the tales

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Archives: Tales

Of Those Called

[a short tale]

WE WERE wallowing through the China Seas in a dense fog, the horn blowing every two minutes for the benefit of the fishery craft that crowded the waterways. From the bridge the fo’c’sle was invisible; from the hand-wheel at the stern by the captain’s cabin. The fog held possession of everything – the pearly white fog. Once or twice when it tried to lift, we saw a glimpse of the oily sea, the flitting vision of a junk’s sail spread in the vain hope of catching the breeze, or the buoys of a line of nets. Somewhere close to us lay the land, but it might have been the Kurile Islands for aught we knew.

Very early in the morning there passed us, not a cable’s length away, but as unseen as the spirits of the dead, a steamer of the same line as ours. She howled melodiously in answer to our bellowing, and passed on.

‘Suppose she had hit us,’ said a man from Saigon. ‘Then we should have gone down,’ answered the chief officer sweetly. ‘Beastly thing to go down in a fog,’ said a young gentleman who was travelling for pleasure. ‘Chokes a man both ways, y’ know.’ We were comfortably gathered in the smoking-room, the weather being too cold to venture on the deck. Conversation naturally turned upon accidents of fog, the horn tooting significantly in the pauses between the tales. I heard of the wreck of the Eric, the cutting down of the Strathnairn within half a mile of harbour, and the carrying away of the bow plates of the Sigismund outside Sandy Hook.

‘It is astonishing,’ said the man from Saigon, ‘how many true stories are put down as sea yarns. It makes a man almost shrink from telling an anecdote.’ ‘Oh, please don’t shrink on our account,’ said the smoking-room with one voice. ‘It’s not my own story,’ said the man from Saigon. ‘A fellow on a Massageries boat told it me. He had been third officer of a sort on a Geordie tramp – one of those lumbering, dish-bottomed coal-barges where the machinery is tied up with a string and the plates are rivetted with putty. The way he told his tale was this.

The tramp had been creeping along some sea or other with a chart ten years old and the haziest sort of chronometers when she got into a fog – just such a fog as we have now.’ Here the smoking-room turned round as one man, and looked through the windows. ‘In the man’s own words, “just when the fog was thickest, the engines broke down. They had been doing this for some weeks, and we were too weary to care. I went forward of the bridge, and leaned over the side, wondering where I should ever get something that I could call a ship, and whether the old hulk would fall to pieces as she lay. The fog was as thick as any London one, but as white as steam.

While they were tinkering at the engines below, I heard a voice in the fog about twenty yards from the ship’s side, calling out, ‘Can you climb on board if we throw you a rope?’ That startled me, because I fancied we were going to be run down the next minute by a ship engaged in rescuing a man overboard. I shouted for the engine-room whistle; and it whistled about five minutes, but never the sound of a ship could we hear.

The ship’s boy came forward with some biscuit for me. As he put it into my hand, I heard the voice in the fog, crying out about throwing us a rope. This time it was the boy that yelled, ‘Ship on us!’ and off went the whistle again, while the men in the engine-room – it generally took the ship’s crew to repair the Hespa’s engines – tumbled upon deck to know what we were doing. I told them about the hail, and we listened in the smother of the fog for the sound of a screw.

We listened for ten minutes, then we blew the whistle for another ten. Then the crew began to call the ship’s boy a fool, meaning that the third mate was no better. When they were going down below, I heard the hail the third time, so did the ship’s boy. ‘There you are,’ I said, ‘it is not twenty yards from us.’ The engineer sings out, ‘I heard it too! Are you all asleep?’ Then the crew began to swear at the engineer; and what with discussion, argument, and a little swearing, – for there is not much discipline on board a tramp, – we raised such a row that our skipper came aft to enquire. I, the engineer, and the ship’s boy stuck to our tale. ‘Voices or no voices,’ said the captain, ‘you’d better patch the old engines up, and see if you’ve got enough steam to whistle with. I’ve a notion that we’ve got into rather too crowded ways.’

The engineer stayed on deck while the men went down below. The skipper hadn’t got back to the chart-room before I saw thirty feet of bowsprit hanging over the break of the fo’c’sle. Thirty feet of bowsprit, sir, doesn’t belong to anything that sails the seas except a sailing-ship or a man-of-war. I speculated quite a long time, with my hands on the bulwarks, as to whether our friend was soft wood or steel plated. It would not have made much difference to us, anyway; but I felt there was more honour in being rammed, you know.

Then I knew all about it. It was a ram. We opened out. I am not exaggerating – we opened out, sir, like a cardboard box. The other ship cut us two-thirds through, a little behind the break of the fo’c’sle. Our decks split up lengthways. The mizzen-mast bounded out of its place, and we heeled over. Then the other ship blew a fog-horn. I remember thinking, as I took water from the port bulwark, that this was rather ostentatious after she had done all the mischief. After that, I was a mile and a half under sea, trying to go to sleep as hard as I could. Some one caught hold of my hair, and waked me up. I was hanging to what was left of one of our boats under the lee of a large English ironclad. There were two men with me; the three of us began to yell. A man on the ship sings out, ‘Can you climb on board if we throw you a rope?’ They weren’t going to let down a fine new man-of-war’s boat to pick up half-drowned rats.

We accepted the invitation. We climbed – I, the engineer, and the ship’s boy. About half an hour later the fog cleared entirely; except for the half of the boat away in the offing, there was neither stick nor string on the sea to show that the Hespa had been cut down. ‘And what do you think of that now?’ said the man from Saigon.

The New Dispensation—II

[a short tale]

WRITING of Kadir Baksh so wrought up my feelings that I could not rest till I had at least made an attempt to get a budli of some sort. The black man is essential to my comfort. I fancied I might in this city of barbarism catch a brokendown native strayed from his home and friends, who would be my friend and humble pardner—the sort of man, y’ know, who would sleep on a rug somewhere near my chambers (I have forty things to tell you about chambers, but they come later), and generally look after my things. In the intervals of labour I would talk to him in his own tongue, and we would go abroad together and explore London. Do you know the Albert Docks? The British-India steamers go thence to the sunshine. They sometimes leave a lascar or two on the wharf, and, in fact, the general tone of the population thereabouts is brown and umber. I was in no case to be particular. Anything dusky would do for me, so long as it could talk Hindustani and sew buttons. I went to the docks and walked about generally among the railway lines and packing-cases, till I found a man selling tooth-combs, which is not a paying trade. He was ragged even to furriness, and very unwashed. But he came from the East. “What are you?” I said, and the look of the missionary that steals over me in moments of agitation deluded that tooth-comb man into answering, “Sar, I am native ki-listi-an,” but he put five more syllables into the last word.

There is no Christianity in the docks worth a tooth-comb. “I don’t want your beliefs. I want your jat,” said I.

“I am Tamil,” said he, “and my name is Ramasawmy.”

It was an awful thing to lower oneself to the level of a Colonel of the Madras Army, and come down to being tended by a Ramasawmy; but beggars cannot be choosers. I pointed out to him that the tooth-comb trade was a thing lightly to be dropped and taken up. He might injure his health by a washing, but he could not much hurt his prospects by coming along with me and trying his hand at bearer’s work. “Could he work?” Oh, yes, he didn’t mind work. He had been a servant in his time. Several servants, in fact.

“Could he wash himself?”

“Ye-es,” he might do that if I gave him a coat—a thick coat—afterwards, and especially took care of the tooth-combs, for they were his little all.

“Had he any character of any kind?”’

He thought for a minute and then said cheerfully: “Not a little dam.” Thereat I loved him, because a man who can speak the truth in minor matters may be trusted with important things, such as shirts.

We went home together till we struck a public bath, mercifully divided into three classes. I got him to go into the third without much difficulty. When he came out he was in the way of cleanliness, and before he had time to expostulate I ran him into the second. Into the first he would not go till I had bought him a cheap ulster. He came out almost clean. That cost me three shillings altogether. The ulster was half a sovereign, and some other clothes were thirty shillings. Even these things could not hide from me that he looked an unusually villainous creature.

At the chambers the trouble began. The people in charge had race prejudices very strongly, and I had to point out that he was a civilised native Christian anxious to improve his English—it was fluent but unchastened—before they would give him some sort of a crib to lie down in. The housemaids called him the Camel. I introduced him as “the Tamil,” but they knew nothing of the ethnological subdivisions of India. They called him “that there beastly camel,” and I saw by the light in his eye he understood only too well.

Coming up the staircase he confided to me his views about the housemaids. He had lived at the docks too long. I said they weren’t. He said they were.

Then I showed him his duties, and he stood long in thought before the wardrobe. He evidently knew more than a little of the work, but whenever he came to a more than unusually dilapidated garment, he said: “No good for you, I take”; and he took. Then he put all the buttons on in the smoking of a pipe, and asked if there was anything else. I weakly said “No.” He said: “Good-bye,” and faded out of the house. The housekeeper of the chambers said he would never return.

But he did. At three in the morning home he came, and, naturally, possessing no latchkey, rang the bell. A policeman interfered, taking him for a burglar, and I was roused by the racket. I explained he was my servant, and the policeman said: “He do swear wonderful. ’Tain’t any language. I know most of it, but some I’ve heard at Poplar.” Then I dragged the Camel upstairs. He was quite sober, and said he had been waiting at the docks. He must wait at the docks every time a British-India steamer came in. A lascar on the Rewah had stabbed him in the side three voyages ago, and he was waiting for his man. “Maybe he have died,” he said; “but if he have not died I catch him and cut his liver out.” Then he curled himself up on the mat, and slept as noiselessly as a child.

Next morning he inspected the humble breakfast bloater, which did not meet with his approval, for he instantly cut it in two pieces, fried it with butter, dusted it with pepper, and miraculously made of it a dish fit for a king. When the shock-headed boy came to take away the breakfast things, he counted every piece of crockery into his quaking hand and said: “If you break one dam thing I cut your dam liver out and fly him with butter.” Consequently, the housemaids said they were not going to clean the rooms as long as the Camel abode within. The Camel put his head out of the door and said they need not. He cleaned the rooms with his own hand and without noise, filled my pipe, made the bed, filled a pipe for himself, and sat down on the hearth-rug while I worked. When thought carried him away to the lascar of the Rewah, he would brandish the poker or take out his knife and whet it on the brickwork of the grate. It was a soothing sound to work to. At one o’clock he said that the Chyebassa would be in, and he must go. He demanded no money, saw that my tiffin was served, and fled. He returned at six o’clock singing a hymn. A lascar on the Chyebassa had told him that the Rewah was due in four days, and that his friend was not dead, but ripe for the knife. That night he got very drunk while I was out, and frightened the housemaids. All the chambers were in an uproar, but he crawled out of the skylight on the roof, and sat there till I came home.

