Tales – Page 18 – The Kipling Society

The Tender Achilles

••FIELD SURGERY 1915

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ST. PEGGOTTY’S annual ‘Senior’ dinner drew Keede from his south-eastern suburbs to listen to the Head of his old Hospital reviewing work and casualties for the past year.Barring a few guests—I was one of Keede’s—the company represented, as the Press said, all branches of the healing art, from authoritative specialists to rural G.P.’s, whose faces told that they worked their practices in light cars. But they all cheered Sir James Belton’s speech as though they were students again. Its opening dealt guardedly with the Great Search on which the Hospital teams were engaged in the newly endowed and extended biological laboratories; and he was sure that all who had the Search at heart would be glad to know that since their Mr. C.R. Wilkett had resumed his old post of bacteriologist, a certain amount of exploration of promising avenues had been initiated.

He then spoke of St. Peggotty’s more domestic concerns. There were esoteric allusions here; professional similes, anecdotes, nicknames, and reminiscences which set some of the whiter heads shouting. But he was not wholly inaudible till he expounded his well-known views on the Pharmacopoeia Britannica, and, incidentally, the ‘Galenical Physician,’ or General Practitioner. Then his hearers overbore him with yells of applause or dissent according to their specialities, and called upon him by the honoured name of Howlieglass, which he had borne when they walked the hospitals, till, at last, they all went home, merry and made young again by good wine and memories renewed.

Keede had discovered in an eminent guest, a friend and a colleague of the War,—a dryish, clean-looking man, who kindly included me in his invitation to come and smoke a pipe with him at his diggings. These proved to be a large, well-administered house in Wimpole Street. He took us to a room at the back of things, where we found the tray set and the fire in order. Keede formally introduced him once as Sir Thomas Horringe, who, he said, specialised in ‘tripe.’ Otherwise and always he called him ‘Scree.’

‘He’s all right,’ Keede explained. ‘He doesn’t know anything really, except how to climb Matterhorns. I only ask him in to please the heirs. He’s as ignorant as the rest of these knife wallahs.’

Sir Thomas said that the darkness of the surgeon was as electric light beside the mediaeval murk of the ‘medicine-man,’ or General Practitioner, and was beginning to tell me what Keede really did and prescribed when he was a sixpenny doctor at Lambeth; but broke off to tell him that, even if they were not too old to fight with siphons, the wife would notice the mess on the rugs next morning, and he would catch it.

Keede then advised me that all surgeon-specialists look on every case as a surgical—‘that is to say, a carpenter’s’—job, whereas the G.P., who represents ‘the Galenical integrity of medicine—before these dam’ barbers wriggled into it’—considers each patient as a human being.

‘In other words,’ he concluded, ‘medicine and surgery is the difference between the Priest and the pew-opener.’

Again the other dissented, and the two carried on some discussion they had begun at dinner about the Great Search, and whether Mr. C.R. Wilkett, whom they called ‘Wilkie’ or ‘Wilks,’ had hit on the right line. The only flaw in this person’s perfection, according to Sir Thomas, was that he had once inclined to ‘Maldoni’s theory of the causation of indeterminate growths,’ which heresy he had now abandoned.

‘But he has got imagination,’ Sir Thomas pointed out. ‘That’s what’ his coming back to St. Peggotty’s will give the whole team. Howlieglass never lost sight of him. He wanted to get him back to the bug-run; and he did.’

‘He’s the only man who’d have had the nerve to do it. He’s worthy to be a G.P.’

‘In the name of the College of Surgeons, ever so many thanks for the compliment, Robin,’ Sir Thomas laughed. ‘Never mind. We’ve got him again. Howlieglass wants his head, not his feet.’

‘Or, for that matter, his hands. ’Rummy thing! You never find a man of his type who really loves a neat job.’ Keede made a suggestive motion of the right hand above the left.

‘Who is Wilkett?’ I demanded, for these two were taking him very seriously.

‘Just now? The best man in his line at St. Peggotty’s. What he’ll be in ten years’ time, the Lord only knows; but Howlieglass is betting on it.’

Keede interrupted the other for my benefit.

‘He’s bugs—agar-agar—guinea-pigs—slides —slices. The microbe-game.’

‘The Lancet’s right,’ Sir Thomas meditated aloud. ‘You G.P.’s ought to learn to read sometimes, and try to catch up with what’s being done.’

‘And leave you knife-wallahs to kill our patients? We daren’t gut ’em and tell the widows they died of shock.’

Sir Thomas turned to me.

‘If you’ve had dealings with him, you’ll know what an impostor Keede is. He’s as good with the knife as——’

‘Any other post-War assassin. But I don’t cut old ladies into bits because it didn’t kill youngsters in the pink of condition. I don’t pose as an expert because I had to take chances in the War. I don’t lecture and publish on insuff——’

‘You’re right, Robin.’ Scree dropped a hand on his shoulder. ‘There has been a deal too much cut-and-thrust since the War. Specially among the youngsters.’

‘’Glad some of you know that, at any rate. It’s the same between Doctor and Patient as it is between Man and Woman. Do you want to prove things to her, or do you want to keep her?’

‘There’s a middle way, though,’ Scree observed. ‘Howlieglass wanted to keep Wilkie, but he had to prove a few things to him first.’

‘Why on earth was Wilks sent to the Front at all? ’Sheer waste!’ said Keede angrily.

‘We knew it. Howlieglass did his best to have him kept back, but Wilkie thought it was his duty.’

‘Lummy! As if any of us could get out of that!’ Keede snorted.

‘The “duty” notion was part of the imaginative equipment, of course,’ said Scree. ‘They used him at the base for a while. He was all right there, because he had time to think.’

‘That’s the research-temperament. But there’s a time for all things.’ Keede spoke severely.

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‘I don’t say he was even second-class in his surgery,’ Scree went on,’ but what did that matter under the circumstances? Only, as you say, Robin, that type of mind wants absolute results, one way or the other; or else absolute accuracy. You don’t get either at a Clearing Station. You’ve got to acknowledge the facts of life and your own limitations. Ambitious men won’t do that till they are broke—like Wilkie was.’

‘What was his trouble?’ I demanded.

Scree hesitated for a definition. Keede supplied it.

‘Bleedin’ vanity,’ said he.

Scree nodded.

‘Lambeth has spoken. The way Howlieglass would put it is a shade more refined.’

‘Let’s have it!’ Keede cried; then, to me ‘Scree’s splendid as Howlieglass. Listen!’

Here Sir Thomas Horringe, whom few would suspect of parlour-tricks, gave a perfect rendering of the Head of St. Peggotty’s thus:

‘Gen-tel-men. In our Pro-fession we are none of us Jee-ho-vahs. Strange as it may seem, not an-y of us are Jee-ho-vahs.’

In the few precisely articulated words, one could see Sir James himself—his likeness in face and carriage to the hawk-headed Egyptian god, the mobile pursed lips, and the stillness of the wonderful hands at his sides.

‘I ought to know,’ said Scree, after our compliments. ‘I was his dresser. . . . Yes, Wilkie was sent up to the dog-fight, and it was too much for him.’

‘Why?’ I said, foolishly enough.

‘Robin’ll tell,’ was the reply. ‘He had it.’

I waited on Keede, who delivered himself at some length; his half-shut eyes on the past.

‘When you are at the Front, you are either doing nothing or trying to do ten times more than you can. When you are, you store up impressions for future use. When you aren’t, they develop. Either way, God help you! A C.C.S. has to be near railhead, hasn’t it?—to evacuate ’em. That means troops and dumps. That means bombing, don’t it? . . . The actual setting? . . . Oh! They take a couple of E.P. tents and join ’em together, and floor ’em with tarpaulins that have—been in use. Then they rig up a big acetylene over each operating table; your anaesthetist gets his dope and the pads ready; your nurses and orderlies stand by with the cutlery and odds and ends, and you’re ready for visitors. They’ve been tagged and labelled by some poor devil up under fire—I’ve been him, too!—and the Receiving Officer sends in the ones that look as if they had the best chance. About that time, Jerry drops an egg or so to steady your hand, and someone vomits.’

‘He does,’ said Scree.

‘Then your job begins. You’ve got to make up your mind what you are going to do, as soon as your man is on the table, because the others are waiting. Often, you lead off with a long break of identical gun-shot wounds in the head—shrapnel on tin-hats, advancing. Then the five-point-nines find ’em, and it’s abdominals. You have to explore and act on your own judgment—one down, t’other come on—till you drop.

‘The longest single stretch I ever put in was three and a half days, four hours’ sleep each night, after Second Vermuizendaal in ’16. The last thing I remember, before I rolled over behind the stores, was old “Duck” Ruthven sluicing off his fat arms in our tea-bucket, and quacking, “Fifteen minutes! My God! Fifteen minutes per capita!” He was the final London word in trephining, and he’d come out to show the young ’uns how to do it. In his own theatre with his own troupe, he considered an hour and a quarter good going for one case; but Berkeley’s team, at the next table, had been polishing ’em off four to the hour for five hours. Talking of Ruthven, did you hear what he said when the Aussies broke into the milliner’s shop at Amiens, just before Villers Bretonneux, and dressed ’emselves lady-fashion all through? He had to cut three of ’em out of their undies afterwards.’

It was no language that Mr. Ruthven would use to a Harley Street patient; but it made us laugh. Keede took on again:

‘I’ve given you a rough notion of things. Six or seven teams working like sin; the stink of the carbide from the acetylene; and the dope; and the stink of your anaesthetist’s pipe—my man ought to have been hung!—mixed up with an occasional egg from Jerry.

‘And when you’ve dropped in your boots, not dead, but dead and buried, someone begins waggling your foot (the Inquisition invented that trick!) and whisperin’ to you to wake up and have a stab at some poor devil who has been warmed and slept off some of his shock, and there’s just a chance for him. Then you dig yourself up and carry on if you can. But God is great, as they say in Mespot. Sometimes you get a card from the base saying you didn’t stitch his diaphragm to his larynx, and he’s doing well. There was a machine-gunner (I remember his eyes) and he had twenty-three perforations of the intestines. I was pretty well all in by then, and my hands hadn’t belonged to me for two days. I must have left the bloke his stomach, but I fancy I made a clean sweep of everything below the duodenum. And now he’s a head-gardener near Plaxtol. ’Pinches his employer’s celery and sends it to me in sugar-boxes.’

This reminded Scree of a man one-third of whose brain he had personally removed, who on recovery wished to show his gratitude by becoming his town chauffeur. As the two talked, the old Army oaths blossomed on their happy tongues, and coloured the rest of their speech for the night.

‘This Hell’s hoop-la was too much for Wilkie,’ said Keede, when, at last, I recalled him. ‘He hadn’t the time he needed to think things out; and he was afraid of injuring his own reputation (God knows he was no surgeon!) by doing the wrong thing. But I think what really coopered him, was being in charge of an S.I.W. show just before Armistice.’

‘What is an S.I.W.?’ I said.

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‘A hospital for self-inflicted wounds. He had to look after a crowd who had blown off their big toes, and so on, and were due for court-martial as soon as they could stand. Enough to send a tank up the pole, ain’t it? And a week before the Eleventh, a Gotha going home had unloaded one on an outhouse, and a bit of tin or something had caught him through the boot and lodged near——’ Keede gave the bones their proper names and showed the position of the wound on his own plump little instep. ‘It wasn’t anything that mattered. He picked it out with the forceps, cleaned it, and it healed. I got that from his colleague when I was sitting on a court of inquiry into missing medical comforts in that sector. (I was a Major then, by God!—so I was.) And that’s where I met Wilkie again. He hung on to himself till proceedings were over; and then he wrung his hands. ‘Don’t often see a man do that.’

‘They do it oftener than women,’ said Scree, which puzzled me till he gave a reason.

‘He said there was blood on everything that he ate. He said he’d been guilty of the murder of a certain number of men because he hadn’t operated on ’em properly. He had their names down in a pocket-book. He said he might have saved ’em if he hadn’t knocked off for a cigarette or a doss. He said he had kept himself going on rum sometimes, and was woozy when the pinch came; and he hadn’t waked up and carried on when the orderlies waggled his foot and asked him to take a long shot with a dog’s-chancer. He didn’t know that lot by name; but he had ’em numbered and dated. He wanted me to go through all his vellum cards, from the C.C.S., so he could prove it. And, of course, he was eternally damned. Liquor? Not enough to have flustered a louse! Besides—he couldn’t stand it. ’Hairtrigger stomach. I’ve seen him. My worrd! He had ’em bad. Everything that a man’s brain automatically shoves into the background was out before the footlights, and dancing Hell’s fox-trot, with drums and horns.’

The simile seemed to convey something to Scree.

‘I didn’t know that,’ he said lazily. ‘Were there noises, then, from the first?’

‘Yes. That’s what made me take notice. Of course, I argued with him, but you know how much good that is against fixed notions! I told him we were all alike, and the conditions of our job hadn’t been human. I said there were limits to the machine. We’d been forced to go beyond ’em, and we ought to be thankful we’d been able to do as much as we had. Then he wrung his hands and said, “To whom much has been given, from the same much shall be required.” That annoyed me. I hate bookkeeping with God! It’s dam’ insolence, anyhow. Who was he to know how much had been given to the other fellow? He wasn’t the Almighty. I told him so. Oh, I know I was a fool. . . .

‘The only thing that kept him at all anchored was his silly foot. That wound I told you about had broken out and was discharging. He dressed it himself twice a day. I reported on him, which I had no right to do, and his Colonel shipped him off to one of those nice “nervous” hospitals where they wore brown gloves and saluted their C.O.’s in case they should forget there had been a war. But I was so busy getting demobbed and trying to pick up what my locum-tenens had left of my practice, that I lost sight of him. He went off to live with his mother.’ Keede gave way to Scree at this point.

‘Yes, his mother kidnapped him. She didn’t know there had been a war, either. She was afraid neighbours might think he was insane, and there hadn’t been any insanity in her family, and she didn’t want the tradespeople to talk. So she hid him in the country and suppressed all letters. There were lots like her. I was trying to get back my practice, too. Do you suppose that mattered to Howlieglass? He had his new bug-runs built and endowed, but he hadn’t got his Wilkie to manage ’em, and he chose to damn my eyes for not producing him. He gave me the telling-off of my life the day I went up for my Knighthood. I told him I wasn’t a gynecologist, and he’d better make touch with the old lady and tackle her himself. No! He said that was my job, because I’d worked with Wilkie on some of the earlier research details. So I had to trace him.’

‘Is—er—Sir James that kind of person?’ I ventured.

‘’Don’t know what you mean by “person,”’ said Scree. ‘But when Howlie begins to dissect his words, you generally attend to him. Luckily, I found a woman who had kept her eye on Wilkie’s whereabouts—mother or no mother. I gave Howlieglass the address, and he kindly let me go on with my practice.’

‘He didn’t me!’ said Keede. ‘He wrote me to report to him after consulting hours, and I went. He told me to look up Wilkie at once. It was only two hundred miles, and one night out. It was lodgings by the seaside, and his mother did social small-talk without daring to stop, and Wilkie played up to her. She said he was all right, and he swore he was.

‘And it rained. I got him let out for a walk on the beach with me. He went to bits behind a bathing-machine. It was the trephining work that had stuck on his mental retina. (Odd! It used to be abdominals with me, the first few months after.) He saw perspectives of heads—gunshot wounds—seen from above and a little behind, as they’d lie on the tables; with the pad over their mouths, but still they all accused him of murder. On off nights he had orderlies whispering to him to wake up and give some poor beggar a chance to live. Then they’d waggle his foot, and he’d wake up grateful for the pain, and change the dressings. His foot was in a filthy state. The thing had formed a sinus. ’Acted as a safety valve, perhaps.’

‘None of your mediaeval speculations here, Robin,’ said Scree. ‘Facts are all that the ex-am-in-ers reequire, gen-tel-men.’

‘He was quite rational, apart from being damned, and walking down those perspectives, and hearing shouts of “Murder!” We had high tea, with a kerosene lamp and crossword puzzles after. She talked about the pretty walks in the neighbourhood. Great thing—mother-love, ain’t it? . . . I turned in my notes to Howlieglass, and he asked me to dinner. My worrd!’ Keede patted his round little pot. ‘And where does he get his champagne?’

‘From grateful appendices—same as your bloody ’umble,’ said Scree. ‘G.P.’s are only entitled to birds and foie gras.’

‘Get out! I had a whole tin of salmon once from a kosher butcher. . . . We-ell! Howlie took me through Wilkie’s case for half an hour, on my notes. I can’t imitate him, but he said that none of us were Jee-ho-vahs, and if, in my considered judgment, Wilkie’s foot was tuberculous, the best thing would be to give him a bed in his old hospital, and have Scree operate. I hadn’t said a word about tubercle. I’d been working out mental symptoms. . . . Where in Hell does hysteria shade into mania?’ Keede broke off.

‘Not on these premises, old man. I’m a knife-wallah,’ said Scree. ‘Carry on.’

‘Howlieglass told me that the best of us make mistakes; but a mistake made by a G.P. of my standing and antecedents would only be natural, and would not shake the faith of my flat-u-lent old ladies. Just that! He was prepared to abide by my verdict because I knew Wilkie’s constitutional needs; and if I recommended homeopathic treatment, he would bow to that, too.’

‘But you tumbled to it?’ said Sir Thomas Horringe, K.C.B., with a grin.

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‘Not that very minute, because it was my third glass. But I noticed he was beginning to dissect his words, so I agreed at once. Then he said it might amuse Wilkie to conduct his own tubercle tests with guinea-pigs and culture in his own fetid atmosphere. That wasn’t my affair. I was to go back and tell the mother that the foot needed attention. He left the rest to my bedside-manner. You needn’t laugh, Scree. He said that you’d come in later as the “bungling amateur,” and—you dam’ well did.

‘Then I went back to the “British Riviera,” and convinced the old lady. She said the change might do him good. But Wilkie became the bacteriologist at once. He disputed the notion of tubercle; but when I told him he could put the question to the guinea-pigs, and examine the slides himself, he was willing to come up and show me what a fool I was. I say, Scree, was Wilkie always as offensive as he is?’

‘Pretty nearly. It’s his sniffle does it. But he’s a genius.’

‘I don’t care for geniuses. He came up with me, and I gave him a bed for the night. He began to see his heads when he was turning in; and, not having his mother to play up to, he let go aloud.’

‘‘Was he playing up to you?’ Scree demanded.

‘How can one tell with a patient? I ’phoned to Howlieglass to come and look. He stayed till nearly daylight, watching. Wilkie talked about being damned and having much required of him. Howlieglass never said a word till just as he was going. Then he told me he couldn’t afford to lose Wilkie’s intellect for the sake of his bleedin’ vanity. No, old man! That wasn’t Lambeth. It was Howlieglass said it.’

‘I apologise to Lambeth.’

‘And then, on the doorstep—he’d sent his car home, and my man waited for him just as he was getting in, he saw a star (you know how keen he is on astronomy) and he stared at Tweed for about half a minute, and then he said: “Oh, Lord! What do You expect for the money?” He was only questioning the general scheme of things, the way he does sometimes; but my man thinks he’s the Devil. He’s more afraid of him than I am. . . . Oh, well, and then we put Wilkie into one of the new paying-rooms at the Hospital, and we hurried up the tests, and they showed unmistakable tubercle. Wilkie saw it for himself. He was fairly winded. What annoyed him more than anything was that it would have to be a Syme operation.’

‘Who is Syme?’ I asked.

‘He’s dead,’ said Scree, ‘but he begat rather a pretty operation on the foot.’ Bob Sawyer-like, he illustrated it with a folded sandwich. ‘Then you turn the flap under like this,’ he concluded, ‘and it makes a false heel that a man can walk about on very comfily.’

‘Then, why was Wilkie annoyed?’ I inquired. Keede answered the question.

‘Because he’d done a good few of ’em in the S.I.W. on chaps who had fired into their own insteps. He said it was a judgment on him for shirking. He was seeing his heads every night while he waited. Howlieglass never noticed ’em. He’d drop in and talk bugs with him however looney he was.’

‘I never knew Wilkie more brilliant than he was in his lucid intervals, then. He used to talk bugs to me, too,’ said Scree. ‘I operated, of course. Howlieglass came to look (he never thinks it makes a man nervous) and—I couldn’t help laughing—just as Wilks was going under—Howlie turned to one of the nurses and said: “Yes, my de-ar. The best of us can make mis-takes. We are none of us Je-ho-vahs—not even Mr. Wilkett.” All the same, I made rather a neat job of that Syme..’

‘You hadn’t to stand being kicked for it,’ said Keede. ‘We gave Wilks a week to pull round in. Then I called and told him that, if he’d been a patient, I should have held my tongue: but, as he was one of us—No, I said, as he had been one of us, and that made him wince—I had to confess that his foot was no more tuberculous than mine. I took full responsibility for the error. . . . Do you want me to tell you what he really said to me?’

I did indeed.

‘He said: “You! What on earth do you matter? You’re only a G.P. The tests were scientific. They can’t lie. I’ll go into that later; but I’ll attend to you first.” He did. He ended up by annoying me a little, though I’m the meekest medico on the register. He said: “How could even you make such a ghastly blunder? You had all the time there was. You had whatever judgment you possess under your control. You weren’t hurried. Were you drunk?”

‘I said I wasn’t, but I didn’t say it with too much conviction. As I told you, he annoyed me. I said that his infernal heads’ nonsense and his hysteria must have biased me, but, if he was eternally damned, the mistake wasn’t worth fussing about. If he wasn’t, he knew as well as I did that errors of this kind happened under the most careful system; and he’d be hopping about on his Syme heel in no time; and at any rate he ought to be grateful I hadn’t diagnosed his trouble as something scandalous.’

‘Not bad, for the meekest medico on the register,’ said Scree approvingly.

‘I was annoyed,’ Keede confessed, ‘but I wasn’t as annoyed as Wilkie. When he’d polished me off, he wanted the slides and test records. I don’t know what hanky-panky they had worked; but a youth turned up from the bug-run and said there had been a mistake in the samples or the filing of the guinea-pigs, and they were tracing the responsibility in the basement. Meantime, here were the genuine articles.

‘Then Wilks began again on him: “But you had all the time you wanted! You had no reason to hurry! You were under no strain! You had only to label and number.” That showed what he had been suffering from, at the back of his mind, at the Front. But he went too far. He asked the pup how long he thought he would be allowed to hold his job after this disgraceful exposure.

‘I had to remind him that he was one blooming civil case in one blooming bed, and he would get his bill, and he could bring his civil action when he pleased, but he did not command the Hospital staff. The youth got out. I took the rest of the barrage. No mistake about it—it was a desperately important affair to Wilkie, damned or saved. Then that “bungling amateur,” Scree, came in.’

‘Was this all a put-up job?’ I asked.

‘Not in the least. It was Scree’s regular round. Wilkie wasn’t as offensive to him as he’d been to me. More professionally pained and shocked, you know. That put Scree on his high horse at once. He said he was an operative mason, not a speculative one.’

‘You infernal old liar,’ Scree broke in, passing over the siphon.

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‘That was the sense of it, at any rate. Scree said he’d been told to operate on a foot reported as tuberculous, and it wasn’t his job to question me. Then he mentioned the figures that the crowned heads of Europe always paid him for cutting their corns, and he implied that being operated on by him was equivalent to a K.C.B. You ought to hear Scree’s top-note. It cowed the bacteriologist. And then he sat down by the old boy’s bed and began to talk Research with him, giving the impression that he was sitting at the feet of Gamaliel. It was—shut up, Scree! This is true!—the prettiest and kindest bit of work I’ve ever known even that hardened ruffian do. It had Wilkie steadied in five minutes, and in another five he was sailing away about Research, with his brain working like treacle.’

The tiny muscle that twitches when we feel certain sorts of shame showed itself beneath Scree’s lower eyelid.

‘In the middle of it Howlie came in, and Scree put up his hand to stop him speaking till Wilkie had finished.’

‘Wilkie was giving his reasons for having chucked Maldoni’s theory,’ said Scree in extenuation.

‘Then Howlieglass slid into the conference, and there they sat, with me playing bad boy in the corner, while they talked about taming spirochetes. Didn’t you, Scree?’

‘We talked, if you want to know, about the general administration of St. Peggotty’s New Biological Laboratories Extension,’ said Scree.

‘Did you? Then you can carry on,’ said Keede; and Sir James Belton was heard speaking through Scree’s lips: ‘“I am ver-ree sor-ree to say that there has been a mis-take, Mis-ter Wilkett, about your foot. It was due to an erroneous di-ag-nosis on the part of Mis-ter Keede, who is onlee a sub-urban Gen-eral Prac-titioner. We must not judge him too hard-ly.”’

‘And then,’ Keede supplemented, ‘Scree, who might have had the decency to have kept out of it, said it was an infernal and grotesque blunder on my part.’

‘Sorry,’ said Scree, returning to his natural voice, ‘I thought you only wanted to know what Howlieglass said. Yes, of course I went for Keede for compromising my professional career that way. We all went for Keede.

‘I haven’t forgotten.’ Keede turned to me again. ‘I’m rather an exponent of the bedside manner, though you mightn’t think it; but for sheer bluff and tying a poor devil into knots I never heard anything within miles of that show round Wilkie’s bed. They had him apologising at last for owning a foot at all, and hoping he hadn’t given too much trouble.’

‘But how about the mix-up of the slides? Did they saddle you with it?’ said I.

‘Worse! Much worse! Wilkie was drawing up to the subject—he’d have apologised for that, too—but Howlieglass got in first, and——’

Keede nodded towards the obedient Scree. Once more we heard the voice of the head of St. Peggotty’s, preciser than ever.

‘“If you had been at your post here after the War, Mis-ter Wil-kett, in-stead of relaxing your mind in rest-cures, this lit-tle af-fair, which we have ag-reed to for-get, would never have ta-ken place. I trust you will not al-low it to oc-cur again.” And, damn it all!’—Scree’s operating hand smacked on my knee—‘poor Wilk’s mouth went down at the corners like a child’s, and he said, “I see that now, sir. I’m so sorry, sir.”’

‘Did it cure him?’ I asked later as we moved towards the taxi-cup.

‘Ab-so-bally-lutely,’ said Keede. ‘Not a head or a hoot since.’

‘And was the foot tuberculous?’ I persisted.

‘Anything with a sinus of long-standing may turn into anything. It’s always best to be on the safe side,’ was the response. ‘We were playing for the man’s reason—not his carcass.’

‘One more,’ I ventured. ‘How was the mix-up in the slides managed? It’s rather a grave matter to play with samples, isn’t it?’

‘By the same woman who knew where his mother had taken him. It wasn’t a job to trust to a man. A man would have said that he had a reputation or something to lose.’

‘Arising out of the reply to the previous question, does Mr. Wilkett realise about the lady? . . .’

‘No,’ said Sir Thomas Horringe very gravely to me; ‘that’s where he has made a mistake.’

‘Mistake! Poor devil! He has!’ said Keede with equal solemnity.

Teem — a Treasure Hunter

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There’s a gentleman of France—better met by choice than chance,
Where there’s time to turn aside and space to flee—
He is born and bred and made for the cattle-droving trade,
And they call him Monsieur Bouvier de Brie.
‘What—Brie?’ ‘Yes, Brie.’ ‘Where those funny cheeses come from?’ ‘Oui! Oui! Oui!
But his name is great through Gaul as the wisest dog of all,
And France pays high for Bouvier de Brie.’
‘De Brie?’ ‘C’est lui. And, if you read my story,—you will see
What one loyal little heart thought of Life and Love and Art,
And notably of Bouvier de Brie——
“My friend the Vicomte Bouvier de Brie.”’

NOTHING could prevent my adored Mother from demanding at once the piece of sugar which was her just reward for every Truffle she found. My revered Father, on the other hand, contented himself with the strict practice of his Art. So soon as that Pierre, our Master, stooped to dig at the spot indicated, my Father moved on to fresh triumphs.

From my Father I inherit my nose, and, perhaps, a touch of genius. From my Mother a practical philosophy without which even Genius is but a bird of one wing.

In appearance? My Parents come of a race built up from remote times on the Gifted of various strains. The fine flower of it to-day is small—of a rich gold, touched with red; pricked and open ears; a broad and receptive brow; eyes of intense but affable outlook, and a Nose in itself an inspiration and unerring guide. Is it any wonder, then, that my Parents stood apart from the generality? Yet I would not make light of those worthy artisans who have to be trained by Persons to the pursuit of Truffles. They are of many stocks and possess many virtues, but not the Nose—that gift which is incommunicable.

Myself? I am not large. At birth, indeed, I was known as The Dwarf; but my achievements early won me the title of The Abbé. It was easy. I do not recall that I was ever trained by any Person. I watched, imitated, and, at need, improved upon, the technique of my Parents among the little thin oaks of my country where the best Truffles are found; and that which to the world seemed a chain of miracles was, for me, as easy as to roll in the dust.

My small feet could walk the sun up and down across the stony hill-crests where we worked. My well-set coat turned wet, wind, and cold, and my size enabled me to be carried, on occasion, in my Master’s useful outside pocket.

My companions of those days? At first Pluton and Dis—the solemn, dewlapped, black, mated pair who drew the little wooden cart whence my master dispensed our Truffles at the white Château near our village, and to certain shopkeepers in the Street of the Fountain where the women talk. Those Two of Us were peasants in grain. They made clear to me the significance of the flat round white Pieces, and the Thin Papers, which my Master and his Mate buried beneath the stone by their fireplace. Not only Truffles but all other things, Pluton told me, turn into Pieces or Thin Papers at last.

But my friend of friends; my preceptor, my protector, my life-long admiration; was Monsieur le Vicomte Bouvier de Brie—a Marshal of Bulls whom he controlled in the stony pastures near the cottage. There were many sheep also, with whom neither the Vicomte nor I was concerned. Mutton is bad for the Nose, and, as I have reason to know, for the disposition.

He was of race, too—‘born’ as I was—and so accepted me when, with the rash abandon of puppyhood, I attached myself to his ear. In place of abolishing me, which he could have done with one of his fore-paws, he lowered me gently between both of them, so that I lay blinking up the gaunt cliff of his chest into his unfathomable eyes, and ‘Little bad one!’ he said. ‘But I prophesy thou wilt go far!’

Here, fenced by those paws, I would repair for my slumbers, to avoid my enemies or to plague him with questions. And, when he went to the Railway Station to receive or despatch more Bulls, I would march beneath his belly, hurling infantile insults at the craven doggerie of the Street of the Fountain. After I was expert in my Art, he would talk to me of his own, breaking off with some thunder of command to a young Bull who presumed to venture too near the woods where our Truffles grow, or descending upon him like hail across walls which his feet scorned to touch.

His strength, his audacity, overwhelmed me. He, on his side, was frankly bewildered by my attainments. ‘But how—how, little one, is it done, your business?’ I could not convey to him, nor he to me, the mystery of our several Arts. Yet always unweariedly he gave me the fruits of his experience and philosophy.

I recall a day when I had chased a chicken which, for the moment, represented to me a sufficiently gross Bull of Salers. There seemed a possibility of chastisement at the hands of the owner, and I refuged me beneath my friend’s neck where he watched in the sun. He listened to my foolish tale, and said, as to himself, ‘These Bulls of mine are but beef fitted with noses and tails by which one regulates them. But these black hidden lumps of yours which only such as you can unearth—that is a business beyond me! I should like to add it to my repertoire.’

‘And I,’ I cried (my second teeth were just pushing), ‘I will be a Driver of Bulls!’

‘Little one,’ he responded with infinite tenderness, ‘here is one thing for us both to remember. Outside his Art, an Artist must never dream.’

About my fifteenth month I found myself brother to four who wearied me. At the same time there was a change in my Master’s behaviour. Never having had any regard for him, I was the quicker to notice his lack of attention. My Mother, as always, said, ‘If it is not something, it is sure to be something else.’ My Father simply, ‘At all hazards follow your Art. That can never lead to a false scent.’

There came a Person of abominable odours to our cottage, not once but many times. One day my Master worked me in his presence. I demonstrated, through a long day of changing airs, with faultless precision. After supper, my Master’s Mate said to him, ‘We are sure of at least two good workers for next season—and with a dwarf one never knows. It is far off, that England the man talks of. Finish the affair, Pierril.’

