Tales – Page 21 – The Kipling Society

The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot

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The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the dawn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn
God’s in His heaven
All’s right with the world!
(Pippa Passes)

THIS is not that Badalia whose spare names were Joanna, Pugnacious, and M’Canna, as the song says, but another and a much nicer lady. In the beginning of things she had been unregenerate; had worn the heavy fluffy fringe which is the ornament of the costermonger’s girl, and there is a legend in Gunnison Street that on her wedding-day she, a flare-lamp in either hand, danced dances on a discarded lover’s winkle-barrow, till a policeman interfered, and then Badalia danced with the Law amid shoutings.

Those were her days of fatness, and they did not last long, for her husband after two years took to himself another woman, and passed out of Badalia’s life, over Badalia’s senseless body; for he stifled protest with blows. While she was enjoying her widowhood the baby that the husband had not taken away died of croup, and Badalia was altogether alone.

With rare fidelity she listened to no proposals for a second marriage according to the customs of Gunnison Street, which do not differ from those of the Barralong. ‘My man,’ she explained to her suitors, ‘’e’ll come back one o’ these days, an’ then, like as not, ’e’ll take an’ kill me if I was livin’ ’long o’ you. You don’t know Tom; I do. Now you go. I can do for myself—not ‘avin’ a kid.’ She did for herself with a mangle, some tending of babies, and an occasional sale of flowers. This latter trade is one that needs capital, and takes the vendor very far westward, insomuch that the return journey from, let us say, the Burlington Arcade to Gunnison Street, E., is an excuse for drink, and then, as Badalia pointed out, ‘You come ’ome with your shawl arf off of your back, an’ your bonnick under your arm, and the price of nothing-at-all in your pocket, let alone a slop takin’ care o’ you.’ Badalia did not drink, but she knew her sisterhood, and gave them rude counsel. Otherwise she kept herself to herself, and meditated a great deal upon Tom Herodsfoot, her husband, who would come back some day, and the baby who would never return. In what manner these thoughts wrought upon her mind will not be known.

Her entry into society dates from the night when she rose literally under the feet of the Reverend Eustace Hanna, on the landing of No. 17 Gunnison Street, and told him that he was a fool without discernment in the dispensation of his district charities.

‘You give Lascar Loo custids,’ said she, without the formality of introduction; ‘give her pork-wine. Garn! Give ’er blankits. Garn ’ome! ’Er mother, she eats ’em all, and drinks the blankits. Gits ’em back from the shop, she does, before you come visiting again, so as to ’ave ’em all handy an’ proper; an’ Lascar Loo she sez to you, “Oh, my mother’s that good to me!” she do. Lascar Loo ’ad better talk so, bein’ sick abed, ’r else ’er mother would kill ’er. Garn! you’re a bloomin’ gardener—you an’ yer custids! Lascar Loo don’t never smell of ’em even.’

Thereon the curate, instead of being offended, recognised in the heavy eyes under the fringe the soul of a fellow-worker, and so bade Badalia mount guard over Lascar Loo, when the next jelly or custard should arrive, to see that the invalid actually ate it. This Badalia did, to the disgust of Lascar Loo’s mother, and the sharing of a black eye between the three; but Lascar Loo got her custard, and coughing heartily, rather enjoyed the fray.

Later on, partly through the Reverend Eustace Hanna’s swift recognition of her uses, and partly through certain tales poured out with moist eyes and flushed cheeks by Sister Eva, youngest and most impressionable of the Little Sisters of the Red Diamond, it came to pass that Badalia, arrogant, fluffy-fringed, and perfectly unlicensed in speech, won a recognised place among such as labour in Gunnison Street.

These were a mixed corps, zealous or hysterical, faint-hearted or only very wearied of battle against misery, according to their lights. The most part were consumed with small rivalries and personal jealousies, to be retailed confidentially to their own tiny cliques in the pauses between wrestling with death for the body of a moribund laundress, or scheming for further mission-grants to resole a consumptive compositor’s very consumptive boots. There was a rector that lived in dread of pauperising the poor, would fain have held bazars for fresh altar-cloths, and prayed in secret for a large new brass bird, with eyes of red glass, fondly believed to be carbuncles. There was Brother Victor, of the Order of Little Ease, who knew a great deal about altar-cloths, but kept his knowledge in the background while he strove to propitiate Mrs. Jessel, the Secretary of the Tea Cup Board, who had money to dispense, but hated Rome—even though Rome would, on its honour, do no more than fill the stomach, leaving the dazed soul to the mercies of Mrs. Jessel. There were all the Little Sisters of the Red Diamond, daughters of the horseleech, crying ‘Give’ when their own charity was exhausted, and pitifully explaining to such as demanded an account of their disbursements in return for one half-sovereign, that relief-work in a bad district can hardly be systematised on the accounts’ side without expensive duplication of staff. There was the Reverend Eustace Hanna, who worked impartially with Ladies’ Committees, Androgynous Leagues and Guilds, Brother Victor, and anybody else who could give him money, boots, or blankets, or that more precious help that allows itself to be directed by those who know. And all these people learned, one by one, to consult Badalia on matters of personal character, right to relief, and hope of eventual reformation in Gunnison Street. Her answers were seldom cheering, but she possessed special knowledge and complete confidence in herself.

‘I’m Gunnison Street,’ she said to the austere Mrs. Jessel. ‘I know what’s what, I do, an’ they don’t want your religion, Mum, not a single——. Excuse me. It’s all right when they comes to die, Mum, but till they die what they wants is things to eat. The men they’ll shif’ for themselves. That’s why Nick Lapworth sez to you that ’e wants to be confirmed an’ all that. ’E won’t never lead no new life, nor ’is wife won’t get no good out o’ all the money you gives ’im. No more you can’t pauperise them as ’asn’t things to begin with. They’re bloomin’ well pauped. The women they can’t shif’ for themselves— ’specially bein’ always confined. ’Ow should they? They wants things if they can get ’em anyways. If not they dies, and a good job too, for women is cruel put upon in Gunnison Street.’

‘Do you believe that—that Mrs. Herodsfoot is altogether a proper person to trust funds to?’ said Mrs. Jessel to the curate after this conversation. ‘She seems to be utterly godless in her, speech at least.’

The curate agreed. She was godless according to Mrs. Jessel’s views, but did not Mrs. Jessel think that since Badalia knew Gunnison Street and its needs, as none other knew it, she might in a humble way be, as it were, the scullion of charity from purer sources, and that if, say, the Tea Cup Board could give a few shillings a week, and the Little Sisters of the Red Diamond a few more, and, yes, he himself could raise yet a few more, the total, not at all likely to be excessive, might be handed over to Badalia to dispense among her associates. Thus Mrs. Jessel herself would be set free to attend more directly to the spiritual wants of certain large-limbed hulking men who sat picturesquely on the lower benches of her gatherings and sought for truth—which is quite as precious as silver, when you know the market for it.

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‘She’ll favour her own friends,’ said Mrs. Jessel. The curate refrained from mirth, and, after wise flattery, carried his point. To her unbounded pride Badalia was appointed the dispenser of a grant—a weekly trust, to be held for the benefit of Gunnison Street.

‘I don’t know what we can get together each week,’ said the curate to her. ‘But here are seventeen shillings to start with. You do what you like with them among your people, only let me know how it goes so that we shan’t get muddled in the accounts. D’you see?’

‘Ho yuss! ’Taint much though, is it?’ said Badalia, regarding the white coins in her palm. The sacred fever of the administrator, only known to those who have tasted power, burned in her veins. ‘Boots is boots, unless they’re give you, an’ then they ain’t fit to wear unless they’re mended top an’ bottom; an’ jellies is jellies; an’ I don’t think anything o’ that cheap pork-wine, but it all comes to something. It’ll go quicker ’n a quartern of gin—seventeen bob. An’ I’ll keep a book—same as I used to do before Tom went an’ took up ’long o’ that pan-faced slut in Hennessy’s Rents. We was the only barrer that kep’ regular books, me an’—’im.’

She bought a large copy-book—her unschooled handwriting demanded room—and in it she wrote the story of her war; boldly, as befits a general, and for no other eyes than her own and those of the Reverend Eustace Hanna. Long ere the pages were full the mottled cover had been soaked in kerosene—Lascar Loo’s mother, defrauded of her percentage on her daughter’s custards, invaded Badalia’s room in 17 Gunnison Street, and fought with her to the damage of the lamp and her own hair. It was hard, too, to carry the precious ‘pork-wine’ in one hand and the book in the other through an eternally thirsty land; so red stains were added to those of the oil. But the Reverend Eustace Hanna, looking at the matter of the book, never objected. The generous scrawls told their own tale, Badalia every Saturday night supplying the chorus between the written statements thus:

Mrs. Hikkey, very ill brandy 3d. Cab for hospital, she had to go, 1s. Mrs. Poone confined. In money for tea (she took it I know, sir) 6d. Met her husband out looking for work.

‘I slapped ’is face for a bone-idle beggar! ’E won’t get no work becos ’e’s—excuse me, sir. Won’t you go on?’ The curate continued’

Mrs. Vincent. Confid. No linning for baby. Most untidy. In money 2s. 6d. Some cloths from Miss Evva.

‘Did Sister Eva do that?’ said the curate very softly. Now charity was Sister Eva’s bounden duty, yet to one man’s eyes each act of her daily toil was a manifestation of angelic grace and goodness—a thing to perpetually admire.

‘Yes, sir. She went back to the Sisters’ ’Ome an’ took ’em off ’er own bed. Most beautiful marked too. Go on, sir. That makes up four and thruppence.’

Mrs. Junnet to keep good fire coals is up. 7d. Mrs. Lockhart took a baby to nurse to earn a triffle but mother can’d pay husband summons over and over. He won’t help. Cash 2s. 2d. Worked in a ketchin but had to leave. Fire, tea, and shin of beef 1s. 7½d.

‘There was a fight there, sir,’ said Badalia. ‘Not me, sir. ’Er ’usband, o’ course ’e come in at the wrong time, was wishful to ’ave the beef, so I calls up the next floor an’ down comes that mulatter man wot sells the sword-stick canes, top o’ Ludgate-’ill. “Muley,” sez I, “you big black beast, you, take an’ kill this big white beast ’ere.” I knew I couldn’t stop Tom Lockart ’alf drunk, with the beef in ’is ’ands. “I’ll beef ’m,” sez Muley, an’ ’e did it, with that pore woman a-cryin’ in the next room, an’ the top banisters on that landin’ is broke out, but she got ’er beef-tea, an’ Tom ’e’s got ’is gruel. Will you go on, sir?’

‘No, I think it will be all right. I’ll sign for the week,’ said the curate. One gets so used to these things profanely called human documents.

‘Mrs. Churner’s baby’s got diptheery,’ said Badalia, turning to go.

‘Where’s that? The Churners of Painter’s Alley, or the other Churners in Houghton Street?’

‘Houghton Street. The Painter’s Alley people, they’re sold out an’ left.’

‘Sister Eva’s sitting one night a week with old Mrs. Probyn in Houghton Street—isn’t she?’ said the curate uneasily.

‘Yes; but she won’t sit no longer. I’ve took up Mrs. Probyn. I can’t talk ’er no religion, but she don’t want it; an’ Miss Eva she don’t want no diptheery, tho’ she sez she does. Don’t you be afraid for Miss Eva.’

‘But—but you’ll get it, perhaps.’

‘Like as not.’ She looked the curate between the eyes, and her own eyes flamed under the fringe. ‘Maybe I’d like to get it, for aught you know.’

The curate thought upon these words for a little time till he began to think of Sister Eva in the gray cloak with the white bonnet ribbons under the chin. Then he thought no more of Badalia.

What Badalia thought was never expressed in words, but it is known in Gunnison Street that Lascar Loo’s mother, sitting blind drunk on her own doorstep, was that night captured and wrapped up in the war-cloud of Badalia’s wrath, so that she did not know whether she stood on her head or her heels, and after being soundly bumped on every particular stair up to her room, was set down on Badalia’s bed, there to whimper and quiver till the dawn, protesting that all the world was against her, and calling on the names of children long since slain by dirt and neglect. Badalia; snorting, went out to war, and since the hosts of the enemy were many, found enough work to keep her busy till the dawn.

As she had promised, she took Mrs. Probyn into her own care, and began by nearly startling the old lady into a fit with the announcement that ‘there ain’t no God like as not, an’ if there is it don’t matter to you or me, an’ any’ow you take this jelly.’ Sister Eva objected to being shut off from her pious work in Houghton Street, but Badalia insisted, and by fair words and the promise of favours to come so prevailed on three or four of the more sober men of the neighbourhood, that they blockaded the door whenever Sister Eva attempted to force an entry, and pleaded the diphtheria as an excuse. ‘I’ve got to keep ’er out o’ ’arm’s way,’ said Badalia, ‘an’ out she keeps. The curick won’t care a —— for me, but—he wouldn’t any’ow.’

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The effect of that quarantine was to shift the sphere of Sister Eva’s activity to other streets, and notably those most haunted by the Reverend Eustace Hanna and Brother Victor, of the Order of Little Ease. There exists, for all their human bickerings, a very close brotherhood in the ranks of those whose work lies in Gunnison Street. To begin with, they have seen pain—pain that no word or deed of theirs can alleviate—life born into Death, and Death crowded down by unhappy life. Also they understand the full significance of drink, which is a knowledge hidden from very many well-meaning people, and some of them have fought with the beasts at Ephesus. They meet at unseemly hours in unseemly places, exchange a word or two of hasty counsel, advice, or suggestion, and pass on to their appointed toil, since time is precious and lives hang in the balance of five minutes. For many, the gas-lamps are their sun, and the Covent Garden wains the chariots of the twilight. They have all in their station begged for money, so that the freemasonry of the mendicant binds them together.

To all these influences there was added in the case of two workers that thing which men have agreed to call Love. The chance that Sister Eva might catch diphtheria did not enter into the curate’s head till Badalia had spoken. Then it seemed a thing intolerable and monstrous that she should be exposed not only to this risk, but any accident whatever of the streets. A wain coming round a corner might kill her; the rotten staircases on which she trod daily and nightly might collapse and maim her; there was danger in the tottering coping-stones of certain crazy houses that he knew well; danger more deadly within those houses. What if one of a thousand drunken men crushed out that precious life? A woman had once flung a chair at the curate’s head. Sister Eva’s arm would not be strong enough to ward off a chair. There were also knives that were quick to fly. These and other considerations cast the soul of the Reverend Eustace Hanna into torment that no leaning upon Providence could relieve. God was indubitably great and terrible—one had only to walk through Gunnison Street to see that much—but it would be better, vastly better, that Eva should have the protection of his own arm. And the world that was not too busy to watch might have seen a woman, not too young, light-haired and light-eyed, slightly assertive in her speech, and very limited in such ideas as lay beyond the immediate sphere of her duty, where the eyes of the Reverend Eustace Hanna turned to follow the footsteps of a Queen crowned in a little gray bonnet with white ribbons under the chin.

If that bonnet appeared for a moment at the bottom of a courtyard, or nodded at him on a dark staircase, then there was hope yet for Lascar Loo, living on one lung and the memory of past excesses, hope even for whining sodden Nick Lapworth, blaspheming, in the hope of money, over the pangs of a ‘true conversion this time, s’elp me Gawd, sir.’ If that bonnet did not appear for a day, the mind of the curate was filled with lively pictures of horror, visions of stretchers, a crowd at some villainous crossing, and a policeman—he could see that policeman—jerking out over his shoulder the details of the accident, and ordering the man who would have set his body against the wheels—heavy dray wheels, he could see them—to ‘move on.’ Then there was less hope for the salvation of Gunnison Street and all in it.

This agony Brother Victor beheld one day when he was coming from a death-bed. He saw the light in the eye, the relaxing muscles of the mouth, and heard a new ring in the voice that had told flat all the forenoon. Sister Eva had turned into Gunnison Street after a forty-eight hours’ eternity of absence. She had not been run over. Brother Victor’s heart must have suffered in some human fashion, or he would never have seen what he saw. But the Law of his Church made suffering easy. His duty was to go on with his work until he died, even as Badalia went on. She, magnifying her office, faced the drunken husband; coaxed the doubly shiftless, thriftless girl-wife into a little fore-thought, and begged clothes when and where she could for the scrofulous babes that multiplied like the green scum on the untopped water-cisterns.

The story of her deeds was written in the book that the curate signed weekly, but she never told him any more of fights and tumults in the street. ‘Mis’ Eva does ’er work ’er way. I does mine mine. But I do more than Mis’ Eva ten times over, an’ “Thank yer, Badalia,” sez ’e, “that’ll do for this week.” I wonder what Tom’s doin’ now long o’ that—other woman. ’Seems like as if I’d go an’ look at ’im one o’ these days. But I’d cut ’er liver out—couldn’t ’elp myself. Better not go, p’raps.’

Hennessy’s Rents lay more than two miles from Gunnison Street, and were inhabited by much the same class of people. Tom had established himself there with Jenny Wabstow, his new woman, and for weeks lived in great fear of Badalia’s suddenly descending upon him. The prospect of actual fighting did not scare him; but he objected to the police-court that would follow, and the orders for maintenance and other devices of a law that cannot understand the simple rule that ‘when a man’s tired of a woman ’e ain’t such a bloomin’ fool as to live with ’er no more, an’ that’s the long an’ short of it.’ For some months his new wife wore very well, and kept Tom in a state of decent fear and consequent orderliness. Also work was plentiful. Then a baby was born, and, following the law of his kind, Tom, little interested in the children he helped to produce, sought distraction in drink. He had confined himself, as a rule, to beer, which is stupefying and comparatively innocuous: at least, it clogs the legs, and though the heart may ardently desire to kill, sleep comes swiftly, and the crime often remains undone. Spirits, being more volatile, allow both the flesh and the soul to work together—generally to the inconvenience of others. Tom discovered that there was merit in whisky—if you only took enough of it—cold. He took as much as he could purchase or get given him, and by the time that his woman was fit to go abroad again, the two rooms of their household were stripped of many valuable articles. Then the woman spoke her mind, not once, but several times, with point, fluency, and metaphor; and Tom was indignant at being deprived of peace at the end of his day’s work, which included much whisky. He therefore withdrew himself from the solace and companionship of Jenny Wabstow, and she therefore pursued him with more metaphors. At the last, Tom would turn round and hit her—sometimes across the head, and sometimes across the breast, and the bruises furnished material for discussion on doorsteps among such women as had been treated in like manner by their husbands. They were not few.

But no very public scandal had occurred till Tom one day saw fit to open negotiations with a young woman for matrimony according to the laws of free selection. He was getting very tired of Jenny, and the young woman was earning enough from flower-selling to keep him in comfort, whereas Jenny was expecting another baby, and most unreasonably expected consideration on this account. The shapelessness of her figure revolted him, and he said as much in the language of his breed. Jenny cried till Mrs. Hart, lineal descendant, and Irish of the ‘mother to Mike of the donkey-cart,’ stopped her on her own staircase and whispered ‘God be good to you, Jenny, my woman, for I see how ’Tis with you.’ Jenny wept more than ever, and gave Mrs. Hart a penny and some kisses, while Tom was conducting his own wooing at the corner of the street.

The young woman, prompted by pride, not by virtue, told Jenny of his offers, and Jenny spoke to Tom that night. The altercation began in their own rooms, but Tom tried to escape; and in the end all Hennessy’s Rents gathered themselves upon the pavement and formed a court to which Jenny appealed from time to time, her hair loose on her neck, her raiment in extreme disorder, and her steps astray from drink. ‘When your man drinks, you’d better drink too! It don’t ’urt so much when ’e ’its you then,’ says the Wisdom of the Women. And surely they ought to know.

‘Look at ’im!’ shrieked Jenny. ‘Look at ’im, standin’ there without any word to say for himself, that ’ud smitch off and leave me an’ never so much as a shillin’ lef’ be’ind! You call yourself a man—you call yourself the bleedin’ shadow of a man? I’ve seen better men than you made outer chewed paper and spat out arterwards. Look at ’im! ’E’s been drunk since Thursday last, an’ ’e’ll be drunk s’ long’s ’e can get drink. ’E’s took all I’ve got, an’ me—an’ me—as you see——’

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A murmur of sympathy from the women.

‘Took it all, he did, an’ atop of his blasted pickin’ an’ stealin’—yes, you, you thief—’e goes off an’ tries to take up long o’ that ’—here followed a complete and minute description of the young woman. Luckily, she was not on the spot to hear. ‘’E’ll serve ’er as ’e served me! ’E’ll drink every bloomin’ copper she makes an’ then leave ’er alone, same as ’e done me! O women, look you, I’ve bore ’im one an’ there’s another on the way, an’ ’e’d up an’ leave me as I am now—the stinkin’ dorg. An’ you may leave me. I don’t want none o’ your leavin’s. Go away. Get away!’ The hoarseness of passion overpowered the voice. The crowd attracted a policeman as Tom began to slink away.

‘Look at ’im,’ said Jenny, grateful for the new listener. ‘Ain’t there no law for such as ’im? ’E’s took all my money, ’E’s beat me once, twice an’ over. ’E’s swine drunk when ’e ain’t mad drunk, an’ now, an’ now ’e’s trying to pick up along o’ another woman. ’;Im I give up a four times better man for. Ain’t there no law?’

‘What’s the matter now? You go into your ’ouse. I’ll see to the man. ‘As ’e been ’itting you?’ said the policeman.

‘’Ittin’ me? ’E’s cut my ’eart in two, an’ ’e stands there grinnin’ as tho’ ’twas all a play to ’im.’

‘You go on into your ’ouse an’ lie down a bit.’

‘I’m a married woman, I tell you, an’ I’ll ’ave my ’usband!’

‘I ain’t done her no bloomin’ ’arm,’ said Tom from the edge of the crowd. He felt that public opinion was running against him.

‘You ain’t done me any bloomin’ good, you dorg. I’m a married woman, I am, an’ I won’t ’ave my ’usband took from me.’

‘Well, if you are a married woman, cover your breasts,’ said the policeman soothingly. He was used to domestic brawls.

‘Shan’t—thank you for your impidence. Look ’ere!’ She tore open her dishevelled bodice and showed such crescent-shaped bruises as are made by a well-applied chair-back. ‘That’s what ’e done to me acause my heart wouldn’t break quick enough! ’E’s tried to get in an’ break it. Look at that, Tom, that you gave me last night; an’ I made it up with you. But that was before I knew what you were tryin’ to do long o’ that woman——’

‘D’you charge ’im?’ said the policeman. ‘’E’ll get a month for it, per’aps.’

‘No,’ said Jenny firmly. It was one thing to expose her man to the scorn of the street, and another to lead him to jail.

‘Then you go in an’ lie down, and you’—this to the crowd—‘pass along the pavement, there. Pass along. ’Taint nothing to laugh at.’ To Tom, who was being sympathised with by his friends, ‘It’s good for you she didn’t charge you, but mind this now, the next time,’ etc.

Tom did not at all appreciate Jenny’s forbearance, nor did his friends help to compose his mind. He had whacked the woman because she was a nuisance. For precisely the same reason he had cast about for a new mate. And all his kind acts had ended in a truly painful scene in the street, a most unjustifiable exposure by and of his woman, and a certain loss of caste—this he realised dimly—among his associates. Consequently, all women were nuisances, and consequently whisky was a good thing. His friends condoled with him. Perhaps he had been more hard on his woman than she deserved, but her disgraceful conduct under provocation excused all offence.

‘I wouldn’t ’ave no more to do with ’er—a woman like that there,’ said one comforter.

‘Let ’er go an’ dig for her bloomin’ self. A man wears ’isself out to ’is bones shovin’ meat down their mouths, while they sit at ’ome easy all day; an’ the very fust time, mark you, you ’as a bit of a difference, an’ very proper too for a man as is a man, she ups an’ ’as you out into the street, callin’ you Gawd knows what all. What’s the good o’ that, I arx you?’ So spoke the second comforter.

The whisky was the third, and his suggestion struck Tom as the best of all. He would return to Badalia his wife. Probably she would have been doing something wrong while he had been away, and he could then vindicate his authority as a husband. Certainly she would have money. Single women always seemed to possess the pence that God and the Government denied to hard-working men. He refreshed himself with more whisky. It was beyond any doubt that Badalia would have done something wrong. She might even have married another man. He would wait till the new husband was out of the way, and, after kicking Badalia, would get money and a long absent sense of satisfaction. There is much virtue in a creed or a law, but when all is prayed and suffered, drink is the only thing that will make clean all a man’s deeds in his own eyes. Pity it is that the effects are not permanent.

Tom parted with his friends, bidding them tell Jenny that he was going to Gunnison Street, and would return to her arms no more. Because this was the devil’s message, they remembered and severally delivered it, with drunken distinctness, in Jenny’s ears. Then Tom took more drink till his drunkenness rolled back and stood off from him as a wave rolls back and stands off the wreck it will swamp. He reached the traffic-polished black asphalte of a side-street and trod warily among the reflections of the shop-lamps that burned in gulfs of pitchy darkness, fathoms beneath his boot-heels. He was very sober indeed. Looking down his past, he beheld that he was justified of all his actions so entirely and perfectly that if Badalia had in his absence dared to lead a blameless life he would smash her for not having gone wrong.

Badalia at that moment was in her own room after the regular nightly skirmish with Lascar Loo’s mother. To a reproof as stinging as a Gunnison Street tongue could make it, the old woman, detected for the hundredth time in the theft of the poor delicacies meant for the invalid, could only cackle and answer—

‘D’you think Loo’s never bilked a man in ’er life? She’s dyin’ now—on’y she’s so cunning long about it. Me! I’ll live for twenty years yet.’

Badalia shook her, more on principle than in any hope of curing her, and thrust her into the night, where she collapsed on the pavement and called upon the devil to slay Badalia.

He came upon the word in the shape of a man with a very pale face who asked for her by name. Lascar Loo’s mother remembered. It was Badalia’s husband—and the return of a husband to Gunnison Street was generally followed by beatings.

‘Where’s my wife?’ said Tom. ‘Where’s my slut of a wife?’

‘Upstairs an’ be —— to her,’ said the old woman, falling over on her side. ‘’Ave you come back for ’er, Tom?’

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‘Yes. ‘Oo’s she took up while I bin gone?’

‘All the bloomin’ curicks in the parish. She’s that set up you wouldn’t know ’er.’

‘’Strewth she is!’

‘Oh, yuss. Mor’n that, she’s always round an’ about with them sniffin’ Sisters of Charity an’ the curick. Mor’n that, ’e gives ’er money—pounds an’ pounds a week. Been keepin’ her that way for months, ’e ’as. No wonder you wouldn’t ’ave nothin’ to do with ’er when you left. An’ she keeps me outer the food-stuff they gets for me lyin’ dyin’ out ’ere like a dorg. She’s been a blazin’ bad un has Badalia since you lef’.’

‘Got the same room still, ’as she?’ said Tom, striding over Lascar Loo’s mother, who was picking at the chinks between the pave-stones.

‘Yes, but so fine you wouldn’t know it.’

Tom went up the stairs and the old lady chuckled. Tom was angry. Badalia would not be able to bump people for some time to come, or to interfere with the heaven-appointed distribution of custards.

Badalia, undressing to go to bed, heard feet on the stair that she knew well. Ere they stopped to kick at her door she had, in her own fashion, thought over very many things.

‘Tom’s back,’ she said to herself. ‘An’ I’m glad . . . spite o’ the curick an’ everythink.’

She opened the door, crying his name.

The man pushed her aside.

‘I don’t want none o’ your kissin’s an’ slaverin’s. I’m sick of ’em,’ said he.

‘You ain’t ’ad so many neither to make you sick these two years past.’

‘I’ve ’ad better. Got any money?’

‘On’y a little—orful little.’

‘That’s a —— lie, an’ you know it.’

‘’Taint—and, oh Tom, what’s the use o’ talkin’ money the minute you come back? Didn’t you like Jenny? I knowed you wouldn’t.’

‘Shut your ’ead. Ain’t you got enough to, make a man drunk fair?’

‘You don’t want bein’ made more drunk any. You’re drunk a’ready. You come to bed, Tom.’

‘To you?’

‘Ay, to me. Ain’t I nothin’—spite o’ Jenny?’

She put out her arms as she spoke. But the drink held Tom fast.

‘Not for me,’ said he, steadying himself against the wall. ‘Don’t I know ’ow you’ve been goin’ on while I was away, yah!’

‘Arsk about!’ said Badalia indignantly, drawing herself together. ‘’Oo sez anythink agin me ere?’

‘’Oo sez? W’y, everybody. I ain’t come back more’n a minute fore I finds you’ve been with the curick Gawd knows where. Wot curick was ’e?’

‘The curick that’s ’ere always,’ said Badalia hastily. She was thinking of anything rather than the Rev. Eustace Hanna at that moment. Tom sat down gravely in the only chair in the room. Badalia continued her arrangements for going to bed.

‘Pretty thing that,’ said Tom, ‘to tell your own lawful married ’usband—an’ I guv five bob for the weddin’-ring. Curick that’s ’ere always! Cool as brass you are. Ain’t you got no shame? Ain’t ’e under the bed now?’

‘Tom, you’re bleedin’ drunk. I ain’t done nothin’ to be ’shamed of.’

‘You! You don’t know wot shame is. But I ain’t come ’ere to mess with you. Give me wot you’ve got, an’ then I’ll dress you down an’ go to Jenny.’

‘I ain’t got nothin’ ’cept some coppers an’ a shillin’ or so.’

‘Wot’s that about the curick keepin’ you on five poun’ a week?’

‘’Oo told you that?’

‘Lascar Loo’s mother, lyin’ on the pavemint outside, an’ more honest than you’ll ever be. Give me wot you’ve got!’

Badalia passed over to a little shell pin-cushion on the mantelpiece, drew thence four shillings and threepence—the lawful earnings of her trade—and held them out to the man who was rocking in his chair and surveying the room with wide-opened, rolling eyes.

‘That ain’t five poun’,’ said he drowsily.

‘I ain’t got no more. Take it an’ go—if you won’t stay.’

Tom rose slowly, gripping the arms of the chair. ‘Wot about the curick’s money that ’e guv you?’ said he. ‘Lascar Loo’s mother told me. You give it over to me now, or I’ll make you.’

‘Lascar Loo’s mother don’t know anything about it.’

‘She do, an’ more than you want her to know.’

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‘She don’t. I’ve bumped the ’eart out of ’er, and I can’t give you the money. Anythin’ else but that, Tom, an’ everythin’ else but that, Tom, I’ll give willin’ and true. ’Taint my money. Won’t the dollar be enough? That money’s my trust. There’s a book along of it too.’

‘Your trust? Wot are you doin’ with any trust that your ’usband don’t know of? You an’ your trust! Take you that!’

Tom stepped towards her and delivered a blow of the clenched fist across the mouth. ‘Give me wot you’ve got,’ said he, in the thick, abstracted voice of one talking in dreams.

‘I won’t,’ said Badalia, staggering to the washstand. With any other man than her husband she would have fought savagely as a wild cat; but Tom had been absent two years, and, perhaps, a little timely submission would win him back to her. None the less, the weekly trust was sacred.

The wave that had so long held back descended on Tom’s brain. He caught Badalia by the throat and forced her to her knees. It seemed just to him in that hour to punish an erring wife for two years of wilful desertion; and the more, in that she had confessed her guilt by refusing to give up the wage of sin.

Lascar Loo’s mother waited on the pavement without for the sounds of lamentation, but none came. Even if Tom had released her gullet Badalia would not have screamed.

‘Give it up, you slut!’ said Tom. ‘Is that ‘ow you pay me back for all I’ve done?’

‘I can’t. ’Tain’t my money. Gawd forgive you, Tom, for wot you’re ——,’ the voice ceased as the grip tightened, and Tom heaved Badalia against the bed. Her forehead struck the bedpost, and she sank, half kneeling, on the floor. It was impossible for a self-respecting man to refrain from kicking her: so Tom kicked with the deadly intelligence born of whisky. The head drooped to the floor, and Tom kicked at that till the crisp tingle of hair striking through his nailed boot with the chill of cold water, warned him that it might be as well to desist.

‘Where’s the curick’s money, you kep’ woman?’ he whispered in the blood-stained ear. But there was no answer—only a rattling at the door, and the voice of Jenny Wabstow crying ferociously, ‘Come out o’ that, Tom, an’ come ’ome with me! An’ you, Badalia, I’ll tear your face off its bones!’

Tom’s friends had delivered their message, and Jenny, after the first flood of passionate tears, rose up to follow Tom, and, if possible, to win him back. She was prepared even to endure an exemplary whacking for her performances in Hennessy’s Rents. Lascar Loo’s mother guided her to the chamber of horrors, and chuckled as she retired down the staircase. If Tom had not banged the soul out of Badalia, there would at least be a royal fight between that Badalia and Jenny. And Lascar Loo’s mother knew well that Hell has no fury like a woman fighting above the life that is quick in her.

Still there was no sound audible in the street. Jenny swung back the unbolted door, to discover her man stupidly regarding a heap by the bed. An eminent murderer has remarked that if people did not die so untidily, most men, and all women, would commit at least one murder in their lives. Tom was reflecting on the present untidiness, and the whisky was fighting with the clear current of his thoughts.

‘Don’t make that noise,’ he said. ‘Come in quick.’

‘My Gawd!’ said Jenny, checking like a startled wild beast. ‘Wot’s all this ’ere? You ain’t——’

‘Dunno. ’Spose I did it.’

‘Did it! You done it a sight too well this time.’

‘She was aggravatin’,’ said Tom thickly, dropping back into the chair. ‘That aggravatin’ you’d never believe. Livin’ on the fat o’ the land among these aristocratic parsons an’ all. Look at them white curtings on the bed. We ain’t got no white curtings. What I want to know is——’ The voice died as Badalia’s had died, but from a different cause. The whisky was tightening its grip after the accomplished deed, and Tom’s eyes were beginning to close. Badalia on the floor breathed heavily.