In the dawn he was very penitent. He had misarranged his drink: the original intention being to sleep it off on my hearth-rug, but a housemaid had invited a friend up to the chambers to look at him, and the whispered comments and giggles made him angry. All next day he was restless but attentive. He urged me to fly to foreign shores, and take him with me. When other inducements failed, he reiterated that he was a “native ki-lis-ti-an,” and whetted his knife more furiously than ever. “You do not like this place, I do not like this place. Let us travel dam quick. Let us go on the sea. I cook blotters.” I told him this was impossible, but that if he stayed in my service we might later go abroad and enjoy ourselves.

But he would not rest and sleep on the rug and tend my shirts. On the morning of the Rewah’s arrival he went away, and from his absence I fancied he had fallen into the hands of the law. But at midnight he came back, weak and husky.

“Have got him,” said he simply, and dragged his ulster down from the wall, wrapping it very tightly round him. “Now I go ’way.”

He went into the bedroom, and began counting over the tale of the week’s wash, the boots, and so forth. “All right,” he called into the other room. Then came in to say good-bye, walking slowly.

“What’s your name, marshter?” said he. I told him. He bowed and descended the staircase painfully. I had not paid him a penny, and since he did not ask for it, counted on his returning at least for wages.

It was not till next morning that I found big dark drops on most of my clean shirts, and the housemaid complained of a trail of blood all down the staircase.

“The Camel” had received payment in full from other hands than mine.

WRITING of Kadir Baksh so wrought up my feelings that I could not rest till I had at least made an attempt to get a budli of some sort. The black man is essential to my comfort. I fancied I might in this city of barbarism catch a brokendown native strayed from his home and friends, who would be my friend and humble pardner—the sort of man, y’ know, who would sleep on a rug somewhere near my chambers (I have forty things to tell you about chambers, but they come later), and generally look after my things. In the intervals of labour I would talk to him in his own tongue, and we would go abroad together and explore London. Do you know the Albert Docks? The British-India steamers go thence to the sunshine. They sometimes leave a lascar or two on the wharf, and, in fact, the general tone of the population thereabouts is brown and umber. I was in no case to be particular. Anything dusky would do for me, so long as it could talk Hindustani and sew buttons. I went to the docks and walked about generally among the railway lines and packing-cases, till I found a man selling tooth-combs, which is not a paying trade. He was ragged even to furriness, and very unwashed. But he came from the East. “What are you?” I said, and the look of the missionary that steals over me in moments of agitation deluded that tooth-comb man into answering, “Sar, I am native ki-listi-an,” but he put five more syllables into the last word.

There is no Christianity in the docks worth a tooth-comb. “I don’t want your beliefs. I want your jat,” said I.

“I am Tamil,” said he, “and my name is Ramasawmy.”

It was an awful thing to lower oneself to the level of a Colonel of the Madras Army, and come down to being tended by a Ramasawmy; but beggars cannot be choosers. I pointed out to him that the tooth-comb trade was a thing lightly to be dropped and taken up. He might injure his health by a washing, but he could not much hurt his prospects by coming along with me and trying his hand at bearer’s work. “Could he work?” Oh, yes, he didn’t mind work. He had been a servant in his time. Several servants, in fact.

“Could he wash himself?”

“Ye-es,” he might do that if I gave him a coat—a thick coat—afterwards, and especially took care of the tooth-combs, for they were his little all.

“Had he any character of any kind?”’

He thought for a minute and then said cheerfully: “Not a little dam.” Thereat I loved him, because a man who can speak the truth in minor matters may be trusted with important things, such as shirts.

We went home together till we struck a public bath, mercifully divided into three classes. I got him to go into the third without much difficulty. When he came out he was in the way of cleanliness, and before he had time to expostulate I ran him into the second. Into the first he would not go till I had bought him a cheap ulster. He came out almost clean. That cost me three shillings altogether. The ulster was half a sovereign, and some other clothes were thirty shillings. Even these things could not hide from me that he looked an unusually villainous creature.

At the chambers the trouble began. The people in charge had race prejudices very strongly, and I had to point out that he was a civilised native Christian anxious to improve his English—it was fluent but unchastened—before they would give him some sort of a crib to lie down in. The housemaids called him the Camel. I introduced him as “the Tamil,” but they knew nothing of the ethnological subdivisions of India. They called him “that there beastly camel,” and I saw by the light in his eye he understood only too well.

Coming up the staircase he confided to me his views about the housemaids. He had lived at the docks too long. I said they weren’t. He said they were.

Then I showed him his duties, and he stood long in thought before the wardrobe. He evidently knew more than a little of the work, but whenever he came to a more than unusually dilapidated garment, he said: “No good for you, I take”; and he took. Then he put all the buttons on in the smoking of a pipe, and asked if there was anything else. I weakly said “No.” He said: “Good-bye,” and faded out of the house. The housekeeper of the chambers said he would never return.

But he did. At three in the morning home he came, and, naturally, possessing no latchkey, rang the bell. A policeman interfered, taking him for a burglar, and I was roused by the racket. I explained he was my servant, and the policeman said: “He do swear wonderful. ’Tain’t any language. I know most of it, but some I’ve heard at Poplar.” Then I dragged the Camel upstairs. He was quite sober, and said he had been waiting at the docks. He must wait at the docks every time a British-India steamer came in. A lascar on the Rewah had stabbed him in the side three voyages ago, and he was waiting for his man. “Maybe he have died,” he said; “but if he have not died I catch him and cut his liver out.” Then he curled himself up on the mat, and slept as noiselessly as a child.

Next morning he inspected the humble breakfast bloater, which did not meet with his approval, for he instantly cut it in two pieces, fried it with butter, dusted it with pepper, and miraculously made of it a dish fit for a king. When the shock-headed boy came to take away the breakfast things, he counted every piece of crockery into his quaking hand and said: “If you break one dam thing I cut your dam liver out and fly him with butter.” Consequently, the housemaids said they were not going to clean the rooms as long as the Camel abode within. The Camel put his head out of the door and said they need not. He cleaned the rooms with his own hand and without noise, filled my pipe, made the bed, filled a pipe for himself, and sat down on the hearth-rug while I worked. When thought carried him away to the lascar of the Rewah, he would brandish the poker or take out his knife and whet it on the brickwork of the grate. It was a soothing sound to work to. At one o’clock he said that the Chyebassa would be in, and he must go. He demanded no money, saw that my tiffin was served, and fled. He returned at six o’clock singing a hymn. A lascar on the Chyebassa had told him that the Rewah was due in four days, and that his friend was not dead, but ripe for the knife. That night he got very drunk while I was out, and frightened the housemaids. All the chambers were in an uproar, but he crawled out of the skylight on the roof, and sat there till I came home.

In the dawn he was very penitent. He had misarranged his drink: the original intention being to sleep it off on my hearth-rug, but a housemaid had invited a friend up to the chambers to look at him, and the whispered comments and giggles made him angry. All next day he was restless but attentive. He urged me to fly to foreign shores, and take him with me. When other inducements failed, he reiterated that he was a “native ki-lis-ti-an,” and whetted his knife more furiously than ever. “You do not like this place, I do not like this place. Let us travel dam quick. Let us go on the sea. I cook blotters.” I told him this was impossible, but that if he stayed in my service we might later go abroad and enjoy ourselves.

But he would not rest and sleep on the rug and tend my shirts. On the morning of the Rewah’s arrival he went away, and from his absence I fancied he had fallen into the hands of the law. But at midnight he came back, weak and husky.

“Have got him,” said he simply, and dragged his ulster down from the wall, wrapping it very tightly round him. “Now I go ’way.”

He went into the bedroom, and began counting over the tale of the week’s wash, the boots, and so forth. “All right,” he called into the other room. Then came in to say good-bye, walking slowly.

“What’s your name, marshter?” said he. I told him. He bowed and descended the staircase painfully. I had not paid him a penny, and since he did not ask for it, counted on his returning at least for wages.

It was not till next morning that I found big dark drops on most of my clean shirts, and the housemaid complained of a trail of blood all down the staircase.

“The Camel” had received payment in full from other hands than mine.

The New Dispensation—I

[a short tale]

THINGS have happened—but that is neither here nor there. What I urgently require is a servant—a nice, fat Mussulman khitmatgar, who is not above doing bearer’s work on occasion. Such a man I would go down to Southampton or Tilbury to meet, would usher tenderly into a first-class carriage (I always go third myself) , and wrap in the warmest of flannel. He should be “Jenab;’ and I would be “O Tum.” When he died, as he assuredly would in this weather, I would bury him in my best back garden and write mortuary verses for publication in the Koh-i-Nur, or whatever vernacular paper he might read. I want, in short, a servant; and this is why I am writing to you.

The English, who, by the way, are unmitigated barbarians, maintain cotton-print housemaids to do work which is the manifest portion of a man. Besides which, no properly constructed person cares to see a white woman waiting upon his needs, filling coal-scuttles (these are very mysterious beasts) and tidying rooms. The young homebred Englishman does not object, and one of the most tantalising sights in the world is that of the young man of the house—the son newly introduced to shaving-water and great on the subject of maintaining authority—it is tantalising, I say, to see this young cub hectoring a miserable little slavey for not having lighted a fire or put his slippers in their proper place. The next time a big, bold man from the frontier comes home I shall hire him to kick a few young gentlemen of my acquaintance all round their own drawing-rooms while I lecture on my theory that this sort of thing accounts for the perceptible lack of chivalry in the modem Englishman. Now, if you or I or anybody else raved over and lectured at Kadir Baksh, or Ram Singh, or Jagesa on the necessity of obeying orders and the beauty of reverencing our noble selves, our men would laugh; or if the lecture struck them as too long-winded would ask us if our livers were out of order and recommend dawai. The housemaid must stand with her eyes on the ground while the yormg whelp sticks his hands under the tail of his dressing-gown and explains her duty to her. This makes me ill and sick—sick for Kadir Baksh, who rose from the earth when I called him, who knew the sequence of my papers and the ordering of my paltry garments, and, I verily believed, loved me not altogether for the sake of lucre. He said he would come with me to Belait because, “though the sahib says he will never return to India, yet I know, and all the other nauker log know, that return is his fate.”

Being a fool, I left Kadir Baksh behind, and now I am alone with housemaids, who will under no circumstances sleep on the mat outside the door. Even as I write, one of these persons is cleaning up my room. Kadir Baksh would have done his work without noise. She tramps and scuffles; and, what is much worse, snuffles horribly. Kadir Baksh would have saluted me cheerfully and began some sort of a yam of the “It hath reached me, O Auspicious King!” order, and perhaps we should have debated over the worthlessness of Dunni, the sais, or the chances of a little cold-weather expedition, or the wisdom of retaining a fresh chaprassi—some intimate friend of Kadir Baksh. But now I have no horses and no chaprassis, and this smutty-faced girl glares at me across the room as though she expected I was going to eat her.

