted for the moment from murder) ‘Oh, you damned liar!’

Haylock: ‘I’m not, I tell you.’

Omnes: ‘Shut up. You are.’

Another pause. Then Norgate: ‘Well, hurry up! What are you going to do about it?’

Haylock: ‘I’ll speak to my agents.’

Mackworth: ‘Swear you will. At once.’

Haylock: ‘I swear I will. Right now.’

Me (and it’s not my fault that I love English): ‘None of your Transatlantic slang here. Say “at once”.’

Haylock: ‘At once. At once! I’ll do it the minute I get to town. I swear I will.’

That seemed enough for us seniors (I speak of age, not rank), but we hadn’t allowed for the necessary cruelty (a wise provision of nature) of the young. Warrender, my lieutenant, and Blore, another angry child, said that Haylock must have supper with us before he left. They indicated mess cake, what (and it was much) was left over of the eternal blancmange, a sardine savoury, and the mess sherry. We protested. They said he deserved to be poisoned, and that they didn’t value their commissions a tinker’s curse. A vindictive lot! But Haylock slipped the noose round his own neck when he assured us that he ‘wouldn’t report anyone’ for the recent proceedings. We groaned with disgust, and escorted him from the condemned cell to the anteroom, as our guest. It was twenty minutes before we could dig up the mess-steward, who, when he saw Haylock, came near to swooning. Haylock re-established himself in his own esteem by telling him off in the tradesmen’s style, which I had never heard before. It justifies the Teuton’s hatred of England. Warrender and Blore added cold meat from the sideboard—the greener slices for choice—to our guest’s simple fare. Lastly, Mackworth, whose mind, except on parade, when mine doesn’t function, moves slowly, lectured—‘jawed’—Haylock on the disgrace he had brought on their school. He ended with the classical tag: ‘I’ve a great mind to give you a special licking on my own account for the House’s sake. You’ve got off very cheap with only your head smacked.’

‘Thank you,’ said Haylock, mouthing through our ossuary. ‘You see my partners were educated privately.’

Debased as the dog was, he couldn’t keep the proper note of scorn out of his voice. We are of all nations the most incomprehensibly marvellous!

He left at midnight, fulfilled with garbage—we looking at him as the islanders looked at St. Paul. But he took no hurt—dura ilia messorum—the indurated intestines of the mess-caterer and the reforms began next day. We had clean, well-cooked gammon of bacon with pease pudding, followed by excellent treacle-roll and an anchovy toast that was toast and anchovy, not to mention twentieth century eggs. The mess-steward drops on all fours and wags his tail when we whistle now. The C.O. pretends officially to believe that it was the outcome of his letter. One learns to lie in the Army quicker even than on the land.

I don’t know what Mackworth may have told you, but these are the bald facts. Use them as I furnish them. There are volumes, social, political, and military in them, but for this occasion, do abstain from dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s. Circumstances, not scribes, are making the public to think.

After which, it is only fair to tell you that I tied up my platoon on parade this morning owing to an exalted mentality which for the moment (I was thinking over the moral significance of Old School ties and the British social fabric) prevented me from distinguishing between my left hand and my right. Nineveh was saved because there were six hundred thousand inhabitants in just my case, as I told Norgate afterwards. I won’t tell you what he told me on the parade-ground!

Thy Servant a Dog

PLEASE may I come in? I am Boots. I am son of Kildonan Brogue—Champion Reserve—V.H.C.—very fine dog; and no-dash-parlour-tricks, Master says, except I can sit-up, and put paws over nose. It is called ‘Making Beseech.’ Look! I do it out of own head. Not for telling . . . . This is Flat-in-Town. I live here with Own God. I tell:

There is walk-in-Park-on-lead. There is off-lead-when-we-come-to-the-grass. There is ’nother dog, like me, off-lead. I say: ‘Name?’ He says: ‘Slippers.’ He says: ‘Name?’ I say: ‘Boots.’ He says: ‘I am fine dog. I have Own God called Miss.’ I say: ‘I am very-fine dog. I have Own God called Master.’ There is walk-round-on-toes. There is Scrap. There is Proper Whacking. Master says ‘Sorry! Awfully sorry! All my fault.’ Slippers’s Miss says: ‘Sorry! My fault too.’ Master says: ‘So glad it is both our faults. Nice little dog, Slippers.’ Slippers’s Miss says ‘Do you really think so?’ Then I made ‘Beseech.’ Slippers’s Miss says: ‘Darling little dog, Boots.’ There is on-lead, again, and walking with Slippers behind both Own Gods, long times . . . . Slippers is not-half-bad dog. Very like me. ‘Make-fine-pair, Master says . . . . There is more walkings in Park. There is Slippers and his Miss in that place, too. Own Gods walk together—like on-lead. We walk behind. We are tired. We yawn. Own Gods do not look. Own Gods do not hear . . . . They have put white bows on our collars. We do not like. We have pulled off. They are bad to eat . . . .

Now we live at Place-in-Country, next to Park, and plenty good smells. We are all here. Please look! I count paws. There is me, and own God-Master. There is Slippers, and Slippers’s Own God-Missus. That is all my paws. There is Adar. There is Cookey. There is James-with-Kennel-that-Moves. There is Harry-with-Spade. That is all Slippers’s paws. I cannot count more; but there is Maids, and Odd-man, and Postey, and Telegrams, and Pleasm-butcher and People. And there is Kitchen Cat which runs up Wall. Bad! Bad! Bad!

At morning-time Adar unties and brushes. There is going quick upstairs past Cookey and asking Gods to come to brekker. There is lie-down-under-the-table-at-each-end, and heads-on-feets of Gods. Sometimes there is things-gived-under-table. But ‘must never beg.’

After brekker, there is hunting Kitchen Cat all over garden to Wall. She climbs. We sit under and sing. There is waiting for Gods going walks. If it is nothing-on-their-tops, it is only round the garden, and ‘get-off-the-flower-bedsyou-two!’ If it is wet, it is hearth-rugs by fire, or ‘who-said-you-could-sit-on-chairs-Little-Men?’ It is always being-with Own Gods—Own Master and Own Missus. We are most fine dogs . . . . There is Tall far-off dog, which comes through laurels, and looks. We have found him by own dust-bin. We said: ‘Come back, and play!’ But he wented off. His legs are all bendy. And wavy ears. But bigger than Me!

III

AUGUST 1923

Please sit up! I will tell you by Times and Long Times—each time at a time. I tell good things and dretful things.

Beginning of Times. There was walk with Own Gods, and ‘basket-of-things-to-eat-when-wesit-down—piggies.’ It were long walks. We ate lots. After, there was rabbits which would not stay. We hunted. We heard sorrowful singing in woods. We went look-see. There was that far-off Tall dog, singing to hole in bank. He said: ‘I have been here dretful long whiles, and I do not know where here is.’ We said ‘Follow tails!’ He followed back to Own Gods. Missus said: ‘Oh, you poor big baby!’ Master said: ‘What on earth is Kent’s puppy doing here?’ Tall dog went on tum plenty, and said small. There was ‘give-him-what’s-left.’ He kissed hands. We all wented home across fields. He said he were playing with washing-on-line, which waved like tails. He said little old dog with black teeth came, and said he would make him grow-into-a-hound, if he went with. So he wented with, and found beautiful Smell. Old dog said him to put his dash-nose-upon-the-ground and puzzle. He puzzled long ways with old dog. There was field full of ’ware-sheep and beautiful Smell stopped. Old dog was angry and said him to cast-forward. But Peoples came saying loud. He ran into woods. Old dog said if he waited long enough there he would grow-into-a-hound, and it would do-him-good to have to find his way home, because he would have to do it most of his life if he was so-dash-stoopid-as-all-that. Old dog went away and Tall dog waited for more beautiful Smell, and it was night-times, and he did not know where home was, and he singed what we heard. He were very sorry. He is quite new dog. He says he is called ‘DamPuppy.’ After long whiles there was smells which he knew. So he went through hedge and ran to his home. He said he was in-for-Proper-Whacking.

One Time after That. Kitchen Cat sits on Wall. We sing. She says: ‘ Own Gods are going away.’ Slippers says: ‘They come back at Biscuit-time.’ Kitchen Cat says: ‘This time they will go and never come back.’ Slippers says: ‘That is not real rat.’ Kitchen Cat says: ‘Go to top of House, and see what Adar is doing with kennels-that-shut.’

We go to top of House. There is Adar and kennels-that-shut. She fills with things off Gods’ feets and tops and middles. We go downstairs. We do not understand . . . .

Kitchen Cat sits on Wall and says: ‘Now you have seen that Own Gods are going. Wait till kennels-that-shut are put behind kennel-that-moves, and Own Gods get in. Then you will know.’ Slippers says: ‘How do you know where that rat will run?’ Kitchen Cat says ‘Because I am Cat. You are Dog. When you have done things, you ask Own Gods if it is Whack or Pat. You crawl on turn. You say “Please, I will be good.” What will you do when Own Gods go and never come back?’ Slippers said: ‘I will bite you when I catch you.’ Kitchen Cat said: ‘Grow legs!’

She ran down Wall and went to Kitchen. We came after. There was Cookey and broom. Kitchen Cat sat in window and said: ‘Look at this Cookey. Sometimes this is thick Cookey; sometimes this is thin Cookey. But it is always my Cookey. I am never Cookey’s Cat. But you must always have Own Gods with. Else you go bad. What will you do when Own Gods go away?’ We were not comfy. We went inside House. We asked Own Gods not to go away and never come back. They did not understand . . . .

Time After. Own Gods have gone away in kennel-that-moves, with kennels-that-shut behind! Kennel came back at Biscuit-time, but no Gods. We went over House looking. Kitchen Cat said: ‘Now you see!’ We went to look everywhere. There was nothing . . . . There is Peoples called Carpenters come. They are making a little House inside Big House. There is Postey talking to Adar. There is Pleasm-butcher talking to Cookey. There is everybody talking. Everybody says: ‘Poor little chaps.’ And goes away.

Some more Time. This night-time, Shiny Plate shined into our kennels, and made sing. We sang: ‘When will Own Gods come back?’ Adar looked out from high-up-above, and said ‘Stop that, or I’ll come down to you.’ We were quiet, but Shiny Plate shined more. We singed ‘We will be good when the Gods come back.’ Adar came down. There was Whackings. We are poor little small dogs. We live in Outside Places. Nobody cares for.

Other more times. I have met that Tall far-off dog with large feet. He is not called ‘DamPuppy.’ He is called Ravager-son-of-Regan. He has no Own God because he will pass-the-bottle-round-and-grow-into-a-Hound. He lives across Park, at Walk, with dretful Peoples called Mister-Kent. I have wented to Walk. There were fine smells and pig-pups, and a bucket full of old things. Ravager said: ‘Eat hearty!’ He is nice dog. I ate lots. Ravager put his head through handle of bucket. It would not go away from him. He went back-first, singing. He sang: ‘I am afraid.’ Peoples came running. I went away. I wented into dark place called Dairy. There was butters and creams. People came. I went out of a little window. I sicked-up two times before I could run quick. I went to own kennel and lay down. That Peoples called Mister-Kent came afterwards. He said to Adar ‘That little black beast is dam-thief.’ Adar said ‘Nonsense! He is asleep.’ Slippers came and said: ‘Come and play Rats.’ I said: ‘Go to Walk and play with Ravager.’ Slippers wented. People thought Slippers was me. Slippers came home quick. I am very fine dog—but Master has not come back!

After that Time. I am Bad Dog. I am Very Bad Dog. I am ‘G’way-you-dirty-little-devil!’ I found a Badness on the road. I liked it! I rolled in it! It were nice! I came home. There was Cookey and Adar. There was ‘Don’t;-you-come-anigh-me.’ There was James-with-kennel-that-moves. There was: ‘Come ’ere, you young pole-cat!’ He picked up, and washed with soap, and sticky water out of kennel-that-moves rubbed into all my hairs. There was tieup. I smelled very bad to myself. Kitchen Cat came. I said: ‘G’way! I am Filfy Bad Dog! I am Proper Stink-pot!’ Kitchen Cat said ‘That is not your own rat. You are bad because Own Gods do not come back. You are like Peoples who can not be good without Own Gods to pat.’

VII

Other Fresh Times. Now I am great friend of Ravager. Slippers and me have wented to hunt Hen at Walk. She were angry Hen-lady with pups. She bit Slippers, two times, with her nose, under his eye. We all went one way. There was Pig-lady with pups that way. We went other way. There was Mister-Kent-Peoples with whack-stick that way. We wented more ways, quick. We found a fish-head on a heap of nice old things. There was Ravager. We all went for play. There was cow-pups in field. They ran after. We went under gate and said. They ran away. W e ran after till they stopped. They turned round. We went away again. They ran after. We played a long while. It were fun. Mister-Kent-People and more Peoples came calling dretful names. We said to Ravager: ‘We will go home.’ Ravager said: ‘Me too.’ He ran across field. We went home by small ditches. We played Rat-sticks on the lawn.

Cowman Peoples came and said to Adar ‘Those two little devils have been chasing pounds off the calves!’Adar said: ‘Be ashamed of yourself! Look at ’em! Good as gold!’ We waited till Peoples were gone. We asked for sugar. Adar gave. Ravager came through laurels—all little. He said: ‘I have had Proper Whacking. What did you get?’ We said ‘Sugar.’ He said: ‘You are very fine dogs. I am hungry.’ I said: ‘I will give you my store-bone in the border. Eat hearty.’ He digged. We helped. Harry-with-Spade came. Ravager went through laurels like Kitchen Cat. We got Proper Whacking and tie-up for digging in borders . . . . When we are bad, there is Sugar. When we are good, there is Whack-whack. That is same rat going two wrong ways . . . .

VIII

Harry-with-Spade has brought a Rat . . . . Look, please! Please look! I am Rrreal Dog! I have killed a Rat. I have slew a Rat! He bit me on the nose. I bit him again. I bit him till he died. I shookened him dead! Harry said ‘Go-ood boy! ’Born ratter!’ I am very-fine-dog-indeed! Kitchen Cat sat on the Wall and said: ‘That is not your own Rat. You killed it to please a God.’ When my legs are grown, I will kill Kitchen Cat like Rats. Bad! Bad! Bad!

Time soon After. I wented to Walk to tell my friend Ravagerabout my Rat, and find more things to kill. Ravager said: ‘There is ’ware-sheep for me, and there is ’ware-chicken for me, but there is no ’ware-Bull for me. Come into Park and play with Bull-in-yard.’ We went under Bull’s gate in his yard. Ravager said ‘He is too fat to run. Say!’ I said. Bull said. Ravager said. Slippers said. I got under watertrough and said dretful things. Bull blew with nose. I went out through fence, and came back through another hole. Ravager said from other side of yard. Bull spun. He blew. He was too fat. It were fun. We heard Mister-Kent saying loud. We went home across Park. Ravager says I am True Sporting Dog, only except because of my little legs.

OCTOBER 1923

Bad Times dead. Sit up! Sit up now! I tell! I tell! There has been washings and Sunday collars. Carpenter Peoples has gone away, and left new Small House inside Big House. There is very small kennel-that-rocks inside Small House. Adar showed. We went to James’s house. He were gone away with kennel-that-moves. We went to front-gate. We heard! We saw! Own Gods—very Own Gods—Master—Missus—came back! We said. We danced. We rolled. We ran round. We went to tea, heads-on-feets of Own Gods! There were buttered toasts gived under table, and two sugars each . . . .

We heard New Peoples talking in Big House. One Peoples said: ‘Angh! Angh!’ very small like cat-pups. Other Peoples said: ‘Bye-loe! Bye-loe! ‘We asked Own Gods to show. We went upstairs to Small House. Adar was giving cup-o’-tea to New Peoples, more thick than Adar, which was called ‘Nurse.’ There was very-small-talk inside kennel-that-rocks. It said ‘Aie! Aie!’ We looked in. Adar held collars. It were very Small Peoples. It opened its own mouth. But there was no teeth. It waved paw. I kissed. Slippers kissed. New Thick, which is that Nurse, said: ‘Well-Mum-I-never!’ Both Own Gods sat down by Smallest Peoples and said and said and kissed paw. Smallest Peoples said very loud. New Thick gave biscuit in a bottle. We tail-thumped on floor, but ‘not-for-you-greedies.’ We went down to hunt Kitchen Cat. She ran up apple—tree. We said ‘Own Gods have come back, with one Smallest New Peoples, in smallest-kennel!’ Kitchen Cat said: ‘That is not Peoples. That is Own Gods’ Very Own Smallest. Now you are only dirty little dogs. If you say too loud to me or Cookey, you will wake that Smallest, and there will be Proper Whackings. If you scratch, New Thick will say: “Fleas! Fleas!” and there will be more Proper Whackings. If you come in wet, you will give Smallest sneezes. So you will be pushed Outside, and you will scratch at doors that shut-in-your-eye. You will belong with Yards and Brooms and Cold Passages and all the Empty Places.’ Slippers said: ‘Let us go to Own Kennel and lie down.’ We wented.

We heard Own Gods walking in garden. They said: ‘’Nice to be home again, but where are the Little Men?’ Slippers said: ‘Lie still, or they will push us into the Empty Places.’ We lay still. Missus called: ‘Where is Slippers?’ Master called: ‘Boots, you ruffian! Hi Boots!’ We lay still. Own Gods came into yard and found. They said: ‘Oh, there you are! Did you think we would forget you? Come-for-walks.’ We came. We said soft. We rolled before feets, asking not to be pushed into Empty Places. I made a Beseech, because I were not comfy. Missus said: ‘Who’d have thought they’d take it this way, poor Little Men?’ Master threw plenty sticks. I picked up and brought back. Slippers went inside with Missus. He came out quick. He said: ‘Hurry! Smallest is being washed.’ I went like rabbits. Smallest was all no-things on top or feets or middle. Nurse, which is Thick, washed and rubbed, and put things on-all-over afterwards. I kissed hind-feet. Slippers too. Both Gods said ‘Look—it tickles him! He laughs. He knows they’re all right!’ Then they said and they said and they kissed and they kissed it, and it was bye-loe—same as ‘kennel-up’—and then dinner, and heads-on-feets under table, and lots things-passed-down. One were kidney, and two was cheeses. We are most fine dogs!

MARCH 1924.

Very many Long Times after those Times. Both Gods have gone-week-ends in kennel-that-moves. But we are not afraid. They will come back. Slippers went up to talk to that Smallest and Nurse. I went to see my great friend Ravager at Walk, because I see him very often. There was new, old, small, white dog outside Barn. There was only one eye. He was dretful bitted all over. His teeth was black. He walked slow. He said: ‘I am Pensioned Hunt Terrier! Behave, you lap-dog!’ I was afraid of his oldness and his crossness. I went paws-up. I told about me and Slippers and Ravager. He said: ‘I know that puppy. I taught him to grow-into-a-hound. I am more dash-old than Royal, his grandfather.’ I said: ‘Is it good Rat? He is my friend. Will he grow-into-a-Hound?’ Hunt Terrier said: ‘That depends.’ He scratched his dretful-bitted neck and looked me out of his eye. I did not feel comfy. I wented into Barn. There was Ravager on Barn floor and two Peoples. One was all white, except his black ends, which was called Moore. One was long, proper man, and nice, which was called m’Lord. Moore-man lifted Ravager’s head and opened his mouth. Proper Man looked. Moore said ‘Look, m’lord. He’s swine-chopped.’ Proper Man said: ‘’Pity! He’s by Romeo and Regan.’ Moore-man said: ‘Yes, and she’s the wisest, worst-tempered bitch ever was.’ Proper Man gave Ravager biscuit. Ravager stood up stiff on toes-very fine dog. Moore said: ‘Romeo’s shoulders. Regan’s feet. It’s a pity, m’lord.’ Proper Man said: ‘And Royal’s depth. ’Great pity. I see. I’ll give you the order about him to-morrow.’

They wented away. Ravager said: ‘Now they will make me grow-into-a-Hound. I will be sent into Kennels, and schooled for cubbing-in-September.’ He went after. Hunt Terrier came and showed black teeth. I said: ‘What is “swine-chopped “?’ He said: ‘Being snipey-about-the nose, stoopid.’ Then Moore came and put Hunt Terrier up on neck, same as Cookey carries Kitchen Cat. Hunt Terrier said: ‘Never walk when you can ride at my time of life.’ They wented away. Me too. But I were not comfy.