Some Thin Papers passed from hand to hand. The Person then thrust me into his coat-pocket (Ours is not a breed to be shown to all) and there followed for me alternations of light and dark in stink-carts: a period when my world rose and rolled till I was sick; a silence beside lapping water under stars; transfer to another Person whose scent and speech were unintelligible; another flight by stink-cart; a burst of sunrise between hedges; a scent of sheep; violent outcries and rockings: finally, a dissolution of the universe which projected me through a hedge from which I saw my captor lying beneath the stink-cart where a large black-and-white She bit him with devotion.’

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A ditch led me to the shelter of a culvert. I composed myself within till the light was suddenly blocked out by the head of that very She, who abused me savagely in Lingua canina. [My Father often recommended me never to reply to a strange She.] I was glad when her Master’s voice recalled this one to her duties, and I heard the clickety of her flock’s feet above my head.

In due time I issued forth to acquaint myself with this world into which I had been launched. It was new in odour and aspect, but with points of likeness to my old one. Clumps of trees fringed close woods and smooth green pastures; and, at the bottom of a shallow basin crowned with woodland, stood a white Château even larger than the one to which Pluton and Dis used to pull their cart.

I kept me among the trees, and was congratulating my Nose on its recovery from the outrageous assaults it had suffered during my journeys, when there came to it the unmistakable aroma of Truffles—not, indeed, the strawberry-scented ones of my lost world, but like enough to throw me into my working-pose.

I took wind, and followed up my line. I was not deceived. There were Truffles of different sorts in their proper places under those thick trees. My Mother’s maxim had proved its truth. This was evidently the ‘something else’ of which she had spoken; and I felt myself again my own equal. As I worked amid the almost familiar odours it seemed to me that all that had overtaken me had not happened, and that at any moment I should meet Pluton and Dis with our cart. But they came not. Though I called they did not come.

A far-off voice interrupted me, with menace. I recognised it for that of the boisterous She of my culvert, and was still.

After cautious circuits I heard the sound of a spade, and in a wooded hollow saw a Person flattening earth round a pile of wood, heaped to make charcoal. It was a business I had seen often.

My Nose assured me that the Person was authentically a peasant and (I recalled the memory later) had not handled One of Us within the time that such a scent would hang on him. My Nose, further, recorded that he was imbued with the aromas proper to his work and was, also, kind, gentle, and equable in temperament. (You Persons wonder that All of Us know your moods before you yourselves realise them? Be well sure that every shade of his or her character, habit, or feeling cries itself aloud in a Person’s scent. No more than We All can deceive Each Other can You Persons deceive Us—though We pretend—We pretend—to believe!)

His coat lay on a bank. When he drew from it bread and cheese, I produced myself. But I had been so long at gaze, that my shoulder, bruised in transit through the hedge, made me fall. He was upon me at once and, with strength equal to his gentleness, located my trouble. Evidently—though the knowledge even then displeased me—he knew how We should be handled.

I submitted to his care, ate the food he offered, and, reposing in the crook of his mighty arm, was borne to a small cottage where he bathed my hurt, set water beside me and returned to his charcoal. I slept, lulled by the cadence of his spade and the bouquet of natural scents in the cottage which included all those I was used to, except garlic and, strangely, Truffles.

I was roused by the entry of a She-Person who moved slowly and coughed. There was on her (I speak now as We speak) the Taint of the Fear—of that Black Fear which bids Us throw up our noses and lament. She laid out food. The Person of the Spade entered. I fled to his knee. He showed me to the Girl-Person’s dull eyes. She caressed my head, but the chill of her hand increased the Fear. He set me on his knees, and they talked in the twilight.

Presently, their talk nosed round hidden flat Pieces and Thin Papers. The tone was so exactly that of my Master and his Mate that I expected they would lift up the hearthstone. But theirs was in the chimney, whence the Person drew several white Pieces, which he gave to the Girl. I argued from this they had admitted me to their utmost intimacy and—I confess it—I danced like a puppy. My reward was their mirth—his specially. When the Girl laughed she coughed. But his voice warmed and possessed me before I knew it.

After night was well fallen, they went out and prepared a bed on a cot in the open, sheltered only by a large faggot-stack. The Girl disposed herself to sleep there, which astonished me. (In my lost world out-sleeping is not done, except when Persons wish to avoid Forest Guards.) The Person of the Spade then set a jug of water by the bed and, turning to reenter the house, delivered a long whistle. It was answered across the woods by the unforgettable voice of the old She of my culvert. I inserted myself at once between, and a little beneath, some of the more robust faggots.

On her silent arrival the She greeted the Girl with extravagant affection and fawned beneath her hand, till the coughings closed in uneasy slumber. Then, with no more noise than the moths of the night, she quested for me in order, she said, to tear out my throat. ‘Ma Tante,’ I replied placidly from within my fortress, ‘I do not doubt you could save yourself the trouble by swallowing me alive. But, first, tell me what I have done.’ ‘That there is My Bone,’ was the reply. It was enough! (Once in my life I had seen poor honest Pluton stand like a raging wolf between his Pierril, whom he loved, and a Forest Guard.) We use that word seldom and never lightly. Therefore, I answered, ‘I assure you she is not mine. She gives me the Black Fear.’

You know how We cannot deceive Each Other? The She accepted my statement; at the same time reviling me for my lack of appreciation—a crookedness of mind not uncommon among elderly Shes.

To distract her, I invited her to tell me her history. It appeared that the Girl had nursed her through some early distemper. Since then, the She had divided her life between her duties among sheep by day and watching, from the First Star till Break of Light, over the Girl, who, she said, also suffered from a slight distemper. This had been her existence, her joy and her devotion long before I was born. Demanding nothing more, she was prepared to back her single demand by slaughter.

Once, in my second month, when I would have run away from a very fierce frog, my friend the Vicomte told me that, at crises, it is best to go forward. On a sudden impulse I emerged from my shelter and sat beside her. There was a pause of life and death during which I had leisure to contemplate all her teeth. Fortunately, the Girl waked to drink. The She crawled to caress the hand that set down the jug, and waited till the breathing resumed. She came back to me—I had not stirred—with blazing eyes. ‘How can you dare this?’ she said. ‘But why not?’ I answered. ‘If it is not something, it is sure to be something else.’ Her fire and fury passed. ‘To whom do you say it! ‘she assented. ‘There is always something else to fear—not for myself but for My Bone yonder.’

Then began a conversation unique, I should imagine, even among Ourselves. My old, unlovely, savage Aunt, as I shall henceforth call her, was eaten alive with fears for the Girl—not so much on account of her distemper, but because of Two She-Persons-Enemies—whom she described to me minutely by Eye and Nose—one like a Ferret, the other like a Goose.

These, she said, meditated some evil to the Girl against which my Aunt and the Girl’s Father, the Person of the Spade, were helpless. The Two Enemies carried about with them certain papers, by virtue of which the Girl could be taken away from the cottage and my Aunt’s care, precisely as she had seen sheep taken out of her pasture by Persons with papers, and driven none knew whither.

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The Enemies would come at intervals to the cottage in daytime (when my Aunt’s duty held her with the sheep) and always they left behind them the Taint of misery and anxiety. It was not that she feared the Enemies personally. She feared nothing except a certain Monsieur The-Law who, I understood later, cowed even her.

Naturally I sympathised. I did not know this gentilhommier de Loire, but I knew Fear. Also, the Girl was of the same stock as He who had fed and welcomed me and Whose voice had reassured. My Aunt suddenly demanded if I purposed to take up my residence with them. I would have detailed to her my adventures. She was acutely uninterested in them all except so far as they served her purposes, which she explained. She would allow me to live on condition that I reported to her, nightly beside the faggot-stack, all I had seen or heard or suspected of every action and mood of the Girl during the day; any arrival of the Enemies, as she called them; and whatever I might gather from their gestures and tones. In other words I was to spy for her as Those of Us who accompany the Forest Guards spy for their detestable Masters.

I was not disturbed. (I had had experience of the Forest Guard.) Still there remained my dignity and something which I suddenly felt was even more precious to me. ‘Ma Tante,’ I said, ‘what I do depends not on you but on My Bone in the cottage there.’ She understood. ‘What is there on Him,’ she said, ‘to draw you?’ ‘Such things are like Truffles,’ was my answer. ‘They are there or they are not there.’ ‘I do not know what “Truffles” may be,’ she snapped. ‘He has nothing useful to me except that He, too, fears for my Girl. At any rate your infatuation for Him makes you more useful as an aid to my plans.’ ‘We shall see,’ said I. ‘But—to talk of affairs of importance—do you seriously mean that you have no knowledge of Truffles?’ She was convinced that I mocked her. ‘Is it,’ she demanded, ‘some lapdog’s trick?’ She said this of Truffles—of my Truffles.

The impasse was total. Outside of the Girl on the cot and her sheep (for I can testify that, with them, she was an artist) the square box of my Aunt’s head held not one single thought. My patience forsook me, but not my politeness. ‘Cheer-up, old one!’ I said. ‘An honest heart outweighs many disadvantages of ignorance and low birth.’ . . .

And She? I thought she would have devoured me in my hair! When she could speak, she made clear that she was ‘born’—entirely soof a breed mated and trained since the days of the First Shepherd. In return I explained that I was a specialist in the discovery of delicacies which the genius of my ancestors had revealed to Persons since the First Person first scratched in the first dirt.

She did not believe me—nor do I pretend that I had been entirely accurate in my genealogy—but she addressed me henceforth as ‘My Nephew.’

Thus that wonderful night passed, with the moths, the bats, the owls, the sinking moon, and the varied respirations of the Girl. At sunrise a call broke out from beyond the woods. My Aunt vanished to her day’s office. I went into the house and found Him lacing one gigantic boot. Its companion lay beside the hearth. I brought it to Him (I had seen my Father do as much for that Pierrounet my Master).

He was loudly pleased. He patted my head, and when the Girl entered, told her of my exploit. She called me to be caressed, and, though the Black Taint upon her made me cringe, I came. She belonged to Him—as at that moment I realised that I did.

Here began my new life. By day I accompanied Him to His charcoal—sole guardian of His coat and the bread and cheese on the bank, or, remembering my Aunt’s infatuation, fluctuated between the charcoal-mound and the house to spy upon the Girl, when she was not with Him. He was all that I desired—in the sound of His solid tread; His deep but gentle voice; the sympathetic texture and scent of His clothes; the safe hold of His hand when He would slide me into His great outer pocket and carry me through the far woods where He dealt secretly with rabbits. Like peasants, who are alone more than most Persons, He talked aloud to himself, and presently to me, asking my opinion of the height of a wire from the ground.

My devotion He accepted and repaid from the first. My Art he could by no means comprehend. For, naturally, I followed my Art as every Artist must, even when it is misunderstood. If not, he comes to preoccupy himself mournfully with his proper fleas.

My new surroundings; the larger size and closer spacing of the oaks; the heavier nature of the soils; the habits of the lazy wet winds—a hundred considerations which the expert takes into account—demanded changes and adjustments of my technique . . . . My reward? I found and brought Him Truffles of the best. I nosed them into His hand. I laid them on the threshold of the cottage and they filled it with their fragrance. He and the Girl thought that I amused myself, and would throw—throw!—them for me to retrieve, as though they had been stones and I a puppy! What more could I do? The scent over that ground was lost.

But the rest was happiness, tempered with vivid fears when we were apart lest, if the wind blew beyond moderation, a tree might fall and crush Him; lest when He worked late He might disappear into one of those terrible river pits so common in the world whence I had come, and be lost without trace. There was no peril I did not imagine for Him till I could hear His feet walking securely on sound earth long before the Girl had even suspected. Thus my heart was light in spite of the nightly conferences with my formidable Aunt, who linked her own dismal apprehensions to every account that I rendered of the Girl’s day-life and actions. For some cause or other, the Two Enemies had not appeared since my Aunt had warned me against them, and there was less of Fear in the house. Perhaps, as I once hinted to my Aunt, owing to my presence.

It was an unfortunate remark. I should have remembered her gender. She attacked me, that night, on a new scent, bidding me observe that she herself was decorated with a Collar of Office which established her position before all the world. I was about to compliment her, when she observed, in the low even tone of detachment peculiar to Shes of age, that, unless I were so decorated, not only was I outside the Law (that Person of whom, I might remember, she had often spoken) but could not be formally accepted into any household.

How, then, I demanded, might I come by this protection? In her own case, she said, the Collar was hers by right as a Preceptress of Sheep. To procure a Collar for me would be a matter of Pieces or even of Thin Papers, from His chimney. (I recalled poor Pluton’s warning that everything changes at last into such things.) If He chose to give of His Pieces for my Collar, my civil status would be impregnable. Otherwise, having no business or occupation, I lived, said my Aunt, like the rabbits—by favour and accident.

‘But, ma Tante,’ I cried, ‘I have the secret of an Art beyond all others.’

‘That is not understood in these parts,’ she replied. ‘You have told me of it many times, but I do not believe. What a pity it is not rabbits! You are small enough to creep down their burrows. But these precious things of yours under the ground which no one but you can find—it is absurd.’

‘It is an absurdity, then, which fills Persons’ chimney-places with Pieces and Thin Papers. Listen, ma Tante!’ I all but howled. ‘The world I came from was stuffed with things underground which all Persons desired. This world here is also rich in them, but I—I alone—can bring them to light!’

She repeated acridly, ‘Here is not there. It should have been rabbits.’

I turned to go. I was at the end of my forces.

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‘You talk too much of the world whence you came,’ my Aunt sneered. ‘Where is that world?’

‘I do not know,’ I answered miserably and crawled under my faggots. As a matter of routine, when my report had been made to my Aunt, I would take post on the foot of His bed where I should be available in case of bandits. But my Aunt’s words had barred that ever-open door.

My suspicions worked like worms in my system. If He chose, He could kick me off on to the floor—beyond sound of His desired voice—into the rabid procession of fears and flights whence He had delivered me. Whither, then, should I go? . . . There remained only my lost world where Persons knew the value of Truffles and of Those of Us who could find them. I would seek that world!

With this intention, and a bitterness in my belly as though I had mouthed a toad, I came out after dawn and fled to the edge of the woods through which He and I had wandered so often. They were bounded by a tall stone wall, along which I quested for an opening. I found none till I reached a small house beside shut gates. Here an officious One of Us advanced upon me with threats. I was in no case to argue or even to expostulate. I hastened away and attacked the wall again at another point.

But after a while, I found myself back at the house of the Officious One. I recommenced my circuit, but—there was no end to that Wall. I remembered crying aloud to it in hope it might fall down and pass me through. I remember appealing to the Vicomte to come to my aid. I remember a flight of big black birds, calling the very name of my lost world—“Aa-or”—above my head. But soon they scattered in all directions. Only the Wall continued to continue, and I blindly at its foot. Once a She-Person stretched out her hand towards me. I fled—as I fled from an amazed rabbit who, like myself, existed by favour and accident.

Another Person coming upon me threw stones. This turned me away from the Wall and so broke its attraction. I subsided into an aimless limp of hours, until some woods that seemed familiar received me into their shades . . . .

I found me at the back of the large white Château in the hollow, which I had seen only once, far off, on the first day of my arrival in this world. I looked down through bushes on to ground divided by strips of still water and stone. Here were birds, bigger than turkeys, with enormous voices and tails which they raised one against the other, while a white-haired She-Person dispensed them food from a pan she held between sparkling hands. My Nose told me that she was unquestionably of race-descended from champion strains. I would have crawled nearer, but the greedy birds forbade. I retreated uphill into the woods, and, moved by I know not what agonies of frustration and bewilderment, threw up my head and lamented.

The harsh imperative call of my Aunt cut through my self-pity. I found her on duty in pastures still bounded by that Wall which encircled my world. She charged me at once with having some disreputable affair, and, for its sake, deserting my post with the Girl. I could but pant. Seeing, at last, my distress, she said, ‘Have you been seeking that lost world of yours?’ Shame closed my mouth. She continued, in softer tones, ‘Except when it concerns My Bone, do not take all that I say at full-fang. There are others as foolish as you. Wait my return.’

She left me with an affectation, almost a coquetry, of extreme fatigue. To her charge had been added a new detachment of sheep who wished to escape. They had scattered into separate crowds, each with a different objective and a different speed. My Aunt, keeping the high ground, allowed them to disperse, till her terrible voice, thrice lifted, brought them to halt. Then, in one long loop of flight, my Aunt, a dumb fury lying wide on their flank, swept down with a certainty, a speed, and a calculation which almost reminded me of my friend the Vicomte. Those diffuse and errant imbeciles reunited and inclined away from her in a mob of mixed smells and outcries—to find themselves exquisitely penned in an angle of the fence, my Aunt, laid flat at full length, facing them! One after another their heads dropped and they resumed their eternal business of mutton-making.

My Aunt came back, her affectation of decrepitude heightened to heighten her performance. And who was I, an Artist also, to mock her?

‘You wonder why my temper is not of the bluntest?’ she said. ‘You could not have done that!’

‘But at least I can appreciate it,’ I cried. ‘It was superb! It was unequalled! It was faultless! You did not even nip one of them.’

‘With sheep that is to confess failure,’ she said. ‘Do you, then, gnaw your Truffles?’ It was the first time that she had ever admitted their existence! My genuine admiration, none the worse for a little flattery, opened her heart. She spoke of her youthful triumphs at sheep- herding expositions; of rescues of lost lambs, or incapable mothers found reversed in ditches. Oh, she was all an Artist, my thin-flanked, haggard-eyed Aunt by enforced adoption. She even let me talk of the Vicomte!

Suddenly (the shadows had stretched) she leaped, with a grace I should never have suspected, on to a stone wall and stood long at far gaze. ‘Enough of this nonsense,’ she said brutally. ‘You are rested now. Get to your work. If you could see, my Nephew, you would observe the Ferret and the Goose walking there, three fields distant. They have come again for My Bone. They will keep to the path made for Persons. Go at once to the cottage before they arrive and—do what you can to harass them. Run—run—mountebank of a yellow imbecile that you are!’

I turned on my tail, as We say, and took the direct line through my well-known woods at my utmost speed since her orders dispatched me without loss of dignity towards my heart’s one desire. And I was received by Him, and by the Girl with unfeigned rapture. They passed me from one to the other like the rarest of Truffles; rebuked me, not too severely, for my long absence; felt me for possible injuries from traps; brought me bread and milk, which I sorely needed; and by a hundred delicate attentions showed me the secure place I occupied in their hearts. I gave my dignity to the cats, and it is not too much to say that we were all engaged in a veritable pas de trois when a shadow fell across our threshold and the Two Enemies most rudely entered!

I conceived, and gave vent to, instant detestation which, for a while, delayed their attack. When it came, He and the Girl accepted it as yoked oxen receive the lash across the eyes—with the piteous dignity which Earth, having so little to give them, bestows upon her humbles. Like oxen, too, they backed side by side and pressed closer together. I renewed my comminations from every angle as I saw how these distracted my adversaries. They then pointed passionately to me and my pan of bread and milk which joy had prevented me from altogether emptying. Their tongues I felt were foul with reproach.

At last He spoke. He mentioned my name more than once, but always (I could tell in my defence. The Girl backed His point. I assisted with—and it was something—all that I had ever heard in my lost world from the sans-kennailerie of the Street of the Fountain. The Enemies renewed the charge. Evidently my Aunt was right. Their plan was to take the Girl away in exchange for pieces of paper. I saw the Ferret wave a paper beneath His nose. He shook His head and launched that peasant’s ‘No,’ which is one in all languages.

Here I applauded vehemently, continuously, monotonously, on a key which, also, I had learned in the Street of the Fountain. Nothing could have lived against it. The Enemies threatened, I could feel, some prodigious action or another; but at last they marched out of our presence. I escorted them to the charcoal-heap—the limit of our private domain—in a silence charged with possibilities for their thick ankles.

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I returned to find my Two sunk in distress, but upon my account. I think they feared I might run away again, for they shut the door. They frequently and tenderly repeated my name, which, with them, was ‘Teem.’ Finally He took a Thin Paper from the chimney-piece, slid me into His outside pocket and walked swiftly to the Village, which I had never smelt before.

In a place where a She-Person was caged behind bars, He exchanged the Thin Paper for one which he laid under my nose, saying ‘Teem! Look! This is Licence-and-Law all-right!’ In yet another place, I was set down before a Person who exhaled a grateful flavour of dried skins. My neck was then encircled by a Collar bearing a bright badge of office. All Persons round me expressed admiration and said ‘Lor!’ many times. On our return through the Village I stretched my decorated neck out of His pocket, like one of the gaudy birds at the Château, to impress Those of Us who might be abroad that I was now under full protection of Monsieur Le Law (whoever he might be), and thus the equal of my exacting Aunt.

That night, by the Girl’s bed, my Aunt was at her most difficult. She cut short my history of my campaign, and cross-examined me coldly as to what had actually passed. Her interpretations were not cheering. She prophesied our Enemies would return, more savage for having been checked. She said that when they mentioned my name (as I have told you) it was to rebuke Him for feeding me, a vagabond, on good bread and milk, when I did not, according to Monsieur Law, belong to Him. (She herself, she added, had often been shocked by His extravagance in this regard.) I pointed out that my Collar now disposed of inconvenient questions. So much she ungraciously conceded, but—I had described the scene to her—argued that He had taken the Thin Paper out of its hiding-place because I had cajoled Him with my ‘lapdog’s tricks,’ and that, in default of that Paper, He would go without food, as well as without what he burned under His nose, which to Him would be equally serious.

I was aghast. ‘But, Ma Tante,’ I pleaded, ‘show me—make me any way to teach Him that the earth on which He walks so loftily can fill His chimneys with Thin Papers, and I promise you that She shall eat chicken!’ My evident sincerity—perhaps, too, the finesse of my final appeal—shook her. She mouthed a paw in thought.

‘You have shown Him those wonderful underground-things of yours?’ she resumed.

‘But often. And to your Girl also. They thought they were stones to throw. It is because of my size that I am not taken seriously.’ I would have lamented, but she struck me down. Her Girl was coughing.

‘Be silent, unlucky that you are! Have you shown your Truffles, as you call them, to anyone else?’

‘Those Two are all I have ever met in this world, my Aunt.’

‘That was true till yesterday,’ she replied. ‘But at the back of the Château—this afternoon—eh?’ (My friend the Vicomte was right when he warned me that all elderly Shes have six ears and ten noses. And the older the more!)

‘I saw that Person only from a distance. You know her, then, my Aunt?’

‘If I know Her! She met me once when I was lamed by thorns under my left heel-pad. She stopped me. She took them out. She also put her hand on my head.’

‘Alas, I have not your charms!’ I riposted.

‘Listen, before my temper snaps, my Nephew. She has returned to her Château. Lay one of those things that you say you find, at her feet. I do not credit your tales about them, but it is possible that She may. She is of race. She knows all. She may make you that way for which you ask so loudly. It is only a chance. But, if it succeeds, and My Bone does not eat the chickens you have promised her, I will, for sure, tear out your throat.’

‘My Aunt,’ I replied, ‘I am infinitely obliged. You have, at least, shown me a way. What a pity you were born with so many thorns under your tongue!’ And I fled to take post at the foot of His bed, where I slept vigorously—for I had lived that day!—till time to bring Him His morning boots.

We then went to our charcoal. As official Guardian of the Coat I permitted myself no excursions till He was busied stopping the vents of little flames on the flanks of the mound. Then I moved towards a patch of ground which I had noted long ago. On my way, a chance of the air told me that the Born One of the Château was walking on the verge of the wood. I fled to my patch, which was even more fruitful than I had thought. I had unearthed several Truffles when the sound of her tread hardened on the bare ground beneath the trees. Selecting my largest and ripest, I bore it reverently towards her, dropped it in her path, and took a pose of humble devotion. Her Nose informed her before her eyes. I saw it wrinkle and sniff deliciously. She stooped and with sparkling hands lifted my gift to smell. Her sympathetic appreciation emboldened me to pull the fringe of her clothes in the direction of my little store exposed beneath the oak. She knelt and, rapturously inhaling their aroma, transferred them to a small basket on her arm. (All Born Ones bear such baskets when they walk upon their own earths.)

Here He called my name. I replied at once that I was coming, but that matters of the utmost importance held me for the moment. We moved on together, the Born One and I, and found Him beside His coat setting apart for me my own bread and cheese. We lived, we two, each always in the other’s life!

I had often seen that Pierrounet my Master, who delivered me to strangers, uncover and bend at the side-door of the Château in my lost world over yonder. At no time was he beautiful. But He—My Own Bone to me!—though He too was uncovered, stood beautifully erect and as a peasant of race should bear himself when He and His are not being tortured by Ferrets or Geese. For a short time, He and the Born One did not concern themselves with me. They were obviously of old acquaintance. She spoke; she waved her sparkling hands; she laughed. He responded gravely, at dignified ease, like my friend the Vicomte. Then I heard my name many times. I fancy He may have told her something of my appearance in this world. (We peasants do not tell all to any one.) To prove to her my character, as He conceived it, He threw a stone. With as much emphasis as my love for Him allowed, I signified that this game of lapdogs was not mine. She commanded us to return to the woods. There He said to me as though it were some question of His magnificent boots, ‘Seek, Teem! Find, Teem!’ and waved His arms at random. He did not know! Even then, My Bone did not know!

But I—I was equal to the occasion! Without unnecessary gesture; stifling the squeaks of rapture that rose in my throat; coldly, almost, as my Father, I made point after point, picked up my lines and worked them (His attendant spade saving me the trouble of digging) till the basket was full. At this juncture the Girl—they were seldom far apart—appeared with all the old miseries on her face, and, behind her (I had been too occupied with my Art, or I should have yelled on their scent) walked the Two Enemies!

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They had not spied us up there among the trees, for they rated her all the way to the charcoal-heap. Our Born One descended upon them softly as a mist through which shine the stars, and greeted them in the voice of a dove out of summer foliage. I held me still. She needed no aid, that one! They grew louder and more loud; she increasingly more suave. They flourished at her one of their detestable papers which she received as though it had been all the Truffles in the world. They talked of Monsieur Le Law. From her renewed smiles I understood that he, too, had the honour of her friendship. They continued to talk of him . . . . Then . . . she abolished them! How? Speaking with the utmost reverence of both, she reminded me of my friend the Vicomte disentangling an agglomeration of distracted, and therefore dangerous, beefs at the Railway Station. There was the same sage turn of the head, the same almost invisible stiffening of the shoulders, the very same small voice out of the side of the mouth, saying ‘I charge myself with this.’ And then—and then—those insupportable offspring of a jumped-up gentilhommier were transformed into amiable and impressed members of their proper class, giving ground slowly at first, but finally evaporating—yes, evaporating—like bad smells—in the direction of the world whence they had intruded.

During the relief that followed, the Girl wept and wept and wept. Our Born One led her to the cottage and consoled. We showed her our bed beside the faggots and all our other small dispositions, including a bottle out of which the Girl was used to drink. (I tasted once some that had been spilt. It was like unfresh fish—fit only for cats.) She saw, she heard, she considered all. Calm came at her every word. She would have given Him some Pieces, in exchange, I suppose, for her filled basket. He pointed to me to show that it was my work. She repeated most of the words she had employed before—my name among them—because one must explain many times to a peasant who desires not to comprehend. At last He took the Pieces.

Then my Born One stooped down to me beside His foot and said, in the language of my lost world, ‘Knowest thou, Teem, that this is all thy work? Without thee we can do nothing. Knowest thou, my little dear Teem?’ If I knew! Had He listened to me at the first the situation would have been regularised half a season before. Now I could fill his chimney-places as my Father had filled that of that disgusting Pierrounet. Logically, of course, I should have begun a fresh demonstration of my Art in proof of my zeal for the interests of my famille. But I did not. Instead, I ran—I rolled—I leaped—I cried aloud—I fawned at their knees What would you? It was hairless, toothless sentiment, but it had the success of a hurricane! They accepted me as though I had been a Person—and He more unreservedly than any of them. It was my supreme moment!

. . . . .

I have at last reduced my famille to the Routine which is indispensable to the right-minded among Us. For example: At intervals He and I descend to the Château with our basket of Truffles for our Born One. If she is there she caresses me. If elsewhere, her basket pursues her in a stink-cart. So does, also, her Chef, a well-scented Person and, I can testify, an Artist. This, I understand, is our exchange for the right to exploit for ourselves all other Truffles that I may find inside the Great Wall. These we dispense to another stink-cart, filled with delightful comestibles, which waits for us regularly on the stink-cart-road by the House of the Gate where the Officious One pursued me. We are paid into the hand (trust us peasants!) in Pieces or Papers, while I stand guard against bandits.

As a result, the Girl has now a wooden-roofed house of her own—open at one side and capable of being turned round against winds by His strong one hand. Here she arranges the bottles from which she drinks, and here comes—but less and less often—a dry Person of mixed odours, who applies his ear at the end of a stick, to her thin back. Thus, and owing to the chickens which, as I promised my Aunt, she eats, the Taint of her distemper diminishes. My Aunt denies that it ever existed, but her infatuation—have I told you?—has no bounds! She has been given honourable demission from her duties with sheep and has frankly installed herself in the Girl’s outside bed-house, which she does not encourage me to enter. I can support that. I too have My Bone . . . .

Only it comes to me, as it does to most of Us who live so swiftly, to dream in my sleep. Then I return to my lost world—to the whistling, dry-leaved, thin oaks that are not these giant ones—to the stony little hillsides and treacherous river-pits that are not these secure pastures—to the sharp scents that are not these scents—to the companionship of poor Pluton and Dis—to the Street of the Fountain up which marches to meet me, as when I was a rude little puppy, my friend, my protector, my earliest adoration, Monsieur le Vicomte Bouvier de Brie.

At this point always, I wake; and not till I feel His foot beneath the bedderie, and hear His comfortable breathing, does my lost world cease to bite . . . .

Oh, wise and well-beloved guardian and playmate of my youth—it is true—it is true, as thou didst warn me—Outside his Art an Artist must never dream!

The Taking of Lungtungpen

[a short tale]

So we loosed a bloomin’ volley,
An’ we made the beggars cut,
An’ when our pouch was emptied out,
We used the bloomin’ butt.
Ho! My!
Don’t yer come anigh,
When Tommy is a-playin’ with the baynit an’ the butt.
(Barrack Room Ballad)

MY friend Private Mulvaney told me this, sitting on the parapet of the road to Dagshai, when we were hunting butterflies together. He had theories about the Army, and coloured clay pipes perfectly. He said that the young soldier is the best to work with, ‘on account av the surpassing innocinse av the child.’

‘Now, listen!’ said Mulvaney, throwing himself full length on the wall in the sun. ‘I’m a born scutt av the barrick-room! The Army’s mate an’ dhrink to me, bekaze I’m wan av the few that can’t quit ut. I’ve put in sivinteen years, an’ the pipeclay’s in the marrow av me. Av I cud have kept out av wan big dhrink a month, I wud have been a Hon’ry Lift’nint by this time—a nuisince to my betthers, a laughin’-shtock to my equils, an’ a curse to meself. Bein’ fwhat I am, I’m Privit Mulvaney, wid no good-conduc’ pay an’ a devourin’ thirst. Always barrin’ me little frind Bobs Bahadur, I know as much about the Army as most men.’

I said something here.

‘Wolseley be shot! Betune you an’ me an’ that butterfly net, he’s a ramblin’, incoherint sort av a divil, wid wan oi on the Quane an’ the Coort, an’ the other on his blessed silf-everlastin’ly playing Saysar and Alexandrier rowled into a lump. Now Bobs is a sinsible little man. Wid Bobs an’ a few three-year-olds, I’d swape any army av the earth into a towel, an’ throw it away aftherwards. Faith, I’m not jokin’! ’Tis the bhoysthe raw bhoys—that don’t know fwat a bullut manes, an’ wudn’t care av they did—that dhu the work. They’re crammed wid bull-mate till they fairly ramps wid good livin’; and thin, av they don’t fight, they blow each other’s hids off. ’Tis the trut’ I’’m tellin’ you. They shud be kept on water an’ rice in the hot weather; but there’d be a mut’ny av ’twas done.