She must have a soul of her own—a life of her own—and perhaps a few amusements. I can’t get at these things. She says: “Ho, yuss,” and “Ho, no,” and if I hadn’t heard her chattering to the lift-boy on the stairs I should think that her education stopped at these two phrases. Now, I knew all about Kadir Baksh, his hopes and his savings—his experiences in the past, and the health of the little ones. He was a man—a human man remarkably like myself, and he knew that as well as I. A housemaid is of course not a man, but she might at least be a woman. My wanderings about this amazing heathen city have brought me into contact with very many English mem sahibs who seem to be eaten up with the fear of letting their servants get “above their position,” or “presume,” or do something which would shake the foundations of the four-mile cab radius. They seem to carry on a sort of cat-and-mouse war when the husband is at office and they have nothing much to do. Later, at places where their friends assemble, they recount the campaign, and the other women purr approvingly and say: “You did quite right, my dear. It is evident that she forgets her place.”

All this is edifying to the stranger, and gives him a great idea of the dignity that has to be bolstered and buttressed, eight hours of the twenty-four, against the incendiary attacks of an eighteen-pound including-beer-money sleeps-in-a-garret-at-the-top-of-the-house servant-girl. There is a fine-crusted, slave-holding instinct in the hearts of a good many deep-bosomed matrons—a “throw back” to the times when we trafficked in black ivory. At tea-tables and places where they eat muffins it is called dignity. Now, your Kadir Baksh or my Kadir Baksh, who is a downtrodden and oppressed heathen (the young gentlemen who bullyrag white women assure me that we are in the habit of kicking our dependents and beating them with umbrellas daily), would ask for his chits, and probably say something sarcastic ere he drifted out of the compound gate, if you nagged or worried his noble self. He does not know much about the meaner forms of dignity, but he is entirely sound on the subject of izzat; and the fact of his cracking an azure and Oriental jest with you in the privacy of your dressing-room, or seeing you at your incoherent worst when you have an attack of fever, does not in the least affect his general deportment in public, where he knows that the honour of his sahib is his own honour, and dons a new kummerbund on the strength of it.

I have tried to deal with those housemaids in every possible way. To sling a blunt “Annie” or “Mary” or “Jane” at a girl whose only fault is that she is a heavy-handed incompetent, strikes me as rather an insult, seeing that the girl may have a brother, and that if you had a sister who was a servant you would object to her being howled at upstairs and downstairs by her given name. But only ladies’ maids are entitled to their surnames. They are not nice people as a castee, and they regard the housemaids as the chamar regards the mehter. Consequently, I have to call these girls by their Christian names, and cock my feet up on a chair when they are cleaning the grate, and pass them in the halls in the morning as though they didn’t exist. Now, the morning salutation of your Kadir Baksh or my Kadir is a performance which Turveydrop might envy. These persons don’t understand a nod; they think it as bad as a wink, I believe. Respect and courtesy are lost upon them, and I suppose I must gather my dressing-gown into a tail and swear at them in the bloodless voice affected by the British female who—have I mentioned this?—is a highly composite heathen when she comes in contact with her sister clay downstairs.

The softer methods lay one open to harder suspicions. Not long ago there was trouble among my shirts. I fancied buttons grew on neck-bands. Kadir Baksh and the durzie encoraged me in the belief. When the lead-coloured linen (they cannot wash, by the way, in this stronghold of infidels) shed its buttons I cast about for a means of renewal. There was a housemaid, and she was not very ugly, and I thought she could sew. I knew I could not. Therefore I strove to ingratiate myself with her, believing that a little interest, combined with a little capital, would fix those buttons more firmly than anything else. Subsequently, and after an interval—the buttons were dropping like autumn leaves—I kissed her. The buttons were attached at once. So, unluckily, was the housemaid, for I gathered that she looked forward to a lifetime of shirtsewing in an ofiicial capacity, and my Revenue Board contemplated no additional establishment. My shirts are buttonsome, but my character is blasted. Oh, I wish I had Kadir Baksh!

This is only the first instalment of my troubles. The heathen in these parts do not understand me; so if you will allow I will come to you for sympathy from time to time. I am a child of calamity.

 

New Brooms

’’If seven maids with seven mops
    Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
    ‘’That they could sweep it clear?’’

[a short tale]

RAM BUKSH, Aryan, went to bed with his buffalo, five goats, three children and a wife, because the evening mists were chilly. His hut was builded on the mud scooped from a green and smelly tank, and there were microbes in the thin blood of Ram Buksh.

Ram Buksh went to bed on a charpoy stretched across the blue tepid drain, because the nights were hot; and there were more microbes in his blood. Then the rains came, and Ram Buksh paddled, mid-thigh deep, in water for a day or two with his buffaloes till he was aware of a crampsome feeling at the pit of his stomach. “Mother of my children,” said Ram Buksh, “this is death.” They gave him cardamoms and capsicums, and gingelly-oil and cloves, and they prayed for him. “It is enough,” said Ram Buksh, and he twisted himself into a knot and died, and they burned him slightly—for the wood was damp—and the rest of him floated down the river, and was caught in an undercurrent at the bank, and there stayed; and when Imam Din, the Jeweller, drank of the stream five days later, he drank Lethe, and passed away, crying in vain upon his gods.

His family did not report his death to the Municipality, for they desired to keep Imam Din with them. Therefore, they buried him under the flagging in the courtyard, secretly and by night. Twelve days later, Imam Din had made connection with the well of the house, and there was typhus among the women in the zenana, but no one knew anything about it—some died and some did not; and Ari Booj, the Faquir, added to the interest of the proceedings by joining the funeral procession and distributing gratis the more malignant forms of smallpox, from which he was just recovering. He had come all the way from Delhi, and had slept on no less than fifteen different charpoys; and that was how they got the smallpox into Bahadurgarh. But Eshmith Sahib’s Dhobi picked it up from An Booj when Imam Din’s wife was being buried—for he was a merry man, and sent home a beautiful sample among the Sunday shirts. So Eshmith Sahib died.

He was only a link in the chain which crawled from the highest to the lowest. The wonder was not that men died like sheep, but that they did not die like flies; for their lives and their surroundings, their deaths, were part of a huge conspiracy against cleanliness. And the people loved to have it so. They huddled together in frowsy clusters, while Death mowed his way through them till the scythe blunted against the unresisting flesh, and he had to get a new one. They died by fever, tens of thousands in a month; they died by cholera a thousand in a week; they died of smallpox, scores in the mohulla, and by dysentery by tens in a house; and when all other deaths failed they laid them down and died because their hands were too weak to hold on to life.

To and fro stamped the Englishman, who is everlastingly at war with the scheme of things. “You shall not die,” he said, and he decreed that there should be no more famines. He poured grain down their throats, and when all failed he went down into the strife and died with them, swearing, and toiling, and working till the last. He fought the famine and put it to flight. Then he wiped his forehead, and attacked the pestilence that walketh in the darkness. Death’s scythe swept to and fro, around and about him; but he only planted his feet more firmly in the way of it, and fought off Death with a dog-whip. “Live, you ruffian!” said the Englishman to Ram Buksh as he rode through the reeking village. “Jenab!” said Ram Buksh, “it is as it was in the days of our fathers!’’ “Then stand back while I alter it,” said the Englishman; and by force, and cunning, and a brutal disregard of vested interests, he strove to keep Ram Buksh aJive. “Clean your mohullas; pay for clean water; keep your streets swept; and see that your food is sound, or I’ll make your life a burden to you,” said the Englishman. Sometimes he died; but more often Ram Buksh went down, and the Englishman regarded each death as a personal insult.

“Softly, there!” said the Government of India. “You’re twisting his tail. You mustn’t do that. The spread of education forbids, and Ram Buksh is an intelligent voter. Let him work out his own salvation.”

“H’m!” said the Englishman with his head in a midden; “collectively you always were a fool. Here, Ram Buksh, the Sirkar says you are to do all these things for yourself.”

“Jenab!” says Ram Buksh, and fell to breeding microbes with renewed vigour.

Curiously enough, it was in the centres of enlightenment that he prosecuted his experiments most energetically. The education had been spread, but so thinly that it could not disguise Ram Buksh’s natural instincts. He created an African village, and said it was the hub of the universe, and all the dirt of all the roads failed to convince him that he was not the most advanced person in the world. There was a pause, and Ram Buksh got himself fearfully entangled among Boards and Committees, but he valued them as a bowerbird values shells and red rags. “See!” said the Englishman to the Government of India, “he is blind on that side—blind by birth, training, instinct and associations. Five-sixths of him is poor stock raised off poor soil, and he’ll die on the least provocation. You’ve no right to let him kill himself.’’

“But he’s educated,” said the Government of India.

“I’ll concede everything,” said the Englishman. “He’s a statesman, author, poet, politician, artist, and all else that you wish him to be, but he isn’t a Sanitary Engineer. And while you’re training him he is dying. Goodness knows that my share in the Government is very limited nowadays, but I’m willing to do all the work while he gets all the credit if you’ll only let me have some authority over him in his mud-pie making,”

“But the liberty of the subject is sacred,” said the Government of India.

“I haven’t any,” said the Englishman. “He can trail through my compounds; start shrines in the public roads; poison my family; have me in court for nothing; ruin my character; spend my money, and call me an assassin when all is done. I don’t object. Let me look after his sanitation.”

“But the days of a paternal Government are over; we must depend on the people. Think of what they would say at home,” said the Government of India. “We have issued a resolution—indeed we have!”

The Englishman sat down and groaned. “I believe you’ll issue a resolution some day notifying your own abolition,” said he. “What are you going to do?’’

“Constitute more Boards,” said the Government of India. “Boards of Control and Supervision—Fund Boards—all sorts of Boards. Nothing like system. It will be at work in three years or so. We haven’t any money, but that’s a detail.”

The Englishman looked at the resolution and sniffed. “It doesn’t touch the weak point of the country.”

“What will touch the weak point of the country, then?” said the Government of India.

“I used to,” said the Englishman. “I was the District Officer, and I twisted their tails. You have taken away my power, and now——“

“Well,” said the Government of India, “you seem to think a good deal of yourself.”

“Never mind me,” said the Englishman. “I’m an effete relic of the past. But Ram Buksh will die, as he used to do.”

And now we all wait to see which is right.

A Naval Mutiny

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

 

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WHAT bronchitis had spared of him came, by medical advice, to Stephano’s Island, that gem of sub-tropical seas, set at a height above the Line where parrots do not breed.Yet there were undoubtedly three of them, squawking through the cedars. He asked a young lady, who knew the Island by descent, how this came. ‘Two are ours,’ she replied. ‘We used to feed them in the veranda, but they got away, and set up housekeeping and had a baby.’