‘No, nor like to ’ave,’ said Jenny. ‘You’ve done for ’er this time. You go!’

‘Not me. She won’t hurt. Do ’er good. I’m goin’ to sleep. Look at those there clean sheets! Aint you comin’ too?’

Jenny bent over Badalia, and there was intelligence in the battered woman’s eyes-intelligence and much hate.

‘I never told ’im to do such,’ Jenny whispered. ‘’Twas Tom’s own doin’—none o’ mine. Shall I get ’im took, dear?’

The eyes told their own story. Tom, who was beginning to snore, must not be taken by the Law.

‘Go,’ said Jenny. ‘Get out! Get out of ’ere.’

‘You—told—me—that—this afternoon,’ said the man very sleepily. ‘Lemme go asleep.’

‘That wasn’t nothing. You’d only ’it me. This time it’s murder—murder—murder! Tom, you’ve killed ’er now.’ She shook the man from his rest, and understanding with cold terror filled his fuddled brain.

‘I done it for your sake, Jenny,’ he whimpered feebly, trying to take her hand.

‘You killed ’er for the money, same as you would ha’ killed me. Get out o’ this. Lay ’er on the bed first, you brute!’

They lifted Badalia on to the bed, and crept forth silently.

‘I can’t be took along o’ you—and if you was took you’d say I made you do it, an’ try to get me ’anged. Go away—anywhere outer ’ere,’ said Jenny, and she dragged him down the stairs.

‘Goin’ to look for the curick?’ said a voice from the pavement. Lascar Loo’s mother was still waiting patiently to hear Badalia squeal.

‘Wot curick?’ said Jenny swiftly. There was a chance of salving her conscience yet in regard to the bundle upstairs.

‘Anna—63 Roomer Terrace—close ’ere,’ said the old woman. She had never been favourably regarded by the curate. Perhaps, since Badalia had not squealed, Tom preferred smashing the man to the woman. There was no accounting for tastes.

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Jenny thrust her man before her till they reached the nearest main road. ‘Go away, now,’ she gasped. ‘Go off anywheres, but don’t come back to me. I’ll never go with you again; an’, Tom—Tom, d’you ‘ear me?—clean your boots.’

Vain counsel. The desperate thrust of disgust which she bestowed upon him sent him staggering face-down into the kennel, where a policeman showed interest in his welfare.

‘Took for a common drunk. Gawd send they don’t look at ’is boots! ’Anna, 63 Roomer Terrace!’ Jenny settled her hat and ran.

The excellent housekeeper of the Roomer Chambers still remembers how there arrived a young person, blue-lipped and gasping, who cried only : Badalia, 17 Gunnison Street. Tell the curick to come at once—at once—at once!’ and vanished into the night. This message was borne to the Rev. Eustace Hanna, then enjoying his beauty-sleep. He saw there was urgency in the demand, and unhesitatingly knocked up Brother Victor across the landing. As a matter of etiquette, Rome and England divided their cases in the district according to the creeds of the sufferers; but Badalia was an institution, and not a case, and there was no district-relief etiquette to be considered. ‘Something has happened to Badalia,’ the curate said, ‘and it’s your affair as well as mine. Dress and come along.’

‘I am ready,’ was the answer. ‘Is there any hint of what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing beyond a runaway-knock and a call.’

‘Then it’s a confinement or a murderous assault. Badalia wouldn’t wake us up for anything less. I’m qualified for both, thank God.’

The two men raced to Gunnison Street, for there were no cabs abroad, and under any circumstances a cab-fare means two days’ good firing for such as are perishing with cold. Lascar Loo’s mother had gone to bed, and the door was naturally on the latch. They found considerably more than they had expected in Badalia’s room, and the Church of Rome acquitted itself nobly with bandages, while the Church of England could only pray to be delivered from the sin of envy. The Order of Little Ease, recognising that the soul is in most cases accessible through the body, take their measures and train their men accordingly.

‘She’ll do now,’ said Brother Victor, in a whisper. ‘It’s internal bleeding, I fear, and a certain amount of injury to the brain. She has a husband, of course?’

‘They all have, more’s the pity.’

‘Yes, there’s a domesticity about these injuries that shows their origin.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It’s a perfectly hopeless business, you understand. Twelve hours at the most.’

Badalia’s right hand began to beat on the counterpane, palm down.

‘I think you are wrong,’ said the Church of England ‘She is going.’

‘No, that’s not the picking at the counterpane,’ said the Church of Rome. ‘She wants to say something; you know her better than L’

The curate bent very low.

‘Send for Miss Eva,’ said Badalia, with a cough.

‘In the morning. She will come in the morning,’ said the curate, and Badalia was content. Only the Church of Rome, who knew something of the human heart, knitted his brows and said nothing. After all, the law of his Order was plain. His duty was to watch till the dawn while the moon went down.

It was a little before her sinking that the Rev. Eustace Hanna said, ‘Hadn’t we better send for Sister Eva? She seems to be going fast.’

Brother Victor made no answer, but as early as decency admitted there came one to the door of the house of the Little Sisters of the Red Diamond and demanded Sister Eva, that she might soothe the pain of Badalia Herodsfoot. That man, saying very little, led her to Gunnison Street, No. 17, and into the room where Badalia lay. Then he stood on the landing, and bit the flesh of his fingers in agony, because he was a priest trained to know, and knew how the hearts of men and women beat back at the rebound, so that Love is born out of horror, and passion declares itself when the soul is quivering with pain.

Badalia, wise to the last, husbanded her strength till the coming of Sister Eva. It is generally maintained by the Little Sisters of the Red Diamond that she died in delirium, but since one Sister at least took a half of her dying advice, this seems uncharitable.

She tried to turn feebly on the bed, and the poor broken human machinery protested according to its nature.

Sister Eva started forward, thinking that she heard the dread forerunner of the death-rattle. Badalia lay still conscious, and spoke with startling distinctness, the irrepressible irreverence of the street-hawker, the girl who had danced on the winkle-barrow, twinkling in her one available eye.

‘Sounds jest like Mrs. Jessel, don’t it? Before she’s ’ad ’er lunch an’ ’as been talkin’ all the mornin’ to her classes.’

Neither Sister Eva nor the curate said anything. Brother Victor stood without the door, and the breath came harshly between his teeth, for he was in pain.

‘Put a cloth over my ’ead,’ said Badalia. ‘I’ve got it good, an’ I don’t want Miss Eva to see. I ain’t pretty this time.’

‘Who was it?’ said the curate.

‘Man from outside. Never seed ’im no more’n Adam. Drunk, I s’pose. S’elp me Gawd that’s truth! Is Miss Eva ’ere? I can’t see under the towel. I’ve got it good, Miss Eva. Excuse my not shakin’ ’ands with you, but I’m not strong, an’ it’s fourpence for Mrs. Imeny’s beef-tea, an’ wot you can give ’er for baby-linning. Allus ’avin’ kids, these people. I ’adn’t oughter talk, for my ’usband ’e never come a-nigh me these two years, or I’d a-bin as bad as the rest; but ’e never come a-nigh me . . . . A man come and ’it me over the ’ead, an’ ’e kicked me, Miss Eva; so it was just the same’s if I had ha’ had a ’usband, ain’t it? The book’s in the drawer, Mister ’Anna, an’ it’s all right, an’ I never guv up a copper o’ the trust money—not a copper. You look under the chist o’ drawers—all wot isn’t spent this week is there . . . . An’, Miss Eva, don’t you wear that gray bonnick no more. I kep’ you from the diptheery, an’—an’ I didn’t want to keep you so, but the curick said it ’ad to be done. I’d a sooner ha’ took up ,with ’im than any one, only Tom ’e come, an’ then—you see, Miss Eva, Tom ’e never come a—nigh me for two years, nor I ’aven’t seen ’im yet. S’elp me——, I ’aven’t. Do you ’ear? But you two go along, and make a match of it. I’ve wished otherways often, but o’ course it was not for the likes o’ me. If Tom ’ad come back, which ’e never did, I’d ha’ been like the rest—sixpence for beef-tea for the baby, an’ a shilling for layin’ out the baby. You’ve seen it in the books, Mister ’Anna. That’s what it is; an’ o’ course, you couldn’t never ’ave nothing to do with me. But a woman she wishes as she looks, an’ never you ’ave no doubt about ’im, Miss Eva. I’ve seen it in ’is face time an’ agin—time an’ agin . . . . Make it a four pound ten funeral—with a pall.’

It was a seven pound fifteen shilling funeral, and all Gunnison Street turned out to do it honour. All but two; for Lascar Loo’s mother saw that a Power had departed, and that her road lay clear to the custards. Therefore, when the carriages rattled off, the cat on the doorstep heard the wail of the dying prostitute who could not die—

‘Oh, mother, mother, won’t you even let me lick the spoon!’

Quiquern

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The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow—
They beg for coffee and sugar; they go where the white men go.
The People of the Western Ice, they learn to steal and fight;
They sell their furs to the trading-post: they sell their souls to the white.
The People of the Southern Ice, they trade with the whaler’s crew;
Their women have many ribbons, but their tents are torn and few.
But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white man’s ken—
Their spears are made of the narwhal-horn, and they are the last of the Men!
(Translation)

‘HE has opened his eyes. Look!’

‘Put him in the skin again. He will be a strong dog. On the fourth month we will name him.’

‘For whom?’ said Amoraq.

Kadlu’s eye rolled round the skin-lined snow-house till it fell on fourteen-year-old Kotuko sitting on the sleeping-bench, making a button out of walrus ivory. ‘Name him for me,’ said Kotuko, with a grin. ‘I shall need him one day.’

Kadlu grinned back till his eyes were almost buried in the fat of his flat cheeks, and nodded to Amoraq, while the puppy’s fierce mother whined to see her baby wriggling far out of reach in the little sealskin pouch hung above the warmth of the blubber-lamp. Kotuko went on with his carving, and Kadlu threw a rolled bundle of leather dog-harnesses into a tiny little room that opened from one side of the house, slipped off his heavy deerskin hunting-suit, put it into a whalebone-net that hung above another lamp, and dropped down on the sleeping-bench to whittle at a piece of frozen seal-meat till Amoraq, his wife, should bring the regular dinner of boiled meat and blood-soup. He had been out since early dawn at the seal-holes, eight miles away, and had come home with three big seal. Half-way down the long, low snow passage or tunnel that led to the inner door of the house you could hear snappings and yelpings, as the dogs of his sleigh-team, released from the day’s work, scuffled for warm places.

When the yelpings grew too loud Kotuko lazily rolled off the sleeping-bench, and picked up a whip with an eighteen-inch handle of springy whalebone, and twenty-five feet of heavy, plaited thong. He dived into the passage, where it sounded as though all the dogs were eating him alive; but that was no more than their regular grace before meals. When he crawled out at the far end, half a dozen furry heads followed him with their eyes as he went to a sort of gallows of whale jawbones, from which the dog’s meat was hung; split off the frozen stuff in big lumps with a broad-headed spear; and stood, his whip in one hand and the meat in the other. Each beast was called by name, the weakest first, and woe betide any dog that moved out of his turn; for the tapering lash would shoot out like thonged lightning, and flick away an inch or so of hair and hide. Each beast growled, snapped, choked once over his portion, and hurried back to the protection of the passage, while the boy stood upon the snow under the blazing Northern Lights and dealt out justice. The last to be served was the big black leader of the team, who kept order when the dogs were harnessed; and to him Kotuko gave a double allowance of meat as well as an extra crack of the whip.

‘Ah!’ said Kotuko, coiling up the lash, ‘I have a little one over the lamp that will make a great many howlings. Sarpok! Get in!’

He crawled back over the huddled dogs, dusted the dry snow from his furs with the whalebone beater that Amoraq kept by the door, tapped the skin-lined roof of the house to shake off any icicles that might have fallen from the dome of snow above, and curled up on the bench. The dogs in the passage snored and whined in their sleep, the boy-baby in Amoraq’s deep fur hood kicked and choked and gurgled, and the mother of the newly-named puppy lay at Kotuko’s side, her eyes fixed on the bundle of sealskin, warm and safe above the broad yellow flame of the lamp.

And all this happened far away to the north, beyond Labrador, beyond Hudson’s Strait; where the great tides heave the ice about, north of Melville Peninsula—north even of the narrow Fury and Hecla Straits—on the north shore of Baffin Land, where Bylot’s Island stands above the ice of Lancaster Sound like a pudding-bowl wrong side up. North of Lancaster Sound there is little we know anything about, except North Devon and Ellesmere Land; but even there live a few scattered people, next door, as it were, to the very Pole.

Kadlu was an Inuit,—what you call an Esquimau,—and his tribe, some thirty persons all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut—‘the country lying at the back of something.’ In the maps that desolate coast is written Navy Board Inlet, but the Inuit name is best, because the country lies at the very back of everything in the world. For nine months of the year there is only ice and snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that no one can realise who has never seen the thermometer even at zero. For six months of those nine it is dark; and that is what makes it so horrible. In the three months of the summer it only freezes every other day and every night, and then the snow begins to weep off on the southerly slopes, and a few ground-willows put out their woolly buds, a tiny stonecrop or so makes believe to blossom, beaches of fine gravel and rounded stones run down to the open sea, and polished boulders and streaked rocks lift up above the granulated snow. But all that is gone in a few weeks, and the wild winter locks down again on the land; while at sea the ice tears up and down the offing, jamming and ramming, and splitting and hitting, and pounding and grounding, till it all freezes together, ten feet thick, from the land outward to deep water.

In the winter Kadlu would follow the seal to the edge of this land-ice, and spear them as they came up to breathe at their blow-holes. The seal must have open water to live and catch fish in, and in the deep of winter the ice would sometimes run eighty miles without a break from the nearest shore. In the spring he and his people retreated from the floes to the rocky mainland, where they put up tents of skins, and snared the sea-birds, or speared the young seal basking on the beaches. Later, they would go south into Baffin Land after the reindeer, and to get their year’s store of salmon from the hundreds of streams and lakes of the interior; coming back north in September or October for the musk-ox hunting and the regular winter sealery. This travelling was done with dog-sleighs, twenty and thirty miles a day, or sometimes down the coast in big skin ‘woman-boats,’ when the dogs and the babies lay among the feet of the rowers, and the women sang songs as they glided from cape to cape over the glassy, cold waters. All the luxuries that the Tununirmiut knew came from the south—driftwood for sleigh-runners, rod-iron for harpoon-tips, steel knives, tin kettles that cooked food much better than the old soap-stone affairs, flint and steel, and even matches, as well as coloured ribbons for the women’s hair, little cheap mirrors, and red cloth for the edging of deerskin dress jackets. Kadlu traded the rich, creamy, twisted narwhal horn and musk-ox teeth (these are just as valuable as pearls) to the Southern Inuit, and they, in turn, traded with the whalers and the missionary-posts of Exeter and Cumberland Sounds; and so the chain went on, till a kettle picked up by a ship’s cook in the Bhendy Bazaar might end its days over a blubber-lamp somewhere on the cool side of the Arctic Circle.

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Kadlu, being a good hunter, was rich in iron harpoons, snow-knives, bird-darts, and all the other things that make life easy up there in the great cold; and he was the head of his tribe, or, as they say, ‘the man who knows all about it by practice.’ This did not give him any authority, except now and then he could advise his friends to change their hunting-grounds; but Kotuko used it to domineer a little, in the lazy, fat Inuit fashion, over the other boys, when they came out at night to play ball in the moonlight, or to sing the Child’s Song to the Aurora Borealis.

But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man, and Kotuko was tired of making snares for wildfowl and kit-foxes, and most tired of all of helping the women to chew seal- and deer-skins (that supples them as nothing else can) the long day through, while the men were out hunting. He wanted to go into the quaggi, the Singing-House, when the hunters gathered there for their mysteries, and the angekok, the sorcerer, frightened them into the most delightful fits after the lamps were put out, and you could hear the Spirit of the Reindeer stamping on the roof; and when a spear was thrust out, into the open black night it came back covered with hot blood. He wanted to throw his big boots into the net with the tired air of the head of a family, and to gamble with the hunters when they dropped in of an evening and played a sort of home-made roulette with a tin pot and a nail. There were hundreds of things that he wanted to do, but the grown men laughed at him and said, ‘Wait till you have been in the buckle, Kotuko. Hunting is not all catching.’

Now that his father had named a puppy for him, things looked brighter. An Inuit does not waste a good dog on his son till the boy knows something of dog-driving; and Kotuko was more than sure that he knew more than everything.

If the puppy had not had an iron constitution he would have died from over-stuffing and overhandling. Kotuko made him a tiny harness with a trace to it, and hauled him all over the house-floor, shouting: ‘Aua! Ja aua!’ (Go to the right). ‘Choiachoi! Ja choiachoi!’ (Go to the left). ‘Ohaha!’ (Stop). The puppy did not like it at all, but being fished for in this way was pure happiness beside being put to the sleigh for the first time. He just sat down on the snow, and played with the seal-hide trace that ran from his harness to the pitu, the big thong in the bows of the sleigh. Then the team started, and the puppy found the heavy ten-foot sleigh running up his back, and dragging him along the snow, while Kotuko laughed till the tears ran down his face. There followed days and days of the cruel whip that hisses like the wind over ice, and his companions all bit him because he did not know his work, and the harness chafed him, and he was not allowed to sleep with Kotuko any more, but had to take the coldest place in the passage. It was a sad time for the puppy.

The boy learned, too, as fast as the dog; though a dog-sleigh is a heart-breaking thing to manage. Each beast is harnessed, the weakest nearest to the driver, by his own separate trace, which runs under his left fore-leg to the main thong, where it is fastened by a sort of button and loop which can be slipped by a turn of the wrist, thus freeing one dog at a time. This is very necessary, because young dogs often get the trace between their hind legs, where it cuts to the bone. And they one and all will go visiting their friends as they run, jumping in and out among the traces. Then they fight, and the result is more mixed than a wet fishing-line next morning. A great deal of trouble can be avoided by scientific use of the whip. Every Inuit boy prides himself as being a master of the long lash; but it is easy to flick at a mark on the ground, and difficult to lean forward and catch a shirking dog just behind the shoulders when the sleigh is going at full speed. If you call one dog’s name for ‘visiting,’ and accidentally lash another, the two will fight it out at once, and stop all the others. Again, if you travel with a companion and begin to talk, or by yourself and sing, the dogs will halt, turn round, and sit down to hear what you have to say. Kotuko was run away from once or twice through forgetting to block the sleigh when he stopped; and he broke many lashings, and ruined a few thongs before he could be trusted with a full team of eight and the light sleigh. Then he felt himself a person of consequence, and on smooth, black ice, with a bold heart and a quick elbow, he smoked along over the levels as fast as a pack in full cry. He would go ten miles to the seal-holes, and when he was on the hunting-grounds he would twitch a trace loose from the pitu, and free the big black leader, who was the cleverest dog in the team. As soon as the dog had scented a breathing-hole, Kotuko would reverse the sleigh, driving a couple of sawed-off antlers, that stuck up like perambulator-handles from the backrest, deep into the snow, so that the team could not get away. Then he would crawl forward inch by inch, and wait till the seal came up to breathe. Then he would stab down swiftly with his spear and running-line, and presently would haul his seal up to the lip of the ice, while the black leader came up and helped to pull the carcass across the ice to the sleigh. That was the time when the harnessed dogs yelled and foamed with excitement, and Kotuko laid the long lash like a red-hot bar across all their faces, till the carcass froze stiff. Going home was the heavy work. The loaded sleigh had to be humoured among the rough ice, and the dogs sat down and looked hungrily at the seal instead of pulling. At last they would strike the well worn sleigh-road to the village, and toodle-kiyi along the ringing ice, heads down and tails up; while Kotuko struck up the ‘An-gutivaun tai-na tau-na-ne taina’ (The Song of the Returning Hunter), and voices hailed him from house to house under all that dim, star-litten sky.

When Kotuko the dog came to his full growth he enjoyed himself too. He fought his way up the team steadily, fight after fight, till one fine evening, over their food, he tackled the big, black leader (Kotuko the boy saw fair play), and made second dog of him, as they say. So he was promoted to the long thong of the leading dog, running five feet in advance of all the others: it was his bounden duty to stop all fighting, in harness or out of it, and he wore a collar of copper wire, very thick and heavy. On special occasions he was fed with cooked food inside the house, and sometimes was allowed to sleep on the bench with Kotuko. He was a good seal-dog, and would keep a muskox at bay by running round him and snapping at his heels. He would even—and this for a sleighdog is the last proof of bravery—he would even stand up to the gaunt Arctic wolf, whom all dogs of the North, as a rule, fear beyond anything that walks the snow. He and his master—they did not count the team of ordinary dogs as company—hunted together, day after day and night after night, fur-wrapped boy and savage, long-haired, narrow-eyed, white-fanged, yellow brute. All an Inuit has to do is to get food and skins for himself and his family. The women-folk make the skins into clothing, and occasionally help in trapping small game; but the bulk of the food—and they eat enormously—must be found by the men. If the supply fails there is no one up there to buy or beg or borrow from. The people must die.

An Inuit does not think of these chances till he is forced to. Kadlu, Kotuko, Amoraq, and the boy-baby who kicked about in Amoraq’s fur hood and chewed pieces of blubber all day, were as happy together as any family in the world. They came of a very gentle race—an Inuit seldom loses his temper, and almost never strikes a child—who did not know exactly what telling a real lie meant, still less how to steal. They were content to spear their living out of the heart of the bitter, hopeless cold; to smile oily smiles, and tell queer ghost and fairy tales of evenings, and eat till they could eat no more, and sing the endless woman’s song: ‘Amna aya, aya amna, ah! ah!’ through the long lamp-lighted days as they mended their clothes and their hunting-gear.

But one terrible winter everything betrayed them. The Tununirmiut returned from the yearly salmon fishing, and made their houses on the early ice to the north of Bylot’s Island, ready to go after the seal as soon as the sea froze. But it was an early and savage autumn. All through September there were continuous gales that broke up the smooth seal-ice when it was only four or five feet thick, and forced it inland, and piled a great barrier, some twenty miles broad, of lumped and ragged and needly ice, over which it was impossible to draw the dog-sleighs. The edge of the floe off which the seal were used to fish in winter lay perhaps twenty miles beyond this barrier, and out of reach of the Tununirmiut. Even so, they might have managed to scrape through the winter on their stock of frozen salmon and stored blubber, and what the traps gave them, but in December one of their hunters came across a tupik (a skin-tent) of three women and a girl nearly dead, whose men had come down from the far

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North and been crushed in their little skin hunting-boats while they were out after the long horned narwhal. Kadlu, of course, could only distribute the women among the huts of the winter village, for no Inuit dare refuse a meal to a stranger. He never knows when his own turn may come to beg. Amoraq took the girl, who was about fourteen, into her own house as a sort of servant. From the cut of her sharp-pointed hood, and the long diamond pattern of her white deer-skin leggings, they supposed she came from Ellesmere Land. She had never seen tin cooking-pots or wooden-shod sleighs before; but Kotuko the boy and Kotuko the dog were rather fond of her.

Then all the foxes went south, and even the wolverine, that growling, blunt-headed little thief of the snow, did not take the trouble to follow the line of empty traps that Kotuko set. The tribe lost a couple of their best hunters, who were badly crippled in a fight with a musk-ox, and this threw more work on the others. Kotuko went out, day after day, with a light hunting-sleigh and six or seven of the strongest dogs, looking till his eyes ached for some patch of clear ice where a seal might perhaps have scratched a breathing-hole. Kotuko the dog ranged far and wide, and in the dead stillness of the ice-fields Kotuko the boy could hear his half-choked whine of excitement, above a seal-hole three miles away, as plainly as though he were at his elbow. When the dog found a hole the boy would build himself a little, low snow wall to keep off the worst of the bitter wind, and there he would wait ten, twelve, twenty hours for the seal to come up to breathe, his eyes glued to the tiny mark he had made above the hole to guide the downward thrust of his harpoon, a little sealskin mat under his feet, and his legs tied together in the tutareang (the buckle that the old hunters had talked about). This helps to keep a man’s legs from twitching as he waits and waits and waits for the quick-eared seal to rise. Though there is no excitement in it, you can easily believe that the sitting still in the buckle with the thermometer perhaps forty degrees below zero is the hardest work an Inuit knows. When a seal was caught, Kotuko the dog would bound forward, his trace trailing behind him, and help to pull the body to the sleigh, where the tired and hungry dogs lay sullenly under the lee of the broken ice.

A seal did not go very far, for each mouth in the little village had a right to be filled, and neither bone, hide, nor sinew was wasted. The dogs’ meat was taken for human use, and Amoraq fed the team with pieces of old summer skin-tents raked out from under the sleeping-bench, and they howled and howled again, and waked to howl hungrily. One could tell by the soap-stone lamps in the huts that famine was near. In good seasons, when blubber was plentiful, the light in the boat-shaped lamps would be two feet high—cheerful, oily, and yellow. Now it was a bare six inches Amoraq carefully pricked down the moss wick, when an unwatched flame brightened for a moment, and the eyes of all the family followed her hand. The horror of famine up there in the great cold is not so much dying, as dying in the dark. All the Inuit dread the dark that presses on them without a break for six months in each year; and when the lamps are low in the houses the minds of people begin to be shaken and confused.

But worse was to come.

The underfed dogs snapped and growled in the passages, glaring at the cold stars, and snuffing into the bitter wind, night after night. When they stopped howling the silence fell down again as solid and heavy as a snowdrift against a door, and men could hear the beating of their blood in the thin passages of the ear, and the thumping of their own hearts, that sounded as loud as the noise of sorcerers’ drums beaten across the snow. One night Kotuko the dog, who, had been unusually sullen in harness, leaped up and pushed his head against Kotuko’s knee. Kotuko patted him, but the dog still pushed blindly forward, fawning. Then Kadlu waked, and gripped the heavy wolf-like head, and stared into the glassy eyes. The dog whimpered and shivered between Kadlu’s knees. The hair rose about his neck, and he growled as though a stranger were at the door; then he barked joyously; and rolled on the ground, and bit at Kotuko’s boot like a puppy.

‘What is it?’ said Kotuko; for he was beginning to be afraid.

‘The sickness,’ Kadlu answered. ‘It is the dog sickness.’ Kotuko the dog lifted his nose and howled and howled again.

‘I have not seen this before. What will he do?’ said Kotuko.

Kadlu shrugged one shoulder a little, and crossed the hut for his short stabbing-harpoon.

The big dog looked at him, howled again, and slunk away down the passage, while the other dogs drew aside right and left to give him ample room. When he was out on the snow he barked furiously, as though on the trail of a musk-ox, and, barking and leaping and frisking, passed out of sight. His trouble was not hydrophobia, but simple, plain madness. The cold and the hunger, and, above all, the dark, had turned his head; and when the terrible dog-sickness once shows itself in a team, it spreads like wild-fire. Next hunting-day another dog sickened, and was killed then and there by Kotuko as he bit and struggled among the traces. Then the black second dog, who had been the leader in the old days, suddenly gave tongue on an imaginary reindeer-track, and when they slipped him from the pitu he flew at the throat of an ice-cliff, and ran away as his leader had done, his harness on his back. After that no one would take the dogs out again. They needed them for something else, and the dogs knew it; and though they were tied down and fed by hand, their eyes were full of despair and fear. To make things worse, the old women began to tell ghost-tales, and to say that they had met the spirits of the dead hunters lost that autumn, who prophesied all sorts of horrible things.

Kotuko grieved more for the loss of his dog than anything else; for though an Inuit eats enormously he also knows how to starve. But the hunger, the darkness, the cold, and the exposure told on his strength, and he began to hear voices inside his head, and to see people who were not there, out of the tail of his eye. One night—he had unbuckled himself after ten hours waiting above a ‘blind’ seal-hole, and was staggering back to the village faint and dizzy—he halted to lean his back against a boulder which happened to be supported like a rocking-stone on a single jutting point of ice. His weight disturbed the balance of the thing, it rolled over ponderously, and as Kotuko sprang aside to avoid it, slid after him, squeaking and hissing on the ice-slope.

That was enough for Kotuko. He had been brought up to believe that every rock and boulder had its owner (its inua), who was generally a one-eyed kind of a Woman-Thing called a tornaq, and that when a tornaq meant to help a man she rolled after him inside her stone house, and asked him whether he would take her for a guardian spirit. (In summer thaws the ice-propped rocks and boulders roll and slip all over the face of the land, so you can easily see how the idea of live stones arose.) Kotuko heard the blood beating in his ears as he had heard it all day, and he thought that was the tornaq of the stone speaking to him. Before he reached home he was quite certain that he had held a long conversation with her, and as all his people believed that this was quite possible, no one contradicted him.

‘She said to me, “I jump down, I jump down from my place on the snow,”’ cried Kotuko, with hollow eyes, leaning forward in the half-lighted hut. ‘She said, “I will be a guide.” She said, “I will guide you to the good seal-holes.” Tomorrow I go out, and the tornaq will guide me.’

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Then the angekok, the village sorcerer, came in, and Kotuko told him the tale a second time. It lost nothing in the telling.

‘Follow the tornait [the spirits of the stones], and they will bring us food again,’ said the angekok.

Now the girl from the North had been lying near the lamp, eating very little and saying less for days past; but when Amoraq and Kadlu next morning packed and lashed a little hand-sleigh for Kotuko, and loaded it with his hunting-gear and as much blubber and frozen seal-meat as they could spare, she took the pulling-rope, and stepped out boldly at the boy’s side.

‘Your house is my house,’ she said, as the little bone-shod sleigh squeaked and bumped behind them in the awful Arctic night.

‘My house is your house,’ said Kotuko; ‘but I think that we shall both go to Sedna together.’

Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Underworld, and the Inuit believe that every one who dies must spend a year in her horrible country before going to Quadliparmiut, the Happy Place, where it never freezes and the fat reindeer trot up when you call.

Through the village people were shouting: ‘The tornait have spoken to Kotuko. They will show him open ice. He will bring us the seal again!’ Their voices were soon swallowed up by the cold, empty dark, and Kotuko and the girl shouldered close together as they strained on the pulling-rope or humoured the sleigh through the ice in the direction of the Polar Sea. Kotuko insisted that the tornaq of the stone had told him to go north, and north they went under Tuktuqdjung the Reindeer—those stars that we call the Great Bear.

No European could have made five miles a day over the ice-rubbish and the sharp-edged drifts; but those two knew exactly the turn of the wrist that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock, the jerk that nearly lifts it out of an ice-crack, and the exact strength that goes to the few quiet strokes of the spear-head that make a path possible when everything looks hopeless.

The girl said nothing, but bowed her head, and the long wolverine-fur fringe of her ermine hood blew across her broad, dark face. The sky above them was an intense velvety black, changing to bands of Indian red on the horizon, where the great stars burned like street-lamps. From time to time a greenish wave of the Northern Lights would roll across the hollow of the high heavens, flick like a flag, and disappear; or a meteor would crackle from darkness to darkness, trailing a shower of sparks behind. Then they could see the ridged and furrowed surface of the floe tipped and laced with strange colours—red, copper, and bluish; but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frost-bitten gray. The floe, as you will remember, had been battered and tormented by the autumn gales till it was one frozen earthquake. There were gullies and ravines, and holes like gravel-pits, cut in ice; lumps and scattered pieces frozen down to the original floor of the floe; blotches of old black ice that had been thrust under the floe in some gale and heaved up again; roundish boulders of ice; saw-like edges of ice carved by the snow that flies before the wind; and sunken pits where thirty or forty acres lay below the level of the rest of the field. From a little distance you might have taken the lumps for seal or walrus, overturned sleighs or men on a hunting expedition, or even the great Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself; but in spite of these fantastic shapes, all on the very edge of starting into life, there was neither sound nor the least faint echo of sound. And through this silence and through this waste, where the sudden lights flapped and went out again, the sleigh and the two that pulled it crawled like things in a nightmare—a nightmare of the end of the world at the end of the world.

When they were tired Kotuko would make what the hunters call a ‘half-house,’ a very small snow hut, into which they would huddle with the travelling-lamp, and try to thaw out the frozen seal-meat. When they had slept, the march began again—thirty miles a day to get ten miles northward. The girl was always very silent; but Kotuko muttered to himself and broke out into songs he had learned in the Singing-House—summer songs, and reindeer and salmon songs—all horribly out of place at that season. He would declare that he heard the tornaq growling to him, and would run wildly up a hummock, tossing his arms and speaking in loud, threatening tones. To tell the truth, Kotuko was very nearly crazy for the time being; but the girl was sure that he was being guided by his guardian spirit, and that everything would come right. She was not surprised, therefore, when at the end of the fourth march Kotuko, whose eyes were burning like fireballs in his head, told her that his tornaq was following them across the snow in the shape of a two-headed dog. The girl looked where Kotuko pointed, and something seemed to slip into a ravine. It was certainly not human, but everybody knew that the tornait preferred to appear in the shape of bear and seal, and such like.

It might have been the Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself, or it might have been anything, for Kotuko and the girl were so starved that their eyes were untrustworthy. They had trapped nothing, and seen no trace of game since they had left the village; their food would not hold out for another week, and there was a gale coming. A Polar storm can blow for ten days without a break, and all that while it is certain death to be abroad. Kotuko laid up a snow-house large enough to take in the hand-sleigh (never be separated from your meat), and while he was shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the key-stone of the roof, he saw a Thing looking at him from a little cliff of ice half a mile away. The air was hazy, and the Thing seemed to be forty feet long and ten feet high, with twenty feet of tail and a shape that quivered all along the outlines. The girl saw it too, but instead of crying aloud with terror, said quietly, ‘That is Quiquern. What comes after?’