‘Did ye iver hear how Privit Mulvaney tuk the town av Lungtungpen? I thought not! ’Twas the Lift’nint got the credit; but ’twas me planned the schame. A little before I was inviladed from Burma, me an’ four-an’-twenty young wans undher a Lift’nint Brazenose, was ruinin’ our dijeshins thryin’ to catch dacoits. An’ such double-ended divils I niver knew! ’Tis only a dah an’ a Snider that makes a dacoit. Widout thim, he’s a paceful cultivator, an’ felony for to shoot. We hunted, an’ we hunted, an’ tuk fever an’ elephints now an’ again; but no dacoits. Evenshually, we puckarowed wan man. “Trate him tinderly,” sez the Lift’nint. So I tuk him away into the jungle, wid the Burmese Interprut’r an’ my clanin’-rod. Sez I to the man, “My paceful squireen,” sez I, “you shquot on your hunkers an’ dimonstrate to my frind here, where your frinds are whin they’re at home?” Wid that I introjuced him to the clanin’-rod, an’ he comminst to jabber; the Interprut’r interprutin’ in betweens, an’ me helpin’ the Intilligince Departmint wid my clanin’-rod whin the man misremimbered.

‘Prisintly, I learn that, acrost the river, about nine miles away, was a town just dhrippin’ wid dahs, an’ bohs an’ arrows, an’ dacoits, an’ elephints, an’ jingles. “Good!” sez I; “this office will now close!”

‘That night I went to the Lift’nint an’ communicates my information. I never thought much of Lift’nint Brazenose till that night. He was shtiff wid books an’ the-ouries, an’ all manner av thrimmin’s no manner av use. “Town did ye say?” sez he. “Accordin’ to the the-ouries av War, we shud wait for reinforcements.”—“Faith!” thinks I, “we’d betther dig our graves thin”; for the nearest throops was up to their shtocks in the marshes out Mimbu way. “But,” says the Lift’nint, “since ’tis a speshil case, I’ll make an excepshin. We’ll visit this Lungtungpen tonight.”

The bhoys was fairly woild wid deloight whin I tould ’em; an’, by this an’ that, they wint through the jungle like buck-rabbits. About midnight we come to the shtrame which I had clane forgot to minshin to my orficer. I was on, ahead, wid four bhoys, an’ I thought that the Lift’nint might want to the-ourise. “Shtrip bhoys!” sez I. “htrip to the buff, an’ shwim in where glory waits!”—“But I can’t shwim!” sez two av thim. “To think I should live to hear that from a bhoy wid a board-school edukashin!” sez I. “Take a lump av timbher, an’ me an’ Conolly here will ferry ye over, ye young ladies!”

‘We got an ould tree-trunk, an’ pushed off wid the kits an’ the rifles on it. The night was chokin’ dhark, an’ just as we was fairly embarked, I heard the Lift’nint behind av me callin’ out. “There’s a bit av a nullah here, Sorr,” sez I, “but I can feel the bottom already.” So I cud, for I was not a yard from the bank.

‘“Bit av a nullah! Bit av an eshtury!” sez the Lift’nint. “Go on, ye mad Irishman! Shtrip bhoys!” I heard him laugh; an’ the bhoys begun shtrippin’ an’ rollin’ a log into the wather to put their kits on. So me an’ Conolly shtruck out through the warm wather wid our log, an’ the rest come on behind.

‘That shtrame was miles woide! Orth’ris, on the rear-rank log, whispers we had got into the Thames below Sheerness by mistake. “Kape on shwimmin’, ye little blayguard,” sez I, “an’ don’t go pokin’ your dirty jokes at the Irriwaddy.—“Silince, men!” sings out the Lift’nint. So we shwum on into the black dhark, wid our chests on the logs, trustin’ in the Saints an’ the luck av the British Army.

Evenshually we hit ground—a bit av sand—an’ a man. I put my heel on the back av him. He skreeched an’ ran.

‘“Now we’ve done it!” sez Lift’nint Brazenose. “Where the Divil is Lungtungpen?” There was about a minute and a half to wait. The bhoys laid a hould av their rifles an’ some thried to put their belts on; we was marchin’ wid fixed baynits av coorse. Thin we knew where Lungtungpen was; for we had hit the river-wall av it in the dhark, an’ the whole town blazed wid thim messin’ jingles an’ Sniders like a cat’s back on a frosty night. They was firin’ all ways at wanst; but over our hids into the shtrame.

‘“Have you got your rifles?” sez Brazenose, “Got ’em!” sez Orth’ris. “I’ve got that thief Mulvaney’s for all my back-pay, an’ she’ll kick my heart sick wid that blunderin’ long shtock av hers”—“Go on!” yells Brazenose, whippin’ his sword out. “Go on an’ take the town! An’ the Lord have mercy on our sowls!”

‘Thin the bhoys gave wan devastatin’ howl, an’ pranced into the dhark, feelin’ for the town, an blindin’ and stiffin’ like Cavalry Ridin’ Masters whin the grass pricked their bare legs. I hammered wid the butt at some bamboo-thing that felt wake, an’ the rest come an’ hammered contagious, while the jingles was jingling, an’ feroshus yells from inside was shplittin’ our ears. We was too close under the wall for thim to hurt us.

‘Evenshually, the thing, whatever ut was, bruk; an’ the six-and-twinty av us tumbled, wan after the other, naked as we was borrun, into the town of Lungtungpen. There was a melly av a sumpshus kind for a whoile; but whether they tuk us, all white an’ wet, for a new breed av’ divll, or a new kind av dacoit, I don’t know. They ran as though we was both, an’ we wint into thim, baynit an’ butt, shriekin’ wid laughin’. There was torches in the shtreets, an’ I saw little Orth’ris rubbin’ his showlther ivry time he loosed my longshtock Martini; an’ Brazenose walkin’ into the gang wid his sword, like Diarmid av the Gowlden Collar—barring he hadn’t a stitch av clothin’ on him. We diskivered elephints wid dacoits under their bellies, an’, what wid wan thing an another, we was busy till mornin’ takin’ possession av the town of Lungtungpen.

‘Thin we halted an’ formed up, the wimmen howlin’ in the houses an’ Lift’nint Brazenose blushin’ pink in the light av the mornin’ sun. ’Twas the most ondasint p’rade I iver tuk a hand in. Foive-and-twenty privits an’ an orficer av the Line in review ordher, an’ not as much as wud dust a fife betune ’em all in the way of clothin’! Eight av us had their belts an’ pouches on; but the rest had gone in wid a handful of cartridges an’ the skin God gave thim. They was as naked as Vanus.

‘“Number off from the right!” sez the Lift’nint. “Odd numbers fall out to dress; even numbers pathrol the town till relieved by the dressing party.” Let me tell you, pathrollin’ a town wid nothing on is an expayrience. I pathrolled for tin minutes, an’ begad, before ’twas over, I blushed. The women laughed so. I niver blushed before or since; but I blushed all over my carkiss thin. Orth’ris didn’t pathrol. He sez only, “Portsmith Barricks an’ the ’Ard av a Sunday!” Thin he lay down an’ rowled any ways wid laughin’.

‘Whin we was all dhressed we counted the dead—sivinty-foive dacoits besides wounded. We tuk five elephints, a hunder’ an’ sivinty Sniders, two hunder’ dahs, and a lot av other burglarious thruck. Not a man av us was hurt—excep’ maybe the Lift’nint, an’ he from the shock to his dasincy.

The Headman av Lungtungpen, who surrinder’d himself, asked the Interprut’r—“Av the English fight like that wid their clo’es off, what in the wurruld do they do wid their clo’es on?” Orth’ris began rowlin’ his eyes an’ crackin’ his fingers an’ dancin’ a step-dance for to impress the Headman. He ran to his house; an’ we spint the rest av the day carryin’ the Lift’nint on our showlthers round the town, an’ playin’ wid the Burmese babies—fat, little, brown little divils, as pretty as picturs.

‘Whin I was inviladed for the dysent’ry to India, I sez to the Lift’nint, “Sorr,” sez I, “you’ve the makin’s in you av a great man; but, av you’ll let an ould sodger spake, you’re too fond of the-ourisin’.;” He shuk hands wid me and sez, “Hit high, hit low, there’s no plasin’ you, Mulvaney. You’ve seen me waltzin’ through Luntungpen like a Red Injin widout the war-paint, any you say I’m too fond of the-ourisin’?”—“Sorr,” sez I, for I loved the bhoy, “I wud waltz wid you in that condishin through Hell, an’ so wud the rest av the men!” Thin I wint downshtrame in the flat an’ left him my blessin’. May the Saints carry ut where ut shud go, for he was a fine upstandin’ young orficer.

‘To reshume. Fwhat I’ve said jist shows the use av three-year-olds. Wud fifty seasoned sodgers have taken Lungtungpen in the dhark that way? No! They’d know the risk av fever and chill; let alone the shootin’. Two hundher’ might have done ut. But the three-year-olds know little an’ care less; an’ where there’s no fear there’s no danger. Catch thim young, feed thim high, an’ by the honour av that great, little man Bobs, behind a good orficer, ’tisn’t only dacoits they’d smash wid their clo’es off—’tis Continental Ar-r-r-mies! They tuk Lungtungpen nakid; an’ they’d take St. Pethersburg in their dhrawers! Begad, they would that!

‘Here’s your pipe, Sorr. Shmoke her tinderly wid honey-dew, afther letting the reek av the Canteen plug die away. But ’tis no good, thanks to you all the same, fillin’ my pouch wid your chopped hay. Canteen baccy’s like the Army; it shpoils a man’s taste for moilder things.’

So saying, Mulvaney took up his butterfly-net, and returned to barracks.

Swept and Garnished

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WHEN the first waves of feverish cold stole over Frau Ebermann she very wisely telephoned for the doctor and went to bed. He diagnosed the attack as mild influenza, prescribed the appropriate remedies, and left her to the care of her one servant in her comfortable Berlin flat. Frau Ebermann, beneath the thick coverlet, curled up with what patience she could until the aspirin should begin to act, and Anna should come back from the chemist with the formamint, the ammoniated quinine, the eucalyptus, and the little tin steam-inhaler. Meantime, every bone in her body ached; her head throbbed; her hot, dry hands would not stay the same size for a minute together; and her body, tucked into the smallest possible compass, shrank from the chill of the well-warmed sheets.

Of a sudden she noticed that an imitation-lace cover which should have lain mathematically square with the imitation-marble top of the radiator behind the green plush sofa had slipped away so that one corner hung over the bronze-painted steam pipes. She recalled that she must have rested her poor head against the radiator-top while she was taking off her boots. She tried to get up and set the thing straight, but the radiator at once receded toward the horizon, which, unlike true horizons, slanted diagonally, exactly parallel with the dropped lace edge of the cover. Frau Ebermann groaned through sticky lips and lay still.

‘Certainly, I have a temperature,’ she said. ‘Certainly, I have a grave temperature. I should have been warned by that chill after dinner.’

She resolved to shut her hot-lidded eyes, but opened them in a little while to torture herself with the knowledge of that ungeometrical thing against the far wall. Then she saw a child—an untidy, thin-faced little girl of about ten, who must have strayed in from the adjoining flat. This proved—Frau Ebermann groaned again at the way the world falls to bits when one is sick—proved that Anna had forgotten to shut the outer door of the flat when she went to the chemist. Frau Ebermann had had children of her own, but they were all grown up now, and she had never been a child-lover in any sense. Yet the intruder might be made to serve her scheme of things.

‘Make—put,’ she muttered thickly, ‘that white thing straight on the top of that yellow thing.’

The child paid no attention, but moved about the room, investigating everything that came in her way—the yellow cut-glass handles of the chest of drawers, the stamped bronze hook to hold back the heavy puce curtains, and the mauve enamel, New Art finger-plates on the door. Frau Ebermann watched indignantly.

‘Aie! That is bad and rude. Go away!’ she cried, though it hurt her to raise her voice. ‘Go away by the road you came!’ The child passed behind the bed-foot, where she could not see her. ‘Shut the door as you go. I will speak to Anna, but—first, put that white thing straight.’

She closed her eyes in misery of body and soul. The outer door clicked, and Anna entered, very penitent that she had stayed so long at the chemist’s. But it had been difficult to find the proper type of inhaler, and——

‘Where did the child go?’ moaned Frau Ebermann—‘the child that was here?’

‘There was no child,’ said startled Anna. ‘How should any child come in when I shut the door behind me after I go out? All the keys of the flats are different.’

‘No, no! You forgot this time. But my back is aching, and up my legs also. Besides, who knows what it may have fingered and upset? Look and see.’

‘Nothing is fingered, nothing is upset,’ Anna replied, as she took the inhaler from its paper box.

‘Yes, there is. Now I remember all about it. Put—put that white thing, with the open edge—the lace, I mean—quite straight on that—’ she pointed. Anna, accustomed to her ways, understood and went to it.

‘Now, is it quite straight?’ Frau Ebermann demanded.

‘Perfectly,’ said Anna. ‘In fact, in the very centre of the radiator.’ Anna measured the equal margins with her knuckle, as she had been told to do when she first took service.

‘And my tortoise-shell hair brushes?’ Fran Ebermann could not command her dressing-table from where she lay.

‘Perfectly straight, side by side in the big tray, and the comb laid across them. Your watch also in the coralline watch-holder. Everything’—she moved round the room to make sure—‘everything is as you have it when you are well.’ Frau Ebermann sighed with relief. It seemed to her that the room and her head had suddenly grown cooler.

‘Good! ‘said she. ‘Now warm my nightgown in the kitchen, so it will be ready when I have perspired. And the towels also. Make the inhaler steam, and put in the eucalyptus; that is good for the larynx. Then sit you in the kitchen, and come when I ring. But, first, my hot-water bottle.’

It was brought and scientifically tucked in.

‘What news?’ said Frau Ebermann drowsily. She had not been out that day.

‘Another victory,’ said Anna. ‘Many more prisoners and guns.’

Frau Ebermann purred, one might almost say grunted, contentedly.

‘That is good too,’ she said; and Anna, after lighting the inhaler-lamp, went out.

Frau Ebermann reflected that in an hour or so the aspirin would begin to work, and all would be well. To-morrow—no, the day after—she would take up life with something to talk over with her friends at coffee. It was rare—every one knew it—that she should be overcome by any ailment. Yet in all her distresses she had not allowed the minutest deviation from daily routine and ritual. She would tell her friends—she ran over their names one by one—exactly what measures she had taken against the lace cover on the radiatortop and in regard to her two tortoise-shell hairbrushes and the comb at right angles. How she had set everything in order—everything in order. She roved further afield as she wriggled her toes luxuriously on the hot-water bottle. If it pleased our dear God to take her to Himself, and she was not so young as she had been—there was that plate of the four lower ones in the blue tooth-glass, for instance—He should find all her belongings fit to meet His eye. ‘Swept and garnished’ were the words that shaped themselves in her intent brain. ‘Swept and garnished for——’

No, it was certainly not for the dear Lord that she had swept; she would have her room swept out to-morrow or the day after, and garnished. Her hands began to swell again into huge pillows of nothingness. Then they shrank, and so did her head, to minute dots. It occurred to her that she was waiting for some event, some tremendously important event, to come to pass. She lay with shut eyes for a long time till her head and hands should return to their proper size.

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She opened her eyes with a jerk.

‘How stupid of me,’ she said aloud, ‘to set the room in order for a parcel of dirty little children!’

They were there—five of them, two little boys and three girls—headed by the anxious-eyed ten-year-old whom she had seen before. They must have entered by the outer door, which Anna had neglected to shut behind her when she returned with the inhaler. She counted them backward and forward as one counts scales—one, two, three, four, five.

They took no notice of her, but hung about, first on one foot then on the other, like strayed chickens, the smaller ones holding by the larger. They had the air of utterly wearied passengers in a railway waiting-room, and their clothes were disgracefully dirty.

‘Go away!’ cried Frau Ebermann at last, after she had struggled, it seemed to her, for years to shape the words.

‘You called?’ said Anna at the living-room door.

‘No,’ said her mistress. ‘Did you shut the flat door when you came in?’

‘Assuredly,’ said Anna. ‘Besides, it is made to catch shut of itself.’

‘Then go away,’ said she, very little above a whisper. If Anna pretended not to see the children, she would speak to Anna later on.

‘And now,’ she said, turning toward them as soon as the door closed. The smallest of the crowd smiled at her, and shook his head before he buried it in his sister’s skirts.

‘Why—don’t—you—go—away?’ she whispered earnestly.

Again they took no notice, but, guided by the elder girl, set themselves to climb, boots and all, on to the green plush sofa in front of the radiator. The little boys had to be pushed, as they could not compass the stretch unaided. They settled themselves in a row, with small gasps of relief, and pawed the plush approvingly.

‘I ask you—I ask you why do you not go away—why do you not go away?’ Frau Ebermann found herself repeating the question twenty times. It seemed to her that everything in the world hung on the answer. ‘You know you should not come into houses and rooms unless you are invited. Not houses and bedrooms, you know.’

‘No,’ a solemn little six-year-old repeated, ‘not houses nor bedrooms, nor dining-rooms, nor churches, nor all those places. Shouldn’t come in. It’s rude.’

‘Yes, he said so,’ the younger girl put in proudly. ‘He said it. He told them only pigs would do that.’ The line nodded and dimpled one to another with little explosive giggles, such as children use when they tell deeds of great daring against their elders.

‘If you know it is wrong, that makes it much worse,’ said Frau Ebermann.

‘Oh yes; much worse,’ they assented cheerfully, till the smallest boy changed his smile to a baby wail of weariness.

‘When will they come for us?’ he asked, and the girl at the head of the row hauled him bodily into her square little capable lap.

‘He’s tired,’ she explained. ‘He is only four. He only had his first breeches this spring.’ They came almost under his armpits, and were held up by broad linen braces, which, his sorrow diverted for the moment, he patted proudly.

‘Yes, beautiful, dear,’ said both girls.

‘Go away!’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘Go home to your father and mother! ‘

Their faces grew grave at once.

‘H’sh! We can’t,’ whispered the eldest ‘There isn’t anything left.’

‘All gone,’ a boy echoed, and he puffed through pursed lips. ‘Like that, uncle told me. Both cows too.’

‘And my own three ducks,’ the boy on the girl’s lap said sleepily.

‘So, you see, we came here.’ The elder girl leaned forward a little, caressing the child she rocked.

‘I—I don’t understand,’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘Are you lost, then? You must tell our police.’

‘Oh no; we are only waiting.’

‘But what are you waiting for?’

‘We are waiting for our people to come for us. They told us to come here and wait for them. So we are waiting till they come,’ the eldest girl replied.

‘Yes. We are waiting till our people come for us,’ said all the others in chorus.

‘But,’ said Frau Ebermann very patiently—‘but now tell me, for I tell you that I am not in the least angry, where do you come from? Where do you come from?’

The five gave the names of two villages of which she had read in the papers.

‘That is silly,’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘The people fired on us, and they were punished. Those places are wiped out, stamped flat.’

‘Yes, yes, wiped out, stamped flat. That is why and—I have lost the ribbon off my pigtail,’ said the younger girl. She looked behind her over the sofa-back.

‘It is not here,’ said the elder. ‘It was lost before. Don’t you remember?’

‘Now, if you are lost, you must go and tell our police. They will take care of you and give you food,’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘Anna will show you the way there.’

‘No,’—this was the six-year-old with the smile,—‘we must wait here till our people come for us. Mustn’t we, sister?’

‘Of course. We wait here till our people come for us. All the world knows that,’ said the eldest girl.

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‘Yes.’ The boy in her lap had waked again. ‘Little children, too—as little as Henri, and he doesn’t wear trousers yet. As little as all that.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Frau Ebermann, shivering. In spite of the heat of the room and the damp breath of the steam-inhaler, the aspirin was not doing its duty.

The girl raised her blue eyes and looked at the woman for an instant.

‘You see,’ she said, emphasising her statements with her fingers, ‘they told us to wait here till our people came for us. So we came. We wait till our people come for us.’

‘That is silly again,’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘It is no good for you to wait here. Do you know what this place is? You have been to school? It is Berlin, the capital of Germany.’

‘Yes, yes,’ they all cried; ‘Berlin, capital of Germany. We know that. That is why we came.’

‘So, you see, it is no good,’ she said triumphantly, ‘because your people can never come for you here.’

‘They told us to come here and wait till our people came for us.’ They delivered this as if it were a lesson in school. Then they sat still, their hands orderly folded on their laps, smiling as sweetly as ever.

‘Go away! Go away!’Frau Ebermann shrieked.

‘You called?’ said Anna, entering.

‘No. Go away! Go away!’

‘Very good, old cat,’ said the maid under her breath. ‘Next time you may call,’ and she returned to her friend in the kitchen.

‘I ask you—ask you, please to go away,’ Frau Ebermann pleaded. ‘Go to my Anna through that door, and she will give you cakes and sweeties. It is not kind of you to come into my room and behave so badly.’

‘Where else shall we go now?’ the elder girl demanded, turning to her little company. They fell into discussion. One preferred the broad street with trees, another the railway station; but when she suggested an Emperor’s palace, they agreed with her.

‘We will go then,’ she said, and added half apologetically to Frau Ebermann, ‘You see, they are so little they like to meet all the others.’

‘What others?’ said Frau Ebermann.

‘The others—hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of the others.’

‘That is a lie. There cannot be a hundred even, much less a thousand,’ cried Frau Ebermann.

‘So?’ said the girl politely.

‘Yes. I tell you; and I have very good information. I know how it happened. You should have been more careful. You should not have run out to see the horses and guns passing. That is how it is done when our troops pass through. My son has written me so.’

They had clambered down from the sofa, and gathered round the bed with eager, interested eyes.

‘Horses and guns going by—how fine!’ some one whispered.

‘Yes, yes; believe me, that is how the accidents to the children happen. You must know yourself that it is true. One runs out to look——’

‘But I never saw any at all,’ a boy cried sorrowfully. ‘Only one noise I heard. That was when Aunt Emmeline’s house fell down.’

‘But listen to me. I am telling you! One runs out to look, because one is little and cannot see well. So one peeps between the man’s legs, and then—you know how close those big horses and guns turn the corners—then one’s foot slips and one gets run over. That’s how it happens. Several times it had happened, but not many times; certainly not a hundred, perhaps not twenty. So, you see, you must be all. Tell me now that you are all that there are, and Anna shall give you the cakes.’

‘Thousands,’ a boy repeated monotonously. ‘Then we all come here to wait till our people come for us.’

‘But now we will go away from here. The poor lady is tired,’ said the elder girl, plucking his sleeve.

‘Oh, you hurt, you hurt!’ he cried, and burst into tears.

‘What is that for?’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘To cry in a room where a poor lady is sick is very inconsiderate.’

‘Oh, but look, lady!’ said the elder girl.

Frau Ebermann looked and saw.

‘Au revoir, lady.’ They made their little smiling bows and curtseys undisturbed by her loud cries. ‘Au revoir, lady. We will wait till our people come for us.’

When Anna at last ran in, she found her mistress on her knees, busily cleaning the floor with the lace cover from the radiator, because, she explained, it was all spotted with the blood of five children—she was perfectly certain there could not be more than five in the whole world—who had gone away for the moment, but were now waiting round the corner, and Anna was to find them and give them cakes to stop the bleeding, while her mistress swept and garnished that Our dear Lord when He came might find everything as it should be.

A Supplementary Chapter

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Shall I not one day remember thy Bower—
One day when all days are one day to me?
Thinking I stirred not and yet had the power,
Yearning—ah, God, if again it might be!
—The Song of the Bower.

THIS is a base betrayal of confidence, but the sin is Mrs. Hauksbee’s and not mine.
If you remember a certain foolish tale called “The Education of Otis Yeere,” you will not forget that Mrs. Mallowe laughed at the wrong time, which was a single, and at Mrs. Hauksbee, which was a double, offence. An experiment had gone wrong, and it seems that Mrs. Mallowe had said some quaint things about the experimentrix.

“I am not angry,” said Mrs. Hauksbee, “and I admire Polly in spite of her evil counsels to me. But I shall wait—I shall wait, like the frog footman in Alice in Wonderland, and Providence will deliver Polly into my hands. It always does if you wait.” And she departed to vex the soul of the “Hawley boy,” who says that she is singularly “uninstruite and childlike.” He got that first word out of a Ouida novel. I do not know what it means, but am prepared to make an affidavit before the Collector that it does not mean Mrs. Hauksbee.

Mrs. Hauksbee’s ideas of waiting are very liberal. She told the “Hawley boy” that he dared not tell Mrs. Reiver that “she was an intellectual woman with a gift for attracting men,” and she offered another man two waltzes if he would repeat the same thing in the same ears. But he said: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” which means “Mistrust all waltzes except those you get for legitimate asking.”

The “Hawley boy” did as he was told because he believes in Mrs. Hauksbee. He was the instrument in the hand of a Higher Power, and he wore jharun coats, like “the scoriac rivers that roll their sulphurous torrents down Yahek, in the realms of the Boreal Pole,” that made your temples throb when seen early in the morning. I will introduce him to you some day if all goes well. He is worth knowing.

Unpleasant things have already been written about Mrs. Reiver in other places.

She was a person without invention. She used to get her ideas from the men she captured, and this led to some eccentric changes of character. For a month or two she would act à la Madonna, and try Theo for a change if she fancied Theo’s ways suited her beauty. Then she would attempt the dark and fiery Lilith, and so and so on, exactly as she had absorbed the new notion. But there was always Mrs. Reiver—hard, selfish, stupid Mrs. Reiver—at the back of each transformation. Mrs. Hauksbee christened her the Magic Lantern on account of this borrowed mutability. “It just depends upon the slide,” said Mrs. Hauksbee. “The case is the only permanent thing in the exhibition. But that, thank Heaven, is getting old,”

There was a Fancy Ball at Government House and Mrs. Reiver came attired in some sort of ’98 costume, with her hair pulled up to the top of her head, showing the clear outline on the back of the neck like the Récamier engravings. Mrs. Hauksbee had chosen to be loud, not to say vulgar, that evening, and went as The Black Death—a curious arrangement of barred velvet, black domino and flame-coloured satin puffery coming up to the neck and the wrists, with one of those shrieking keel-backed cicalas in the hair. The scream of the creature made people jump. It sounded so unearthly in a ballroom.

I heard her say to some one: “Let me introduce you to Madame Récamier,” and I saw a man dressed as Autolycus bowing to Mrs. Reiver, while The Black Death looked more than usually saintly. It was a very pleasant evening, and Autolycus and Madame Recamier—I heard her ask Autolycus who Madame Récamier was, by the way—danced together ever so much. Mrs. Hauksbee was in a meditative mood, but she laughed once or twice in the back of her throat, and that meant trouble.

Autolycus was Trewinnard, the man whom Mrs. Mallowe had told Mrs. Hauksbee about—the Platonic Paragon, as Mrs. Hauksbee called him. He was amiable, but his moustache hid his mouth, and so he did not explain himself all at once. If you stared at him, he turned his eyes away, and through the rest of the dinner kept looking at you to see whether you were looking again. He took stares as a tribute to his merits, which were generally known and recognised. When he played billiards he apologised at length between each bad stroke, and explained what would have happened if the red had been somewhere else, or the bearer had trimmed the third lamp, or the wind hadn’t made the door bang. Also he wriggled in his chair more than was becoming to one of his inches. Little men may wriggle and fidget without attracting notice. It doesn’t suit big-framed men. He was the Main Girder Boom of the Kutcha, Pukka, Bimdobust and Benaoti Department and corresponded direct with the Three Taped Bashaw. Every one knows what that means. The men in his own office said that where anything was to be gained, even temporarily, he would never hesitate for a moment over handing up a subordinate to be hanged and drawn and quartered. He didn’t back up his underlings, and for that reason they dreaded taking responsibility on their shoulders, and the strength of the Department was crippled.

A weak Department can, and often does, do a power of good work simply because its chief sees it through thick and thin. Mistakes may be bom of this policy, but it is safe and sounder than giving orders which may be read in two ways and reserving to yourself the right of interpretation according to subsequent failure or success. Offices prefer administration to diplomacy. They are very like Empires.

Hatchett of the Almirah and Thannicutch—a vicious little three-cornered Department that was always stamping on the toes of the Elect—had the fairest estimate of Trewinnard, when he said: “I don’t believe he is as good as he is.” They always quoted that verdict as an instance of the blind jealousy of the Uncovenanted, but Hatchett was quite right. Trewinnard was just as good and no better than Mrs. Mallowe could make him; and she had been engaged on the work for three years. Hatchett has a narrow-minded partiality for the more than naked—the anatomised Truth—but he can gauge a man.

Trewinnard had been spoilt by over-much petting, and the devil of vanity that rides nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand made him behave as he did. He had been too long one woman’s property; and that belief will sometimes drive a man to throw the best things in the world behind him, from rank perversity. Perhaps che only meant to stray temporarily and then return, but in arranging for this excursion he misimderstood both Mrs. Mallowe and Mrs. Reiver. The one made no sign, she would have died first; and the other—well, the high-falutin mindsome lay was her craze for the time being. She had never tried it before and several men had hinted that it would eminently become her. Trewinnard was in himself pleasant, with the great merit of belonging to somebody else. He was what they call “intellectual,” and vain to the marrow. Mrs. Reiver returned his lead in the first, and hopelessly out-trumped him in the second suit. Put down all that comes after this to Providence or The Black Death.

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Trewimiard never realised how far he had fallen from his allegiance till Mrs. Reiver referred to some official matter that he had been telling her about as “ours.” He remembered then how that word had been sacred to Mrs. Mallowe and how she had asked his permission to use it. Opium is intoxicating, and so is whisky, but more intoxicating than either to a certain build of mind is the first occasion on which a woman—especially if she have asked leave for the “honour”—identifies herself with a man’s work. The second time is not so pleasant. The answer has been given before, and the treachery comes to the top and tastes coppery in the mouth.

Trewinnard swallowed the shame—he felt dimly that he was not doing Mrs. Reiver any great wrong by untruth—and told and told and continued to tell, for the snare of this form of open-heartedness is that no man, unless he be a consmnmate liar, knows where to stop. The office door of all others must be either open wide or shut tight with a shaprassi to keep off callers.

Mrs. Mallowe made no sign to show that she felt Trewinnard’s desertion till a piece of information that could only have come from one quarter ran about Simla like quicksilver. She met Trewinnard at a dinner. “Choose your confidantes better, Harold,” she whispered as she passed him in the drawing-room. He turned salmon-colour, and swore very hard to himself that Babu Durga Charan Laha must go—must go—must go. He almost believed in that grey-headed old oyster’s guilt.

And so another of those upside-down tragedies that we call a Simla Season wore through to the end—from the Birthday Ball to the “tripping” to Naldera and Kotghar. And fools gave feasts and wise men ate them, and they were bidden to the wedding and sat down to bake, and those who had nuts had no teeth and they staked the substance for the shadow, and carried coals to Newcastle, and in the dark all cats were grey, as it was in the days of the great Curé of Meudon.

Late in the year there developed itself a battle-royal between the K.P.B. and B. Department and the Almirah and Thannicutch. Three columns of this paper would be needed to supply you with the outlines of the difficulty; and then you would not be grateful. Hatchett snuffed the fray from afar and went into it with his teeth bared to the gums, while his Department stood behind him solid to a man. They believed in him, and their answer to the fury of men who detested him was: “Ah! But you’ll admit he’s d—d right in what he says.”

“The head of Trewinnard in a Government Resolution,” said Hatchett, and he told the daftri to put a new pad on his blotter, and smiled a bleak smile as he spread out his notes. Hatchett is a Thug in his systematic way of butchering a man’s reputation.

“What are you going to do?” asked Trewinnard’s Department. “Sit tight,” said Trewinnard, which was tantamount to saying “Lord knows.” The Department groaned and said: “Which of us poor beggars is to be Jonahed this time?” They knew Trewinnard’s vice.

The dispute was essentially not one for the K.P.B. and B. under its then direction to fight out. It should have been compromised, or at the worst sent up to the Supreme Government with a private and confidential note directing justice into the proper paths.

Some people say that the Supreme Government is the Devil. It is more like the Deep Sea. Anything that you throw into it disappears for weeks, and comes to light hacked and furred at the edges, crusted with weeds and shells and almost unrecognisable. The bold man who would dare to give it a file of love-letters would be amply rewarded. It would overlay them with original comments and marginal notes, and work them piecemeal into D. O. dockets. Few things, from a setter or a whirlpool to a sausage-machine or a hatching hen, are more interesting and peculiar than the Supreme Government.

“What shall we do?” said Trewinnard, who had fallen from grace into sin. “Fight,” said Mrs. Reiver, or words to that effect; and no one can say how far aimless desire to test her powers, and how far belief in the man she had brought to her feet prompted the judgment. Of the merits of the case she knew just as much as any ayah.