‘What does a baby parrot look like?’

‘Oh, just like a little Jew baby. I expect there will be some more soon.’ She smiled prophetically.

.     .     .     .     .

He watched H.M.S. Florealia work her way into the harbour. She moored, and sent a gig ashore. The bull-terrier, who is de facto Chief Superintendent of the Island Police, was explaining Port Regulations to the dog in charge of a Florida lumber schooner at the quay. His Policeman stood beside him. The gig, after landing her officer, lay off. The Policeman said in a clear voice to the dog ‘Come on, then, Polly! Pretty Polly! Come on, Polly, Polly, Polly!’ The gig’s crew seemed to grind their teeth a little as man and dog moved off. The invalid exchanged a few sentences with the Policeman and limped along the front street to the far and shallow end of the harbour, where Randolph’s boat-repairing yard stands, just off the main road, near the mangrove clump by the poinsettias. A small mongrel fox-terrier pup, recovering from distemper, lay in the path of two men, who wanted to haul in a forty-foot craft, known to have been in the West India trade for a century, and now needing a new barrel to her steering-wheel.

‘Let Lil lay,’ Mr. Randolph called. ‘Bring the boat in broadside, and run a plank to her.’ Then he greeted the visitor. ‘Mornin’, Mr. Heatleigh. How’s the cough? Our climate suitin’ you? That’s fine. Lil’s fine too. The milk’s helpin’ her. You ain’t the only one of her admirers. Winter Vergil’s fetchin’ her milk now. He ought to be here.’

‘Winter Vergil! What the—who’s he?’

‘He hasn’t been around the last week. He’s had trouble.’ Mr. Randolph laughed softly. ‘He’s a Navy Bo’sun—any age you please. He took his pension on the Island when I was a boy. ’Married on the Island too—a widow out of Cornwall Parish. That ’ud make her a Gallop or a Mewett. Hold a minute! It was Mewett. Her first man was a Gallop. He left her five acres of good onion-ground, that a Hotel wanted for golf-development. So-o, that way, an’ Vergil havin’ saved, he has his house an’ garden handy to the Dockyard. ’No more keepin’ Daddy away from there than land-crabs off a dead nigger. I’m expectin’ him any time now.’

Mr. Heatleigh unbuttoned his light coat, for the sun was beginning to work deliciously. Behind the old boat lay a scarlet hydroplane crowded with nickel fitments and reeking of new enamels.

‘That’s Rembrandt Casalis’s latest,’ Mr. Randolph explained. ‘He’s Glucose Utilities—wuth fifteen million they say. But no boatman. He took her alongside a wharf last week. That don’t worry me. His estate can pay my repair-bills. I’m doo to deliver her back this morning. . . . Now! Now! Don’t get movin’ jest as you’re come. Set in the shed awhile. Vergil’s bound to be along with Lil’s milk. Lay-to an’ meet him. I’d not go, ’lest I had to. But Lil ’ll keep you company.’

He splashed out to the hydroplane, which he woke to outrageous howlings, and departed in one splitting crack. The dead-water-rubbish swirled in under the mangrove-stems as the sound of her flight up-harbour faded. Mr. Heatleigh watched the two hands on the West Indiaman. They laid a gang-plank up to her counter, bore away the rusty scarred wheel-barrel, and went elsewhere. Lil slept, and along the white coral road behind passed a procession of horse-drawn vehicles; for another tripper-steamer had arrived, and her passengers were being dealt out to the various hotels. An old, spare, clean-shaven man, in spotless tussore silk, stepped off the road into the yard. He bore left-handedly (his right was bandaged) a sealed bottle of sterilised milk. Lil ran to him, and he asked where her master might be. Mr. Heatleigh told him, and they exchanged names. Mr. Vergil rummaged a clean saucer out of the shed, but found he could not pour single-handed. Mr. Heatleigh helped him.

‘She may be worth seventy-five cents,’ Mr. Vergil observed as Lil lapped. ‘She’s cost more’n four dollars a week the last six weeks. Well, she’s Randolph’s dam’ dog, anyhow.’

‘’Not fond of dogs?’ Mr. Heatleigh asked.

‘Not of any pets you might say, just now.’

Mr. Heatleigh glanced at the neatly-bandaged hand and nodded.

‘No—not dogs,’ said Mr. Vergil.. ‘Parrots. The medical officer at the Dockyard said it was more like the works of vulshures.’

‘I don’t know much about parrots.’

‘You get to know about most things in the Navy—sooner or later. Burst-a-Frog, you do!’

‘Mr. Randolph told me you had been in the Ser—Navy.’

‘Boy and man—forty odd years. I took my pension here in Nineteen Ten when Jacky’s dam’ first silly Dreadnought came in. All this so-called noo Navy has hove up since my time. I was boy, for example, in the old Black Fleet—Warrior, Minotaur, Hercules, an’ those. In the Hungry Six too, if that means anything. . . . Are ye going away?’ Mr. Heatleigh had moved out from the shed.

‘Oh no! I was only thinking of bringing my—sitting up there for a bit.’ Mr. Heatleigh turned towards the boat, but seemed to wait for Mr. Vergil to precede him up the gang-plank. The old man ran up it and dropped inboard little less nimbly than Mr. Heatleigh, who followed. They settled themselves at the stern, by the wheel. All forward of her mast was the naked hold of black rock-hard timbers. Mr. Vergil’s glance, under frosty eyebrows, swept his companion’s long visage as a searchlight sweeps a half-guessed foreshore. ‘’Tourist?’ he demanded suddenly.

‘Yes, for a bit. I’ve got a motor-boat at Southampton.’

‘‘Don’t believe in ’em—never did. This beats ’em all!’

He pointed to the bleached and cracked mast. There was silence while the two sunned themselves. Mr. Heatleigh joined hands across one knee to help lift a rather stiff leg, as he lolled against the low stern-rail. The action drew his coat-cuff more than half-way up his wrist, which was tattooed. Mr. Vergil, backed against the sun, dug out his pipe-bowl. A breath of warmed cedar came across a patch of gladioli. ‘Think o’ Southampton Water now! ‘ said Mr. Vergil. ‘Thick—an’ cold!’

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The three parrots screamed and whirled across the tip of the harbour. Mr. Vergil shook his bandaged hand at them.

‘How did it happen?’ Mr. Heatleigh asked.

‘’Obligin’ a friend. ’No surer way.’

‘How?—If you don’t mind.’ But there was command in the voice.

Once more Mr. Vergil’s eyes raked the lean figure. ‘It’s due,’ he said, ‘to the Navy keepin’ pets. Battleships an’ armoured cruisers carry bears till they start huggin’ senior ranks. Smaller craft, monkeys and parrots where allowed. There was a man in the old Audacious—Go-ood Lord, an’ how she steered!—kep’ chameleons in the engine-room, but they interfered with the movin’ parts. Parrots are best. People pay high for well-spoken parrots.’

‘Who teaches ’em?’

‘Parrots are like women. They pick up where they shouldn’t. I’ve heard it’s the tone that attracts ’em. Now we’ve two cruisers—sloops I call ’em—on the Station. One’s Bulleana, and t’other’s the Florealia. Both of ’em stinkin’ with parrots. Every dam’ kind o’ green—an’ those pink-tailed greys like we used to get on the West Coast. Go-ood Lord! Burst-a-Frog! When was I in the Bight last? An’ what in? Theseus—St. George, was it? Benin Expedition, was it? When we found those four hundred sovereigns and the four dozen champagne left in the King’s Royal Canoe? An’ no one noticed the cash till after! . . . But parrots. There’s a man called Mowlsey, a sort of Dockyard makee-do on the Stores side. He came to see me, knowin’ Mrs. Vergil had a parrot. My house is handy to the Dockyard, because that way I can gratify my tastes. What I mean is what I’ve worked at forty years is good enough for me to stay by. That bein’ so, I am often asked to bear a hand at delicate jobs.’

‘Quite so,’ said Mr. Heatleigh, still further extending himself to toast his lizard-like stomach. His coat-cuff was well above the wrist now.

‘An’—that evenin’ I’m speakin’ of—this Mowlsey wanted me for special dooties. Owin’ to approachin’ target-practice for both ships, all Squadron parrots was to be handed in to the Riggin’ Loft. There would be an O.C. Parrots, authorised to charge per diem for food an’ maintenance. On return of Squadron, parrots would be returned to respective owners. He showed me the Orders—typed; an’ Mrs. Vergil havin’ a parrot, an’ Mowlsey saying I had the requisite prestige, made me take on. The Riggin’ Loft ain’t a bad place, too, to sit in. Go-ood Lord! I remember when it used to be chock-a-block with spars, an’ now—who’d know a stuns’le-boom from a wash-pole if they was crucified on ’em?’

‘Why do they send parrots ashore for target-practice?’

‘On account of the concussion strikin’ ’em dumb. They don’t like it themselves either. We had a big dog-baboon in the old Penelope (she with that stern) never could stummick big gun-practice even with black powder. He used to betake himself to the Head an’ gnash his teeth against all an’ sundry. Now that was a noosance—because the Head——’

Mr. Heatleigh coughed. ‘Bronchitis,’ he explained swiftly. ‘Car—go ahead.’

‘My instructions was to prepare to receive parrots at five bells. I daresay they told you in your passenger-steamer comin’ out what time that is aboardship.’

‘It’s on the back of the passenger-list, I think,’ Mr. Heatleigh answered meekly.

Mr. Vergil drew an impatient breath and went on.

‘There was a bin full of parrot-rations inside. I put it down to Dockyard waste as usual. I had no notion what it’ud mean for me. Now a Riggin’ Loft, I may tell you, is mostly windows, an’ along beneath ’em was spare awnin’-stretchers and sailin’-boat spars stacked on booms. I shifted some to make a shelving for the cages. I didn’t see myself squattin’ on the deck to attend to ’em. ’Takes too long to get up again, these days. (Go-ood Lord! Burst-a-Frog! An’ I was an upper-yard-man for six years—leadin’ hand, fore cross-trees, in the Resistance.) While I was busy, it sounded like our Marines landing in Crete—an’ how long ago was that, now? They marched up from the boat-steps, Bulleanas leadin’, Florealias in the rear, each man swingin’ a cage to keep his bird quiet. When they halted an’ the motion ceased they all began to rejoice—the birds, I mean—at findin’ themselves together. A Petty Officer wraps his hands round my ear an’ megaphones: “Look sharp, Daddy. ’Tain’t a cargo that’ll keep.”