‘He will speak to me,’ said Kotuko; but the snow-knife trembled in his hand as he spoke, because however much a man may believe that he is a friend of strange and ugly spirits, he seldom likes to be taken quite at his word. Quiquern, too, is the phantom of a gigantic toothless dog without any hair, who is supposed to live in the far North, and to wander about the country just before things are going to happen. They may be pleasant or unpleasant things, but not even the sorcerers care to speak about Quiquern. He makes the dogs go mad. Like the Spirit-Bear, he has several extra pairs of legs,—six or eight,—and this Thing jumping up and down in the haze had more legs than any real dog needed. Kotuko and the girl huddled into their hut quickly. Of course if Quiquern had wanted them, he could have torn it to pieces above their heads, but the sense of a foot-thick snow-wall between themselves and the wicked dark was great comfort. The gale broke with a shriek of wind like the shriek of a train, and for three days and three nights it held, never varying one point, and never lulling even for a minute. They fed the stone lamp between their knees, and nibbled at the half-warm seal-meat, and watched the black soot gather on the roof for seventy-two long hours. The girl counted up the food in the sleigh; there was not more than two days supply, and Kotuko looked over the iron heads and the deer-sinew fastenings of his harpoon and his seal-lance and his bird-dart. There was nothing else to do.

‘We shall go to Sedna soon—very soon,’ the girl whispered. ‘In three days we shall lie down and go. Will your tornaq do nothing? Sing her an angekok’s song to make her come here.’

He began to sing in the high-pitched howl of the magic songs, and the gale went down slowly. In the middle of his song the girl started, laid her mittened hand and then her head to the ice floor of the hut. Kotuko followed her example, and the two kneeled, staring into each other’s eyes, and listening with every nerve. He ripped a thin sliver of whalebone from the rim of a bird-snare that lay on the sleigh, and, after straightening, set it upright in a little hole in the ice, firming it down with his mitten. It was almost as delicately adjusted as a compass-needle, and now instead of listening they watched. The thin rod quivered a little—the least little jar in the world; then it vibrated steadily for a few seconds, came to rest, and vibrated again, this time nodding to another point of the compass.

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‘Too soon!’ said Kotuko. ‘Some big floe has broken far away outside.’

The girl pointed at the rod, and shook her head. ‘It is the big breaking,’ she said. ‘Listen to the ground-ice. It knocks.’

When they kneeled this time they heard the most curious muffled grunts and knockings, apparently under their feet. Sometimes it sounded as though a blind puppy were squeaking above the lamp; then as if a stone were being ground on hard ice; and again, like muffled blows on a drum; but all dragged out and made small, as though they travelled through a little horn a weary distance away.

‘We shall not go to Sedna lying down,’ said Kotuko. ‘It is the breaking. The tornaq has cheated us. We shall die.’

All this may sound absurd enough, but the two were face to face with a very real danger. The three days’ gale had driven the deep water of Baffin’s Bay southerly, and piled it on to the edge of the far-reaching land-ice that stretches from Bylot’s Island to the west. Also, the strong current which sets east out of Lancaster Sound carried with it mile upon mile of what they call pack-ice—rough ice that has not frozen into fields; and this pack was bombarding the floe at the same time that the swell and heave of the storm-worked sea was weakening and undermining it. What Kotuko and the girl had been listening to were the faint echoes of that fight thirty or forty miles away, and the little tell-tale rod quivered to the shock of it.

Now, as the Inuit say, when the ice once wakes after its long winter sleep, there is no knowing what may happen, for solid floe-ice changes shape almost as quickly as a cloud. The gale was evidently a spring gale sent out of time, and anything was possible.

Yet the two were happier in their-minds than before. If the floe broke up there would be no more waiting and suffering. Spirits, goblins, and witch-people were moving about on the racking ice, and they might find themselves stepping into Sedna’s country side by side with all sorts of wild Things, the flush of excitement still on them. When they left the hut after the gale, the noise on the horizon was steadily growing, and the tough ice moaned and buzzed all round them.

‘It is still waiting,’ said Kotuko.

On the top of a hummock sat or crouched the eight-legged Thing that they had seen three days before—and it howled horribly.

‘Let us follow,’ said the girl. ‘It may know some way that does not lead to Sedna’; but she reeled from weakness as she took the pulling-rope. The Thing moved off slowly and clumsily across the ridges, heading always toward the westward and the land, and they followed, while the growling thunder at the edge of the floe rolled nearer and nearer. The floe’s lip was split and cracked in every direction for three or four miles inland, and great pans of ten-foot-thick ice, from a few yards to twenty acres square, were jolting and ducking and surging into one another, and into the yet unbroken floe, as the heavy swell took and shook and spouted between them. This battering-ram ice was, so to speak, the first army that the sea was flinging against the floe. The incessant crash and jar of these cakes almost drowned the ripping sound of sheets of pack-ice driven bodily under the floe as cards are hastily pushed under a tablecloth. Where the water was shallow these sheets would be piled one atop of the other till the bottommost touched mud fifty feet down, and the discoloured sea banked behind the muddy ice till the increasing pressure drove all forward again. In addition to the floe and the pack-ice, the gale and the currents were bringing down true bergs, sailing mountains of ice, snapped off from the Greenland side of the water or the north shore of Melville Bay. They pounded in solemnly, the waves breaking white round them, and advanced on the floe like an old-time fleet under full sail. A berg that seemed ready to carry the world before it would ground helplessly in deep water, reel over, and wallow in a lather of foam and mud and flying frozen spray, while a much smaller and lower one would rip and ride into the flat floe, flinging tons of ice on either side, and cutting a track half a mile long before it was stopped. Some fell like swords, shearing a raw-edged canal; and others splintered into a shower of blocks, weighing scores of tons apiece, that whirled and skirled among the hummocks. Others, again, rose up bodily out of the water when they shoaled, twisted as though in pain, and fell solidly on their sides, while the sea threshed over their shoulders. This trampling and crowding and bending and buckling and arching of the ice into every possible shape was going on as far as the eye could reach all along the north line of the floe. From where Kotuko and the girl were, the confusion looked no more than an uneasy, rippling, crawling movement under the horizon; but it came toward them each moment, and they could hear, far away to landward a heavy booming, as it might have been the boom of artillery through a fog. That showed that the floe was being jammed home against the iron cliffs of Bylot’s Island, the land to the southward behind them.

‘This has never been before,’ said Kotuko, staring stupidly. ‘This is not the time. How can the floe break now?’

‘Follow that!’ the girl cried, pointing to the Thing half limping, half running distractedly before them. They followed, tugging at the hand-sleigh, while nearer and nearer came the roaring march of the ice. At last the fields round them cracked and starred in every direction, and the cracks opened and snapped like the teeth of wolves. But where the Thing rested, on a mound of old and scattered ice-blocks some fifty feet high, there was no motion. Kotuko leaped forward wildly, dragging the girl after him, and crawled to the bottom of the mound. The talking of the ice grew louder and louder round them, but the mound stayed fast, and, as the girl looked at him, he threw his right elbow upward and outward, making the Inuit sign for land in the shape of an island. And land it was that the eight-legged, limping Thing had led them to-some granite-tipped, sand-beached islet off the coast, shod and sheathed and masked with ice so that no man could have told it from the floe, but at the bottom solid earth, and not shifting ice! The smashing and rebound of the floes as they grounded and splintered marked the borders of it, and a friendly shoal ran out to the northward, and turned aside the rush of the heaviest ice, exactly as a ploughshare turns over loam. There was danger, of course, that some heavily squeezed ice-field might shoot up the beach, and plane off the top of the islet, bodily; but that did not trouble Kotuko and the girl when they made their snow-house and began to eat, and heard the ice hammer and skid along the beach. The Thing had disappeared, and Kotuko was talking excitedly about his power over spirits as he crouched round the lamp. In the middle of his wild sayings the girl began to laugh, and rock herself backward and forward.

Behind her shoulder, crawling into the hut crawl by crawl, there were two heads, one yellow and one black, that belonged to two of the most sorrowful and ashamed dogs that ever you saw. Kotuko the dog was one, and the black leader was the other. Both were now fat, well-looking, and quite restored to their proper minds, but coupled to each other in an extraordinary fashion. When the black leader ran off, you remember, his harness was still on him. He must have met Kotuko the dog, and played or fought with him, for his shoulder-loop had caught in the plaited copper wire of Kotuko’s collar, and had drawn tight, so that neither could get at the trace to gnaw it apart, but each was fastened sidelong to his neighbour’s neck. That, with the freedom of hunting on their own account, must have helped to cure their madness. They were very sober.

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The girl pushed the two shamefaced creatures towards Kotuko, and, sobbing with laughter, cried, ‘That is Quiquern, who led us to safe ground. Look at his eight legs and double head!’

Kotuko cut them free, and they fell into his arms, yellow and black together, trying to explain how they had got their senses back again. Kotuko ran a hand down their ribs, which were round and well clothed. ‘They have found food,’ he said, with a grin. ‘I do not think we shall go to Sedna so soon. My tornaq sent these. The sickness has left them.’

As soon as they had greeted Kotuko, these two, who had been forced to sleep and eat and hunt together for the past few weeks, flew at each other’s throat, and there was a beautiful battle in the snow-house. ‘Empty dogs do not fight,’ Kotuko said. ‘They have found the seal. Let us sleep. We shall find food.’

When they waked there was open water on the north beach of the island, and all the loosened ice had been driven landward. The first sound of the surf is one of the most delightful that the Inuit can hear, for it means that spring is on the road. Kotuko and the girl took hold of hands and smiled, for the clear, full roar of the surge among the ice reminded them of salmon and reindeer time and the smell of blossoming ground-willows. Even as they looked, the sea began to skim over between the floating cakes of ice, so intense was the cold; but on the horizon there was a vast red glare, and that was the light of the sunken sun. It was more like hearing him yawn in his sleep than seeing him rise, and the glare lasted for only a few minutes, but it marked the turn of the year. Nothing, they felt, could alter that.

Kotuko found the dogs fighting over a fresh-killed seal who was following the fish that a gale always disturbs. He was the first of some twenty or thirty seal that landed on the island in the course of the day, and till the sea froze hard there were hundreds of keen black heads rejoicing in the shallow free water and floating about with the floating ice.

It was good to eat seal-liver again; to fill the lamps recklessly with blubber, and watch the flame blaze three feet in the air; but as soon as the new sea-ice bore, Kotuko and the girl loaded the hand-sleigh, and made the two dogs pull as they had never pulled in their lives, for they feared what might have happened in their village. The weather was as pitiless as usual; but it is easier to draw a sleigh loaded with good food than to hunt starving. They left five-and-twenty seal carcasses buried in the ice of the beach, all ready for use, and hurried back to their people. The dogs showed them the way as soon as Kotuko told them what was expected, and though there was no sign of a landmark, in two days they were giving tongue outside Kadlu’s house. Only three dogs answered them; the others had been eaten, and the houses were all dark. But when Kotuko shouted, ‘Ojo!’ (boiled meat), weak voices replied, and when he called the muster of the village name by name, very distinctly, there were no gaps in it.

An hour later the lamps blazed in Kadlu’s house; snow-water was heating; the pots were beginning to simmer, and the snow was dripping from the roof, as Amoraq made ready a meal for all the village, and the boy-baby in the hood chewed at a strip of rich nutty blubber, and the hunters slowly and methodically filled themselves to the very brim with seal-meat. Kotuko and the girl told their tale. The two dogs sat between them, and when ever their names came in, they cocked an ear apiece and looked most thoroughly ashamed of themselves. A dog who has once gone mad and recovered, the Inuit say, is safe against all further attacks.

‘So the tornaq did not forget us,’ said Kotuko. ‘The storm blew, the ice broke, and the seal swam in behind the fish that were frightened by the storm. Now the new seal-holes are not two days distant. Let the good hunters go to-morrow and bring back the seal I have speared—twenty-five seal buried in the ice. When we have eaten those we will all follow the seal on the floe.’

‘What do you do?’ said the sorcerer in the same sort of voice as he used to Kadlu, richest of the Tununirmiut.

Kadlu looked at the girl from the North, and said quietly, ‘We build a house.’ He pointed to the north-west side of Kadlu’s house, for that is the side on which the married son or daughter always lives.

The girl turned her hands palm upward, with a little despairing shake of her head. She was a foreigner, picked up starving, and could bring nothing to the housekeeping.

Amoraq jumped from the bench where she sat, and began to sweep things into the girl’s lap—stone lamps, iron skin-scrapers, tin kettles, deerskins embroidered with musk-ox teeth, and real canvas-needles such as sailors use—the finest dowry that has ever been given on the far edge of the Arctic Circle, and the girl from the North bowed her head down to the very floor.

‘Also these!’ said Kotuko, laughing and signing to the dogs, who thrust their cold muzzles into the girl’s face.

‘Ah,’ said the angekok, with an important cough, as though he had been thinking it all over. ‘As soon as Kotuko left the village I went to the Singing-House and sang magic. I sang all the long nights, and called upon the Spirit of the Reindeer. My singing made the gale blow that broke the ice and drew the two dogs toward Kotuko when the ice would have crushed his bones. My song drew the seal in behind the broken ice. My body lay still in the quaggi, but my spirit ran about on the ice, and guided Kotuko and the dogs in all the things they did. I did it.’

Everybody was full and sleepy, so no one contradicted; and the angekok, by virtue of his office, helped himself to yet another lump of boiled meat, and lay down to sleep with the others in the warm, well-lighted, oil-smelling home.

. . . . .

Now Kotuko, who drew very well in the Inuit fashion, scratched pictures of all these adventures on a long, flat piece of ivory with a hole at one end. When he and the girl went north to Ellesmere Land in the year of the Wonderful Open Winter, he left the picture-story with Kadlu, who lost it in the shingle when his dog-sleigh broke down one summer on the beach of Lake Netilling at Nikosiring, and there a Lake Inuit found it next spring and sold it to a man at Imigen who was interpreter on a Cumberland Sound whaler, and he sold it to Hans Olsen, who was afterward a quartermaster on board a big steamer that took tourists to the North Cape in Norway. When the tourist season was over, the steamer ran between London and Australia, stopping at Ceylon, and there Olsen sold the ivory to a Cingalese jeweller for two imitation sapphires. I found it under some rubbish in a house at Colombo, and have translated it from one end to the other.

The Puzzler

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

page 1 of 6

I HAD not seen Penfentenyou since the Middle Nineties, when he was Minister of Ways and Woodsides in De Thouar’s first Administration. Last summer, though he nominally held the same portfolio, he was his Colony’s Premier in all but name, and the idol of his own province, which is two and a half times the size of England. Politically, his creed was his growing country; and he came over to England to develop a Great Idea in her behalf.Believing that he had put it in train, I made haste to welcome him to my house for a week.

That he was chased to my door by his own Agent-General in a motor; that they turned my study into a Cabinet Meeting which I was not invited to attend; that the local telegraph all but broke down beneath the strain of hundred word coded cables; and that I practically broke into the house of a stranger to get him telephonic facilities on a Sunday, are things I overlook. What I objected to was his ingratitude, while I thus tore up England to help him. So I said: “Why on earth didn’t you see your Opposite Number in Town instead of bringing your office work here?”

“Eh? Who?” said he, looking up from his fourth cable since lunch.

“See the English Minister for Ways and Woodsides.”

“I saw him,” said Penfentenyou, without enthusiasm.

It seemed that he had called twice on the gentleman, but without an appointment—(“I thought if I wasn’t big enough, my business was”)—and each time had found him engaged. A third party intervening, suggested that a meeting might be arranged if due notice were given.

“Then,” said Penfentenyou, “I called at the office at ten o’clock.”

“But they’d be in bed,” I cried.

“One of the babies was awake. He told me that—that ‘my sort of questions’”—he slapped the pile of cables—“were only taken between 11 and 2 p.m. So I waited.”

“And when you got to business?” I asked.

He made a gesture of despair. “It was like talking to children. They’d never heard of it.”

“And your Opposite Number?”

Penfentenyou described him.

“Hush! You mustn’t talk like that!” I shuddered. “He’s one of the best of good fellows. You should meet him socially.”

“I’ve done that too,” he said. “Have you?”

“Heaven forbid!” I cried; “but that’s the proper thing to say.”

“Oh, he said all the proper things. Only I thought as this was England that they’d more or less have the hang of all the—general hang-together of my Idea. But I had to explain it from the beginning.”

“Ah! They’d probably mislaid the papers,” I said, and I told him the story of a three-million pound insurrection caused by a deputy Under-Secretary sitting upon a mass of green-labelled correspondence instead of reading it.

“I wonder it doesn’t happen every week,” the answered. “D’you mind my having the Agent-General to dinner again tonight? I’ll wire, and he can motor down.”

The Agent-General arrived two hours later, a patient and expostulating person, visibly torn between the pulling Devil of a rampant Colony, and the placid Baker of a largely uninterested England. But with Penfentenyou behind him he had worked; for he told us that Lord Lundie—the Law Lord was the final authority on the legal and constitutional aspects of the Great Idea, and to him it must be referred.

“Good Heavens alive!” thundered Penfentenyou. “I told you to get that settled last Christmas.”

“It was the middle of the house-party season,” said the Agent-General mildly. “Lord Lundie’s at Credence Green now—he spends his holidays there. It’s only forty miles off.”

“Shan’t I disturb his Holiness?” said Penfentenyou heavily. “Perhaps ‘my sort of questions,’” he snorted, “mayn’t be discussed except at midnight.”

“Oh, don’t be a child,” I said.

“What this country needs,” said Penfentenyou, “is—” and for ten minutes he trumpeted rebellion.

“What you need is to pay for your own protection,” I cut in when he drew breath, and I showed him a yellowish paper, supplied gratis by Government, which is called Schedule D. To my merciless delight he had never seen the thing before, and I completed my victory over him and all the Colonies with a Brassey’s “Naval Annual” and a “Statesman’s Year Book.”

The Agent-General interposed with agent-generalities (but they were merely provocateurs) about Ties of Sentiment.

“They be blowed!” said Penfentenyou. “What’s the good of sentiment towards a Kindergarten?”

“Quite so. Ties of common funk are the things that bind us together; and the sooner you new nations realize it the better. What you need is an annual invasion. Then you’d grow up.”

“Thank you! Thank you!” said the Agent-General. “That’s what I am always trying to tell my people.”

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“But, my dear fool,” Penfentenyou almost wept, “do you pretend that these banana-fingered amateurs at home are grown up?”

“You poor, serious, pagan man,” I retorted, “if you take ’em that way, you’ll wreck your Great Idea.”

“Will you take him to Lord Lundie’s to-morrow?” said the Agent-General promptly.

“I suppose I must,” I said, “if you won’t.”

“Not me! I’m going home,” said the Agent-General, and departed. I am glad that I am no colony’s Agent-General.

Penfentenyou continued to argue about naval contributions till 1.15 a.m., though I was victor from the first.

At ten o’clock I got him and his correspondence into the motor, and he had the decency to ask whether he had been unpolished over-night. I replied that I waited an apology. This he made excuse for renewed arguments, and used wayside shows as illustrations of the decadence of England.

For example we burst a tyre within a mile of Credence Green, and, to save time, walked into the beautifully kept little village. His eye was caught by a building of pale-blue tin, stencilled “Calvinist Chapel,” before whose shuttered windows an Italian organ-grinder .with a petticoated monkey was playing “Dolly Grey—”

“Yes. That’s it!” snapped the egoist. “That’s a parable of the general situation in England. And look at those brutes!” A huge household removals van was halted at a public-house. The men in charge were drinking beer from blue and white mugs. It seemed to me a pretty sight, but Penfentenyou said it represented Our National Attitude.

Lord Lundie’s summer resting-place we learned was a farm, a little out of the village, up a hill round which curled a high hedged road. Only an initiated few spend their holidays at Credence Green, and they have trained the householders to keep the place select. Penfentenyou made a grievance of this as we walked up the lane, followed at a distance by the organ-grinder.

“Suppose he is having a house-party,” he said: “Anything’s possible in this insane land.”

Just at that minute we found ourselves opposite an empty villa. Its roof was of black slate, with bright unweathered ridge-tiling; its walls were of blood-coloured brick, cornered and banded with vermiculated stucco work, and there was cobalt, magenta, and purest apple-green window-glass on either side of the front door. The whole was fenced from the road by a low, brick-pillared, flint wall, topped with a cast-iron Gothic rail, picked out in blue and gold.

Tight beds of geranium, calceolaria, and lobelia speckled the glass-plat, from whose centre rose one of the finest araucarias (its other name by the way is “monkey-puzzler”), that it has ever been my lot to see. It must have been full thirty feet high, and its foliage exquisitely answered the iron railings. Such bijou ne plus ultras, replete with all the amenities, do not, as I pointed out to Penfentenyou, transpire outside of England.

A hedge, swinging sharp right, flanked the garden, and above it on a slope of daisy-dotted meadows we could see Lord Lundie’s tiled and half-timbered summer farmhouse. Of a sudden we heard voices behind the tree—the fine full tones of the unembarrassed English, speaking to their equals—that tore through the hedge like sleet through rafters.

“That it is not called ‘monkey-puzzler’ for nothing, I willingly concede”—this was a rich and rolling note—“but on the other hand—”

“I submit, me lud, that the name implies that it might, could, would, or should be ascended by a monkey, and not that the ascent is a physical impossibility. I believe one of our South American spider monkeys wouldn’t hesitate . . . By Jove, it might be worth trying, if—”

This was a crisper voice than the first. A third, higher-pitched, and full of pleasant affectations, broke in.

“Oh, practical men, there is no ape here. Why do you waste one of God’s own days on unprofitable discussion? Give me a match!”

“I’ve a good mind to make you demonstrate in your own person. Come on, Bubbles! We’ll make Jimmy climb!”

There was a sound of scuffling, broken by squeaks from Jimmy of the high voice. I turned back and drew Penfentenyou into the side of the flanking hedge. I remembered to have read in a society paper that Lord Lundie’s lesser name was “Bubbles.”

“What are they doing?” Penfentenyou said sharply. “Drunk?”

“Just playing! Superabundant vitality of the Race, you know. We’ll watch ’em,” I answered. The noise ceased.

“My deliver,” Jimmy gasped. “The ram caught in the thicket, and—I’m the only one who can talk Neapolitan! Leggo my collar!” He cried aloud in a foreign tongue, and was answered from the gate.

“It’s the Calvinistic organ-grinder,” I whispered. I had already found a practicable break at the bottom of the hedge. “They’re going to try to make the monkey climb, I believe.”

“Here—let me look!” Penfentenyou flung himself down, and rooted till he too broke a peep-hole. We lay side by side commanding the entire garden at ten yards’ range.

“You know ’em?” said Penfentenyou, as I made some noise or other.

“By sight only. The big fellow in flannels is Lord Lundie; the light-built one with the yellow beard painted his picture at the last Academy: He’s a swell R.A., James Loman.”

“And the brown chap with the hands?”

“Tomling, Sir Christopher Tomling, the South American engineer who built the—”

page 3

“San Juan Viaduct. I know,” said Penfentenyou. “We ought to have had him with us . . . . Do you think a monkey would climb the tree?”

The organ-grinder at the gate fenced his beast with one arm as Jimmy-talked.

“Don’t show off your futile accomplishments,” said Lord Lundie. “Tell him it’s an experiment. Interest him!”

“Shut up, Bubbles. You aren’t in court,” Jimmy’,replied. “This needs delicacy. Giuseppe says—”

“Interest the monkey,” the brown engineer interrupted. “He won’t climb for love. Cut up to the house and get some biscuits, Bubbles—sugar ones and an orange or two. No need to tell our womenfolk.”

The huge white figure lobbed off at a trot which would not have disgraced a boy of seventeen. I gathered from something Jimmy let fall that the three had been at Harrow together.

“That Tomling has a head on his Shoulders,” muttered Penfentenyou. “Pity we didn’t get him for the Colony. But the question is, will the monkey climb?”

“Be quick, Jimmy. Tell the man we’ll give him five bob for the loan of the beast. Now run the organ under the tree, and we’ll dress it when Bubbles comes back,” Sir Christopher cried.

“I’ve often wondered,” said Penfentenyou, “whether it would puzzle a monkey?” He had forgotten the needs of his Growing Nation, and was earnestly parting the white-thorn stems with his fingers.

. . . . .

Giuseppe and Jimmy did as they were told, the monkey following them with a wary and malignant eye.

“Here’s a discovery,” said Jimmy. “The singing part of this organ comes off the wheels.” He spoke volubly to the proprietor. “Oh, it’s so as Giuseppe can take it to his room o’ nights. And play it. D’you hear that? The organ-grinder, after his day’s crime, plays his accursed machine for love. For love, Chris! And Michael Angelo was one of ’em!”

“Don’t jaw! Tell him to take the beast’s petticoat off,” said Sir Christopher Tomling.

Lord Lundie returned, very little winded, through a gap higher up the hedge.

“They’re all out, thank goodness!” he cried, “but I’ve raided what I could. Macrons glaces, candied fruit, and a bag of oranges.”

“Excellent!” said the world-renowned contractor.

“Jimmy, you’re the light-weight; jump up on the organ and impale these things on the leaves as I hand ’em!”

“I see,” said Jimmy, capering like a springbuck. “Upward and onward, eh? First, he’ll reach out for—how infernal prickly these leaves are!—this biscuit. Next we’ll lure him on—(that’s about the reach of his arm)—with the marron glare, and then he’ll open out this orange. How human! How like your ignoble career, Bubbles!”

With care and elaboration they ornamented that tree’s lower branches with sugar-topped biscuits, oranges, bits of banana, and marrons glares till it looked very ape’s path to Paradise.

“Unchain the Gyascutis!” said Sir Christopher commandingly. Giuseppe placed the monkey atop of the organ, where the beast, misunderstanding, stood on his head.

“He’s throwing himself on the mercy of the Court, me lud,” said Jimmy. “No—now he’s interested. Now he’s reaching after higher things. What wouldn’t I give to have here” (he mentioned a name not unhonoured in British Art). “Ambition plucking apples of Sodom!” (the monkey had pricked himself and was swearing). “Genius hampered by Convention? Oh, there’s a whole bushelful of allegories in it!”

“Give him time. He’s balancing the probabilities,” said Lord Lundie.

The three closed round the monkey,—hanging on his every motion with an earnestness almost equal to ours. The great judge’s head—seamed and vertical forehead, iron mouth, and pike-like under-jaw, all set on that thick neck rising out of the white flannelled collar—was thrown against the puckered green silk of the organ-front as it might have been a cameo of Titus. Jimmy, with raised eyes and parted lips, fingered his grizzled chestnut beard, and I was near enough to-note, the capable beauty of his hands. Sir Christopher stood a little apart, his arms folded behind his back, one heavy brown boot thrust forward, chin in as curbed, and black eyebrows lowered to shade the keen eyes.

Giuseppe’s dark face between flashing earrings, a twisted rag of red and yellow silk round his throat, turned from the reaching yearning monkey to the pink and white biscuits spiked on the bronzed leafage. And upon them all fell the serious and workmanlike sun of an English summer forenoon.

“Fils de Saint Louis, montez au ciel!” said Lord Lundie suddenly in a voice that made me think of Black Caps. I do not know what the monkey thought, because at that instant he leaped off the organ and disappeared.

There was a clash of broken glass behind the tree.

The monkey’s face, distorted with passion, appeared at an upper window of the house, and a starred hole in the stained-glass window to the left of the front door showed the first steps of his upward path.

“We’ve got to catch him,” cried Sir Christopher. “Come along!”

They pushed at the door, which was unlocked.

page 4

“Yes. But consider the ethics of the case,” said Jimmy. “Isn’t this burglary or something, Bubbles?”

“Settle that when he’s caught,” said Sir Christopher. “We’re responsible for the beast.”

A furious clanging of bells broke out of the empty house, followed by muffed gurglings and trumpetings.

“What the deuce is that?” I asked, half aloud.

“The plumbing, of course,” said Penfentenyou. “What a pity! I believe he’d have climbed if Lord Lundie hadn’t put him off!”

“Wait a moment, Chris,” said Jimmy the interpreter; “ Guiseppe says he may answer to the music of his infancy. Giuseppe, therefore, will go in with the organ. Orpheus with his lute, you know. Avante, Orpheus! There’s no Neapolitan for bathroom, but I fancy your friend is there.”

“I’m not going into another man’s house with a, hurdy-gurdy,” said Lord Lundie, recoiling, as Giuseppe unshipped the working mechanism of the organ (it developed a hang-down leg) from its wheels, slipped a strap round his shoulders, and gave the handle a twist.

“Don’t be a cad, Bubbles,” was Jimmy’s answer. “You couldn’t leave us now if you were on the Woolsack. Play, Orpheus! The Cadi accompanies.”

. . . . .

With a whoop, a buzz, and a crash, the organ sprang to life under the hand of Giuseppe, and the procession passed through the rained-to-imitate-walnut front door. A moment later we saw the monkey ramping on the roof.

“He’ll be all over the township in a minute if we don’t head him,” said Penfentenyou, leaping to his feet, and crashing into the garden. We headed him with pebbles till he retired through a window to the tuneful reminder that he had left a lot of little things behind him. As we passed the front door it swung open, and showed Jimmy the artist sitting at the bottom of a newly-cleaned staircase. He waggled his hands at us, and when we entered we saw that the man was stricken speechless. His eyes grew red—red like a ferret’s—and what little breath he had whistled shrilly. At first we thought it was a fit, and then we saw that it was mirth—the inopportune mirth of the Artistic Temperament.

The house palpitated to an infamous melody punctuated by the stump of the barrel-organ’s one leg, as Giuseppe, above, moved from room to room after his rebel slave. Now and again a floor shook a little under the combined rushes of Lord Lundie and Sir Christopher Tomling, who gave many and contradictory orders. But when they could they cursed Jimmy with splendid thoroughness.

“Have you anything to do with the house?” panted Jimmy at last. “Because we’re using it just now.” He gulped. “And I’m ah—keeping cave.”

“All right,” said Penfentenyou, and shut the hall door.

“Jimmy, you unspeakable blackguard, Jimmy, you cur! You coward!” (Lord Lundie’s voice overbore the flood of melody.) “Come up here! Giussieppe’s saying something we don’t understand.”

Jimmy listened and interpreted between hiccups.

“He says you’d better play the organ, Bubbles, and let him do the stalking. The monkey knows him.”

“By Jove, he’s quite right,” said Sir Christopher ,from the landing. “Take it, Bubbles, at once.”

“My God!” said Lord Lundie in horror.

The chase reverberated over our heads, from the attics to the first floor and back again. Bodies and Voices met in collision and argument, and once or twice the organ hit walls and doors. Then it broke forth in a new manner.

“He’s playing it,” said Jimmy. “I know his acute Justinian ear. Are you fond of music?”

“I think Lord Lundie plays very well for a beginner,” I ventured.

“Ah! That’s the trained legal intellect. Like mastering a brief. I haven’t got it.” He wiped his eyes and shook.

“Hi!” said Penfentenyou, looking through the stained glass window down the garden. “What’s that!”

. . . . .

A household removals van, in charge of four men, had halted at the gate. A husband and his wife householders beyond question—quavered irresolutely up the path. He looked tired. She was certainly cross. In all this haphazard world the last couple to understand a scientific experiment.

I laid hands on Jimmy—the clamour above drowning speech and with Penfentenyou’s aid, propped him against the window, that he should see.

He saw, nodded, fell as an umbrella can fall, and kneeling, beat his forehead on the shut door. Penfentenyou slid the bolt.

The furniture men reinforced the two figures on the path, and advanced, spreading generously.

“Hadn’t we better warn them up-stairs?” I suggested:

page 5

“No. I’ll die first!” said Jimmy. “I’m pretty near it now. Besides, they called me names.”

I turned from the Artist to the Administrator.

“Coeteris paribus, I think we’d better be going,” said Penfentenyou, dealer in crises.

“Ta—take me with you,” said Jimmy. “I’ve no reputation to lose, but I’d like to watch ’em from—er—outside the picture.”

“There’s always a modus viviendi,” Penfentenyou murmured, and tiptoed along the hall to a back door, which he opened quite silently. We passed into a tangle of gooseberry bushes where, at his statesmanlike example, we crawled on all fours, and regained the hedge.

Here we lay up, secure in our alibi.

“But your firm,”—the woman was wailing to the furniture removals men—”your firm promised me everything should be in yesterday. And it’s to-day! You should have been here yesterday!”

“The last tenants ain’t out yet, lydy,” said one of them.

Lord Lundie was rapidly improving in technique, though organ-grinding, unlike the Law, is more of a calling than a trade, and he hung occasionally on a dead centre. Giuseppe, I think, was singing, but I could not understand the drift of Sir Christopher’s remarks. They were Spanish.

The woman said something we did not catch.

“You might ’ave sub-let it,” the man insisted. “Or your gentleman ’ere might.”

“But I didn’t. Send for the Police at once.”

“I wouldn’t do that, lydy. They’re only fruit pickers on a beano. They aren’t particular where they sleep.”

“D’you mean they’ve been sleeping there? I only had it cleaned last week. Get them out.”

“Oh, if you say so, we’ll ’ave ’em out of it in two twos. Alf, fetch me the spare swingle-bar.”

“Don’t! You’ll knock the paint off the door. Get them out!”

“What the ’ell else am I trying to do for you, lydy?” the man answered with pathos; but the woman wheeled on her mate.

“Edward! They’re all drunk here, and they’re all mad there. Do something!” she said.

Edward took one short step forward, and sighed “Hullo!” in the direction of the turbulent house. The woman walked up and down, the very figure of Domestic Tragedy. The furniture men swayed a little on their heels, and—

“Got him!” The shout rang through all the windows at once. It was followed by a blood-hound-like bay from Sir Christopher, a maniacal prestissimo on the organ, and loud cries, for Jimmy. But Jimmy, at my side, rolled his congested eyeballs, owl-wise.