Then Mrs. Mallowe, upon an evil word that went through Simla, put on her visiting-garb and attired herself for the sacrifice, and went to call—to call upon Mrs. Reiver, knowing what the torture would be. From half-past twelve till twenty-five minutes to two she sat, her hand upon her cardcase, and let Mrs. Reiver stab at her, all for the sake of the information. Mrs. Reiver double-acted her part, but she played into Mrs. Mallowe’s hand by this defect. The assumptions of ownership, the little intentional slips, were overdone, and so also was the pretence of intimate knowledge. Mrs. Mallowe never winced. She repeated to herself: “And he has trusted this—this Thing. She knows nothing and she cares nothing, and she has digged this trap for him.” The main feature of the case was abundantly clear. Trewinnard, whose capacities Mrs. Mallowe knew to the utmost farthing, to whom public and departmental petting were as the breath of his delicately-cut nostrils—Trewinnard, with his nervous dread of dispraise, was to be pitted against the Paul de Cassagnac of the Almirah and Thannicutch—the unspeakable Hatchett, who fought with the venom of a woman and the skill of a Red Indian. Unless his cause was triply just, Trewinnard was already under the guiotine. and if he had been under this “Thing’s” dominance, small hope for the justice of his case. “Oh, why did I let him go without putting out a hand to fetch him back?” said Mrs. Mallowe, as she got into her ’rickshaw.

Now, Tim, her fox-terrier, is the only person who knows what Mrs. Mallowe did that afternoon, and as I found him loafing on the Mall in a very disconsolate condition and as he recognised me effusively and suggested going for a monkey-hunt—a thing he had never done before—my impression is that Mrs. Mallowe stayed at home till the light fell and thought. If she did this, it is of course hopeless to account for her actions. So you must fill in the gap for yourself.

That evening it rained heavily, and horses mired their riders. But not one of all the habits was so plastered with mud as the habit of Mrs. Mallowe when she pulled up under the scrub oaks and sent in her name by the astounded bearer to Trewinnard. “Folly! downright folly!” she said as she sat in the steam of the dripping horse. “But it’s all a horrible jumble together.”

It may be as well to mention that ladies do not usually call upon bachelors at their houses. Bachelors would scream and run away. Trewinnard came into the light of the verandah with a nervous, undecided smile upon his lips, and he wished—in the bottomless bottom of his bad heart—he wished that Mrs. Reiver was there to see. A minute later he was profoundly glad that he was alone, for Mrs. Mallowe was standing in his office room and calling him names that reflected no credit on his intellect. “What have you done? What have you said?’ she asked. “Be quick! Be quick! And have the horse led round to the back. Can you speak? What have you written? Show me!”

She had interrupted him in the middle of what he was pleased to call his reply; for Hatchett’s first shell had already fallen in the camp. He stood back and offered her the seat at the duftar table. Her elbow left a great wet stain on the baize, for she was soaked through and through.

“Say exactly how the matter stands,” she said, and laughed a weak little laugh, which emboldened Trewinnard to say loftily: “Pardon me, Mrs. Mallowe, but I hardly recognise your——’

“Idiot! Will you show me the papers, will you speak, and will you be quick?”

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Her most reverent admirers would hardly have recognised the soft-spoken, slow-gestured, quiet-eyed Mrs. Mallowe in the indignant woman who was drununing on Trewinnard’s desk. He submitted to the voice of authority, as he had submitted in the old times, and explained as quickly as might be the cause of the war between the two Departments. In conclusion he handed over the rough sheets of his reply. As she read he watched her with the expectant sickly half-smile of the unaccustomed writer who is doubtful of the success of his work. And another smile followed, but died away as he saw Mrs. Mallowe read his production. All the old phrases out of which she had so carefully drilled him had returned; the unpruned fluency of diction was there, the more luxuriant for being so long cut back; the reckless riotousness of assertion that sacrificed all—even the vital truth that Hatchett would be so sure to take advantage of—for the sake of scoring a point, was there; and through and between every line ran the weak, wilful vanity of the man. Mrs. Mallowe’s mouth hardened.

“And you wrote this!” she said. Then to herself: “He wrote this!”

Trewinnard stepped forward with a gesture habitual to him when he wished to explain. Mrs. Reiver had never asked for explanations. She had told him that all his ways were perfect. Therefore he loved her.

Mrs. Mallowe tore up the papers one by one, saying as she did so: “You were going to cross swords with Hatchett. Do you know your own strength? Oh, Harold, Harold, it is too pitiable! I thought—I thought——” Then the great anger that had been growing in her broke out, and she cried: “Oh, you fool! You blind, blind, blind, trumpery fool! Why do I help you? Why do I have anything to do with you? You miserable man! Sit down and write as I dictate. Quickly! And I had chosen you out of a hundred other men! Write! It is a terrible thing to be found out by a mere unseeing male—Thackeray has said it. It is worse, far worse, to be found out by a woman, and in that hour after long years to discover her worth. For ten minutes Trewinnard’s pen scratched across the paper, and Mrs. Mallowe spoke. “And that is all,” she said bitterly. “As you value yourself—your noble, honourable, modest self—keep within that.”

But that was not all—by any means. At least as far as Trewinnard was concerned.

He rose from his chair and delivered his soul of many mad and futile thoughts—such things as a man babbles when he is deserted of the gods, has missed his hold upon the latch-door of Opportunity—and cannot see that the ways are shut. Mrs. Mallowe bore with him to the end, and he stood before her—no enviable creature to look upon.

“A cur as well as a fool!” she said. “Will you be good enough to tell them to bring my horse? I do not trust to your honour—you have none—but I believe that your sense of shame will keep you from speaking of my visit.”

So he was left in the verandah crying “Come back” like a distracted guinea-fowl.

. . . . .

“He’s done us in the eye,” grunted Hatchett as he perused the K.P.B. and B. reply. “Look at the cunning of the brute in shifting the issue on to India in that carneying, blarneying way! Only wait until I can get my knife into him again. I’ll stop every bolt-hole before the hunt begins.”

. . . . .

Oh, I believe I have forgotten to mention the success of Mrs. Hauksbee’s revenge. It was so brilliant and overwhelming that she had to cry in Mrs. Mallowe’s arms for the better part of half an hour; and Mrs. Mallowe was just as bad, though she thanked Mrs. Hauksbee several times in the course of the interview, and Mrs. Hauksbee said that she would repent and reform, and Mrs. Mallowe said: “Hush, dear, hushl I don’t think either of us had anything to be proud of.” And Mrs. Hauksbee said: “Oh, but I didn’t mean it, Polly, I didn’t mean itl” And I stood with my hat in my hand trying to make two very indignant ladies imderstand that the bearer really had given me “salaam bolta.”

That was an evil quarter minute.

The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes

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Alive or dead—there is no other way.
—Native Proverb.

THERE is, as the conjurers say, no deception about this tale. Jukes by accident stumbled upon a village that is well known to exist, though he is the only Englishman who has been there. A somewhat similar institution used to flourish on the outskirts of Calcutta, and there is a story that if you go into the heart of Bikanir, which is in the heart of the Great Indian Desert, you shall come across not a village but a town where the Dead who did not die but may not live have established their headquarters. And, since it is perfectly true that in the same Desert is a wonderful city where all the rich money lenders retreat after they have made their fortunes (fortunes so vast that the owners cannot trust even the strong hand of the Government to protect them, but take refuge in the waterless sands), and drive sumptuous C-spring barouches, and buy beautiful girls and decorate their palaces with gold and ivory and Minton tiles and mother-n’-pearl, I do not see why Jukes’s tale should not be true. He is a Civil Engineer, with a head for plans and distances and things of that kind, and he certainly would not take the trouble to invent imaginary traps. He could earn more by doing his legitimate work. He never varies the tale in the telling, and grows very hot and indignant when he thinks of the disrespectful treatment he received. He wrote this quite straightforwardly at first, but he has since touched it up in places and introduced Moral Reflections, thus:—

In the beginning it all arose from a slight attack of fever. My work necessitated my being in camp for some months between Pakpattan and Muharakpur—a desolate sandy stretch of country as every one who has had the misfortune to go there may know. My coolies were neither more nor less exasperating than other gangs, and my work demanded sufficient attention to keep me from moping, had I been inclined to so unmanly a weakness.

On the 23d December, 1884, I felt a little feverish. There was a full moon at the time, and, in consequence, every dog near my tent was baying it. The brutes assembled in twos and threes and drove me frantic. A few days previously I had shot one loud-mouthed singer and suspended his carcass in terrorem about fifty yards from my tent-door. But his friends fell upon, fought for, and ultimately devoured the body; and, as it seemed to me, sang their hymns of thanksgiving afterward with renewed energy.

The light-heartedness which accompanies fever acts differently on different men. My irritation gave way, after a short time, to a fixed determination to slaughter one huge black and white beast who had been foremost in song and first in flight throughout the evening. Thanks to a shaking hand and a giddy head I had already missed him twice with both barrels of my shot-gun, when it struck me that my best plan would be to ride him down in the open and finish him off with a hog-spear. This, of course, was merely the semi-delirious notion of a fever patient; but I remember that it struck me at the time as being eminently practical and feasible.

I therefore ordered my groom to saddle Pornic and bring him round quietly to the rear of my tent. When the pony was ready, I stood at his head prepared to mount and dash out as soon as the dog should again lift up his voice. Pornic, by the way, had not been out of his pickets for a couple of days; the night air was crisp and chilly; and I was armed with a specially long and sharp pair of persuaders with which I had been rousing a sluggish cob that afternoon. You will easily believe, then, that when he was let go he went quickly. In one moment, for the brute bolted as straight as a die, the tent was left far behind, and we were flying over the smooth sandy soil at racing speed. In another we had passed the wretched dog, and I had almost forgotten why it was that I had taken the horse and hog-spear.

The delirium of fever and the excitement of rapid motion through the air must have taken away the remnant of my senses. I have a faint recollection of standing upright in my stirrups, and of brandishing my hog-spear at the great white Moon that looked down so calmly on my mad gallop; and of shout-log challenges to the camel-thorn bushes as they whizzed past. Once or twice I believe, I swayed forward on Pornic’s neck, and literally hung on by my spurs—as the marks next morning showed.

The wretched beast went forward like a thing possessed, over what seemed to be a limitless expanse of moonlit sand. Next, I remember, the ground rose suddenly in front of us, and as we topped the ascent I saw the waters of the Sutlej shining like a silver bar below. Then Pornic blundered heavily on his nose, and we rolled together down some unseen slope.

I must have lost consciousness, for when I recovered I was lying on my stomach in a heap of soft white sand, and the dawn was beginning to break dimly over the edge of the slope down which I had fallen. As the light grew stronger I saw that I was at the bottom of a horse-shoe shaped crater of sand, opening on one side directly on to the shoals of the Sutlej. My fever had altogether left me, and, with the exception of a slight dizziness in the head, I felt no bad effects from the fall over night.

Pornic, who was standing a few yards away, was naturally a good deal exhausted, but had not hurt himself in the least. His saddle, a favorite polo one was much knocked about, and had been twisted under his belly. It took me some time to put him to rights, and in the meantime I had ample opportunities of observing the spot into which I had so foolishly dropped.

At the risk of being considered tedious, I must describe it at length: inasmuch as an accurate mental picture of its peculiarities will be of material assistance in enabling the reader to understand what follows.

Imagine then, as I have said before, a horseshoe-shaped crater of sand with steeply graded sand walls about thirty-five feet high. (The slope, I fancy, must have been about 65°.) This crater enclosed a level piece of ground about fifty yards long by thirty at its broadest part, with a crude well in the centre. Round the bottom of the crater, about three feet from the level of the ground proper, ran a series of eighty-three semi-circular ovoid, square, and multilateral holes, all about three feet at the mouth. Each hole on inspection showed that it was carefully shored internally with drift-wood and bamboos, and over the mouth a wooden drip-board projected, like the peak of a jockey’s cap, for two feet. No sign of life was visible in these tunnels, but a most sickening stench pervaded the entire amphitheatre—a stench fouler than any which my wanderings in Indian villages have introduced me to.

Having remounted Pornic, who was as anxious as I to get back to camp, I rode round the base of the horseshoe to find some place whence an exit would be practicable. The inhabitants, whoever they might be, had not thought fit to put in an appearance, so I was left to my own devices. My first attempt to “rush” Pornic up the steep sand-banks showed me that I had fallen into a trap exactly on the same model as that which the ant-lion sets for its prey. At each step the shifting sand poured down from above in tons, and rattled on the drip-boards of the holes like small shot. A couple of ineffectual charges sent us both rolling down to the bottom, half choked with the torrents of sand; and I was constrained to turn my attention to the river-bank.

Here everything seemed easy enough. The sand hills ran down to the river edge, it is true, but there were plenty of shoals and shallows across which I could gallop Pornic, and find my way back to terra firma by turning sharply to the right or left. As I led Pornic over the sands I was startled by the faint pop of a rifle across the river; and at the same moment a bullet dropped with a sharp “whit” close to Pornic’s head.

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There was no mistaking the nature of the missile—a regulation Martini-Henry “picket.” About five hundred yards away a country-boat was anchored in midstream; and a jet of smoke drifting away from its bows in the still morning air showed me whence the delicate attention had come. Was ever a respectable gentleman in such an impasse? The treacherous sand slope allowed no escape from a spot which I had visited most involuntarily, and a promenade on the river frontage was the signal for a bombardment from some insane native in a boat. I’m afraid that I lost my temper very much indeed.

Another bullet reminded me that I had better save my breath to cool my porridge; and I retreated hastily up the sands and back to the horseshoe, where I saw that the noise of the rifle had drawn sixty-five human beings from the badger-holes which I had up till that point supposed to be untenanted. I found myself in the midst of a crowd of spectators—about forty men, twenty women, and one child who could not have been more than five years old. They were all scantily clothed in that salmon-colored cloth which one associates with Hindu mendicants, and, at first sight, gave me the impression of a band of loathsome fakirs. The filth and repulsiveness of the assembly were beyond all description, and I shuddered to think what their life in the badger-holes must be.

Even in these days, when local self government has destroyed the greater part of a native’s respect for a Sahib, I have been accustomed to a certain amount of civility from my inferiors, and on approaching the crowd naturally expected that there would be some recognition of my presence. As a matter of fact there was; but it was by no means what I had looked for.

The ragged crew actually laughed at me—such laughter I hope I may never hear again. They cackled, yelled, whistled, and howled as I walked into their midst; some of them literally throwing themselves down on the ground in convulsions of unholy mirth. In a moment I had let go Pornic’s head, and irritated beyond expression at the morning’s adventure, commenced cuffing those nearest to me with all the force I could. The wretches dropped under my blows like nine-pins, and the laughter gave place to wails for mercy; while those yet untouched clasped me round the knees, imploring me in all sorts of uncouth tongues to spare them.

In the tumult, and just when I was feeling very much ashamed of myself for having thus easily given way to my temper, a thin, high voice murmured in English from behind my shoulder:—“Sahib! Sahib! Do you not know me? Sahib, it is Gunga Dass, the telegraph-master.”

I spun round quickly and faced the speaker.

Gunga Dass, (I have, of course, no hesitation in mentioning the man’s real name) I had known four years before as a Deccanee Brahmin loaned by the Pun-jab Government to one of the Khalsia States. He was in charge of a branch telegraph-office there, and when I had last met him was a jovial, full-stomached, portly Government servant with a marvellous capacity for making bad puns in English—a peculiarity which made me remember him long after I had forgotten his services to me in his official capacity. It is seldom that a Hindu makes English puns.

Now, however, the man was changed beyond all recognition. Caste-mark, stomach, slate-colored continuations, and unctuous speech were all gone. I looked at a withered skeleton, turban-less and almost naked, with long matted hair and deep-set codfish-eyes. But for a crescent-shaped scar on the left cheek—the result of an accident for which I was responsible—I should never have known him. But it was indubitably Gunga Dass, and—for this I was thank-full—an English-speaking native who might at least tell me the meaning of all that I had gone through that day.

The crowd retreated to some distance as I turned toward the miserable figure, and ordered him to show me some method of escaping from the crater. He held a freshly plucked crow in his hand, and in reply to my question climbed slowly on a platform of sand which ran in front of the holes, and commenced lighting a fire there in silence. Dried bents, sand-poppies, and driftwood burn quickly; and I derived much consolation from the fact that he lit them with an ordinary sulphur-match. When they were in a bright glow, and the crow was neatly spitted in front thereof, Gunga Dass began without a word of preamble:

“There are only two kinds of men, Sar—the alive and the dead. When you are dead you are dead, but when you are alive you live.” (Here the crow demanded his attention for an instant as it twirled before the fire in danger of being burned to a cinder.) “If you die at home and do not die when you come to the ghat to be burned you come here.”

The nature of the reeking village was made plain now, and all that I had known or read of the grotesque and the horrible paled before the fact just communicated by the ex-Brahmin. Sixteen years ago, when I first landed in Bombay, I had been told by a wandering Armenian of the existence, somewhere in India, of a place to which such Hindus as had the misfortune to recover from trance or catalepsy were conveyed and kept, and I recollect laughing heartily at what I was then pleased to consider a traveler’s tale.

Sitting at the bottom of the sand-trap, the memory of Watson’s Hotel, with its swinging punkahs, white-robed attendants, and the sallow-faced Armenian, rose up in my mind as vividly as a photograph, and I burst into a loud fit of laughter. The contrast was too absurd!

Gunga Dass, as he bent over the unclean bird, watched me curiously. Hindus seldom laugh, and his surroundings were not such as to move Gunga Dass to any undue excess of hilarity. He removed the crow solemnly from the wooden spit and as solemnly devoured it. Then he continued his story, which I give in his own words:—

“In epidemics of the cholera you are carried to be burned almost before you are dead. When you come to the riverside the cold air, perhaps, makes you alive, and then, if you are only little alive, mud is put on your nose and mouth and you die conclusively. If you are rather more alive, more mud is put; but if you are too lively they let you go and take you away. I was too lively, and made protestation with anger against the indignities that they endeavored to press upon me. In those days I was Brahmin and proud man. Now I am dead man and eat”—here he eyed the well-gnawed breast bone with the first sign of emotion that I had seen in him since we met—“crows, and other things. They took me from my sheets when they saw that I was too lively and gave me medicines for one week, and I survived successfully. Then they sent me by rail from my place to Okara Station, with a man to take care of me; and at Okara Station we met two other men, and they conducted we three on camels, in the night, from Okara Station to this place, and they propelled me from the top to the bottom, and the other two succeeded, and I have been here ever since two and a half years. Once I was Brahmin and proud man, and now I eat crows.”

“There is no way of getting out?”

“None of what kind at all. When I first came I made experiments frequently and all the others also, but we have always succumbed to the sand which is precipitated upon our heads.”

“But surely,” I broke in at this point, “the river-front is open, and it is worth while dodging the bullets; while at night——”

I had already matured a rough plan of escape which a natural instinct of selfishness forbade me sharing with Gunga Dass. He, however, divined my unspoken thought almost as soon as it was formed; and, to my intense astonishment, gave vent to a long low chuckle of derision—the laughter, be it understood, of a superior or at least of an equal.

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“You will not”—he had dropped the ‘Sir’ completely after his opening sentence—“make any escape that way. But you can try. I have tried. Once only.”

The sensation of nameless terror and abject fear which I had in vain attempted to strive against overmastered me completely. My long fast—it was now close upon ten o’clock, and I had eaten nothing since tiffin on the previous day—combined with the violent and unnatural agitation of the ride had exhausted me, and I verily believe that, for a few minutes, I acted as one mad. I hurled myself against the pitiless sand-slope I ran round the base of the crater, blaspheming and praying by turns. I crawled out among the sedges of the river-front, only to be driven back each time in an agony of nervous dread by the rifle-bullets which cut up the sand round me—for I dared not face the death of a mad dog among that hideous crowd—and finally fell, spent and raving, at the curb of the well. No one had taken the slightest notion of an exhibition which makes me blush hotly even when I think of it now.

Two or three men trod on my panting body as they drew water, but they were evidently used to this sort of thing, and had no time to waste upon me. The situation was humiliating. Gunga Dass, indeed, when he had banked the embers of his fire with sand, was at some pains to throw half a cupful of fetid water over my head, an attention for which I could have fallen on my knees and thanked him, but he was laughing all the while in the same mirthless, wheezy key that greeted me on my first attempt to force the shoals. And so, in a semi-comatose condition, I lay till noon.

Then, being only a man after all, I felt hungry, and intimated as much to Gunga Dass, whom I had begun to regard as my natural protector. Following the impulse of the outer world when dealing with natives, I put my hand into my pocket and drew out four annas. The absurdity of the gift struck me at once, and I was about to replace the money.

Gunga Dass, however, was of a different opinion. “Give me the money,” said he; “all you have, or I will get help, and we will kill you!” All this as if it were the most natural thing in the world!

A Briton’s first impulse, I believe, is to guard the contents of his pockets; but a moment’s reflection convinced me of the futility of differing with the one man who had it in his power to make me comfortable; and with whose help it was possible that I might eventually escape from the crater. I gave him all the money in my possession, Rs. 9-8-5—nine rupees eight annas and five pice—for I always keep small change as bakshish when I am in camp. Gunga Dass clutched the coins, and hid them at once in his ragged loin cloth, his expression changing to something diabolical as he looked round to assure himself that no one had observed us.

“Now I will give you something to eat,” said he.

What pleasure the possession of my money could have afforded him I am unable to say; but inasmuch as it did give him evident delight I was not sorry that I had parted with it so readily, for I had no doubt that he would have had me killed if I had refused. One does not protest against the vagaries of a den of wild beasts; and my companions were lower than any beasts. While I devoured what Gunga Dass had provided, a coarse chapatti and a cupful of the foul well-water, the people showed not the faintest sign of curiosity—that curiosity which is so rampant, as a rule, in an Indian village.

I could even fancy that they despised me. At all events they treated me with the most chilling indifference, and Gunga Dass was nearly as bad. I plied him with questions about the terrible village, and received extremely unsatisfactory answers. So far as I could gather, it had been in existence from time immemorial—whence I concluded that it was at least a century old—and during that time no one had ever been known to escape from it. (I had to control myself here with both hands, lest the blind terror should lay hold of me a second time and drive me raving round the crater.) Gunga Dass took a malicious pleasure in emphasizing this point and in watching me wince. Nothing that I could do would induce him to tell me who the mysterious “They” were.

“It is so ordered,” he would reply, “and I do not yet know any one who has disobeyed the orders.”

“Only wait till my servants find that I am missing,” I retorted, “and I promise you that this place shall be cleared off the face of the earth, and I’ll give you a lesson in civility, too, my friend.”

“Your servants would be torn in pieces before they came near this place; and, besides, you are dead, my dear friend. It is not your fault, of course, but none the less you are dead and buried.”

At irregular intervals supplies of food, I was told, were dropped down from the land side into the amphitheatre, and the inhabitants fought for them like wild beasts. When a man felt his death coming on he retreated to his lair and died there. The body was sometimes dragged out of the hole and thrown on to the sand, or allowed to rot where it lay

The phrase “thrown on to the sand” caught my attention, and I asked Gunga Dass whether this sort of thing was not likely to breed a pestilence.

“That.” said he. with another of his wheezy chuckles, “you may see for yourself subsequently. You will have much time to make observations.”

Whereat, to his great delight, I winced once more and hastily continued the conversation:—“And how do you live here from day to day? What do you do?” The question elicited exactly the same answer as before—coupled with the information that “this place is like your European heaven; there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.”

Gunga Dass had been educated at a Mission School, and, as he himself admitted, had he only changed his religion “like a wise man,” might have avoided the living grave which was now his portion. But as long as I was with him I fancy he was happy.

Here was a Sahib, a representative of the dominant race, helpless as a child and completely at the mercy of his native neighbors. In a deliberate lazy way he set himself to torture me as a schoolboy would devote a rapturous half-hour to watching the agonies of an impaled beetle, or as a ferret in a blind burrow might glue himself comfortably to the neck of a rabbit. The burden of his conversation was that there was no escape “of no kind whatever,” and that I should stay here till I died and was “thrown on to the sand.” If it were possible to forejudge the conversation of the Damned on the advent of a new soul in their abode, I should say that they would speak as Gunga Dass did to me throughout that long afternoon. I was powerless to protest or answer; all my energies being devoted to a struggle against the inexplicable terror that threatened to overwhelm me again and again. I can compare the feeling to nothing except the struggles of a man against the overpowering nausea of the Channel passage—only my agony was of the spirit and infinitely more terrible.

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As the day wore on, the inhabitants began to appear in full strength to catch the rays of the afternoon sun, which were now sloping in at the mouth of the crater. They assembled in little knots, and talked among themselves without even throwing a glance in my direction. About four o’clock, as far as I could judge Gunga Dass rose and dived into his lair for a moment, emerging with a live crow in his hands. The wretched bird was in a most draggled and deplorable condition, but seemed to be in no way afraid of its master, Advancing cautiously to the river front, Gunga Dass stepped from tussock to tussock until he had reached a smooth patch of sand directly in the line of the boat’s fire. The occupants of the boat took no notice. Here he stopped, and, with a couple of dexterous turns of the wrist, pegged the bird on its back with outstretched wings. As was only natural, the crow began to shriek at once and beat the air with its claws. In a few seconds the clamor had attracted the attention of a bevy of wild crows on a shoal a few hundred yards away, where they were discussing something that looked like a corpse. Half a dozen crows flew over at once to see what was going on, and also, as it proved, to attack the pinioned bird. Gunga Dass, who had lain down on a tussock, motioned to me to be quiet, though I fancy this was needless precaution. In a moment, and before I could see how it happened, a wild crow, who had grappled with the shrieking and helpless bird, was entangled in the latter’s claws, swiftly disengaged by Gunga Dass, and pegged down beside its companion in adversity. Curiosity, it seemed, overpowered the rest of the flock, and almost before Gunga Dass and I had time to withdraw to the tussock, two more captives were struggling in the upturned claws of the decoys. So the chase—if I can give it so dignified a name—continued until Gunga Dass had captured seven crows. Five of them he throttled at once, reserving two for further operations another day. I was a good deal impressed by this, to me, novel method of securing food, and complimented Gunga Dass on his skill.

“It is nothing to do,” said he. “Tomorrow you must do it for me. You are stronger than I am.”

This calm assumption of superiority upset me not a little, and I answered peremptorily;—“Indeed, you old ruffian! What do you think I have given you money for?”

“Very well,” was the unmoved reply. “Perhaps not to-morrow, nor the day after, nor subsequently; but in the end, and for many years, you will catch crows and eat crows, and you will thank your European God that you have crows to catch and eat.”

I could have cheerfully strangled him for this; but judged it best under the circumstances to smother my resentment. An hour later I was eating one of the crows; and, as Gunga Dass had said, thanking my God that I had a crow to eat. Never as long as I live shall I forget that evening meal. The whole population were squatting on the hard sand platform opposite their dens, huddled over tiny fires of refuse and dried rushes. Death, having once laid his hand upon these men and forborne to strike, seemed to stand aloof from them now; for most of our company were old men, bent and worn and twisted with years, and women aged to all appearance as the Fates themselves. They sat together in knots and talked—God only knows what they found to discuss—in low equable tones, curiously in contrast to the strident babble with which natives are accustomed to make day hideous. Now and then an access of that sudden fury which had possessed me in the morning would lay hold on a man or woman; and with yells and imprecations the sufferer would attack the steep slope until, baffled and bleeding, he fell back on the platform incapable of moving a limb. The others would never even raise their eyes when this happened, as men too well aware of the futility of their fellows’ attempts and wearied with their useless repetition. I saw four such outbursts in the course of the evening.

Gunga Dass took an eminently business-like view of my situation, and while we were dining—I can afford to laugh at the recollection now, but it was painful enough at the time—propounded the terms on which he would consent to “do” for me. My nine rupees eight annas, he argued, at the rate of three annas a day, would provide me with food for fifty-one days, or about seven weeks; that is to say, he would be willing to cater for me for that length of time. At the end of it I was to look after myself. For a further consideration—videlicet my boots—he would be willing to allow me to occupy the den next to his own, and would supply me with as much dried grass for bedding as he could spare.

“Very well, Gunga Dass,” I replied; “to the first terms I cheerfully agree, but, as there is nothing on earth to prevent my killing you as you sit here and taking everything that you have” (I thought of the two invaluable crows at the time), “I flatly refuse to give you my boots and shall take whichever den I please.”

The stroke was a bold one, and I was glad when I saw that it had succeeded. Gunga Dass changed his tone immediately, and disavowed all intention of asking for my boots. At the time it did not strike me as at all strange that I, a Civil Engineer, a man of thirteen years’ standing in the Service, and, I trust, an average Englishman, should thus calmly threaten murder and violence against the man who had, for a consideration it is true, taken me under his wing. I had left the world, it seemed, for centuries. I was as certain then as I am now of my own existence, that in the accursed settlement there was no law save that of the strongest; that the living dead men had thrown behind them every canon of the world which had cast them out; and that I had to depend for my own life on my strength and vigilance alone. The crew of the ill-fated Mignonette are the only men who would understand my frame of mind. “At present,” I argued to myself, “I am strong and a match for six of these wretches. It is imperatively necessary that I should, for my own sake, keep both health and strength until the hour of my release comes—if it ever does.”

Fortified with these resolutions, I ate and drank as much as I could, and made Gunga Dass understand that I intended to be his master, and that the least sign of insubordination on his part would be visited with the only punishment I had it in my power to inflict—sudden and violent death. Shortly after this I went to bed. That is to say, Gunga Dass gave me a double armful of dried bents which I thrust down the mouth of the lair to the right of his, and followed myself, feet foremost; the hole running about nine feet into the sand with a slight downward inclination, and being neatly shored with timbers. From my den, which faced the river-front, I was able to watch the waters of the Sutlej flowing past under the light of a young moon and compose myself to sleep as best I might.

The horrors of that night I shall never forget. My den was nearly as narrow as a coffin, and the sides had been worn smooth and greasy by the contact of innumerable naked bodies, added to which it smelled abominably. Sleep was altogether out of question to one in my excited frame of mind. As the night wore on, it seemed that the entire amphitheatre was filled with legions of unclean devils that, trooping up from the shoals below, mocked the unfortunates in their lairs.

Personally I am not of an imaginative temperament,—very few Engineers are,—but on that occasion I was as completely prostrated with nervous terror as any woman. After half an hour or so, however, I was able once more to calmly review my chances of escape. Any exit by the steep sand walls was, of course, impracticable. I had been thoroughly convinced of this some time before. It was possible, just possible, that I might, in the uncertain moonlight, safely run the gauntlet of the rifle shots. The place was so full of terror for me that I was prepared to undergo any risk in leaving it. Imagine my delight, then, when after creeping stealthily to the river-front I found that the infernal boat was not there. My freedom lay before me in the next few steps!

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By walking out to the first shallow pool that lay at the foot of the projecting left horn of the horseshoe, I could wade across, turn the flank of the crater, and make my way inland. Without a moment’s hesitation I marched briskly past the tussocks where Gunga Dass had snared the crows, and out in the direction of the smooth white sand beyond. My first step from the tufts of dried grass showed me how utterly futile was any hope of escape; for, as I put my foot down, I felt an indescribable drawing, sucking motion of the sand below. Another moment and my leg was swallowed up nearly to the knee. In the moonlight the whole surface of the sand seemed to be shaken with devilish delight at my disappointment. I struggled clear, sweating with terror and exertion, back to the tussocks behind me and fell on my face.

My only means of escape from the semicircle was protected with a quicksand!

How long I lay I have not the faintest idea; but I was roused at last by the malevolent chuckle of Gunga Dass at my ear “I would advise you, Protector of the Poor” (the ruffian was speaking English) “to return to your house. It is unhealthy to lie down here. Moreover, when the boat returns, you will most certainly be rifled at.” He stood over me in the dim light of the dawn, chuckling and laughing to himself. Suppressing my first impulse to catch the man by the neck and throw him on to the quicksand, I rose sullenly and followed him to the platform below the burrows.

Suddenly, and futilley as I thought while I spoke, I asked—“Gunga Dass, what is the good of the boat if I can’t get out anyhow?” I recollect that even in my deepest trouble I had been speculating vaguely on the waste of ammunition in guarding an already well protected foreshore.