‘Nor was it. I could only walk backwards, semaphorin’ Bulleanas to stack cages to port, an’ Florealias to starboard o’ the Loft. They marched in an’ stacked accordin’—forty-three Bulleana birds, an’ twenty-nine Florealias, makin’ seventy-two in all.’

‘Why didn’t you say a hundred?’ Mr. Heatleigh asked.

‘Because there weren’t that many. The landin’ parties then proceeded to the far doors, an’, turnin’ port or starboard, accordin’ to their ships, navigated back again along outside the premises to say good-bye. Seventy-two birds, and seventy-two lower-deck ratin’s leanin’ through the windows, tellin’ ’em to be good an’ true till they returned. An’ that had to be done in dumb-crambo too! A Petty Officer towed me into the offing before we could communicate. But he only said:—“Gawd help you, Daddy!” an’ marched ’em aboard again. That broke the birds’ hearts . . . Do? If you can’t do anything, don’t make yourself a laughing-stock. I hung on an’ off outside waitin’ for a lull in the typhoon. Go-ood Lord-Burst-a-Frog! How many have I seen of ’em? But, look you—’wasn’t any typhoon scuppered the Serpent! She was overgunned forrard, an’ couldn’t shake her head clear of a ripple. Sister-ship to Viper an’ Cobra, was she? No! No! They were destroyers. But all unlucky sampans! . . . An about my parrots. I went into the Loft an’ said:—“Hush!” like Mrs. Vergil. They detailed a coverin’-party to keep up the fire, but most of ’em slued their heads round, and took stock of me—sizin’ me up, the same as the watches do their Warrants and Bo’suns before the ship’s shaken down. I took stock o’ them, to spot the funny-men an’ trouble makers for the ensuin’ commission. Burst-a-Frog! How often have I done that! The screechers didn’t worry me. Most men can’t live, let alone work, unless they’re chewin’ the rag. It was the noocleus—the on-the-knee parties—that I wanted to identify. Why? If a man knows one job properly, don’t matter what it is, he ought to know ’em all. For example. I had spent twenty odd years headin’ off bad hats layin’ to aggravate me; and liars and sea-lawyers tryin’ to trip me on Admiralty Regulations; not to mention the usual cheap muckin’s, eatin’ into the wind. An’ there they was—every man I’d ever logged or got twisted at seven bells—all there, metamorfused into those dam’ birds, an’ o’ course, havin’ been Navy trained, talkin’ lowerdeck.’

As Mr. Vergil paused, Mr. Heatleigh nodded with apparent understanding.

page 3

‘There was a pink-tail grey—a West Coast ju-ju-wallah—squatting on the floor of his cage. I’d ha’ put him in the bowse on his general tally if he’d been a regular ratin’. He waited till me eye travelled past him, as I was lookin’ ’em over. Then he called me It out of his belly, ventriloquial. Now there was an upper-yard-man in—now which one of those old bitch-cruisers was it? No! No! Resistance—five masts. Yes,—who had the very same gift, and other men got the blame. Jemmy Reader was his name—a sour dog with a broken mouth. I said to him, the bird I mean: “The anchor ain’t fairly stowed yet; so I didn’t hear you. But I won’t forget it, Jemmy.” And Burst-a-Frog! I hadn’t thought of Jemmy Reader in thirty odd years.

‘An’ there was a sulphur-crested cockatoo, swearin’ like poison. He reminded me o’ someone I couldn’t fit, but I saw he was good for trouble. One way an’ another, I spotted half-a-dozen proper jokers, an’ a dozen, maybe, that ’ud follow ’em if things went well. The rest was ord’nary seamen, ready to haul with any crowd that promised a kick-up. (I’d seen it all before, when I had to know seven hundred men by name and station within the first week. ’Never allowed meself or anyone else any longer.)

‘Then Mrs. Vergil came down with me luncheon. We had to go a long way outside the Loft to talk. They weren’t ladies’ birds. But she said, quick as cordite:—“Our Polly’s cage-cover’s the thing.” And I said:—“The heart of her husband shall safely trust in her. Send it down now. One of ’em’s overdue for it already.” She sent it, an’ my Presentation Whistle which they had presented to me on leaving the Raleigh. Burst-a-Frog! She was a ship. Ten knots on a bowline, comin’ out o’ Simonstown, draggin’ her blasted screw.’

‘What did you want your Call for?’ Once more Mr. Vergil’s eyes pierced Mr. Heatleigh through at the question.

‘If the game was workin’ out on lower-deck lines, how could I do without it? Next time that cockatoo-bird began cursin’ me, I piped down. It fetched him up with a round turn. He squatted an’ said, “Lord love a Duck!” He hadn’t Jemmy’s guts. An’ just that, mark you, hove him up in my mind for the man which he’d been. It was Number Three at the port six-pounder—she hadn’t much else—in the old Polyphemus—ram, that broke the boom at Berehaven—how long back? He was a beefy beggar, with a greasy lollopin’ lovelock on his forehead—but I can’t remember his tally. There were some other duplicates o’ men I had known, but Jemmy and the Polyphemus bird were the ringleaders. Bye and bye those green screechers cooled off a bit—creakin’ an’ mutterin’ like hens on a hot day; an’ I did a caulk by the open door, where the boat-rollers are. Then Jemmy sprung it on me, an’ I heard what I haven’t in a long day! “Hand-of-a-Mess for biscuits!” They feed ’em on French rolls in the so-called New Navy; but it used to be, when a boy heard that, he sculled off an’ drew what was on issue for his mess, or got kicked. An’ just then I was a boy bringin’ a boat alongside the old Squirrel training-brig in slow time. (Dreamin’ I mean.) So I was halfway down the Loft ’fore I woke, an’ they all scoffed at me! Jemmy leadin’. But there was somethin’ at the back o’ the noise (you can always tell), an’ while I was rubbin’ my eyes open, I saw the bin o’ parrot-food. Seven bells in the afternoon-watch, it was, an’ what they wanted, an’ what by Admiralty Regulations, d’ye see, they were entitled to, was their food-pans refillin’. That’s where Jemmy showed his cunnin’! Lots o’ food was still unexpended, but they were within their rights; an’ he had disrated me to Hand-of-a-Mess in his birdshop!’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothin’. It was a lower-deck try-on. ’Question was should I treat ’em as birds or blue jackets. I gave ’em the benefit o’ the doubt. Navy-pattern they was, an’ Navy tack they should get. I filled pans and renewed water where requisite, an’ they mocked me. They mocked me all the time. That took me through the first dog-watch. Jemmy waited till I had finished, an’ then he called me It again. (Jemmy Reader out on a weather-earrin’ to the life!) An’ that started Polyphemus. I dowsed Jemmy’s glim with our Polly s cage-cover. That short-circuited the quiff bird too; provin’ they was workin’ off the same lead. I carried on cleanin’ their cages, with a putty-knife. It gratified ’em highly to see me Captain of the Head as well as Mess Boy. Jemmy o’ course couldn’t see, but Polyphemus told him, an’ he said what he shouldn’t in the dark. He had guts. I give him that. I then locked up the Loft and went home.

‘Mrs. Vergil said that I had done well, but I knew that, so far, it had only been ranging on the target. Mut’ny an’ conspiracy was their game, an’ the question was how they’d work it. Go-ood Lord-Burst-a-Frog! I’ve seen three years’ continuous mut’ny, slave-dhowing in the Red Sea, under single awnin’s, with “Looney Dick” in the old Petruchio corvette—the one that dropped her bottom out off The Minicoys. By the end of the commission, all Officers not under open arrest was demandin’ court-martials, an’ the lower-deck was prowlin’ murder.’

‘How did it finish?’ Mr. Heatleigh asked.

‘Navy-fashion. We came home. When our cockroaches had died—off Gozo that would be—Dick piped all hands to look at a kit-bag full of evidence, in the waist, under the Ensign. “There’s enough bile an’ spite an’ perjury there,” he says, “to scupper all hands—an’ me first. If you want it taken home, say so.” We didn’t. “Then we’ll give it Christian burial,” he says. We did; our Doctor actin’ Chaplain. . . . But about my parrots. I went back to ’em at sunrise—you could have heard ’em off the Bahamas since dawn—but that was the bird in ’em. I gave them room to swing till it crossed my mind they were mockin’ me again. (The nastiest rux I ever saw, when a boy, began with “All hands to skylark.” I don’t hold with it.) When I took our Polly’s cage-cover off Jemmy, he didn’t call me anything. He sat an’ scoffed at me. I couldn’t tell what traverse he was workin’ till he cocked one eye up—Jemmy Reader workin’ some dirty game to the life!—an’ there, in the roof, was a little green beggar skimmin’ up an’ down. He’d broke out of his cage. Next minute, there was another promenadin’ along a spar, looking back at me like a Gosport lady to see how I took it. I shut doors an’ windows before they had made up their minds to run. Then I inspected cages. They’d been busy since light unpickin’ the wire granny-knots this so-called Noo Navy had tied ’em in with. At sea, o’ course, there was nowhere to break out to, an’ they knew it. Ashore, they had me pawled as responsible for ’em if run or dead. An’ that was why Jemmy had scoffed. They’d been actin’ under his orders.’

‘But couldn’t it have been Polyphemus?’ Mr. Heatleigh suggested.

‘He may have passed on Jemmy’s orders, but he hadn’t Jemmy’s mind. All I heard out of him was mockin’s an’ curses. Any way, I couldn’t round up those common greens, hoppin’ out their cages by dozens, an’ when you can’t exercise authority—don’t. So I slipped out o’ the door, and listened outside. ’Reg’lar lower-deck palaver. Jemmy damned ’em all for bitchin’ the evolution. The first deserters ought to ha’ run as units, d’ye see, instead o’ waitin’ to make up a boatload. Polyphemus damned back at Jemmy like a Chatham matey, an’ the rest made noises because they liked listenin’-in to themselves. If it wasn’t for chin-wagging, there’d be serious trouble in lots of families. But I thought it was time this was being put a stop to. So I went to the house for a pair o’ scissors.’

‘I don’t quite see what——’

‘I told you that that gunner in the Polyphemus had a quiff an’ fancied himself the whole watch an’ a half till—Go-ood Lord, how it all came back watchin’ those poultry—he was run round to the barber an’ Dartmoor-clipped for wearin’ oily and indecent appendages. It tamed him. Only I can’t remember his name.’

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Mr. Vergil wrinkled his brows, and it seemed as though Mr. Heatleigh did the like. But there was no result.