“I never knew them,” he said. “I’m an orphan.”

. . . . .

The front, door opened, and the three came forth to short-lived triumph. I had never before seen a Law Lord dressed as for tennis, with a stump-leg barrel-organ strapped to his shoulder. But it is a shy bird in this plumage. Lord Lundie strove to disembarrass himself of his accoutrements much as an ill-trained Punch and Judy dog tries to escape backwards through his frilled collar. Sir Christopher, covered with limewash, cherished a bleeding thumb, and the almost crazy monkey tore at Giuseppe’s hair.

The men on both sides reeled, but the woman stood her ground. “Idiots!” she said, and once more, “Idiots!”

I could have gladdened a few convicts of my acquaintance with a photograph of Lord Lundie at that instant.

“Madam,” he began, wonderfully preserving the roll in his voice, “it was a monkey.”

Sir Christopher sucked his thumb and nodded.

“Take it away and go,” she replied. “Go away!”

I would have gone, and gladly, on this permission, but these still strong men must ever be justifying themselves. Lord Lundie turned to the husband, who for the first time spoke.

“I have rented this house. I am moving in,” he said.

“We ought to have been in yesterday,” the woman interrupted.

“Yes. We ought to have been in yesterday. Have you slept there overnight?” said the man peevishly.

“No; I assure you we haven’t,” said Lord Lundie.

“Then go away. Go quite away,” cried the woman.

They went—in single file down the path. They went silently, restrapping the organ on its wheels, and rechaining the monkey to the organ.

page 6

“Damn it all!” said Penfentenyou. “They do face the music, and they do stick by each other in private life!”

“Ties of Common Funk,” I answered. Giuseppe ran to the gate and fled back to the possible world. Lord Lundie and Sir Christopher, constrained by tradition, paced slowly.

Then it came to pass that the woman, who walked behind them, lifted up her eyes, and beheld the tree which they had dressed.

“Stop!” she called; and they stopped. “Who did that?”

There was no answer. The Eternal Bad Boy in every man hung its head before the Eternal Mother in every woman.

“Who put these disgusting things there?” she repeated.

Suddenly Penfentenyou, Premier of his Colony in all but name, left Jimmy and me, and appeared at the gate. (If he is not turned out of office, that is how he will appear on the Day of Armageddon.)

“Well done you!” he cried zealously, and doffed his hat to the woman. “Have you any children, madam?” he demanded.

“Yes, two. They should have been here to-day. The firm promised—”

“Then we’re not a minute too soon. That monkey escaped. It was a very dangerous beast. ’Might have frightened your children into fits. All the organ-grinder’s fault! A most lucky thing these gentlemen caught it when they did. I hope you aren’t badly mauled, Sir Christopher?” Shaken as I was (I wanted to get away and laugh) I could not but admire the scoundrel’s consummate tact in leading his second highest trump. An ass would have introduced Lord Lundie and they would not have believed him.

It took the trick. The couple smiled, and gave respectful thanks for their deliverance by such hands from such perils.

“Not in the least,” said Lord Lundie. “Anybody—any father would have done as much, and pray don’t apologize your mistake was quite natural.” A furniture man sniggered here, and Lord Lundie rolled an Eye of Doom on their ranks. “By the way, if you have trouble with these persons—they seem to have taken as much as is good for them—please let me know. Er—Good morning!”

They turned into the lane.

“Heavens!” said Jimmy, brushing himself down. “Who’s that real man with the real head?” and we hurried after them, for they were running unsteadily, squeaking like rabbits as they ran. We overtook them in a little nut wood half a mile up the road, where they had turned aside, and were rolling. So we rolled with them, and ceased not till we had arrived at the extremity of exhaustion.

“You—you saw it all, then?” said Lord Lundie, rebuttoning his nineteen-inch collar.

“I saw it was a vital question from the first,” responded Penfentenyou, and blew his nose.

“It was. By the way, d’you mind telling me your name?”

Summa Penfentenyou’s Great Idea has gone through, a little chipped at the edges, but in fine and far-reaching shape. His Opposite Number worked at it like a mule—a bewildered mule, beaten from behind, coaxed from in front, and propped on either soft side by Lord Lundie of the compressed mouth and the searing tongue.

Sir Christopher Tomling has been ravished from the Argentine, where, after all, he was but preparing trade-routes for hostile peoples, and now adorns the forefront of Penfentenyou’s Advisory Board. This was an unforeseen extra, as was Jimmy’s gratis full-length—(it will be in this year’s Academy) of Penfentenyou, who has returned to his own place.

Now and again, from afar off, between the slam and bump of his shifting scenery, the glare of his manipulated limelight, and the controlled rolling of his thunder-drums, I catch his voice, lifted in encouragement and advice to his fellow-countrymen. He is quite sound on Ties of Sentiment, and—alone of Colonial Statesmen ventures to talk of the Ties of Common Funk.

Herein I have my reward.

The Propagation of Knowledge

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THE Army Class ‘English,’ which included the Upper Fifth, was trying to keep awake; for ‘English’ (Literature—Augustan epoch—eighteenth century came at last lesson, and that, on a blazing July afternoon; meant after every one had been bathing. Even Mr. King found it hard to fight against the snore of the tide along the Pebble Ridge, and spurred himself with strong words. Since, said he, the pearls of English Literature existed only to be wrenched from their settings and cast before young swine rooting for marks, it was his loathed business—in anticipation of the Army Preliminary Examination which, as usual, would be held at the term’s end, under the auspices of an official examiner sent down ad hoc—to prepare for the Form a General Knowledge test-paper, which he would give them next week. It would cover their studies, up to date, of the Augustans and King Lear, which was the selected—and strictly expurgated—Army Exam, play for that year. Now, English Literature, as he might have told them, was not divided into water-tight compartments, but flowed like a river. For example, Samuel Johnson, glory of the Augustans and no mean commentator of Shakespeare, was but one in a mighty procession which——

At this point Beetle’s nodding brows came down with a grunt on the desk. He had been soaking and sunning himself in the open sea-baths built out on the rocks under the cliffs, from two-fifteen to four-forty.

The Army Class took Johnson off their minds. With any luck, Beetle would last King till the tea-bell. King rubbed his hands and began to carve him. He had gone to sleep to show his contempt (a) for Mr. King, who might or might not matter, and (b) for the Augustans, who none the less were not to be sneered at by one whose vast and omnivorous reading, for which such extraordinary facilities had been granted (this was because the Head had allowed Beetle the run of his library), naturally overlooked such epigonoi as Johnson, Swift, Pope, Addison, and the like. Harrison Ainsworth and Marryat doubtless appealed——

Even so, Beetle salt-encrusted all over except his spectacles, and steeped in delicious languors, was sliding back to sleep again, when ‘Taffy’ Howell, the leading light of the Form, who knew his Marryat as well as Stalky did his Surtees, began in his patent, noiseless whisper: ‘“Allow me to observe—in the most delicate manner in the world—just to hint——”’

‘Under pretext of studying literature, a desultory and unformed mind would naturally return, like the dog of Scripture——’

‘“You’re a damned trencher-scrapin’, napkin-carryin’, shillin’—seekin’, up—an’—down—stairs &c.”’ Howell breathed.

Beetle choked aloud on the sudden knowledge that King was the ancient and eternal Chucks—later Count Shucksen—of Peter Simple. He had not realised it before.

‘Sorry, sir. I’m afraid I’ve been asleep, sir,’ he sputtered.

The shout of the Army Class diverted the storm. King was grimly glad that Beetle had condescended to honour truth so far. Perhaps he would now lend his awakened ear to a summary of the externals of Dr. Johnson, as limned by Macaulay. And he read, with intention, the just historian’s outline of a grotesque figure with untied shoe-strings, that twitched and grunted, gorged its food, bit its finger-nails, and neglected its ablutions. The Form hailed it as a speaking likeness of Beetle; nor were they corrected.

Then King implored him to vouchsafe his comrades one single fact connected with Dr. Johnson which might at any time have adhered to what, for decency’s sake, must, Mr. King supposed, be called his mind.

Beetle was understood to say that the only thing he could remember was in French.

‘You add, then, the Gallic tongue to your accomplishments? The information plus the accent? ’Tis well ! Admirable Crichton, proceed!’

And Beetle proceeded with the text of an old Du Maurier drawing in a back-number of Punch:

De tous ces défunts cockolores
Le moral Fénelon,
Michel Ange et Johnson
(Le Docteur) sont les plus awful bores.’

To which Howell, wooingly, just above his breath:

‘“Oh, won’t you come up, come up?”’

Result, as the tea-bell rang, one hundred lines, to be shown up at seven-forty-five that evening. This was meant to blast the pleasant summer interval between tea and prep. Howell, a favourite in ‘English’ as well as Latin, got off; but the Army Class crashed in to tea with a new Limerick.

The imposition was a matter of book-keeping, as far as Beetle was concerned; for it was his custom of rainy afternoons to fabricate store of lines in anticipation of just these accidents. They covered such English verse as interested him at the moment, and helped to fix the stuff in his memory. After tea; he drew the required amount from his drawer in Number Five Study, thrust it into his pocket, went up to the Head’s house, and settled himself in the big Outer Library where, ever since the Head had taken him off all mathematics, he did précis-work and French translation. Here he buried himself in a close-printed, thickish volume which had been his chosen browse for some time. A hideous account of a hanging, drawing, and quartering had first attracted him to it; but later he discovered the book (Curiosities of Literature was its name) full of the finest confused feeding—such as forgeries and hoaxes, Italian literary societies, religious and scholastic controversies of old when men (even that most dreary John Milton, of Lycidas) slanged each other, not without dust and heat, in scandalous pamphlets; personal peculiarities of the great; and a hundred other fascinating inutilities. This evening he fell on a description of wandering, mad Elizabethan beggars, known as Tom-a-Bedlams, with incidental references to Edgar who plays at being a Tom-a-Bedlam in Lear, but whom Beetle did not consider at all funny. Then, at the foot of a left-hand page, leaped out on him a verse—of incommunicable splendour, opening doors into inexplicable worlds—from a song which Tom-a-Bedlams were supposed to sing. It ran:

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With a heart of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
With a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney,
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end—
Methinks it is no journey.

He sat, mouthing and staring before him, till the prep-bell rang and it was time to take his lines up to King’s study and lay them, as hot from the press, in the impot-basket appointed. He carried his dreams on to Number Five. They knew the symptoms of old.

‘Readin’ again,’ said Stalky, like a wife welcoming her spouse from the pot-house.

‘Look here, I’ve found out something——’ Beetle began. ‘Listen——’

‘No, you don’t—till afterwards. It’s Turkey’s prep.’ This meant it was a Horace Ode through which Turkey would take them for a literal translation, and all possible pitfalls. Stalky gave his businesslike attention, but Beetle’s eye was glazed and his mind adrift throughout, and he asked for things to be repeated. So, when Turkey closed the Horace, justice began to be executed.

‘I’m all right,’ he protested. ‘I swear I heard a lot what Turkey said. Shut up! Oh, shut up! Do shut up, you putrid asses.’ Beetle was speaking from the fender, his head between Turkey’s knees, and Stalky largely over the rest of him.

‘What’s the metre of the beastly thing?’ McTurk waved his Horace. ‘Look it up, Stalky. Twelfth of the Third.’

‘Ionicum a minore,’ Stalky reported, closing his book in turn. ‘Don’t let him forget it’; and Turkey’s Horace marked the metre on Beetle’s skull, with special attention to elisions. It hurt.

‘Miserar’ est neq’ arnori dare ludum neque dulci
Mala vino layer’ aut ex——

Got it? You liar! You’ve no ear at all! Chorus, Stalky! ‘

Both Horaces strove to impart the measure, which was altogether different from its accompaniment. Presently Howell dashed in from his study below.

‘Look out! If you make this infernal din we’ll have some one up the staircase in a sec.’

‘We’re teachin’ Beetle Horace. He was goin’ to burble us some muck he’d read,’ the tutors explained.

‘’Twasn’t muck! It was about those Tom-a-Bedlams in Lear.’

‘Oh!’ said Stalky. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

‘’Cause you didn’t listen. They had drinkin’-horns an’ badges, and there’s a Johnson note on Shakespeare about the meanin’ of Edgar sayin’ “My horn’s dry.” But Johnson’s dead-wrong about it. Aubrey says——’

‘Who’s Aubrey?’ Howell demanded. ‘Does King know about him?’

‘Dunno. Oh yes, an’ Johnson started to learn Dutch when he was seventy.’

‘What the deuce for?’ Stalky asked.

‘For a change after his Dikker, I suppose,’ Howell suggested.

‘And I looked up a lot of other English stuff, too. I’m goin’ to try it all on King.’

‘Showin’-off as usual,’ said the acid, McTurk, who, like his race, lived and loved to destroy illusions.

‘No. For a draw. He’s an unjust dog! If you read, he says you’re showin’-off. If you don’t, you’re a mark-huntin’ Philistine. What does he want you to do, curse him?’

‘Shut up, Beetle!’ Stalky pronounced. ‘There’s more than draws in this. You’ve cribbed your maths off me ever since you came to Coll. You don’t know what a co-sine is, even now. Turkey does all your Latin.’

‘I like that! Who does both your Picciolas?’

‘French don’t count. It’s time you began to work for your giddy livin’ an’ help us. You aren’t goin’ up for anythin’ that matters. Play for your side, as Heffles says, or die the death! You don’t want to die the death, again, do you? Now, let’s hear about that stinkard Johnson swottin’ Dutch. You’re sure it was Sammivel, not Binjamin? You are so dam’ inaccurate!’

Beetle conducted an attentive class on the curiosities of literature for nearly a quarter of an hour. As Stalky pointed out, he promised to be useful.

The Horace Ode next morning ran well; and King was content. Then, in full feather, he sailed round the firmament at large, and, somehow, apropos to something or other, used the word ‘della Cruscan’—‘if any of you have the faintest idea of its origin.’ Some one hadn’t caught it correctly; which gave Beetle just time to whisper ‘Bran—an’ mills’ to Howell, who said, promptly: ‘Hasn’t it somethin’ to do with mills—an’ bran, sir?’ King cast himself into poses of stricken wonder. ‘Oddly enough,’ said he, ‘it has.’

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They were then told a great deal about some silly Italian Academy of Letters which borrowed its office furniture from the equipment of mediaeval flour-mills. And: ‘How has our Ap-Howell come by his knowledge?’ Howell, being, indeed, Welsh, thought that it might have been something he had read in the holidays. King openly purred over him.

‘If that had been me,’ Beetle observed while they were toying with sardines between lessons, ‘he’d ha’ dropped on me for showin’-off.’

‘See what we’re savin’ you from,’ Stalky answered. ‘I’m playin’ Johnson, ’member, this afternoon.’

That, too, came cleanly off the bat; and King was gratified by this interest in the Doctor’s studies. But Stalky hadn’t a ghost of a notion how he had come by the fact.

‘Why didn’t you say your father told you?’ Beetle asked at tea.

‘My-y Lord! Have you ever seen the guv’nor?’ Stalky collapsed shrieking among the piles of bread and butter. ‘Well, look here. Taffy goes in to-morrow about those drinkin’ horns an’ Tom-a-Bedlams. You cut up to the library after tea, Beetle. You know what King’s English papers are like. Look out useful stuff for answers an’ we’ll divvy at prep.’

At prep, then, Beetle, loaded with assorted curiosities, made his forecast. He argued that there were bound to be a good many ‘what-do-you-know-abouts’ those infernal Augustans. Pope was generally a separate item; but the odds were that Swift, Addison, Steele, Johnson, and Goldsmith would be lumped under one head. Dryden was possible, too, though rather outside the Epoch.

‘Dryden. Oh! “Glorious John!” ’Know that much, anyhow,’ Stalky vaunted.

‘Then lug in Claude Halcro in The Pirate,’ Beetle advised. ‘He’s always sayin’ “Glorious John.” King’s a hog on Scott, too.’

‘No-o. I don’t read Scott. You take this Hell Crow chap, Taffy.’

‘Right. What about Addison, Beetle?’ Howell asked.

‘’Drank like a giddy fish.’

‘We all know that,’ chorused the gentle children.

‘He said, “See how a Christian can die”; an’ he hadn’t any conversation, ’cause some one or other——’

‘Guessin’ again, as usual,’ McTurk sneered. ‘Who?’

‘’Cynical man called Mandeville—said he was a silent parson in a tie-wig.’

‘Right-ho! I’ll take the silent parson with wig and ’purtenances. Taffy can have the dyin’ Christian,’ Stalky decided.

Howell nodded, and resumed: ‘What about Swift, Beetle?’

‘’Died mad. Two girls. Saw a tree, an’ said: “I shall die at the top.” Oh yes, an’ his private amusements were “ridiculous an’ trivial.”’

Howell shook a wary head. ‘Dunno what that might let me in for with King. You can have it, Stalky.’

‘I’ll take that,’ McTurk yawned. ‘King doesn’t matter a curse to me, an’ he knows it. “Private amusements contemptible.”’ He breathed all Ireland into the last perverted word.

‘Right,’ Howell assented. ‘Bags I the dyin’ tree, then.’

‘’Cheery lot, these Augustans,’ Stalky sighed. ‘’Any more of ’em been croakin’ lately, Beetle?’

‘My Hat!’ the far-seeing Howell struck in. ‘King always gives us a stinker half-way down. What about Richardson—that “Clarissa” chap, y’know?’

‘I’ve found out lots about him,’ said Beetle, promptly. ‘He was the “Shakespeare of novelists.”’

‘King won’t stand that. He says there’s only one Shakespeare. ’Mustn’t rot about Shakespeare to King,’ Howell objected.

‘An’ he was “always delighted with his own works,”’ Beetle continued.

‘Like you,’ Stalky pointed out.

‘Shut up. Oh yes, an’——’ he consulted some hieroglyphics on a scrap of paper—‘the—the impassioned Diderot (dunno who he was) broke forth: “O Richardson, thou singular genius!”’

Howell and Stalky rose together, each clamouring that he had bagged that first.

‘I must have it!’ Howell shouted. ‘King’s never seen me breakin’ forth with the impassioned Diderot. He’s got to! Give me Diderot, you impassioned hound!’

‘Don’t upset the table. There’s tons more. An’ his genius was “fertile and prodigal.”’

‘All right! I don’t mind bein’ “fertile and prodigal” for a change,’ Stalky volunteered. ‘King’s going to enjoy this exam. If he was the Army Prelim. chap we’d score.’

‘The Prelim. questions will be pretty much like King’s stuff,’ Beetle assured them.

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‘But it’s always a score to know what your examiner’s keen on,’ Howell said, and illustrated it with an anecdote. ‘’Uncle of mine stayin’ with my people last holidays——’

‘Your Uncle Diderot?’ Stalky asked.

‘No, you ass! Captain of Engineers. He told me he was up for a Staff exam. to an old Colonel-bird who believed that the English were the lost Tribes of Israel, or something like that. He’d written tons o’ books about it.’

‘All Sappers are mad,’ said Stalky. ‘That’s one of the things the guv’nor did tell me.’

‘Well, ne’er mind. My uncle played up, o’course. ’Said he’d always believed it, too. And so he got nearly top-marks for field-fortification. ’Didn’t know a thing about it, either, he said.’

‘Good biznai!’ said Stalky. ‘Well, go on, Beetle. What about Steele?’

‘Can’t I keep anything for myself?’

‘Not much! King’ll ask you where you got it from, and you’d show off, an’ he’d find out. This ain’t your silly English Literature, you ass. It’s our marks. Can’t you see that?’

Beetle very soon saw it was exactly as Stalky had said.

Some days later a happy, and therefore not too likeable, King was explaining to the Reverend John in his own study how effort, zeal, scholarship, the humanities, and perhaps a little natural genius for teaching, could inspire even the mark-hunting minds of the young. His text was the result of his General Knowledge paper on the Augustans and King Lear.

‘Howell,’ he said, ‘I was not surprised at. He has intelligence. But, frankly, I did not expect young Corkran to burgeon. Almost one might believe he occasionally read a book.’

‘And McTurk too?’

‘Yes. He had somehow arrived at a rather just estimate of Swift’s lighter literary diversions. They are contemptible. And in the “Lear” questions—they were all attracted by Edgar’s character—Stalky had dug up something about Aubrey on Tom-a-Bedlams from some unknown source. Aubrey, of all people! I’m sure I only alluded to him once or twice.’

‘Stalky among the prophets of “English”! And he didn’t remember where he’d got it either?’

‘No. Boys are amazingly purblind and limited. But if they keep this up at the Army Prelim., it is conceivable the Class may not do itself discredit. I told them so.’

‘I congratulate you. Ours is the hardest calling in the world, with the least reward. By the way, who are they likely to send down to examine us?’

‘It rests between two, I fancy. Martlett—with me at Balliol—and Hume. They wisely chose the Civil Service. Martlett has published a brochure on Minor Elizabethan Verse—journeyman work, of course—enthusiasms, but no grounding. Hume I heard of lately as having infected himself in Germany with some Transatlantic abominations about Shakespeare and Bacon. He was Sutton.’ (The Head, by the way, was a Sutton man.)

King returned to his examination-papers and read extracts from them, as mothers repeat the clever sayings of their babes.

‘Here’s old Taffy Howell, for instance—apropos to Diderot’s eulogy of Richardson. “The impassioned Diderot broke forth: ‘Richardson, thou singular genius!’”’

It was the Reverend John who stopped himself, just in time, from breaking forth. He recalled that, some days ago, he had heard Stalky on the stairs of Number Five, hurling the boots of many fags at Howell’s door and bidding the ‘impassioned Diderot’ within ‘break forth’ at his peril.

‘Odd,’ said he, gravely, when his pipe drew again. ‘Where did Diderot say that?’

‘I’ve forgotten for the moment. Taffy told me he’d picked it up in the course of holiday reading.’

‘Possibly. One never knows what heifers the young are ploughing with. Oh! How did Beetle do?’

‘The necessary dates and his handwriting defeated him, I’m glad to say. I cannot accuse myself of having missed any opportunity to castigate that boy’s inordinate and intolerable conceit. But I’m afraid it’s hopeless. I think I touched him somewhat, though, when I read Macaulay’s stock piece on Johnson. The others saw it at once.’

‘Yes, you told me about that at the time,’ said the Reverend John, hurriedly.

‘And our esteemed Head having taken him off maths for this précis-writing—whatever that means!—has turned him into a most objectionable free-lance. He was without any sense of reverence before, and promiscuous cheap fiction—which is all that his type of reading means—aggravates his worst points. When it came to a trial he was simply nowhere.’

‘Ah, well! Ours is a hard calling—specially if one’s sensitive. Luckily, I’m too fat.’ The Reverend John went out to bathe off the Pebble Ridge, girt with a fair linen towel whose red fringe signalled from half a mile away.

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There lurked on summer afternoons, round the fives-court or the gym, certain watchful outcasts who had exhausted their weekly ration of three baths, and who were too well known to Cory the bathman to outface him by swearing that they hadn’t. These came in like sycophantic pups at walk, and when the Reverend John climbed the Pebble Ridge, more than a dozen of them were at his heels, with never a towel among them. One could only bathe off the Ridge with a House Master, but by custom, a dozen details above a certain age, no matter whence recruited, made a ‘House’ for bathing, if any kindly Master chose so to regard them. Beetle led the low, growing reminder: ‘House! House, sir? We’ve got a House now, Padre.’

‘Let it be law as it is desired,’ boomed the Reverend John. On which word they broke forward, hirpling over the unstable pebbles and stripping as they ran, till, when they touched the sands, they were as naked as God had made them, and as happy as He intended them to be.

It was half-flood—dead-smooth, except for the triple line of combers, a mile from wing to wing, that broke evenly with a sound of ripping canvas, while their sleek rear-guards formed up behind. One swam forth, trying to copy the roll, rise, and dig-out of the Reverend John’s sidestroke, and manoeuvred to meet them so that they should crash on one’s head, when for an instant one glanced down arched perspectives of beryl, before all broke in fizzy, electric diamonds, and the pulse of the main surge slung one towards the beach. From a good comber’s crest one was hove up almost to see Lundy on the horizon. In its long cream-streaked trough, when the top had turned over and gone on, one might be alone in mid-Atlantic. Either way it was divine. Then one capered on the sands till one dried off; retrieved scattered flannels, gave thanks in chorus to the Reverend John, and lazily trailed up to five-o’clock call-over, taken on the lower cricket field.

‘Eight this week,’ said Beetle, and thanked Heaven aloud.

‘Bathing seems to have sapped your mind,’ the Reverend John remarked. ‘Why did you do so vilely with the Augustans?’

‘They are vile, Padre. So’s Lear.’

‘The other two did all right, though.’

‘I expect they’ve been swottin’,’ Beetle grinned.

‘I’ve expected that, too, in my time. But I want to hear about the “impassioned Diderot,” please.’

‘Oh, that was Howell, Padre. You mean when Diderot broke forth: “Richardson, thou singular genius”? He’d read it in the holidays somewhere.’

‘I beg your pardon. Naturally, Taffy would read Diderot in the holidays. Well, I’m sorry I can’t lick you for this; but if any one ever finds out anything about it, you’ve only yourself to thank.’

Beetle went up to College and to the Outer Library, where he had on tap the last of a book called Elsie Venner, by a man called Oliver Wendell Holmes—all about a girl who was interestingly allied to rattlesnakes. He finished what was left of her, and cast about for more from the same hand, which he found on the same shelf, with the trifling difference that the writer’s Christian name was now Nathaniel, and he did not deal in snakes. The authorship of Shakespeare was his theme—not that Shakespeare with whom King oppressed the Army Class, but a low-born, poaching, ignorant, immoral village lout who could not have written one line of any play ascribed to him. (Beetle wondered what King would say to Nathaniel if ever they met.) The real author was Francis Bacon, of Bacon’s Essays, which did not strike Beetle as any improvement. He had ‘done’ the essays last term. But evidently Nathaniel’s views annoyed people, for the margins of his book—it was second-hand, and the old label of a public library still adhered—flamed with ribald, abusive, and contemptuous comments by various hands. They ranged from ‘Rot!’ ‘Rubbish!’ and such-like to crisp counter-arguments. And several times some one had written: ‘This beats Delia.’ One copious annotator dissented, saying: ‘Delia is supreme in this line,’ ‘Delia beats this hollow.’ ‘See Delia’s Philosophy, page so and so.’ Beetle grieved he could not find anything about Delia (he had often heard King’s views on lady-writers as a class) beyond a statement by Nathaniel, with pencilled exclamation-points rocketing all round it, that ‘Delia Bacon discovered in Francis Bacon a good deal more than Macaulay.’ Taking it by and large, with the kind help of the marginal notes, it appeared that Delia and Nathaniel between them had perpetrated every conceivable outrage against the Head-God of King’s idolatry: and King was particular about his idols. Without pronouncing on the merits of the controversy, it occurred to Beetle that a well-mixed dose of Nathaniel ought to work on King like a seidlitz powder. At this point a pencil and a half sheet of impot-paper came into action, and he went down to tea so swelled with Baconian heresies and blasphemies that he could only stutter between mouthfuls. He returned to his labours after the meal, and was visibly worse at prep.

‘I say,’ he began, ‘have you ever heard that Shakespeare never wrote his own beastly plays?’

‘’Fat lot of good to us!’ said Stalky. ‘We’ve got to swot ’em up just the same. Look here! This is for English parsin’ to-morrow. It’s your biznai.’ He read swiftly from the school Lear (Act II. Sc. 2) thus

STEWARD: ’Never any:
It pleased the King his master, very late,
To strike at me, upon his misconstruction;
When he, conjunct, an’ flatterin’ his displeasure,
Tripped me behind: bein’ down, insulted, railed,
And put upon him such a deal of man,
That worthy’d him, got praises of the King
For him attemptin’ who was self-subdued;
And, in the fleshment of this dread exploit,
Drew on me here again.

‘Now then, my impassioned bard, construez! That’s Shakespeare.’

‘’Give it up! He’s drunk,’ Beetle declared at the end of a blank half minute.

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‘No, he isn’t,’ said Turkey. ‘He’s a steward—on the estate—chattin’ to his employers.’

‘Well—look here, Turkey. You ask King if Shakespeare ever wrote his own plays, an’ he won’t give a dam’ what the steward said.’

‘I’ve not come here to play with ushers,’ was McTurk’s view of the case.

‘I’d do it,’ Beetle protested, ‘only he’d slay me! He don’t love me when I ask about things. I can give you the stuff to draw him—tons of it!’ He broke forth into a précis, interspersed with praises, of Nathaniel Holmes and his commentators—especially the latter. He also mentioned Delia, with sorrow that he had not read her. He spoke through nearly the whole of prep; and the upshot of it was that McTurk relented and promised to approach King next ‘English’ on the authenticity of Shakespeare’s plays.

The time and tone chosen were admirable. While King was warming himself by a preliminary canter round the Form’s literary deficiencies, Turkey coughed in a style which suggested a reminder to a slack employee that it was time to stop chattering and get to work. As King began to bristle, Turkey inquired: ‘I’d be glad to know, sir, if it’s true that Shakespeare did not write his own plays at all?’

‘Good God!’ said King most distinctly. Turkey coughed again piously. ‘They all say so in Ireland, sir.’

‘Ireland—Ireland—Ireland!’ King overran Ireland with one blast of flame that should have been written in letters of brass for instruction to-day. At the end, Turkey coughed once more, and the cough said: ‘It is Shakespeare, and not my country, that you are hired to interpret to me.’ He put it directly, too: ‘An’ is it true at all about the alleged plays, sir?’

‘It is not,’ Mr. King whispered, and began to explain, on lines that might, perhaps, have been too freely expressed for the parents of those young (though it gave their offspring delight), but with a passion, force, and wealth of imagery which would have crowned his discourse at any university. By the time he drew towards his peroration the Form was almost openly applauding. Howell noiselessly drummed the cadence of ‘Bonnie Dundee’ on his desk; Paddy Vernon framed a dumb: ‘Played! Oh, well played, sir!’ at intervals; Stalky kept tally of the brighter gems of invective; and Beetle sat aghast but exulting among the spirits he had called up. For though their works had never been mentioned, and though Mr. King said he had merely glanced at the obscene publications, he seemed to know a tremendous amount about Nathaniel and Delia—especially Delia.

‘I told you so!’ said Beetle, proudly, at the end.

‘What? Him! I wasn’t botherin’ myself to listen to him an’ his Delia,’ McTurk replied.

Afterwards King fought his battle over again with the Reverend John in the Common Room.

‘Had I been that triple ass Hume, I might have risen to the bait. As it is, I flatter myself I left them under no delusions as to Shakespeare’s authenticity. Yes, a small drink, please. Virtue has gone out of me indeed. But where did they get it from?’

‘The devil! The young devil,’ the Reverend John muttered, half aloud.

‘I could have excused devilry. It was ignorance. Sheer, crass, insolent provincial ignorance! I tell you, Gillett, if the Romans had dealt faithfully with the Celt, ab initio, this—this would never have happened.’

‘Quite so. I should like to have heard your remarks.’

‘I’ve told ’em to tell me what they remember of them, with their own conclusions, in essay form next week.’

Since he had loosed the whirlwind, the fairminded Beetle offered to do Turkey’s essay for him. On Turkey’s behalf, then, he dealt with Shakespeare’s lack of education, his butchering, poaching, drinking, horse-holding, and errandrunning as Nathaniel had described them; lifted from the same source pleasant names, such as ‘rustic’ and ‘sorry poetaster,’ on which last special hopes were built; and expressed surprise that one so ignorant could have done ‘what he was attributed to.’ His own essay contained no novelties. Indeed, he withheld one or two promising ‘subsequently transpireds’ for fear of distracting King.

But, when the essays were read, Mr. King confined himself wholly to Turkey’s pitiful, puerile, jejune, exploded, unbaked, half-bottomed thesis. He touched, too, on the ‘lie in the soul,’ which was, fundamentally, vulgarity—the negation of Reverence and the Decencies. He broke forth into an impassioned defence of ‘mere atheism,’ which he said was often no more than mental flatulence—transitory and curable by knowledge of life—in no way comparable, for essential enormity, with the debasing pagan abominations to which Turkey had delivered himself. He ended with a shocking story about one Jowett, who seemed to have held some post of authority where King came from, and who had told an atheistical undergraduate that if he could not believe in a Personal God by five that afternoon he would be expelled—as, with tears of rage in his eyes, King regretted that he could not expel McTurk. And Turkey blew his nose in the middle of it.

But the aim of education being to develop individual judgment, King could not well kill him for his honest doubts about Shakespeare. And he himself had several times quoted, in respect to other poets: ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.’ So he treated Turkey in Form like a coiled puff-adder; and there was a tense peace among the Augustans. The only ripple was the day before the Army Examiner came, when Beetle inquired if he ‘need take this exam., sir, as I’m not goin’ up for anything.’ Mr. King said there was great need—for many reasons, none of them flattering to vanity.

As far as the Army Class could judge, the Examiner was not worse than his breed, and the written ‘English’ paper ran closely on the lines of King’s mid-term General Knowledge test. Howell played his ‘impassioned Diderot’ to the Richardson lead; Stalky his parson in the wig; McTurk his contemptible Swift; Beetle, Steele’s affectionate notes out of the spunginghouse to ‘Dearest Prue,’ all in due order. There were, however, one or two leading questions about Shakespeare. A boy’s hand shot up from a back bench.

‘In answering Number Seven—reasons for Shakespeare’s dramatic supremacy,’ he said, ’are we to take it Shakespeare did write the plays he is supposed to have written, sir?’

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The Examiner hesitated an instant. ‘It is generally assumed that he did.’ But there was no reproof in his words. Beetle began to sit down slowly.