Gunga Dass laughed again and made answer:—“They have the boat only in daytime. It is for the reason that there is a way. I hope we shall have the pleasure of your company for much longer time. It is a pleasant spot when you have been here some years and eaten roast crow long enough.”

I staggered, numbed and helpless, toward the fetid burrow allotted to me, and fell asleep. An hour or so later I was awakened by a piercing scream—the shrill, high-pitched scream of a horse in pain. Those who have once heard that will never forget the sound. I found some little difficulty in scrambling out of the burrow. When I was in the open, I saw Pornic, my poor old Pornic, lying dead on the sandy soil. How they had killed him I cannot guess. Gunga Dass explained that horse was better than crow, and “greatest good of greatest number is political maxim. We are now Republic, Mister Jukes, and you are entitled to a fair share of the beast. If you like, we will pass a vote of thanks. Shall I propose?”

Yes, we were a Republic indeed! A Republic of wild beasts penned at the bottom of a pit, to eat and fight and sleep till we died. I attempted no protest of any kind, but sat down and stared at the hideous sight in front of me. In less time almost than it takes me to write this, Pornic’s body was divided, in some unclear way or other; the men and women had dragged the fragments on to the platform and were preparing their normal meal. Gunga Dass cooked mine. The almost irresistible impulse to fly at the sand walls until I was wearied laid hold of me afresh, and I had to struggle against it with all my might. Gunga Dass was offensively jocular till I told him that if he addressed another remark of any kind whatever to me I should strangle him where he sat. This silenced him till silence became insupportable, and I bade him say something.

“You will live here till you die like the other Feringhi,” he said, coolly, watching me over the fragment of gristle that he was gnawing.

“What other Sahib, you swine? Speak at once, and don’t stop to tell me a lie.”

“He is over there,” answered Gunga Dass, pointing to a burrow-mouth about four doors to the left of my own. “You can see for yourself. He died in the burrow as you will die, and I will die, and as all these men and women and the one child will also die.”

“For pity’s sake tell me all you know about him. Who was he? When did he come, and when did he die?”

This appeal was a weak step on my part. Gunga Dass only leered and replied:—“I will not—unless you give me something first.”

Then I recollected where I was, and struck the man between the eyes, partially stunning him. He stepped down from the platform at once, and, cringing and fawning and weeping and attempting to embrace my feet, led me round to the burrow which he had indicated.

“I know nothing whatever about the gentleman. Your God be my witness that I do not. He was as anxious to escape as you were, and he was shot from the boat, though we all did all things to prevent him from attempting. He was shot here.” Gunga Dass laid his hand on his lean stomach and bowed to the earth.

“Well, and what then? Go on!”

“And then—and then, Your Honor, we carried him in to his house and gave him water, and put wet cloths on the wound, and he laid down in his house and gave up the ghost.”

“In how long? In how long?”

“About half an hour, after he received his wound. I call Vishnu to witness,” yelled the wretched man, “that I did everything for him. Everything which was possible, that I did!”

He threw himself down on the ground and clasped my ankles. But I had my doubts about Gunga Dass’s benevolence, and kicked him off as he lay protesting.

“I believe you robbed him of everything he had. But I can find out in a minute or two. How long was the Sahib here?”

“Nearly a year and a half. I think he must have gone mad. But hear me swear Protector of the Poor! Won’t Your Honor hear me swear that I never touched an article that belonged to him? What is Your Worship going to do?”

I had taken Gunga Dass by the waist and had hauled him on to the platform opposite the deserted burrow. As I did so I thought of my wretched fellow-prisoner’s unspeakable misery among all these horrors for eighteen months, and the final agony of dying like a rat in a hole, with a bullet-wound in the stomach. Gunga Dass fancied I was going to kill him and howled pitifully. The rest of the population, in the plethora that follows a full flesh meal, watched us without stirring.

“Go inside, Gunga Dass,” said I, “and fetch it out.”

I was feeling sick and faint with horror now. Gunga Dass nearly rolled off the platform and howled aloud.

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“But I am Brahmin, Sahib—a high-caste Brahmin. By your soul, by your father’s soul, do not make me do this thing!”

“Brahmin or no Brahmin, by my soul and my father’s soul, in you go!” I said, and, seizing him by the shoulders, I crammed his head into the mouth of the burrow, kicked the rest of him in, and, sitting down, covered my face with my hands.

At the end of a few minutes I heard a rustle and a creak; then Gunga Dass in a sobbing, choking whisper speaking to himself; then a soft thud—and I uncovered my eyes.

The dry sand had turned the corpse entrusted to its keeping into a yellow-brown mummy. I told Gunga Dass to stand off while I examined it. The body—clad in an olive-green hunting-suit much stained and worn, with leather pads on the shoulders—was that of a man between thirty and forty, above middle height, with light, sandy hair, long mustache, and a rough unkempt beard. The left canine of the upper jaw was missing, and a portion of the lobe of the right ear was gone. On the second finger of the left hand was a ring—a shield-shaped bloodstone set in gold, with a monogram that might have been either “B.K.” or “B.L.” On the third finger of the right hand was a silver ring in the shape of a coiled cobra, much worn and tarnished. Gunga Dass deposited a handful of trifles he had picked out of the burrow at my feet, and, covering the face of the body with my handkerchief, I turned to examine these. I give the full list in the hope that it may lead to the identification of the unfortunate man:—

1. Bowl of a briarwood pipe, serrated at the edge; much worn and blackened; bound with string at the crew.

2. Two patent-lever keys; wards of both broken.

3. Tortoise-shell-handled penknife, silver or nickel. name-plate, marked with monogram “B.K.”

4. Envelope, postmark undecipherable, bearing a Victorian stamp, addressed to “Miss Mon—” (rest illegible)—“ham”—“nt.”

5. Imitation crocodile-skin notebook with pencil. First forty-five pages blank; four and a half illegible; fifteen others filled with private memoranda relating chiefly to three persons—a Mrs.L. Singleton, abbreviated several times to “Lot Single,” “Mrs. S. May,” and “Garmison,” referred to in places as “Jerry” or “Jack.”

6.Handle of small-sized hunting-knife. Blade snapped short. Buck’s horn, diamond cut, with swivel and ring on the butt; fragment of cotton cord attached.

It must not be supposed that I inventoried all these things on the spot as fully as I have here written them down. The notebook first attracted my attention, and I put it in my pocket with a view of studying it later on. The rest of the articles I conveyed to my burrow for safety’s sake, and there being a methodical man, I inventoried them. I then returned to the corpse and ordered Gunga Dass to help me to carry it out to the river-front. While we were engaged in this, the exploded shell of an old brown cartridge dropped out of one of the pockets and rolled at my feet. Gunga Dass had not seen it; and I fell to thinking that a man does not carry exploded cartridge-cases, especially “browns,” which will not bear loading twice, about with him when shooting. In other words, that cartridge-case had been fired inside the crater. Consequently there must be a gun somewhere. I was on the verge of asking Gunga Dass, but checked myself, knowing that he would lie. We laid the body down on the edge of the quicksand by the tussocks. It was my intention to push it out and let it be swallowed up—the only possible mode of burial that I could think of. I ordered Gunga Dass to go away.

Then I gingerly put the corpse out on the quicksand. In doing so—it was lying face downward—I tore the frail and rotten khaki shooting-coat open, disclosing a hideous cavity in the back. I have already told you that the dry sand had, as it were, mummified the body. A moment’s glance showed that the gaping hole had been caused by a gun-shot wound; the gun must have been fired with the muzzle almost touching the back. The shooting-coat, being intact, had been drawn over the body after death, which must have been instantaneous. The secret of the poor wretch’s death was plain to me in a flash. Some one of the crater, presumably Gunga Dass, must have shot him with his own gun—the gun that fitted the brown cartridges. He had never attempted to escape in the face of the rifle-fire from the boat.

I pushed the corpse out hastily, and saw it sink from sight literally in a few seconds. I shuddered as I watched. In a dazed, half-conscious way I turned to peruse the notebook. A stained and discolored slip of paper had been inserted between the binding and the back, and dropped out as I opened the pages. This is what it contained:—“Four out from crow-clump: three left; nine out; two right; three back; two left; fourteen out; two left; seven out; one left; nine back; two right; six back; four right; seven back.” The paper had been burned and charred at the edges. What it meant I could not understand. I sat down on the dried bents turning it over and over between my fingers, until I was aware of Gunga Dass standing immediately behind me with glowing eyes and outstretched hands.

“Have you got it?” he panted. “Will you not let me look at it also? I swear that I will return it.”

“Got what? Return what?” I asked.

“That which you have in your hands. It will help us both.” He stretched out his long, bird-like talons, trembling with eagerness.

“I could never find it,” he continued. “He had secreted it about his person. Therefore I shot him, but nevertheless I was unable to obtain it.”

Gunga Dass had quite forgotten his little fiction about the rifle-bullet. I received the information perfectly calmly. Morality is blunted by consorting with the Dead who are alive.

“What on earth are you raving about? What is it you want me to give you?”

“The piece of paper in the notebook. It will help us both. Oh, you fool! You fool! Can you not see what it will do for us? We shall escape!”

His voice rose almost to a scream, and he danced with excitement before me. I own I was moved at the chance of my getting away.

“Don’t skip! Explain yourself. Do you mean to say that this slip of paper will help us? What does it mean?”

“Read it aloud! Read it aloud! I beg and I pray you to read it aloud.”

I did so. Gunga Dass listened delightedly, and drew an irregular line in the sand with his fingers.

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“See now! It was the length of his gun-barrels without the stock. I have those barrels. Four gun-barrels out from the place where I caught crows Straight out; do you follow me? Then three left-Ah! how well I remember when that man worked it out night after night Then nine out, and so on. Out is always straight before you across the quicksand. He told me so before I killed him.”

“But if you knew all this why didn’t you get out before?”

“I did not know it. He told me that he was working it out a year and a half ago, and how he was working it out night after night when the boat had gone away, and he could get out near the quicksand safely. Then he said that we would get away together. But I was afraid that he would leave me behind one night when he had worked it all out, and so I shot him. Besides, it is not advisable that the men who once get in here should escape. Only I, and I am a Brahmin.”

The prospect of escape had brought Gunga Dass’s caste back to him. He stood up, walked about and gesticulated violently. Eventually I managed to make him talk soberly, and he told me how this Englishman had spent six months night after night in exploring, inch by inch, the passage across the quicksand; how he had declared it to be simplicity itself up to within about twenty yards of the river bank after turning the flank of the left horn of the horseshoe. This much he had evidently not completed when Gunga Dass shot him with his own gun.

In my frenzy of delight at the possibilities of escape I recollect shaking hands effusively with Gunga Dass, after we had decided that we were to make an attempt to get away that very night. It was weary work waiting throughout the afternoon.

About ten o’clock, as far as I could judge, when the Moon had just risen above the lip of the crater, Gunga Dass made a move for his burrow to bring out the gun-barrels whereby to measure our path. All the other wretched inhabitants had retired to their lairs long ago. The guardian boat drifted downstream some hours before, and we were utterly alone by the crow-clump. Gunga Dass, while carrying the gun-barrels, let slip the piece of paper which was to be our guide. I stooped down hastily to recover it, and, as I did so, I was aware that the diabolical Brahmin was aiming a violent blow at the back of my head with the gun-barrels. It was too late to turn round. I must have received the blow somewhere on the nape of my neck. A hundred thousand fiery stars danced before my eyes, and I fell forwards senseless at the edge of the quicksand.

When I recovered consciousness, the Moon was going down, and I was sensible of intolerable pain in the back of my head. Gunga Dass had disappeared and my mouth was full of blood. I lay down again and prayed that I might die without more ado. Then the unreasoning fury which I had before mentioned, laid hold upon me, and I staggered inland toward the walls of the crater. It seemed that some one was calling to me in a whisper—“Sahib! Sahib! Sahib!” exactly as my bearer used to call me in the morning I fancied that I was delirious until a handful of sand fell at my feet. Then I looked up and saw a head peering down into the amphitheatre—the head of Dunnoo, my dog-boy, who attended to my collies. As soon as he had attracted my attention, he held up his hand and showed a rope. I motioned. staggering to and fro for the while, that he should throw it down. It was a couple of leather punkah-ropes knotted together, with a loop at one end. I slipped the loop over my head and under my arms; heard Dunnoo urge something forward; was conscious that I was being dragged, face downward, up the steep sand slope, and the next instant found myself choked and half fainting on the sand hills overlooking the crater. Dunnoo, with his face ashy grey in the moonlight, implored me not to stay but to get back to my tent at once.

It seems that he had tracked Pornic’s footprints fourteen miles across the sands to the crater; had returned and told my servants, who flatly refused to meddle with any one, white or black, once fallen into the hideous Village of the Dead; whereupon Dunnoo had taken one of my ponies and a couple of punkah-ropes, returned to the crater, and hauled me out as I have described.

To cut a long story short, Dunnoo is now my personal servant on a gold mohur a month—a sum which I still think far too little for the services he has rendered. Nothing on earth will induce me to go near that devilish spot again, or to reveal its whereabouts more clearly than I have done. Of Gunga Dass I have never found a trace, nor do I wish to do. My sole motive in giving this to be published is the hope that some one may possibly identify, from the details and the inventory which I have given above, the corpse of the man in the olive-green hunting-suit.

The Story of Muhammad Din

[a short tale]

Who is the happy man? He that sees in his own house at home, little children crowned with dust, leaping and falling and crying. (Munichandra – translated by Professor Peterson)

THE polo-ball was an old one, scarred, chipped, and dinted. It stood on the mantelpiece among the pipe-stems which Imam Din, khitmatgar, was cleaning for me.

‘Does the Heaven-born want this ball?’ said Imam Din deferentially.

The Heaven-born set no particular store by it; but of what use was a polo-ball to a khitmatgar ?

‘By Your Honour’s favour, I have a little son. He has seen this ball, and desires it to play with. I do not want it for myself.’

No one would for an instant accuse portly old Imam Din of wanting to play with polo-balls. He carried out the battered thing into the verandah; and there followed a hurricane of joyful squeaks, a patter of small feet, and the thud-thud-thud of the ball rolling along the ground. Evidently the little son had been waiting outside the door to secure his treasure. But how had he managed to see that polo-ball ?

Next day, coming back from office half an hour earlier than usual, I was aware of a small figure in the dining-room, a tiny, plump figure in a ridiculously inadequate shirt which came, perhaps, halfway down the tubby stomach. It wandered round the room, thumb in mouth, crooning to itself as it took stock of the pictures. Undoubtedly this was the ‘little son’.

He had no business in my room, of course; but was so deeply absorbed in his discoveries that he never noticed me in the doorway. I stepped into the room and startled him nearly into a fit. He sat down on the ground with a gasp. His eyes opened, and his mouth followed suit. I knew what was coming, and fled, followed by a long, dry howl which reached the servants’ quarters far more quickly than any command of mine had ever done. In ten seconds Imam Din was in the dining-room. Then despairing sobs arose, and I returned to find Imam Din admonishing the small sinner who was using most of his shirt as a handkerchief.

‘This boy,’ said Imam Din judicially, ‘is a budmash—a big budmash. He will, without doubt, go to the jail-khana for his behaviour.’ Renewed yells from the penitent, and an elaborate apology to myself from Imam Din.

‘Tell the baby,’ said I, ‘that the Sahib is not angry, and take him away.’ Imam Din conveyed my forgiveness to the offender, who had now gathered all his shirt round his neck, stringwise, and the yell subsided into a sob. The two set off for the door. ‘His name,’ said Imam Din, as though the name were part of the crime, ‘is Muhammad Din, and he is a budmash.’ Freed from present danger, Muhammad Din turned round in his father’s arms, and said gravely, ‘It is true that my name is Muhammad Din, Tahib, but I am not a budmash. I am a man!’

From that day dated my acquaintance with Muhammad Din. Never again did he come into my dining-room, but on the neutral ground of the garden we greeted each other with much state, though our conversation was confined to ‘Talaam, Tahib’ from his side, and ‘Salaam, Muhammad Din’ from mine. Daily on my return from office, the little white shirt and the fat little body used to rise from the shade of the creeper-covered trellis where they had been hid; and daily I checked my horse here, that my salutation might not be slurred over or given unseemly.

Muhammad Din never had any companions. He used to trot about the compound, in and out of the castor-oil bushes, on mysterious errands of his own. One day I stumbled upon some of his handiwork far down the grounds. He had half buried the polo-ball in dust, and stuck six shrivelled old marigold flowers in a circle round it. Outside that circle again was a rude square, traced out in bits of red brick alternating with fragments of broken china; the whole bounded by a little bank of dust. The water-man from the well-curb put in a plea for the small architect, saying that it was only the play of a baby and did not much disfigure my garden.

Heaven knows that I had no intention of touching the child’s work then or later; but, that evening, a stroll through the garden brought me unawares full on it; so that I trampled, before I knew, marigold-heads, dust-bank, and fragments of broken soap-dish into confusion past all hope of mending. Next morning, I came upon Muhammad Din crying softly to himself over the ruin I had wrought. Some one had cruelly told him that the Sahib was very angry with him for spoiling the garden, and had scattered his rubbish, using bad language the while. Muhammad Din laboured for an hour at effacing every trace of the dustbank and pottery fragments, and it was with a tearful and apologetic face that he said, ‘Talaam Tahib,’ when I came home from office. A hasty inquiry resulted in Imam Din informing Muhammad Din that, by my singular favour, he was permitted to disport himself as he pleased. Whereat the child took heart and fell to tracing the ground-plan of an edifice which was to eclipse the marigold-poloball creation.

For some months the chubby little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, I fancy, from my fowls—always alone, and always crooning to himself.

A gaily-spotted sea-shell was dropped one day close to the last of his little buildings; and I looked that Muhammad Din should build something more than ordinarily splendid on the strength of it. Nor was I disappointed. He meditated for the better part of an hour, and his crooning rose to a jubilant song. Then he began tracing in the dust. It would certainly be a wondrous palace, this one, for it was two yards long and a yard broad in ground-plan. But the palace was never completed.

Next day there was no Muhammad Din at the head of the carriage-drive, and no ‘Talaam, Tahib’ to welcome my return. I had grown accustomed to the greeting, and its omission troubled me. Next day Imam Din told me that the child was suffering slightly from fever and needed quinine. He got the medicine, and an English Doctor.

‘They have no stamina, these brats,’ said the Doctor, as he left Imam Din’s quarters.

A week later, though I would have given much to have avoided it, I met on the road to the Mussulman burying-ground Imam Din, accompanied by one other friend, carrying in his arms, wrapped in a white cloth, all that was left of little Muhammad Din.

Steam Tactics

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I CAUGHT sight of their faces as we came up behind the cart in the narrow Sussex lane; but though it was not eleven o’clock, they were both asleep.That the carrier was on the wrong side of the road made no difference to his language when I rang my bell. He said aloud of motor-cars, and specially of steam ones, all the things which I had read in the faces of superior coachmen. Then he pulled slantwise across me.

There was a vociferous steam air-pump attached to that car which could be applied at pleasure ….

The cart was removed about a bowshot’s length in seven and a quarter seconds, to the accompaniment of parcels clattering. At the foot of the next hill the horse stopped, and the two men came out over the tail-board.

My engineer backed and swung the car, ready to move out of reach.

‘The blighted egg-boiler has steam up,’ said Mr. Hinchcliffe, pausing to gather a large stone. ‘Temporise with the beggar, Pye, till the sights come on!’

‘I can’t leave my ’orse!’ roared the carrier; ‘but bring ’em up ’ere, an’ I’ll kill ’em all over again.’

‘Good morning, Mr. Pyecroft,’ I called cheerfully. ‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’

The attack broke up round my fore-wheels.

‘Well, we do ’ave the knack o’ meeting in puris naturalibus, as I’ve so often said.’ Mr. Pyecroft wrung my hand. ‘Yes, I’m on leaf. So’s Hinch. We’re visiting friends among these kopjes.’

A monotonous bellowing up the road persisted, where the carrier was still calling for corpses.

‘That’s Agg. He’s Hinch’s cousin. You aren’t fortunit in your family connections, Hinch. ’E’s usin’ language in derogation of good manners. Go and abolish ’im.’

Henry Salt Hinchcliffe stalked back to the cart and spoke to his cousin. I recall much that the wind bore to me of his words and the carrier’s. It seemed as if the friendship of years were dissolving amid throes.

‘’Ave it your own silly way, then,’ roared the carrier, ‘an’ get into Linghurst on your own silly feet. I’ve done with you two runagates.’ He lashed his horse and passed out of sight still rumbling.

‘The fleet’s sailed,’ said Pyecroft, ‘leavin’ us on the beach as before. Had you any particular port in your mind?’

‘Well, I was going to meet a friend at Instead Wick, but I don’t mind——’

‘Oh! that’ll do as well as anything! We’re on leaf, you see.’

‘She’ll hardly hold four,’ said my engineer. I had broken him of the foolish habit of being surprised at things, but he was visibly uneasy.

Hinchcliffe returned, drawn as by ropes to my steam-car, round which he walked in narrowing circles.

‘What’s her speed?’ he demanded of the engineer.

‘Twenty-five,’ said that loyal man.

‘Easy to run?’

‘No; very difficult,’ was the emphatic answer.

‘That just shows that you ain’t fit for your rating. D’you suppose that a man who earns his livin’ by runnin’ 30-knot destroyers for a parstime—for a parstime, mark you!—is going to lie down before any blighted land-crabbing steampinnace on springs?’

Yet that was what he did. Directly under the car he lay and looked upward into pipes—petrol, steam, and water—with a keen and searching eye.

I telegraphed Mr. Pyecroft a question.

‘Not—in—the—least,’ was the answer. ‘Steam gadgets always take him that way. We had a bit of a riot at Parsley Green through his tryin’ to show a traction-engine haulin’ gipsy-wagons how to turn corners.’

‘Tell him everything he wants to know,’ I said to the engineer, as I dragged out a rug and spread it on the roadside.

‘He don’t want much showing,’ said the engineer. Now, the two men had not, counting the time we took to stuff our pipes, been together more than three minutes.

‘This,’ said Pyecroft, driving an elbow back into the deep verdure of the hedge-foot, ‘is a little bit of all right. Hinch, I shouldn’t let too much o’ that hot muckings drop in my eyes. Your leaf’s up in a fortnight, an’ you’ll be wantin’ ’em.’

‘Here!’ said Hinchcliffe, still on his back, to the engineer. ‘Come here and show me the lead of this pipe.’ And the engineer lay down beside him.

‘That’s all right,’ said Mr. Hinchcliffe, rising. ‘But she’s more of a bag of tricks than I thought. Unship this superstructure aft’—he pointed to the back seat—‘and I’ll have a look at the forced draught.’

The engineer obeyed with alacrity. I heard him volunteer the fact that he had a brother an artificer in the Navy.

‘They couple very well, those two,’ said Pyecroft critically, while Hinchcliffe sniffed round the asbestos-lagged boiler and turned on gay jets of steam.

‘Now take me up the road,’ he said. My man, for form’s sake, looked at me.

‘Yes, take him,’ I said. ‘He’s all right.’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Hinchcliffe of a sudden—‘not if I’m expected to judge my water out of a little shaving-glass.’

The water-gauge of that steam-car was reflected on a mirror to the right of the dashboard. I also had found it inconvenient.

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‘Throw up your arm and look at the gauge under your armpit. Only mind how you steer while you’re doing it, or you’ll get ditched!’ I cried, as the car ran down the road.

‘I wonder!’ said Pyecroft, musing. ‘But, after all, it’s your steamin’ gadgets he’s usin for his libretto, as you might put it. He said to me after breakfast only this mornin’ ’ow he thanked his Maker, on all fours, that he wouldn’t see nor smell nor thumb a runnin’ bulgine till the nineteenth prox. Now look at him! Only look at ’im!’

We could see, down the long slope of the road, my driver surrendering his seat to Hinchcliffe, while the car flickered generously from hedge to hedge.

‘What happens if he upsets?’

‘The petrol will light up and the boiler may blow up.’

‘How rambunkshus! And’—Pyecroft blew a slow cloud—’Agg’s about three hoops up this mornin’, too.’

‘What’s that to do with us? He’s gone down the road,’ I retorted.

‘Ye—es, but we’ll overtake him. He’s a vindictive carrier. He and Hinch ’ad words about pig-breeding this morning. O’ course, Hinch don’t know the elements o’ that evolution; but he fell back on ’is naval rank an’ office, an’ Agg grew peevish. I wasn’t sorry to get out of the cart . . . . Have you ever considered how, when you an’ I meet, so to say, there’s nearly always a remarkably hectic day ahead of us! Hullo! Behold the beef-boat returnin’!’

He rose as the car climbed up the slope, and shouted: ‘In bow! Way ‘nuff!’

‘You be quiet!’ cried Hinchcliffe, and drew up opposite the rug, his dark face shining with joy. ‘She’s the Poetry o’ Motion! She’s the Angel’s Dream. She’s——’ He shut off steam, and the slope being against her, the car slid soberly downhill again.

‘What’s this? I’ve got the brake on!’ he yelled.

‘It doesn’t hold backwards,’ I said. ‘Put her on the mid-link.’

‘That’s a nasty one for the chief engineer o’ the Djinn, 31-knot T.B.D.,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Do you know what the mid-link is, Hinch?’

Once more the car returned to us; but as Pyecroft stooped to gather up the rug, Hinchcliffe jerked the lever testily, and with prawn-like speed she retired backwards into her own steam.

‘Apparently ’e don’t,’ said Pyecroft. ‘What’s he done now, Sir?’

‘Reversed her. I’ve done it myself.’

‘But he’s an engineer.’

For the third time the car manoeuvred up the hill.

‘I’ll teach you to come alongside properly, if I keep you tiffies out all night!’ shouted Pyecroft. It was evidently a quotation. Hinchcliffe’s face grew livid, and, his hand ever so slightly working on the throttle, the car buzzed twenty yards uphill.

‘That’s enough. We’ll take your word for it. The mountain will go to Ma’ommed. Stand fast!’

Pyecroft and I and the rug marched up where she and Hinchcliffe fumed together.

‘Not as easy as it looks—eh, Hinch?’

‘It is dead easy. I’m going to drive her to Instead Wick—aren’t I?’ said the first-class engineroom artificer. I thought of his performances with No. 267 and nodded. After all, it was a small privilege to accord to pure genius.

‘But my engineer will stand by—at first,’ I added.

‘An’ you a family man, too,’ muttered Pyecroft, swinging himself into the right rear seat. ‘Sure to be a remarkably hectic day when we meet.’

We adjusted ourselves and, in the language of the immortal Navy doctor, paved our way towards Linghurst, distant by mile-post 11¾ miles.

Mr. Hinchcliffe, every nerve and muscle braced, talked only to the engineer, and that professionally. I recalled the time when I, too, had enjoyed the rack on which he voluntarily extended himself.

And the County of Sussex slid by in slow time.

‘How cautious is the tiffy-bird!’ said Pyecroft.

‘Even in a destroyer,’ Hinch snapped over his shoulder, ‘you ain’t expected to con and drive simultaneous. Don’t address any remarks to me!’

‘Pump!’ said the engineer. ‘Your water’s droppin’.’

‘I know that. Where the Heavens is that blighted by-pass?’

He beat his right or throttle hand madly on the side of the car till he found the bent rod that more or less controls the pump, and, neglecting all else, twisted it furiously.

My engineer grabbed the steering-bar just in time to save us lurching into a ditch.

‘If I was a burnin’ peacock, with two hundred bloodshot eyes in my shinin’ tail, I’d need ’em all on this job!’ said Hinch.

‘Don’t talk! Steer! This ain’t the North Atlantic,’ Pyecroft replied.

‘Blast my stokers! Why, the steam’s dropped fifty pounds!’ Hinchcliffe cried.

‘Fire’s blown out,’ said the engineer. ‘Stop her!’

‘Does she do that often?’ said Hinch, descending.

‘Sometimes.’

page 3

‘Any time?’

‘Any time a cross-wind catches her.’

The engineer produced a match and stooped.

That car (now, thank Heaven, no more than an evil memory) never lit twice in the same fashion. This time she backfired superbly, and Pyecroft went out over the right rear wheel in a column of rich yellow flame.

‘I’ve seen a mine explode at Bantry—once—prematoor,’ he volunteered.

‘That’s all right,’ said Hinchcliffe, brushing down his singed beard with a singed forefinger. (He had been watching too closely.) ‘Has she any more little surprises up her dainty sleeve?’

‘She hasn’t begun yet,’ said my engineer, with a scornful cough. ‘Some one ’as opened the petrol-supply-valve too wide.’

‘Change places with me, Pyecroft,’ I commanded, for I remembered that the petrol-supply, the steam-lock, and the forced draught were all controlled from the right rear seat.

‘Me? Why? There’s a whole switchboard full o’ nickel-plated muckin’s which I haven’t begun to play with yet. The starboard side’s crawlin’ with ’em.’

‘Change, or I’ll kill you!’ said Hinchcliffe, and he looked like it.

‘That’s the tiffy all over. When anything goes wrong, blame it on the lower deck. Navigate by your automatic self, then! I won’t help you any more.’

We navigated for a mile in dead silence.

‘Talkin’ o’ wakes——’ said Pyecroft suddenly.

‘We weren’t,’ Hinchcliffe grunted.

‘There’s some wakes would break a snake’s back; but this of yours, so to speak, would fair turn a tapeworm giddy. That’s all I wish to observe, Hinch . . . . Cart at anchor on the port bow. It’s Agg!’

Far up the shaded road into secluded Bromlingleigh we saw the carrier’s cart at rest before the post-office.

‘He’s bung in the fairway. How’m I to get past?’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘There’s no room. Here, Pye, come and relieve the wheel!’

‘Nay, nay, Pauline. You’ve made your own bed. You’ve as good as left your happy home an’ family cart to steal it. Now you lie on it.’

‘Ring your bell,’ I suggested.

‘Glory!’ said Pyecroft, falling forward into the nape of Hinchcliffe’s neck as the car stopped dead.

‘Get out o’ my back-hair! That must have been the brake I touched off,’ Hinchcliffe muttered, and repaired his error tumultuously.

We passed the cart as though we had been all Bruges belfry. Agg, from the post-office door, regarded us with a too pacific eye. I remembered later that the pretty postmistress looked on us pityingly.

Hinchcliffe wiped the sweat from his brow and drew breath. It was the first vehicle that he had passed, and I sympathised with him.

‘You needn’t grip so hard,’ said my engineer. ‘She steers as easy as a bicycle.’

‘Ho! You suppose I ride bicycles up an’ down my engine-room?’ was the answer. ‘I’ve other things to think about. She’s a terror. She’s a whistlin’ lunatic. I’d sooner run the old SouthEaster at Simonstown than her!’

‘One of the nice things they say about her,’ I interrupted, ‘is that no engineer is needed to run this machine.’

‘No. They’d need about seven.’

‘“Common-sense only is needed,”’ I quoted.

‘Make a note of that, Hinch. Just commonsense,’ Pyecroft put in.

‘And now,’ I said, ‘we’ll have to take in water. There isn’t more than a couple of inches of water in the tank.’

‘Where d’you get it from?’

‘Oh!—cottages and such-like.’

‘Yes, but that being so, where does your much-advertised twenty-five miles an hour come in? Ain’t a dung-cart more to the point?’

‘If you want to go anywhere, I suppose it would be,’ I replied.

‘I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m thinkin’ of you who’ve got to live with her. She’ll burn her tubes if she loses her water?’

‘She will.’

‘I’ve never scorched yet, and I’m not beginnin’ now.’ He shut off steam firmly. ‘Out you get, Pye, an’ shove her along by hand.’

‘Where to?’

‘The nearest water-tank,’ was the reply. ‘And Sussex is a dry county.’

‘She ought to have drag-ropes—little pipe-clayed ones,’ said Pyecroft.

We got out and pushed under the hot sun for half a mile till we came to a cottage, sparsely inhabited by one child who wept.

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‘All out haymakin’, o’ course,’ said Pyecroft, thrusting his head into the parlour for an instant. ‘What’s the evolution now?’

‘Skirmish till we find a well,’ I said.

‘Hmm! But they wouldn’t ’ave left that kid without a chaperon, so to say . . . I thought so! Where’s a stick?’

A bluish and silent beast of the true old sheepdog breed glided from behind an outhouse and without words fell to work.