When I got home, Nurse and Adar and Cookey were in scullery, all saying loud about Slippers and Kitchen Cat and Smallest. Slippers were sitting in sink—bleedy. Adar turned sink-tap-water on his head. Slippers jumped down and ran. We hid in boot-house. Slippers said: ‘I wented up to see that Smallest. He was bye-loe. I lay under Nurse’s bed. She went down for cup-o’-tea. Kitchen Cat came and jumped into kennel-that-rocks, beside Smallest. I said: “G’out of this! “ She said: “I will sleep here. It is warm.” I said very loud. Kitchen Cat jumped out on floor. I bit her going to the door. She hit. I shook. We fell downstairs into Nurse. Kitchen Cat hit across face. I let go because I did not see. Kitchen Cat said, and Cookey picked up. I said, and Adar picked up, and put me on sink and poured water on bleedy eye. Then they all said. But I am quite well-dog, and it is not washing-day for me.’ I said: ‘Slippers, you are fine dog! I am afraid of Kitchen Cat.’ Slippers said: ‘Me too. But that time I was new dog inside-me. I were ’normous f’rocious big Hound! Now I am Slippers.’

I told about Ravager and Moore and Proper Man and Hunt Terrier and swine-chopped. Slippers said: ‘I cannot see where that Rat will run. I smell it is bad rat. But I must watch my Smallest. It is your Rat to kill.’

XII

Next Time after Not-Comfy. Kitchen Cat is gone away and not come back. Kitchen is not nice to go in. I have went to see my friend Ravager at Walk. He were tied up. He sang sorrowful. He told dretful things. He said: ‘When I were asleep last night, I grew-into-a-Hound—very fine Hound. I went sleep-hunting with ’nother Hound—lemon-and-white Hound. We sleep-hunted ’normous big Fox-Things all through Dark Covers. Then I fell in a pond. There was a heavy thing tied to my neck. I went down and down into pond till it was all dark. I were frightened and I unsleeped. Now I am not comfy.’ I said: ‘Why are you tied-up?’ He said: ‘Mister-Kent has tied me up to wait for Moore.’ I said: ‘That is not my Rat. I will ask Hunt Terrier.’

So I went back into Park. I were uncomfy in all my hairs because of my true friend Ravager. There were hedgehog in ditch. He rounded up. I said loud. Hunt Terrier came out of bushes and pushed him into a wetness. He unrounded. Hunt Terrier killed. I said: ‘You are most wonderful, wise, strong, fine dog.’ He said ‘What bone do you want now, Snipey?’ I said ‘Tell me, what is “snipey-about-the-nose”?’ He said: ‘It is what they kill Hound puppies for, because they cannot eat fast or bite hard. It is being like your nose.’ I said: ‘I can eat and bite hard. I am son of Champion Kildonan Brogue—Reserve—V.H.C.—very-fine-dog.’ Hunt Terrier said: ‘I know that pack. They hunt fleas. What flea is biting you?’ I said ‘Ravager is uncomfy, and I am uncomfy of my friend Ravager.’ He said: ‘You are not so lap-dog as you look. Show me that puppy on the flags.’ So I said about Ravager sleep-hunting and falling in pond, which he had told me when he were tied up. Hunt Terrier said ‘Did he sleep-hunt with a lemon-and-white-bitch with a scar on her left jowl?’ I said ‘He said he hunted with ’nother Hound—lemon-and-white—but he did not say Lady-Hound or jowels. How did you know?’ Hunt Terrier said: ‘I knew last night. It will be dash-near-squeak for Ravager.’

Then we saw Moore on Tall Horse in Park. Hunt Terrier said: ‘He is going to the Master for orders about Ravager. Run!’ I were runnier than Hunt Terrier. He was rude. There was Big House in Park. There was garden and door at side. Moore went in. Hunt Terrier stayed to mind Horse, which was his Tall Friend. I saw Proper Man inside, which had been kind to Ravager at Walk. So I wented in, too. Proper Man said: ‘What’s this, Moore? ’Nother Hunt Terrier?’ Moore said ‘No. m’lord. It’s that little black devil from The Place, that’s always coming over to Kent’s and misleading Ravager.’ Proper Man said ‘No getting away from Ravager this morning, it seems.’ Moore said: ‘No—nor last night either, m’lord.’ Proper Man said: ‘Yes, I heard her.’ Moore said: ‘I’ve come for orders about Ravager, m’lord.’ Proper Man sat look-not-see—same as Master with pipe. I were not comfy. So I sat up on my end, and put paws over nose, and made a big Beseech. That is all I can. Proper Man looked and said: ‘What? Are you in it too, you little oddity?’ Hunt Terrier said outside: ‘No dash-parlour-tricks in there! Come on out of it!’ So I came out and helped mind Tall Horse.

After whiles, Moore came out, and picked up Hunt Terrier, and put him on front-saddle, and hurried. Hunt Terrier said rudenesses about my short legs. When we got to Walk, Moore said loud to Mister-Kent: ‘It is all right.’ Mister-Kent said: ‘’Glad of it. How did it come about?’ Moore said: ‘Regan saved him. She was howling cruel last night; and when his Lordship looked in this morning, she was all over him, playing the kitten and featherin’ and pleadin’. She knew! He didn’t say anything then, but he said to me just now: ‘Ravager will be sent to Kennels with the young entry, and we’ll hope his defect ain’t-too-heredity.’

Mister-Kent untied. Ravager rolled and said and said and played with me. We played I were Fox-at-his-home-among-the-rocks, all round Pig-ladies-houses. I went to ground under hen-house. Hen-ladies said plenty. Hunt Terrier said if he had me for two seasons, he would make me earn-my-keep. But I would not like. I am afraid I would be put-in-ponds and sunk, because I am snipey-about-the-nose. But now I am comfy in all my hairs. I have ate grass and sicked up. I am happy dog.

XIII

EARLY APRIL 1924.

Most wonderful Times. We are fine dogs. There was Bell-Day, when Master comes black-all-over, and walks slow with shiny box on top and ‘don’t-you-play-with-my-brolly.’ That is always Bell-Day Rat. Nurse put Smallest into push-kennel, and went for walk-in-Park. We went with, and ran, and said lots. We went by Walk all along railings of Park. Ravager heard. He said: ‘I will come. My collar is too big.’ He slipped collar and came with. That Smallest said loud and nice, and waved paw. Ravager looked into push-kennel and kissed Smallest on its face. Nurse shooed and wiped with hanky. Ravager said: ‘Why am I “slobberybeast”? It is not ’ware-Smallest for me.’

We all walked across Park beside push-kennel. There was noise behind bushes. Bull-which-we-played-with-in-yard came out, and digged with paws and waved tail. Nurse said ‘Oh, what shall I do—I do? My legs are wobbly.’ She took Smallest out of push-kennel and ran to railings. Bull walked quick after. We ran in front. Slippers and I said lots. Ravager jumped at his nose and ran. Bull spun. Ravager ran behind push-kennel. Bull hit push-kennel on one side, and kneeled-down-on. Ravager jumped at his nose, and Slippers bit behind. Me too. Bull spun. Ravager ran a little in front. Bull came after to shrubbery. Ravager said: ‘Chop him in cover!’ We chopped, running in and out. Then Ravager bited and jumped back-with-barks before nose. It was fun. Bull got bleedy. Slippers and me said dretful things. Bull ran away into Park and stopped. We said from three places, so he could not choose which. It were great fun.

Peoples called out from railings round Walk. There was Nursey paws-up on ground, kicking feet. There was that Smallest and Own Gods holding tight. There was Mister-Kent-Peoples. Bull said, quite small—like cow-pup. Mister-Kent came and put stick at Bull’s nose and took away on-lead. All the Peoples on the railing said most loud at us. We were frightened, because of chasing-pounds-off-those-calves. We went home other ways. Ravager came with, because he had slipped his collar and was in for Proper-Whack-Whack. I opened dust-bin with my nose-like I can do. There were porridge and herring-tails and outsides of cheeses. It was nice. Then Ravager stuck up his back-hairs most dretful, and said: ‘If I am for Proper Whackings, I will chop Mister-Kent.’ We went with to see.

There was plenty Peoples there, all Bell-Day-black all over. We saw Moore. We saw Mister-Kent. He was bleedy one side his blacks. He blew. He said ‘Ravager’s made a proper hash of him. Look at me Sunday-best!’ Moore said: ‘That shows he ain’t swine-chopped to matter.’ Mister-Kent said: ‘Dam-all-how-it-shows! What about my Bull?’ Moore said ‘Put him down to the Poultry Fund; for if ever Bull cried dung-hill, he did with Ravager.’ Mister-Kent said plenty-lots.

Ravager walked slow round barn and stopped stiff. His back-hairs was like angry Gentlemen-pigs. Mister-Kent began to say dretful. Moore said: ‘Keep away. He has his mother’s temper, and it’s dash-awkward.’ Then Moore said nice small things and patted. Ravager put his head on Moore’s feets, and all his back-hairs lay down and was proper coat again. Moore took him to kennel, and filled water-trough, and turned straw on sleeping-bench. Ravager curled up like small puppy, and kissed hands. Moore said: ‘Let him be till he sees fit to come out. Else there’ll be more hurt than your Bull.’

Slippers and me ran away. We was afraid. We were dretful dirty. My nice frilly drawers was full of sticky burrs, and our front-shirts were bleedy off Bull. So we went to our Adar, but Own Gods and Smallest and Nurse Thick came, and they all said and said and petted, except Cookey because Kitchen Cat is not come back. There was wonderful things-under-table at dinner. One was liver. One was cheese-straw and one was sardine. Afterwards, was coffee-sugar. We wcnted up to see Smallest bye-loed. He is quite well. We are most fine dogs. Own Gods keep saying so. It are fun!

Just after that Times. There is no more Ravager at Walk. I have wented to see him. Moore came with Tall Horse and cracky-whip and took. Ravager showed very proud dog inside (he said), but outside frightened puppy. He said I were his true friend in spite of my little legs. He said he will come again when he is grown-into-a-Hound, and I will always be his True Small Friend. He went looking back, but Moore cracked whip. Ravager sung dretful. I heard him all down the lane after I could see. I am sorrowful dog, but I am always friend of my friend Ravager. Slippers came to meet me at Rabbit Holes. We got muddy on tum, because we have low clearances. So we went to our Adar for clean.

Kitchen Cat was on Wall again. Slippers said: ‘Give her cold-dead-rat.’ We wented-past-under quite still. She said: ‘I am Kitchen Cat come back, silly little pups!’ We did not say or look. We went to Adar. Slippers said me: ‘Now we hunt Bulls in Parks, do not ever say to Kitchen Cat—ever!’ I said: ‘Good rat! You are wise dog.’ Cookey picked up and said: ‘Mee own precious Pussums!’ Kitchen Cat said: ‘I am Cat, not Dog, drat you!’ Cookey kept on petting. Then she tied up by basket in kitchen, and said: ‘Now you’ve had your lesson about going up to the nursery, you’ll stay with me in future and behave!’ Kitchen Cat spitted. Cookey took broom in case we hunted; but we went past quite still. This is finish to Kitchen Cat. We are fine dogs. We hunt Bulls. She does not hunt real rats. She is Bad! Bad! Bad!

XIV

LATE APRIL 1925

Most Wonderful Times. This is me—Boots. Three years old. I am ’sponsible dog (Slippers, too), Master says. We are ’sponsible for that Smallest. He can get out of push-kennel. He walks puppy-way between Slippers and me. He holds by ears and noses. When he sits down, he pulls up same way. He says: ‘Boo-boo!’ That is me. He says: ‘See-see!’ That is Slippers. He has bitted both our tails to make his teeth grow strong, because he has no bone at night. We did not say. He has come into both our kennels, and tried to eat our biscuit. Nurse found. There was smallest Whack-Whacks. He did not say. He is finest Smallest that is.

He had washings and new collar and extra brush. It was not Bell-Day. It was after last-run-of-season. He walked on lawn. We came, one each side. He held. There was horns in Park. I were tingly in all my hairs. But I did not say. (’Too old to make-fool-of-myself, my time of life, Master says.) There was Hounds and Pinks coming on grass. There was Moore—but he was Pinks. There was Mister-Kent. But he was like rat-catcher, Hunt Terrier said. There was nice Proper Man which was kind to Ravager in barn about being swine-chopped. There was some more Pinks, but not friends. Moore took all Hounds to gate by lawn. They sat down quiet. They was beautiful muddy, and seeds in coats and tails, and ears bleedy. Hunt Terrier sat in own basket on Tall Horse. When Moore put him down he said dretful things to Hounds. They did not say back. Proper Man said to Master and Missus: ‘We have come to call with brush for that Smallest.’

Smallest liked because it tickled; but Nurse Thick washed off with hanky quick. Master-an’-Missus said: ‘How did Ravager do?’ Proper Man said: ‘As usual. ’Led from end to end. He wants to talk to you.’ Ravager stood up tall at the gate and put nose through. Smallest stretched out and Ravager kissed. Then Moore said: ‘Over, lad!’ Ravager overed in one jump, and said to Smallest, two times most loud, like Bell-Day, and played puppy very careful, and let Smallest hold by ears. His ears was all made round.

He spoke me. I went paws-up, because he were so big and dretful and strong. He said ‘Drop it, Stoopid! ’Member me bein’ lost? ’Member Bucket and Fishheads? ’Member Bull? ’Member Cow-pups and Lady-pigs and Mister-Kent and Proper Whackings and all those things at Walk? You are True Sporting Dog, except only because of your little legs, and always true friend of Ravager.’ He rolled me over, and held down with paws, and play-bit in my neck. I play-bitted him too, right on jowels! All the Hounds saw! I walked round stiff-on-toes, most proud.

Then Hunt Terrier wiggled under gate without leave. Proper Man said to Missus: ‘He is pensioned now, but it would break his heart not to turn out with the rest. He can’t hurt your dogs, poor fellow.’ Hunt Terrier walked-on-toes round me and showed black teeth. I went paws-up, because he were old and dretful about knowing Uncomfy things. He said: ‘I will let you off this time, Snipey, because you knew about Ravager sleep-hunting in Dark Covers. ’Dash narrow shave, that! Now I must go and look after the young entry. Not one-dash-Hound among ’em!’

He went away and bitted at an old Lady-Hound, lemon-and-white, with black bites on jowels. She said, and wrinkled nose dretful, but she did not chop. She sat and looked at Ravager through gate, and said to him—like Bell-Day, but more loud. Proper Man said: ‘Old Regan wants her tea. ’Fraid we must be going.’ They wented away. There was horns and Horses and Pinks, and Hounds jumping up, and Moore saying names loud, and Ravager overed gate most beautiful. They wented all away—all—all. I were very small little dog.

Then Smallest said: ‘Boo-boo!’ ‘See-see!’ He took necks by collars. He said to Own Gods: ‘Look! Look! Own ’ounds! Own ’ounds! Turn on tea, ’ounds.’ . . .

Please, that is finish for now of all about me-and-Slippers. I make Beseech!

Thrown Away

[a short tale]

And some are sulky, while some will plunge.
[So ho! Steady! Stand still, you!]
Some you must gentle, and some you must lunge.
[There! There! Who wants to kill you?]
Some—there are losses in every trade—
Will break their hearts ere bitted and made,
Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard,
And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard.
(Toolungala Stockyard Chorus)

TO rear a boy under what parents call the ‘sheltered life system’ is, if the boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise. Unless he be one in a thousand he has certainly to pass through many unnecessary troubles; and may, possibly, come to extreme grief simply from ignorance of the proper proportions of things.

Let a puppy eat the soap in the bath-room or chew a newly-blacked boot. He chews and chuckles until, by and by, he finds out that blacking and Old Brown Windsor make him very sick; so he argues that soap and boots are not wholesome. Any old dog about the house will soon show him the unwisdom of biting big dogs’ ears. Being young, he remembers and goes abroad, at six months, a well-mannered little beast with a chastened appetite. If he had been kept away from boots, and soap, and big dogs till he came to the trinity full-grown and with developed teeth, consider how fearfully sick and thrashed he would be! Apply that notion to the ‘ sheltered life,’ and see how it works. It does not sound pretty, but it is the better of two evils.

There was a Boy once who had been brought up under the ‘sheltered life’ theory; and the theory killed him dead. He stayed with his people all his days, from the hour he was born till the hour he went into Sandhurst nearly at the top of the list. He was beautifully taught in all that wins marks by a private tutor, and carried the extra weight of ‘never having given his parents an hour’s anxiety in his life.’ What he learnt at Sandhurst beyond the regular routine is of no great consequence. He looked about him, and he found soap and blacking, so to speak, very good. He ate a little, and came out of Sandhurst not so high as he went in. Then there was an interval and a scene with his people, who expected much from him. Next a year of living unspotted from the world in a third-rate depôt battalion where all the juniors were children and all the seniors old women ; and lastly, he came out to India, where he was cut off from the support of his parents, and had no one to fall back on in time of trouble except himself.

Now India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriously—the midday sun always excepted. Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink. Flirtation does not matter, because every one is being transferred, and either you or she leave the Station and never return. Good work does not matter, because a man is judged by his worst output, and another man takes all the credit of his best as a rule. Bad work does not matter, because other men do worse, and incompetents hang on longer in India than anywhere else. Amusements do not matter, because you must repeat them as soon as you have accomplished them once, and most amusements only mean trying to win another person’s money. Sickness does not matter, because it’s all in the day’s work, and if you die, another man takes over your place and your office in the eight hours between death and burial. Nothing matters except Home-furlough and acting allowances, and these only because they are scarce. It is a slack country, where all men work with imperfect instruments ; and the wisest thing is to escape as soon as ever you can to some place where amusement is amusement and a reputation worth the having.

But this Boy—the tale is as old as the Hills—came out, and took all things seriously. He was pretty and was petted. He took the pettings seriously, and fretted over women not worth saddling a pony to call upon. He found his new free life in India very good. It does look attractive in the beginning, from a subaltern’s point of view—all ponies, partners, dancing, and so on. He tasted it as the puppy tastes the soap. Only he came late to the eating, with a grown set of teeth. He had no sense of balance—just like the puppy—and could not understand why he was not treated with the consideration he received under his father’s roof. This hurt his feelings.

He quarrelled with other boys and, being sensitive to the marrow, remembered these quarrels, and they excited him. He found whist, and gymkhanas, and things of that kind (meant to amuse one after office) good ; but he took them seriously too, just as seriously as he took the ‘head’ that followed after drink. He lost his money over whist and gymkhanas because they were new to him.

He took his losses seriously, and wasted as much energy and interest over a two-goldmohur race for maiden ekka-ponies with their manes hogged, as if it had been the Derby. One-half of this came from inexperience — much as the puppy squabbles with the corner of the hearthrug — and the other half from the dizziness bred by stumbling out of his quiet life into the glare and excitement of a livelier one. No one told him about the soap and the blacking, because an average man takes it for granted that an average man is ordinarily careful in regard to them. It was pitiful to watch The Boy knocking himself to pieces, as an overhandled colt falls down and cuts himself when he gets away from the groom.

This unbridled license in amusements not worth the trouble of breaking line for, much less rioting over, endured for six months—all through one cold weather—and then we thought that the heat and the knowledge of having lost his money and health and lamed his horses would sober The Boy down, and he would stand steady. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this would have happened. You can see the principle working in any Indian Station. But this particular case fell through because The Boy was sensitive and took things seriously—as I may have said some seven times before. Of course, we could not tell how his excesses struck him personally. They were nothing very heartbreaking or above the average. He might be crippled for life financially, and want a little nursing. Still the memory of his performances would wither away in one hot weather, and the bankers would help him to tide over the money-troubles. But he must have taken another view altogether, and have believed himself ruined beyond redemption. His Colonel talked to him severely when the cold weather ended. That made him more wretched than ever ; and it was only an ordinary ‘Colonel’s wigging’!

What follows is a curious instance of the fashion in which we are all linked together and made responsible for one another. The thing that kicked the beam in The Boy’s mind was a remark that a woman made when he was talking to her. There is no use in repeating it, for it was only a cruel little sentence, rapped out before thinking, that made him flush to the roots of his hair. He kept himself to himself for three days, and then put in for two days’ leave to go shooting near a Canal Engineer’s Rest House about thirty miles out. He got his leave, and that night at Mess was noisier and more offensive than ever. He said that he was ‘going to shoot big game,’ and left at half-past ten o’clock in an ekka. Partridge—which was the only thing a man could get near the Rest House—is not big game; so every one laughed.

Next morning one of the Mayors came in from short leave, and heard that The Boy had gone out to shoot ‘big game.’ The Major had taken an interest in The Boy, and had, more than once, tried to check him. The Major put up his eyebrows when he heard of the expedition, and went to The Boy’s rooms where he rummaged.