Another hand and another voice: ‘Have we got to say we believe he did, sir? Even if we do not?’

‘You are not called upon to state your beliefs. But we can go into that at viva voce this afternoon—if it interests you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘What did you do that for?’ Paddy Vernon demanded at dinner.

‘It’s the lost tribes of Israel game, you ass,’ said Howell.

‘To make sure,’ Stalky amplified. ‘If he was like King, he’d have shut up Beetle an’ Turkey at the start, but he’d have thought King gave us the Bacon notion. Well, he didn’t shut ’em up; so they’re playin’ it again this afternoon. If he stands it then, he’ll be sure King gave us the notion. Either way, it’s dead-safe for us, an’ King.’

At the afternoon’s viva voce, before they sat down to the Augustans, the Examiner wished to hear, ‘with no bearing on the examination, of course,’ from those two candidates who had asked him about Question Seven. Which were they?

‘Take off your gigs, you owl,’ said Stalky between his teeth. Beetle pocketed them and looked into blurred vacancy with a voice coming out of it that asked: ‘Who—what gave you that idea about Shakespeare?’ From Stalky’s kick he knew the question was for him.

‘Some people say, sir, there’s a good deal of doubt about it nowadays, sir.’

‘Ye-es, that’s true, but——’

‘It’s his knowin’ so much about legal phrases.’ Turkey was in support—a lone gun barking somewhere to his right.

‘That is a crux, I admit. Of course, whatever one may think privately, officially Shakespeare is Shakespeare. But how have you been taught to look at the question?’

‘Well, Holmes says it’s impossible he could——’

‘On the legal phraseology alone, sir,’ McTurk chimed in.

‘Ah, but the theory is that Shakespeare’s experiences in the society of that day brought him in contact with all the leading intellects.’ The Examiner’s voice was quite colloquial now.

‘But they didn’t think much of actors then, sir, did they?’ This was Howell cooing like a cushat dove. ‘I mean——’

The Examiner explained the status of the Elizabethan actor in some detail, ending: ‘And that makes it the more curious, doesn’t it?’

‘And this Shakespeare was supposed to be writin’ plays and actin’ in ’em all the time?’ McTurk asked, with sinister meaning.

‘Exactly what I—what lots of people have pointed out. Where did he get the time to acquire all his special knowledge?’

‘Then it looks as if there was something in it, doesn’t it, sir?’

‘That,’ said the Examiner, squaring his elbows at ease on the desk, ‘is a very large question which——’

‘Yes, sir!’—in half-a-dozen eagerly attentive keys . . . .

For decency’s sake a few Augustan questions were crammed in conscience-strickenly, about the last ten minutes. Howell took them since they involved dates, but the answers, though highly marked, were scarcely heeded. When the clock showed six-thirty the Examiner addressed them as ‘Gentlemen’ ; and said he would have particular pleasure in speaking well of this Army Class, which had evinced such a genuine and unusual interest in English Literature, and which reflected the greatest credit on their instructors. He passed out: the Form upstanding, as custom was.

‘He’s goin’ to congratulate King,’ said Howell. ‘Don’t make a row! “Don’t—make—a—noise—Or else you’ll wake the Baby!”’ . . .

Mr. King of Balliol, after Mr. Hume of Sutton had complimented him, as was only just, before all his colleagues in Common Room, was kindly taken by the Reverend John to his study, where he exploded on the hearth-rug.

‘He—he thought I had loosed this—this rancid Baconian rot among them. He complimented me on my breadth of mind—my being abreast of the times! You heard him? That’s how they think at Sutton. It’s an open stye! A lair of bestial! They have a chapel there, Gillett, and they pray for their souls—their souls!’

‘His particular weakness apart, Hume was perfectly sincere about what you’d done for the Army Class. He’ll report in that sense, too. That’s a feather in your cap, and a deserved one. He said their interest in Literature was unusual. That is all your work, King.’

‘But I bowed down in the House of Rimmon while he Baconised all over me!—poor devil of an usher that I am! You heard it! I ought to have spat in his eye! Heaven knows I’m as conscious of my own infirmities as my worst enemy can be; but what have I done to deserve this? What have I done?’

‘That’s just what I was wondering,’ the Reverend John replied. ‘Have you, perchance, done anything?’

‘Where? How?’

‘In the Army Class, for example.’

‘Assuredly not! My Army Class? I couldn’t wish for a better—keen, interested enough to read outside their allotted task—intelligent, receptive! They’re head and shoulders above last year’s. The idea that I, forsooth, should, even by inference, have perverted their minds with this imbecile and unspeakable girls’-school tripe that Hume professes! You at least know that I have my standards; and in Literature and in the Classics, I hold maxima debetur pueris reverentia.’

‘It’s singular, not plural, isn’t it?’ said the Reverend John. ‘But you’re absolutely right as to the principle! . . . Ours is a deadly calling, King—especially if one happens to be sensitive.’

Private Learoyd’s Story

[a short tale]

FAR from the haunts of Company Officers who insist upon kit-inspections, far from keen-nosed Sergeants who sniff the pipe stuffed into the bedding-roll, two miles from the tumult of the barracks, lies the Trap. It is an old dry well, shadowed by a twisted pipal tree and fenced with high grass. Here, in the years gone by, did Private Ortheris establish his depot and menagerie for such possessions, dead and living, as could not safely be introduced to the barrack-room. Here were gathered Houdin pullets, and fox-terriers of undoubted pedigree and more than doubtful ownership, for Ortheris was an inveterate poacher and pre-eminent among a regiment of neat-handed dog-stealers.Never again will the long lazy evenings return wherein Ortheris, whistling softly, moved surgeon-wise among the captives of his craft at the bottom of the well; when Learoyd sat in the niche, giving sage counsel on the management of ‘tykes,’ and Mulvaney, from the crook of the overhanging pipal, waved his enormous boots in benediction above our heads, delighting us with tales of Love and War, and strange experiences of cities and men.

Ortheris—landed at last in the ‘little stuff’ bird-shop ‘for which your soul longed; Learoyd—back again in the smoky, stone-ribbed North, amid the clang of the Bradford looms; Mulvaney—grizzled, tender, and very wise Ulysses, sweltering on the earthworks of a Central India line—judge if I have forgotten old days in the Trap! …

Orth’ris, as allus thinks he knaws more than other foaks, said she wasn’t a real laady, but nobbut a Hewrasian. Ah don’t gainsay as her culler was a bit doosky like. But she was a laady. Why, she rode iv a carriage, an’ good ’osses, too, an’ her ’air was that oiled as you could see your faice in it, an’ she wore di’mond rings an’ a goold chain, an’ silk an’ satin dresses as mun ha’ cost a deal, for it isn’t a cheap shop as keeps enough o’ one pattern to fit a figure like hers. Her naame was Mrs. DeSussa, an’ t’ waay I coom to be acquainted wi’ her was along iv our Colonel’s Laady’s dog Rip.

Ah’ve seen a vast o’ dogs, but Rip was t’ prettiest picter iv a cliver fox-tarrier ’at iver I set eyes on. He cud do owt yo’ like but speeak, an’ t’ Colonel’s Laady set more store by him than if he hed been a Christian. She hed bairns iv her awn, but they was i’ England, and Rip seemed to get all t’ coodlin’ an’ pettin’ as belonged to a bairn by good rights.

But Rip wor a bit on a rover, an’ hed a habit o’ breakin’ out o’ barricks like and trottin’ round t’ plaice as if he were t’ Cantonment Magistrate coom round inspectin’. The Colonel leathers him once or twice, but Rip didn’t care an’ kept on gooin’ his rounds, wi’ his taail a-waggin’ as if he were flag-signallin’ to t’ world at large ’at he was ‘gettin’ on nicely, thank yo’, and how’s yo’sen?’ An’ then t’ Colonel, as was noa sort iv a hand wi’ a dog, tees him oop. A real clipper iv a dog, an’ it’s noa wonder yon laady, Mrs. DeSussa, should tek a fancy tiv him. Theer’s one o’ t’ Ten Commandments says yo’ maun’t cuvvet your neebor’s ox nor his jackass, but it doesn’t say nowt about his tarrier dogs, an’ happen thot’s t’ reason why Mrs. DeSussa cuvveted Rip, tho’ she went to church reg’lar along wi’ her husband, who was soa mich darker ’at if he hedn’t such a good coaat tiv his back yo’ might ha’ called him a black man and nut tell a lee nawther. They said he addled his brass i’ jute; an’ he’d a rare lot on it.

Well, yo’ see, when they teed Rip oop, t’ poor awd lad didn’t enjoy very good ’ealth. Soa t’ Colonel’s Laady sends for me as ’ad a naame for bein’ knowledgeable about a dog, an’ axes what’s ailin’ wi’ him.

‘Why,’ says I, ‘he’s getten t’ mopes, an’ what he wants is his libbaty an’ coompany like t’ rest on us; wal happen a rat or two ’ud liven him oop. It’s low, mum,’ says I, ‘is rats, but it’s t’ nature iv a dog. An’ soa’s coottin’ round an’ meetin’ another dog or two an’ passin’ t’ time o’ day, an’ hevvin’ a bit on a turn-up wi’ him like a Christian.’

Soa she says her dog maun’t niver fight an’ noa Christians iver fought.

‘Then what’s a soldier for?’ says I; an’ I explains to her t’ contrairy qualities iv a dog, ’at, when yo’ coom to think on’t, is one o’ t’ curusest things as is. For they larn to behave theirsens like gentlemen born, fit for t’ fost o’ coompany—they tell me t’ Widdy hersen is fond iv a good dog and knaws one when she sees it as well as onnybody: then on t’ other hand a-tewin’ round after cats an’ gettin’ mixed oop i’ all manners o’ blackguardly street-rows, an’ killin’ rats, an’ fightin’ like divils.

T’ Colonel’s Laady says: ‘Well, Learoyd, I doan’t agree wi’ yo’, but yo’re right in a way o’ speeakin’, an’ Ah should like yo’ to tek Rip out a-walkin’ wi’ yo’ sometimes; but yo’ maun’t let him fight, nor chaase cats, nor do nowt ’orrid.’ An’ them was her very wods.

Soa Rip an’ me gooes out a-walkin’ o’ evenin’s, he bein’ a dog as did credit tiv a man, an’ I catches a lot o’ rats an’ we hed a bit iv a match on in an awd dry swimmin’-bath at back o’ t’ cantonments, an’ it was none so long afore he was as bright as a button again. He hed a waay o’ flyin’ at them big yaller pariah dogs as if he was a harrow offan a bow, an’ though his weight were nowt, he tuk ’em so suddint-like they rolled ovver like skittles in a halley, an’ when they coot he stretched after ’em as if he were rabbit-runnin’. Saame wi’ cats when he cud get t’ cat agaate o’ runnin’.

One evenin’, him an’ me was trespassin’ ovver a compound wall after one of them mongooses ’at he’d started, an’ we was busy grubbin’ round a prickle-bush, an’ when we looks oop there was Mrs. DeSussa wi’ a parasel ovver her shoulder, a-watchin’ us. ‘Oh my!’ she sings out. ‘There’s that lovelee dog! Would he let me stroke him, Mister Soldier?’

‘Ay, he would, mum,’ says I, ‘for he’s fond o’ laadies’ coompany. Coom here, Rip, an’ speeak to this kind laady.’ An’ Rip, seein’ ’at t’ mongoose hed getten clean awaay, cooms oop like t’ gentleman he was, niver a hauporth shy nor okkord.

‘Oh, you beautiful—you prettee dog!’ she says, clippin’ an’ chantin’ her speech in a waay them sooart has o’ their awn; ‘I would like a dog like you. You are so verree lovelee—so awfullee prettee,’ an’ all thot sort o’ talk, ’at a dog o’ sense mebbe thinks nowt on, tho’ he’ll bide it by reason o’ his breedin’.

An’ then I meks him joomp ovver my swaggercane, an’ shek hands, an’ beg, an’ lie dead, an’ a lot o’ them tricks as laadies teeaches dogs, though I doan’t haud wi’ it mysen, for it’s mekkin’ a fool o’ a good dog to do such-like.

An’ at lung length it cooms out ’at she’d been thrawin’ sheep’s eyes, as t’ sayin’ is, at Rip for many a daay. Yo’ see, her childer was grown up, an’ she’d nowt mich to do, an’ wor allus fond iv a dog. Soa she axes me if I’d tek somethin’ to drink. An’ we gooes into t’ drawn-room wheer her ’usband was a-settin’. They meks a gurt fuss ovver t’ dog an’ I has a bottle o’ aale an’ he gev me a handful o’ cigars.

Soa Ah coomed awaay, but t’ awd lass sings out: ‘Oh, Mister Soldier, please coom again and bring that prettee dog.’

Ah didn’t let on to t’ Colonel’s Laady about Mrs. DeSussa, an’ Rip he says nowt nawther; an’ I gooes again, an’ ivry time there was a good drink an’ a handful o’ good smooakes. An’ Ah telled t’ awd lass a heeap more about Rip than Ah’d ever heeard. How he tuk t’ fost prize at Lunnon dog-show an’ cost thotty-three pounds fower shillin’ from t’ man as bred him; ’at his own brother was t’ propputty o’ t’ Prince o’ Wailes, an’ ’at he had a pedigree as long as a Dook’s. An’ she lapped it all oop an’ wor niver tired o’ admirin’ him. But when t’ awd lass took to givin’ me money an’ Ah seed ’at she wor gettin’ fair fond about t’ dog, Ah began to suspicion summat. Onnybody may give a soldier t’ price iv a pint in a friendly waay an’ theer’s no ’arm done, but when it cooms to five rupees slipt into your hand, sly like, why, it’s what t’ ’lectioneerin’ fellows calls bribery an’ corruption. Specially when Mrs. DeSussa thrawed hints how t’ cold weather would soon be ovver, an’ she wor gooin’ to Munsoorie Pahar an’ we wor gooin’ to Rawalpindi, an’ she would niver see Rip onny more onless somebody she knawed on would be kind tiv her.

Soa I tells Mulvaaney an’ Orth’ris all t’ taale thro’, beginnin’ to end.

‘’Tis larceny that wicked ould laady manes,’ says t’ Irishman. ‘’Tis felony she is sejucin’ ye into, my frind Learoyd, but I’ll purtect your innocence. I’ll save ye from the wicked wiles av that wealthy ould woman, an’ I’ll go wid ye this evenin’ an’ spake to her the wurruds av truth an’ honesty. But, Jock,’ says he, waggin’ his heead, ‘’Twas not like ye to kape all that good dhrink an’ thim fine cigars to yo’sen, while Orth’ris here an’ me have been prowlin’ round wid throats as dry as lime-kilns, and nothin’ to smoke but Canteen plug. ’Twas a dhirty thrick to play on a comrade, for why should you, Learoyd, be balancin’ yo’sen on the butt av a satin chair, as if Terence Mulvaney was not the aquil av anybody who thrades in jute!’

‘Let alone me,’ sticks in Orth’ris, ‘but that’s like life. Them wot’s really fitted to decorate society get no show, while a blunderin’ Yorkshireman like you——’

‘Nay,’ says I, ‘it’s none o’ t’ blunderin’ Yorkshireman she wants; it’s Rip. He’s t’ gentleman this journey.’

Soa t’ next daay, Mulvaaney an’ Rip an’ me gooes to Mrs. DeSussa’s, an’ t’ Irishman bein’ a strainger she wor a bit shy at fost. But yo’ve heeard Mulvaaney talk, an’ yo’ may believe as he fairly bewitched t’ awd lass wal she let out ’at she wanted to tek Rip awaay wi’ her to Munsoorie Pahar. Then Mulvaaney changes his tune an’ axes her solemn-like if she’d thowt o’ t’ consequences o’ gettin’ two poor but honest soldiers sent t’ Andamning Islands. Mrs. DeSussa began to cry, so Mulvaaney turns round oppen t’ other tack and smooths her down, allowin’ ’at Rip ’ud be a vast better off in t’ Hills than down i’ Bengal, an’ ’twor a pity he shouldn’t go wheer he was so well beliked. And soa he went on, backin’ an’ fillin’ an’ workin’ up t’ awd lass wal she felt as if her life worn’t worth nowt if she didn’t hev t’ dog.

Then of a suddint he says: ‘But ye shall have him, marm, for I’ve a feelin’ heart, not like this could-blooded Yorkshireman. But ’twill cost ye not a penny less than three hundher rupees.

‘Don’t yo’ believe him, mum,’ says I. ‘T’ Colonel’s Laady wouldn’t tek five hundred for him.’

‘Who said she would?’ says Mulvaaney. ‘’Tis not buyin’ him I mane, but for the sake o’ this kind, good laady, I’ll do what I never dreamt to do in my life. I’ll stale him!’

‘Don’t saay steeal,’ says Mrs. DeSussa; ‘he shall hev the happiest home. Dogs often get lost, yo’ know, and then they stray, an’ he likes me an’ I like him as I niver liked a dog yet, an’ I must hev him. If I got him at t’ last minute I cud carry him off to Munsoorie Pahar and nobody would niver knaw.’

Now an’ again Mulvaaney looked acrost at me, an’ tho’ I could mek nowt o’ what he was after, I concluded to tek his leead.

‘Well, mum,’ I says, ‘I never thowt to coom down to dog-steealin’, but if my comraade sees how it cud be done to oblige a laady like yo’sen, I’m nut t’ man to hod back, tho’ it’s a bad business I’m thinkin’, an’ three hundred rupees is a poor set-off again t’ chance iv them Damning Islands as Mulvaaney talks on.’

‘I’ll mek it three-fifty,’ says Mrs. DeSussa. ‘Only let me hev t’ dog!’

So we let her persuade us, an’ she teks Rip’s measure theer an’ then, an’ sent to Hamilton’s to order a silver collar again’ t’ time when he was to be her verree awn, which was to be t’ daay she set off for Munsoorie Pahar.

‘Sitha, Mulvaaney,’ says I, when we was out side, ‘yo’re niver goin’ to let her hev Rip!’

‘An’ wud ye disappoint a poor old woman?’ says he. ‘She shall have a Rip.’

‘An’ wheer’s he to come thro’?’ says I.

‘Learoyd, my man,’ he sings out, ‘you’re a pretty man av your inches an’ a good comrade, but your head is made av duff. Isn’t our frind Orth’ris a Taxidermist, an’ a rale artist wid his cliver white fingers? An’ fwhat’s a Taxidermist but a man who can thrate shkins? Do ye mind the white dog that belongs to the Canteen Sargint, bad cess to him—he that’s lost half his time an’ snarlin’ the rest? He shall be lost for good now; an’ do ye mind that he’s the very spit in shape an’ size av the Colonel’s, barrin’ that his tail is an inch too long, an’ he has none av the colour that divarsifies the rale Rip, an’ his timper is that av his masther an’ worse? But fwhat is an inch on a dog’s tail? An’ fwhat to a professional like Orth’ris is a few ringstraked shpots av black, brown, an’ white? Nothin’ at all, at all.’

Then we meets Orth’ris, an’ that little man, bein’ sharp as a needle, seed his waay through t’ business in a minute. An’ he went to work a-practisin’ ’air-dyes the very next daay, beginnin’ on some white rabbits he hed, an’ then he drored all Rip’s markin’s on t’ back of a white Commissariat bullock, so as to get his ’and in an’ be sure of his cullers; shadin’ off brown into black as nateral as life. If Rip hed a fault it was too mich markin’, but it was straingely reg’lar, an’ Orth’ris settled himsen to make a fost-rate job on it when he got haud o’ t’ Canteen Sargint’s dog. Theer niver was sich a dog as thot for bad timper, an’ it did nut get noa better when his tail hed to be fettled a inch an’ a haalf shorter. But they may talk o’ theer Royal Academies as they like. I niver seed a bit o’ animal paintin’ to beat t’ copy as Orth’ris made iv Rip’s marks, wal t’ picter itself was snarlin’ all t’ time an’ tryin’ to get at Rip standin’ theer to be copied as good as goold.

Orth’ris allus hed as much conceit on himsen as would lift a balloon, an’ he wor so pleeased wi’ his sham Rip he wor for tekkin’ him to Mrs. DeSussa before she went awaay. But Mulvaaney an’ me stopped thot, knowin’ Orth’ris’s work, though niver so cliver, was nobbut skin-deep.

An’ at last Mrs. DeSussa fixed t’ daay for startin’ to Munsoorie Pahar. We was to tek Rip to t’ staashun i’ a basket an’ hand him ovver just when they was ready to start, an’ then she’d give us t’ brass—as wor ’greed upon.

An’ my wod! It wor high time she wor off, for them ’air-dyes upon t’ cur’s back took a vast iv paintin’ to keep t’ reet culler, tho’ Orth’ris spent a matter o’ seven rupees six annas i’ t’ best drooggist shops i’ Calcutta.

An’ t’ Canteen Sargint was lookin’ for ’is dog everywheer; an’, wi’ bein’ teed oop, t’ beast’s timper got waur nor ever.

It wor i’ t’ evenin’ when t’ train started thro’ Howrah, an’ we ’elped Mrs. DeSussa wi’ about sixty boxes, an’ then we gev her t’ basket. Orth’ris, for pride iv his work, axed us to let him coom along wi’ us, an’ he cudn’t help liftin’ t’ lid an’ showin’ t’ cur as he lay coiled oop.

‘Oh!’ says t’ awd lass; ‘the beautee! How sweet he looks!’ An’ just then t’ beauty snarled an’ showed his teeth, so Mulvaaney shuts down t’ lid an’ says: ‘Ye’ll be careful, marm, whin ye tek him out. He’s disaccustomed to travellin’ by t’ railway, an’ he’ll be sure to want his rale mistress an’ his frind Learoyd, so ye’ll make allowance for his feelin’s at fost.’

She would do all thot an’ more for the dear, good Rip, an’ she would nut oppen t’ basket till they were miles awaay, for fear onnybody should recognise him, an’ we wor real good an’ kind soldier-men, we wor, an’ she honds me a bundle o’ notes, an’ then cooms oop a few of her relations an’ friends to say goodbye—nut more than seventy-five there wasn’t—an’ we coots awaay . . . .

What coom to t’ three hundred an’ fifty rupees? Thot’s what I can scarcelins tell yo’, but we melted it—we melted it. It was share an’ share alike, for Mulvaaney said: ‘If Learoyd got hoult av Mrs. DeSussa first, sure ’twas I that remimbered the Sargint’s dog just in the nick av time, an’ Orth’ris was the artist av janius that made a work av art out av that ugly piece av ill-natur’. Yet, by way av a thank-offerin’ that I was not led into felony by that wicked ould woman, I’ll send a thrifle to Father Victor for the poor people he’s always beggin’ for.’

But me an’ Orth’ris, he bein’ Cockney an’ I bein’ pretty far north, did nut see it i’ t’ saame waay. We’d getten t’ brass, an’ we meaned to keep it. An’ soa we did—for a short time.

Noa, noa, we niver heeard a wod more o’ t’ awd lass. Our Rig’mint went to Pindi, an t Canteen Sargint he got himself another tyke insteead o’ t’ one ’at got lost so reg’lar, an’ wor lost for good at last.

A Priest in Spite of Himself

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THE DAY after they came home from the sea-side they set out on a tour of inspection to make sure everything was as they had left it. Soon they discovered that old Hobden had blocked their best hedge-gaps with stakes and thorn-bundles, and had trimmed up the hedges where the blackberries were setting.‘It can’t be time for the gipsies to come along,’ said Una. ‘Why, it was summer only the other day!’

‘There’s smoke in Low Shaw!’ said Dan, sniffing. ‘Let’s make sure!’

They crossed the fields towards the thin line of blue smoke that leaned above the hollow of Low Shaw which lies beside the King’s Hill road. It used to be an old quarry till somebody planted it, and you can look straight down into it from the edge of Banky Meadow.

‘I thought so,’ Dan whispered, as they came up to the fence at the edge of the larches. A gipsy-van—not the show-man’s sort, but the old black kind, with little windows high up and a baby-gate across the door—was getting ready to leave. A man was harnessing the horses; an old woman crouched over the ashes of a fire made out of broken fence-rails; and a girl sat on the van-steps singing to a baby on her lap. A wise-looking, thin dog snuffed at a patch of fur on the ground till the old woman put it carefully in the middle of the fire. The girl reached back inside the van and tossed her a paper parcel. This was laid on the fire too, and they smelt singed feathers.

‘Chicken feathers!’ said Dan. ‘I wonder if they are old Hobden’s.’

Una sneezed. The dog growled and crawled to the girl’s feet, the old woman fanned the fire with her hat, while the man led the horses up to the shafts, They all moved as quickly and quietly as snakes over moss.

‘Ah!’ said the girl. ‘I’ll teach you!’ She beat the dog, who seemed to expect it.

‘Don’t do that,’ Una called down. ‘It wasn’t his fault.’

‘How do you know what I’m beating him for?’ she answered.

‘For not seeing us,’ said Dan. ‘He was standing right in the smoke, and the wind was wrong for his nose, anyhow.’

The girl stopped beating the dog, and the old woman fanned faster than ever.

‘You’ve fanned some of your feathers out of the fire,’ said Una. ‘There’s a tail-feather by that chestnut-tot.’

‘What of it?’ said the old woman, as she grAbbéd it.

‘Oh, nothing!’ said Dan. ‘Only I’ve heard say that tail-feathers are as bad as the whole bird, sometimes.’

That was a saying of Hobden’s about pheasants. Old Hobden always burned all feather and fur before he sat down to eat.

‘Come on, mother,’ the man whispered. The old woman climbed into the van, and the horses drew it out of the deep-rutted shaw on to the hard road.

The girl waved her hands and shouted something they could not catch.

‘That was gipsy for “Thank you kindly, Brother and Sister,”’ said Pharaoh Lee.

He was standing behind them, his fiddle under his arm. ‘Gracious, you startled me!’ said Una.

‘You startled old Priscilla Savile,’ Puck called from below them. ‘Come and sit by their fire. She ought to have put it out before they left.’

They dropped down the ferny side of the shaw. Una raked the ashes together, Dan found a dead wormy oak branch that burns without flame, and they watched the smoke while Pharaoh played a curious wavery air.

‘That’s what the girl was humming to the baby,’ said Una.

‘I know it,’ he nodded, and went on:

‘Ai Lumai, Lumai, Lumai! Luludia!
Ai Luludia!’

He passed from one odd tune to another, and quite forgot the children. At last Puck asked him to go on with his adventures in Philadelphia and among the Seneca Indians.

‘I’m telling it,’ he said, staring straight in front of him as he played. ‘Can’t you hear?’

‘Maybe, but they can’t. Tell it aloud,’ said Puck.

Pharaoh shook himself, laid his fiddle beside him, and began:

‘I’d left Red Jacket and Cornplanter riding home with me after Big Hand had said that there wouldn’t be any war. That’s all there was to it. We believed Big Hand and we went home again—we three braves. When we reached Lebanon we found Toby at the cottage with his waistcoat a foot too big for him—so hard he had worked amongst the yellow-fever people. He beat me for running off with the Indians, but ’twas worth it—I was glad to see him,—and when we went back to Philadelphia for the winter, and I was told how he’d sacrificed himself over sick people in the yellow fever, I thought the world and all of him. No, I didn’t neither. I’d thought that all along. That yellow fever must have been something dreadful. Even in December people had no more than begun to trinkle back to town. Whole houses stood empty and (they) was robbing them out. But I can’t call to mind that any of the Moravian Brethren had died. It seemed like they had just kept on with their own concerns, and the good Lord He’d just looked after ’em. That was the winter—yes, winter of ’Ninety-three—the Brethren bought a stove for the church. Toby spoke in favour of it because the cold spoiled his fiddle hand, but many thought stove-heat not in the Bible, and there was yet a third party which always brought hickory coal foot-warmers to service and wouldn’t speak either way. They ended by casting the Lot for it, which is like pitch-and-toss. After my summer with the Senecas, church-stoves didn’t highly interest me, so I took to haunting round among the French emigres which Philadelphia was full of. My French and my fiddling helped me there, d’ye see. They come over in shiploads from France, where, by what I made out, every one was killing every one else by any means, and they spread ’emselves about the city—mostly in Drinker’s Alley and Elfrith’s Alley—and they did odd jobs till times should mend. But whatever they stooped to, they were gentry and kept a cheerful countenance, and after an evening’s fiddling at one of their poor little proud parties, the Brethren seemed old-fashioned. Pastor Meder and Brother Adam Goos didn’t like my fiddling for hire, but Toby said it was lawful in me to earn my living by exercising my talents. He never let me be put upon.

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‘In February of ’Ninety-four—No, March it must have been, because a new Ambassador called Faucher had come from France, with no more manners than Genet the old one—in March, Red Jacket came in from the Reservation bringing news of all kind friends there. I showed him round the city, and we saw General Washington riding through a crowd of folk that shouted for war with England. They gave him quite rough music, but he looked ’twixt his horse’s ears and made out not to notice. His stirrup brished Red Jacket’s elbow, and Red Jacket whispered up, “My brother knows it is not easy to be a chief.” Big Hand shot just one look at him and nodded. Then there was a scuffle behind us over some one who wasn’t hooting at Washington loud enough to please the people. We went away to be out of the fight. Indians won’t risk being hit.’

‘What do they do if they are?’ Dan asked.

‘Kill, of course. That’s why they have such proper manners. Well, then, coming home by Drinker’s Alley to get a new shirt which a French Vicomte’s lady was washing to take the stiff out of (I’m always choice in my body-linen) a lame Frenchman pushes a paper of buttons at us. He hadn’t long landed in the United States, and please would we buy. He sure-ly was a pitiful scrattel—his coat half torn off, his face cut, but his hands steady; so I knew it wasn’t drink. He said his name was Peringuey, and he’d been knocked about in the crowd round the Stadt—Independence Hall. One thing leading to another we took him up to Toby’s rooms, same as Red Jacket had taken me the year before. The compliments he paid to Toby’s Madeira wine fairly conquered the old man, for he opened a second bottle and he told this Monsieur Peringuey all about our great stove dispute in the church. I remember Pastor Meder and Brother Adam Goos dropped in, and although they and Toby were direct opposite sides regarding stoves, yet this Monsieur Peringuey he made ’em feel as if he thought each one was in the right of it. He said he had been a clergyman before he had to leave France. He admired at Toby’s fiddling, and he asked if Red Jacket, sitting by the spinet, was a simple Huron. Senecas aren’t Hurons, they’re Iroquois, of course, and Toby told him so. Well, then, in due time he arose and left in a style which made us feel he’d been favouring us, instead of us feeding him. I’ve never seen that so strong before—in a man. We all talked him over but couldn’t make head or tail of him, and Red Jacket come out to walk with me to the French quarter where I was due to fiddle at a party. Passing Drinker’s Alley again we saw a naked window with a light in it, and there sat our button-selling Monsieur Peringuey throwing dice all alone, right hand against left.

‘Says Red Jacket, keeping back in the dark, “Look at his face!”

‘I was looking. I protest to you I wasn’t frightened like I was when Big Hand talked to his gentlemen. I—I only looked, and I wondered that even those dead dumb dice ’ud dare to fall different from what that face wished. It—it was a face!

‘“He is bad,” says Red Jacket. “But he is a great chief. The French have sent away a great chief. I thought so when he told us his lies. Now I know.”

‘I had to go on to the party, so I asked him to call round for me afterwards and we’d have hymn-singing at Toby’s as usual. “No,” he says. “Tell Toby I am not Christian tonight. All Indian.” He had those fits sometimes. I wanted to know more about Monsieur Peringuey, and the emigre party was the very place to find out. It’s neither here nor there, of course, but those French emigre parties they almost make you cry. The men that you bought fruit of in Market Street, the hairdressers and fencing-masters and French teachers, they turn back again by candlelight to what they used to be at home, and you catch their real names. There wasn’t much room in the washhouse, so I sat on top of the copper and played ’em the tunes they called for—“Si le Roi m’avait donne,” and such nursery stuff. They cried sometimes. It hurt me to take their money afterwards, indeed it did. And there I found out about Monsieur Peringuey. He was a proper rogue too! None of ’em had a good word for him except the Marquise that kept the French boarding-house on Fourth Street. I made out that his real name was the Count Talleyrand de Perigord—a priest right enough, but sorely come down in the world. He’d been King Louis’ Ambassador to England a year or two back, before the French had cut off King Louis’ head; and, by what I heard, that head wasn’t hardly more than hanging loose before he’d run back to Paris and prevailed on Danton, the very man which did the murder, to send him back to England again as Ambassador of the French Republic! That was too much for the English, so they kicked him out by Act of Parliament, and he’d fled to the Americas without money or friends or prospects. I’m telling you the talk in the washhouse. Some of ’em was laughing over it. Says the French Marquise, “My friends, you laugh too soon. That man ‘ll be on the winning side before any of us.”

‘“I did not know you were so fond of priests, Marquise,” says the Vicomte. His lady did my washing, as I’ve told you.

‘“I have my reasons,” says the Marquise. “He sent my uncle and my two brothers to Heaven by the little door,”—that was one of the emigre names for the guillotine. “He will be on the winning side if it costs him the blood of every friend he has in the world.”

‘“Then what does he want here?” says one of ’em. “We have all lost our game.”

‘“My faith!” says the Marquise. “He will find out, if any one can, whether this canaille of a Washington means to help us to fight England. Genet” (that was my Ambassador in the Embuscade) “has failed and gone off disgraced; Faucher” (he was the new man) “hasn’t done any better, but our Abbé will find out, and he will make his profit out of the news. Such a man does not fall.”

‘“He begins unluckily,” says the Vicomte. “He was set upon today in the street for not hooting your Washington.” They all laughed again, and one remarks, “How does the poor devil keep himself?”

‘He must have slipped in through the washhouse door, for he flits past me and joins ’em, cold as ice.