‘When I went to ’em again, there must ha’ been twenty small greens loose. But they couldn’t break out o’ the ship, so I disregarded ’em, an’ struck at the root o’ the matter. I tried to get Polyphemus to let me scratch his head—the sweep! He bit like a bloodhound on the snap of the scissors.’ Mr. Vergil waved his right hand. ‘I had to drag an’ scrag him ’fore I offed it—his quiff—crest, I mean. An’ then—Go-ood Lord-Burst-a-Frog!—he keeled over on his side in a dead faint like a Christian! The barberin’ had worked livin’ wonders with—with the man he was, but, even so, I was surprised at that pore bald fowl! “That’s for you, you yellow dog,” I said. “The rest’s for Jemmy Reader.” Jemmy hadn’t missed a stroke of my operations. He knew what was comin’. He turned on his back like a shark, an’ began to fight tooth an’ nail. It must ha’ meant as much to him as pigtails used to—his tail, I mean.

‘I said:—“Jemmy, there’s never been more than one Bo’sun in any ship I’ve served in. Dead or alive, you’re for disratin’, so you can say what you please. It won’t go in the report.”’

‘And did he?’

‘Yes—oh yes! But I didn’t log it against him, the charge being strictly mut’ny. I got him at last—torn to ribbons twice over—an’ I sheared off his red tail-feathers level with his bare behind. He’d been askin’ for it the whole Commission.’

‘And what did he do?’

‘He stopped. I’ve never heard anyone chat much after disratin’. They can’t manage the voice, dye see? He tried to squat, but his backstays were carried away. Then he climbed up the wires to his ring, like an old, old man; an’ there he sat bobbin’ an’ balancin’, all down by the head like a collier-brig. Pore beggar!’

Mr. Heatleigh echoed him. ‘And that finished the business?’ he said.

‘I had struck at the root of the matter,’ Mr. Vergil replied simply. ‘There was only those common greens flyin’ loose. When they found I didn’t notice ’em, they began going back to their cages, two an’ three together for company’s sake, an’ arguin’ about it. I hurried ’em up by throwin’ my cap (the Loft was gettin’ warmish through bein’ shut up), an’ ’fore sundown they were all back, an’ I fastened up behind ’em with the same spun-yarn tricks as their silly owners had. Don’t anyone teach anything in this Noo Navy nowadays?’

‘What about Jemmy and Polyphemus?’ Mr. Heatleigh asked.

‘Jemmy was busy gettin’ used to his new trim, an’ Polyphemus squatted, croakin’ like a frog an’ sayin’, “Lord love a Duck!” No guts! That’s how it was till the Squadron returned.’

‘But wasn’t there some sort of fuss then between ships? A Policeman on the wharf told me—and the Florealia’s gig——’

‘They’ve been rubbin’ it in to ’em on the Island; that’s why. Yes. The banzai-parties came ashore, all hats and hosannas like a taxpayers’ treat. The Petty Officer checked my seventy-two cages—one bird per cage—an’ that finished my watch. But, then he gave the party time to talk to their sweethearts instead o’ marchin’ off at once. Some oily-wad of a Bulleana struck up about not having got his proper bird. I heard a P.O. say:—“Settle it among yourselves.” (Democratic, I suppose he thought it.) The man naturally started across the Loft to do so. He met a Florealia with the same complaint. They began settlin’ it. That let everything go by the run. They were holdin’ up their cages, and lookin’ at ’em in the light like glasses o’ port. Wonderful thing—the eye o’ Love! Yes, they began settlin’ in pairs.’

‘But what about Jemmy Reader and Polyphemus?’

‘There was a good deal o’ talk over them too. A torpedo-midwife, or some such ratin’, sculled about lookin’ for the beggar who had cut off his poor Josie’s tail. (It never hit me till then that Jemmy might have been a lady.) He fell foul of Polyphemus (the owner, I mean) moaning over his quiff; an’, not bein’ shipmates, they began settlin’ too. Then such as had drawn their proper true-loves naturally cut in for their ship or mess. I’ve seen worse ruxes in my time, but a quicker breeze-up—never! As usual there was something behind it. I heard one of the ships had been dished out pre-war cordite for target practice, and so her shooting was like the old Superb’s at Alexandria, till we touched off the magazine. The other ship had stood by condoling with five-flag hoists. So both parties landed more or less horstile. When the noise was gettin’ noticeable outside, a P.O. says to me:—“They won’t listen to us, Daddy. They say we ain’t impartial!” I said:—“God knows what you ain’t. But I know what you are! You’re less use than ten mines in a Portuguee pig-knot. Close doors an’ windows, an’ let me take charge.” So they did, an’ what with the noise bein’ bottled up inside, an’ the Loft gettin’ red-hot, an’ no one interferin’, which was what I recommended, the lower-deck broke away from the clinch, and began to pick up bashed cage-work an’ argue.

‘Then I piped “Clear Lower Deck,” an’ I told ’em how I’d disrated Jemmy an’ Polyphemus for doin’ what they did. (Jemmy was a lady, after all. He laid an egg next day aboard ship, an’ his owner sent me a kodak picture.) That took their minds off. I told ’em how I’d sweated in the Loft, guardin’ their treasures for ’em, an’ they had no right to complain if the poor little lonely beggars had mixed hammicks in their absence. When I had ’em laughing, I told ’em they was all gas an’ gaspers an’ hair-oil, like the rest of the so-called Noo Navy, an’ they were marched off. Otherwise—even if some fool wouldn’t ha’ sent for the Marines, and spilled some silly mess into the papers—those two ships ’ud ha’ been sortin’ parrots out of each other the rest of the commission. You know what that means in the way of ruxes ashore! As it is, they are actin’ as a unit when they’re chipped about “pretty Pollies” all over the Island. The worse they’ll do now is to kill a Policeman or two. An’, if I may say so, my handlin’ of ’em—birds an’ lower-deck—shows what comes of a man knowing his profession, Sir Richard.’

Mr. Heatleigh’s countenance and bearing changed as they expanded. He held out his hand. Mr. Vergil rose to his feet and shook it. The two beamed on each other.

‘I can testify to that, Vergil, since my first commission. You knew me all along?’

‘I thought it was you, sir, when you signalled me to go into this boat ahead of you. But I wasn’t certain till I saw that bit of work I put on you.’ Mr. Vergil pointed to the bared wrist, where the still deep blue foul-anchor showed under red hairs.

‘In the foretop of the Resistance, off Port Royal,’ Mr. Heatleigh said.

Mr. Vergil nodded and smiled. ‘It’s held,’ said he. ‘But—what’s happened to your proper tally, Sir Richard?’

‘That was because better men than me died in the War. I inherited, you see.’

‘Meanin’ you’re a Lord now?’

The other nodded. Then he slapped his knee. ‘’Got it at last,’ he cried. ‘That Polyphemus gunner! It was Harris—Chatty, not Bugs. He was with me in the Comus and Euryalus after. ’Nov 20, 2002;Used to lend money.’

‘That’s him,’ Mr. Vergil cried. ‘I always thought he was a bit of a Jew. Who commanded the Comus then? I mean that time in the Adriatic, when she was pooped an’ dam-near drowned the owner in his cabin.’

Mr. Heatleigh fished up that name also from his memory; and backwards and forwards through time they roved, recovering ships and men of ancient and forgotten ages. For, as the old know, the dead draw the dead, as iron does iron. The Admiral sat in the curve of the stern-timbers, his hands clenched on his knees, as though tiller-lines might still be there. Mr. Vergil, erect for the honour of great days and names, faced him across the battered disconnected wheel, swaying a shade in the rush of the memories that flooded past him. Victorias and phaetons began to come back from the filled hotels. One of them held a perspiring officer of the Bulleana, who had been instructed to find by all means Admiral (Retired) Lord Heatleigh, somehow mis-registered in some boarding-house, and to convey to him his Captain’s invitation to do them the honour of lunching with them. And it was already perilously near cocktail time! . . .

Later, over those same cocktails, Lord Heatleigh gathered that the opinion of His Majesty’s Squadron on the station was that ‘Daddy’ Vergil merited hanging at the yard-arm.

‘’Glad you haven’t got one between you,’ was the answer. ‘He taught me most of my seamanship when I was a Snotty. The best Bo’sun and—off duty—the biggest liar in the Service.’

My Sunday at Home

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IT was the unreproducible slid r, as he said this was his ‘fy-ist’ visit to England, that told me he was a New Yorker from New York; and when, in the course of our long, lazy journey westward from Waterloo, he enlarged upon the beauties of his city, I, professing ignorance, said no word. He had, amazed and delighted at the man’s civility, given the London porter a shilling for carrying his bag nearly fifty yards; he had thoroughly investigated the first-class lavatory compartment, which the London and South-Western sometimes supply without extra charge; and now, half awed, half contemptuous, but wholly interested, he looked out upon the ordered English landscape wrapped in its Sunday peace, while I watched the wonder grow upon his face. Why were the cars so short and stilted? Why had every other freight-car a tarpaulin drawn over it? What wages would an engineer get now? Where was the swarming population of England he had read so much about. What was the rank of all those men on tricycles along the roads? When were we due at Plymouth?I told him all I knew, and very much that I did not. He was going to Plymouth to assist in a consultation upon a fellow-countryman who had retired to a place called The Hoe—was that up town or down town?—to recover from nervous dyspepsia. Yes, he himself was a doctor by profession, and how any one in England could retain any nervous disorder passed his comprehension. Never had he dreamed of an atmosphere so soothing. Even the deep rumble of London traffic was monastical by comparison with some cities he could name; and the country—why, it was Paradise. A continuance of it, he confessed, would drive him mad; but for a few months it was the most sumptuous rest cure in his knowledge.

‘I’ll come over every year after this,’ he said, in a burst of delight, as we ran between two ten foot hedges of pink and white may. ‘It’s seeing all the things I’ve ever read about. Of course it doesn’t strike you that way. I presume you belong here? What a finished land it is! It’s arrived. Must have been born this way. Now, where I used to live—Hello I what’s up?’

The train stopped in a blaze of sunshine at Framlynghame Admiral, which is made up entirely of the nameboard, two platforms, and an overhead bridge, without even the usual siding. I had never known the slowest of locals stop here before; but on Sunday all things are possible to the London and South-Western. One could hear the drone of conversation along the carriages, and, scarcely less loud, the drone of the bumblebees in the wallflowers up the bank. My companion thrust his head through the window and sniffed luxuriously.

‘Where are we now?’ said he.

‘In Wiltshire,’ said I.

‘Ah! A man ought to be able to write novels with his left hand in a country like this. Well, well! And so this is about Tess’s country, ain’t it? I feel just as if I were in a book. Say, the conduc—the guard has something on his mind. What’s he getting at? ‘

The splendid badged and belted guard was striding up the platform at the regulation official pace, and in the regulation official voice was saying at each door—

‘Has any gentleman here a bottle of medicine? A gentleman. has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.’