Presently he came out and found me leaving cards on the Mess. There was no one else in the ante-room.

He said, ‘The Boy has gone out shooting. Does a man shoot tetur with a revolver and writingcase ?’

I said, ‘Nonsense, Major!’ for I saw what was in his mind.

He said, ‘Nonsense or no nonsense, I’m going to the Canal now—at once. I don’t feel easy.’

Then he thought for a minute, and said, ‘Can you lie ?’

‘You know best,’ I answered. ‘It’s my profession.’

‘Very well,’ said the Major, ‘you must come out with me now—at once—in an ekka to the Canal to shoot black-buck. Go and put on shikar kit—quick—and drive here with a gun.’

The Major was a masterful man, and I knew that he would not give orders for nothing. So I obeyed, and on return found the Major packed up in an ekka—gun—cases and food slung below-all ready for a shooting-trip.

He dismissed the driver and drove himself. We jogged along quietly while in the station ; but, as soon as we got to the dusty road across the plains, he made that pony fly. A country-bred can do nearly anything at a pinch. We covered the thirty miles in under three hours, but the poor brute was nearly dead.

Once I said, ‘What’s the blazing hurry, Major ?’

He said quietly, ‘The Boy has been alone, by himself for—one, two, five,—fourteen hours now! I tell you, I don’t feel easy.’

This uneasiness spread itself to me, and I helped to beat the pony.

When we came to the Canal Engineer’s Rest House the Major called for The Boy’s servant ; but there was no answer. Then we went up to the house, calling for The Boy by name ; but there was no answer.

‘Oh, he’s out shooting,’ said I.

Just then I saw through one of the windows a little hurricane-lamp burning. This was at four in the afternoon. We both stopped dead in the verandah, holding our breath to catch every sound; and we heard, inside the room, the ‘brr—brr—brr’ of a multitude of flies. The Major said nothing, but he took off his helmet and we entered very softly.

The Boy was dead on the bed in the centre of the bare, lime-washed room. He had shot his head nearly to pieces with his revolver. The gun cases were still strapped, so was the bedding, and on the table lay The Boy’s writing-case with photographs. He had gone away to die like a poisoned rat!

The Major said to himself softly, ‘Poor Boy! Poor, poor devil!’ Then he turned away from the bed and said, ‘I want your help in this business.’

Knowing The Boy was dead by his own hand, I saw exactly what that help would be, so I passed over to the table, took a chair, lit a cheroot, and began to go through the writing-case; the Major looking over my shoulder and repeating to himself, ‘We came too late !—Like a rat in a hole !—Poor, poor devil!’

The Boy must have spent half the night in writing to his people, to his Colonel, and to a girl at Home ; and as soon as he had finished, must have shot himself, for he had been dead a long time when we came in.

I read all that he had written, and passed over each sheet to the Major as I finished it.

We saw from his accounts how very seriously he had taken everything. He wrote about ‘disgrace which he was unable to bear’—‘indelible shame’—‘criminal folly’—‘wasted life,’ and so on; besides a lot of private things to his father and mother much too sacred to put into print. The letter to the girl at Home was the most pitiful of all, and I choked as I read it. The Mayor made no attempt to keep dry-eyed. I respected him for that. He read and rocked himself to and fro, and simply cried like a woman without caring to hide it. The letters were so dreary and hopeless and touching. We forgot all about The Boy’s follies, and only thought of the poor Thing on the bed and the scrawled sheets in our hands. It was utterly impossible to let the letters go Home. They would have broken his father’s heart and killed his mother after killing her belief in her son.

At last the Major dried his eyes openly, and said, ‘Nice sort of thinto spring on an English family! What shall we-do ?’

I said, knowing what the Major had brought me out for,—’The Boy died of cholera. We were with him at the time. We can’t commit ourselves to half-measures. Come along.’

Then began one of the most grimly comic scenes I have ever taken part in—the concoction of a big, written lie, bolstered with evidence, to soothe The Boy’s people at Home. I began the rough draft of the letter, the Major throwing in hints here and there while he gathered up all the stuff that The Boy had written and burnt it in the fireplace. It was a hot, still evening when we began, and the lamp burned very badly. In due course I made the draft to my satisfaction, setting forth how The Boy was the pattern of all virtues, beloved by his regiment, with every promise of a great career before him, and so on; how we had helped him through the sickness—it was no time for little lies, you will understand—and how he had died without pain. I choked while I was putting down these things and thinking of the poor people who would read them. Then I laughed at the grotesqueness of the affair. and the laughter mixed itself up with the choke—and the Major said that we both wanted drinks.

I am afraid to say how much whisky we drank before the letter was finished. It had not the least effect on us. Then we took off The Boy’s watch, locket, and ring.

Lastly, the Major said, ‘We must send a lock of hair too. A woman values that.’

But there were reasons why we could not find a lock fit to send. The Boy was black-haired, and so was the Major, luckily. I cut off a piece of the Major’s hair above the temple with a knife, and put it into the packet we were making. The laughing-fit and the chokes got hold of me again, and I had to stop. The Mayor was nearly as bad; and we both knew that the worst part of the work was to come.

We sealed up the packet, photographs, locket, seals, ring, letter, and lock of hair with The Boy’s sealingwax and The Boy’s seal.

Then the Major said, ‘For God’s sake let’s get outside—away from the room—and think!’

We went outside, and walked on the banks of the Canal for an hour, eating and drinking what we had with us, until the moon rose. I know now exactly how a murderer feels. Finally, we forced ourselves back to the room with the lamp and the Other Thing in it, and began to take up the next piece of work. I am not going to write about this. It was too horrible. We burned the bedstead and dropped the ashes into the Canal ; we took up the matting of the room and treated that in the same way. I went off to a village and borrowed two big hoes,—I did not want the villagers to help,—while the Major arranged—the other matters. It took us four hours’ hard work to make the grave. As we worked, we argued out whether it was right to say as much as we remembered of the Burial of the Dead. We compromised things by saying the Lord’s Prayer with a private unofficial prayer for the peace of the soul of The Boy. Then we filled in the grave and went into the verandah—not the house—to lie down to sleep. We were dead-tired.

When we woke the Major said wearily,’We can’t go back till to-morrow. We must give him a decent time to die in. He died early this morning, remember. That seems more natural: So the Major must have been lying awake all the time, thinking.

I said, ‘Then why didn’t we bring the body back to cantonments ?’

The Major thought for a minute. ‘Because the people bolted when they heard of the cholera. And the ekka has gone!’

That was strictly true. We had forgotten all about the ekka-pony, and he had gone home.

So we were left there alone, all that stifling day, in the Canal Rest House, testing and re-testing our story of The Boy’s death to see if it was weak in any point. A native appeared in the afternoon, but we said that a Sahib was dead of cholera, and he ran away. As the dusk gathered, the Major told me all his fears about The Boy, and awful stories of suicide or nearly-carried-out suicide—tales that made one’s hair crisp. He said that he himself had once gone into the same Valley of the Shadow as The Boy, when he was young and new to the country; so he understood how things fought together in The Boy’s poor jumbled head. He also said that youngsters, in their repentant moments, consider their sins much more serious and ineffaceable than they really are. We talked together all through the evening and rehearsed the story of the death of The Boy. As soon as the moon was up, and The Boy, theoretically, just buried, we struck across country’ for the Station. We walked from eight till six o’clock in the morning; but though we were dead-tired, we did not forget to go to The Boy’s rooms and put away his revolver with the proper amount of cartridges in the pouch. Also to set his writing-case on the table. We found the Colonel and reported the death, feeling more like murderers than ever. Then we went to bed and slept the clock round, for there was no more in us.

The tale had credence as long as was necessary; for every one forgot about The Boy before a fortnight was over. Many people, however, found time to say that the Major had behaved scandalously in not bringing in the body for a regimental funeral. The saddest thing of all was the letter from The Boy’s mother to the Major and me—with big inky blisters all over the sheet. She wrote the sweetest possible things about our great kindness, and the obligation she would be under to us as long as she lived.

All things considered, she was under an obligation, but not exactly as she meant.

The Three Musketeers

[a short tale]

An’ when the war began, we chased the bold Afghan,
An’ we made the bloomin’ Ghazi for to flee, boys O!
An’ we marched into Kabul, an’ we tuk the Balar ’Issar,
An’ we taught ’em to respec’ the British Soldier.
Barrack Room Ballad

MULVANEY, Ortheris, and Learoyd are Privates in B Company of a Line Regiment, and personal friends of mine. Collectively, I think, but am not certain, they are the worst men in the regiment so far as genial blackguardism goes.

They told me this story in the Umballa Refreshment Room while we were waiting for an up-train. I supplied the beer. The tale was cheap at a gallon and a half.

All men know Lord Benira Trig. He is a Duke, or an Earl, or something unofficial; also a Peer; also a Globe-trotter. On all three counts, as Ortheris says, ‘’e didn’t deserve no consideration.’ He was out in India for three months collecting materials for a book on ‘Our Eastern Impedimenta,’ and quartering himself upon everybody, like a Cossack in evening-dress.

His particular vice—because he was a Radical, men said—was having garrisons turned out for his inspection. He would then dine with the Officer Commanding, and insult him, across the Mess table, about the appearance of the troops. That was Benira’s way.

He turned out troops once too often. He came to Helanthami Cantonment on a Tuesday. He wished to go shopping in the bazars on Wednesday, and he ‘desired’ the troops to be turned out on a Thursday. On-a-Thursday. The Officer Commanding could not well refuse; for Benira was a Lord. There was an indignation meeting of subalterns in the Mess Room, to call the Colonel pet names.

‘But the rale dimonstrashin,’ said Mulvaney, ‘was in B Comp’ny barrick; we three headin’ it.’

Mulvaney climbed on to the refreshment-bar, settled himself comfortably by the beer, and went on, ‘Whin the row was at ut’s foinest an’ B Comp’ny was fur goin’ out to murther this man Thrigg on the p’rade-groun’, Learoyd here takes up his helmut an’ sez—fwhat was ut ye said ?’

‘Ah said,’ said Learoyd, ‘gie us t’ brass. Tak oop a subscripshun, lads, for to put off t’ p’rade, an’ if t’ p’rade’s not put off, ah’ll gie t’ brass back agean. Thot’s wot ah said. All B Coomp’ny knawed me. Ah took oop a big subscripshun—fower rupees eight annas’twas—an’ ah went oot to turn t’ job over. Mulvaney an’ Orth’ris coom with me.’

‘We three raises the Divil in couples gin’rally,’ explained Mulvaney.

Here Ortheris interrupted. ‘’Ave you read the papers ?’ said he.

‘Sometimes,’ I said.

‘We ’ad read the papers, an’ we put hup a faked decoity, a—a sedukshun.’

‘Abdukshin, ye cockney,’ said Mulvaney.

‘Abdukshun or sedukshun – no great odds. Any ’ow, we arranged to taik an’ put Mister Benhira out o’ the way till Thursday was hover, or ’e too busy to rux ’isself about p’raids. Hi was the man wot said, “ We’ll make a few rupees off o’ the business.”’

‘We hild a Council av War,’ continued Mulvaney, ‘walkin’ roun’ by the Artill’ry Lines. I was Prisidint, Learoyd was Minister av Finance, an’ little Orth’ris here was—’

‘A bloomin’ Bismarck! Hi made the ’ole show pay.’

‘This interferin’ bit av a Benira man,’ said Mulvaney, ‘did the thrick for us himself; for, on me sowl, we hadn’t a notion av what was to come afther the next minut. He was shoppin’ in the bazar on fut. ’Twas dhrawin’ dusk thin, an’ we stud watchin’ the little man hoppin’ in an’ out av the shops, thryin’ to injuce the naygurs to mallum his bat. Prisintly, he sthrols up, his arrums full av thruck, an’ he sez in a consiquinshal way, shticking out his little belly, “Me good men,” sez he, “have ye seen the Kernel’s b’roosh? ”—“B’roosh ?” says Learoyd. “There’s no b’roosh here—nobbut a hekka.” “Fwhat’s that?” sez Thrigg. Learoyd shows him wan down the sthreet, an’ he sez, “How thruly Orientil ! I will ride on a hekka.” I saw thin that our Rigimintal Saint was for givin’ Thrigg over to us neck an’ brisket. I purshued a hekka, an’ I sez to the dhriver-divil, I sez, “Ye black limb, there’s a Sahib comin’ for this hekka. He wants to go jildi to the Padsahi Jhil”—’twas about to moiles away—” to shoot snipe—chirria. You dhrive Jehannum ke marfik, mallum—like Hell? ’Tis no manner av use bukkin’ to the Sahib, bekaze he doesn’t samjao your talk. Av he bolos anything, just you choop and chel. Dekker? Go arsty for the first arder mile from cantonmints. Thin chel, Shaitan ke marfik, an’ the chooper you choops an’ the jildier you chels the better kooshy will that Sahib be; an’ here’s a rupee for ye?”

‘The hekka-man knew there was somethin’ out av the common in the air. He grinned an’ sez, “Bote achee ! I goin’ damn fast.” I prayed that the Kernel’s b’roosh wudn’t arrive till me darlin’ Benira by the grace av God was undher weigh. The little man puts his thruck into the hekka an’ scuttles in like a fat guinea-pig; niver offerin’ us the price av a dhrink for our services in helpin’ him home. “He’s off to the Padsahi jhil,” sez I to the others.’

Ortheris took up the tale—

‘Jist then, little Buldoo kim up,’oo was the son of one of the Artillery grooms—’e would’av made a’evinly newspaper-boy in London, bein’ sharp an’ fly to all manner o’ games.’E’ad bin watchin’ us puttin’ Mister Benhira into’is temporary baroush, an’’e sez, “What’ave you been a doin’ of, Sahibs?” sez’e. Learoyd ’e caught ’im by the ear an ’e sez-’

‘Ah says,’ went on Learoyd, “Young mon, that mon’s gooin’ to have t’ goons out o’ Thursday —to-morrow — an’ thot’s more work for you, young mon. Now, sitha, tak’ a tat an’ a lookri, an’ ride tha domdest to t’ Padsahi Jhil. Cotch thot there hekka, and tell t’ driver iv your lingo thot you’ve coom to tak’ his place. T’ Sahib doesn’t speak t’ bat, an’ he’s a little mon. Drive t’ hekka into t’ Padsahi Jhil into t’ watter. Leave t’ Sahib theer an’ roon hoam ; an’ here’s a rupee for tha.”’

Then Mulvaney and Ortheris spoke together in alternate fragments: Mulvaney leading [You must pick out the two speakers as best you can]—‘He was a knowin’ little divil was Bhuldoo,—’e sez bote achee an’ cuts—wid a wink in his oi—but Hi sez there’s money to be made—an’ I wanted to see the ind av the campaign—so Hi says we’ll double hout to the Padsahi Jhil—an’ save the little man from bein’ dacoited by the murtherin’ Bhuldoo—an’ turn hup like reskooers in a Vic’oria Melodrama—so we doubled for the jhil, an’ prisintly there was the divil av a hurroosh behind us an’ three bhoys on grasscuts’ ponies come by, poundin’ along for the dear life—s’elp me Bob, hif Buldoo ’adn’t raised a rig’lar harmy of decoits—to do the job in shtile. An’ we ran, an’ they ran, shplittin’ with laughin’, till we gets near the jhil—and ’ears sounds of distress floatin’ molloncolly on the hevenin’ hair.’ [Ortheris was growing poetical under the influence of the beer. The duet recommenced: Mulvaney leading again.]

‘Thin we heard Bhuldoo, the dacoit, shoutin’ to the hekka man, an’ wan of the young divils brought his stick down on the top av the hekka-cover, an’ Benira Thrigg inside howled “Murther an’ Death.” Buldoo takes the reins and dhrives like mad for the jhil, havin’ dishpersed the hekka-dhriver—’oo cum up to us an’ ’e sez, sez ’e, “That Sahib’s nigh mad with funk ! Wot devil’s work ’ave you led me into?” —“Hall right,” sez we, “you catch that there pony an’ come along. This Sahib’s been decoited, an’ we’re going to resky ’im !” Says the driver, “Decoits ! Wot decoits? That’s Buldoo the budmash”—“Bhuldoo be shot!” sez we. “’Tis a woild dissolute Pathan frum the hills. There’s about eight av thim coercin’ the Sahib. You remimber that an you’ll get another rupee!” Thin we heard the whop-whop-whop av the hekka turnin’ over, an’ a splash av water an’ the voice av Benira Thrigg callin’ upon God to forgive his sins—an’ Buldoo an’ ’is friends squatterin’ in the water like boys in the Serpentine.’

Here the Three Musketeers retired simultaneously into the beer.

‘Well? What came next?’ said I.

‘Fwhat nex’?’ answered Mulvaney, wiping his mouth. ‘Wud ye let three bould sodger-bhoys lave the ornamint av the House av Lords to be dhrowned an’ dacoited in a jhil? We formed line av quarther-column an’ we discinded upon the inimy. For the better part av tin minutes you could not hear yerself spake. The tattoo was screamin’ in chune wid Benira Thrigg an’ Bhuldoo’s army, an’ the shticks was whistlin’ roun’ the hekka, an’ Orth’ris was beatin’ the hekka-cover wid his fistes, an’ Learoyd yellin’, “Look out for their knives!” an’ me cuttin’ into the dark, right an’ lef’, dishpersin’ arrmy corps av Pathans. Holy Mother av Moses! ’twas more disp’rit than Ahmid Kheyl wid Maiwand thrown in. Afther a while Bhuldoo an’ his bhoys flees. Have ye iver seen a rale live Lord thryin’ to hide his nobility undher a fut an’ a half av brown swamp-wather?’ Tis the livin’ image av a water-carrier’s goatskin wid the shivers. It tuk toime to pershuade me frind Benira he was not disimbowilled : an’ more toime to get out the hekka. The dhriver come up afther the battle, swearin’ he tuk a hand in repulsin’ the inimy. Benira was sick wid the fear. We escorted him back, very slow, to cantonmints, for that an’ the chill to soak into him. It suk ! Glory be to the Rigimintil Saint, but it suk to the marrow av Lord Benira Thrigg !’

Here Ortheris, slowly, with immense pride—‘’E sez, “You har my noble preservers,” sez ’e. “You har a honour to the British Harmy,” sez ’e. With that ’e describes the hawful band of dacoits wot set on ’im. There was about forty of ’em an’ ’e was hoverpowered by numbers, so ’e was ; but ’e never lorst ’is presence of mind, so ’e didn’t. ’E guv the hekka-driver five rupees for ’is noble assistance, an’ ’e said ’e would see to us after ’e ’ad spoken to the Kernul. For we was a honour to the Regiment, we was.’

‘An’ we three,’ said Mulvaney, with a seraphic smile, ‘have dhrawn the par-ti-cu-lar attinshin av Bobs Bahadur more than wanst. But he’s a rale good little man is Bobs. Go on, Orth’ris, my son.’

‘Then we leaves ’im at the Kernul ’s ’ouse, werry sick, an’ we cuts hover to B Comp’ny barrick an’ we sez we ’ave saved Benira from a bloody doom, an’ the chances was agin there bein’ p’raid on Thursday. About ten minutes later come three envelicks, one for each of us. S’elp me Bob, if the old bloke ’adn’t guv us a fiver apiece—sixty-four rupees in the bazar! On Thursday ’e was in ’orspital recoverin’ from ’is sanguinary encounter with a gang of Pathans, an’ B Comp’ny was drinkin’ ’emselves into Clink by squads. So there never was no Thursday p’raid. But the Kernul, when ’e ’eard of our galliant conduct, ’e sez, “Hi know there’s been some devilry somewheres,” sez ’e, “but I can’t bring it ’ome to you three.”’

‘An’ my privit imprisshin is,’ said Mulvaney, getting off the bar and turning his glass upside down, ‘that, av they had known they wudn’t have brought ut home. ’Tis flyin’ in the face, firstly av Nature, secon’ av the Rig’lations, an’ third the will av Terence Mulvaney, to hold p’rades av Thursdays.’

‘Good, ma son!’ said Learoyd ; ‘but, young mon, what’s t’ notebook for?’

‘Let be,’ said Mulvaney; ‘ this time next month we’re in the Sherapis. ’Tis immortial fame the gentleman’s goin’ to give us. But kape it dhark till we’re out av the range av me little frind Bobs Bahadur.’

And I have obeyed Mulvaney’s order.

The Three Young Men

[a short tale]

“CURIOUSER and curiouser,” as Alice in Wonderland said when she found her neck beginning to grow. Each day under the smoke brings me new and generally unpleasant discoveries. The latest are most on my mind. I hasten to transfer them to yours.