‘“One does what one can,” he says. “I sell buttons. And you, Marquise?”

‘“I?”—she waves her poor white hands all burned—“I am a cook—a very bad one—at your service, Abbé. We were just talking about you.”

‘They didn’t treat him like they talked of him. They backed off and stood still.

‘“I have missed something, then,” he says. “But I spent this last hour playing—only for buttons, Marquise—against a noble savage, the veritable Huron himself.”

‘“You had your usual luck, I hope?” she says.

‘“Certainly,” he says. “I cannot afford to lose even buttons in these days.”

‘“Then I suppose the child of nature does not know that your dice are usually loaded, Father Tout-a-tous,” she continues. I don’t know whether she meant to accuse him of cheating. He only bows. ‘“Not yet, Mademoiselle Cunegonde,” he says, and goes on to make himself agreeable to the rest of the company. And that was how I found out our Monsieur Peringuey was Count Charles Maurice Talleyrand de Perigord.’

Pharaoh stopped, but the children said nothing.

‘You’ve heard of him?’ said Pharaoh.

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Una shook her head. ‘Was Red Jacket the Indian he played dice with?’ Dan asked.

‘He was. Red Jacket told me the next time we met. I asked if the lame man had cheated. Red Jacket said no—he had played quite fair and was a master player. I allow Red Jacket knew. I’ve seen him, on the Reservation, play himself out of everything he had and in again. Then I told Red Jacket all I’d heard at the party concerning Talleyrand.

‘“I was right,” he says. “I saw the man’s war-face when he thought he was alone. That’s why I played him. I played him face to face. He’s a great chief. Do they say why he comes here?”

‘“They say he comes to find out if Big Hand makes war against the English,” I said.

‘Red Jacket grunted. “Yes,” he says. “He asked me that too. If he had been a small chief I should have lied. But he is a great chief. He knew I was a chief, so I told him the truth. I told him what Big Hand said to Cornplanter and me in the clearing—‘There will be no war.’ I could not see what he thought. I could not see behind his face. But he is a great chief. He will believe.’

‘“Will he believe that Big Hand can keep his people back from war?” I said, thinking of the crowds that hooted Big Hand whenever he rode out.

‘“He is as bad as Big Hand is good, but he is not as strong as Big Hand,” says Red Jacket. “When he talks with Big Hand he will feel this in his heart. The French have sent away a great chief. Presently he will go back and make them afraid.”

‘Now wasn’t that comical? The French woman that knew him and owed all her losses to him; the Indian that picked him up, cut and muddy on the street, and played dice with him; they neither of ’em doubted that Talleyrand was something by himself—appearances notwithstanding.’

‘And was he something by himself?’ asked Una.

Pharaoh began to laugh, but stopped. ‘The way I look at it,’he said, ‘Talleyrand was one of just three men in this world who are quite by themselves. Big Hand I put first, because I’ve seen him.’

‘Ay,’ said Puck. ‘I’m sorry we lost him out of Old England. Who d’you put second?’

‘Talleyrand: maybe because I’ve seen him too,’ said Pharaoh.

‘Who’s third?’said Puck.

‘Boney—even though I’ve seen him.’

‘Whew!’ said Puck. ‘Every man has his own weights and measures, but that’s queer reckoning.’

‘Boney?’ said Una. ‘You don’t mean you’ve ever met Napoleon Bonaparte?’

‘There, I knew you wouldn’t have patience with the rest of my tale after hearing that! But wait a minute. Talleyrand he come round to Hundred and Eighteen in a day or two to thank Toby for his kindness. I didn’t mention the dice-playing, but I could see that Red Jacket’s doings had made Talleyrand highly curious about Indians—though he would call him the Huron. Toby, as you may believe, was all holds full of knowledge concerning their manners and habits. He only needed a listener. The Brethren don’t study Indians much till they join the Church, but Toby knew ’em wild. So evening after evening Talleyrand crossed his sound leg over his game one and Toby poured forth. Having been adopted into the Senecas I, naturally, kept still, but Toby ’ud call on me to back up some of his remarks, and by that means, and a habit he had of drawing you on in talk, Talleyrand saw I knew something of his noble savages too. Then he tried a trick. Coming back from an emigre party he turns into his little shop and puts it to me, laughing like, that I’d gone with the two chiefs on their visit to Big Hand. I hadn’t told. Red Jacket hadn’t told, and Toby, of course, didn’t know. ’Twas just Talleyrand’s guess. “Now,” he says, my English and Red Jacket’s French was so bad that I am not sure I got the rights of what the President really said to the unsophisticated Huron. Do me the favour of telling it again.” I told him every word Red Jacket had told him and not one word more. I had my suspicions, having just come from an emigre party where the Marquise was hating and praising him as usual.

‘“Much obliged,” he said. “But I couldn’t gather from Red Jacket exactly what the President said to Monsieur Genet, or to his American gentlemen after Monsieur Genet had ridden away.”

‘I saw Talleyrand was guessing again, for Red Jacket hadn’t told him a word about the white men’s pow-wow.’

‘Why hadn’t he?’ Puck asked.

‘Because Red Jacket was a chief. He told Talleyrand what the President had said to him and Cornplanter; but he didn’t repeat the talk, between the white men, that Big Hand ordered him to leave behind.’

‘Oh!’ said Puck. ‘I see. What did you do?’

‘First I was going to make some sort of tale round it, but Talleyrand was a chief too. So I said, “As soon as I get Red Jacket’s permission to tell that part of the tale, I’ll be delighted to refresh your memory, Abbé.” What else could I have done?

‘“Is that all?” he says, laughing. “Let me refresh your memory. In a month from now I can give you a hundred dollars for your account of the conversation.”

‘“Make it five hundred, Abbé,” I says. ‘”Five, then,” says he.

‘“That will suit me admirably,” I says. “Red Jacket will be in town again by then, and the moment he gives me leave I’ll claim the money.”

‘He had a hard fight to be civil, but he come out smiling.

‘“Monsieur,” he says, “I beg your pardon as sincerely as I envy the noble Huron your loyalty. Do me the honour to sit down while I explain.”

‘There wasn’t another chair, so I sat on the button-box.

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‘He was a clever man. He had got hold of the gossip that the President meant to make a peace treaty with England at any cost. He had found out—from Genet, I reckon, who was with the President on the day the two chiefs met him. He’d heard that Genet had had a huff with the President and had ridden off leaving his business at loose ends. What he wanted—what he begged and blustered to know—was just the very words which the President had said to his gentlemen after Genet had left, concerning the peace treaty with England. He put it to me that in helping him to those very words I’d be helping three great countries as well as mankind. The room was as bare as the palm of your hand, but I couldn’t laugh at him.

‘“I’m sorry,” I says, when he wiped his forehead. “As soon as Red Jacket gives permission—”

‘“You don’t believe me, then?” he cuts in.

‘“Not one little, little word, Abbé,” I says; “except that you mean to be on the winning side. Remember, I’ve been fiddling to all your old friends for months.”

‘Well, then his temper fled him and he called me names.

‘“Wait a minute, ci-devant,” I says at last. “I am half English and half French, but I am not the half of a man. I will tell thee something the Indian told me. Has thee seen the President?”

‘“Oh yes!” he sneers. “I had letters from the Lord Lansdowne to that estimable old man.”

‘“Then,” I says, “thee will understand. The Red Skin said that when thee has met the President thee will feel in thy heart he is a stronger man than thee.”

‘“Go!” he whispers. “Before I kill thee, go.”

‘He looked like it. So I left him.’

‘Why did he want to know so badly?’ said Dan.

‘The way I look at it is that if he had known for certain that Washington meant to make the peace treaty with England at any price, he’d ha’ left old Faucher fumbling about in Philadelphia while he went straight back to France and told old Danton—“It’s no good your wasting time and hopes on the United States, because she won’t fight on our side—that I’ve proof of!” Then Danton might have been grateful and given Talleyrand a job, because a whole mass of things hang on knowing for sure who’s your friend and who’s your enemy. just think of us poor shop-keepers, for instance.’

‘Did Red Jacket let you tell, when he came back?’ Una asked.

‘Of course not. He said, “When Cornplanter and I ask you what Big Hand said to the whites you can tell the Lame Chief. All that talk was left behind in the timber, as Big Hand ordered. Tell the Lame Chief there will be no war. He can go back to France with that word.”

‘Talleyrand and me hadn’t met for a long time except at emigre parties. When I give him the message he just shook his head. He was sorting buttons in the shop.

‘I cannot return to France with nothing better than the word of an unsophisticated savage,” he says.

‘“Hasn’t the President said anything to you?” I asked him.

‘“He has said everything that one in his position ought to say, but—but if only I had what he said to his Cabinet after Genet rode off I believe I could change Europe—the world, maybe.”

‘“I’m sorry,” I says. “Maybe you’ll do that without my help.”

‘He looked at me hard. “Either you have unusual observation for one so young, or you choose to be insolent,” he says.

‘“It was intended for a compliment,” I says. “But no odds. We’re off in a few days for our summer trip, and I’ve come to make my good-byes.”

‘“I go on my travels too,” he says. “If ever we meet again you may be sure I will do my best to repay what I owe you.”

‘“Without malice, Abbé, I hope,” I says.

‘“None whatever,” says he. “Give my respects to your adorable Dr Pangloss” (that was one of his side-names for Toby) “and the Huron.” I never could teach him the difference betwixt Hurons and Senecas.

‘Then Sister Haga came in for a paper of what we call “pilly buttons,” and that was the last I saw of Talleyrand in those parts.’

‘But after that you met Napoleon, didn’t you?’ said Una.

‘Wait Just a little, dearie. After that, Toby and I went to Lebanon and the Reservation, and, being older and knowing better how to manage him, I enjoyed myself well that summer with fiddling and fun. When we came back, the Brethren got after Toby because I wasn’t learning any lawful trade, and he had hard work to save me from being apprenticed to Helmbold and Geyer the printers. ’Twould have ruined our music together, indeed it would. And when we escaped that, old Mattes Roush, the leather-breeches maker round the corner, took a notion I was cut out for skin-dressing. But we were rescued. Along towards Christmas there comes a big sealed letter from the Bank saying that a Monsieur Talleyrand had put five hundred dollars—a hundred pounds—to my credit there to use as I pleased. There was a little note from him inside—he didn’t give any address—to thank me for past kindnesses and my believing in his future, which he said was pretty cloudy at the time of writing. I wished Toby to share the money. I hadn’t done more than bring Talleyrand up to Hundred and Eighteen. The kindnesses were Toby’s. But Toby said, “No! Liberty and Independence for ever. I have all my wants, my son.” So I gave him a set of new fiddle-strings, and the Brethren didn’t advise us any more. Only Pastor Meder he preached about the deceitfulness of riches, and Brother Adam Goos said if there was war the English ’ud surely shoot down the Bank. I knew there wasn’t going to be any war, but I drew the money out and on Red Jacket’s advice I put it into horse-flesh, which I sold to Bob Bicknell for the Baltimore stage-coaches. That way, I doubled my money inside the twelvemonth.’

‘You gipsy! You proper gipsy!’ Puck shouted.

‘Why not? ’Twas fair buying and selling. Well, one thing leading to another, in a few years I had made the beginning of a worldly fortune and was in the tobacco trade.’

‘Ah!’ said Puck, suddenly. ‘Might I inquire if you’d ever sent any news to your people in England—or in France?’

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‘O’ course I had. I wrote regular every three months after I’d made money in the horse trade. We Lees don’t like coming home empty-handed. If it’s only a turnip or an egg, it’s something. Oh yes, I wrote good and plenty to Uncle Aurette, and—Dad don’t read very quickly—Uncle used to slip over Newhaven way and tell Dad what was going on in the tobacco trade.’

‘I see—

Aurettes and Lees—
Like as two peas.

Go on, Brother Square-toes,’ said Puck. Pharaoh laughed and went on.

‘Talleyrand he’d gone up in the world same as me. He’d sailed to France again, and was a great man in the Government there awhile, but they had to turn him out on account of some story about bribes from American shippers. All our poor emigres said he was surely finished this time, but Red Jacket and me we didn’t think it likely, not unless he was quite dead. Big Hand had made his peace treaty with Great Britain, just as he said he would, and there was a roaring trade ’twixt England and the United States for such as ’ud take the risk of being searched by British and French men-o’-war. Those two was fighting, and just as his gentlemen told Big Hand ’ud happen—the United States was catching it from both. If an English man-o’-war met an American ship he’d press half the best men out of her, and swear they was British subjects. Most of ’em was! If a Frenchman met her he’d, likely, have the cargo out of her, swearing it was meant to aid and comfort the English; and if a Spaniard or a Dutchman met her—they was hanging on to England’s coat-tails too—Lord only knows what they wouldn’t do! It came over me that what I wanted in my tobacco trade was a fast-sailing ship and a man who could be French, English, or American at a pinch. Luckily I could lay my hands on both articles. So along towards the end of September in the year ’Ninety-nine I sailed from Philadelphia with a hundred and eleven hogshead o’ good Virginia tobacco, in the brig Berthe Aurette, named after Mother’s maiden name, hoping ’twould bring me luck, which she didn’t—and yet she did.’

‘Where was you bound for?’ Puck asked.

‘Er—any port I found handiest. I didn’t tell Toby or the Brethren. They don’t understand the ins and outs of the tobacco trade.’

Puck coughed a small cough as he shifted a piece of wood with his bare foot.

‘It’s easy for you to sit and judge,’ Pharaoh cried. ‘But think o’ what we had to put up with! We spread our wings and run across the broad Atlantic like a hen through a horse-fair. Even so, we was stopped by an English frigate, three days out. He sent a boat alongside and pressed seven able seamen. I remarked it was hard on honest traders, but the officer said they was fighting all creation and hadn’t time to argue. The next English frigate we escaped with no more than a shot in our quarter. Then we was chased two days and a night by a French privateer, firing between squalls, and the dirty little English ten-gun brig which made him sheer off had the impudence to press another five of our men. That’s how we reached to the chops of the Channel. Twelve good men pressed out of thirty-five; an eighteen-pound shot-hole close beside our rudder; our mainsail looking like spectacles where the Frenchman had hit us—and the Channel crawling with short-handed British cruisers. Put that in your pipe and smoke it next time you grumble at the price of tobacco!

‘Well, then, to top it off, while we was trying to get at our leaks, a French lugger come swooping at us out o’ the dusk. We warned him to keep away, but he fell aboard us, and up climbed his JAbbéring red-caps. We couldn’t endure any more—indeed we couldn’t. We went at ’em with all we could lay hands on. It didn’t last long. They was fifty odd to our twenty-three. Pretty soon I heard the cutlasses thrown down and some one bellowed for the sacri captain.

‘“Here I am!” I says. “I don’t suppose it makes any odds to you thieves, but this is the United States brig Berthe Aurette.”

‘“My aunt!” the man says, laughing. “Why is she named that?”

‘“Who’s speaking?” I said. ’Twas too dark to see, but I thought I knew the voice.

‘“Enseigne de Vaisseau Estephe L’Estrange,” he sings out, and then I was sure.

‘“Oh!” I says. “It’s all in the family, I suppose, but you have done a fine day’s work, Stephen.”

‘He whips out the binnacle-light and holds it to my face. He was young L’Estrange, my full cousin, that I hadn’t seen since the night the smack sank off Telscombe Tye—six years before.

‘“Whew!” he says. “That’s why she was named for Aunt Berthe, is it? What’s your share in her, Pharaoh?”

‘“Only half owner, but the cargo’s mine.”

‘“That’s bad,” he says. “I’ll do what I can, but you shouldn’t have fought us.”

‘“Steve,” I says, “you aren’t ever going to report our little fall-out as a fight! Why, a Revenue cutter ’ud laugh at it!”

‘“So’d I if I wasn’t in the Republican Navy,” he says. “But two of our men are dead, d’ye see, and I’m afraid I’ll have to take you to the Prize Court at Le Havre.”

‘“Will they condemn my ’baccy?” I asks.

‘“To the last ounce. But I was thinking more of the ship. She’d make a sweet little craft for the Navy if the Prize Court ’ud let me have her,” he says.

‘Then I knew there was no hope. I don’t blame him—a man must consider his own interests, but nigh every dollar I had was in ship or cargo, and Steve kept on saying, “You shouldn’t have fought us.”

‘Well, then, the lugger took us to Le Havre, and that being the one time we did want a British ship to rescue us, why, o’ course we never saw one. My cousin spoke his best for us at the Prize Court. He owned he’d no right to rush alongside in the face o’ the United States flag, but we couldn’t get over those two men killed, d’ye see, and the Court condemned both ship and cargo. They was kind enough not to make us prisoners—only beggars—and young L’Estrange was given the Berthe Aurette to re-arm into the French Navy.

‘”I’ll take you round to Boulogne,” he says. “Mother and the rest’ll be glad to see you, and you can slip over to Newhaven with Uncle Aurette. Or you can ship with me, like most o’ your men, and take a turn at King George’s loose trade. There’s plenty pickings,” he says.

‘Crazy as I was, I couldn’t help laughing.

page 6

‘“I’ve had my allowance of pickings and stealings,” I says. “Where are they taking my tobacco?” ’Twas being loaded on to a barge.

‘“Up the Seine to be sold in Paris,” he says. “Neither you nor I will ever touch a penny of that money.”

‘“Get me leave to go with it,” I says. “I’ll see if there’s justice to be gotten out of our American Ambassador.”

‘“There’s not much justice in this world,” he says, “without a Navy.” But he got me leave to go with the barge and he gave me some money. That tobacco was all I had, and I followed it like a hound follows a snatched bone. Going up the river I fiddled a little to keep my spirits up, as well as to make friends with the guard. They was only doing their duty. Outside o’ that they were the reasonablest o’ God’s creatures. They never even laughed at me. So we come to Paris, by river, along in November, which the French had christened Brumaire. They’d given new names to all the months, and after such an outrageous silly piece o’ business as that, they wasn’t likely to trouble ’emselves with my rights and wrongs. They didn’t. The barge was laid up below Notre Dame church in charge of a caretaker, and he let me sleep aboard after I’d run about all day from office to office, seeking justice and fair dealing, and getting speeches concerning liberty. None heeded me. Looking back on it I can’t rightly blame ’em. I’d no money, my clothes was filthy mucked; I hadn’t changed my linen in weeks, and I’d no proof of my claims except the ship’s papers, which, they said, I might have stolen. The thieves! The door-keeper to the American Ambassador—for I never saw even the Secretary—he swore I spoke French a sight too well for an American citizen. Worse than that—I had spent my money, d’ye see, and I—I took to fiddling in the streets for my keep; and—and, a ship’s captain with a fiddle under his arm—well, I don’t blame ’em that they didn’t believe me.

‘I come back to the barge one day—late in this month Brumaire it was—fair beazled out. Old Maingon, the caretaker, he’d lit a fire in a bucket and was grilling a herring.

‘“Courage, mon ami,” he says. “Dinner is served.”

‘“I can’t eat,” I says. “I can’t do any more. It’s stronger than I am.”

‘“Bah!” he says. “Nothing’s stronger than a man. Me, for example! Less than two years ago I was blown up in the Orient in Aboukir Bay, but I descended again and hit the water like a fairy. Look at me now,” he says. He wasn’t much to look at, for he’d only one leg and one eye, but the cheerfullest soul that ever trod shoe-leather. “That’s worse than a hundred and eleven hogshead of ’baccy,” he goes on. “You’re young, too! What wouldn’t I give to be young in France at this hour! There’s nothing you couldn’t do,” he says. “The ball’s at your feet—kick it!” he says. He kicks the old fire-bucket with his peg-leg. “General Buonaparte, for example!” he goes on. “That man’s a babe compared to me, and see what he’s done already. He’s conquered Egypt and Austria and Italy—oh! half Europe!” he says, “and now he sails back to Paris, and he sails out to St Cloud down the river here—don’t stare at the river, you young fool! —and all in front of these pig-jobbing lawyers and citizens he makes himself Consul, which is as good as a King. He’ll be King, too, in the next three turns of the capstan—King of France, England, and the world! Think o’ that!” he shouts, “and eat your herring.”

‘I says something about Boney. If he hadn’t been fighting England I shouldn’t have lost my ’baccy—should I?

‘“Young fellow,” says Maingon, “you don’t understand.”

‘We heard cheering. A carriage passed over the bridge with two in it. ‘“That’s the man himself,” says Maingon. “He’ll give ’em something to cheer for soon.” He stands at the salute.

‘“Who’s t’other in black beside him?” I asks, fairly shaking all over.

‘“Ah! he’s the clever one. You’ll hear of him before long. He’s that scoundrel-bishop, Talleyrand.”

‘“It is!” I said, and up the steps I went with my fiddle, and run after the carriage calling, “Abbé, Abbé!”

‘A soldier knocked the wind out of me with the back of his sword, but I had sense to keep on following till the carriage stopped—and there just was a crowd round the house-door! I must have been half-crazy else I wouldn’t have struck up “Si le Roi m’avait donne Paris la grande ville!” I thought it might remind him.

‘“That is a good omen!” he says to Boney sitting all hunched up; and he looks straight at me.

‘“Abbé—oh, Abbé!” I says. “Don’t you remember Toby and Hundred and Eighteen Second Street?”

‘He said not a word. He just crooked his long white finger to the guard at the door while the carriage steps were let down, and I skipped into the house, and they slammed the door in the crowd’s face. ‘“You go there,” says a soldier, and shoves me into an empty room, where I catched my first breath since I’d left the barge. Presently I heard plates rattling next door—there were only folding doors between—and a cork drawn. “I tell you,” someone shouts with his mouth full, “it was all that sulky ass Sieyes’ fault. Only my speech to the Five Hundred saved the situation.”

‘“Did it save your coat?” says Talleyrand. “I hear they tore it when they threw you out. Don’t gasconade to me. You may be in the road of victory, but you aren’t there yet.”

‘Then I guessed t’other man was Boney. He stamped about and swore at Talleyrand.

‘“You forget yourself, Consul,” says Talleyrand, “or rather you remember yourself—Corsican.”

‘“Pig!” says Boney, and worse.

‘“Emperor!” says Talleyrand, but, the way he spoke, it sounded worst of all. Some one must have backed against the folding doors, for they flew open and showed me in the middle of the room. Boney whipped out his pistol before I could stand up.

“General,” says Talleyrand to him, “this gentleman has a habit of catching us canaille en deshabille. Put that thing down.”

‘Boney laid it on the table, so I guessed which was master. Talleyrand takes my hand—“Charmed to see you again, Candide,” he says. “How is the adorable Dr Pangloss and the noble Huron?”

‘“They were doing very well when I left,” I said. “But I’m not.”

‘“Do you sell buttons now?” he says, and fills me a glass of wine off the table.

‘“Madeira,” says he. “Not so good as some I have drunk.”

‘“You mountebank!” Boney roars. “Turn that out.” (He didn’t even say “man,” but Talleyrand, being gentle born, just went on.)

page 7

‘“Pheasant is not so good as pork,” he says. “You will find some at that table if you will do me the honour to sit down. Pass him a clean plate, General.” And, as true as I’m here, Boney slid a plate along just like a sulky child. He was a lanky-haired, yellow-skinned little man, as nervous as a cat—and as dangerous. I could feel that.

‘“And now,” said Talleyrand, crossing his game leg over his sound one, “will you tell me your story?”

‘I was in a fluster, but I told him nearly everything from the time he left me the five hundred dollars in Philadelphia, up to my losing ship and cargo at Le Havre. Boney began by listening, but after a bit he dropped into his own thoughts and looked at the crowd sideways through the front-room curtains. Talleyrand called to him when I’d done.

‘“Eh? What we need now,” says Boney, “is peace for the next three or four years.”

‘“Quite so,” says Talleyrand. “Meantime I want the Consul’s order to the Prize Court at Le Havre to restore my friend here his ship.”

‘“Nonsense!” says Boney. “Give away an oak-built brig of two hundred and seven tons for sentiment? Certainly not! She must be armed into my Navy with ten—no, fourteen twelve- pounders and two long fours. Is she strong enough to bear a long twelve forward?”

‘Now I could ha’ sworn he’d paid no heed to my talk, but that wonderful head-piece of his seemingly skimmed off every word of it that was useful to him.

‘“Ah, General!” says Talleyrand. “You are a magician—a magician without morals. But the brig is undoubtedly American, and we don’t want to offend them more than we have. “

‘“Need anybody talk about the affair?” he says. He didn’t look at me, but I knew what was in his mind—just cold murder because I worried him; and he’d order it as easy as ordering his carriage.

‘“You can’t stop ’em,” I said. “There’s twenty-two other men besides me.” I felt a little more ’ud set me screaming like a wired hare.

‘“Undoubtedly American,” Talleyrand goes on. “You would gain something if you returned the ship—with a message of fraternal good-will—published in the Moniteur” (that’s a French paper like the Philadelphia Aurora).

‘“A good idea!” Boney answers. “One could say much in a message.”

‘“It might be useful,” says Talleyrand. “Shall I have the message prepared?” He wrote something in a little pocket ledger.

‘“Yes—for me to embellish this evening. The Moniteur will publish it tonight.”

‘“Certainly. Sign, please,” says Talleyrand, tearing the leaf out.

‘“But that’s the order to return the brig,” says Boney. “Is that necessary? Why should I lose a good ship? Haven’t I lost enough ships already?”

‘Talleyrand didn’t answer any of those questions. Then Boney sidled up to the table and jabs his pen into the ink. Then he shies at the paper again: “My signature alone is useless,” he says. “You must have the other two Consuls as well. Sieyes and Roger Ducos must sign. We must preserve the Laws.”

‘“By the time my friend presents it,” says Talleyrand, still looking out of window, “only one signature will be necessary.”

‘Boney smiles. “It’s a swindle,” says he, but he signed and pushed the paper across.

‘“Give that to the President of the Prize Court at Le Havre,” says Talleyrand, “and he will give you back your ship. I will settle for the cargo myself. You have told me how much it cost. What profit did you expect to make on it?”

‘Well, then, as man to man, I was bound to warn him that I’d set out to run it into England without troubling the Revenue, and so I couldn’t rightly set bounds to my profits.’

‘I guessed that all along,’ said Puck.

‘There was never a Lee to Warminghurst—
That wasn’t a smuggler last and first.’

The children laughed.

‘It’s comical enough now,’ said Pharaoh. ‘But I didn’t laugh then. Says Talleyrand after a minute, “I am a bad accountant and I have several calculations on hand at present. Shall we say twice the cost of the cargo?”

‘Say? I couldn’t say a word. I sat choking and nodding like a China image while he wrote an order to his secretary to pay me, I won’t say how much, because you wouldn’t believe it.’

‘“Oh! Bless you, Abbé! God bless you!” I got it out at last.

‘“Yes,” he says, “I am a priest in spite of myself, but they call me Bishop now. Take this for my episcopal blessing,” and he hands me the paper.

‘“He stole all that money from me,” says Boney over my shoulder. “A Bank of France is another of the things we must make. Are you mad?” he shouts at Talleyrand.

‘“Quite,” says Talleyrand, getting up. “But be calm. The disease will never attack you. It is called gratitude. This gentleman found me in the street and fed me when I was hungry.”

‘”I see; and he has made a fine scene of it, and you have paid him, I suppose. Meantime, France waits. “

‘“Oh! poor France!” says Talleyrand. “Good-bye, Candide,” he says to me. “By the way,” he says, “have you yet got Red Jacket’s permission to tell me what the President said to his Cabinet after Monsieur Genet rode away?”

‘I couldn’t speak, I could only shake my head, and Boney—so impatient he was to go on with his doings—he ran at me and fair pushed me out of the room. And that was all there was to it.’ Pharaoh stood up and slid his fiddle into one of his big skirt-pockets as though it were a dead hare.

‘Oh! but we want to know lots and lots more,’said Dan. ‘How you got home—and what old Maingon said on the barge—and wasn’t your cousin surprised when he had to give back the Berthe Aurette, and—’

‘Tell us more about Toby!’ cried Una.

‘Yes, and Red Jacket,’ said Dan.

‘Won’t you tell us any more?’ they both pleaded.

Puck kicked the oak branch on the fire, till it sent up a column of smoke that made them sneeze. When they had finished the Shaw was empty except for old Hobden stamping through the larches.

‘They gipsies have took two,’he said. “My black pullet and my liddle gingy-speckled cockrel.’

‘I thought so,’ said Dan, picking up one tail-feather that the old woman had overlooked.

‘Which way did they go? Which way did the runagates go?’ said Hobden.

‘Hobby!’ said Una. ‘Would you like it if we told Keeper Ridley all your goings and comings?’

The Potted Princess

[a short tale]

NOW THIS IS THE TRUE TALE that was told to Punch and Judy his sister by their nurse, in the city of Bombay. They were playing in the veranda, waiting for their mother to come back from her evening drive. The big pink crane, who generally lived by himself at the bottom of the garden, because he hated horses and carriages, was with them too, and their nurse, who was called the ayah, was making him dance by throwing pieces of mud at him. Pink cranes dance very prettily until they grow angry. Then they peck. This pink crane lost his temper, opened his wings and clattered his beak, and the ayah had to sing a song which never fails to quiet all the cranes in Bombay. It is a very old song, and it says:

Buggle baita nuddee kanara
Toom-toom mushia kaye!
Nuddee kinara kanta lugga
Tullaka-tullaka ju jaye!

That means: A crane sat by the river-bank, eating fish, toom-toom: and a thorn in the river-bank pricked him, and his life went away, tullaka-tullaka – drop by drop. The ayah and Punch and Judy always talked Hindustani because they spent more time talking to their ayah than to their parents, and understood it better than English.

‘See now,’ said Punch, clapping his hands. ‘He knows, and he is ashamed. Tullaka-tullaka ju jaye! Go away!’

‘Tullaka-tullaka,’ said little Judy, who was five; and the pink crane shut up his beak, and went down to the bottom of the garden to the coconut palms and the aloes and the red peppers.

Punch followed, shouting ‘Tullaka-tullaka!’ till the crane hopped over an aloe hedge and Punch got pricked by the spikes. Then he cried, because he was only seven, and because it was so hot that he was wearing only very few clothes and the aloes had pricked a great deal of him; and Judy cried too, because Punch was crying, and she knew that that meant something worth crying for.

‘Ohoo!’said Punch, looking at both his fat little legs together. ‘I am very badly pricked by the very bad aloe. Perhaps I shall die!’

‘Punch will die because he has been pricked by the very bad aloe; and then there will be only Judy,’ said Judy.

‘No,’ said Punch very quickly, putting his legs down. ‘Then you will sit up to dinner alone. I will not die; but, ayah, I am very badly pricked. What is good for that?’

The ayah looked down for a minute, just to see that there were two tiny pink scratches on Punch’s legs. Then she looked out across the garden to the blue water of Bombay harbour, where the ships are, and said:

‘Once upon a time there was a Rajah.’ [‘Rajah’ in Hindustani means king, just as ‘Ranee’ means queen.]

‘Will Punch die, ayah?’ said Judy. She too had seen the pink scratches, and they seemed very dreadful to her.

‘No,’ said Punch. ‘Ayah is telling a tale. Stop crying, Judy.’

‘And the Rajah had a daughter,’ said the ayah.

‘It is a new tale,’ said Punch. ‘The last Rajah had a son, and he was turned into a monkey. Hssh!’

The ayah put out her soft brown arm, picked Judy off the matting of the veranda, and tucked her into her lap. Punch sat cross-legged close by.

‘That Rajah’s daughter was very beautiful,’ the ayah went on.

‘How beautiful? More beautiful than Mamma? Then I do not believe this tale,’ said Punch.

‘She was a fairy Princess, Punch baba, and she was very beautiful indeed. And when she grew up the Rajah her father said that she must marry the best Prince in all India!’

‘Where did all these things happen?’ said Punch. ‘In a big forest near Delhi. So it was told to me,’ said the ayah.

‘Very good,’ said Punch. ‘When I am big I will go to Delhi. Tell the tale, ayah.’

‘Therefore the king made a talk with his magicians – men with white beards who do jadoo[magic], and make snakes come out of baskets, and grow mangoes from little stones, such as you, Punch, and you, Judy baba, have seen. But in those days they did much more wonderful things. They turned men into tigers and elephants. And the magicians counted the stars under which the Princess was born.’

‘I – I do not understand this,’ said Judy, wriggling on the ayah‘s lap. Punch did not understand either, but he looked very wise.

The ayah hugged her close. ‘How should a babe understand?’ she said very softly. ‘It is in this way. When the stars are in one position when a child is born, it means well. When they are in another position, it means, perhaps, that the child may be sick or ill-tempered, or she may have to travel very far away.’

‘Must I travel far away?’ said Judy.

‘No, no. There were only good little stars in the sky on the night that Judy baba was born – little home-keeping stars that danced up and down, they were so pleased.’

‘And I – I – I? What did the stars do when I was born?’ said Punch.

‘There was a new star that night. I saw it. A great star with a fiery tail all across the sky. Punch will travel far.’

‘That is true. I have been to Nasik in the railway train. Never mind the Princess’s stars. What did the magic-men do?’

‘They consulted the stars, little impatient, and they said that the Princess must be shut up in such a manner that only the very best of all the Princes in India could take her out. So they shut her up, when she was sixteen years old, in a big deer grain-jar of dried clay, with a cover of plaited grass.

‘I have seen them in the Bombay market,’ said Judy. ‘Was it of the very big kind?’ The ayah nodded, and Judy shivered, for her father had once held her up to look into the mouth of just such a grain-jar, and it was full of empty darkness.

‘How did they feed her?’ said Punch.

‘She was a fairy. Perhaps she did not want food,’ the ayah replied.

‘All people want food. This is not a true tale. I shall go and beat the crane.’ Punch got up on his knees.