Pyecroft kept him at bay with a rake-handle while our party, in rallying-square, retired along the box-bordered brick path to the car.

At the garden gate the dumb devil halted, looked back on the child, and sat down to scratch.

‘That’s his three-mile limit, thank Heaven!’ said Pyecroft. ‘Fall in, push-party, and proceed with land-transport o’ pinnace. I’ll protect your flanks in case this sniffin’ flea-bag is tempted beyond ’is strength.’

We pushed off in silence. The car weighed 1200 lb., and even on ball-bearings was a powerful sudorific. From somewhere behind a hedge we heard a gross rustic laugh.

‘Those are the beggars we lie awake for, patrollin’ the high seas. There ain’t a port in China where we wouldn’t be better treated. Yes, a Boxer ’ud be ashamed of it,’ said Pyecroft.

A cloud of fine dust boomed down the road.

‘Some happy craft with a well-found engineroom! How different!’ panted Hinchcliffe, bent over the starboard mudguard.

It was a claret-coloured petrol car, and it stopped courteously, as good cars will at sight of trouble.

‘Water, only water,’ I answered in reply to offers of help.

‘There’s a lodge at the end of these oak palings. They’ll give you all you want. Say I sent you. Gregory—Michael Gregory. Good-bye!’

‘Ought to ’ave been in the Service. Prob’ly is,’ was Pyecroft’s comment.

At that thrice-blessed lodge our water-tank was filled (I dare not quote Mr. Hinchcliffe’s remarks when he saw the collapsible rubber bucket with which we did it) and we re-embarked. It seemed that Sir Michael Gregory owned many acres, and that his park ran for miles.

‘No objection to your going through it,’ said the lodge-keeper. ‘It’ll save you a goodish bit to Instead Wick.’

But we needed petrol, which could be purchased at Pigginfold, a few miles farther up, and so we held to the main road, as our fate had decreed.

‘We’ve come seven miles in fifty-four minutes, so far,’ said Hinchcliffe (he was driving with greater freedom and less responsibility), ‘and now we have to fill our bunkers. This is worse than the Channel Fleet.’

At Pigginfold, after ten minutes, we refilled our petrol tank and lavishly oiled our engines. Mr. Hinchcliffe wished to discharge our engineer on the grounds that he (Mr. Hinchcliffe) was now entirely abreast of his work. To this I demurred, for I knew my car. She had, in the language of the road, held up for a day and a half, and by most bitter experience I suspected that her time was very near. Therefore, three miles short of Linghurst, I was less surprised than any one, excepting always my engineer, when the engines set up a lunatic clucking, and, after two or three kicks, jammed.

‘Heaven forgive me all the harsh things I may have said about destroyers in my sinful time!’ wailed Hinchcliffe, snapping back the throttle. ‘What’s worryin’ Ada now?’

‘The forward eccentric-strap screw’s dropped off,’ said the engineer, investigating.

‘That all ? I thought it was a propeller-blade.’

‘We must go an’ look for it. There isn’t another.’

‘Not me,’ said Pyecroft from his seat. ‘Out pinnace, Hinch, an’ creep for it. It won’t be more than five miles back.’

The two men, with bowed heads, moved up the road.

‘Look like etymologists, don’t they? Does she decant her innards often, so to speak?’ Pyecroft asked.

I told him the true tale of a race-full of ball bearings strewn four miles along a Hampshire road, and by me recovered in detail. He was profoundly touched.

‘Poor Hinch! Poor—poor Hinch!’ he said. ‘And that’s only one of her little games, is it? He’ll be homesick for the Navy by night.’

When the search-party doubled back with the missing screw, it was Hinchcliffe who replaced it in less than five minutes, while my engineer looked on admiringly.

‘Your boiler’s only seated on four little paperclips,’ he said, crawling from beneath her. ‘She’s a wicker-willow lunchbasket below. She’s a runnin’ miracle. Have you had this combustible spirit-lamp long?’

I told him.

‘And yet you were afraid to come into the Nightmare’s engine-room when we were runnin’ trials!’

‘It’s all a matter of taste,’ Pyecroft volunteered. ‘But I will say for you, Hinch, you’ve certainly got the hang of her steamin’ gadgets in quick time.’

He was driving her very sweetly, but with a worried look in his eye and a tremor in his arm.

‘She don’t seem to answer her helm somehow,’ he said.

‘There’s a lot of play to the steering-gear,’ said my engineer. ‘We generally tighten it up every few miles.’

‘‘Like me to stop now? We’ve run as much as one mile and a half without incident,’ he replied tartly.

page 5

‘Then you’re lucky,’ said my engineer, bristling in turn.

‘They’ll wreck the whole turret out o’ nasty professional spite in a minute,’ said Pyecroft. ‘That’s the worst o’ machinery. Man dead ahead, Hinch—semaphorin’ like the flagship in a fit!’

‘Amen!’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘Shall I stop, or shall I cut him down?’

He stopped, for full in the centre of the Linghurst Road stood a person in pepper-and-salt raiment (ready-made), with a brown telegraph envelope in his hands.

‘Twenty-three and a half miles an hour,’ he began, weighing a small beam-engine of a Waterbury in one red paw. ‘From the top of the hill over our measured quarter-mile—twenty-three and a half.’

‘You manurial gardener——’ Hinchcliffe began. I prodded him warningly from behind, and laid the other hand on Pyecroft’s stiffening knee.

‘Also—on information received-drunk and disorderly in charge of a motor-car—to the common danger—two men like sailors in appearance,’ the man went on.

‘Like sailors! . . . That’s Agg’s little roose. No wonder he smiled at us,’ said Pyecroft.

‘I’ve been waiting for you some time,’ the man concluded, folding up the telegram.

‘Who’s the owner?’

I indicated myself.

‘Then I want you as well as the two seafaring men. Drunk and disorderly can be treated summary. You come on.’

My relations with the Sussex constabulary have, so far, been of the best, but I could not love this person.

‘Of course you have your authority to show?’ I hinted.

‘I’ll show it you at Linghurst,’ he retorted hotly—‘all the authority you want.’

‘I only want the badge, or warrant, or whatever it is a plain-clothes man has to show.’

He made as though to produce it, but checked himself, repeating less politely the invitation to Linghurst. The action and the tone confirmed my many-times-tested theory that the bulk of English shoregoing institutions are based on conformable strata of absolutely impervious inaccuracy. I reflected and became aware of a drumming on the back of the front seat that Pyecroft, bowed forward and relaxed, was tapping with his knuckles. The hardly checked fury on Hinchcliffe’s brow had given place to a greasy imbecility, and he nodded over the steering-bar. In longs and shorts, as laid down by the pious and immortal Mr. Morse, Pyecroft tapped out, ‘Sham drunk. Get him in the car.’

‘I can’t stay here all day,’ said the constable.

Pyecroft raised his head. Then was seen with what majesty the British sailor-man envisages a new situation.

‘Met gennelman heavy sheeway,’ said he. ‘Do’ tell me British gelman can’t give ’ole Brish Navy lif’ own blighted ste’ cart. Have another drink!’

‘I didn’t know they were as drunk as all that when they stopped me,’ I explained.

‘You can say all that at Linghurst,’ was the answer. ‘Come on.’

‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘But the question is, if you take these two out on the road, they’ll fall down or start killing you.’

‘Then I’d call on you to assist me in the execution o’ my duty.’

‘But I’d see you further first. You’d better come with us in the car. I’ll turn this passenger out.’ (This was my engineer, sitting quite silent.) ‘You don’t want him, and, anyhow, he’d only be a witness for the defence.’

‘That’s true,’ said the constable. ‘But it wouldn’t make any odds—at Linghurst.’

My engineer skipped into the bracken like a rabbit. I bade him cut across Sir Michael Gregory’s park, and if he caught my friend, to tell him I should probably be rather late for lunch.

‘I ain’t going to be driven by him.’ Our destined prey pointed at Hinchcliffe with apprehension.

‘Of course not. You take my seat and keep the big sailor in order. He’s too drunk to do much. I’ll change places with the other one. Only be quick; I want to pay my fine and get it over.’

‘That’s the way to look at it,’ he said, dropping into the left rear seat. ‘We’re making quite a lot out o’ you motor gentry.’ He folded his arms judicially as the car gathered way under Hinchcliffe’s stealthy hand.

‘But you aren’t driving!’ he cried, half rising.

‘You’ve noticed it?’ said Pyecroft, and embraced him with one anaconda-like left arm.

‘Don’t kill him,’ said Hinchcliffe briefly. ‘I want to show him what twenty-three and a quarter is.’ We were going a fair twelve, which was about the car’s limit.

Our passenger swore something and then groaned.

‘Hush, darling!’ said Pyecroft, ‘or I’ll have to hug you.’

The main road, white under the noon sun, lay broad before us, running north to Linghurst. We slowed and looked anxiously for a side track.

‘And now,’ said I, ‘I want to see your authority.’

‘The badge of your ratin’,’ Pyecroft added.

page 6

‘I’m a constable,’ he said, and kicked. Indeed, his boots would have bewrayed him across half a county’s plough ; but boots are not legal evidence.

‘I want your authority,’ I repeated coldly; ‘some evidence that you are not a common, drunken tramp.’

It was as I had expected. He had forgotten or mislaid his badge. He had neglected to learn the outlines of the work for which he received money and consideration; and he expected me, the taxpayer, to go to infinite trouble to supplement his deficiencies.

‘If you don’t believe me, come to Linghurst,’ was the burden of his almost national anthem.

‘But I can’t run all over Sussex every time a blackmailer jumps up and says he is a policeman.’

‘Why, it’s quite close,’ he persisted.

‘’Twon’t be—soon,’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘None of the other people ever made any trouble. To be sure they was gentlemen,’ he cried. ‘All I can say is, it may be very funny, but it ain’t fair.’

I laboured with him in this dense fog, but to no end. He had forgotten his badge, and we were villains for that we did not cart him to the pub or barracks where he had left it.

Pyecroft listened critically as we spun along the hard road.

‘If he was a concentrated Boer, he couldn’t expect much more,’ he observed. ‘Now, suppose I’d been a lady in a delicate state o’ health—you’d ha’ made me very ill with your doings.’

‘I wish I ’ad. ’Ere!’Elp!’Elp! Hi!’

The man had seen a constable in uniform fifty yards ahead, where a lane ran into the road, and would have said more but that Hinchcliffe jerked her up that lane with a wrench that nearly capsized us as the constable came running heavily.

It seemed to me that both our guest and his fellow-villain in uniform smiled as we fled down the road easterly betwixt the narrowing hedges.

‘You’ll know all about it in a little time,’ said our guest. ‘You’ve only yourselves to thank for runnin’ your ’ead into a trap.’ And he whistled ostentatiously.

We made no answer.

‘If that man ’ad chose, ’e could have identified me,’ he said.

Still we were silent.

‘But ’e’ll do it later, when you’re caught.’

‘Not if you go on talking. ’E won’t be able to,’ said Pyecroft. ‘I don’t know what traverse you think you’re workin’, but your duty till you’re put in cells for a highway robber is to love, honour, an’ cherish me most special—performin’ all evolutions signalled in rapid time. I tell you this, in case o’ anything turnip’ up.’

‘Don’t you fret about things turnip’ up,’ was the reply.

Hinchcliffe had given the car a generous throttle, and she was well set to work, when, without warning, the road—there are two or three in Sussex like it—turned down and ceased.

‘Holy Muckins!’ he cried, and stood on both brakes as our helpless tyres slithered over wet grass and bracken—down and down into forest—early British woodland. It was the change of a nightmare, and that all should fit, fifty yards ahead of us a babbling brook barred our way. On the far side a velvet green ride, sprinkled with rabbits and fern, gently sloped upwards and away, but behind us was no hope. Forty horse-power would never have rolled wet pneumatic tyres up that verdurous cliff we had descended.

‘H’m!’ Our guest coughed significantly. ‘A great many cars thinks they can take this road; but they all come back. We walks after ’em at our convenience.’

‘Meanin’ that the other jaunty is now pursuin’ us on his lily feet?’ said Pyecroft.

‘Precisely.’

‘An’ you think,’ said Pyecroft (I have no hope to render the scorn of the words), ‘that’ll make any odds? Get out!’

The man obeyed with alacrity.

‘See those spars up-ended over there? I mean that wickyup-thing. Hop-poles, then, you rural blighter. Keep on fetching me hop-poles at the double.’

And he doubled, Pyecroft at his heels; for they had arrived at a perfect understanding.

There was a stack of hurdles a few yards down stream, laid aside after sheep-washing; and there were stepping-stones in the brook. Hinchcliffe rearranged these last to make some sort of causeway; I brought up the hurdles; and when Pyecroft and his subaltern had dropped a dozen hop-poles across the stream, laid them down over all.

‘Talk o’ the Agricultur’l Hall!’ he said, mopping his brow—‘’tisn’t in it with us. The approach to the bridge must now be paved with hurdles, owin’ to the squashy nature o’ the country. Yes, an’ we’d better have one or two on the far side to lead her on to terror fermior. Now, Hinch Give her full steam and ’op along. If, she slips off, we’re done. Shall I take the wheel?’

‘No. This is my job,’ said the first-class engine-room artificer. ‘Get over the far side, and be ready to catch her if she jibs on the uphill.’

page 7

We crossed that elastic structure and stood ready amid the bracken. Hinchcliffe gave her a full steam and she came like a destroyer on her trial. There was a crack, a flicker of white water, and she was in our arms fifty yards up the slope; or rather, we were behind her pushing her madly towards a patch of raw gravel whereon her wheels could bite. Of the bridge remained only a few wildly vibrating hop-poles, and those hurdles which had been sunk in the mud of the approaches.

‘She—she kicked out all the loose ones behind her, as she finished with ’em,’ Hinchcliffe panted.

‘At the Agricultural Hall they would ’ave been fastened down with ribbons,’ said Pyecroft. ‘But this ain’t Olympia.’

‘She nearly wrenched the tiller out of my hand. Don’t you think I conned her like a cock-angel, Pye?’

‘I never saw anything like it,’ said our guest propitiatingly. ‘And now, gentlemen, if you’ll let me go back to Linghurst, I promise you you won’t hear another word from me.’

‘Get in,’ said Pyecroft, as we puffed out on to a metalled road once more. ‘We ’aven’t begun on you yet.’

‘A joke’s a joke,’ he replied. ‘I don’t mind a little bit of a joke myself, but this is going beyond it.’

‘Miles an’ miles beyond it, if this machine stands up. We’ll want water pretty soon.’

Our guest’s countenance brightened, and Pyecroft perceived it.

‘Let me tell you,’ he said earnestly, ‘it won’t make any difference to you whatever happens. Barrin’ a dhow or two Tajurrah-way, prizes are scarce in the Navy. Hence we never abandon ’em.’

There was a long silence. Pyecroft broke it suddenly.

‘Robert,’ he said, ‘have you a mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you a big brother?’

‘Yes.’

‘An’ a little sister?’

‘Yes.’

‘Robert. Does your mamma keep a dog?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘All right, Robert. I won’t forget it.’

I looked for an explanation.

‘I saw his cabinet photograph in full uniform on the mantelpiece o’ that cottage before faithful Fido turned up,’ Pyecroft whispered. ‘Ain’t you glad it’s all in the family somehow?’

We filled with water at a cottage on the edge of St. Leonard’s Forest, and, despite our increasing leakage, made shift to climb the ridge above Instead Wick. Knowing the car as I did, I felt sure that final collapse would not be long delayed. My sole concern was to run our guest well into the wilderness before that came.

On the roof of the world—a naked plateau clothed with young heather—she retired from active life in floods of tears. Her feed-water-heater (Hinchcliffe blessed it and its maker for three minutes) was leaking beyond hope of repair; she had shifted most of her packing, and her waterpump would not lift.

‘If I had a bit of piping I could disconnect this tin cartridge-case an’ feed direct into the boiler. It ’ud knock down her speed, but we could get on,’ said he, and looked hopelessly at the long dun ridges that hove us above the panorama of Sussex. Northward we could see the London haze. Southward, between gaps of the whale-backed Downs, lay the Channel’s zinc-blue. But all our available population in that vast survey was one cow and a kestrel.

‘It’s down hill to Instead Wick. We can run her there by gravity,’ I said at last.

‘Then he’ll only have to walk to the station to get home. Unless we take off ’is boots first,’ Pyecroft replied.

‘That,’ said our guest earnestly, ‘would be theft atop of assault and very serious.’

‘Oh, let’s hang him an’ be done,’ Hinchcliffe grunted. ‘It’s evidently what he’s sufferin’ for.’

Somehow murder did not appeal to us that warm noon. We sat down to smoke in the heather, and presently out of the valley below came the thick beat of a petrol-motor ascending. I paid little attention to it till I heard the roar of a horn that has no duplicate in all the Home Counties.

‘That’s the man I was going to lunch with!’ I cried. ‘Hold on!’ and I ran down the road.

It was a big, black, black-dashed, tonneaued twenty-four-horse Octopod; and it bore not only Kysh my friend, and Salmon his engineer, but my own man, who for the first time in our acquaintance smiled.

‘Did they get you? What did you get? I was coming into Linghurst as witness to character—your man told me what happened—but I was stopped near Instead Wick myself,’ cried Kysh.

‘What for?’

‘Leaving car unattended. An infernal swindle, when you think of the loose carts outside every pub in the county. I was jawing with the police for an hour, but it’s no use. They’ve got it all their own way, and we’re helpless.’

Hereupon I told him my tale, and for proof, as we topped the hill, pointed out the little group round my car.

All supreme emotion is dumb. Kysh put on the brake and hugged me to his bosom till I groaned. Then, as I remember, he crooned like a mother returned to her suckling.

page 8

‘Divine! Divine!’ he murmured. ‘Command me.’

‘Take charge of the situation,’ I said. ‘You’ll find a Mr. Pyecroft on the quarter-deck. I’m altogether out of it.’

‘He shall stay there. Who am I but the instrument of vengeance in the hands of an over-ruling Providence? (And I put in fresh sparking-plugs this morning.) Salmon, take that steamkettle home, somehow. I would be alone.’

‘Leggatt,’ I said to my man, ‘help Salmon home with my car.’

‘Home? Now? It’s hard. It’s cruel hard,’ said Leggatt, almost with a sob.

Hinchcliffe outlined my car’s condition briefly to the two engineers. Mr. Pyecroft clung to our guest, who stared with affrighted eyes at the palpitating Octopod; and the free wind of high Sussex whimpered across the ling.

‘I am quite agreeable to walkin’ ’ome all the way on my feet,’ said our guest. ‘I wouldn’t go to any railway station. It ’ud be just the proper finish to our little joke.’ He laughed nervously.

‘What’s the evolution?’ said Pyecroft. ‘Do we turn over to the new cruiser?’

I nodded, and he escorted our guest to the tonneau with care. When I was in, he sat himself broad-armed on the little flap-seat which controls the door. Hinchcliffe sat by Kysh.

‘You drive?’ Kysh asked, with the smile that has won him his chequered way through the world.

‘Steam only, and I’ve about had my whack for to-day, thanks.’

‘I see.’

The long, low car slid forward and then dropped like a bullet down the descent our steam toy had so painfully climbed. Our guest’s face blanched, and he clutched the back of the tonneau.

‘New commander’s evidently been trained on a destroyer,’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘What’s ’is wonderful name?’ whispered Pyecroft. ‘Ho! Well, I’m glad it ain’t Saul we’ve run up against—nor Nimshi, for that matter. This is makin’ me feel religious.’

Our impetus carried us half-way up the next slope, where we steadied to a resonant fifteen an hour against the collar.

‘What do you think?’ I called to Hinchcliffe.

‘’Taint as sweet as steam, o’ course; but for power it’s twice the Furious against half the Jaseur in a head-sea.’

Volumes could not have touched it more exactly. His bright eyes were glued on Kysh’s hands juggling with levers behind the discreet backward-sloping dash.

‘An’ what sort of a brake might you use?’ he said politely.

‘This,’ Kysh replied, as the last of the hill shot up to one in eight. He let the car run back a few feet and caught her deftly on the brake, repeating the performance cup and ball fashion. It was like being daped above the Pit at the end of an uncoiled solar plexus. Even Pyecroft held his breath.

‘It ain’t fair! It ain’t fair!’ our guest moaned. ‘You’re makin’ me sick.’

‘What an ungrateful blighter he is!’ said Pyecroft. ‘Money couldn’t buy you a run like this . . . . Do it well overboard!’

‘We’ll just trundle up the Forest and drop into the Park Row, I think,’ said Kysh. ‘There’s a bit of good going hereabouts.’

He flung a careless knee over the low raking tiller that the ordinary expert puts under his armpit, and down four miles of yellow road, cut through barren waste, the Octopod sang like a six-inch shell.

‘Whew ! But you know your job,’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘You’re wasted here. I’d give something to have you in my engineroom.’

‘He’s steering with ’is little hind-legs,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Stand up and look at him, Robert. You’ll never see such a sight again!’

‘Nor don’t want to,’ was our guest’s reply. ‘Five ’undred pounds wouldn’t begin to cover ’is fines even since I’ve been with him.’

Park Row is reached by one hill which drops three hundred feet in half a mile. Kysh had the thought to steer with his hand down the abyss, but the manner in which he took the curved bridge at the bottom brought my few remaining hairs much nearer the grave.

‘We’re in Surrey now; better look out,’ I said.

‘Never mind. I’ll roll her into Kent for a bit. We’ve lots of time; it’s only three o’clock.’

‘Won’t you want to fill your bunkers, or take water, or oil her up?’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘We don’t use water, and she’s good for two hundred on one tank o’ petrol if she doesn’t break down.’

‘Two hundred miles from ’ome and mother and faithful Fido to-night, Robert,’ said Pyecroft, slapping our guest on the knee. ‘Cheer up! Why, I’ve known a destroyer do less.’

We passed with some decency through some towns, till by way of the Hastings road we whirled into Cramberhurst, which is a deep pit.

‘Now,’ said Kysh, ‘we begin.’

‘Previous service not reckoned towards pension,’ said Pyecroft. ‘We are doin’ you lavish, Robert.’

‘But when’s this silly game to finish, any’ow?’ our guest snarled.

‘Don’t worry about the when of it, Robert. The where’s the interestin’ point for you just now.’

page 9

I had seen Kysh drive before, and I thought I knew the Octopod, but that afternoon he and she were exalted beyond my knowledge. He improvised on the keys—the snapping levers and quivering accelerators—marvellous variations, so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and sometimes a barn-dance, varied on open greens by the weaving of fairy rings. When I protested, all that he would say was: ‘I’ll hypnotise the fowl! I’ll dazzle the rooster!’ or other words equally futile. And she—oh! that I could do her justice!—she turned her broad black bows to the westering light, and lifted us high upon hills that we might see and rejoice with her. She whooped into veiled hollows of elm and Sussex oak; she devoured infinite perspectives of park palings; she surged through forgotten hamlets, whose single streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her exhaust, and, tireless, she repeated the motions. Over naked uplands she droned like a homing bee, her shadow lengthening in the sun that she chased to his lair. She nosed up unparochial byways and accommodation-roads of the least accommodation, and put old scarred turf or new-raised molehills under her most marvellous springs with never a jar. And since the King’s highway is used for every purpose save traffic, in mid-career she stepped aside for, or flung amazing loops about, the brainless driver, the driverless horse, the drunken carrier, the engaged couple, the female student of the bicycle and her staggering instructor, the pig, the perambulator, and the infant school (where it disembogued yelping on cross-roads), with the grace of Nellie Farren (upon whom be the Peace) and the lithe abandon of all the Vokes family. But at heart she was ever Judic as I remember that Judic long ago—Judic clad in bourgeois black from wrist to ankle, achieving incredible improprieties.

We were silent—Hinchcliffe and Pyecroft through professional appreciation; I with a layman’s delight in the expert; and our guest because of fear.

At the edge of the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green flats fringed by martello towers.

‘Ain’t that Eastbourne yonder?’ said our guest, reviving. ‘I’ve a aunt there—she’s cook to a J.P.—could identify me.’

‘Don’t worry her for a little thing like that,’ said Pyecroft; and ere he had ceased to praise family love, our unpaid judiciary, and domestic service, the Downs rose between us and the sea, and the Long Man of Hillingdon lay out upon the turf.

‘Trevington—up yonder—is a fairly isolated little dorp,’ I said, for I was beginning to feel hungry.

‘No,’ said Kysh. ‘He’d get a lift to the railway in no time …. Besides, I’m enjoying myself . . . . Three pounds eighteen and sixpence. Infernal swindle!’

I take it one of his more recent fines was rankling in Kysh’s brain; but he drove like the Archangel of the Twilight.

About the longitude of Cassocks, Hinchcliffe yawned. ‘Aren’t we ever goin’ to maroon our Robert? I’m hungry, too.’

‘The commodore wants his money back,’ I answered.

‘If he drives like this habitual, there must be a tidyish little lump owin’ to him,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Well, I’m agreeable.’

‘I didn’t know it could be done. S’welp me, I didn’t,’ our guest murmured.

‘But you will,’ said Kysh. And that was the first and last time he addressed the man.

We ran through Penfield Green, half stupefied with open air, drugged with the relentless boom of the Octopod, and extinct with famine.

‘I used to shoot about here,’ said Kysh, a few miles farther on. ‘Open that gate, please,’ and he slowed as the sun touched the sky-line. At this point we left metalled roads and bucked vigorously amid ditches and under trees for twenty minutes.

‘Only cross-country car on the market,’ he said, as we wheeled into a straw-yard where a lone bull bellowed defiance to our growlings. ‘Open that gate, please. I hope the cattle-bridge will stand up.’

‘I’ve took a few risks in my time,’ said Pyecroft as timbers cracked beneath us and we entered between thickets, ‘but I’m a babe to this man, Hinch.’

‘Don’t talk to me. Watch him! It’s a liberal education, as Shakespeare says. Fallen tree on the port bow, Sir.’

‘Right! That’s my mark. Sit tight!’

She flung up her tail like a sounding whale and buried us in a fifteen-foot-deep bridle-path buttressed with the exposed roots of enormous beeches. The wheels leaped from root to rounded boulder, and it was very dark in the shadow of the foliage.

‘There ought to be a hammer-pond somewhere about here.’ Kysh was letting her down this chute in brakeful spasms.

‘Water dead ahead, Sir. Stack o’ brushwood on the starboard beam, and—no road,’ sang Pyecroft.

‘Cr-r-ri-key!’ said Hinchcliffe, as the car on a wild cant to the left went astern, screwing herself round the angle of a track that overhung the pond. ‘If she only had two propellers, I believe she’d talk poetry. She can do everything else.’

‘We’re rather on our port wheels now,’ said Kysh ; ‘but I don’t think she’ll capsize. This road isn’t used much by motors.’

‘You don’t say so,’ said Pyecroft. ‘What a pity!’

She bored through a mass of crackling brushwood, and emerged into an upward-sloping fernglade fenced with woods so virgin, so untouched, that William Rufus might have ridden off as we entered. We climbed out of the violet-purple shadows towards the upland where the last of the day lingered. I was filled to my moist eyes with the almost sacred beauty of sense and association that clad the landscape.

‘Does ’unger produce ’alluciations ?’ said Pyecroft in a whisper. ‘Because I’ve just seen a sacred ibis walkin’ arm in arm with a British cock-pheasant.’

‘What are you panickin’ at?’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘I’ve been seein’ zebra for the last two minutes, but I ’aven’t complained.’

He pointed behind us, and I beheld a superb painted zebra (Burchell’s, I think), following our track with palpitating nostrils. The car stopped, and it fled away.

There was a little pond in front of us from which rose a dome of irregular sticks crowned with a blunt-muzzled beast that sat upon its haunches.

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‘Is it catching?’ said Pyecroft.

‘Yes. I’m seeing beaver,’ I replied.

‘It is here!’ said Kysh, with the air and gesture of Captain Nemo, and half turned.

‘No—no—no ! For ’Eaven’s sake—not ’ere!’ Our guest gasped like a sea-bathed child, as four efficient hands swung him far out-board on to the turf. The car ran back noiselessly down the slope.

‘Look! Look! It’s sorcery!’ cried Hinchcliffe.

There was a report like a pistol-shot as the beaver dived from the roof of his lodge, but we watched our guest. He was on his knees, praying to kangaroos. Yea, in his bowler hat he kneeled before kangaroos—gigantic, erect, silhouetted against the light—four buck-kangaroos in the heart of Sussex!

And we retrogressed over the velvet grass till our hind-wheels struck well-rolled gravel, leading us to sanity, main roads, and, half an hour later, the ‘Grapnel Inn ‘at Horsham.

. . . . .

After a great meal we poured libations and made burnt-offerings in honour of Kysh, who received our homage graciously, and, by the way, explained a few things in the natural history line that had puzzled us. England is a most marvellous country, but one is not, till one knows the eccentricities of large landowners, trained to accept kangaroos, zebras, or beavers as part of its landscape.When we went to bed Pyecroft pressed my hand, his voice thick with emotion.

‘We owe it to you,’ he said. ‘We owe it all to you. Didn’t I say we never met in pup-pup-puris naturalibus, if I may so put it, without a remarkably hectic day ahead of us?’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘Mind the candle.’ He was tracing smoke-patterns on the wall.

‘But what I want to know is whether we’ll succeed in acclimatisin’ the blighter, or whether Sir William Gardner’s keepers ’ll kill ’im before ’e gets accustomed to ’is surroundin’s?’

Some day, I think, we must go up the Linghurst road and find out.

Stalky

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“AND then,” it was a boy’s voice, curiously level and even, “De Vitré said we were beastly funks not to help, and I said there were too many chaps in it to suit us. Besides, there’s bound to be a mess somewhere or other, with old De Vitré in charge. Wasn’t I right, Beetle?”“And, anyhow, it’s a silly biznai, bung through. What’ll they do with the beastly cows when they’ve got ’em? You can milk a cow—if she’ll stand still. That’s all right, but drivin’ ’em about——”

“You’re a pig, Beetle.”

“No, I ain’t. What is the sense of drivin’ a lot of cows up from the Burrows to—to—where is it?”

“They’re tryin’ to drive ’em up to Toowey’s farmyard at the top of the hill—the empty one, where we smoked last Tuesday. It’s a revenge. Old Vidley chivied De Vitré twice last week for ridin’ his ponies on the Burrows; and De Vitré’s goin’ to lift as many of old Vidley’s cattle as he can and plant ’em up the hill. He’ll muck it, though—with Parsons, Orrin and Howlett helpin’ him. They’ll only yell, an’ shout, an’ bunk if they see Vidley.”

“We might have managed it,” said McTurk slowly, turning up his coat-collar against the rain that swept over the Burrows. His hair was of the dark mahogany red that goes with a certain temperament.

“We should,” Corkran replied with equal confidence. “But they’ve gone into it as if it was a sort of spadger-hunt. I’ve never done any cattle-liftin’, but it seems to me-e-e that one might just as well be stalky about a thing as not.” The smoking vapours of the Atlantic drove in wreaths above the boys’ heads. Out of the mist to windward, beyond the grey bar of the Pebble Ridge, came the unceasing roar of mile-long Atlantic rollers. To leeward, a few stray ponies and cattle, the property of the Northam potwallopers, and the unwilling playthings of the boys in their leisure hours, showed through the haze. The three boys had halted by the Cattle-gate which marks the limit of cultivation, where the fields come down to the Burrows from Northam Hill. Beetle, shock-headed and spectacled, drew his nose to and fro along the wet top-bar; McTurk shifted from one foot to the other, watching the water drain into either print; while Corkran whistled through his teeth as he leaned against a sod-bank, peering into the mist.

A grown or sane person might have called the weather vile; but the boys at that School had not yet learned the national interest in climate. It was a little damp, to be sure; but it was always damp in the Easter term, and sea-wet, they held, could not give one a cold under any circumstances. Mackintoshes were things to go to church in, but crippling if one had to run at short notice across heavy country. So they waited serenely in the downpour, clad as their mothers would not have cared to see.

“I say, Corky,” said Beetle, wiping his spectacles for the twentieth time, “if we aren’t going to help De Vitré, what are we here for?”

“We’re goin’ to watch,” was the answer. “Keep your eye on your Uncle and he’ll pull you through.”