At first, and several times afterwards, I very greatly desired to talk to a thirteen-two subaltern—not because he or I would have anything valuable to say to each outher, but just because he was a subaltern. I wanted to know all about that evergreen polo-pony that “can turn on a sixpence,” and the second-hand charger that, by a series of prefectly unprecedented misfortunes, just failed to win the Calcutta Derby. Then, too, I wished to hear of many old friends across the sea, and who had got his company, and why and where the new Generals were going next cold weather, and how the Commander-in-Chief had been enlivening the Simla season. So I looked east and west, and north and south, but never a thirteen-two subaltern broke through the fog; except once—and he had grown a fifteen-one cot down, and wore a tall hat and frock coat, and was begging for coppers from the Horse-Guards. By the way, if you stand long enough between the mounted sentries—the men who look like reflectors stolen from Christmas trees —you will presently meet every human being you ever knew in India. When I am not happy—that is to say, once a day—I run off and play on the pavement in front of the Horse-Guards, and watch the expressions on the gentlemen’s faces as they come out. But this is a digression.

After some days—I grew lonelier and lonelier every hour—I went away to the other end of the town, and catching a friend, said: “Lend me a man—a young man—to play with. I don’t feel happy. I want rousing. I have liver.” And the friend said: “Ah, yes, of course. What you want is congenial society, something that will stir you up—a fellowmind. Now let me introduce you to a thoroughly nice young man. He’s by way of being an ardent Neo-Alexandrine, and has written some charming papers on the ‘Ethics of the Wood Pavement.’” Concealing my almost visible rapture, I murmured “Oh, bliss!” as they used to say at the Gaiety, and extended the hand of friendship to a young gentleman attired after the fashion of the Neo-Alexandrines, who appear to be a subcaste of social priests. His hand was a limp hand, his face was very smooth because he had not yet had time to grow any hair, and he wore a cloak like a policeman’s cloak, but much more so. On his finger was a cameo-ring about three inches wide, and round his neck, the weather being warm, was a fawn, olive and dead-leaf comforter of soft silk—the sort of thing any right-minded man would give to his mother or his sister without being asked.

We looked at each other cautiously for some minutes. Then he said: “What do you think of the result of the Brighton election?” “Beautiful, beautiful,” I said, watching his eye, which saddened, “One of the worst—that is, entirely the most absurd reductio ad absurdum of the principle of the narrow and narrow-minded majority imposing a will which is necessarily incult on a minority ammated by . . . ” I forget exactly what he said they were animated by, but it was something very fine,

“When I was at Oxford,” he said, “Haward of Exeter”—he spoke as one speaks of Smith of Asia—“always inculcated at the Union—— By the way, you do not know, I suppose, anything of the life at Oxford?” “No,” I said, anxious to propitiate, “but I remember some boys once who seduced an ekka and a pony into a Major’s tent at a camp of exercise, laced up the door, and let the Major fight it out with the horse.” I told that little incident in my best style, and was three parts through it before I discovered that he was looking pained and shocked.

“That—ah—was not the side of Oxford that I had in mind when I was saying that Haward of Exeter——” And he explained all about Mr. Haward, who appeared to be a young gentleman, rising twenty-three, of wonderful mental attainments, and as pernicious a prig as I ever dreamed about. Mr. Haward had schemes for the better management of creation; my friend told me them all—social, political and economical.

Then, just as I was feeling faint and very much in need of a drink, he launched without warning upon the boundless seas of literature. He wished to know whether I had read the works of Messrs. Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget and Pierre Loti. This in the tone of a teacher of Euclid. I replied that all my French was confined to the Vie Parisienne and translations of Zola’s novels with illustrations. Here we parted. London is very large, and I do not think we shall meet any more.

I thanked our Mutual Friend for his kindness, and asked for another young man to play with. This gentleman was even younger than the last, but quite as cocksure. He told me in the course of half a cigar that only men of mediocre calibre went into the army, which was a brutalising profession; that he suffered from nerves, and “an uncontrollable desire to walk up and down the room and sob” (that was too many cigarettes), and that he had never set foot out of England, but knew all about the world from his own theories. Thought Dickens coarse; Scott jingling and meretricious; and had not by any chance read the novels of Messrs. Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget and Pierre Loti.

Him I left quickly, but sorry that he could not do a six weeks’ training with a Middlesex militia regiment, where he would really get something to sob for. The novel business interested me. I perceived that it was a fashion, like his tie and his collars, and I wanted to work it to the fountain-head. To this end I procured the whole Shibboleth from Guy de Maupassant even unto Pierre Loti by way of Bourget. Unwholesome was a mild term for these interesting books, which the yoimg men assured me that they read for style. When a fat Major makes that remark in an Indian Club, everybody hoots and laughs. But you must not laugh overseas, especially at young gentlemen who have been to Oxford and listened to Mr. Haward of Exeter.

Then I was introduced to another young man who said he belonged to a movement called Toynbee Hall, where, I gathered, young gentlemen took an indecent interest in the affairs of another caste, whom, with rare tact, they called “the poor,” and told them generally how to order their lives. Such was the manner and general aggressiveness of this third young gentleman, that if he had told me that coats were generally worn and good for the protection of the body, I should have paraded Bond Street in my shirt. What the poor thought of him I could not tell, but there is no room for it in this letter. He said that there was going to be an upheaval of the classes—the English are very funny about their castes. They don’t know how to handle them one little bit, and never allow them to draw water or build huts in peace—and the entire social fabric was about to be remodelled on his recommendations, and the world would be generally altered past recognition. No, he had never seen anything of the world, but close acquaintance with authorities had enabled him to form dispassionate judgments on the subjects, and had I, by any chance, read the novels of Guy de Maupassant, Pierre Loti and Paul Bourget?

It was a mean thing to do, but I couldn’t help it. I had read ’em. I put him on, so to speak, far back in Paul Bourget, who is a genial sort of writer. I pinned him to one book. He could not escape from Paul Bourget. He was fed with it till he confessed—and he had been quite ready to point out its beauties—that we could not take much interest in the theories put forward in that particular book. Then I said: “Get a dictionary and read him,” which severed our budding friendship.

Thereafter I sought our Mutual Friend and walked up and down his room sobbing, or words to that eflFect. “Good gracious!” said my friend. “Is that what’s troubling you? Now, I hold the ravaging rights over half a dozen fields and a bit of a wood. You can pot rabbits there in the evenings sometimes, and anyway you get exercise. Come along.”

So I went. I have not yet killed anything, but it seems wasteful to drive good powder and shot after poor little bunnies when there are so many other things in the world that would be better for an ounce and a half of number five at sixty yards—not enough to disable, but just sufiicient to sting, and be pricked out with a penknife.

I should like to wield that penknife.

They

(The Kipling Society presents here Kipling’s work as he
wrote it, but wishes to alert readers that the text below
contains some derogatory and/or offensive language)

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ONE view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping forward of a lever, I let the county flow under my wheels. The orchid-studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen level miles; and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded hills and woods I had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States, I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple. Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little further on I disturbed a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.As the wooded hills closed about me I stood up in the car to take the bearings of that great Down whose ringed head is a landmark for fifty miles across the low countries. I judged that the lie of the country would bring me across some westward running road that went to his feet, but I did not allow for the confusing veils of the woods. A quick turn plunged me first into a green cutting brimful of liquid sunshine, next into a gloomy tunnel where last year’s dead leaves whispered and scuffled about my tyres. The strong hazel stuff meeting overhead had not been cut for a couple of generations at least, nor had any axe helped the moss-cankered oak and beech to spring above them. Here the road changed frankly into a carpeted ride on whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked blue-bells nodded together. As the slope favoured I shut off the power and slid over the whirled leaves, expecting every moment to meet a keeper; but I only heard a jay, far off, arguing against the silence under the twilight of the trees.

Still the track descended. I was on the point of reversing and working my way back on the second speed ere I ended in some swamp, when I saw sunshine through the tangle ahead and lifted the brake.

It was down again at once. As the light beat across my face my fore-wheels took the turf of a great still lawn from which sprang horsemen ten feet high with levelled lances, monstrous peacocks, and sleek round-headed maids of honour—blue, black, and glistening—all of clipped yew. Across the lawn—the marshalled woods besieged it on three sides—stood an ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with mullioned windows and roofs of rose-red tile. It was flanked by semi-circular walls, also rose-red, that closed the lawn on the fourth side, and at their feet a box hedge grew man-high. There were doves on the roof about the slim brick chimneys, and I caught a glimpse of an octagonal dove-house behind the screening wall.

Here, then, I stayed; a horseman’s green spear laid at my breast; held by the exceeding beauty of that jewel in that setting.

“If I am not packed off for a trespasser, or if this knight does not ride a wallop at me,” thought I, “Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at least must come out of that half-open garden door and ask me to tea.”

A child appeared at an upper window, and I thought the little thing waved a friendly hand. But it was to call a companion, for presently another bright head showed. Then I heard a laugh among the yew-peacocks, and turning to make sure (till then I had been watching the house only) I saw the silver of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the sun. The doves on the roof cooed to the cooing water; but between the two notes I caught the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief.

The garden door—heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall—opened further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the time-hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf. I was forming some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.

“I heard you,” she said. “Isn’t that a motor car?”

“I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake in my road. I should have turned off up above—I never dreamed——” I began.

“But I’m very glad. Fancy a motor car coming into the garden! It will be such a treat——” She turned and made as though looking about her. “You—you haven’t seen any one, have you—perhaps?”

“No one to speak to, but the children seemed interested at a distance.”

“Which?”

“I saw a couple up at the window just now, and I think I heard a little chap in the grounds.”

“Oh, lucky you!” she cried, and her face brightened. “I hear them, of course, but that’s all. You’ve seen them and heard them?”

“Yes,” I answered. “And if I know anything of children one of them’s having a beautiful time by the fountain yonder. Escaped, I should imagine.”

“You’re fond of children?”

I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.

“Of course, of course,” she said. “Then you understand. Then you won’t think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once or twice—quite slowly. I’m sure they’d like to see it. They see so little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but——” she threw out her hands towards the woods. “We’re so out of the world here.”

“That will be splendid,” I said. “But I can’t cut up your grass.”

She faced to the right. “Wait a minute,” she said. “We’re at the South gate, aren’t we? Behind those peacocks there’s a flagged path. We call it the Peacock’s Walk. You can’t see it from here, they tell me, but if you squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the first peacock and get on to the flags.”

It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming house-front with the clatter of machinery, but I swung the car to clear the turf, brushed along the edge of the wood and turned in on the broad stone path where the fountain-basin lay like one star-sapphire.

“May I come too?” she cried. “No, please don’t help me. They’ll like it better if they see me.”

She felt her way lightly to the front of the car, and with one foot on the step she called: “Children, oh, children! Look and see what’s going to happen!”

The voice would have drawn lost souls from the Pit, for the yearning that underlay its sweetness, and I was not surprised to hear an answering shout behind the yews. It must have been the child by the fountain, but he fled at our approach, leaving a little toy boat in the water. I saw the glint of his blue blouse among the still horsemen.

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Very disposedly we paraded the length of the walk and at her request backed again. This time the child had got the better of his panic, but stood far off and doubting.

“The little fellow’s watching us,” I said. “I wonder if he’d like a ride.”

“They’re very shy still. Very shy. But, oh, lucky you to be able to see them! Let’s listen.”

I stopped the machine at once, and the humid stillness, heavy with the scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some gardener was clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that might have been the doves.

“Oh, unkind!” she said weariedly.

“Perhaps they’re only shy of the motor. The little maid at the window looks tremendously interested.”

“Yes?” She raised her head. “It was wrong of me to say that. They are really fond of me. It’s the only thing that makes life worth living—when they’re fond of you, isn’t it? I daren’t think what the place would be without them. By the way, is it beautiful?”

“I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen.”

“So they all tell me. I can feel it, of course, but that isn’t quite the same thing.”

“Then have you never?——” I began, but stopped abashed.

“Not since I can remember. It happened when I was only a few months old, they tell me. And yet I must remember something, else how could I dream about colours? I see light in my dreams, and colours, but I never see them. I only hear them just as I do when I’m awake.”

“It’s difficult to see faces in dreams. Some people can, but most of us haven’t the gift,” I went on, looking up at the window where the child stood all but hidden.

“I’ve heard that too,” she said. “And they tell me that one never sees a dead person’s face in a dream. Is that true?”

“I believe it is—now I come to think of it.”

“But how is it with yourself—yourself?” The blind eyes turned towards me.

“I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream,” I answered.

“Then it must be as bad as being blind.”

The sun had dipped behind the woods and the long shades were possessing the insolent horsemen one by one. I saw the light die from off the top of a glossy-leaved lance and all the brave hard green turn to soft black. The house, accepting another day at end, as it had accepted an hundred thousand gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among the shadows.

“Have you ever wanted to?” she said after the silence.

“Very much sometimes,” I replied. The child had left the window as the shadows closed upon it.

“Ah! So’ve I, but I don’t suppose it’s allowed. . . . Where d’you live?”

“Quite the other side of the county—sixty miles and more, and I must be going back. I’ve come without my big lamp.”

“But it’s not dark yet. I can feel it.”

“I’m afraid it will be by the time I get home. Could you lend me some one to set me on my road at first? I’ve utterly lost myself.”

“I’ll send Madden with you to the cross-roads. We are so out of the world, I don’t wonder you were lost! I’ll guide you round to the front of the house; but you will go slowly, won’t you, till you’re out of the grounds? It isn’t foolish, do you think?”

“I promise you I’ll go like this,” I said, and let the car start herself down the flagged path.

We skirted the left wing of the house, whose elaborately cast lead guttering alone was worth a day’s journey; passed under a great rose-grown gate in the red wall, and so round to the high front of the house which in beauty and stateliness as much excelled the back as that all others I had seen.

“Is it so very beautiful?” she said wistfully when she heard my raptures. “And you like the lead-figures too? There’s the old azalea garden behind. They say that this place must have been made for children. Will you help me out, please? I should like to come with you as far as the cross-roads, but I mustn’t leave them. Is that you, Madden? I want you to show this gentleman the way to the cross-roads. He has lost his way but—he has seen them.”

A butler appeared noiselessly at the miracle of old oak that must be called the front door, and slipped aside to put on his hat. She stood looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the first time that she was beautiful.

“Remember,” she said quietly, “if you are fond of them you will come again,” and disappeared within the house.

The butler in the car said nothing till we were nearly at the lodge gates, where, catching a glimpse of a blue blouse in a shrubbery, I swerved amply lest the devil that leads little boys to play should drag me into child-murder.

“Excuse me,” he asked of a sudden, “but why did you do that, Sir?”

“The child yonder.”

“Our young gentleman in blue?”

“Of course.”

“He runs about a good deal. Did you see him by the fountain, Sir?”

“Oh, yes, several times. Do we turn here?”

“Yes, Sir. And did you ’appen to see them upstairs too?”

“At the upper window? Yes.”

“Was that before the mistress come out to speak to you, Sir?”

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“A little before that. Why d’you want to know?”

He paused a little. “Only to make sure that—that they had seen the car, Sir, because with children running about, though I’m sure you’re driving particularly careful, there might be an accident. That was all, Sir. Here are the cross-roads. You can’t miss your way from now on. Thank you, Sir, but that isn’t our custom, not with——”

“I beg your pardon,” I said, and thrust away the British silver.

“Oh, it’s quite right with the rest of ’em as a rule. Good-bye, Sir.”

He retired into the armour-plated conning tower of his caste and walked away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the honour of his house, and interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.

Once beyond the signposts at the cross-roads I looked back, but the crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with motor cars had small right to live—much less to “go about talking like carriage folk.” They were not a pleasant-mannered community.

When I retraced my route on the map that evening I was little wiser. Hawkin’s Old Farm appeared to be the survey title of the place, and the old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my difficulty to a neighbour—a deep-rooted tree of that soil—and he gave me a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.

A month or so later—I went again, or it may have been that my car took the road of her own volition. She over-ran the fruitless Downs, threaded every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew through the high-walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the cross-roads where the butler had left me, and a little further on developed an internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that cut into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the sun and a six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that wood which I had first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit, spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It was a trap to catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the children would not be far off. When I paused in my work I listened, but the wood was so full of the noises of summer (though the birds had mated) that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small cautious feet stealing across the dead leaves. I rang my bell in an alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I repented, for to a child a sudden noise is very real terror. I must have been at work half an hour when I heard in the wood the voice of the blind woman crying: “Children, oh, children, where are you?” and the stillness made slow to close on the perfection of that cry. She came towards me, half feeling her way between the tree-boles, and though a child, it seemed, clung to her skirt, it swerved into the leafage like a rabbit as she drew nearer.

“Is that you?” she said, “from the other side of the county?”

“Yes, it’s me from the other side of the county.”

“Then why didn’t you come through the upper woods? They were there just now.”

“They were here a few minutes ago. I expect they knew my car had broken down, and came to see the fun.”

“Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars break down?”

“In fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty-first.”

She laughed merrily at the tiny joke, cooed with delicious laughter, and pushed her hat back.

“Let me hear,” she said.

“Wait a moment,” I cried, “and I’ll get you a cushion.”

She set her foot on the rug all covered with spare parts, and stooped above it eagerly. “What delightful things!” The hands through which she saw glanced in the chequered sunlight. “A box here—another box! Why you’ve arranged them like playing shop!”

“I confess now that I put it out to attract them. I don’t need half those things really.”

“How nice of you! I heard your bell in the upper wood. You say they were here before that?”

“I’m sure of it. Why are they so shy? That little fellow in blue who was with you just now ought to have got over his fright. He’s been watching me like a Red Indian.”

“It must have been your bell,” she said. “I heard one of them go past me in trouble when I was coming down. They’re shy—so shy even with me.” She turned her face over her shoulder and cried again: “Children! Oh, children! Look and see!”

“They must have gone off together on their own affairs,” I suggested, for there was a murmur behind us of lowered voices broken by the sudden squeaking giggles of childhood. I returned to my tinkerings and she leaned forward, her chin on her hand, listening interestedly.

“How many are they?” I said at last. The work was finished, but I saw no reason to go.

Her forehead puckered a little in thought. “I don’t quite know,” she said simply. “Sometimes more—sometimes less. They come and stay with me because I love them, you see.”

“That must be very jolly,” I said, replacing a drawer, and as I spoke I heard the inanity of my answer.

“You—you aren’t laughing at me,” she cried. “I—I haven’t any of my own. I never married. People laugh at me sometimes about them because—because—”

“Because they’re savages,” I returned. “It’s nothing to fret for. That sort laugh at everything that isn’t in their own fat lives.”

“I don’t know. How should I? I only don’t like being laughed at about them. It hurts; and when one can’t see. . . . I don’t want to seem silly,” her chin quivered like a child’s as she spoke, “but we blindies have only one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at our souls. It’s different with you. You’ve such good defences in your eyes—looking out—before any one can really pain you in your soul. People forget that with us.”

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I was silent, reviewing that inexhaustible matter—the more than inherited (since it is also carefully taught) brutality of the Christian peoples, beside which the mere heathendom of the West Coast nigger is clean and restrained. It led me a long distance into myself.

“Don’t do that!” she said of a sudden, putting her hands before her eyes.

“What?”

She made a gesture with her hand.

“That! It’s—it’s all purple and black. Don’t! That colour hurts.”

“But how in the world do you know about colours?” I exclaimed, for here was a revelation indeed.

“Colours as colours?” she asked.

“No. Those Colours which you saw just now.”

“You know as well as I do,” she laughed, “else you wouldn’t have asked that question. They aren’t in the world at all. They’re in you—when you went so angry.”

“D’you mean a dull purplish patch, like port-wine mixed with ink?” I said.

“I’ve never seen ink or port-wine, but the colours aren’t mixed. They are separate—all separate.”

“Do you mean black streaks and jags across the purple?”

She nodded. “Yes—if they are like this,” and zigzagged her finger again, “but it’s more red than purple—that bad colour.”

“And what are the colours at the top of the—whatever you see?”

Slowly she leaned forward and traced on the rug the figure of the Egg itself.

“I see them so,” she said, pointing with a grass stem, “white, green, yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or bad, black across the red—as you were just now.”

“Who told you anything about it—in the beginning?” I demanded.

“About the colours? No one. I used to ask what colours were when I was little—in table-covers and curtains and carpets, you see—because some colours hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got older that was how I saw people.” Again she traced the outline of the Egg which it is given to very few of us to see.

“All by yourself?” I repeated.