Between each five paces he looked at an official telegram in his hand, refreshed his memory, and said his say. The dreamy look on my companion’s face—he had gone far away with Tess—passed with the speed of a snap -shutter. After the manner of his countrymen, he had risen to the situation, jerked his bag down from the overhead rack, opened it, and I heard the click of bottles. ‘Find out where the man is,’ he said briefly. ‘I’ve got something here that will fix him—if he can swallow still.’

Swiftly I fled up the line of carriages in the wake of the guard. There was clamour in a rear compartment—the voice of one bellowing to be let out, and the feet of one who kicked. With the tail of my eye I saw the New York doctor hastening thither, bearing in his hand a blue and brimming glass from the lavatory compartment. The guard I found scratching his head unofficially, by the engine, and murmuring: ‘Well, I put a bottle of medicine off at Andover, I’m sure I did.’

‘Better say it again, any’ow,’ said the driver. ‘Orders is orders. Say it again.’

Once more the guard paced back, I, anxious to attract his attention, trotting at his heels.

‘In a minute—in a minute, sir,’ he said, waving an arm capable of starting all, the traffic on the London and South-Western Railway at a wave. ‘Has any gentleman here got a bottle of medicine? A gentleman has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.’

‘Where’s the man?’ I gasped.

‘Woking. ’Ere’s my orders.’ He showed me the telegram, on which were the words to be said. ‘’E must have left ’is bottle in the train, an’ took another by mistake. ’E’s been wirin’ from Woking awful, an’, now I come to think of it, I’m nearly sure I put a bottle of medicine off at Andover.’

‘Then the man that took the poison isn’t on the train?’

‘Lord, no, sir. No one didn’t take poison that way. ’E took it away with ’im, in ’is ’ands. ’E’s wirin’ from Wokin’. My orders was to ask everybody on the train, and I ’ave, an’ we’re four minutes late now. Are you comin’ on, sir? No? Right be’ind!’

There is nothing, unless, perhaps, the English language, more terrible than the workings of an English railway line. An instant before it seemed as though we were going to spend all eternity at Framlynghame Admiral, and now I was watching the tail of the train disappear round the curve of the cutting.

But I was not alone. On the one bench of the down platform sat the largest navvy I have ever seen in my life, softened and made affable (for he smiled generously) with liquor. In his huge hands he nursed an empty tumbler marked ‘L.S.W.R.’—marked also, internally, with streaks of blue-gray sediment. Before him, a hand on his shoulder, stood the doctor, and as I came within earshot this is what I heard him say: ‘Just you hold on to your patience for a minute or two longer, and you’ll be as right as ever you were in your life. I’ll stay with you till you’re better.’

‘Lord! I’m comfortable enough,’ said the navvy. ‘Never felt better in my life.’

Turning to me, the doctor lowered his voice. ‘He might have died while that fool conduct—guard was saying his piece. I’ve fixed him, though. The stuff’s due in about five minutes, but there’s a heap to him. I don’t see how we can make him take exercise.’

For the moment I felt as though seven pounds of crushed ice had been neatly applied in the form of a compress to my lower stomach.

‘How—how did you manage it?’ I gasped.

‘I asked him if he’d have a drink. He was knocking spots out of the car—strength of his constitution, I suppose. He said he’d go ’most anywhere for a drink, so I lured him on to the platform, and loaded him up. Cold-blooded people you Britishers are. That train’s gone, and no one seemed to care a cent.’

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‘We’ve missed it,’ I said.

He looked at me curiously.

‘We’ll get another before sundown, if that’s your only trouble. Say, porter, when’s the next train down?’

‘Seven forty-five,’ said the one porter, and passed out through the wicket-gate into the landscape. It was then three-twenty of a hot and sleepy afternoon. The station was absolutely deserted. The navvy had closed his eyes, and now nodded.

‘That’s bad,’ said the doctor. ‘The man, I mean, not the train. We must make him walk somehow—walk up and down:’

Swiftly as might be, I explained the delicacy of the situation, and the doctor from New York turned a full bronze-green. Then he swore comprehensively at the entire fabric of our glorious Constitution, cursing the English language, root, branch, and paradigm, through its most obscure derivatives. His coat and bag lay on the bench next to the sleeper. Thither he edged cautiously, and I saw treachery in his eye.

What devil of delay possessed him to slip on his spring overcoat, I cannot tell. They say a slight noise arouses a sleeper more surely than a heavy one, and scarcely had the doctor settled himself in his sleeves when the giant waked and seized that silkfaced collar in a hot right hand. There was rage in his face—rage and the realisation of new emotions.

‘I’m—I’m not so comfortable as I were,’ he said from the deeps of his interior. ‘You’ll wait along o’ me, you will.’ He breathed heavily through shut lips.

Now, if there was one thing more than another upon which the doctor had dwelt in his conversation with me, it was upon the essential law-abidingness, not to say gentleness, of his much-misrepresented country. And yet (truly, it may have been no more than a button that irked him) I saw his hand travel backwards to his right hip, clutch at something, and come away empty.

‘He won’t kill you,’ I said. ‘He’ll probably sue you in court, if I know my own people. Better give him some money from time to time.’

‘If he keeps quiet till the stuff gets in its work,’ the doctor answered, ‘I’m all right. If he doesn’t . . . my name is Emory—Julian B. Emory—193 ’Steenth Street, corner of Madison and——’

‘I feel worse than I’ve ever felt,’ said the navvy, with suddenness. ‘What—did—you—give—me—the—drink—for?’

The matter seemed to be so purely personal that I withdrew to a strategic position on the overhead bridge, and, abiding in the exact centre, looked on from afar.

I could see the white road that ran across the shoulder of Salisbury Plain, unshaded for mile after mile, and a dot in the middle distance, the back of the one porter returning to Framlynghame Admiral, if such a place existed, till seven forty-five. The bell of a church invisible clanked softly. There was a rustle in the horse-chestnuts to the left of the line, and the sound of sheep cropping close.

The peace of Nirvana lay upon the land, and, brooding in it, my elbow on the warm iron girder of the footbridge (it is a forty-shilling fine to cross by any other means), I perceived, as never before, how the consequences of our acts run eternal through time and through space. If we impinge never so slightly upon the life of a fellow-mortal, the touch of our personality, like the ripple of a stone cast into a pond, widens and widens in unending circles across the aeons, till the far-off gods themselves cannot say where action ceases. Also, it was I who had silently set before the doctor the tumbler of the first-class lavatory compartment now speeding Plymouthward. Yet I was, in spirit at least, a million leagues removed from that unhappy man of another nationality, who had chosen to thrust an inexpert finger into the workings of an alien life. The machinery was dragging him up and down the sunlit platform. The two men seemed to be learning polkamazurkas together, and the burden of their song, borne by one deep voice, was: ‘What did you give me the drink for? ‘

I saw the flash of silver in the doctor’s hand. The navvy took it and pocketed it with his left; but never for an instant did his strong right leave the doctor’s coat-collar, and as the crisis approached louder and louder rose his bull-like roar: ‘What did you give me the drink for?’

They drifted under the great twelve-inch pinned timbers of the footbridge towards the bench, and, I gathered, the time was very near at hand. The stuff was getting in its work. Blue, white, and blue again, rolled over the navvy’s face in waves, till all settled to one rich clay-bank yellow and—that fell which fell.

I thought of the blowing-up of Hell Gate; of the geysers in the Yellowstone Park; of Jonah and his whale; but the lively original, as I watched it foreshortened from above, exceeded all these things. He staggered to the bench, the heavy wooden seat cramped with iron cramps into the enduring stone, and clung there with his left hand. It quivered and shook, as a breakwater-pile quivers to the rush of landward-racing seas; nor was there lacking when he caught his breath, the ‘scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave.’ His right hand was upon the doctor’s collar, so that the two shook to one paroxysm, pendulums vibrating together, while I, apart, shook with them.

It was colossal—immense; but of certain manifestations the English language stops short. French only, the caryatid French of Victor Hugo, would have described it; so I mourned while I laughed, hastily shuffling and discarding inadequate adjectives. The vehemence of the shock spent itself, and the sufferer half fell, half knelt, across the bench. He was calling now upon God and his wife, huskily, as the wounded bull calls upon the unscathed herd to stay. Curiously enough, he used no bad language: that had gone from him with the rest. The doctor exhibited gold. It was taken, and retained. So, too, was the grip on the coat-collar.

‘If I could stand,’ boomed the giant despairingly, ‘I’d smash you—you an’ your drinks. I’m dyin’—dyin’—dyin’!’

‘That’s what you think,’ said the doctor. ‘You’ll find it will do you a lot of good’; and, making a virtue of a somewhat imperative necessity, he added: ‘I’ll stay by you. If you’d let go of me a minute I’d give you something that would settle you.’

‘You’ve settled me now, you damned anarchist. Takin’ the bread out of the mouth of an English workin’ man! But I’ll keep ’old of you till I’m well or dead. I never did you no harm. S’pose I were a little full? They pumped me out once at Guy’s with a stummick-pump. I could see that, but I can’t see this ’ere, an’ it’s killin’ of me by slow degrees.’

‘You’ll be all right in half an hour. What do you suppose I’d want to kill you for?’ said the doctor, who came of a logical breed.

“Ow do I know? Tell ’em in court. You’ll get seven years for this, you body-snatcher. That’s what you are—a bloomin’ body-snatcher. There’s justice, I tell you, in England; and my Union’ll prosecute, too. We don’t stand no tricks with people’s insides ’ere. They gave a woman ten years for a sight less than this. An’ you’ll ’ave to pay ’undreds an’ ’undreds o’ pounds, besides a pension to the missus. You’ll see, you physickin’ furriner. Where’s your licence to do such? You’ll catch it, I tell you!’

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Then I observed, what I had frequently observed before, that a man who is but reasonably afraid of an altercation with an alien has a most poignant dread of the operations of foreign law. The doctor’s voice was flute-like in its exquisite politeness, as he answered:

‘But I’ve given you a very great deal of money—fif—three pounds, I think.’

‘An’ what’s three pounds for poisonin’ the likes o’ me? They told me at Guy’s I’d fetch twenty—cold—on the slates. Ouh! It’s comin’ again.’

A second time he was cut down by the foot, as it were, and the straining bench rocked to and fro as I averted my eyes.

It was the very point of perfection in the heart of an English May-day. The unseen tides of the air had turned, and all nature was setting its face with the shadows of the horse-chestnuts towards the peace of the coming night. But there were hours yet, I knew—long, long hours of the eternal English twilight—to the ending of the day. I was well content to be alive—to abandon myself to the drift of Time and Fate; to absorb great peace through my skin, and to love my country with the devotion that three thousand miles of intervening sea bring to fullest flower. And what a garden of Eden it was, this fatted, clipped, and washen land! A man could camp in any open field with more sense of home and security than the stateliest buildings of foreign cities could afford. And the joy was that it was all mine inalienably—groomed hedgerow, spotless road, decent greystone cottage, serried spinney, tasselled copse, apple-bellied hawthorn, and well-grown tree. A light puff of wind—it scattered flakes of may over the gleaming rails—gave me a faint whiff as it might have been of fresh coconut, and I knew that the golden gorse was in bloom somewhere out of sight. Linnæus had thanked God on his bended knees. when he first saw a field of it; and, by the way, the navvy was on his knees too. But he was by no means praying. He was purely disgustful.