“ It’s an awful biznai, driving cattle—in open country,” said McTurk, who, as the son of an Irish baronet, knew something of these operations. “They’ll have to run half over the Burrows after ’em. ’S’pose they’re ridin’ Vidley’s ponies?”

“De Vitré’s sure to be. He’s a dab on a horse. Listen! What a filthy row they’re making. They’ll be heard for miles.”

The air filled with whoops and shouts, cries, words of command, the rattle of broken golf-clubs, and a clatter of hooves. Three cows with their calves came up to the Cattle-gate at a milch-canter, followed by four wild-eyed bullocks and two rough-coated ponies. A fat and freckled youth of fifteen trotted behind them, riding bareback and brandishing a hedge-stake. De Vitré, up to a certain point, was an inventive youth, with a passion for horse-exercise that the Northam farmers did not encourage. Farmer Vidley, who could not understand that a grazing pony likes being galloped about, had once called him a thief, and the insult rankled. Hence the raid.

“Come on,” he cried over his shoulder. “Open the gate, Corkran, or they’ll all cut back again. We’ve had no end of bother to get ’em. Oh, won’t old Vidley be wild 1”

Three boys on foot ran up, “shooing” the cattle in excited and amateur fashion, till they headed them into the narrow, high-banked Devonshire lane that ran uphill.

“Come on, Corkran. It’s no end of a lark,” pleaded De Vitré; but Corkran shook his head. The affair had been presented to him after dinner that day as a completed scheme, in which he might, by favour, play a minor part. And Arthur Lionel Corkran, No. 104, did not care for lieutenancies.

“You’ll only be collared,” he cried, as he shut the gate. “Parsons and Orrin are no good in a row. You’ll be collared sure as a gun, De Vitré.”

“Oh, you’re a beastly funk!” The speaker was already hidden by the fog.

“Hang it all,” said McTurk. “It’s about the first time we’ve ever tried a cattle-lift at the Coll. Let’s——”

“Not much,” said Corkran firmly; “keep your eye on your Uncle.” His word was law in these matters, for experience had taught them that if they manœuvred without Corkran they fell into trouble.

“You’re wrathy because you didn’t think of it first,” said Beetle. Corkran kicked him thrice calmly, neither he nor Beetle changing a muscle the while.

“No, I ain’t; but it isn’t stalky enough for me.”

“Stalky,” in their school vocabulary, meant clever, well-considered and wily, as applied to plans of action; and “stalkiness “was the one virtue Corkran toiled after.

“’Same thing,” said McTurk. “You think you’re the only stalky chap in the Coll.”

Corkran kicked him as he had kicked Beetle; and even as Beetle, McTurk took not the faintest notice. By the etiquette of their friendship, this was no more than a formal notice of dissent from a proposition.

“They haven’t thrown out any pickets,” Corkran went on (that school prepared boys for the Army). “You ought to do that—even for apples. Toowey’s farmyard may be full of farmchaps.”

“’Twasn’t last week,” said Beetle, “when we smoked in that cart-shed place. It’s a mile from any house, too.”

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Up went one of Corkran’s light eyebrows. “Oh, Beetle, I am so tired o’ kickin’ you! Does that mean it’s empty now? They ought to have sent a fellow ahead to look. They’re simply bound to be collared. An’ where’ll they bunk to if they have to run for it? Parsons has only been here two terms. He don’t know the lie of the country. Orrin’s a fat ass, an’ Howlett bunks from a guv’nor” [vernacular for any native of Devon engaged in agricultural pursuits] “as far as he can see one. De Vitré’s the only decent chap in the lot, an’—an.’ I put him up to usin’ Toowey’s farmyard.”

“Well, keep your hair on,” said Beetle. “What are we going to do? It’s hefty damp here.”

“Let’s think a bit.” Corkran whistled between his teeth and presently broke into a swift, short double-shuffle. “We’ll go straight up the hill and see what happens to ’em. Cut across the fields; an’ we’ll lie up in the hedge where the lane comes in by the barn—where we found that dead hedgehog last term. Come on!”

He scrambled over the earth bank and dropped on to the rain-soaked plough. It was a steep slope to the brow of the hill where Toowey’s barns stood. The boys took no account of stiles or footpaths, crossing field after field diagonally, and where they found a hedge, bursting through it like beagles. The lane lay on their right flank, and they heard much lowing and shouting in that direction.

“Well, if De Vitré isn’t collared,” said McTurk, kicking off a few pounds of loam against a gate-post, “he jolly well ought to be.”

“We’ll get collared, too, if you go on with your nose up like that. Duck, you ass, and stalk along under the hedge. We can get quite close up to the barn,” said Corkran. “There’s no sense in not doin’ a thing stalkily while you’re about it.”

They wriggled into the top of an old hollow double hedge less than thirty yards from the big black-timbered barn with its square outbuildings. Their ten-minutes’ climb had lifted them a couple of hundred feet above the Burrows. As the mists parted here and there, they could see its great triangle of sodden green, tipped with yellow sand-dunes and fringed with white foam, laid out like a blurred map below. The surge along the Pebble Ridge made a background to the wild noises in the lane.

“What did I tell you?” said Corkran, peering through the stems of the quickset which commanded a view of the farmyard. “Three farm-chaps—getting out dung—with pitchforks. It’s too late to head off De Vitré. We’d be collared if we showed up. Besides, they’ve heard ’em. They couldn’t help hearing. What asses!”

The natives, brandishing their weapons, talked together, using many times the word “Colleger.” As the tumult swelled, they disappeared into various pens and byres. The first of the cattle trotted up to the yard-gate, and De Vitré felicitated his band.

“That’s all right,” he shouted. “Oh, won’t old Vidley be wild! Open the gate, Orrin, an’ whack ’em through. They’re pretty warm.”

“So’ll you be in a minute,” muttered McTurk as the raiders hurried into the yard behind the cattle. They heard a shout of triumph, shrill yells of despair; saw one Devonian guarding the gate with a pitchfork, while the others, alas! captured all four boys.

“Of all the infernal, idiotic, lower-second asses!” said Corkran. “They haven’t even taken off their house-caps.” These dainty confections of primary colours were not issued, as some believe, to encourage House-pride or esprit de corps, but for purposes of identification from afar, should the wearer break bounds or laws. That is why, in time of war, any one but an idiot wore his inside out.

“Aie! Yeou young rascals. We’ve got ’e! Whutt be doin’ to Muster Vidley’s bullocks?”

“Oh, we found ’em,” said De Vitré, who bore himself gallantly in defeat. “Would you like ’em.?”

“Found ’em! They bullocks drove like that—all heavin’ an’ penkin’ an’ hotted! Oh! Shameful. Yeou’ve nigh to killed the cows—lat alone stealin’ ’em. They sends pore boys to jail for half o’ this.”

“That’s a lie,” said Beetle to McTurk, turning on the wet grass.

“I know; but they always say it. ’Member when they collared us at the Monkey Farm that Sunday, with the apples in your topper?”

“My Aunt! They’re goin’ to lock ’em up an’ send for Vidley,” Corkran whispered, as’ one of the captors hurried downhill in the direction of Appledore, and the prisoners were led into the barn.

“But they haven’t taken their names, and numbers, anyhow,” said Corkran, who had fallen into the hands of the enemy more than once.

“But they’re bottled! Rather sickly for De Vitré,” said Beetle. “It’s one lickin’ anyhow, even if Vidley don’t hammer him. The Head’s rather hot about gate-liftin’, and poachin’, an’ all that sort of thing. He won’t care for cattle-liftin’ much.”

“It’s awfully bad for cows, too, to run ’em about in milk,” said McTurk, lifting one knee from a sodden primrose-tuft. “What’s the next move, Corky?”

“We’ll get into the old cart-shed where we smoked. It’s next to the barn. We can cut across over while they’re inside and climb in through the window.”

“S’pose we’re collared?” said Beetle, cramming his house-cap into his pocket. Caps may tumble off, so one goes into action bare-headed.

“That’s just it. They’d never dream of any more chaps walkin’ bung into the trap. Besides, we can get out through the roof if they spot us. Keep your eye on your Uncle. Come on,” said Corkran.

A swift dash carried them to a huge clump of nettles, beneath the unglazed back window of the cart-shed. Its open front, of course, gave on to the barnyard.

They scrambled through, dropped among the carts, and climbed up into the rudely boarded upper floor that they had discovered a week before when in search of retirement. It covered a half of the building and ended in darkness at the barn wall. The roof-tiles were broken and displaced. Through the chinks they commanded a clear view of the barnyard, half filled with disconsolate cattle, steaming sadly in the rain.

“You see,” said Corkran, always careful to secure his line of retreat, “if they bottle us up here, we can squeeze out between these rafters, slide down the roof, an’ bunk. They couldn’t even get out through the window. They’d have to run right round the barn. Now are you satisfied, you burbler?”

page 3

“Huh! You only said that to make quite sure yourself,” Beetle retorted.

“If the boards weren’t all loose, I’d kick you,” growled Corkran. “’No sense gettin’ into a place you can’t get out of. Shut up and listen.”

A murmur of voices reached them from the end of the attic. McTurk tiptoed thither with caution.

“Hi! It leads through into the barn. You can get through. Come along!” He fingered the boarded wall.

“What’s the other side?” said Corkran the cautious.

“Hay, you idiot.” They heard his bootheels click on wood, and he had gone.

At some time or other sheep must have been folded in the cart-shed, and an inventive farmhand, sooner than take the hay round, had displaced a board in the barn-side to thrust fodder through. It was in no sense a lawful path, but twelve inches in the square is all that any boy needs.

“Look here!” said Beetle, as they waited for McTurk’s return. The cattle are coming in out of the wet.”

A brown, hairy back showed some three feet below the half-floor, as one by one the cattle shouldered in for shelter among the carts below, filling the shed with their sweet breath.

“That blocks our way out, unless we get out by the roof, an’ that’s rather too much of a drop, unless we have to,” said Corkran. “They’re all bung in front of the window, too. What a day we’re havin’!”

“Corkran! Beetle!” McTurk’s whisper shook with delight. “You can see ’em; I’ve seen ’em. They’re in a blue funk in the barn, an’ the two clods are makin’ fun of ’em—horrid. Orrin’s, tryin’ to bribe ’em an’ Parsons is nearly blubbin’. Come an’ look! I’m in the hayloft. Get through the hole. Don’t make a row, Beetle.”

Lithely they wriggled between the displaced boards into the hay and crawled to the edge of the loft. Three years’ skirmishing against a hard and unsympathetic peasantry had taught them the elements of strategy. For tactics they looked to Corkran; but even Beetle, notoriously absentminded, held a lock of hay before his head as he crawled. There was no haste, no betraying giggle, no squeak of excitement. They had learned, by stripes, the unwisdom of these things. But the conference by a root-cutter on the barn floor was deep in its own affairs; De Vitré’s party promising, entreating, and cajoling, while the natives laughed like Inquisitors.

“Wait till Muster Vidley an’ Muster Toowey—yis, an’ the policemen come,” was their only answer. “’Tis about time to go to milkin’. What’ull us do?”

“Yeou go milk, Tom, an’ I’ll stay long o’ the young gentlemen,” said the bigger of the two, who answered to the name of Abraham. “Muster Toowey, he’m laike to charge yeou for usin’ his yard so free. Iss fai! Yeou’ll be wopped proper. ’Rackon yeou’ll be askin’ for junkets to set in this week o’ Sundays to come. But Muster Vidley, he’ll give ’ee the best leatherin’ of all.’ He’m passionful, I tal ’ee.”

Tom stumped out to milk. The barn doors closed behind him, and in the fading light a great gloom fell on all but Abraham, who discoursed eloquently on Mr. Vidley, his temper and strong arm.

Corkran turned in the hay and retreated to the attic, followed by his army.

“No good,” was his verdict. “I’m afraid it’s all up with ’em. We’d better get out.”

“Yes, but look at these beastly cows,” said McTurk, spitting on to a heifer’s back. “It’ll take us a week to shove ’em away from the window, and that brute Tom’ll hear us. He’s just across the yard, milkin’.”

“Tweak ’em, then,” said Corkran. “Hang it, I’m sorry to have to go, though. If we could get that other beast out of the barn for a minute we might make a rescue. Well, it’s no good. Tweakons!”

He drew forth a slim, well-worn home-made catapult—the “tweaker” of those days—slipped a buckshot into its supple chamois leather pouch, and pulled to the full stretch of the elastic. The others followed his example. They only wished to get the cattle out of their way, but seeing the backs so near, they deemed it their duty each to choose his bird and to let fly with all their strength.

They were not prepared in the least for what followed. Three bullocks, trying to wheel amid six close-pressed companions, not to mention three calves, several carts, and all the lumber of a general-utility shed, do not turn end-for-end without confusion. It was lucky for the boys that they stood a little back on the floor, because one horned head, tossed in pain, flung up a loose board at the edge, and it came down lancewise on an amazed back. Another victim floundered bodily across the shafts of a decrepit gig, smashing these and oversetting the wheels. That was more than enough for the nerves of the assembly. With wild bellowings and a good deal of left-and-right butting, they dashed into the barnyard, tails on end, and began a fine free fight on the midden. The last cow out hooked down an old set of harness; it flapped over one eye and trailed behind her. When a companion trod on it, which happened every few seconds, she naturally fell on her knees; and, being a Burrows cow, with the interests of her calf at heart, attacked the first passer-by. Half-awed, but wholly delighted, the boys watched the outburst. It was in full flower before they even dreamed of a second shot. Tom came out from a byre with a pitchfork, to be chased in again by the harnessed cow. A bullock floundered on the muck-heap, fell, rose and bedded himself to the belly, helpless and bellowing. The others took great interest in him.

Corkran, through the roof, scientifically “tweaked” a frisky heifer on the nose, and it is no exaggeration to say that she danced on her hind legs for half a minute.

“Abram! Oh, Abram! They’m bewitched. They’m ragin’. ’Tes the milk fever. They’ve been drove mad. Oh, Abram! They’ll horn the bullocks! They’ll horn me! Abram!!”

“Bide till I lock the door,” quoth Abraham, faithful to his trust. They heard him padlock the barn door; saw him come out with yet another pitchfork. A bullock lowered his head, Abraham ran to the nearest pig-pen, where loud squeakings told that he had disturbed the peace of a large family.

“Beetle,” snapped Corkran. “Go in an’ get those asses out. Quick! We’ll keep the cows happy.”

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A people sitting in darkness and the shadow of monumental lickings, too depressed to be angry with De Vitré, heard a voice from on high saying, “Come up here! Come on! Come up! There’s a way out.”

They shinned up the loft-stanchions without a word; found a boot-heel which they were bidden to take for guide, and squeezed desperately through a hole in darkness, to be hauled out by Corkran.

“Have you got your caps? Did you give ’em your names and numbers?”

“Yes. No.”

“That’s all right. Drop down here. Don’t stop to jaw. Over the cart—through that window, and bunk! Get out!”

De Vitré needed no more. They heard him squeak as he dropped among the nettles, and through the roof-chinks they watched four slight figures disappear into the rain. Tom and Abraham, from byre and pig-pen, exhorted the cattle to keep quiet.

“By gum!” said Beetle; “that was stalky. How did you think of it?”

“It was the only thing to do. Anybody could have seen that.”

“Hadn’t we better bunk, too, now?” said McTurk uneasily.

“Why? We’re all right. We haven’t done anything. I want to hear what old Vidley will say. Stop tweakin’, Turkey. Let ’em cool’ off. Golly! how that heifer danced! I swear I didn’t know cows could be so lively. We’re only just in time.”

“My Hat! Here’s Vidley—and Toowey,” said Beetle, as the two farmers strode into the yard.

“Gloats! oh, gloats! Fids! oh, fids! Hefty fids and gloats to us!” said Corkran.

These words, in their vocabulary, expressed the supreme of delight. “Gloats “implied more or less of personal triumph, “fids “was felicity in the abstract, and the boys were tasting both that day. Last joy of all, they had had the pleasure of Mr. Vidley’s acquaintance, albeit he did not love them. Toowey was more of a stranger; his orchards lying over-near to the public road.

Tom and Abraham together told a tale of stolen cattle maddened by overdriving; of cows sure to die in calving, and of milk that would never return; that made Mr. Vidley swear for three consecutive minutes in the speech of north Devon.

“’Tes tu bad. ‘Tes tu bad,” said Toowey, consolingly; “let’s ’ope they ’aven’t took no great ’arm. They be wonderful wild, though.”

“’Tes all well for yeou, Toowey, that sells them dom Collegers seventy quart a week.”

“Eighty,” Toowey replied, with the meek triumph of one who has underbidden his neighbour on public tender; “but that’s no odds to me. Yeou’m free to leather ’em saame as if they was yeour own sons. On my barn-floor shall ’ee leather ’em.”

“Generous old swine!” said Beetle. “De Vitré ought to have stayed for this.”

“They’m all safe an’ to rights,” said the officious Abraham, producing the key. “Rackon us’ll come in an’ hold ’em for yeou. Hey! The cows are fair ragin’ still. Us’ll have to run for it.”

The barn being next to the shed, the boys could not see that stately entry. But they heard. “Gone an’ hided in the hay. Aie! They’m proper afraid,” cried Abraham.

“Rout un out! Rout un out!” roared Vidley, rattling a stick impatiently on the root-cutter.

“Oh, my Aunt!” said Corkran, standing on one foot.

“Shut the door. Shut the door, I tal ’ee. Rackon us can find un in the dark. Us don’t want un boltin’ like rabbits under our elbows.” The big barn door closed with a clang.

“My Gum!” said Corkran, which was always his War oath in time of action. He dropped down and was gone for perhaps twenty seconds.

“And that’s all right,” he said, returning at a gentle saunter.

“Hwatt?” McTurk almost shrieked, for Corkran, in the shed below, waved a large key.

“Stalks! Frabjous Stalks! Bottled ’em! all four!” was the reply, and Beetle fell on his bosom. “Yiss. They’m so’s to say, like, locked up. If you’re goin’ to laugh, Beetle, I shall have to kick you again.”

“But I must!” Beetle was blackening with suppressed mirth.

“You won’t do it. here, then.” He thrust the already limp. Beetle through the cart shed window. It sobered him; one cannot laugh on a bed of nettles. Then Corkran stepped on his prostrate carcass, and McTurk followed, just as Beetle would have risen; so he was upset, and the nettles painted on his cheek a likeness of hideous eruptions.

“’Thought that ’ud cure you,” said Corkran, with a sniff.

Beetle rubbed his face desperately with dockleaves, and said nothing. All desire to laugh had gone from him. They entered the lane.

Then a clamour broke from the barn—a compound noise of horse-like kicks, shaking of doorpanels, and various yells.

“They’ve found it out,” said Corkran. “How strange!” He sniffed again.

“Let ’em,” said Beetle. “No one can hear ’em. Come on up to Coll.”

“What a brute you are, Beetle! You only think of your beastly self. Those cows want milkin’. Poor dears! Hear ’em low,” said McTurk.

“Go back and milk ’em yourself, then.” Beetle danced with pain. “We shall miss Callover, hangin’ about like this; an’ I’ve got two black marks this week already.”

“Then you’ll have fatigue-drill on Monday,” said Corkran. “‘Come to think of it, I’ve got two black marks aussi. Hm! This is serious. This is hefty serious.”

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“I told you,” said Beetle, with vindictive triumph. “An’ we want to go out after that hawk’s nest on Monday. We shall be swottin’ dum-bells, though. All your fault. If we’d bunked with De Vitré at first——”

Corkran paused between the hedgerows. “Hold on a shake an’ don’t burble. Keep your eye on Uncle. Do you know, I believe some one’s shut up in that barn. I think we ought to go and see.”

“Don’t be a giddy idiot. Come on up to Coll.” But Corkran took no notice of Beetle.

He retraced his steps to the head of the lane, and, lifting up his voice, cried as in bewilderment, “Hullo? Who’s there? What’s that row about? Who are you?”

“Oh, Peter!” said Beetle, skipping, and forgetting his anguish in this new development.

“Hoi! Hoi! ’Ere! Let us out!” The answers came muffled and hollow from the black bulk of the barn, with renewed thunders on the door.

“Now play up,” said Corkran. “Turkey, you keep the cows busy. ’Member that we’ve just discovered ’em. We don’t know anything. Be polite, Beetle.”

They picked their way over the muck and held speech through a crack by the door-hinge. Three more genuinely surprised boys the steady rain never fell upon. And they were so difficult to enlighten. They had to be told again and again by the captives within.

“We’ve been ’ere for hours an’ hours.” That was Toowey. “An’ the cows to milk, an’ all.” That was Vidley. “The door she blewed against us an’ jammed herself.” That was Abraham.

“Yes, we can see that. It’s jammed on this side,” said Corkran. “How careless you chaps are!”

“Oppen un. Oppen un. Bash her oppen with a rock, young gen’elmen! The cows are milkheated an’ ragin’. Haven’t you boys no sense?”

Seeing that McTurk from time to time tweaked the cattle into renewed caperings, it was quite possible that the boys had some knowledge of a sort. But Mr. Vidley was rude. They told him so through the door, professing only now to recognize his voice.

“Humour un if ’e can. I paid seven-an’-six for the padlock,” said Toowey. “Niver mind him. ’Tes only old Vidley.”

“Be yeou gwaine to stay a prisoneer an’ captive for the sake of a lock, Toowey? I’m shaamed of ’ee. Rowt un oppen, young gen’elmen! ’Twas a God’s own mercy yeou heard us, Toowey, yeou’m a borned miser.”

“It’ll be a long job,” said Corkran. “Look here. It’s near our call-over. If we stay to help you we’ll miss it. We’ve come miles out of our way already—after you.”

“Tell yeour master, then, what keeped ’ee—an arrand o’ mercy, laike. I’ll tal un to when I bring the milk to-morrow,” said Toowey.

“That’s no good,” said Corkran; “we may be licked twice over by then. You’ll have to give us a letter.” McTurk, backed against the barnwall, was firing steadily and accurately into the brown of the herd.

“Yiss, yiss. Come down to my house. My missus shall write ’ee a beauty, young gen’elmen. She makes out the bills. I’ll give ’ee just such a letter o’ racommendation as I’d give to my own son, if only yeou can humour the lock!”

“Niver mind the lock,” Vidley wailed. “Let me get to me pore cows, ’fore they’m dead.”

They went to work with ostentatious rattlings and wrenchings, and a good deal of the by-play that Corkran always loved. At last—the noise of unlocking was covered by some fancy hammering with a young boulder—the door swung open and the captives marched out.

“Hurry up, Mister Toowey,” said Corkran; “we ought to be getting back. Will you give us that note, please?”

“Some of yeou young gentlemen was drivin’ my cattle off the Burrowses,” said Vidley. “I give ’ee fair warnin’, I’ll tell yeour masters. I know yeou!” He glared at Corkran with malignant recognition.

McTurk looked him over from head to foot. “Oh, it’s only old Vidley. Drunk again, I suppose. Well, we can’t help that. Come on, Mister Toowey. We’ll go to your house.”

“Drunk, am I? I’ll drunk ’ee! How do I know yeou bain’t the same lot? Abram!, did ’ee take their names an’ numbers?”

“What is he ravin’ about?” said Beetle. “Can’t you see that if we’d taken your beastly cattle we shouldn’t be hanging round your beastly barn. ’Pon my Sam, you Burrows guv’nors haven’t any sense——”

“Let alone gratitude,” said Corkran. “I suppose he was drunk, Mister Toowey; an’ you locked him in the barn to get sober. Shockin’! Oh, shockin’!”

Vidley denied the charge in language that the boys’ mothers would have wept to hear.

“Well, go and look after your cows, then,” said McTurk. “Don’t stand there cursin’ us because we’ve been kind enough to help you out of a scrape. Why on earth weren’t your cows milked before? You’re no farmer. It’s long past milkin’. No wonder they’re half crazy. ’Disreputable old bog-trotter, you are. Brush your hair, sir. . . . I beg your pardon, Mister Toowey. ’Hope we’re not keeping you.”

They left Vidley dancing on the muck-heap, amid the cows, and devoted themselves to propitiating Mr. Toowey on their way to his house. Exercise had made them hungry; hunger is the mother of good manners; and they won golden opinions from Mrs. Toowey.

. . . . .

“Three-quarters of an hour late for Call-over, and fifteen minutes late for Lock-up,” said Foxy, the school Sergeant, crisply. He was waiting for them at the head of the corridor. “Report to your housemaster, please—an’ a nice mess you’re in, young gentlemen.”

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“Quite right, Foxy. Strict attention to dooty does it,” said Corkran. “Now where, if we asked you, would you say that his honour Mister Prout might, at this moment of time, be found prouting—eh?”

“In ‘is study—as usual, Mister Corkran. He took Call-over.”

“Hurrah! Luck’s with us all the way. Don’t blub, Foxy. I’m afraid you don’t catch us this time.”

. . . . .

“We went up to change, sir, before comin’ to you. That made us a little late, sir. We weren’t really very late. We were detained—by a——”

“An errand of mercy,” said Beetle, and they laid Mrs. Toowey’s laboriously written note before him. “We thought you’d prefer a letter, sir. Toowey got himself locked into a barn, and we heard him shouting—it’s Toowey who brings the Coll. milk, sir—and we went to let him out.”

“There were ever so many cows waiting to be milked,” said McTurk; “and of course, he couldn’t get at them, sir. They said the door had jammed. There’s his note, sir.”

Mr. Prout read it over thrice. It was perfectly unimpeachable; but it said nothing of a large tea supplied by Mrs. Toowey.

“Well, I don’t like your getting mixed up with farmers and potwallopers. Of course you will not pay any more—er—visits to the Tooweys,” said he.

“Of course not, sir. It was really on account of the cows, sir,” replied McTurk, glowing with philanthropy.

“And you came straight back?”

“We ran nearly all the way from the Cattle-gate,” said Corkran, carefully developing the unessential. “That’s one mile, sir. Of course, we had to get the note from Toowey first.”

“But it was because we went to change—we were rather wet, sir—that we were really late. After we’d reported ourselves to the Sergeant, sir, and he knew we were in Coll., we didn’t like to come to your study all dirty.” Sweeter than honey was the voice of Beetle.

“Very good. Don’t let it happen again.” Their housemaster learned to know them better in later years.

They entered—not to say swaggered—into Number Nine form-room, where De Vitré, Orrin, Parsons, and Howlett, before the fire, were still telling their adventures to admiring associates. The four rose as one boy.

“What happened to you? We just saved Call-over. Did you stay on? Tell us! Tell us!”

The three smiled pensively. They were not distinguished for telling more than was necessary.

“Oh, we stayed on a bit and then we came away,” said McTurk. “That’s all.”

“You scab! You might tell a chap anyhow.”

“’Think so? Well, that’s awfully good of you, De Vitré. ’Pon my sainted Sam, that’s awfully good of you,” said Corkran, shouldering into the centre of the warmth and toasting one slippered foot before the blaze. “So you really think we might tell you?”

They stared at the coals and shook with deep, delicious chuckles.

“My Hat! We were stalky,” said McTurk. “I swear we were about as stalky as they make ’em. Weren’t we?”

“It was a frabjous Stalk,” said Beetle. “’Much too good to tell you brutes, though.”

The form wriggled under the insult, but made no motion to avenge it. After all, on De Vitré’s showing, the three had saved the raiders from at least a public licking.

“It wasn’t half bad,” said Corkran. “Stalky is the word.”

“You were the really stalky one,” said McTurk, one contemptuous shoulder turned to a listening world. “By Gum! you were stalky.”

Corkran accepted the compliment and the name together. “Yes,” said he; “keep your eye on your Uncle Stalky an’ he’ll pull you through.”

“Well, you needn’t gloat so,” said De Vitré, viciously; “you look like a stuffed cat.”

Corkran, henceforth known as Stalky, took not the slightest notice, but smiled dreamily.

“My Hat! Yes. Of course,” he murmured. “Your Uncle Stalky—a doocid good name. Your Uncle Stalky is no end of a stalker. He’s a Great Man. I swear he is. De Vitré, you’re an ass—a putrid ass.”

De Vitré would have denied this but for the assenting murmurs from Parsons and Orrin.

“You needn’t rub it in, then.”

“But I do. I does. You are such a woppin’ ass. D’you know it? Think over it a bit at prep. Think it up in bed. Oblige me by thinkin’ of it every half hour till further notice. Gummy! What an ass you are! But your Uncle Stalky”—he picked up the form-room poker and beat it against the mantelpiece—“is a Great Man!”

“Hear, hear,” said Beetle and McTurk, who had fought under that general.

“Isn’t your Uncle Stalky a great man, De Vitré? Speak the truth, you fat-headed old impostor.”

“Yes,” said De Vitré, deserted by all his band. “I—I suppose he is.”

“’Mustn’t suppose. Is he?”

“Well, he is.”

“A Great Man?”

“A Great Man. Now won’t you tell us?” said De Vitré pleadingly.

“Not by a heap,” said “Stalky” Corkran.

Therefore the tale has stayed untold till to-day.

The Spring Running

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Man goes to Man! Cry the challenge through the Jungle!
He that was our Brother goes away.
Hear, now, and judge, O ye People of the Jungle,—
Answer, who shall turn him—who shall stay? 

Man goes to Man! He is weeping in the jungle:
He that was our Brother sorrows sore!
Man goes to Man! (Oh, we loved him in the jungle!)
To the Man-Trail where we may not follow more.

THE second year after the great fight with Red Dog and the death of Akela, Mowgli must have been nearly seventeen years old. He looked older, for hard exercise, the best of good eating, and baths whenever he felt in the least hot or dusty, had given him strength and growth far beyond his age. He could swing by one hand from a top branch for half an hour at a time, when he
had occasion to look along the tree-roads. He could stop a young buck in mid-gallop and throw him sideways by the head. He could even jerk over the big, blue wild boars that lived in the Marshes of the North. The Jungle People who used to fear him for his wits feared him now for his strength, and when he moved quietly on his own affairs the mere whisper of his coming cleared the wood-paths. And yet the look in his eyes was always gentle. Even when he fought, his eyes never blazed as Bagheera’s did. They only grew more and more interested and excited; and that was one of the things that Bagheera himself did not understand.

He asked Mowgli about it, and the boy laughed and said: ‘When I miss the kill I am angry. When I must go empty for two days I am very angry. Do not my eyes talk then?’

‘The mouth is hungry,’ said Bagheera, ‘but the eyes say nothing. Hunting, eating, or swimming, it is all one—like a stone in wet or dry weather.’ Mowgli looked at him lazily from under his long eyelashes, and, as usual, the panther’s head dropped. Bagheera knew his master.

They were lying out far up the side of a hill overlooking the Waingunga, and the morning mists hung below them in bands of white and green. As the sun rose it changed into bubbling seas of red gold, churned off, and let the low rays stripe the dried grass on which Mowgli and Bagheera were resting. It was the end of the cold weather, the leaves and the trees looked worn and faded, and there was a dry, ticking rustle everywhere when the wind blew. A little leaf tap-tap-tapped furiously against a twig, as a single leaf caught in a current will. It roused Bagheera, for he snuffed the morning air with a deep, hollow cough, threw himself on his back, and struck with his fore-paws at the nodding leaf above.

‘The year turns,’ he said. ‘The Jungle goes forward. The Time of New Talk is near. That leaf knows. It is very good.’

‘The grass is dry,’ Mowgli answered, pulling up a tuft. ‘Even Eye-of-the-Spring [that is a little trumpet-shaped, waxy red flower that runs in and out among the grasses]—even Eye-of-the Spring is shut, and . . . Bagheera, is it well for the Black Panther so to lie on his back and beat with his paws in the air, as though he were the tree-cat?’

‘Aowh?’ said Bagheera. He seemed to be thinking of other things.

‘I say, is it well for the Black Panther so to mouth and cough, and howl and roll? Remember, we be the Masters of the Jungle, thou and I’

‘Indeed, yes; I hear, Man-cub.’ Bagheera rolled over hurriedly and sat up, the dust on his ragged black flanks. (He was just casting his winter coat.) ‘We be surely the Masters of the Jungle! Who is so strong as Mowgli? Who so wise?’ There was a curious drawl in the voice that made Mowgli turn to see whether by any chance the Black Panther were making fun of him, for the Jungle is full of words that sound like one thing, but mean another. ‘I said we be beyond question the Masters of the Jungle,’ Bagheera repeated. ‘Have I done wrong? I did not know that the Man-cub no longer lay upon the ground. Does he fly, then?’