“All by myself. There wasn’t any one else. I only found out afterwards that other people did not see the Colours.”

She leaned against the tree-bole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.

“Now I am sure you will never laugh at me,” she went on after a long silence. “Nor at them.”

“Goodness! No!” I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. “A man who laughs at a child—unless the child is laughing too—is a heathen!”

“I didn’t mean that of course. You’d never laugh at children, but I thought—I used to think—that perhaps you might laugh about them. So now I beg your pardon. . . . What are you going to laugh at?”

I had made no sound, but she knew.

“At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a pillar of the state and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was disgraceful of me—inexcusable.”

She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk—long and steadfastly—this woman who could see the naked soul.

“How curious,” she half whispered. “How very curious.”

“Why, what have I done?”

“You don’t understand . . . and yet you understood about the Colours. Don’t you understand?”

She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller, and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips. They, too, had some child’s tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly astray there in the broad sunlight.

“No,” I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note. “Whatever it is, I don’t understand yet. Perhaps I shall later—if you’ll let me come again.”

“You will come again,” she answered. “You will surely come again and walk in the wood.”

“Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play with them—as a favour. You know what children are like.”

“It isn’t a matter of favour but of right,” she replied, and while I wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman plunged round the bend of the road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped forward. “What is it, Mrs. Madehurst?” she asked.

The woman flung her apron over her head and literally grovelled in the dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to death, that the local doctor was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her wits’ end, and so forth, with repetitions and bellowings.

“Where’s the next nearest doctor?” I asked between paroxysms.

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“Madden will tell you. Go round to the house and take him with you. I’ll attend to this. Be quick!” She half-supported the fat woman into the shade. In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of Jericho under the front of the House Beautiful, and Madden, in the pantry, rose to the crisis like a butler and a man.

A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles away. Within the half-hour we had decanted him, much interested in motors, at the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the road to await the verdict.

“Useful things cars,” said Madden, all man and no butler. “If I’d had one when mine took sick she wouldn’t have died.”

“How was it?” I asked.

“Croup. Mrs. Madden was away. No one knew what to do. I drove eight miles in a tax cart for the Doctor. She was choked when we came back. This car ’d ha’ saved her. She’d have been close on ten now.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were rather fond of children from what you told me going to the cross-roads the other day.”

“Have you seen ’em again, Sir—this mornin’?”

“Yes, but they’re well broke to cars. I couldn’t get any of them within twenty yards of it.”

He looked at me carefully as a scout considers a stranger—not as a menial should lift his eyes to his divinely appointed superior.

“I wonder why,” he said just above the breath that he drew.

We waited on. A light wind from the sea wandered up and down the long lines of the woods, and the wayside grasses, whitened already with summer dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.

A woman, wiping the suds off her arms, came out of the cottage next the sweetmeat shop.

“I’ve be’n listenin’ in de back-yard,” she said cheerily. “He says Arthur’s unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck just now? Unaccountable bad. I reckon t’will come Jenny’s turn to walk in de wood nex’ week along, Mr. Madden.”

“Excuse me, Sir, but your lap-robe is slipping,” said Madden deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and hurried away.

“What does she mean by ‘walking in the wood’?” I asked.

“It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I’m from Norfolk myself,” said Madden. “They’re an independent lot in this county. She took you for a chauffeur, Sir.”

I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed wench who clung to his arm as though he could make treaty for her with Death. “Dat sort,” she wailed—“dey’re just as much to us dat has ’em as if dey was lawful born. Just as much—just as much! An’ God he’d be just as pleased if you saved ’un, Doctor. Don’t take it from me. Miss Florence will tell ye de very same. Don’t leave ’im, Doctor!”

“I know. I know,” said the man, “but he’ll be quiet for a while now. We’ll get the nurse and the medicine as fast as we can.” He signalled me to come forward with the car, and I strove not to be privy to what followed; but I saw the girl’s face, blotched and frozen with grief, and I felt the hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved away.

The Doctor was a man of some humour, for I remember he claimed my car under the Oath of Aesculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick-bed till the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis), and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market cattle, reported itself out of nurses, for the moment we literally flung ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great houses—magnates at the ends of overarching avenues whose big-boned womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious Doctor. At last a white-haired lady sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and surrounded by a court of magnificent Borzois—all hostile to motors—gave the Doctor, who received them as from a princess, written orders which we bore many miles at top speed, through a park, to a French nunnery, where we took over in exchange a pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at the bottom of the tonneau telling her beads without pause till, by short cuts of the Doctor’s invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once more. It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles; and I went home in the dusk, wearied out, to dream of the clashing horns of cattle; round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties beneath shaded trees; the carbolic-scented, grey-painted corridors of the County Institute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.

. . . . .

I had intended to return in a day or two, but it pleased Fate to hold me from that side of the county, on many pretexts, till the elder and the wild rose had fruited. There came at last a brilliant day, swept clear from the south-west, that brought the hills within hand’s reach—a day of unstable airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of my own I was free, and set the car for the third time on that known road. As I reached the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and, across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first dry sample of autumn leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the brickfields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill grey. We were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my lips.

Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers—mallow of the wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden—showed gay in the mist, and beyond the sea’s breath there was little sign of decay in the leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open, and bare-legged, bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to shout “pip-pip” at the stranger.

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I made bold to call at the sweetmeat shop, where Mrs. Madehurst met me with a fat woman’s hospitable tears. Jenny’s child, she said, had died two days after the nun had come. It was, she felt, best out of the way, even though insurance offices, for reasons which she did not pretend to follow, would not willingly insure such stray lives. “Not but what Jenny didn’t tend to Arthur as though he’d come all proper at de end of de first year—like Jenny herself.” Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been buried with a pomp which, in Mrs. Madehurst’s opinion, more than covered the small irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and without, the glass hearse, and the evergreen lining of the grave.

“But how’s the mother?” I asked.

“Jenny? Oh, she’ll get over it. I’ve felt dat way with one or two o’ my own. She’ll get over. She’s walkin’ in de wood now.”

“In this weather?”

Mrs. Madehurst looked at me with narrowed eyes across the counter.

“I dunno but it opens de ’eart like. Yes, it opens de ’eart. Dat’s where losin’ and bearin’ comes so alike in de long run, we do say.”

Now the wisdom of the old wives is greater than that of all the Fathers, and this last oracle sent me thinking so extendedly as I went up the road that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at the wooded corner by the lodge gates of the House Beautiful.

“Awful weather!” I cried, as I slowed dead for the turn.

“Not so bad,” she answered placidly out of the fog. “Mine’s used to ’un. You’ll find yours indoors, I reckon.”

Indoors, Madden received me with professional courtesy, and kind inquiries for the health of the motor, which he would put under cover.

I waited in a still, nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and warmed with a delicious wood fire—a place of good influence and great peace. (Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the truth of those who have lived in it.) A child’s cart and a doll lay on the black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that the children had only just hurried away—to hide themselves, most like—in the many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of the hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing—from the soul:—

In the pleasant orchard-closes...

And all my early summer came back at the call.

In the pleasant orchard-closes,
God bless all our gains say we—
But may God bless all our losses,
Better suits with our degree.

She dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated—

Better suits with our degree!

I saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against the oak.

“Is that you—from the other side of the county?” she called.

“Yes, me from the other side of the county,” I answered, laughing.

“What a long time before you had to come here again.” She ran down the stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. “It’s two months and four days. Summer’s gone!”

“I meant to come before, but Fate prevented.”

“I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won’t let me play with it, but I can feel it’s behaving badly. Hit it!”

I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.

“It never goes out, day or night,” she said, as though explaining. “In case any one comes in with cold toes, you see.”

“It’s even lovelier inside than it was out,” I murmured. The red light poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses and lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An old eagle-topped convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog turned to stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad window I could see valiant horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against the wind that taunted them with legions of dead leaves.

“Yes, it must be beautiful,” she said. “Would you like to go over it? There’s still light enough upstairs.”

I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery, whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.

“Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children.” She swung a light door inward.

“By the way, where are they?” I asked. “I haven’t even heard them to-day.”

She did not answer at once. Then, “I can only hear them,” she replied softly. “This is one of their rooms—everything ready, you see.”

She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate tables and children’s chairs. A doll’s house, it’s hooked front half open, faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a child’s scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.

“Surely they’ve only just gone,” I whispered. In the failing light a door creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet—quick feet through a room beyond.

“I heard that,” she cried triumphantly. “Did you? Children, oh, children, where are you?”

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The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note, but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There were bolt-holes innumerable—recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or twice had seen the silhouette of a child’s frock against some darkening window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.

“No, I haven’t seen her either this evening, Miss Florence,” I heard her say, “but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed.”

“Oh, Mr. Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the hall, Mrs. Madden.”

I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and deep in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we were in the passages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind an old gilt leather screen. By child’s law, my fruitless chase was as good as an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to force them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children detest, of pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little huddle, no more than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an outline.

“And now we’ll have some tea,” she said. “I believe I ought to have offered it you at first, but one doesn’t arrive at manners, somehow, when one lives alone and is considered—h’m—peculiar.” Then with very pretty scorn, “would you like a lamp to see to eat by?”

“The firelight’s much pleasanter, I think.” We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden brought tea.

I took my chair in the direction of the screen, ready to surprise or be surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.

“Where do you get these beautiful short faggots from?” I asked idly. “Why, they are tallies!”

“Of course,” she said. “As I can’t read or write I’m driven back on the early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I’ll tell you what it meant.”

I passed her an unburnt hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her thumb down the nicks.

“This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last year, in gallons,” said she. “I don’t know what I should have done without tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It’s out of date now for every one else; but my tenants respect it. One of them’s coming now to see me. Oh, it doesn’t matter. He has no business here out of office hours. He’s a greedy, ignorant man—very greedy or—he wouldn’t come here after dark.”

“Have you much land then?”

“Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this Turpin is quite a new man—and a highway robber.”

“But are you sure I sha’n’t be——?”

“Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn’t any children.”

“Ah, the children!” I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly touched the screen that hid them. “I wonder whether they’ll come out for me.”

There was a murmur of voices—Madden’s and a deeper note—at the low, dark side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the unmistakable tenant farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.

“Come to the fire, Mr. Turpin,” she said.

“If—if you please, Miss, I’ll—I’ll be quite as well by the door.” He clung to the latch as he spoke, like a frightened child. Of a sudden I realised that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.

“Well?”

“About that new shed for the young stock—that was all. These first autumn storms settin’ in . . . but I’ll come again, Miss.” His teeth did not chatter much more than the door latch.

“I think not,” she answered levelly. “The new shed—m’m. What did my agent write you on the 15th?”

“I—fancied p’r’aps that if I came to see you—ma—man to man like, Miss—but——”

His eyes rolled into every corner of the room, wide with horror. He half opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again—from without and firmly.

“He wrote what I told him,” she went on. “You are overstocked already. Dunnett’s Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks—even in Mr. Wright’s time. And he used cake. You’ve sixty-seven and you don’t cake. You’ve broken the lease in that respect. You’re dragging the heart out of the farm.”

“I’m—I’m getting some minerals—superphosphates—next week. I’ve as good as ordered a truck-load already. I’ll go down to the station to-morrow about ’em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the daylight. . . . That gentleman’s not going away, is he?” He almost shrieked.

I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to tap on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.

“No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin.” She turned in her chair and faced him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of scheming that she forced from him—his plea for the new cowshed at his landlady’s expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next year’s rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that ran wet on his forehead.

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I ceased to tap the leather—was, indeed, calculating the cost of the shed—when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers. . . .

The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm—as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful half-reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when grown-ups were busiest—a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.

Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window.

I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that she knew.

What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in the chair very close to the screen.

“Now you understand,” she whispered, across the packed shadows.

“Yes, I understand—now. Thank you.”

“I—I only hear them.” She bowed her head in her hands. “I have no right, you know—no other right. I have neither borne nor lost—neither borne nor lost!”

“Be very glad then,” said I, for my soul was torn open within me.

“Forgive me!”

She was still, and I went back to my sorrow and my joy.

“It was because I loved them so,” she said at last, brokenly. “That was why it was, even from the first—even before I knew that they—they were all I should ever have. And I loved them so!”

She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the shadow.

“They came because I loved them—because I needed them. I—I must have made them come. Was that wrong, think you?”

“No—no.”

“I—I grant you that the toys and—and all that sort of thing were nonsense, but—but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was little.” She pointed to the gallery. “And the passages all empty. . . . And how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose——”

“Don’t! For pity’s sake, don’t!” I cried. The twilight had brought a cold rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.

“And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. I don’t think it so foolish—do you?”

I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that there was no unpassable iron on or near it, and bowed my head.

“I did all that and lots of other things—just to make believe. Then they came. I heard them, but I didn’t know that they were not mine by right till Mrs. Madden told me——”

“The butler’s wife? What?”

“One of them—I heard—she saw—and knew. Hers! Not for me. I didn’t know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to understand that it was only because I loved them, not because——. . . Oh, you must bear or lose,” she said piteously. “There is no other way—and yet they love me. They must! Don’t they?”

There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the screen.

“Don’t think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but—but I’m all in the dark, you know, and you can see.”

In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I would stay since it was the last time.

“You think it is wrong, then?” she cried sharply, though I had said nothing.

“Not for you. A thousand times no. For you it is right. . . . I am grateful to you beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For me only. . . .”

“Why?” she said, but passed her hand before her face as she had done at our second meeting in the wood. “Oh, I see,” she went on simply as a child. “For you it would be wrong.” Then with a little indrawn laugh, “and, d’you remember, I called you lucky—once—at first. You who must never come here again!”

She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of her feet die out along the gallery above.

Their Lawful Occasions – part II

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The wind went down with the sunset—
The fog came up with the tide,
When the Witch of the North took an Egg-shell
With a little Blue Devil inside.
‘Sink,’ she said, ‘or swim,’ she said,
‘It’s all you will get from me.
And that is the finish of him!’ she said,
And the Egg-shell went to sea.

The wind got up with the morning,
And the fog blew off with the rain,
When the Witch of the North saw the Egg-shell
And the little Blue Devil again.
‘Did you swim?’ she said. ‘Did you sink?’ she said,
And the little Blue Devil replied
‘For myself I swam, but I think,’ he said,
‘There’s somebody sinking outside.’

BUT for the small detail that I was a passenger and a civilian, and might not alter her course, torpedo-boat No. 267 was mine to me all that priceless day. Moorshed, after breakfast—frizzled ham and a devil that Pyecroft made out of sardines, anchovies, and French mustard smashed together with a spanner—showed me his few and simple navigating tools, and took an observation. Morgan, the signaller, let me hold the chamois leathers while he cleaned the searchlight (we seemed to be better equipped with electricity than most of our class), that lived under a bulbous umbrella-cover amidships. Then Pyecroft and Morgan, standing easy, talked together of the King’s Service as reformers and revolutionists, so notably, that were I not engaged on this tale I would, for its conclusion, substitute theirs.

I would speak of Hinchcliffe—Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, first-class engine-room artificer, and genius in his line, who was prouder of having taken part in the Hat Crusade in his youth than of all his daring, his skill, and his nickel-steel nerve. I consorted with him for an hour in the packed and dancing engine-room, when Moorshed suggested ‘whacking her up’ to eighteen knots, to see if she would stand it. The floor was ankle-deep in a creamy batter of oil and water; each moving part flicking more oil in zoetrope-circles, and the gauges invisible for their dizzy chattering on the chattering steel bulkhead. Leading Stoker Grant, said to be a bigamist, an ox-eyed man smothered in hair, took me to the stokehold and planted me between a searing white furnace and some hell-hot iron plate for fifteen minutes, while I listened to the drone of fans and the worry of the sea without, striving to wrench all that palpitating firepot wide open.

Then I came on deck and watched Moorshed—revolving in his orbit from the canvas bustle and torpedo-tubes aft, by way of engine-room, conning-tower, and wheel, to the doll’s house of a foc’sle—learned in experience withheld from me, moved by laws beyond my knowledge, authoritative, entirely adequate, and yet, in heart, a child at his play. I could not take ten steps along the crowded deck but I collided with some body or thing; but he and his satellites swung, passed, and returned on their vocations with the freedom and spaciousness of the well-poised stars.

Even now I can at will recall every tone and gesture, with each dissolving picture inboard or overside—Hinchcliffe’s white arm buried to the shoulder in a hornet’s nest of spinning machinery; Moorshed’s halt and jerk to windward as he looked across the water; Pyecroft’s back bent over the Berthon collapsible boat, while he drilled three men in expanding it swiftly; the outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails bulging sideways like insolent cheeks; the ribbed and pitted coal-dust on our decks, all iridescent under the sun; the first filmy haze that paled the shadows of our funnels about lunch-time; the gradual die-down and dulling over of the short, cheery seas; the sea that changed to a swell; the swell that crumbled up and ran allwhither oilily; the triumphant, almost audible roll inward of wandering fog-walls that had been stalking us for two hours, and—welt upon welt, chill as the grave—the drive of the interminable main fog of the Atlantic. We slowed to little more than steerage-way and lay listening. Presently a hand-bellows foghorn jarred like a corncrake, and there rattled out of the mist a big ship literally above us. We could count the rivets in her plates as we scrooped by, and the little drops of dew gathered below them.

‘Wonder why they’re always barks—always steel—always four-masted—an’ never less than two thousand tons. But they are,’ said Pyecroft. He was out on the turtle-backed bows of her; Moorshed was at the wheel, and another man worked the whistle.

‘This fog is the best thing could ha’ happened to us,’ said Moorshed. ‘It gives us our chance to run in on the quiet . . . . Hal-lo!’

A cracked bell rang. Clean and sharp (beautifully grained, too), a bowsprit surged over our starboard bow, the bobstay confidentially hooking itself into our forward rail.

I saw Pyecroft’s arm fly up; heard at the same moment the severing of the tense rope, the working of the wheel, Moorshed’s voice down the tube saying, ‘Astern a little, please, Mr. Hinchcliffe !’ and Pyecroft’s cry, ‘Trawler with her gear down! Look out for our propeller, Sir, or we’ll be wrapped up in the rope.’

267 surged quickly under my feet, as the pressure of the downward-bearing bobstay was removed. Half-a-dozen men of the foc’sle had already thrown out fenders, and stood by to bear off a just visible bulwark.

Still going astern, we touched slowly, broadside on, to a suggestive crunching of fenders, and I looked into the deck of a Brixham trawler, her crew struck dumb.

‘Any luck?’ said Moorshed politely.

‘Not till we met yeou,’ was the answer. ‘The Lard he saved us from they big ships to be spitted by the little wan. Where be’e gwine to with our fine new bobstay?’

‘Yah ! You’ve had time to splice it by now,’ said Pyecroft with contempt.

‘Aie ; but we’m all crushed to port like aigs. You was runnin’ twenty-seven knots, us reckoned it. Didn’t us, Albert?’

‘Liker twenty-nine, an’ niver no whistle.’

‘Yes, we always do that. Do you want a tow to Brixham?’ said Moorshed.

A great silence fell upon those wet men of the sea.

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We lifted a little toward their side, but our silent, quick-breathing crew, braced and strained outboard, bore us off as though we had been a mere picket-boat.

‘What for?’ said a puzzled voice.

‘For love; for nothing. You’ll be abed in Brixham by midnight.’

‘Yiss; but trawls down.’

‘No hurry. I’ll pass you a line and go ahead. Sing out when you’re ready.’ A rope smacked on their deck with the word; they made it fast; we slid forward, and in ten seconds saw nothing save a few feet of the wire rope running into fog over our stern; but we heard the noise of debate.

‘Catch a Brixham trawler letting go of a free tow in a fog,’ said Moorshed, listening.

‘But what in the world do you want him for?’ I asked.

‘Oh, he’ll come in handy later.’

‘Was that your first collision?’

‘Yes.’ I shook hands with him in silence, and our tow hailed us.

‘Aie! yeou little man-o’-war!’ The voice rose muffled and wailing. ‘After us’ve upped trawl, us’ll be glad of a tow. Leave line just slack abaout as ’tis now, and kip a good fine look-out be’ind ’ee.’

‘There’s an accommodatin’ blighter for you !’ said Pyecroft. ‘Where does he expect we’ll be, with these currents evolutin’ like sailormen at the Agricultural Hall?’