‘No, no. I have forgotten. There was plenty of food. Plantains, red and yellow ones, almond curd, boiled rice and peas, fowl stuffed with raisins and red peppers, and cakes fried in oil with coriander seeds, and sweetmeats of sugar and butter. Is that enough food? So the Princess was shut up in the grain-jar, and the Rajah made a proclamation that whoever could take her out should marry her and should govern ten provinces, sitting upon an elephant with tusks of gold. That proclamation was made through all India.’

‘We did not hear it, Punch and I,’ said Judy. ‘Is this a true tale, ayah?’

‘It was before Punch was born. It was before even I was born; but so my mother told it to me. And when the proclamation was made, there came to Delhi hundreds and thousands of Princes and Rajahs and great men. The grain-jar with the cover of plaited grass was set in the middle of all, and the Rajah said he would allow to each man one year in which to make charms and learn great words that would open the grain-jar.’

‘I do not understand,’ said Judy again. She had been looking down the garden for her mother’s return, and had lost the thread of the tale.

‘The jar was a magic one, and it was to be opened by magic,’ said Punch. ‘Go on, ayah; I understand.’

The ayah laughed a little. ‘Yes, the Rajah’s magicians told all the Princes that it was a magic jar, and led them three times round it, muttering under their beards, and bade them come back in a year. So the Princes and the Subadars, and the Wazirs and the Maliks rode away east and west and north and south, and consulted the magicians in their fathers’ Courts, and holy men caves.’

‘Like the holy men I saw at Nasik on the mountain. They were all nungapunga [naked], but they showed me their little Gods, and I burned stuff that smelt in a pot before them all, and they said I was a Hindu and -‘ Punch stopped, out of breath.

‘Yes. Those were the men. Old men smeared with ashes and yellow paint did the Princes consult, and witches and dwarfs that live in caves, and wise tigers and talking horses and learned parrots. They told these men and all these beasts of the Princess in the grain-jar; and the holy men and the wise beasts taught them charms and spells that were very strong magic indeed. Some of the Princes they advised to go out and kill giants and dragons, and cut off their heads. And some of the Princes stayed for a year with the holy men in forests, learning charms that would immediately split open great mountains. There was no charm and no magic that these Princes and Subadars did not learn, for they knew that the Rajah’s magicians were very strong magicians, and therefore they needed very very strong charms to open the grain-jar. So they did all these things that I have told, and also cut off the tails of the little devils that live on the sand of the great Desert in the north; and at last there were very few djinns and giants left, and poor people could plough without being bewitched any more.

‘Only there was one Prince that did not ride away with the others, for he had neither horse nor saddle nor any men to follow him. He was a Prince of low birth for his mother had married the son of a potter, and he was the son of his mother. So he sat down on the ground, and the little boys of the city driving the cattle to pasture threw mud at him.’

‘Ah,’ said Punch. ‘Mud is nice. Did they hit him?’

‘I am telling the tale of the Princess, and if there are so many questions, how can I finish before bedtime? He sat on the ground, and presently his mother, the Ranee, came by, gathering sticks to cook bread, and he told her of the Princess and the grain-jar. And she said: “Remember that a pot is a pot, and thou art the son of a potter.” Then she went away with those dry sticks, and the Potter-Prince waited till the end of the year.

‘Then – the Princes returned, as many of them as were left over from the fights that they had fought. They brought with them the terrible cut-off heads of the giants and the dragons, so that people fell down with fright; and the tails of all the little devils, bunch by bunch, tied up with string; and the feathers of magic birds; and holy men and dwarfs and talking beasts came with them. And there were bullock carts full of the locked books of magic incantations and spells. The Rajah appointed a day, and his magicians came, and the grain-jar was set in the middle of all, and the Princes began according to their birth and the age of their families to open the grain-jar by means of their charm-work. There were very many Princes, and the charms were very strong, so that, as they performed the ceremonies, the lightning ran about the ground as a broken egg runs over the cook-house floor, and it was thick, dark night, and the people heard the voices of devils and djinns and talking tigers, and saw them running to and fro about the grain-jar till the ground shook. But, none the less, the grain-jar did not open. And the next day the ground was split up as a log of wood is split, and great rivers flowed up and down the plain, and magic armies with banners walked in circles – so great was the strength of the charms! Snakes, too, crawled round the grain-jar and hissed, but none the less the jar did not open. When morning came the holes in the ground had closed up, and the rivers were gone away, and there was only the plain. And that was because it was all magic charm-work, which cannot last.’

‘Aha,’ said Punch, drawing a deep breath. ‘I am glad of that. It was only magic, Judy. Tell the tale, ayah.’

‘At the very last, when they were all wearied out, and the holy men began to bite their nails with vexation, and the Rajah’s magicians laughed, the Potter Prince came into the plain alone, without even one little talking beast or wise bird, and all the people made jokes at him. But he walked to the grain-jar and cried: “A pot is a pot, and I am the son of a potter!” And he put his two hands upon the grain-jar’s cover, and he lifted it up, and the Princess came out! Then the people said, “This is very great magic indeed”; and they began to chase the talking beasts and the holy men up and down, meaning to kill them. But the Rajah’s magicians said: “This is no magic jar at all, for we did not put any charm upon the jar. It was a common grain-jar, and it is a common grain-jar, such as they buy in the bazar; and a child might have lifted the cover a year ago, or on any day since that day. You are too wise, O Princes and Subadars, who rely on holy men and the heads of dead giants and devils’ tails, but do not work with your own hands! You are too cunning! There was no magic, and now one man has taken it all away from you because he was not afraid. Go home, Princes, or, if you will, stay to see the wedding. But remember that a pot is a pot.”‘

There was a long silence at the end of the tale. ‘But the charms were very strong,’ said Punch doubtfully.

‘They were only words, and how could they touch the pot? Could words turn you into a tiger, Punch baba?’

‘No. I am Punch.’

‘Even so, ‘said the ayah. ‘If the pot had been charmed, a charm would have opened it. But it was a common, bazar pot. what did it know of charms? It opened to a hand on the cover.’

‘Oh!’ said Punch; and then he began to laugh, and Judy followed his example. ‘Now I quite understand. I will tell it to Mamma.’

When Mamma came back from her drive, the children told her the tale twice over, while she was dressing for dinner; but as they began in the middle and put the beginning first, and then began at the end and put the middle last, she became a little confused.

‘Never mind,’ said Punch. ‘I will show.’ And he reached up to the table for the big eau-de-cologne bottle that he was strictly forbidden to touch, and pulled out the stopper, and upset half the scent down the front of his dress, shouting, ‘A pot is a pot, and I am the son of a potter!’

The Pleasure Cruise

[a short discourse]

CHARON, HERMES, ATKEINOS, CHRYSIPPUS, DAMASIUS, AN OFFICER, A PHILOSOPHER, and very many DEAD MEN.

CHARON. (in the uniform of the Captain of a Pleasure Cruiser) Steady, you fellows! Though my boat has been changed to this tall-sterned sea-castle, I am still responsible for the full tale of you.

THE DEAD MEN. But we have leave to see again the land of our birth. Tie up, and let us go ashore!

CHARON. Willingly, though I warn you, you will twice as willing return. In case, however, any should forget the other half of his ticket, Hermes here will conduct you. Lock up the bar! They do not draw their extra Lethe till they come back.

HERMES. (in the uniform of a Platoon-Sergeant). At your service, gentlemen. What are your destinations and desires?

THE DEAD MEN. (confusedly). I will go first to see all my children still weeping for me…. And I to console my widow in her dreams…. And I to press a thin kiss upon the shoulders of my sweetheart…. And I to snuff the scent of the liquors of upper Lethe that I loved so to drink.

HERMES. That is the only sensible fellow in the batch But be off on your supposed businesses. When you are satisfied, meet me at the Statue of Achilles. I shall walk there with these others who pull such long faces over what can’t be helped. (The DEAD MEN disperse about the Island.) Tell me now, Damasius, as we journey to the City, how came you to be pitched into Charon’s boat so early in the War? — for I understand you were no mean athlete.

DAMASIUS. I fell over a hole hidden by bushes; breaking both my legs ere I had accomplished anything.

HERMES. Such obstacles can be avoided by one who sees clearly.

DAMASIUS. You forget that I had been trained for fifteen seasons upon ground not only flat, but daily flattened by means of rollers.

HERMES. I see. Then that rough ground gave you Hades. And you, Chrysippus, whom I picked up in such a filthy condition?

CHRYSIPPUS. I had been instructed since my seventh year by the Philosophers of the Pavilion to fix my mind upon figures clad in pure white, moving over grass at fore-ordained distances.

HERMES. This after you were of full age?

CHRYSIPPUS. More particularly so, because it then became my vocation. Had the figures continued white and near, I should have won victories, but they being remote and earth-coloured, I … [missing].

HERMES. Certainly, your own Mother would not know you now. And you, you unphilosophical lout, Atkeinos, how did you put [your] foot in it?

ATKEINOS. We were despatched thrice against unbroken iron fences on which we hung like flies in frost.

HERMES. What, then, of the catapults whose bolts, in war, batter down expressly such things?

ATKEINOS. They were few at the first and their bolts so hard to procure that we were restricted to six casts in the day.

HERMES. But, later, surely, there were many?

ATKEINOS. Many indeed and those of the best. But, by that time, many indeed of the men were dead, and those of the best.

HERMES. And you, yonder, with the blue gums and the shrunk belly, how did you manage your transfer?

A DEAD MAN. By drinking water with which mules and dead men had had to do.

HERMES. Incontinent! You should have waited for waters purified by art.

A DEAD MAN. In all that country over against the shore of India there was not then one such pailful. So we died on those barges in our own dung and flux. A man must drink, Hermes.

HERMES. Some of you seem to have been at the liquor already. Whom do you ghosts pommel and drag by the hair here? Let go, dogs, and tell me your grievance against him.

A DEAD MAN. We were one hundred and forty entitled to live out our days.

HERMES. That lies with Atropos. What followed?

A DEAD MAN. This widow-maker with half a skull led us to perdition through dreadful night.

HERMES. You battling meantime, like heroes?

A DEAD MAN. We could not see. We knew not our right from our left beneath those lights. So forty [of us] were slain at a blast.

HERMES. You make more noise over it than over eight hundred and eighty thousand [dead]. (To OFFICER.) And what have you to say for yourself?

THE OFFICER. Look at the remains of my face. My own hand did it.

HERMES. Since death was so certain at that time, what made you kill yourself?

THE OFFICER. I was commanded to lead these uneasy children not in the least trained for war, to discover an enemy. But the enemy discovering us first, my men howled and fled. I, seeing this, turned my weapon against myself.

HERMES. Little you gained! Those who ran fastest united to swear that you were in all respects incompetent.

THE OFFICER. I knew that tale would arise [as their defence], so I crooked my finger more firmly.

HERMES. .What odds? You were not the only one, but all is forgotten now. (To DEAD MEN.) There is no need to spoil this fine day with brawling. Behold the City! We can moll about just as we please, for I assure you, we shall not be jostled by admirers.

THE DEAD MEN. Aie! Aie! Aie! Aie! The pleasant places where we were once so satisfied in the flesh!

HERMES. Remember you do not feel hunger or thirst, and fancy, if you like, that your lives were given for the good of this very State.

DAMASIUS. I see no change in the State — least of all in the amusements.

HERMES. You cast no shadows now, but when you did were you ever able to step off your shadows?

CHRYSIPPUS. To me my death was so terrible that I imagined all would take warning by it.

HERMES. One must cry very loud to be heard above the flute-players. What a pity you cannot address them in orations!

DAMASIUS. Surely they know by now that war is not of words but for the life.

HERMES. Was there not in your day one of your Generals, a man entitled to consideration, telling you that very thing? How did you take it?

CHRYSIPPUS. Most of us mocked at his white hairs. Some, however, went politely about our pleasures, which he as mildly as possible wished us to diminish a little, in order that we might learn to man the walls.

DAMASIUS. Since we are dead let us be just. We ourselves in those days were hostile witnesses at home, for we asserted that all virtue lay in the games.

CHRYSIPPUS. Then you, like a snapped stick, broke because the ground was a little broken!

DAMASIUS. Were you any better with your white-and-green ball-parlours?

CHRYSIPPUS.Yet bear witness, ye Gods, we stood to it — suffered and perished; though it was all in vain….

THE DEAD MEN. Vain as the Sun on the dead. But this Philosopher-fellow here, who smiles upon us, took no hand in the War except to talk comfortingly to the enemy out of side-doors and from back-gates.

HERMES. Hands off him! Do not bandy reproach with a prophet. He seems in good fettle. (To PHILOSOPHER) How was it, my friend, that you escaped so comfortably?

PHILOSOPHER. Justice protected me when I swore that my actions were directed towards my own salvation.

HERMES. Well, you cannot deny that that has been settled. But it is the sleekness of your carcass which I [take the liberty to] admire.

PHILOSOPHER. Naturally I ate and drank. A man must live, Hermes.

THE DEAD MEN. But — but — but — but —

HERMES. Stop quacking while I question this bird. (To PHILOSOPHER) For how long did you eat?

PHILOSOPHER. Through fifteen hundred days.

HERMES. Multiply that by three, some of you Quarter-Master Sergeants. We think in millions here.

THE DEAD MEN. It makes four thousand five hundred full meals, but — but — listen, Hermes! The bread and the wine for each meal was brought to his mouth by the blood or the lives of fifteen thousand men who died in that single service.

HERMES. Except that he has already been judged, I would call him a somewhat gluttonous devourer of his own damnation.

PHILOSOPHER. That is only a matter of opinion in which I am now justified, for I hear that the head of my School [of thought] has become head of all [the State] here.

HERMES. It is true. Stop cursing, you dead! Yonder is the Statue of Achilles and here are the fortunate ones who have just visited their families.

THE DEAD MEN (by the Statue of Achilles). We have seen our wives and mistresses. They do not desire us, even in their dreams!

HERMES. I suppose, then, you were in the habit of maintaining twenty years’ lamentation for men who fell in those old wars in which you took no interest. And what else did you find out?

A DEAD MAN. Most of the living here are persuaded that except through the sin of their own rulers there would be no more war; and they say they will never suffer any war to be waged.

HERMES. That, as I understand it, is a counsel to which the enemy must also agree.

THE DEAD MEN. By no means, for the rulers and the demus and many women and especially the Priests asseverate that it needs always two persons to make war.

HERMES. By no means if the one possess naught but riches and the other a sharpened sword. However, as your guide, I am glad you were amused.

THE DEAD MEN. How can we, even in death, forbear to grieve when we see the land bared both of armed men and catapults? … And more than half the ships of old are not! … Nor can those that are left be got ready without borrowings and makeshifts.

HERMES. That is because the womenfolk and specially their handmaidens must nowadays have their hair weekly made as to ripple by the public tire-women.

DAMASIUS. How has a woman’s headgear to do with the phalanxes?

CHRYSIPPUS. Or with the surge-dividing beaks?

HERMES. Because all power is with the demus, of which to-day the greater part are women, or men who wait on their desires or fears or, expenses.

DAMASIUS. But the power of women in themselves is dreadfully sufficient.

HERMES. Not for these new women. Lacking men, since so many of you stout fellows shipped with Charon, they have taken, as it were, the State for bed-fellow, and conceive strange things.

THE DEAD MEN. There is but one conceivable end to the matter. The land lies naked to the covert strife of vengeance. How shall it endure?

HERMES. As it is now, for a certain time during which the demagogues will deliver up, by means of well-chosen words, all the arms, possessions, islands and commerce of the State, one by one or altogether, to the enemy, according to [their] fears or [his] threats.

CHRYSIPPUS. But after that, at any rate, the people will be left in peace?

HERMES. On the contrary. It is then that their bodies will pay the debt of shame. To be utterly defenceless wakens in the victor the strong lust of killing for pleasure and of enslaving for profit, as indeed is already practised among the Scythians.

DAMASIUS. So the island now stands again with shut eyes on the brink of Fate?

HERMES. Their eyes, they assert, are now opened.

CHRYSIPPUS. I have looked into the eyes of the very newly dead. Why is it, O Compeller of Shades, that they are always filled with such questioning surprise?

HERMES. By my Wand of Office, I have been too busy to consider such trifles! Nor, indeed, need you. When we return to the Ship you will each drink down the special long glass of Lethe, to which, by pity, you are entitled. It is made of triple strength for just such cases as yours.

Pig

[a short tale]

Go, stalk the red deer o’er the heather,
    Ride, follow the fox if you can!
But, for pleasure and profit together,
    Allow me the hunting of Man,—
The chase of the Human,
The search for the Soul
    To its ruin,—the hunting of Man.
The Old Shikarri

I BELIEVE the difference began in the matter of a horse, with a twist in his temper, whom Pinecoffln sold to Nafferton, and by whom Nafferton was nearly slain. There may have been other causes of offence; the horse was the official stalking-horse. Nafferton was very angry; but Pinecoffln laughed, and said that he had never guaranteed the beast’s manners. Nafferton laughed too, though he vowed that he would write off his fall against Pinecoffin if he waited five years. Now, a Dalesman from beyond Skipton will forgive an injury when the Strid lets a man live; but a South Devon man is as soft as a Dartmoor bog. You can see from their names that Nafferton had the race-advantage of Pinecoffln. He was a peculiar man, and his notions of humour were cruel. He taught me a new and fascinating form of shikar. He hounded Pinecoffln from Mithankot to Jagadri, and from Gurgaon to Abbottabad—up and across the Punjab, a large Province, and in places remarkably dry. He said that he had no intention of allowing Assistant Commissioners to ‘sell him pups,’ in the shape of ramping, screaming countrybreds, without making their lives a burden to them.

Most Assistant Commissioners develop a bent for some special work after their first hot weather in the country. The boys with digestions hope to write their names large on the Frontier, and struggle for dreary places like Bannu and Kohat. The bilious ones climb into the Secretariat; which is very bad for the liver. Others are bitten with a mania for District work, Ghuznivide coins or Persian poetry; while some, who come of farmers’ stock, find that the smell of the Earth after the Rains gets into their blood, and calls them to ‘develop the resources of the Province.’ These men are enthusiasts. Pinecoffin belonged to their class. He knew a great many facts bearing on the cost of bullocks and temporary wells, and opium-scrapers, and what happens if you burn too much rubbish on a field in the hope of enriching used-up soil. All the Pinecoffins come of a landholding breed, and so the land only took back her own again. Unfortunately—most unfortunately for Pinecoffin—he was a Civilian as well as a farmer. Nafferton watched him, and thought about the horse. Nafferton said, ‘See me chase that boy till he drops!’ I said, ‘You can’t get your knife into an Assistant Commissioner.’ Nafferton told me that I did not understand the administration of the Province.

Our Government is rather peculiar. It gushes on the agricultural and general information side, and will supply a moderately respectable man with all sorts of ‘economic statistics,’ if he speaks to it prettily. For instance, you are interested in gold-washing in the sands of the Sutlej. You pull the string, and find that it wakes up half a dozen Departments, and finally communicates, say, with a friend of yours in the Telegraph, who once wrote some notes on the customs of the gold-washers when he was on construction-work in their part of the Empire. He may or may not be pleased at being ordered to write out everything he knows for your benefit. This depends on his temperament. The bigger man you are, the more information and the greater trouble can you raise.

Nafferton was not a big man; but he had the reputation of being very ‘earnest.’ An ‘earnest’ man can do much with a Government. There was an earnest man once who nearly wrecked . . . but all India knows that story. I am not sure what real ‘earnestness’ is. A very fair imitation can be manufactured by neglecting to dress decently, by mooning about in a dreamy, misty sort of way, by taking office-work home, after staying in office till seven, and by receiving crowds of native gentlemen on Sundays. That is one sort of ‘earnestness.’

Nafferton cast about for a peg whereon to hang his earnestness, and for a string that would communicate with Pinecoffin. He found both. They were Pig. Nafferton became an earnest inquirer after Pig. He informed the Government that he had a scheme whereby a very large percentage of the British Army in India could be fed, at a very large saving, on Pig. Then he hinted that Pinecoffin might supply him with the ‘varied information necessary to the proper inception of the scheme.’ So the Government wrote on the back of the letter, ‘Instruct Mr. Pinecoffin to furnish Mr. Nafferton with any information in his power.’ Government is very prone to writing things on the backs of letters which, later, lead to trouble and confusion.

Nafferton had not the faintest interest in Pig, but he knew that Pinecoffin would flounce into the trap. Pinecoffin was delighted at being consulted about Pig. The Indian Pig is not exactly an important factor in agricultural life; but Nafferton explained to Pinecoffin that there was room for improvement, and corresponded direct with that young man.

You may think that there is not much to be evolved from Pig. It all depends how you set to work. Pinecoffin being a Civilian and wishing to do things thoroughly, began with an essay on the Primitive Pig, the Mythology of the Pig, and the Dravidian Pig. Nafferton filed that information—twenty-seven foolscap sheets—and wanted to know about the distribution of the Pig in the Punjab, and how it stood the Plains in the hot weather. From this point onwards remember that I am giving you only the barest outlines of the affair—the guy-ropes, as it were, of the web that Nafferton spun round Pinecoffln.

Pinecoffln made a coloured Pig-population map, and collected observations on the comparative longevity of Pig (a) in the sub-montane tracts of the Himalayas, and (b) in the Rechna Doab. Nafferton filed that, and asked what sort of people looked after Pig. This started an ethnological excursus on swineherds, and drew from Pinecoffin long tables showing the proportion per thousand of the caste in the Derajat. Nafferton filed that bundle, and explained that the figures which he wanted referred to the Cis-Sutlej states, where he understood that Pigs were very fine and large, and where he proposed to start a Piggery. By this time Government had quite forgotten their instructions to Mr. Pinecoffln. They were like the gentlemen in Keats’ poem, who turned well-oiled wheels to skin other people. But Pinecoffin was just entering into the spirit of the Pig-hunt, as Nafferton well knew he would do. He had a fair amount of work of his own to clear away; but he sat up of nights reducing Pig to five places of decimals for the honour of his Service. He was not going to appear ignorant of so easy a subject as Pig.

Then Government sent him on special duty to Kohat, to ‘inquire into’ the big, seven-foot, ironshod spades of that District. People had been killing each other with those peaceful tools; and Government wished to know ‘whether a modified form of agricultural implement could not, tentatively and as a temporary measure, be introduced among the agricultural population without needlessly or unduly exacerbating the existing religious sentiments of the peasantry.’

Between those spades and Nafferton’s Pig, Pinecoffin was rather heavily burdened.

Nafferton now began to take up ‘(a) The food-supply of the indigenous Pig, with a view to the improvement of its capacities as a flesh-former. (b) The acclimatisation of the exotic Pig, maintaining its distinctive peculiarities.’ Pinecoffin replied exhaustively that the exotic Pig would become merged in the indigenous type; and quoted horse-breeding statistics to prove this. The side-issue was debated at great length on Pinecoffin’s side, till Nafferton owned that he had been in the wrong, and moved the previous question. When Pinecoffin had quite written himself out about flesh-formers, and fibrins, and glucose, and the nitrogenous constituents of maize and lucerne, Nafferton raised the question of expense. By this time Pinecoffin, who had been transferred from Kohat, had developed a Pig theory of his own, which he stated in thirty-three folio pages’all carefully filed by Nafferton; who asked for more.

These things took ten months, and Pinecoffin’s interest in the potential Piggery seemed to die down after he had stated his own views. But Nafferton bombarded him with letters on ‘the Imperial aspect of the scheme, as tending to officialise the sale of pork, and thereby calculated to give offence to the Mahommedan population of Upper India.’ He guessed that Pinecofn would want some broad, free-hand work after his niggling, stippling, decimal details. Pinecoffin handled the latest development of the case in masterly style, and proved that no ‘popular ebullition of excitement was to be apprehended.’ Nafferton said that there was nothing like Civilian insight in matters of this kind, and lured him up a by-path—‘the possible profits to accrue to the Government from the sale of hog-bristles.’ There is an extensive literature of hog-bristles, and the shoe, brush, and colourman’s trades recognise more varieties of bristles than you would think possible. After Pinecoffin had wondered a little at Nafferton’s rage for information, he sent back a monograph, fifty-one pages, on ‘Products of the Pig.’ This led him, under Nafferton’s tender handling, straight to the Cawnpore factories, the trade in hog-skin for saddles—and thence to the tanners. Pinecoffin wrote that pomegranate-seed was the best cure for hog-skin, and suggested—for the past fourteen months had wearied him—that Nafferton should ‘raise his pigs before he tanned them.’

Nafferton went back to the second section of his fifth question. How could the exotic Pig be brought to give as much pork as it did in the West and yet I assume the essentially hirsute characteristics of its Oriental congener’? Pinecoffin felt dazed, for he had forgotten what he had written sixteen months before, and fancied that he was about to reopen the entire question. He was too far involved in the hideous tangle to retreat, and, in a weak moment, he wrote, I Consult my first letter’ ; which related to the Dravidian Pig. As a matter of fact, Pinecoffin had still to reach the acclimatisation stage ; having gone off on a sido-issue on the merging of types.

Then Nafferton really unmasked his batteries! He complained to the Government, in stately language, of ‘the paucity of help accorded to me in my earnest attempts to start a potentially remunerative industry, and the flippancy with which my requests for information are treated by a gentleman whose pseudo-scholarly attainments should at least have taught him the primary differences between the Dravidian and the Berkshire variety of the genus Sus. If I am to understand that the letter to which he refers me contains his serious views on the acclimatisation of a valuable, though possibly uncleanly, animal, I am reluctantly compelled to believe,’ etc. etc.

There was a new man at the head of the Department of Castigation. The wretched Pinecoffin was told that the Service was made for the Country, and not the Country for the Service, and that he had better begin to supply information about Pig.

Pinecoffin answered insanely that he had written everything that could be written about Pig, and that some furlough was due to him.

Nafferton got a copy of that letter, and sent it, with the essay on the Dravidian Pig, to a down-country paper which printed both in full. The essay was rather highflown; but if the Editor had seen the stacks of paper, in Pinecoffin’s handwriting, on Nafferton’s table, he would not have been so sarcastic about the ‘nebulous discursiveness and blatant self-sufficiency of the modern Competition-wallah, and his utter inability to grasp the practical issues of a practical question.’ Many friends cut out these remarks and sent them to Pinecoffin.

I have already stated that Pinecoffin came of a soft stock. This last stroke frightened and shook him. He could not understand it; but he felt that he had been, somehow, shamelessly betrayed by Nafferton. He realised that he had wrapped himself up in the Pigskin without need, and that he could not well set himself right with his Government. All his acquaintances asked after his ‘nebulous discursiveness’ or his ‘blatant selfsufficiency,’ and this made him miserable.

He took a train and went to Nafferton, whom he had not seen since the Pig business began. He also took the cutting from the paper, and blustered feebly and called Nafferton names, and then died down to a watery, weak protest of the ‘I-say-it’s-too-bad-you-know’ order.

Nafferton was very sympathetic.

‘I’m afraid I’ve given you a good deal of trouble, haven’t I?’ said he.

‘Trouble!’ whimpered Pinecoffin; ‘I don’t mind the trouble so much, though that was bad enough; but what I resent is this showing up in print. It will stick to me like a burr all through my service. And I did do my best for your interminable swine. It’s too bad of you—on my soul it is!’

‘I don’t know,’ said Nafferton. ‘Have you ever been stuck with a horse? It isn’t the money I mind, though that is bad enough; but what I resent is the chaff that follows, especially from the boy who stuck me. But I think we’ll cry quits now.’

Pinecoffin found nothing to say save bad words; and Nafferton smiled ever so sweetly, and asked him to dinner.

The Phantom Rickshaw

page 1 of 7

May no ill dreams disturb my rest,
Nor Powers of Darkness me molest.
(Evening Hymn)

ONE of the few advantages that India has over England is a great Knowability. After five years’ service a man is directly or indirectly acquainted with the two or three hundred Civilians in his Province, all the Messes of ten or twelve Regiments and Batteries, and some fifteen hundred other people of the non-official caste. In ten years his knowledge should be doubled, and at the end of twenty he knows, or knows something about, every Englishman in the Empire, and may travel anywhere and everywhere without paying hotel-bills.

Globe-trotters who expect entertainment as a right, have, even within my memory, blunted this open-heartedness, but none the less to-day, if you belong to the Inner Circle and are neither a Bear nor a Black Sheep, all houses are open to you, and our small world is very, very kind and helpful.

Rickett of Kamartha stayed with Polder of Kumaon some fifteen years ago. He meant to stay two nights, but was knocked down by rheumatic fever, and for six weeks disorganized Polder’s establishment, stopped Polder’s work, and nearly died in Polder’s bedroom. Polder behaves as though he had been placed under eternal obligation by Rickett, and yearly sends the little Ricketts a box of presents and toys. It is the same everywhere. The men who do not take the trouble to conceal from you their opinion that you are an incompetent ass, and the women who blacken your character and misunderstand your wife’s amusements, will work themselves to the bone in your behalf if you fall sick or into serious trouble.

Heatherlegh, the Doctor, kept, in addition to his regular practice, a hospital on his private account—an arrangement of loose boxes for Incurables, his friend called it—but it was really a sort of fitting-up shed for craft that had been damaged by stress of weather. The weather in India is often sultry, and since the tale of bricks is always a fixed quantity, and the only liberty allowed is permission to work overtime and get no thanks, men occasionally break down and become as mixed as the metaphors in this sentence.

Heatherlegh is the dearest doctor that ever was, and his invariable prescription to all his patients is, “lie low, go slow, and keep cool.” He says that more men are killed by overwork than the importance of this world justifies. He maintains that overwork slew Pansay, who died under his hands about three years ago. He has, of course, the right to speak authoritatively, and he laughs at my theory that there was a crack in Pansay’s head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death. “Pansay went off the handle,” says Heatherlegh, “after the stimulus of long leave at Home. He may or he may not have behaved like a blackguard to Mrs. Keith-Wessington. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi Settlement ran him off his legs, and that he took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P. & 0. flirtation. He certainly was engaged to Miss Mannering, and she certainly broke off the engagement. Then he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense about ghosts developed. Overwork started his illness, kept it alight, and killed him poor devil. Write him off to the System—one man to take the work of two and a half men.”

I do not believe this. I used to sit up with Pansay sometimes when Heatherlegh was called out to patients, and I happened to be within claim. The man would make me most unhappy by describing in a low, even voice, the procession that was always passing at the bottom of his bed. He had a sick man’s command of language.

When he recovered I suggested that he should write out the whole affair from beginning to end, knowing that ink might assist him to ease his mind. When little boys have learned a new bad word they are never happy till they have chalked it up on a door. And this also is Literature.

He was in a high fever while he was writing, and the blood-and-thunder Magazine diction he adopted did not calm him. Two months afterward he was reported fit for duty, but, in spite of the fact that he was urgently needed to help an undermanned Commission stagger through a deficit, he preferred to die; vowing at the last that he was hag-ridden. I got his manuscript before he died, and this is his version of the affair, dated 1885:—

My doctor tells me that I need rest and change of air. It is not improbable that I shall get both ere long—rest that neither the red-coated messenger nor the midday gun can break, and change of air far beyond that which any homeward-bound steamer can give me. In the meantime I am resolved to stay where I am; and, in flat defiance of my doctor’s orders, to take all the world into my confidence. You shall learn for yourselves the precise nature of my malady; and shall, too, judge for yourselves whether any man born of woman on this weary earth was ever so tormented as I.

Speaking now as a condemned criminal might speak ere the drop-bolts are drawn, my story, wild and hideously improbable as it may appear, demands at least attention. That it will ever receive credence I utterly disbelieve. Two months ago I should have scouted as mad or drunk the man who had dared tell me the like. Two months ago I was the happiest man in India. Today, from Peshawur to the sea, there is no one more wretched. My doctor and I are the only two who know this. His explanation is, that my brain, digestion, and eyesight are all slightly affected; giving rise to my frequent and persistent “delusions.” Delusions, indeed! I call him a fool; but he attends me still with the same unwearied smile, the same bland professional manner, the same neatly trimmed red whiskers, till I begin to suspect that I am an ungrateful, evil-tempered invalid. But you shall judge for your-selves.

Three years ago it was my fortune—my great misfortune—to sail from Gravesend to Bombay, on return from long leave, with one Agnes Keith-Wessington, wife of an officer on the Bombay side. It does not in the least concern you to know what manner of woman she was. Be content with the knowledge that, ere the voyage had ended, both she and I were desperately and unreasoningly in love with one another. Heaven knows that I can make the admission now without one particle of vanity. In matters of this sort there is always one who gives and another who accepts. From the first day of our ill-omened attachment, I was conscious that Agnes’s passion was a stronger, a more dominant, and—if I may use the expression—a purer sentiment than mine. Whether she recognized the fact then, I do not know. Afterward it was bitterly plain to both of us.

Arrived at Bombay in the spring of the year, we went our respective ways, to meet no more for the next three or four months, when my leave and her love took us both to Simla. There we spent the season together; and there my fire of straw burned itself out to a pitiful end with the closing year. I attempt no excuse. I make no apology. Mrs. Wessington had given up much for my sake, and was prepared to give up all. From my own lips, in August, 1882, she learned that I was sick of her presence, tired of her company, and weary of the sound of her voice. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have wearied of me as I wearied of them; seventy-five of that number would have promptly avenged themselves by active and obtrusive flirtation with other men. Mrs. Wessington was the hundredth. On her neither my openly expressed aversion nor the cutting brutalities with which I garnished our interviews had the least effect.

“Jack, darling!” was her one eternal cuckoo cry: “I’m sure it’s all a mistake—a hideous mistake; and we’ll be good friends again some day. Please forgive me, Jack, dear.”

page 2

I was the offender, and I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity into passive endurance, and, eventually, into blind hate—the same instinct, I suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider he has but half killed. And with this hate in my bosom the season of 1882 came to an end.