Mowgli sat with his elbows on his knees, looking out across the valley at the daylight. Somewhere down in the woods below a bird was trying over in a husky, reedy voice the first few notes of his spring song. It was no more than a shadow of the liquid, tumbling call he would be pouring later, but Bagheera heard it.

‘I said the Time of New Talk is near,’ growled the panther, switching his tail.

‘I hear,’ Mowgli answered. ‘Bagheera, why dost thou shake all over? The sun is warm.’

‘That is Ferao, the scarlet woodpecker,’ said Bagheera. ‘He has not forgotten. Now I, too, must remember my song,’ and he began purring and crooning to himself, harking back dissatisfied again and again.

‘There is no game afoot,’ said Mowgli.

‘Little Brother, are both thine ears stopped? That is no killing-word, but my song that I make ready against the need.’

‘I had forgotten. I shall know when the Time of New Talk is here, because then thou and the others all run away and leave me alone.’ Mowgli spoke rather savagely.

‘But, indeed, Little Brother,’ Bagheera began, ‘we do not always——’

‘I say ye do,’ said Mowgli, shooting out his forefinger angrily. ‘Ye do run away, and I, who am the Master of the Jungle, must needs walk alone. How was it last season, when I would gather sugar-cane from the fields of a Man-Pack? I sent a runner—I sent thee!—to Hathi, bidding him to come upon such a night and pluck the sweet grass for me with his trunk.’

‘He came only two nights later,’ said Bagheera, cowering a little; ‘and of that long, sweet grass that pleased thee so he gathered more than any Man-cub could eat in all the nights of the Rains. That was no fault of mine.’

‘He did not come upon the night when I sent him the word. No, he was trumpeting and running and roaring through the valleys in the moonlight. His trail was like the trail of three elephants, for he would not hide among the trees. He danced in the moonlight before the houses of the Man-Pack. I saw him, and yet he would not come to me; and I am the Master of the Jungle!’

‘It was the Time of New Talk,’ said the panther, always very humble. ‘Perhaps, Little Brother, thou didst not that time call him by a Master-word? Listen to Ferao, and be glad!’

Mowgli’s bad temper seemed to have boiled itself away. He lay back with his head on his arms, his eyes shut. ‘I do not know—nor do I care,’ he said sleepily. ‘Let us sleep, Bagheera. My stomach is heavy in me. Make me a rest for my head.’

The panther lay down again with a sigh, because he could hear Ferao practising and repractising his song against the Springtime of New Talk, as they say.

In an Indian Jungle the seasons slide one into the other almost without division. There seem to be only two—the wet and the dry; but if you look closely below the torrents of rain and the clouds of char and dust you will find all four going round in their regular ring. Spring is the most wonderful, because she has not to cover a clean, bare field with new leaves and flowers, but to drive before her and to put away the hanging-on, over-surviving raffle of half-green things which the gentle winter has suffered to live, and to make the partly-dressed stale earth feel new and young once more. And this she does so well that there is no spring in the world like the Jungle spring.

There is one day when all things are tired, and the very smells, as they drift on the heavy air, are old and used. One cannot explain this, but it feels so. Then there is another day—to the eye nothing whatever has changed—when all the smells are new and delightful, and the whiskers of the Jungle People quiver to their roots, and the winter hair comes away from their sides in long, draggled locks. Then, perhaps, a little rain falls, and all the trees and the bushes and the bamboos and the mosses and the juicy-leaved plants wake with a noise of growing that you can almost hear, and under this noise runs, day and night, a deep hum. That is the noise of the spring—a vibrating boom which is neither bees, nor falling water, nor the wind in tree-tops, but the purring of the warm, happy world.

Up to this year Mowgli had always delighted in the turn of the seasons. It was he who generally saw the first Eye-of-the-Spring deep down among the grasses, and the first bank of spring clouds, which are like nothing else in the Jungle. His voice could be heard in all sorts of wet, star-lighted, blossoming places, helping the big frogs through their choruses, or mocking the little upside-down owls that hoot through the white nights. Like all his people, spring was the season he chose for his flittings—moving, for the mere joy of rushing through the warm air, thirty, forty, or fifty miles between twilight and the morning star, and coming back panting and laughing and wreathed with strange flowers. The Four did not follow him on these wild ringings of the Jungle, but went off to sing songs with other wolves. The Jungle People are very busy in the spring, and Mowgli could hear them grunting and screaming and whistling according to their kind. Their voices then are different from their voices at other times of the year, and that is one of the reasons why spring in the Jungle is called the Time of New Talk.

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But that spring, as he told Bagheera, his stomach was changed in him. Ever since the bamboo shoots turned spotty-brown he had been looking forward to the morning when the smells should change. But when the morning came, and Mor the Peacock, blazing in bronze and blue and gold, cried it aloud all along the misty woods, and Mowgli opened his mouth to send on the cry, the words choked between his teeth, and a feeling came over him that began at his toes and ended in his hair—a feeling of pure unhappiness, so that he looked himself over to be sure that he had not trod on a thorn. Mor cried the new smells, the other birds took it over, and from the rocks by the Waingunga he heard Bagheera’s hoarse scream—something between the scream of an eagle and the neighing of a horse. There was a yelling and scattering of Bandar-log in the new-budding branches above, and there stood Mowgli, his chest, filled to answer Mor, sinking in little gasps as the breath was driven out of it by this unhappiness.

He stared all round him, but he could see no more than the mocking Bandar-log scudding through the trees, and Mor, his tail spread in full splendour, dancing on the slopes below.

‘The smells have changed,’ screamed Mor. ‘Good hunting, Little Brother! Where is thy answer?’

‘Little Brother, good hunting.!’ whistled Chil the Kite and his mate, swooping down together. The two baffed under Mowgli’s nose so close that a pinch of downy white feathers brushed away.

A light spring rain—elephant-rain they call it—drove across the Jungle in a belt half a mile wide, left the new leaves wet and nodding behind, and died out in a double rainbow and a light roll of thunder. The spring hum broke out for a minute, and was silent, but all the Jungle Folk seemed to be giving tongue at once. All except Mowgli.

‘I have eaten good food,’ he said to himself. ‘I have drunk good water. Nor does my throat burn and grow small, as it did when I bit the blue-spotted root that Oo the Turtle said was clean food. But my stomach is heavy, and I have given very bad talk to Bagheera and others, people of the Jungle and my people. Now, too, I am hot and now I am cold, and now I am neither hot nor cold, but angry with that which I cannot see. Huhu! It is time to make a running! To-night I will cross the ranges; yes, I will make a spring running to the Marshes of the North, and back again. I have hunted too easily too long. The Four shall come with me, for they grow as fat as white grubs.’

He called, but never one of the Four answered. They were far beyond earshot, singing over the spring songs—the Moon and Sambhur Songs—with the wolves of the Pack; for in the spring-time the Jungle People make very little difference between the day and the night. He gave the sharp, barking note, but his only answer was the mocking maiou of the little spotted tree-cat winding in and out among the branches for early birds’ nests. At this he shook all over with rage and half drew his knife. Then he became very haughty, though there was no one to see him, and stalked severely down the hillside, chin up and eyebrows down. But never a single one of his people asked him a question, for they were all too busy with their own affairs.

‘Yes,’ said Mowgli to himself, though in his heart he knew that he had no reason. ‘Let the Red Dhole come from the Dekkan, or the Red Flower dance among the bamboos, and all the Jungle runs whining to Mowgli, calling him great elephant-names. But now, because Eye-of-the-Spring is red, and Mor, forsooth, must show his naked legs in some spring dance, the Jungle goes mad as Tabaqui . . … By the Bull that bought me! am I the Master of the Jungle, or am I not? Be silent! What do ye here?’

A couple of young wolves of the Pack were cantering down a path, looking for open ground in which to fight. (You will remember that the Law of the Jungle forbids fighting where the Pack can see.) Their neck-bristles were as stiff as wire, and they bayed furiously, crouching for the first grapple. Mowgli leaped forward, caught one outstretched throat in either hand, expecting to fling the creatures backward as he had often done in games or Pack hunts. But he had never before interfered with a spring fight. The two leaped forward and dashed him aside, and without word to waste rolled over and over close locked.

Mowgli was on his feet almost before he fell, his knife and his white teeth were bared, and at that minute he would have killed both for no reason but that they were fighting when he wished them to be quiet, although every wolf has full right under the Law to fight. He danced round them with lowered shoulders and quivering hand, ready to send in a double blow when the first flurry of the scuffle should be over; but while he waited the strength seemed to ebb from his body, the knife-point lowered, and he sheathed the knife and watched.

‘I have surely eaten poison,’ he sighed at last. ‘Since I broke up the Council with the Red Flower—since I killed Shere Khan—none of the Pack could fling me aside. And these be only tail-wolves in the Pack, little hunters! My strength is gone from me, and presently I shall die. Oh, Mowgli, why dost thou not kill them both?’

The fight went on till one wolf ran away, and Mowgli was left alone on the torn and bloody ground, looking now at his knife, and now at his legs and arms, while the feeling of unhappiness he had never known before covered him as water covers a log.

He killed early that evening and ate but little, so as to be in good fettle for his spring running, and he ate alone because all the Jungle People were away singing or fighting. It was a perfect white night, as they call it. All green things seemed to have made a month’s growth since the morning. The branch that was yellow-leaved the day before dripped sap when Mowgli broke it. The mosses curled deep and warm over his feet, the young grass had no cutting edges, and all the voices of the Jungle boomed like one deep harpstring touched by the moon—the Moon of New Talk, who splashed her light full on rock and pool, slipped it between trunk and creeper, and sifted it through a million leaves. Forgetting his unhappiness, Mowgli sang aloud with pure delight as he settled into his stride. It was more like flying than anything else, for he had chosen the long downward slope that leads to the Northern Marshes through the heart of the main Jungle, where the springy ground deadened the fall of his feet. A man-taught man would have picked his way with many stumbles through the cheating moonlight, but Mowgli’s muscles, trained by years of experience, bore him up as though he were a feather. When a rotten log or a hidden stone turned under his foot he saved himself, never checking his pace, without effort and without thought. When he tired of ground-going he threw up his hands monkey-fashion to the nearest creeper, and seemed to float rather than to climb up into the thin branches, whence he would follow a tree-road till his mood changed, and he shot downward in a long, leafy curve to the levels again. There were still, hot hollows surrounded by wet rocks where he could hardly breathe for the heavy scents of the night flowers and the bloom along the creeper buds; dark avenues where the moonlight lay in belts as regular as checkered marbles in a church aisle; thickets where the wet young growth stood breast-high about him and threw its arms round his waist; and hilltops crowned with broken rock, where he leaped from stone to stone above the lairs of the frightened little foxes. He would hear, very faint and far off, the chug-drug of a boar sharpening his tusks on a bole; and would come across the great gray brute all alone, scribing and rending the bark of a tall tree, his mouth dripping with foam, and his eyes blazing like fire. Or he would turn aside to the sound of clashing horns and hissing grunts, and dash past a couple of furious sambhur, staggering to and fro with lowered heads, striped with blood that showed black in the moonlight. Or at some rushing ford he would hear Jacala the Crocodile bellowing like a bull, or disturb a twined knot of the Poison People, but before they could strike he would be away and across the glistening shingle, and deep in the Jungle again.

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So he ran, sometimes shouting, sometimes singing to himself, the happiest thing in all the jungle that night, till the smell of the flowers warned him that he was near the marshes, and those lay far beyond his farthest hunting-grounds.

Here, again, a man-trained man would have sunk overhead in three strides, but Mowgli’s feet had eyes in them, and they passed him from tussock to tussock and clump to quaking clump without asking help from the eyes in his head. He ran out to the middle of the swamp, disturbing the duck as he ran, and sat down on a moss-coated tree-trunk lapped in the black water. The marsh was awake all round him, for in the spring the Bird People sleep very lightly; and companies of them were coming or going the night through. But no one took any notice of Mowgli sitting among the tall reeds humming songs without words, and looking at the soles of his hard brown feet in case of neglected thorns. All his unhappiness seemed to have been left behind in his own jungle, and he was just beginning a full-throat song when it came back again—ten times worse than before.

This time Mowgli was frightened. ‘It is here also!’ he said half aloud. ‘It has followed me,’ and he looked over his shoulder to see whether the It were not standing behind him. ‘There is no one here.’ The night noises of the marsh went on, but never a bird or beast spoke to him, and the new feeling of misery grew.

‘I have surely eaten poison,’ he said in an awestricken voice. ‘It must be that carelessly I have eaten poison, and my strength is going from me. I was afraid—and yet it was not I that was afraid—Mowgli was afraid when the two wolves fought. Akela, or even Phao, would have silenced them; yet Mowgli was afraid. That is true sign I have eaten poison . . . . But what do they care in the jungle? They sing and howl and fight, and run in companies under the moon, and I—Hai-mai!—I am dying in the marshes, of that poison which I have eaten.’ He was so sorry for himself that he nearly wept. ‘And after,’ he went on, ‘they will find me lying in the black water. Nay, I will go back to my own Jungle, and I will die upon the Council Rock, and Bagheera, whom I love, if he is not screaming in the valley—Bagheera, perhaps, may watch by what is left for a little, lest Chil use me as he used Akela.’

A large, warm tear splashed down on his knee, and, miserable as he was, Mowgli felt happy that he was so miserable, if you can understand that upside-down sort of happiness. ‘As Chil the Kite used Akela,’ he repeated, ‘on the night I saved the Pack from Red Dog.’ He was quiet for a little, thinking of the last words of the Lone Wolf, which you, of course, remember. ‘Now Akela said to me many foolish things before he died, for when we die our stomachs change. He said . . . None the less, I am of the Jungle!’

In his excitement, as he remembered the fight on Waingunga bank, he shouted the last words aloud, and a wild buffalocow among the reeds sprang to her knees, snorting, ‘Man!’

‘Uhh!’ said Mysa the Wild Buffalo (Mowgli could hear him turn in his wallow), ‘that is no man. It is only the hairless wolf of the Seeonee Pack. On such nights runs he to and fro.’

‘Uhh!’ said the cow, dropping her head again to graze, ‘I thought it was Man.’

‘I say no. Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?’ lowed Mysa.

‘Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?’ the boy called back mockingly. ‘That is all Mysa thinks for: Is it danger? But for Mowgli, who goes to and fro in the Jungle by night, watching, what do ye care?’

‘How loud he cries!’ said the cow.

‘Thus do they cry,’ Mysa answered contemptuously, ‘who, having torn up the grass, know not how to eat it.’

‘For less than this,’ Mowgli groaned to himself,—‘for less than this even last Rains I had pricked Mysa out of his wallow, and ridden him through the swamp on a rush halter.’ He stretched a hand to break one of the feathery reeds, but drew it back with a sigh. Mysa went on steadily chewing the cud, and the long grass ripped where the cow grazed. ‘I will not die here,’ he said angrily. ‘Mysa, who is of one blood with Jacala and the pig, would see me. Let us go beyond the swamp and see what comes. Never have I run such a spring running—hot and cold together. Up, Mowgli!’

He could not resist the temptation of stealing across the reeds to Mysa and pricking him with the point of his knife. The great dripping bull broke out of his wallow like a shell exploding, while Mowgli laughed till he sat down.

‘Say now that the hairless wolf of the Seeonee Pack once herded thee, Mysa,’ he called.

‘Wolf! Thou?’ the bull snorted, stamping in the mud. ‘All the Jungle knows thou wast a herder of tame cattle—such a man’s brat as shouts in the dust by the crops yonder. Thou of the Jungle! What hunter would have crawled like a snake among the leeches, and for a muddy jest—a jackal’s jest—have shamed me before my cow? Come to firm ground, and I will—I will . . .’ Mysa frothed at the mouth, for Mysa has nearly the worst temper of any one in the Jungle.

Mowgli watched him puff and blow with eyes that never changed. When he could make himself heard through the pattering mud, he said
‘What Man-Pack lair here by the marshes, Mysa? This is new Jungle to me.’

‘Go north, then,’ roared the angry bull, for Mowgli had pricked him rather sharply. ‘It was a naked cow-herd’s jest. Go and tell them at the village at the foot of the marsh.’

‘The Man-Pack do not love jungle-tales, nor do I think, Mysa, that a scratch more or less on thy hide is any matter for a council. But I will go and look at this village. Yes, I will go. Softly now. It is not every night that the Master of the Jungle comes to herd thee.’

He stepped out to the shivering ground on the edge of the marsh, well knowing that Mysa would never charge over it, and laughed, as he ran, to think of the bull’s anger.

‘My strength is not altogether gone,’ he said. ‘It may be that the poison is not to the bone. There is a star sitting low yonder.’ He looked at it between his half-shut hands. ‘By the Bull that bought me, it is the Red Flower—the Red Flower that I lay beside before—before I came even to the first Seeonee Pack! Now that I have seen, I will finish the running.’

The marsh ended in a broad plain where a light twinkled. It was a long time since Mowgli had concerned himself with the doings of men, but this night the glimmer of the Red Flower drew him forward.

‘I will look,’ said he, ‘as I did in the old days, and I will see how far the Man-Pack has changed.’

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Forgetting that he was no longer in his own jungle, where he could do what he pleased, he trod carelessly through the dew-loaded grasses till he came to the hut where the light stood. Three or four yelping dogs gave tongue, for he was on the outskirts of a village.

‘Ho!’ said Mowgli, sitting down noiselessly, after sending back a deep wolf-growl that silenced the curs. ‘What comes will come. Mowgli, what hast thou to do any more with the lairs of the Man-Pack?’ He rubbed his mouth, remembering where a stone had struck it years ago when the other Man-Pack had cast him out.

The door of the hut opened; and a woman stood peering out into the darkness. A child cried, and the woman said over her shoulder, ‘Sleep. It was but a jackal that waked the dogs. In a little time morning comes.’

Mowgli in the grass began to shake as though he had fever. He knew that voice well, but to make sure he cried softly, surprised to find how man’s talk came back, ‘Messua! O Messua!’

‘Who calls?’ said the woman, a quiver in her voice.

‘Hast thou forgotten?’ said Mowgli. His throat was dry as he spoke.

‘If it be thou, what name did I give thee? Say!’ She had half shut the door, and her hand was clutching at her breast.

‘Nathoo! Ohé, Nathoo!’ said Mowgli, for, as you remember, that was the name Messua gave him when he first came to the Man-Pack.

‘Come, my son,’ she called, and Mowgli stepped into the light, and looked full at Messua, the woman who had been good to him, and whose life he had saved from the Man-Pack so long before. She was older, and her hair was gray, but her eyes and her voice had not changed. Woman-like, she expected to find Mowgli where she had left him, and her eyes travelled upward in a puzzled way from his chest to his head, that touched the top of the door.

‘My son,’ she stammered; and then, sinking to his feet: ‘But it is no longer my son. It is a Godling of the Woods! Ahai!’

As he stood in the red light of the oil-lamp, strong, tall, and beautiful, his long black hair sweeping over his shoulders, the knife swinging at his neck, and his head crowned with a wreath of white jasmine, he might easily have been mistaken for some wild god of a jungle legend. The child half asleep on a cot sprang up and shrieked aloud with terror. Messua turned to soothe him, while Mowgli stood still, looking in at the water jars and the cooking-pots, the grain-bin, and all the other human belongings that he found himself remembering so well.

‘What wilt thou eat or drink?’ Messua murmured. ‘This is all thine. We owe our lives to thee. But art thou him I called Nathoo, or a Godling, indeed?’

‘I am Nathoo,’ said Mowgli, ‘I am very far from my own place. I saw this light, and came hither. I did not know thou wast here.’

‘After we came to Khanhiwara,’ Messua said timidly, ‘the English would have helped us against those villagers that sought to burn us. Rememberest thou?’

‘Indeed, I have not forgotten.’

‘But when the English Law was made ready, we went to the village of those evil people, and it was no more to be found.’

‘That also I remember,’ said Mowgli, with a quiver of his nostril.

‘My man, therefore, took service in the fields, and at last—for, indeed, he was a strong man—we held a little land here. It is not so rich as the old village, but we do not need much—we two.’

‘Where is he—the man that dug in the dirt when he was afraid on that night?’

‘He is dead-a year.’

` And he ? ‘ Mowgli pointed to the child.

‘My son that was born two Rains ago. If thou art a Godling, give him the Favour of the Jungle, that he may be safe among thy—thy people, as we were safe on that night.’

She lifted up the child, who, forgetting his fright, reached out to play with the knife that hung on Mowgli’s chest, and Mowgli put the little fingers aside very carefully.

‘And if thou art Nathoo whom the tiger carried away,’ Messua went on, choking, ‘he is then thy younger brother. Give him an elder brother’s blessing.’

‘Hai-mai! What do I know of the thing called a blessing? I am neither a Godling nor his brother, and—O mother, mother, my heart is heavy in me.’ He shivered fits he set down the child.

‘Like enough,’ said Messua, bustling among the cooking-pots. ‘This comes of running about the marshes by night. Beyond question, the fever had soaked thee to the marrow.’ Mowgli smiled a little at the idea of anything in the Jungle hurting him. ‘I will make a fire, and thou shalt drink warm milk. Put away the jasmine wreath: the smell is heavy in so small a place.’

Mowgli sat down, muttering, with his face in his hands: All manner of strange feelings that he had never felt before were running over him, exactly as though he had been poisoned, and he felt dizzy and a little sick. He drank the warm milk in long gulps; Messua patting him on the shoulder from time to time, not quite sure whether he were her son Nathoo of the long ago days, or some wonderful Jungle being, but glad to feel that he was at least flesh and blood.

‘Son,’ she said at last,—her eyes were full of pride,—’have any told thee that thou art beautiful beyond all men?’

‘Hah?’ said Mowgli, for naturally he had never heard anything of the kind. Messua laughed softly and happily. The look in his face was enough for her.

‘I am the first, then? It is right, though it comes seldom, that a mother should tell her son these good things. Thou art very beautiful. Never have I looked upon such a man.’

Mowgli twisted his head and tried to see over his own hard shoulder, and Messua laughed again so long that Mowgli, not knowing why, was forced to laugh with her, and the child ran from one to the other, laughing too.

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‘Nay, thou must not mock thy brother,’ said Messua, catching him to her breast. ‘When thou art one-half as fair we will marry thee to the youngest daughter of a king, and thou shalt ride great elephants.’

Mowgli could not understand one word in three of the talk here; the warm milk was taking effect on him after his long run, so he curled up and in a minute was deep asleep, and Messua put the hair back from his eyes, threw a cloth over him, and was happy. Jungle-fashion, he slept out the rest of that night and all the next day; for his instincts, which never wholly slept, warned him there was nothing to fear. He waked at last with a bound that shook the hut, for the cloth over his face made him dream of traps; and there he stood, his hand on his knife, the sleep all heavy in his rolling eyes, ready for any fight.

Messua laughed, and set the evening meal before him. There were only a few coarse cakes baked over the smoky fire, some rice, and a lump of sour, preserved tamarinds just enough to go on with till he could get to his evening kill. The smell of the dew in the marshes made him hungry and restless. He wanted to finish his spring running, but the child insisted on sitting in his arms, and Messua would have it that his long, blue-black hair must be combed out. So she sang, as she combed, foolish little baby-songs, now calling Mowgli her son, and now begging him to give some of his jungle power to the child. The hut door was closed, but Mowgli heard a sound he knew well, and saw Messua’s jaw drop with horror as a great gray paw came under the bottom of the door, and Gray Brother outside whined a muffled and penitent whine of anxiety and fear.

‘Out and wait! Ye would not come when I called,’ said Mowgli in Jungle-talk, without turning his head, and the great gray paw disappeared.

‘Do not—do not bring thy—thy servants with thee,’ said Messua. ‘I—we have always lived at peace with the Jungle.’

‘It is peace,’ said Mowgli, rising. ‘Think of that night on the road to Khanhiwara. There were scores of such folk before thee and behind thee. But I see that even in springtime the Jungle People do not always forget. Mother, I go.’

Messua drew aside humbly—he was indeed a wood-god, she thought; but as his hand was on the door the mother in her made her throw her arms round Mowgli’s neck again and again.

‘Come back!’ she whispered. ‘Son or no son, come back, for I love thee—Look, he too grieves.’

The child was crying because the man with the shiny knife was going away.

‘Come back again,’ Messua repeated. ‘By night or by day this door is never shut to thee.’

Mowgli’s throat worked as though the cords in it were being pulled, and his voice seemed to be dragged from it as he answered, ‘I will surely come back.’

‘And now,’ he said, as he put by the head of the fawning wolf on the threshold, ‘I have a little cry against thee, Gray Brother. Why came ye not all four when I called so long ago?’

‘So long ago? It was but last night. I—we—were singing in the Jungle the new songs, for this is the Time of New Talk. Rememberest thou?’

‘Truly, truly.’

‘And as soon as the songs were sung,’ Gray Brother went on earnestly, ‘I followed thy trail. I ran from all the others and followed hot-foot. But, O Little Brother, what hast thou done, eating and sleeping with the Man-Pack?’

‘If ye had come when I called, this had never been,’ said Mowgli, running much faster.

‘And now what is to be?’ said Gray Brother.

Mowgli was going to answer when a girl in a white cloth came down some path that led from the outskirts of the village. Gray Brother dropped out of sight at once, and Mowgli backed noiselessly into a field of high-springing crops. He could almost have touched her with his hand when the warm; green stalks ,closed before his face and he disappeared like a ghost. The girl screamed, for she thought she had seen a spirit, and then she gave a deep sigh. Mowgli parted the stalks with his hands and watched her till she was out of sight.

‘And now I do not know,’ he said, sighing in his turn. ‘Why did ye not come when I called?’

‘We follow thee—we follow thee,’ Gray Brother mumbled, licking at Mowgli’s heel. ‘We follow thee always, except in the Time of the New Talk.’

‘And would ye follow me to the Man-Pack?’ Mowgli whispered.

‘Did I not follow thee on the night our old Pack cast thee out? Who waked thee lying among the crops?’

‘Ay, but again?’

‘Have I not followed thee to-night?’

‘Ay, but again and again, and it may be again, Gray Brother?’

Gray Brother was silent. When he spoke he growled to himself, ‘The Black One spoke truth.’

‘And he said?’

‘Man goes to Man at the last. Raksha, our mother, said——’

‘So also said Akela on the night of Red Dog,’ Mowgli muttered.

‘So also says Kaa, who is wiser than us all.’

‘What dost thou say, Gray Brother?’

‘They cast thee out once, with bad talk. They cut thy mouth with stones. They sent Buldeo to slay thee. They would have thrown thee into the Red Flower. Thou, and not I, hast said that they are evil and senseless. Thou, and not I—I follow my own people—didst let in the jungle upon them. Thou, and not I, didst make song against them more bitter even than our song against Red Dog.’

‘I ask thee what thou sagest?’

They were talking as they ran. Gray Brother cantered on a while without replying, and then he said,—between bound and bound as it were,—‘Man-cub—Master of the Jungle—Son of Raksha, Lair-brother to me—though I forget for a little while in the spring, thy trail is my trail, thy lair is my lair, thy kill is my kill, and thy deathfight is my death-fight. I speak for the Three. But what wilt thou say to the Jungle?’

page 6

‘That is well thought. Between the sight and the kill it is not good to wait. Go before and cry them all to the Council Rock, and I will tell them what is in my stomach. But they may not come—in the Time of New Talk they may forget me.’

‘Hast thou, then, forgotten nothing?’ snapped Gray Brother over his shoulder, as he laid him self down to gallop, and Mowgli followed, thinking.

At any other season the news would have called all the Jungle together with bristling necks, but now they were busy hunting and fighting and killing and singing. From one to another Gray Brother ran, crying, ‘The Master of the Jungle goes back to Man! Come to the Council Rock.’ And the happy, eager People only answered, ‘He will return in the summer heats. The Rains will drive him to lair. Run and sing with us, Gray Brother.’

‘But the Master of the jungle goes back to Man,’ Gray Brother would repeat.

‘Eee—Yoawa? Is the Time of New Talk any less sweet for that?’ they would reply. So when Mowgli, heavy-hearted, came up through the well-remembered rocks to the place where he had been brought into the Council, he found only the Four, Baloo, who was nearly blind with age, and the heavy, cold-blooded Kaa coiled around Akela’s empty seat.

‘Thy trail ends here, then, Manling?’ said Kaa, as Mowgli threw himself down, his face in his hands. ‘Cry thy cry. We be of one blood, thou and I—man and snake together.’

‘Why did I not die under Red Dog?’ the boy moaned. ‘My strength is gone from me, and it is not any poison. By night and by day I hear a double step upon my trail. When I turn my head it is as though one had hidden himself from me that instant. I go to look behind the trees and he is not there. I call and none cry again; but it is as though one listened and kept back the answer. I lie down, but I do not rest. I run the spring running, but I am not made still. I bathe, but I am not made cool. The kill sickens me, but I have no heart to fight except I kill. The Red Flower is in my body, my bones are water—and—I know not what I know.’

‘What need of talk?’ said Baloo slowly, turning his head to where Mowgli lay. ‘Akela by the river said it, that Mowgli should drive Mowgli back to the Man-Pack. I said it. But who listens now to Baloo? Bagheera—where is Bagheera this night?—he knows also. It is the Law.’

‘When we met at Cold Lairs, Manling, I knew it,’ said Kaa, turning a little in his mighty coils. ‘Man goes to Man at the last, though the Jungle does not cast him out.’

The Four looked at one another and at Mowgli, puzzled but obedient.

‘The Jungle does not cast me out, then?’ Mowgli stammered.

Gray Brother and the Three growled furiously, beginning, ‘So long as we live none shall dare——’ But Baloo checked them.

‘I taught thee the Law. It is for me to speak,’ he said; ‘and, though I cannot now see the rocks before me, I see far. Little Frog, take thine own trail; make thy lair with thine own blood and pack and people; but when there is need of foot or tooth or eye, or a word carried swiftly by night, remember, Master of the Jungle, the Jungle is thine at call.’

‘The Middle Jungle is thine also,’ said Kaa. ‘I speak for no small people.’

‘Hai-mai, my brothers,’ cried Mowgli, throwing up his arms with a sob. ‘I know not what I know! I would not go; but I am drawn by both feet. How shall I leave these nights?’

‘Nay, look up, Little Brother,’ Baloo repeated. ‘There is no shame in this hunting. When the honey is eaten we leave the empty hive.’

‘Having cast the skin,’ said Kaa, ‘we may not creep into it afresh. It is the Law.’

‘Listen, dearest of all to me,’ said Baloo. ‘There is neither word nor will here to hold thee back. Look up! Who may question the Master of the Jungle? I saw thee playing among the white pebbles yonder when thou wast a little frog; and Bagheera, that bought thee for the price of a young bull newly killed, saw thee also. Of that Looking Over we two only remain; for Raksha, thy lair-mother, is dead with thy lair-father; the old Wolf-Pack is long since dead; thou knowest whither Shere Khan went, and Akela died among the dholes, where, but for thy wisdom and strength, the second Seeonee Pack would also have died. There remains nothing but old bones. It is no longer the Man-cub that asks leave of his Pack, but the Master of the Jungle that changes his trail. Who shall question Man in his ways?’

‘But Bagheera and the Bull that bought me,’ said Mowgli. ‘I would not—’

His words were cut short by a roar and a crash in the thicket below, and Bagheera, light, strong, and terrible as always, stood before him.

‘Therefore,’ he said, stretching out a dripping right paw, ‘I did not come. It was a long hunt, but he lies dead in the bushes now—a bull in his second year—the Bull that frees thee, Little Brother. All debts are paid now. For the rest, my word is Baloo’s word.’ He licked Mowgli’s foot. ‘Remember, Bagheera loved thee,’ he cried, and bounded away. At the foot of the hill he cried again long and loud, ‘Good hunting on a new trail, Master of the Jungle! Remember, Bagheera loved thee.’

‘Thou hast heard,’ said Baloo. ‘There is no more. Go now; but first come to me. O wise Little Frog, come to me!’

‘It is hard to cast the skin,’ said Kaa as Mowgli sobbed and sobbed, with his head on the blind bear’s side and his arms round his neck, while Baloo tried feebly to lick his feet.

‘The stars are thin,’ said Gray Brother, snuffing at the dawn wind. ‘Where shall we lair to-day? for, from now, we follow new trails.’

. . . . .

And this is the last of the Mowgli stories.