I left the bridge to watch the wire-rope at the stern as it drew out and smacked down upon the water. By what instinct or guidance 267 kept it from fouling her languidly flapping propeller, I cannot tell. The fog now thickened and thinned in streaks that bothered the eyes like the glare of intermittent flash-lamps; by turns granting us the vision of a sick sun that leered and fled, or burying all a thousand fathom deep in gulfs of vapours. At no time could we see the trawler though we heard the click of her windlass, the jar of her trawl-beam, and the very flap of the fish on her deck. Forward was Pyecroft with the lead; on the bridge Moorshed pawed a Channel chart; aft sat I, listening to the whole of the British Mercantile Marine (never a keel less) returning to England, and watching the fog-dew run round the bight of the tow back to its motherfog.

‘Aie! yeou little man-o’-war! We’m done with trawl. Yeou can take us home if you know the road.’

‘Right O!’ said Moorshed. ‘We’ll give the fishmonger a run for his money. Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe.’

The next few hours completed my education. I saw that I ought to be afraid, but more clearly (this was when a liner hooted down the back of my neck) that any fear which would begin to do justice to the situation would, if yielded to, incapacitate me for the rest of my days. A shadow of spread sails, deeper than the darkening twilight, brooding over us like the wings of Azrael (Pyecroft said she was a Swede), and, miraculously withdrawn, persuaded me that there was a working chance that I should reach the beach—any beach—alive, if not dry; and (this was when an economical tramp laved our port-rail with her condenser water) were I so spared, I vowed I would tell my tale worthily.

Thus we floated in space as souls drift through raw time. Night added herself to the fog, and I laid hold on my limbs jealously, lest they, too, should melt in the general dissolution.

‘Where’s that prevaricatin’ fishmonger?’ said Pyecroft, turning a lantern on a scant yard of the gleaming wire-rope that pointed like a stick to my left. ‘He’s doin’ some fancy steerin’ on his own. No wonder Mr. Hinchcliffe is blasphemious. The tow’s sheered off to starboard, Sir. He’ll fair pull the stern out of us.’

Moorshed, invisible, cursed through the megaphone into invisibility.

‘Aie! yeou little man-o’-war!’ The voice butted through the fog with the monotonous insistence of a strayed sheep’s. ‘We don’t all like the road you’m takin’. ’Tis no road to Brixham. You’ll be buckled up under Prawle Point by’mbye.’

‘Do you pretend to know where you are?’ the megaphone roared.

‘Iss, I reckon; but there’s no pretence to me!,

‘0 Peter!’ said Pyecroft. ‘Let’s hang him at ’is own gaff.’

I could not see what followed, but Moorshed said: ‘Take another man with you. If you lose the tow, you’re done. I’ll slow her down.’

I heard the dinghy splash overboard ere I could cry ‘Murder!’ Heard the rasp of a boat-hook along the wire-rope, and then, as it had been in my ear, Pyecroft’s enormous and jubilant bellow astern: ‘Why, he’s here! Right atop of us! The blighter ’as pouched half the tow, like a shark!’ A long pause filled with soft Devonian bleatings. Then Pyecroft, solo arpeggio: ‘Rum? Rum? Rum? Is that all? Come an’ try it, uncle.’

I lifted my face to where once God’s sky had been, and besought The Trues I might not die inarticulate, amid these halfworked miracles, but live at least till my fellow-mortals could be made one-millionth as happy as I was happy. I prayed and I waited, and we went slow—slow as the processes of evolution—till the boat-hook rasped again.

‘He’s not what you might call a scientific navigator,’ said Pyecroft, still in the dinghy, but rising like a fairy from a pantomime trap. ‘The lead’s what ’e goes by mostly; rum is what he’s come for; an’ Brixham is ’is ’ome. Lay on, Macduff!’

A white-whiskered man in a frock-coat—as I live by bread, a frock-coat!—sea-boots, and a comforter, crawled over the torpedo-tube into Moorshed’s grip and vanished forward.

‘’E’ll probably ’old three gallon (look sharp with that dinghy!); but ’is nephew, left in charge of the Agatha, wants two bottles command-allowance. You’re a taxpayer, Sir. Do you think that excessive?’

‘Lead there! Lead!’ rang out from forward. ‘Didn’t I say ’e wouldn’ understand compass deviations? Watch him close. It’ll be worth it!’

As I neared the bridge I heard the stranger say: ‘Let me zmell un!’ and to his nose was the lead presented by a trained man of the King’s Navy.

page 3

‘I’ll tell ’ee where to goo, if yeou’ll tell your donkey-man what to du. I’m no hand wi’ steam.’ On these lines we proceeded miraculously, and, under Moorshed’s orders—I was the fisherman’s Ganymede, even as ‘M. de C.’ had served the captain—I found both rum and curaçoa in a locker, and mixed them equal bulk in an enamelled iron cup.

‘Now we’m just abeam o’ where we should be,’ he said at last, ‘an’ here we’ll lay till she lifts. I’d take ’e in for another bottle—and wan for my nevvy; but I reckon yeou’m shart-allowanced for rum. That’s nivver no Navy rum yeou’m give me. Knowed ’en by the smack to un. Anchor now!’

I was between Pyecroft and Moorshed on the bridge, and heard them spring to vibrating attention at my side. A man with a lead a few feet to port caught the panic through my body, and checked like a wild boar at gaze, for not far away an unmistakable ship’s bell was ringing. It ceased, and another began.

‘Them!’ said Pyecroft. ‘Anchored!’

‘More!’ said our pilot, passing me the cup, and I filled it. The trawler astern clattered vehemently on her bell. Pyecroft with a jerk of his arm threw loose the forward three-pounder. The bar of the back-sight was heavily Mobbed with dew; the foresight was invisible.

‘No—they wouldn’t have their picket-boats out in this weather, though they ought to.’ He returned the barrel to its crotch slowly.

‘Be yeou gwine to anchor?’ said Macduff, smacking his lips, ‘or be yeou gwine straight on to Livermead Beach?’

‘Tell him what we’re driving at. Get it into his head somehow,’ said Moorshed ; and Pyecroft, snatching the cup from me, enfolded the old man with an arm and a mist of wonderful words.

‘And if you pull it off,’ said Moorshed at the last, ‘I’ll give you a fiver.’

‘Lard! What’s fivers to me, young man? My nevvy, he likes ’em; but I do cherish more on fine drink than filthy lucre any day o’ God’s good weeks. Leave goo my arm, yeou common sailorman! I tall ’ee, gentlemen, I bain’t the ram-faced, ruddle-nosed old fule yeou reckon I be. Before the mast I’ve fared in my time; fisherman I’ve been since I seed the unsense of sea-dangerin’. Baccy and spirits—yiss, an’ cigars too, I’ve run a plenty. I’m no blind harse or boy to be coaxed with your forty-mile free towin’ and rum atop of all. There’s none more sober to Brix’am this tide, I don’t care who ’tis—than me. I know—I know. Yander’m two great King’s ships. Yeou’m wishful to sink, burn, and destroy they while us kips ’em busy sellin’ fish. No need tall me so twanty taime over. Us’ll find they ships! Us’ll find ’em, if us has to break our fine new bowsprit so close as Crump’s bull’s horn!’

‘Good egg!’ quoth Moorshed, and brought his hand down on the wide shoulders with the smack of a beaver’s tail.

‘Us’ll go look for they by hand. Us’ll give they something to play upon; an’ do ’ee deal with them faithfully, an’ may the Lard have mercy on your sowls! Amen. Put I in dinghy again.’

The fog was as dense as ever—we moved in the very womb of night—but I cannot recall that I took the faintest note of it as the dinghy, guided by the tow-rope, disappeared toward the Agatha, Pyecroft rowing. The bell began again on the starboard bow.

‘We’re pretty near,’ said Moorshed, slowing down. ‘Out with the Berthon. (We’ll sell ’em fish, too.) And if any one rows Navy-stroke, I’ll break his jaw with the tiller. Mr. Hinchcliffe’ (this down the tube), ‘you’ll stay here in charge with Gregory and Shergold and the engine-room staff. Morgan stays, too, for signalling purposes.’ A deep groan broke from Morgan’s chest, but he said nothing. ‘If the fog thins and you’re seen by any one, keep ’em quiet with the signals. I can’t think of the precise lie just now, but you can, Morgan.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Suppose their torpedo-nets are down?’ I whispered, shivering with excitement.

‘If they’ve been repairing minor defects all day, they won’t have any one to spare from the engine-room, and “Out nets!” is a job for the whole ship’s company. I expect they’ve trusted to the fog—like us. Well, Pyecroft?’

That great soul had blown up on to the bridge like a feather. ‘’Ad to see the first o’ the rum into the Agathites, Sir. They was a bit jealous o’ their commandin’ officer comin’ ’ome so richly lacquered, and at first the conversazione languished, as you might say. But they sprang to attention ere I left. Six sharp strokes on the bells, if any of ’em are sober enough to keep tally, will be the signal that our consort ’as cast off her tow an’ is manoeuvrin’ on ’er own.’

‘Right O! Take Laughton with you in the dinghy. Put that Berthon over quietly there! Are you all right, Mr. Hinchcliffe?’

I stood back to avoid the rush of half-a-dozen shadows dropping into the Berthon boat. A hand caught me by the slack of my garments, moved me in generous arcs through the night, and I rested on the bottom of the dinghy.

‘I want you for prima facie evidence, in case the vaccination don’t take,’ said Pyecroft in my ear. ‘Push off, Alf!’

The last bell-ringing was high overhead. It was followed by six little tinkles from the Agatha, the roar of her falling anchor, the clash of pans, and loose shouting.

‘Where be gwine to? Port your ’ellum. Aie! you mud-dredger in the fairway, goo astern! Out boats! She’ll sink us!’

A clear-cut Navy voice drawled from the clouds

‘Quiet! you gardeners there. This is the Cryptic at anchor.’

‘Thank you for the range,’ said Pyecroft, and paddled gingerly. ‘Feel well out in front of you, Alf. Remember your fat fist is our only Marconi installation.’

The voices resumed

‘Bournemouth steamer he says she be.’

‘Then where be Brixham Harbour?’

‘Damme, I’m a taxpayer tu. They’ve no right to cruise about this way. I’ll have the laa on ’ee if anything carries away.’

Then the man-of-war

‘Short on your anchor! Heave short, you howling maniacs! You’ll get yourselves smashed in a minute if you drift.’

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The air was full of these and other voices as the dinghy, checking, swung. I passed one hand down Laughton’s stretched arm and felt an iron gooseneck and a foot or two of a backward-sloping torpedo-net boom. The other hand I laid on broad, cold iron—even the flank of H.M.S. Cryptic, which is twelve thousand tons.

I heard a scrubby, raspy sound, as though Pyecroft had chosen that hour to shave, and I smelled paint. ‘Drop aft a bit, Alf; we’ll put a stencil under the stern six-inch casements.’

Boom by boom Laughton slid the dinghy along the towering curved wall. Once, twice, and again we stopped, and the keen scrubbing sound was renewed.

‘Umpires are ’ard-’earted blighters, but this ought to convince ’em . . . . Captain Panke’s stern-walk is now above our defenceless ’eads. Repeat the evolution up the starboard side, Alf.’

I was only conscious that we moved around an iron world palpitating with life. Though my knowledge was all by touch—as, for example, when Pyecroft led my surrendered hand to the base of some bulging sponson, or when my palm closed on the knife-edge of the stem and patted it timidly—yet I felt lonely and unprotected as the enormous, helpless ship was withdrawn, and we drifted away into the void where voices sang:

Tom Pearse, Tom Pearse, lend me thy gray mare,
All along, out along, down along lea!
For I want for to go to Widdicombe Fair
With Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney,
Peter Davy, Dan’l Whiddon, Harry Hawke,
Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh an’ all.

‘That’s old Sinbad an’ ’is little lot from the Agatha! Give way, Alf! You might sing somethin’, too.’

‘I’m no burnin’ Patti. Ain’t there noise enough for you, Pye?’

‘Yes, but it’s only amateurs. Give me the tones of ’earth and ’ome. Ha! List to the blighter on the ’orizon sayin’ his prayers, Navy-fashion. ’Eaven ’elp me argue that way when I’m a warrant-officer!’

We headed with little lapping strokes toward what seemed to be a fair-sized riot.

‘An’ I’ve ’eard the Devolution called a happy ship, too,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Just shows ’ow a man’s misled by prejudice. She’s peevish—that’s what she is—nasty-peevish. Prob’ly all because the Agathites are scratching ’er paint. Well, rub along, Alf. I’ve got the lymph!’

A voice, which Mr. Pyecroft assured me belonged to a chief carpenter, was speaking through an aperture (starboard bow twelve-pounder on the lower deck. He did not wish to purchase any fish, even at grossly reduced rates. Nobody wished to buy any fish. This ship was the Devolution at anchor, and desired no communication with shore boats.

‘Mark how the Navy ’olds its own. He’s sober. The Agathites are not, as you might say, an’ yet they can’t live with ’im. It’s the discipline that does it. ’Ark to the bald an’ unconvincin’ watch-officer chimin’ in. I wonder where Mr. Moorshed has got to?’

We drifted down the Devolution’s side, as we had drifted down her sister’s; and we dealt with her in that dense gloom as we had dealt with her sister.

‘Whai! ’Tis a man-o’-war, after all! I can see the captain’s whisker all gilt at the edges! We took’ee for the Bournemouth steamer. Three cheers for the real man-o’-war!’

That cry came from under the Devolution’s stern. Pyecroft held something in his teeth, for I heard him mumble, ‘Our Mister Moorshed!’

Said a boy’s voice above us, just as we dodged a jet of hot water from some valve: ‘I don’t half like that cheer. If I’d been the old man I’d ha’ turned loose the quick-firers at the first go-off. Aren’t they rowing Navy-stroke, yonder?’

‘True,’ said Pyecroft, listening to retreating oars. ‘It’s time to go ’ome when snotties begin to think. The fog’s thinnin’, too.’

I felt a chill breath on my forehead, and saw a few feet of the steel stand out darker than the darkness, disappear—it was then the dinghy shot away from it—and emerge once more.

‘Hallo! what boat’s that?’ said the voice suspiciously.

‘Why, I do believe it’s a real man-o’-war, after all,’ said Pyecroft, and kicked Laughton.

‘What’s that for?’ Laughton was no dramatist.

‘Answer in character, you blighter! Say somethin’ opposite.’

‘What boat’s thatt?’ The hail was repeated.

‘What do yee say-ay?’ Pyecroft bellowed, and, under his breath to me: ‘Give us a hand.’

‘It’s called the Marietta—F. J. Stokes—Torquay,’ I began, quaveringly. ‘At least that’s the name on the name-board. I’ve been dining—on a yacht.’

‘I see.’ The voice shook a little, and my way opened before me with disgraceful ease.

‘Yesh. Dining private yacht. Eshmesheralda. I belong to Torquay Yacht Club. Are you member Torquay Yacht Club?’

‘You’d better go to bed, Sir. Good-night.’ We slid into the rapidly thinning fog.

‘Dig out, Alf. Put your nix mangiare back into it. The fog’s peelin’ off like a petticoat. Where’s Two Six Seven?’

‘I can’t see her,’ I replied, ‘but there’s a light low down ahead.’

‘The Agatha!’ They rowed desperately through the uneasy dispersal of the fog for ten minutes and ducked round the trawler’s bow.

‘Well, Emanuel means “God with us”—so far.’ Pyecroft wiped his brow, laid a hand on the low rail, and as he boosted me up to the trawler, I saw Moorshed’s face, white as pearl in the thinning dark.

‘Was it all right?’ said he, over the bulwarks.

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‘Vaccination ain’t in it. She’s took beautiful. But where’s 267, Sir?’ Pyecroft replied.

‘Gone. We came here as the fog lifted. I gave the Devolution four. Was that you behind us?’

‘Yes, sir; but I only got in three on the Devolution. I gave the Cryptic nine, though. They’re what you might call more or less vaccinated.’

He lifted me inboard, where Moorshed and six pirates lay round the Agatha’s hatch. There was a hint of daylight in the cool air.

‘Where is the old man?’ I asked.

‘Still selling ’em fish, I suppose. He’s a darling! But I wish I could get this filthy paint off my hands. Hallo! What the deuce is the Cryptic signalling?’

A pale masthead light winked through the last of the fog. It was answered by a white pencil to the southward.

‘Destroyer signallin’ with searchlight.’ Pyecroft leaped on the stern-rail. ‘The first part is private signals. Ah! now she’s Morsing against the fog. “ P-O-S-T—yes, postpone”—“D-E-P(go on!) departure—till—further—orders—which—will—be com (he’s dropped the other m) unicated—verbally. End.”’ He swung round. ‘Cryptic is now answering: “Ready—proceed—immediately. What—news—promised—destroyer—flotilla?”’

‘Hallo!’ said Moorshed. ‘Well, never mind. They’ll come too late.’

‘Whew! That’s some ’igh-born suckling on the destroyer. Destroyer signals: “Care not. All will be known later.” What merry beehive’s broken loose now?’

‘What odds! We’ve done our little job.’

‘Why—why—it’s Two Six Seven!’

Here Pyecroft dropped from the rail among the fishy nets and shook the Agatha with heavings. Moorshed cast aside his cigarette, looked over the stern, and fell into his subordinate’s arms. I heard. the guggle of engines, the rattle of a little anchor going over not a hundred yards away, a cough, and Morgan’s subdued hail . . . . So far as I remember, it was Laughton whom I hugged; but the men who hugged me most were Pyecroft and Moorshed, adrift among the fishy nets.

There was no semblance of discipline in our flight over the Agatha’s side, nor, indeed, were ordinary precautions taken for the common safety, because (I was in the Berthon) they held that patent boat open by hand for the most part. We regained our own craft, cackling like wild geese, and crowded round Moorshed and Hinchcliffe. Behind us the Agatha’s boat, returning from her fish-selling cruise, yelled : ‘Have ’ee done the trick? Have ’ee done the trick?’ and we could only shout hoarsely over the stern, guaranteeing them rum by the hold-full.

‘Fog got patchy here at 12.27,’ said Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, growing clearer every instant in the dawn. ‘Went down to Brixham Harbour to keep out of the road. Heard whistles to the south and went to look. I had her up to sixteen good. Morgan kept on shedding private Red Fleet signals out of the signal-book, as the fog cleared, till we was answered by three destroyers. Morgan signalled ’em by searchlight: “Alter course to South Seventeen East, so as not to lose time.” They came round quick. We kept well away—on their port beam—and Morgan gave ’em their orders.’ He looked at Morgan and coughed.

‘The signalman, acting as second in command,’ said Morgan, swelling, ‘then informed destroyer flotilla that Cryptic and Devolution had made good defects, and, in obedience to Admiral’s supplementary orders (I was afraid they might suspect that, but they didn’t), had proceeded at seven knots at 11.23 p.m. to rendezvous near Channel Islands, seven miles N.N.W. the Casquet light. (I’ve rendezvoused there myself, Sir.) Destroyer flotilla would therefore follow cruisers and catch up with them on their course. Destroyer flotilla then dug out on course indicated, all funnels sparking briskly.’

‘Who were the destroyers?’

‘Wraith, Kobbold, Stiletto, Lieutenant-Commander A. L. Hignett, acting under Admiral’s orders to escort cruisers received off the Dodman at 7 p.m. They’d come slow on account of fog.’

‘Then who were you?’

‘We were the Afrite, port engine broke down, put in to Torbay, and there instructed by Cryptic, previous to her departure with Devolution, to inform Commander Hignett of change of plans. Lieutenant-Commander Hignett signalled that our meeting was quite providential. After this we returned to pick up our commanding officer, and being interrogated by Cryptic, marked time signalling as requisite, which you may have seen. The Agatha representing the last known rallying-point—or, as I should say, pivot-ship of the evolution—it was decided to repair to the Agatha at conclusion of manoeuvre.’

We breathed deeply, all of us, but no one spoke a word till Moorshed said: ‘Is there such a thing as one fine big drink aboard this one fine big battleship?’

‘Can do, sir,’ said Pyecroft, and got it. Beginning with Mr. Moorshed and ending with myself, junior to the third firstclass stoker, we drank, and it was as water of the brook, that two and a half inches of stilt, treacly Navy rum. And we looked each in the other’s face, and we nodded, bright-eyed, burning with bliss.

Moorshed walked aft to the torpedo-tubes and paced back and forth, a captain victorious on his own quarter-deck; and the triumphant day broke over the green-bedded villas of Torquay to show us the magnitude of our victory. There lay the cruisers (I have reason to believe that they had made good their defects). They were each four hundred and forty feet long and sixty-six wide; they held close upon eight hundred men apiece, and they had cost, say, a million and a half the pair. And they were ours, and they did not know it. Indeed, the Cryptic, senior ship, was signalling vehement remarks to our address, which we did not notice.