Next year we met again at Simla—she with her monotonous face and timid attempts at reconciliation, and I with loathing of her in every fibre of my frame. Several times I could not avoid meeting her alone; and on each occasion her words were identically the same. Still the unreasoning wail that it was all a “mistake”; and still the hope of eventually “making friends.” I might have seen had I cared to look, that that hope only was keeping her alive. She grew more wan and thin month by month. You will agree with me, at least, that such conduct would have driven any one to despair. It was uncalled for; childish; unwomanly. I maintain that she was much to blame. And again, sometimes, in the black, fever-stricken night-watches, I have begun to think that I might have been a little kinder to her. But that really is a “delusion.” I could not have continued pretending to love her when I didn’t; could I? It would have been unfair to us both.

Last year we met again—on the same terms as before. The same weary appeal, and the same curt answers from my lips. At least I would make her see how wholly wrong and hopeless were her attempts at resuming the old relationship. As the season wore on, we fell apart—that is to say, she found it difficult to meet me, for I had other and more absorbing interests to attend to. When I think it over quietly in my sick-room, the season of 1884 seems a confused nightmare wherein light and shade were fantastically intermingled: my courtship of little Kitty Mannering; my hopes, doubts, and fears; our long rides together; my trembling avowal of attachment; her reply; and now and again a vision of a white face flitting by in the ’rickshaw with the black and white liveries I once watched for so earnestly; the wave of Mrs. Wessington’s gloved hand; and, when she met me alone, which was but seldom, the irksome monotony of her appeal. I loved Kitty Mannering; honestly, heartily loved her, and with my love for her grew my hatred for Agnes. In August Kitty and I were engaged. The next day I met those accursed “magpie” jhampanies at the back of Jakko, and, moved by some passing sentiment of pity, stopped to tell Mrs. Wessington everything. She knew it already.

“So I hear you’re engaged, Jack dear.” Then, without a moment’s pause—”I’m sure it’s all a mistake—a hideous mistake. We shall be as good friends some day, Jack, as we ever were.”

My answer might have made even a man wince. It cut the dying woman before me like the blow of a whip. “Please forgive me, Jack; I didn’t mean to make you angry; but it’s true, it’s true!”

And Mrs. Wessington broke down completely. I turned away and left her to finish her journey in peace, feeling, but only for a moment or two, that I had been an unutterably mean hound. I looked back, and saw that she had turned her ’rickshaw with the idea, I suppose, of overtaking me.

The scene and its surroundings were photographed on my memory. The rain-swept sky (we were at the end of the wet weather), the sodden, dingy pines, the muddy road, and the black powder-riven cliffs formed a gloomy background against which the black and white liveries of the jhampanies, the yellow-paneled ’rickshaw and Mrs. Wessington’s down-bowed golden head stood out clearly. She was holding her handkerchief in her left hand and was leaning hack exhausted against the ’rickshaw cushions. I turned my horse up a bypath near the Sanjowlie Reservoir and literally ran away. Once I fancied I heard a faint call of “Jack!” This may have been imagination. I never stopped to verify it. Ten minutes later I came across Kitty on horseback; and, in the delight of a long ride with her, forgot all about the interview.

A week later Mrs. Wessington died, and the inexpressible burden of her existence was removed from my life. I went Plainsward perfectly happy. Before three months were over I had forgotten all about her, except that at times the discovery of some of her old letters reminded me unpleasantly of our bygone relationship. By January I had disinterred what was left of our correspondence from among my scattered belongings and had burned it. At the beginning of April of this year, 1885, I was at Simla—semi-deserted Simla—once more, and was deep in lover’s talks and walks with Kitty. It was decided that we should be married at the end of June. You will understand, therefore, that, loving Kitty as I did, I am not saying too much when I pronounce myself to have been, at that time, the happiest man in India.

Fourteen delightful days passed almost before I noticed their flight. Then, aroused to the sense of what was proper among mortals circumstanced as we were, I pointed out to Kitty that an engagement ring was the outward and visible sign of her dignity as an engaged girl; and that she must forthwith come to Hamilton’s to be measured for one. Up to that moment, I give you my word, we had completely forgotten so trivial a matter. To Hamilton’s we accordingly went on the 15th of April, 1885. Remember that—whatever my doctor may say to the contrary—I was then in perfect health, enjoying a well-balanced mind and an absolutely tranquil spirit. Kitty and I entered Hamilton’s shop together, and there, regardless of the order of affairs, I measured Kitty for the ring in the presence of the amused assistant. The ring was a sapphire with two diamonds. We then rode out down the slope that leads to the Combermere Bridge and Peliti’s shop.

While my Waler was cautiously feeling his way over the loose shale, and Kitty was laughing and chattering at my side—while all Simla, that is to say as much of it as had then come from the Plains, was grouped round the Reading-room and Peliti’s veranda,—I was aware that some one, apparently at a vast distance, was calling me by my Christian name. It struck me that I had heard the voice before, but when and where I could not at once determine. In the short space it took to cover the road between the path from Hamilton’s shop and the first plank of the Combermere Bridge I had thought over half a dozen people who might have committed such a solecism, and had eventually decided that it must have been singing in my ears. Immediately opposite Peliti’s shop my eye was arrested by the sight of four jharnpanies in “magpie” livery, pulling a yellow-paneled, cheap, bazar ’rickshaw. In a moment my mind flew back to the previous season and Mrs. Wessington with a sense of irritation and disgust. Was it not enough that the woman was dead and done with, without her black and white servitors reappearing to spoil the day’s happiness? Whoever employed them now I thought I would call upon, and ask as a personal favor to change her jhampanies’ livery. I would hire the men myself, and, if necessary, buy their coats from off their backs. It is impossible to say here what a flood of undesirable memories their presence evoked.

“Kitty,” I cried, “there are poor Mrs. Wessington’s jhampanies turned up again! I wonder who has them now?”

Kitty had known Mrs. Wessington slightly last season, and had always been interested in the sickly woman.

“What? Where?” she asked. “I can’t see them anywhere.”

Even as she spoke her horse, swerving from a laden mule, threw himself directly in front of the advancing ’rickshaw. I had scarcely time to utter a word of warning when, to my unutterable horror, horse and rider passed through men and carriage as if they had been thin air.

“What’s the matter?” cried Kitty; “what made you call out so foolishly, Jack? If I am engaged I don’t want all creation to know about it. There was lots of space between the mule and the veranda; and, if you think I can’t ride——There!”

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Whereupon wilful Kitty set off, her dainty little head in the air, at a hand-gallop in the direction of the Bandstand; fully expecting, as she herself afterward told me, that I should follow her. What was the matter? Nothing indeed. Either that I was mad or drunk, or that Simla was haunted with devils. I reined in my impatient cob, and turned round. The ’rickshaw had turned too, and now stood immediately facing me, near the left railing of the Comber-mere Bridge.

“Jack! Jack, darling!” (There was no mistake about the words this time: they rang through my brain as if they had been shouted in my ear.) “It’s some hideous mistake, I’m sure. Please forgive me, Jack, and let’s be friends again.”

The ’rickshaw-hood had fallen back, and inside, as I hope and pray daily for the death I dread by night, sat Mrs. Keith-Wessington, handkerchief in hand, and golden head bowed on her breast.

How long I stared motionless I do not know. Finally, I was aroused by my sais taking the Waler’s bridle and asking whether I was ill. From the horrible to the commonplace is but a step. I tumbled off my horse and dashed, half fainting, into Peliti’s for a glass of cherry-brandy. There two or three couples were gathered round the coffee-tables discussing the gossip of the day. Their trivialities were more comforting to me just then than the consolations of religion could have been. I plunged into the midst of the conversation at once; chatted, laughed, and jested with a face (when I caught a glimpse of it in a mirror) as white and drawn as that of a corpse. Three or four men noticed my condition; and, evidently setting it down to the results of over-many pegs, charitably endeavoured to draw me apart from the rest of the loungers. But I refused to be led away. I wanted the company of my kind—as a child rushes into the midst of the dinner-party after a fright in the dark. I must have talked for about ten minutes or so, though it seemed an eternity to me, when I heard Kitty’s clear voice outside inquiring for me. In another minute she had entered the shop, prepared to roundly upbraid me for failing so signally in my duties. Something in my face stopped her.

“Why, Jack,” she cried, “what have you been doing? What has happened? Are you ill?” Thus driven into a direct lie, I said that the sun had been a little too much for me. It was close upon five o’clock of a cloudy April afternoon, and the sun had been hidden all day. I saw my mistake as soon as the words were out of my mouth: attempted to recover it; blundered hopelessly and followed Kitty in a regal rage, out of doors, amid the smiles of my acquaintances. I made some excuse (I have forgotten what) on the score of my feeling faint; and cantered away to my hotel, leaving Kitty to finish the ride by herself.

In my room I sat down and tried calmly to reason out the matter.

Here was I, Theobald Jack Pansay, a well-educated Bengal Civilian in the year of grace, 1885, presumably sane, certainly healthy, driven in terror from my sweetheart’s side by the apparition of a woman who had been dead and buried eight months ago. These were facts that I could not blink. Nothing was further from my thought than any memory of Mrs. Wessington when Kitty and I left Hamilton’s shop. Nothing was more utterly commonplace than the stretch of wall opposite Peliti’s. It was broad daylight. The road was full of people; and yet here, look you, in defiance of every law of probability, in direct outrage of Nature’s ordinance, there had appeared to me a face from the grave.

Kitty’s Arab had gone through the ’rickshaw: so that my first hope that some woman marvelously like Mrs. Wessington had hired the carriage and the coolies with their old livery was lost. Again and again I went round this treadmill of thought; and again and again gave up baffled and in despair. The voice was as inexplicable as the apparition. I had originally some wild notion of confiding it all to Kitty; of begging her to marry me at once; and in her arms defying the ghostly occupant of the ’rickshaw. “After all,” I argued, “the presence of the ’rickshaw is in itself enough to prove the existence of a spectral illusion. One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never of coolies and carriages. The whole thing is absurd Fancy the ghost of a hill-man!”

Next morning I sent a penitent note to Kitty, imploring her to overlook my strange conduct of the previous afternoon. My Divinity was still very wroth, and a personal apology was necessary. I explained, with a fluency born of night-long pondering over a falsehood, that I had been attacked with sudden palpitation of the heart—the result of indigestion. This eminently practical solution had its effect; and Kitty and I rode out that afternoon with the shadow of my first lie dividing us.

Nothing would please her save a canter round Jakko. With my nerves still unstrung from the previous night I feebly protested against the notion, suggesting Observatory Hill, Jutogh, the Boileaugunge road—anything rather than the Jakko round. Kitty was angry and a little hurt: so I yielded from fear of provoking further misunderstanding, and we set out together toward Chota Simla. We walked a greater part of the way, and, according to our custom, cantered from a mile or so below the Convent to the stretch of level road by the Sanjowlie Reservoir. The wretched horses appeared to fly, and my heart beat quicker and quicker as we neared the crest of the ascent. My mind had been full of Mrs. Wessington all the afternoon; and every inch of the Jakko road bore witness to our oldtime walks and talks. The bowlders were full of it; the pines sang it aloud overhead; the rain-fed torrents giggled and chuck led unseen over the shameful story; and the wind in my ears chanted the iniquity aloud.

As a fitting climax, in the middle of the level men call the Ladies’ Mile the Horror was awaiting me. No other ’rickshaw was in sight—only the four black and white jhampanies, the yellow-paneled carriage, and the golden head of the woman within—all apparently just as I had left them eight months and one fortnight ago! For an instant I fancied that Kitty must see what I saw—we were so marvelously sympathetic in all things. Her next words undeceived me—‘Not a soul in sight! Come along, Jack, and I’ll race you to the Reservoir buildings!” Her wiry little Arab was off like a bird, my Waler following close behind, and in this order we dashed under the cliffs. Half a minute brought us within fifty yards of the ’rickshaw. I pulled my Waler and fell back a little. The ’rickshaw was directly in the middle of the road; and once more the Arab passed through it, my horse following. “Jack! Jack dear! Please forgive me,” rang with a wail in my ears, and, after an interval:—“It’s a mistake, a hideous mistake!”

I spurred my horse like a man possessed. When I turned my head at the Reservoir works, the black and white liveries were still waiting—patiently waiting—under the grey hillside, and the wind brought me a mocking echo of the words I had just heard. Kitty bantered me a good deal on my silence throughout the remainder of the ride. I had been talking up till then wildly and at random.

To save my life I could not speak afterward naturally, and from Sanjowlie to the Church wisely held my tongue.

I was to dine with the Mannerings that night, and had barely time to canter home to dress. On the road to Elysium Hill I overheard two men talking together in the dusk.—“It’s a curious thing,” said one, “how completely all trace of it disappeared. You know my wife was insanely fond of the woman (’never could see anything in her myself), and wanted me to pick up her old ’rickshaw and coolies if they were to be got for love or money. Morbid sort of fancy I call it; but I’ve got to do what the Memsahib tells me. Would you believe that the man she hired it from tells me that all four of the men—they were brothers—died of cholera on the way to Hardwar, poor devils, and the ’rickshaw has been broken up by the man himself. ’Told me he never used a dead Memsakib’s ’rickshaw. ’Spoiled his luck. Queer notion, wasn’t it? Fancy poor little Mrs. Wessington spoiling any one’s luck except her own!” I laughed aloud at this point; and my laugh jarred on me as I uttered it. So there were ghosts of ’rickshaws after all, and ghostly employments in the other world! How much did Mrs. Wessington give her men? What were their hours? Where did they go?

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And for visible answer to my last question I saw the infernal Thing blocking my path in the twilight. The dead travel fast, and by short cuts unknown to ordinary coolies. I laughed aloud a second time and checked my laughter suddenly, for I was afraid I was going mad. Mad to a certain extent I must have been, for I recollect that I reined in my horse at the head of the ’rickshaw, and politely wished Mrs. Wessington “Good-evening.” Her answer was one I knew only too well. I listened to the end; and replied that I had heard it all before, but should be delighted if she had anything further to say. Some malignant devil stronger than I must have entered into me that evening, for I have a dim recollection of talking the commonplaces of the day for five minutes to the Thing in front of me.

“Mad as a hatter, poor devil—or drunk. Max, try and get him to come home.”

Surely that was not Mrs. Wessington’s voice! The two men had overheard me speaking to the empty air, and had returned to look after me. They were very kind and considerate, and from their words evidently gathered that I was extremely drunk. I thanked them confusedly and cantered away to my hotel, there changed, and arrived at the Mannerings’ ten minutes late. I pleaded the darkness of the night as an excuse; was rebuked by Kitty for my unlover-like tardiness; and sat down.

The conversation had already become general; and under cover of it, I was addressing some tender small talk to my sweetheart when I was aware that at the further end of the table a short red-whiskered man was describing, with much broidery, his encounter with a mad unknown that evening.

A few sentences convinced me that he was repeating the incident of half an hour ago. In the middle of the story he looked round for applause, as professional story-tellers do, caught my eye, and straightway collapsed. There was a moment’s awkward silence, and the red-whiskered man muttered something to the effect that he had “forgotten the rest,” thereby sacrificing a reputation as a good story~teller which he had built up for six seasons past. I blessed him from the bottom of my heart, and—went on with my fish.

In the fulness of time that dinner came to an end; and with genuine regret I tore myself away from Kitty—as certain as I was of my own existence that It would be waiting for me outside the door. The red-whiskered man, who had been introduced to me as Doctor Heatherlegh, of Simla, volunteered to bear me company as far as our roads lay together. I accepted his offer with gratitude.

My instinct had not deceived me. It lay in readiness in the Mall, and, in what seemed devilish mockery of our ways, with a lighted head-lamp. The red-whiskered man went to the point at once, in a manner that showed he bad been thinking over it all dinner time.

“I say, Pansay, what the deuce was the matter with you this evening on the Elysium road?” The suddenness of the question wrenched an answer from me before I was aware.

“That!.” said I, pointing to It.

“That may be either D.T. or Eyes for aught I know. Now you don’t liquor. I saw as much at dinner, so it can’t be D.T. There’s nothing whatever where you’re pointing, though you’re sweating and trembling with fright like a scared pony. Therefore, I conclude that it’s Eyes. And I ought to understand all about them. Come along home with me. I’m on the Blessington lower road.”

To my intense delight the ’rickshaw instead of waiting for us kept about twenty yards ahead—and this, too whether we walked, trotted, or cantered. In the course of that long night ride I had told my companion almost as much as I have told you here.

“Well, you’ve spoiled one of the best tales I’ve ever laid tongue to,” said he, “but I’ll forgive you for the sake of what you’ve gone through. Now come home and do what I tell you; and when I’ve cured you, young man, let this be a lesson to you to steer clear of women and indigestible food till the day of your death.”

The ’rickshaw kept steady in front; and my red-whiskered friend seemed to derive great pleasure from my account of its exact whereabouts.

“Eyes, Pansay—all Eyes, Brain, and Stomach. And the greatest of these three is Stomach. You’ve too much conceited Brain, too little Stomach, and thoroughly unhealthy Eyes. Get your Stomach straight and the rest follows. And all that’s French for a liver pill. I’ll take sole medical charge of you from this hour! for you’re too interesting a phenomenon to be passed over.”

By this time we were deep in the shadow of the Blessington lower road and the ’rickshaw came to a dead stop under a pine-clad, over-hanging shale cliff. Instinctively I halted too, giving my reason. Heatherlegh rapped out an oath.

‘Now, if you think I’m going to spend a cold night on the hillside for the sake of a stomach-cum-Brain-cum-Eye illusion —— Lord, ha’ mercy! What’s that?”

There was a muffled report, a blinding smother of dust just in front of us, a crack, the noise of rent boughs, and about ten yards of the cliff-side-pines., undergrowth, and all-slid down into the road below, completely blocking it up. The uprooted trees swayed and tottered for a moment like drunken giants in the gloom, and then fell prone among their fellows with a thunderous crash. Our two horses stood motionless and sweating with fear. As soon as the rattle of falling earth and stone had subsided, my companion muttered:—“Man, if we’d gone forward we should have been ten feet deep in our graves by now. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth.’ . . . Come home, Pansay, and thank God. I want a peg badly.”

We retraced our way over the Church Ridge, and I arrived at Dr. Heatherlegh’s house shortly after midnight.

His attempts toward my cure commenced almost immediately, and for a week I never left his sight. Many a time in the course of that week did I bless the good-fortune which had thrown me in contact with Simla’s best and kindest doctor. Day by day my spirits grew lighter and more equable. Day by day, too, I became more and more inclined to fall in with Heatherlegh’s “spectral illusion” theory, implicating eyes, brain, and stomach. I wrote to Kitty, telling her that a slight sprain caused by a fall from my horse kept me indoors for a few days; and that I should be recovered before she had time to regret my absence.

Heatherlegh’s treatment was simple to a degree. It consisted of liver pills, cold-water baths, and strong exercise, taken in the dusk or at early dawn—for, as he sagely observed: “A man with a sprained ankle doesn’t walk a dozen miles a day, and your young woman might be wondering if she saw you.”

At the end of the week, after much examination of pupil and pulse, and strict injunction’ as to diet and pedestrianism, Heatherlegh dismissed me as brusquely as he had taken charge of me. Here is his parting benediction:—“Man, I can certify to your mental cure, and that’s as much as to say I’ve cured most of your bodily ailments. Now, get your ’traps out of this as soon as you can; and be off to make love to Miss Kitty.”

I was endeavoring to express my thanks for his kindness. He cut me short.

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“Don’t think I did this because I like you. I gather that you’ve behaved like a blackguard all through. But, all the same, you re a phenomenon, and as queer a phenomenon as you are a blackguard. No!”—checking me a second time—“not a rupee please. Go out and see if you can find the eyes-brain-and-stomach business again. I’ll give you a lakh for each time you see it.”

Half an hour later I was in the Mannerings’ drawing-room with Kitty—drunk with the intoxication of present happiness and the fore-knowledge that I should never more be troubled with Its hideous presence. Strong in the sense of my new-found security, I proposed a ride at once; and, by preference, a canter round Jakko.

Never had I felt so well, so overladen with vitality and mere animal spirits, as I did on the afternoon of the 30th of April. Kitty was delighted at the change in my appearance, and complimented me on it in her delightfully frank and outspoken manner. We left the Mannerings’ house together, laughing and talking, and cantered along the Chota Simla road as of old.

I was in haste to reach the Sanjowlie Reservoir and there make my assurance doubly sure. The horses did their best, but seemed all too slow to my impatient mind. Kitty was astonished at my boisterousness. “Why, Jack!” she cried at last, “you are behaving like a child. What are you doing?”

We were just below the Convent, and from sheer wantonness I was making my Waler plunge and curvet across the road as I tickled it with the loop of my riding-whip.

“Doing?” I answered; “nothing, dear. That’s just it. If you’d been doing nothing for a week except lie up, you’d be as riotous as I.”

‘Singing and murmuring in your feastful mirth,
Joying to feel yourself alive;
Lord over Nature, Lord of the visible Earth,
Lord of the senses five.’

My quotation was hardly out of my lips before we had rounded the corner above the Convent; and a few yards further on could see across to Sanjowlie. In the centre of the level road stood the black and white liveries, the yellow-paneled ’rickshaw, and Mrs. Keith-Wessington. I pulled up, looked, rubbed my eyes, and, I believe must have said something. The next thing I knew was that I was lying face downward on the road with Kitty kneeling above me in tears.

“Has it gone, child I” I gasped. Kitty only wept more bitterly.

“Has what gone, Jack dear? what does it all mean? There must be a mistake somewhere, Jack. A hideous mistake.” Her last words brought me to my feet—mad—raving for the time being.

“Yes, there is a mistake somewhere,” I repeated, “a hideous mistake. Come and look at It.”

I have an indistinct idea that I dragged Kitty by the wrist along the road up to where It stood, and implored her for pity’s sake to speak to It; to tell It that we were betrothed; that neither Death nor Hell could break the tie between us; and Kitty only knows how much more to the same effect. Now and again I appealed passionately to the Terror in the ’rickshaw to bear witness to all I had said, and to release me from a torture that was killing me. As I talked I suppose I must have told Kitty of my old relations with Mrs. Wessington, for I saw her listen intently with white face and blazing eyes.

“Thank you, Mr. Pansay,” she said, “that’s quite enough. Sais, ghora láo.”

The saises, impassive as Orientals always are, had come up with the recaptured horses; and as Kitty sprang into her saddle I caught hold of the bridle, entreating her to hear me out and forgive. My answer was the cut of her riding-whip across my face from mouth to eye, and a word or two of farewell that even now I cannot write down. So I judged, and judged rightly, that Kitty knew all; and I staggered back to the side of the ’rickshaw. My face was cut and bleeding, and the blow of the riding-whip had raised a livid blue wheal on it. I had no self-respect. Just then, Heatherlegh, who must have been following Kitty and me at a distance, cantered up.

“Doctor,” I said, pointing to my face, “here’s Miss Mannering’s signature to my order of dismissal and——I’ll thank you for that lakh as soon as convenient.”

Heatherlegh’s face, even in my abject misery, moved me to laughter.

“I’ll stake my professional reputation”——he began.

“Don’t be a fool,” I whispered. “I’ve lost my life’s happiness and you’d better take me home.”

As I spoke the ’rickshaw was gone. Then I lost all knowledge of what was passing. The crest of Jakko seemed to heave and roll like the crest of a cloud and fall in upon me.

Seven days later (on the 7th of May, that is to say) I was aware that I was lying in Heatherlegh’s room as weak as a little child. Heatherlegh was watching me intently from behind the papers on his writing-table. His first words were not encouraging; but I was too far spent to be much moved by them.

“Here’s Miss Kitty has sent back your letters. You corresponded a good deal, you young people. Here’s a packet that looks like a ring, and a cheerful sort of a note from Mannering Papa, which I’ve taken the liberty of reading and burning. The old gentleman’s not pleased with you.”

“And Kitty?” I asked, dully.

“Rather more drawn than her father from what she says. By the same token you must have been letting out any number of queer reminiscences just before I met you. ‘Says that a man who would have behaved to a woman as you did to Mrs. Wessington ought to kill himself out of sheer pity for his kind. She’s a hot-headed little virago, your girl. ‘Will have it too that you were suffering from D.T. when that row on the Jakko road turned up. ‘Says she’ll die before she ever speaks to you again.”

I groaned and turned over to the other side.

“Now you’ve got your choice, my friend. This engagement has to be broken off; and the Mannerings don’t want to be too hard on you. Was it broken through D. T. or epileptic fits? Sorry I can’t offer you a better exchange unless you’d prefer hereditary insanity. Say the word and I’ll tell ’em its fits. All Simla knows about that scene on the Ladies’ Mile. Come! I’ll give you five minutes to think over it.”

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During those five minutes I believe that I explored thoroughly the lowest circles of the Inferno which it is permitted man to tread on earth. And at the same time I myself was watching myself faltering through the dark labyrinths of doubt, misery, and utter despair. I wondered, as Heatherlegh in his chair might have wondered, which dreadful alternative I should adopt. Presently I heard myself answering in a voice that I hardly recognized,—

“They’re confoundedly particular about morality in these parts. Give ’em fits, Heatherlegh, and my love. Now let me sleep a bit longer.”

Then my two selves joined, and it was only I (half crazed, devil-driven I) that tossed in my bed, tracing step by step the history of the past month.

“But I am in Simla,” I kept repeating to myself. “I, Jack Pansay, am in Simla and there are no ghosts here. It’s unreasonable of that woman to pretend there are. Why couldn’t Agnes have left me alone? I never did her any harm. It might just as well have been me as Agnes. Only I’d never have come hack on purpose to kill her. Why can’t I be left alone—left alone and happy?”

It was high noon when I first awoke: and the sun was low in the sky before I slept—slept as the tortured criminal sleeps on his rack, too worn to feel further pain.

Next day I could not leave my bed. Heatherlegh told me in the morning that he had received an answer from Mr. Mannering, and that, thanks to his (Heatherlegh’s) friendly offices, the story of my affliction had traveled through the length and breadth of Simla, where I was on all sides much pitied.

“And that’s rather more than you deserve,” he concluded, pleasantly, “though the Lord knows you’ve been going through a pretty severe mill. Never mind; we’ll cure you yet, you perverse phenomenon.”

I declined firmly to be cured. “You’ve been much too good to me already, old man,” said I; “but I don’t think I need trouble you further.”

In my heart I knew that nothing Heatherlegh could do would lighten the burden that had been laid upon me.

With that knowledge came also a sense of hopeless, impotent rebellion against the unreasonableness of it all. There were scores of men no better than I whose punishments had at least been reserved for another world; and I felt that it was bitterly, cruelly unfair that I alone should have been singled out for so hideous a fate. This mood would in time give place to another where it seemed that the ’rickshaw and I were the only realities in a world of shadows; that Kitty was a ghost; that Mannering, Heatherlegh, and all the other men and women I knew were all ghosts; and the great, grey hills themselves but vain shadows devised to torture me. From mood to mood I tossed backward and forward for seven weary days; my body growing daily stronger and stronger, until the bedroom looking-glass told me that I had returned to everyday life, and was as other men once more. Curiously enough my face showed no signs of the struggle I had gone through. It was pale indeed, but as expressionless and commonplace as ever. I had expected some permanent alteration—visible evidence of the disease that was eating me away. I found nothing.

On the 15th of May, I left Heatherlegh’s house at eleven o’clock in the morning; and the instinct of the bachelor drove me to the Club. There I found that every man knew my story as told by Heatherlegh, and was, in clumsy fashion, abnormally kind and attentive. Nevertheless I recognized that for the rest of my natural life I should be among but not of my fellows; and I envied very bitterly indeed the laughing coolies on the Mall below. I lunched at the Club, and at four o’clock wandered aimlessly down the Mall in the vague hope of meeting Kitty. Close to the Bandstand the black and white liveries joined me; and I heard Mrs. Wessington’s old appeal at my side. I had been expecting this ever since I came out; and was only surprised at her delay. The phantom ’rickshaw and I went side by side along the Chota Simla road in silence. Close to the bazar, Kitty and a man on horseback overtook and passed us. For any sign she gave I might have been a dog in the road. She did not even pay me the compliment of quickening her pace; though the rainy afternoon had served for an excuse.

So Kitty and her companion, and I and my ghostly Light-o’-Love, crept round Jakko in couples. The road was streaming with water; the pines dripped like roof-pipes on the rocks below, and the air was full of fine, driving rain. Two or three times I found myself saying to myself almost aloud: “I’m Jack Pansay on leave at Simla—at Simla! Everyday, ordinary Simla. I mustn’t forget that—I mustn’t forget that.” Then I would try to recollect some of the gossip I had heard at the Club: the prices of So-and-So’s horses—anything, in fact, that related to the workaday Anglo-Indian world I knew so well. I even repeated the multiplication-table rapidly to myself, to make quite sure that I was not taking leave of my senses. It gave me much comfort; and must have prevented my hearing Mrs. Wessington for a time.

Once more I wearily climbed the Convent slope and entered the level road. Here Kitty and the man started off at a canter, and I was left alone with Mrs. Wessington. “Agnes,” said I, “will you put back your hood and tell me what it all means?” The hood dropped noiselessly, and I was face to face with my dead and buried mistress. She was wearing the dress in which I had last seen her alive; carried the same tiny handkerchief in her right hand; and the same card-case in her left. (A woman eight months dead with a card-case!) I had to pin myself down to the multiplication-table, and to set both hands on the stone parapet of the road, to assure myself that that at least was real.

“Agnes,” I repeated, “for pity’s sake tell me what it all means.” Mrs. Wessington leaned forward, with that odd, quick turn of the head I used to know so well, and spoke.

If my story had not already so madly overleaped the bounds of all human belief I should apologize to you now. As I know that no-one—no, not even Kitty, for whom it is written as some sort of justification of my conduct—will believe me, I will go on. Mrs. Wessington spoke and I walked with her from the Sanjowlie road to the turning below the Commander-in-Chief’s house as I might walk by the side of any living woman’s ’rickshaw, deep in conversation. The second and most tormenting of my moods of sickness had suddenly laid hold upon me, and like the Prince in Tennyson’s poem, “I seemed to move amid a world of ghosts.” There had been a garden-party at the Commander-in-Chief’s, and we two joined the crowd of homeward-bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed that they were the shadows—impalpable, fantastic shadows—that divided for Mrs. Wessington’s ’rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh’s comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been “mashing a brain-eye-and-stomach chimera.” It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvelously dear experience. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I was in this life to woo a second time the woman I had killed by my own neglect and cruelty?

I met Kitty on the homeward road—a shadow among shadows.

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If I were to describe all the incidents of the next fortnight in their order, my story would never come to an end; and your patience would he exhausted. Morning after morning and evening after evening the ghostly ’rickshaw and I used to wander through Simla together. Wherever I went there the four black and white liveries followed me and bore me company to and from my hotel. At the Theatre I found them amid the crowd of yelling jhampanies; outside the Club veranda, after a long evening of whist; at the Birthday Ball, waiting patiently for my reappearance; and in broad daylight when I went calling. Save that it cast no shadow, the ’rickshaw was in every respect as real to look upon as one of wood and iron. More than once, indeed, I have had to check myself from warning some hard-riding friend against cantering over it. More than once I have walked down the Mall deep in conversation with Mrs. Wessington to the unspeakable amazement of the passers-by.

Before I had been out and about a week I learned that the “fit” theory had been discarded in favor of insanity. However, I made no change in my mode of life. I called, rode, and dined out as freely as ever. I had a passion for the society of my kind which I had never felt before; I hungered to be among the realities of life; and at the same time I felt vaguely unhappy when I had been separated too long from my ghostly companion. It would be almost impossible to describe my varying moods from the 15th of May up to to-day.

The presence of the ’rickshaw filled me by turns with horror, blind fear, a dim sort of pleasure, and utter despair. I dared not leave Simla; and I knew that my stay there was killing me. I knew, moreover, that it was my destiny to die slowly and a little every day. My only anxiety was to get the penance over as quietly as might be. Alternately I hungered for a sight of Kitty and watched her outrageous flirtations with my successor—to speak more accurately, my successors—with amused interest. She was as much out of my life as I was out of hers. By day I wandered with Mrs. Wessington almost content. By night I implored Heaven to let me return to the world as I used to know it. Above all these varying moods lay the sensation of dull, numbing wonder that the Seen and the Unseen should mingle so strangely on this earth to hound one poor soul to its grave.

. . . . .

August 27.—Heatherlegh has been indefatigable in his attendance on me; and only yesterday told me that I ought to send in an application for sick leave. An application to escape the company of a phantom! A request that the Government would graciously permit me to get rid of five ghosts and an airy ’rickshaw by going to England. Heatherlegh’s proposition moved me to almost hysterical laughter. I told him that I should await the end quietly at Simla; and I am sure that the end is not far off. Believe me that I dread its advent more than any word can say; and I torture myself nightly with a thousand speculations as to the manner of my death.

Shall I die in my bed decently and as an English gentleman should die; or, in one last walk on the Mall, will my soul be wrenched from me to take its place forever and ever by the side of that ghastly phantasm? Shall I return to my old lost allegiance in the next world, or shall I meet Agnes loathing her and bound to her side through all eternity? Shall we two hover over the scene of our lives till the end of Time? As the day of my death draws nearer, the intense horror that all living flesh feels toward escaped spirits from beyond the grave grows more and more powerful. It is an awful thing to go down quick among the dead with scarcely one-half of your life completed. It is a thousand times more awful to wait as I do in your midst, for I know not what unimaginable terror. Pity me, at least on the score of my “delusion,” for I know you will never believe what I have written here Yet as surely as ever a man was done to death by the Powers of Darkness I am that man.

In justice, too, pity her. For as surely as ever woman was killed by man, I killed Mrs. Wessington. And the last portion of my punishment is ever now upon me.