‘If you take these glasses, you’ll get the general run o’ last night’s vaccination,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Each one represents a torpedo got ’ome, as you might say.’

I saw on the Cryptic’s port side, as she lay half a mile away across the glassy water, four neat white squares in outline, a white blur in the centre.

‘There are five more to starboard. ’Ere’s the original!’ He handed me a paint-dappled copper stencil-plate, two feet square, bearing in the centre the six-inch initials, ‘G.M.’

‘Ten minutes ago I’d ha’ eulogised about that little trick of ours, but Morgan’s performance has short-circuited me. Are you happy, Morgan?’

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‘Bustin’,’ said the signalman briefly.

‘You may be. Gawd forgive you, Morgan, for as Queen ’Enrietta said to the ’ousemaid, I never will. I’d ha’ given a year’s pay for ten minutes o’ your signallin’ work this mornin’.’

‘I wouldn’t ’ave took it up,’ was the answer. ‘Perishin’ ’Eavens above! Look at the Devolution’s semaphore !’ Two black wooden arms waved from the junior ship’s upper bridge. ‘They’ve seen it.’

‘The mote on their neighbour’s beam, of course,’ said Pyecroft, and read syllable by syllable ‘“ Captain Malan to Captain Panke. Is—sten—cilled—frieze your starboard side new Admiralty regulation, or your Number One’s private expense?” Now Cryptic is saying, “Not understood.” Poor old Crippy, the Devolute’s raggin’ ’er sore. “Who is G.M.?” she says. That’s fetched the Cryptic. She’s answerin’: “You ought to know. Examine own paintwork.” Oh Lord! they’re both on to it now. This is balm. This is beginning to be balm. I forgive you, Morgan!’

Two frantic pipes twittered. From either cruiser a whaler dropped into the water and madly rowed round the ship, as a gay-coloured hoist rose to the Cryptic’s yardarm : ‘Destroyer will close at once. Wish to speak by semaphore.’ Then on the bridge semaphore itself : ‘Have been trying to attract your attention last half-hour. Send commanding officer aboard at once.’

‘Our attention? After all the attention we’ve given ’er, too,’ said Pyecroft. ‘What a greedy old woman!’ To Moorshed : ‘Signal from the Cryptic, Sir.’

‘Never mind that!’ said the boy, peering through his glasses. ‘Out dinghy quick, or they’ll paint our marks out. Come along!’

By this time I was long past even hysteria. I remember Pyecroft’s bending back, the surge of the driven dinghy, a knot of amazed faces as we skimmed the Cryptic’s ram, and the dropped jaw of the midshipman in her whaler when we barged fairly into him.

‘Mind my paint!’ he yelled.

‘You mind mine, snotty,’ said Moorshed. ‘I was all night putting these little ear-marks on you for the umpires to sit on. Leave ’em alone.’

We splashed past him to the Devolution’s boat, where sat no one less than her first lieutenant, a singularly unhandy-looking officer.

‘What the deuce is the meaning of this?’ he roared, with an accusing forefinger.

‘You’re sunk, that’s all. You’ve been dead half a tide.’

‘Dead, am I? I’ll show you whether I’m dead or not, Sir!’

‘Well, you may be a survivor,’ said Moorshed ingratiatingly, ‘though it isn’t at all likely.’

The officer choked for a minute. The midshipman crouched up in the stern said, half aloud

‘Then I was right—last night.’

‘Yesh,’ I gasped from the dinghy’s coal-dust. ‘Are you member Torquay Yacht Club?’

‘Hell!’ said the first lieutenant, and fled away. The Cryptic’s boat was already at that cruiser’s side, and semaphores flicked zealously from ship to ship. We floated, a minute speck, between the two hulls, while the pipes went for the captain’s galley on the Devolution.

‘That’s all right,’ said Moorshed. ‘Wait till the gangway’s down and then board her decently. We oughtn’t to be expected to climb up a ship we’ve sunk.’

Pyecroft lay on his disreputable oars till Captain Malan, full-uniformed, descended the Devolution’s side. With due compliments—not acknowledged, I grieve to say—we fell in behind his sumptuous galley, and at last, upon pressing invitation, climbed, black as sweeps all, the lowered gangway of the Cryptic. At the top stood as fine a constellation of marine stars as ever sang together of a morning on a King’s ship. Every one who could get within earshot found that his work took him aft. I counted eleven able seamen polishing the breech-block of the stern nine-point-two, four marines zealously relieving each other at the lifebuoy, six call-boys, nine midshipmen of the watch, exclusive of naval cadets, and the higher ranks past all census.

‘If I die o’ joy,’ said Pyecroft behind his hand, ‘remember I died forgivin’ Morgan from the bottom of my ’eart, because, like Martha, we ’ave scoffed the better part. You’d better try to come to attention, Sir.’

Moorshed ran his eye voluptuously over the upper deck battery, the huge beam, and the immaculate perspective of power. Captain Panke and Captain Malan stood on the well-browned flash-plates by the dazzling hatch. Precisely over the flagstaff I saw Two Six Seven astern, her black petticoat half hitched up, meekly floating on the still sea. She looked like the pious Abigail who has just spoken her mind, and, with folded hands, sits thanking Heaven among the pieces. I could almost have sworn that she wore black worsted gloves and had a little dry cough. But it was Captain Panke that coughed so austerely. He favoured us with a lecture on uniform, deportment, and the urgent necessity of answering signals from a senior ship. He told us that he disapproved of masquerading, that he loved discipline, and would be obliged by an explanation. And while he delivered himself deeper and more deeply into our hands, I saw Captain Malan wince. He was watching Moorshed’s eye.

‘I belong to Blue Fleet, Sir. I command Number Two Six Seven,’ said Moorshed, and Captain Panke was dumb. ‘Have you such a thing as a frame-plan of the Cryptic aboard?’ He spoke with winning politeness as he opened a small and neatly folded paper.

‘I have, sir.’ The little man’s face was working with passion.

‘Ah! Then I shall be able to show you precisely where you were torpedoed last night in’ he consulted the paper with one finely arched eyebrow—‘in nine places. And since the Devolution is, I understand, a sister ship’—he bowed slightly toward Captain Malan ‘the same plan—’

I had followed the clear precision of each word with a dumb amazement which seemed to leave my mind abnormally clear. I saw Captain Malan’s eye turn from Moorshed and seek that of the Cryptic’s commander. And he telegraphed as clearly as Moorshed was speaking: ‘My dear friend and brother officer, I know Panke; you know Panke; we know Panke—good little Panke! In less than three Greenwich chronometer seconds Panke will make an enormous ass of himself, and I shall have to put things straight, unless you who are a man of tact and discernment—’

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‘Carry on.’ The Commander’s order supplied the unspoken word. The cruiser boiled about her business around us; watch and watch-officers together, up to the limit of noise permissible. I saw Captain Malan turn to his senior.

‘Come to my cabin!’ said Panke gratingly, and led the way. Pyecroft and I stayed still.

‘It’s all right,’ said Pyecroft. ‘They daren’t leave us loose aboard for one revolution,’ and I knew that he had seen what I had seen.

‘You, too!’ said Captain Malan, returning suddenly. We passed the sentry between white-enamelled walls of speckless small-arms, and since that Royal Marine Light Infantryman was visibly suffocating from curiosity, I winked at him. We entered the chintz-adorned, photo-speckled, brass-fendered, tile-stowed main cabin. Moorshed, with a ruler, was demonstrating before the frame-plan of H.M.S. Cryptic.

‘—making nine stencils in all of my initials G.M.,’ I heard him say. ‘Further, you will find attached to your rudder, and you, too, Sir’—he bowed to Captain Malan yet again—‘one fourteen-inch Mark IV practice torpedo, as issued to first-class torpedo-boats, properly buoyed. I have sent full particulars by telegraph to the umpires, and have requested them to judge on the facts as they—appear.’ He nodded through the large window to the stencilled Devolution awink with brass-work in the morning sun, and ceased.

Captain Panke faced us. I remembered that this was only play, and caught myself wondering with what keener agony comes the real defeat.

‘Good God, Johnny!’ he said, dropping his lower lip like a child, ‘this young pup says he has put us both out of action. Inconceivable—eh? My first command of one of the class. Eh? What shall we do with him? What shall we do with him—eh?’

‘As far as I can see, there’s no getting over the stencils,’ his companion answered.

‘Why didn’t I have the nets down? Why didn’t I have the nets down?’ The cry tore itself from Captain Panke’s chest as he twisted his hands.

‘I suppose we’d better wait and find out what the umpires will say. The Admiral won’t be exactly pleased.’ Captain Malan spoke very soothingly. Moorshed looked out through the stern door at Two Six Seven. Pyecroft and I, at attention, studied the paintwork opposite. Captain Panke had dropped into his desk chair, and scribbled nervously at a blotting-pad.

Just before the tension became unendurable, he looked at his junior for a lead. ‘What—what are you going to do about it, Johnny—eh?’

‘Well, if you don’t want him, I’m going to ask this young gentleman to breakfast, and then we’ll make and mend clothes till the umpires have decided.’

Captain Panke flung out a hand swiftly.

‘Come with me,’ said Captain Malan. ‘Your men had better go back in the dinghy to—their—own—ship.’

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Moorshed, and passed out behind the captain. We followed at a respectful interval, waiting till they had ascended the ladder.

Said the sentry, rigid as the naked barometer behind him : ‘For Gawd’s sake! ’Ere, come ’ere! For Gawd’s sake! What’s ’appened? Oh! come ’ere an’ tell.’

‘Tell? You?’ said Pyecroft. Neither man’s lips moved, and the words were whispers: ‘Four ultimate illegitimate grandchildren might begin to understand, not you—nor ever will.’

‘Captain Malan’s galley away, Sir,’ cried a voice above; and one replied: ‘Then get those two greasers into their dinghy and hoist the Blue Peter. We’re out of action.’

‘Can you do it, Sir?’ said Pyecroft at the foot of the ladder. ‘Do you think it is in the English language, or do you not?’

‘I don’t think I can, but I’ll try. If it takes me two years, I’ll try.’

. . . . .

There are witnesses who can testify that I have used no artifice. I have, on the contrary, cut away priceless slabs of opus alexandrinum. My gold I have lacquered down to dull bronze, my purples overlaid with sepia of the sea, and for hell-hearted ruby and blinding diamond I have substituted pale amethyst and mere jargoon. Because I would say again ‘Disregarding the inventions of the Marine Captain whose other name is Gubbins, let a plain statement suffice.’

Their Lawful Occasions – part I

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DISREGARDING the inventions of the Marine Captain, whose other name is Gubbins, let a plain statement suffice.H.M.S. Caryatid went to Portland to join Blue Fleet for manœuvres. I travelled overland from London by way of Portsmouth, where I fell among friends. When I reached Portland, H.M.S. Caryatid, whose guest I was to have been, had, with Blue Fleet, already sailed for some secret rendezvous off the west coast of Ireland, and Portland breakwater was filled with Red Fleet, my official enemies and joyous acquaintances, who received me with unstinted hospitality. For example, Lieutenant-Commander A. L. Hignett, in charge of three destroyers, Wraith, Stiletto, and Kobbold, due to depart at 6 p.m. that evening, offered me a berth on his thirty-knot flagship, but I preferred my comforts, and so accepted sleeping-room in H.M.S. Pedantic (15,000 tons), leader of the second line. After dining aboard her I took boat to Weymouth to get my kit aboard, as the battleships would go to war at midnight. In transferring my allegiance from Blue to Red Fleet, whatever the Marine Captain may say, I did no wrong. I truly intended to return to the Pedantic and help to fight Blue Fleet. All I needed was a new toothbrush, which I bought from a chemist in a side street at 9.15 p.m. As I turned to go, one entered seeking alleviation of a gumboil. He was dressed in a checked ulster, a black silk hat three sizes too small, cord-breeches, boots, and pure brass spurs. These he managed painfully, stepping like a prisoner fresh from leg-irons. As he adjusted the pepper-plaster to the gum the light fell on his face, and I recognised Mr. Emanuel Pyecroft, late second-class petty officer of H.M.S. Achimandrite, an unforgettable man, met a year before under Tom Wessels’ roof in Plymouth. It occurred to me that when a petty officer takes to spurs he may conceivably meditate desertion. For that reason I, though a taxpayer, made no sign. Indeed, it was Mr. Pyecroft, following me out of the shop, who said hollowly: ‘What might you be doing here?’

‘I’m going on manœuvres in the Pedantic,’ I replied.

‘Ho!’ said Mr. Pyecroft. ‘An’ what manner o’ manœuvres d’you expect to see in a blighted cathedral like the Pedantic? I know’er. I knew her in Malta, when the Vulcan was her permanent tender, manœuvres ! You won’t see more than “Man an’ arm watertight doors!” in your little woollen undervest.’

‘I’m sorry for that.’

‘Why?’ He lurched heavily as his spurs caught and twanged like tuning-forks. ‘War’s declared at midnight. Pedantics be sugared! Buy an ’am an’ see life!’

For the moment I fancied Mr. Pyecroft, a fugitive from justice, purposed that we two should embrace a Robin Hood career in the uplands of Dorset. The spurs troubled me, and I made bold to say as much. ‘Them!’ he said, coming to an intricate halt. ‘They’re part of the prima facie evidence. But as for me—let me carry your bag—I’m second in command, leadin’-hand, cook, steward, an’ lavatory man, with a few incidentals for sixpence a day extra, on No. 267 torpedo-boat.’

‘They wear spurs there?’

‘Well,’ said Mr. Pyecroft, ‘seein’ that Two Six Seven belongs to Blue Fleet, which left the day before yesterday, disguises are imperative. It transpired thus. The Right Honourable Lord Gawd Almighty Admiral Master Frankie Frobisher, K.C.B., commandin’ Blue Fleet, can’t be bothered with one tin-torpedo-boat more or less ; and what with lyin’ in the Reserve four years, an’ what with the new kind o’ tiffy which cleans dynamos with brick-dust and oil (Blast these spurs! They won’t render!), Two Six Seven’s steam-gadgets was paralytic. Our Mr. Moorshed done his painstakin’ best—it’s his first command of a war-canoe, matoor age nineteen (down that alley-way, please!), but be that as it may, His Holiness Frankie is aware of us crabbin’ ourselves round the breakwater at five knots, an’ steerin’ pari passu, as the French say. (Up this alley-way, please!) If he’d given Mr. Hinchcliffe, our chief engineer, a little time, it would never have transpired, for what Hinch can’t drive he can coax; but the new port bein’ a trifle cloudy, an’ ’is joints tinglin’ after a post-captain dinner, Frankie come on the upper bridge seekin’ for a sacrifice. We, offerin’ a broadside target, got it. He told us what ’is grandmamma, ’oo was a lady an’ went to sea in stick-and-string bateaus, had told him about steam. He throwed in his own prayers for the ’ealth an’ safety of all steam-packets an’ their officers. Then he give us several distinct orders. The first few—I kept tally—was all about going to Hell; the next many was about not evolutin’ in his company, when there; an’ the last all was simply repeatin’ the motions in quick time. Knowin’ Frankie’s groovin’ to be badly eroded by age and lack of attention, I didn’t much panic ; but our Mr. Moorshed, ’e took it a little to heart. Me an’ Mr. Hinchcliffe consoled ’im as well as service conditions permits of, an’ we had a résumé supper at the back o’ the camber—secluded an’ lugubrious! Then one thing leadin’ up to another, an’ our orders, except about anchorin’ where he’s booked for, leavin’ us a clear ’orizon, Number Two Six Seven is now—mind the edge of the wharf—here!’

By mysterious doublings he had brought me out on to the edge of a narrow strip of water crowded with coastwise shipping that runs far up into Weymouth town. A large foreign timber-brig lay at my feet, and under the round of her stern cowered, close to the wharf-edge, a slate coloured, unkempt, two-funnelled craft of a type—but I am no expert—between the first-class torpedo-boat and the full-blooded destroyer. From her archaic torpedo-tubes at the stern, and quick-firers forward and amidships, she must have dated from the early ’nineties. Hammerings and clinkings, with spurts of steam and fumes of hot oil, arose from her inside, and a figure in a striped jersey squatted on the engine-room gratings.

‘She ain’t much of a war-canoe, but you’ll see more life in her than on an whole squadron of bleedin’ Pedantics.’

‘But she’s laid up here—and Blue Fleet have gone,’ I protested.

‘Pre-cisely. Only, in his comprehensive orders Frankie didn’t put us out of action. Thus we’re a non-neglectable fightin’ factor which you mightn’t think from this elevation; an’ m’rover, Red Fleet don’t know we’re ’ere. Most of us’—he glanced proudly at his boots—‘didn’t run to spurs, but we’re disguised pretty devious, as you might say. Morgan, our signaliser, when last seen, was a Dawlish bathing-machine proprietor. Hinchcliffe was naturally a German waiter, and me you behold as a squire of low degree; while yonder Levantine dragoman on the hatch is our Mr. Moorshed. He was the second cutter’s snotty—my snotty—on the Archimandrite—two years—Cape Station. Likewise on the West Coast, mangrove-swampin’, an’ gettin’ the cutter stove in on small an’ unlikely bars, an’ manufacturin’ lies to correspond. What I don’t know about Mr. Moorshed is precisely the same gauge as what Mr. Moorshed don’t know about me—half a millimetre, as you might say. He comes into awful opulence of his own when ’e’s of age; an’ judgin’ from what passed between us when Frankie cursed ’im, I don’t think ’e cares whether he’s broke to-morrow or—the day after. Are you beginnin’ to follow our tattics? They’ll be worth followin’. Or are you goin’ back to your nice little cabin on the Pedantic—which I lay they’ve just dismounted the third engineer out of—to eat four fat meals per diem, an’ smoke in the casement?’

The figure in the jersey lifted its head and mumbled.

‘Yes, Sir,’ was Mr. Pyecroft’s answer. ‘I ’ave ascertained that Stiletto, Wraith, and Kobbold left at 6 p.m. with the first division o’ Red Fleet’s cruisers except Devolution and Cryptic, which are delayed by engine-room defects.’ Then to me: ‘Won’t you go aboard? Mr. Moorshed ’ud like some one to talk to. You buy an ’am an’ see life.’

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At this he vanished; and the Demon of Pure Irresponsibility bade me lower myself from the edge of the wharf to the tea-tray plates of No. 267.

‘What ’d’you want?’ said the striped jersey.

‘I want to join Blue Fleet if I can,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been left behind by—an accident.’

‘Well?’

‘Mr. Pyecroft told me to buy a ham and see life. About how big a ham do you need?’

‘I don’t want any ham, thank you. That’s the way up the wharf. Good-night.’

‘Good-night!’ I retraced my steps, wandered in the dark till I found a shop, and there purchased, of sardines, canned tongue, lobster, and salmon, not less than half a hundredweight. A belated sausage-shop supplied me with a partially cut ham of pantomime tonnage. These things I, sweating, bore out to the edge of the wharf and set down in the shadow of a crane. It was a clear, dark summer night, and from time to time I laughed happily to myself. The adventure was preordained on the face of it. Pyecroft alone, spurred or barefoot, would have drawn me very far from the paths of circumspection. His advice to buy a ham and see life clinched it. Presently Mr. Pyecroft—I heard spurs clink-passed me. Then the jersey voice said: ‘What the mischief’s that?’

‘’Asn’t the visitor come aboard, Sir? ’E told me he’d purposely abandoned the Pedantic for the pleasure of the trip with us. Told me he was official correspondent for the Times; an’ I know he’s Jittery by the way ’e tries to talk Navy-talk. Haven’t you seen ’im, Sir?’

Slowly and dispassionately the answer drawled long on the night; ‘Pye, you are without exception the biggest liar in the Service!’

‘Then what am I to do with the bag, Sir? It’s marked with his name.’ There was a pause till Mr. Moorshed said ‘Oh!’ in a tone which the listener might construe precisely as he pleased.

‘He was the maniac who wanted to buy a ham and see life—was he? If he goes back to the Pedantic——’

‘Pre-cisely, Sir. Gives us all away, Sir.’

‘Then what possessed you to give it away to him, you owl?’

‘I’ve got his bag. If ’e gives anything away, he’ll have to go naked.’

At this point I thought it best to rattle my tins and step out of the shadow of the crane.

‘I’ve bought the ham,’ I called sweetly. ‘Have you still any objection to my seeing life, Mr. Moorshed?’

‘All right, if you’re insured. Won’t you come down?’

I descended; Pyecroft, by a silent flank movement, possessing himself of all the provisions, which he bore to some hole forward.

‘Have you known Mr. Pyecroft long?’ said my host.

‘Met him once, a year ago, at Devonport. What do you think of him?’

‘What do you think of him?’

‘I’ve left the Pedantic—her boat will be waiting for me at ten o’clock, too—simply because I happened to meet him,’ I replied.

‘That’s all right. If you’ll come down below, we may get some grub.’

We descended a naked steel ladder to a steel-beamed tunnel, perhaps twelve feet long by six high. Leather-topped lockers ran along either side; a swinging table, with tray and lamp above, occupied the centre. Other furniture there was none.

‘You can’t shave here, of course. We don’t wash, and, as a rule, we eat with our fingers when we’re at sea. D’you mind?’

Mr. Moorshed, black-haired, black-browed, sallow-complexioned, looked me over from head to foot and grinned. He was not handsome in any way, but his smile drew the heart. ‘You didn’t happen to hear what Frankie told me from the flagship, did you? His last instructions, and I’ve logged ’em here in shorthand, were’—he opened a neat pocket-book—‘“Get out of this and conduct your own damned manœuvres in your own damned tinker fashion! You’re a disgrace to the Service, and your boat’s offal.”’

‘Awful?’ I said.

‘No—offal—tripes—swipes—ullage.’ Mr. Pyecroft entered, in the costume of his calling, with the ham and an assortment of tin dishes, which he dealt out like cards.

‘I shall take these as my orders,’ said Mr. Moorshed. ‘I’m chucking the Service at the end of the year, so it doesn’t matter.’

We cut into the ham under the ill-trimmed lamp, washed it down with whisky, and then smoked. From the foreside of the bulkhead came an uninterrupted hammering and clinking, and now and then a hiss of steam.

‘That’s Mr. Hinchcliffe,’ said Pyecroft. ‘He’s what is called a first-class engine-room artificer. If you hand ’im a drum of oil an’ leave ’im alone, he can coax a stolen bicycle to do typewritin’.’

Very leisurely, at the end of his first pipe, Mr. Moorshed drew out a folded map, cut from a newspaper, of the area of manœuvres, with the rules that regulate these wonderful things, below.

‘Well, I suppose I know as much as an average stick-and-string admiral,’ he said, yawning. ‘Is our petticoat ready yet, Mr. Pyecroft?’

As a preparation for naval manœuvres these councils seemed inadequate. I followed up the ladder into the gloom cast by the wharf edge and the big lumber-ship’s side. As my eyes stretched to the darkness I saw that No. 267 had miraculously sprouted an extra pair of funnels—soft, for they gave as I touched them.

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‘More prima facie evidence. You runs a rope fore an’ aft, an’ you erects perpendick-u-arly two canvas tubes, which you distends with cane hoops, thus ’avin’ as many funnels as a destroyer. At the word o’ command, up they go like a pair of concertinas, an’ consequently collapses equally ’andy when requisite. Comin’ aft we shall doubtless overtake the Dawlish bathin’-machine proprietor fittin’ on her bustle.’

Mr. Pyecroft whispered this in my ear as Moorshed moved toward a group at the stern.

‘None of us who ain’t built that way can be destroyers, but we can look as near it as we can. Let me explain to you, Sir, that the stern of a Thornycroft boat, which we are not, comes out in a pretty bulge, totally different from the Yarrow mark, which again we are not. But, on the other ’and, Dirk, Stiletto, Goblin, Ghoul, Djinn, and A-frite—Red Fleet dee-stroyers, with ’oom we hope to consort later on terms o’ perfect equality—are Thornycrofts, an’ carry that Grecian bend which we are now adjustin’ to our arrière-pensée—as the French would put it—by means of painted canvas an’ iron rods bent as requisite. Between you an’ me an’ Frankie, we are the Gnome, now in the Fleet Reserve at Pompey—Portsmouth, I should say.’

‘The first sea will carry it all away,’ said Moorshed, leaning gloomily outboard, ‘but it will do for the present.’

‘We’ve a lot of prima facie evidence about us,’ Mr. Pyecroft went on. ‘A first-class torpedo-boat sits lower in the water than a destroyer. Hence we artificially raise our sides with a black canvas wash-streak to represent extra freeboard ; at the same time paddin’ out the cover of the forward three-pounder like as if it was a twelvepounder, an’ variously fakin’ up the bows of ’er. As you might say, we’ve took thought an’ added a cubic to our stature. It’s our len’th that sugars us. A ’undred an’ forty feet, which is our len’th, into two ’undred and ten, which is about the Gnome’s, leaves seventy feet over, which we haven’t got.’

‘Is this all your own notion, Mr. Pyecroft?’ I asked.

‘In spots, you might say—yes; though we all contributed to make up deficiencies. But Mr. Moorshed, not much carin’ for further Navy after what Frankie said, certainly threw himself into the part with avidity.’

‘What the dickens are we going to do?’s

‘Speaking as a seaman gunner, I should say we’d wait till the sights came on, an’ then fire. Speakin’ as a torpedo-coxswain, L.T.O., T.I., M.D.) etc., I presume we fall in—Number One in rear of the tube, etc., secure tube to ball or diaphragm, clear away securin’-bar, release safety-pin from lockin’-levers, an’ pray Heaven to look down on us. As second in command o’ 267, I say wait an’ see! ‘

‘What’s happened? We’re off,’ I said. The timber-ship had slid away from us.

‘We are. Stern first, an’ broadside on! If we don’t hit anything too hard, we’ll do.’

‘Come on the bridge,’ said Mr. Moorshed. I saw no bridge, but fell over some sort of conning-tower forward, near which was a wheel. For the next few minutes I was more occupied with cursing my own folly than with the science of navigation. Therefore I cannot say how we got out of Weymouth Harbour, nor why it was necessary to turn sharp to the left and wallow in what appeared to be surf.

‘Excuse me,’ said Mr. Pyecroft behind us, ‘I don’t mind rammin’ a bathin’-machine; but if only one of them week-end Weymouth blighters has thrown his empty baccy-tin into the sea here, we’ll rip our plates open on it; 267 isn’t the Archimandrite’s old cutter.’

‘I am hugging the shore,’ was the answer.

‘There’s no actual ’arm in huggin’, but it can come expensive if pursooed.’

‘Right O!’ said Moorshed, putting down the wheel, and as we left those scant waters I felt 267 move more freely.

A thin cough ran up the speaking-tube.

‘Well, what is it, Mr. Hinchcliffe ?’ said Moorshed.

‘I merely wished to report that she is still continuin’ to go, Sir.’

‘Right O! Can we whack her up to fifteen, d’you think?’

‘I’ll try, Sir; but we’d prefer to have the engine-room hatch open—at first, Sir.’

Whacked up then she was, and for half an hour we careered largely through the night, turning at last with a suddenness that slung us across the narrow deck.

‘This,’ said Mr. Pyecroft, who received me on his chest as a large rock receives a shadow, ‘represents the Gnome arrivin’ cautious from the direction o’ Portsmouth, with Admiralty orders.’

He pointed through the darkness ahead, and after much staring my eyes opened to a dozen destroyers, in two lines, some few hundred yards away.

‘Those are the Red Fleet destroyer flotilla, which is too frail to panic about among the full-blooded cruisers inside Portland breakwater, and several millimetres too excited over the approachin’ war to keep a look-out inshore. Hence our tattics!’

We wailed through our siren—a long, malignant, hyena-like howl—and a voice hailed us as we went astern tumultuously.

‘The Gnome—Carteret-Jones—from Portsmouth, with orders—mm—mm—Stiletto,’ Moorshed answered through the megaphone in a high, whining voice, rather like a chaplain’s.

‘Who?’ was the answer.

‘Carter—et—Jones.’

‘Oh Lord!’

There was a pause ; a voice cried to some friend, ‘It’s Podgie, adrift on the high seas in charge of a whole dee-stroyer!’

Another voice echoed, ‘Podgie!’ and from its note I gathered that Mr. Carteret-Jones had a reputation, but not for independent command.

‘Who’s your sub?’ said the first speaker, a shadow on the bridge of the Dirk.

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‘A gunner at present, Sir. The Stiletto—broken down—turns over to us.’

‘When did the Stiletto break down?’

‘Off the Start, Sir ; two hours after—after she left here this evening, I believe! My orders are to report to you for the manoeuvre signal-codes, and join Commander Hignett’s flotilla, which is in attendance on Stiletto.’

A smothered chuckle greeted this last. Moorshed’s voice was high and uneasy. Said Pyecroft, with a sigh: ‘The amount o’ trouble me an’ my bright spurs ’ad fishin’ out that information from torpedo-coxswains and similar blighters in pubs, all this afternoon, you would never believe.’

‘But has the Stiletto broken down?’ I asked weakly.

‘How else are we to get Red Fleet’s private signal-code? Anyway, if she ’asn’t now, she will before manœuvres are ended. It’s only executin’ in anticipation.’

‘Go astern and send your coxswain aboard for orders, Mr. Jones.’ Water carries sound well, but I do not know whether we were intended to hear the next sentence: ‘They must have given him one intelligent keeper.’

‘That’s me,’ said Mr. Pyecroft, as a black and coal-stained dinghy—I did not foresee how well I should come to know her—was flung overside by three men. ‘Havin’ bought an ’am, we will now see life.’ He stepped into the boat and was away.

‘I say, Podgie!’—the speaker was in the last of the line of destroyers, as we thumped astern—‘aren’t you lonely out there?’

‘Oh, don’t rag me!’ said Moorshed. ‘Do you suppose I’ll have to manoeuvre with your flo-tilla?’

‘No, Podgie ! I’m pretty sure our commander will see you sifting cinders in Tophet before you come with our flo-tilla.’

‘Thank you! She steers rather wild at high speeds.’

Two men laughed together.

‘By the way, who is Mr. Carteret-Jones when he’s at home?’ I whispered.

‘I was with him in the Britannia. I didn’t like him much, but I’m grateful to him now. I must tell him so some day.’

‘They seemed to know him hereabouts.’

‘He rammed the Caryatid twice with her own steam-pinnace.’

Presently, moved by long strokes, Mr. Pyecroft returned, skimming across the dark. The dinghy swung up behind him, even as his heel spurned it.

‘Commander Fasset’s compliments to Mr. L. Carteret-Jones, and the sooner he digs out in pursuance of Admiralty orders as received at Portsmouth, the better pleased Commander Fasset will be. But there’s a lot more——’

‘Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe! Come on to the bridge. We can settle it as we go. Well?’

Mr. Pyecroft drew an important breath, and slid off his cap.

‘Day an’ night private signals of Red Fleet complete, Sir!’ He handed a little paper to Moorshed. ‘You see, Sir, the trouble was, that Mr. Carteret-Jones bein’, so to say, a little new to his duties, ’ad forgot to give ’is gunner his Admiralty orders in writin’, but, as I told Commander Fasset, Mr. Jones had been repeatin’ ’em to me, nervous-like, most of the way from Portsmouth, so I knew ’em by heart—an’ better. The Commander, recognisin’ in me a man of agility, cautioned me to be a father an’ mother to Mr. Carteret-Jones.’

‘Didn’t he know you?’ I asked, thinking for the moment that there could be no duplicates of Emanuel Pyecroft in the Navy.

‘What’s a torpedo-gunner more or less to a full lootenant commandin’ six thirty-knot destroyers for the first time? ’E seemed to cherish the ’ope that ’e might use the Gnome for ’is own ’orrible purposes; but what I told him about Mr. Jones’s sad lack o’ nerve comin’ from Pompey, an’ going dead slow on account of the dark, short-circuited that connection. “M’rover,” I says to him, “our orders is explicit; Stiletto’s reported broke down somewhere off the Start, an’ we’ve been tryin’ to coil down a new stiff wire hawser all the evenin’, so it looks like towin’ ’er back, don’t it?” I says. That more than ever jams his turrets, an’ makes him keen to get rid of us. ’E even hinted that Mr. Carteret-Jones passin’ hawsers an’ assistin’ the impotent in a sea-way might come pretty expensive on the taxpayer. I agreed in a disciplined way. I ain’t proud. Gawd knows I ain’t proud! But when I’m really diggin’ out in the fancy line, I sometimes think that me in a copper punt, single-’anded, ’ud beat a cutter-full of De Rougemongs in a row round the fleet.’

At this point I reclined without shame on Mr. Pyecroft’s bosom, supported by his quivering arm.

‘Well?’ said Moorshed, scowling into the darkness, as 267’s bows snapped at the shore seas of the broader Channel, and we swayed together.

‘“You’d better go on,” says Commander Fasset, “an’ do what you’re told to do. I don’t envy Hignett if he has to dry-nurse the Gnome’s commander. But what d’you want with signals?” ’e says. “It’s criminal lunacy to trust Mr. Jones with anything that steams.”

‘“May I make an observation, Sir?” I says. “Suppose,” I says, “you was torpedo-gunner on the Gnome, an’ Mr. Carteret-Jones was your commandin’ officer, an’ you had your reputation as a second in command for the first time,” I says, well knowin’ it was his first command of a flotilla, “what ’ud you do, Sir?” That gouged ’is unprotected ends open—clear back to the citadel.’

‘What did he say?’ Moorshed jerked over his shoulder.

‘If you were Mr. Carteret-Jones, it might be disrespect for me to repeat it, Sir.’

‘Go ahead,’ I heard the boy chuckle.

‘“Do?”’e says. “I’d rub the young blighter’s nose into it till I made a perishin’ man of him, or a perspirin’ pillow-case,” ’e says, “which,” he adds, “is forty per cent more than he is at present.”

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‘Whilst he’s gettin’ the private signals—they’re rather particular ones—I went forrard to see the Dirk’s gunner about borrowin’ a holdin’-down bolt for our twelve-pounder. My open ears, while I was rovin’ over his packet, got the followin’ authentic particulars.’ I heard his voice change and his feet shifted. ‘There’s been a last council o’ war of destroyer-captains at the flagship, an’ a lot o’ things ’as come out. To begin with, Cryptic and Devolution, Captain Panke and Captain Malan——’

‘Cryptic and Devolution, first-class cruisers,’ said Mr. Moorshed dreamily. ‘Go on, Pyecroft.’

‘—bein’ delayed by minor defects in engine-room, did not, as we know, accompany Red Fleet’s first division of scouting cruisers, whose rendezvous is unknown, but presumed to be somewhere off the Lizard. Cryptic an’ Devolution left at 9.30 p.m. still reportin’ copious minor defects in engine-room. Admiral’s final instructions was they was to put in to Torbay, an’ mend themselves there. If they can do it in twenty-four hours, they’re to come on and join the Red battle squadron at the first rendezvous, down Channel somewhere. (I couldn’t get that, Sir.) If they can’t, he’ll think about sendin’ them some destroyers for escort. But his present intention is to go ’ammer and tongs down Channel, usin’ ’is destroyers for all they’re worth, an’ thus keepin’ Blue Fleet too busy off the Irish coast to sniff into any eshtuaries.’

‘But if those cruisers are crocks, why does the Admiral let ’em out of Weymouth at all?’ I asked.

‘The taxpayer,’ said Mr. Moorshed.

‘An’ newspapers,’ added Mr. Pyecroft. ‘In Torbay they’ll look as they was muckin’ about for strategical purposes—hammerin’ like blazes in the engine-room all the weary day, an’ the skipper droppin’ questions down the engine-room hatch every two or three minutes. I’ve been there. Now, Sir?’ I saw the white of his eye turn broad on Mr. Moorshed.

The boy dropped his chin over the speakingtube.

‘Mr. Hinchcliffe, what’s her extreme economical radius? ‘

‘Three hundred and forty knots, down to swept bunkers.’

‘Can do,’ said Moorshed. ‘By the way, have her revolutions any bearing on her speed, Mr. Hinchcliffe? ‘

‘None that I can make out yet, Sir.’

‘Then slow to eight knots. We’ll jog down to forty-nine, forty-five, or four about, and three east. That puts us say forty miles from Torbay by nine o’clock to-morrow morning. We’ll have to muck about till dusk before we run in and try our luck with the cruisers.’

‘Yes, Sir. Their picket boats will be panickin’ round them all night. It’s considered good for the young gentlemen.’

‘Hallo! War’s declared! They’re off!’ said Moorshed.

He swung 267’s head round to get a better view. A few miles to our right the low horizon was spangled with small balls of fire, while nearer ran a procession of tiny cigar-ends.

‘Red hot! Set ’em alight,’ said Mr. Pyecroft. ‘That’s the second destroyer flotilla diggin’ out for Commander Fasset’s reputation.’

The smaller lights disappeared; the glare of the destroyers’ funnels dwindled even as we watched.

‘They’re going down Channel with lights out, thus showin’ their zeal an’ drivin’ all watch-officers crazy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll get you your pyjamas, an’ you’ll turn in,’ said Pyecroft.

He piloted me to the steel tunnel, where the ham still swung majestically over the swaying table, and dragged out trousers and a coat with a monk’s hood, all hewn from one hairy inch-thick board.

‘If you fall over in these you’ll be drowned. They’re lammies. I’ll chock you off with a pillow; but sleepin’ in a torpedoboat’s what you might call an acquired habit.’

I coiled down on an iron-hard horse-hair pillow next the quivering steel wall to acquire that habit. The sea, sliding over 267’s skin, worried me with importunate, half-caught confidences. It drummed tackily to gather my attention, coughed, spat, cleared its throat, and, on the eve of that portentous communication, retired up stage as a multitude whispering. Anon, I caught the tramp of armies afoot, the hum of crowded cities awaiting the event, the single sob of a woman, and dry roaring of wild beasts. A dropped shovel clanging on the stokehold floor was, naturally enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds; our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge of God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more—though I ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was Livingstone, painless and incurious in the grip of his lion—my shut eyes saw the lamp swinging in its gimbals, the irregularly gliding patch of light on the steel ladder, and every elastic shadow in the corners of the frail angle-irons; while my body strove to accommodate itself to the infernal vibration of the machine. At the last I rolled limply on the floor, and woke to real life with a bruised nose and a great call to go on deck at once.

‘It’s all right,’ said a voice in my booming ears. ‘Morgan and Laughton are worse than you!’

I was gripping a rail. Mr. Pyecroft pointed with his foot to two bundles beside a torpedo-tube, which at Weymouth had been a signaller and a most able seaman. ‘She’d do better in a bigger sea,’ said Mr. Pyecroft. ‘This lop is what fetches it up.’

The sky behind us whitened as I laboured, and the first dawn drove down the Channel, tipping the wave-tops with a chill glare. To me that round wind which runs before the true day has ever been fortunate and of good omen. It cleared the trouble from my body, and set my soul dancing to 267’s heel and toe across the northerly set of the waves—such waves as I had often watched contemptuously from the deck of a ten-thousand-ton liner. They shouldered our little hull sideways and passed, scalloped, and splayed out, toward the coast, carrying our white wake in loops along their hollow backs. In succession we looked down a lead-gray cutting of water for half a clear mile, were flung up on its ridge, beheld the Channel traffic—full-sailed to that fair breeze—all about us, and swung slantwise, light as a bladder, elastic as a basket, into the next furrow. Then the sun found us, struck the wet gray bows to living, leaping opal, the colourless deep to hard sapphire, the many sails to pearl, and the little steam-plume of our escape to an inconstant rainbow.

‘A fair day and a fair wind for all, thank God!’ said Emanuel Pyecroft, throwing back the cowllike hood of his blanket coat. His face was pitted with coal-dust and grime, pallid for lack of sleep; but his eyes shone like a gull’s.

‘I told you you’d see life. Think o’ the Pedantic now. Think o’ her Number One chasin’ the mobilised gobbles round the lower deck flats. Think o’ the pore little snotties now bein’ washed, fed, and taught, an’ the yeoman o’ signals with a pink eye waken’ bright an’ brisk to another perishin’ day of five-flag hoists. Whereas we shall caulk an’ smoke cigarettes, same as the Spanish destroyers did for three weeks after war was declared.’ He dropped into the wardroom singing:

‘If you’re going to marry me, marry me, Bill,
It’s no use muckin’ about!’

The man at the wheel, uniformed in what had once been a tam-o’-shanter, a pair of very worn R.M.L.I. trousers rolled up to the knee, and a black sweater, was smoking a cigarette. Moorshed, in a gray Balaclava and a brown mackintosh with a flapping cape, hauled at our supplementary funnel guys, and a thing like a waiter from a Soho restaurant sat at the head of the engine-room ladder exhorting the unseen below. The following wind beat down our smoke and covered all things with an inch-thick layer of stokers, so that eyelids, teeth, and feet gritted in their motions. I began to see that my previous experiences among battleships and cruisers had been altogether beside the mark.