The doctor was compelled to bend over him, his face towards the back of the seat, and from what I had seen I supposed the navvy was now dead. If that were the case it would be time for me to go; but I knew that so long as a man trusts himself to the current of Circumstance, reaching out for and rejecting nothing that comes his way, no harm can overtake him. It is the contriver, the schemer, who is caught by the law, and never the philosopher. I knew that when the play was played, Destiny herself would move me on from the corpse; and I felt very sorry for the doctor.

In the-far distance, presumably upon the road that led to Framlynghame Admiral, there appeared a vehicle and a horse—the one ancient fly that almost every village can produce at need. This thing was advancing, unpaid by me, towards the station; would have to pass along the deep-cut lane, below the railway-bridge, and come out on the doctor’s side. I was in the centre of things, so all sides were alike to me. Here, then, was my machine from the machine. When it arrived, something would happen, or something else. For the rest, I owned my deeply interested soul.

The doctor, by the seat, turned so far as his cramped position allowed, his head over his left shoulder, and laid his right hand upon his lips. I threw back my hat and elevated my eyebrows in the form of a question. The doctor shut his eyes and nodded his head slowly twice or thrice, beckoning me to come. I descended cautiously, and it was as the signs had told. The navvy was asleep, empty to the lowest notch; yet his hand clutched still the doctor’s collar, and at the lightest movement (the doctor was really very cramped) tightened mechanically, as the hand of a sick woman tightens on that of the watcher. He had dropped, squatting almost upon his heels, and, falling lower, had dragged the doctor over to the left.

The doctor thrust his right hand, which was free, into his pocket, drew forth some keys, and shook his head. The navvy gurgled in his sleep. Silently I dived into my pocket, took out one sovereign, and held it up between finger and thumb Again the doctor shook his head. Money was not what was lacking to his peace. His bag had fallen from the’ seat to the ground. He looked towards it, and opened his mouth—O-shape. The catch was not a difficult one, and when I had mastered it, the doctor’s right forefinger was sawing the air. With an immense caution, I extracted from the bag such a knife as they use for cutting collops off legs. The doctor frowned, and with his first and second fingers imitated the action of scissors. Again I searched, and found a most diabolical pair of cocknosed shears, capable of vandyking the interiors of elephants. The doctor then slowly lowered his left shoulder till the navvy’s right wrist was supported by the bench, pausing a moment as the spent volcano rumbled anew. Lower and lower the doctor sank, kneeling now by the navvy’s side, till his head was on a level with, and just in front of, the great hairy fist, and—there was no tension on the coat-collar. Then light dawned on me.

Beginning a little to the right of the spinal column, I cut a huge demilune out of his new spring overcoat, bringing it round as far under his left side (which was the right side of the navvy) as I dared. Passing thence swiftly to the back of the seat, and reaching between the splines, I sawed through the silk-faced front on the left-hand side of the coat till the two cuts joined.

Cautiously as the box-turtle of his native heath, the doctor drew away sideways and to the right, with the air of a frustrated burglar coming out from under a bed, and stood up free, one black diagonal shoulder projecting through the gray of his ruined overcoat. I returned the scissors to the bag, snapped the catch, and held all out to him as the wheels of the fly rang hollow under the railway arch.

It came at a foot-pace past the wicket-gate of the station, and the doctor stopped it with a whisper. It was going some five miles across country to bring home from church some one—I could not catch the name—because his own carriage-horses were lame. Its destination happened to be the one place in all the world that the doctor was most burningly anxious to visit, and he promised the driver untold gold to drive to some ancient flame of his—Helen Blazes, she was called.

‘Aren’t you coming, too?’ he said, bundling his overcoat into his bag.

Now the fly had been so obviously sent to the doctor, and to no one else, that I had no concern with it. Our roads, I saw, divided, and there was, further, a need upon me to laugh.

‘I shall stay here,’ I said. ‘It’s a very pretty country.’

‘My God!’ he murmured, as softly as he shut the door, and I felt that it was a prayer.

Then he went out of my life, and I shaped my course for the railway-bridge. It was necessary to pass by the bench once more, but the wicket was between us. The departure of the fly had waked the navvy. He crawled on to the seat, and with malignant eyes watched the driver flog down the road.

‘The man inside o’ that,’ he called, ‘’as poisoned me. ’E’s a body-snatcher. ’E’s comin’ back again when I’m cold. ’Ere’s my evidence!’

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He waved his share of the overcoat, and I went my way, because I was hungry. Framlynghame Admiral village is a good two miles from the station, and I waked the holy calm of the evening every step of that way with shouts and yells, casting myself down in the flank of the good green hedge when I was too weak to stand. There was an inn,—a blessed inn with a thatched roof, and peonies in the garden,—and I ordered myself an upper chamber in which the Foresters held their courts, for the laughter was not all out of me. A bewildered woman brought me ham and eggs, and I leaned out of the mullioned window, and laughed between mouthfuls. I sat long above the beer and the perfect smoke that followed, till the light changed in the quiet street, and I began to think of the seven forty-five down, and all that world of the Arabian Nights I had quitted.

Descending, I passed a giant in moleskins who filled the low-ceiled tap-room. Many empty plates stood before him, and beyond them a fringe of the Framlynghame Admiralty, to whom he was unfolding a wondrous tale of anarchy, of body-snatching, of bribery, and the Valley of the Shadow from the which he was but newly risen. And as he talked he ate, and as he ate he drank, for there was much room in him; and anon he paid royally, speaking of justice and the law, before whom all Englishmen are equal, and all foreigners and anarchists vermin and slime.

On my way to the station he passed me with great strides, his head high among the low-flying bats, his feet firm on the packed road metal, his fists clenched, and his breath coming sharply. There was a beautiful smell in the air—the smell of white dust, bruised nettles, and smoke, that brings tears to the throat of a man who sees his country but seldom—a smell like the echoes of the lost talk of lovers; the infinitely suggestive odour of an immemorial civilisation. It was a perfect walk; and, lingering on every step, I came to the station just as the one porter lighted the last of a truck-load of lamps, and set them back in the lamp-room, while he dealt tickets to four or five of the population, who, not contented with their own peace, thought fit to travel. It was no ticket that the navvy seemed to need. He was sitting on a bench wrathfully grinding a tumbler into fragments with his heel. I abode in obscurity at the end of the platform, interested as ever, thank heaven, in my surroundings. There was a jar of wheels on the road. The navvy rose as they approached, strode through the wicket, and laid a hand upon a horse’s bridle that brought the beast up on his hireling hind-legs. It was the providential fly coming back, and for a moment I wondered whether the doctor had been mad enough to revisit his practice.

‘Get away; you’re drunk,’ said the driver.

‘I’m not,’ said the navvy. ‘I’ve been waitin’ ’ere hours and hours. Come out, you beggar inside there.’

‘Go on, driver,’ said a voice I did not know—a crisp, clear, English voice.

‘All right,’ said the navvy. ‘You wouldn’t ’ear me when I was polite. Now will you come?’

There was a chasm in the side of the fly, for he had wrenched the door bodily off its hinges, and was feeling within purposefully. A well-booted leg rewarded him, and there came out, not with delight, hopping on one foot, a round and grayhaired Englishman, from whose armpits dropped hymn-books, but from his mouth an altogether different service of song.

‘Come on, you bloomin’ body-snatcher! You thought I was dead, did you?’ roared the navvy. And the respectable gentleman came accordingly, inarticulate with rage.

‘’Ere’s a man murderin’ the Squire,’ the driver shouted, and fell from his box upon the navvy’s neck.

To do them justice, the people of Framlynghame Admiral, so many as were on the platform, rallied to the call in the best spirit of feudalism. It was the one porter who beat the navvy on the nose with a ticket-punch, but it was the three third-class tickets who attached themselves to his legs and freed the captive.

‘Send for a constable! lock him up!’ said that man, adjusting his collar; and unitedly they cast him into the lamp-room, and turned the key, while the driver mourned over the wrecked fly.

Till then the navvy, whose only desire was justice, had kept his temper nobly. Then he went Berserk before our amazed eyes. The door of the lamp-room was generously constructed, and would not give an inch, but the window he tore from its fastenings and hurled outwards. The one porter counted the damage in a loud voice, and the others, arming themselves with agricultural implements from the station garden, kept up a ceaseless winnowing before the window, themselves backed close to the wall, and bade the prisoner think of the gaol. He answered little to the point, so far as they could understand; but seeing that his exit was impeded, he took a lamp and hurled it through the wrecked sash. It fell on the metals and went out. With inconceivable velocity, the others, fifteen in all, followed looking like rockets in the gloom, and with the last (he could have had no plan) the Berserk rage left him as the doctor’s deadly brewage waked up, under the stimulus of violent exercise and a very full meal, to one last cataclysmal exhibition, and—we heard the whistle of the seven forty-five down.

They were all acutely interested in as much of the wreck as they could see, for the station smelt to heaven of oil, and the engine skittered over broken glass like a terrier in a cucumber-frame. The guard had to hear of it, and the Squire had his version of the brutal assault, and heads were out all along the carriages as I found me a seat.

‘What is the row?’ said a young man, as I entered. ‘Man drunk?’

‘Well, the symptoms, so far as my observation has gone, more resemble those of Asiatic cholera than anything else,’ I answered, slowly and judicially, that every word might carry weight in the appointed scheme of things. Till then, you will observe, I had taken no part in that war.

He was an Englishman, but he collected his belongings as swiftly as had the American, ages before, and leaped upon the platform, crying, ‘Can I be of any service? I’m a doctor.’

From the lamp-room I heard a wearied voice wailing: ‘Another bloomin’ doctor!’

And the seven forty-five carried me on, a step nearer to Eternity, by the road that is worn and seamed and channelled with the passions, and weaknesses, and warring interests of man who is immortal and master of his fate.

My Own True Ghost Story

(a short tale)

As I came through the Desert thus it was—
As I came through the Desert.
(The City of Dreadful Night)

SOMEWHERE in the Other World, where there are books and pictures and plays and shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who spend their lives in building up all four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories about the real insides of people; and his name is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will insist upon treating his ghosts he has published half a workshopful of them—with levity. He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an Indian one.

There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black.

Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night- watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses “repeats” on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers’ Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something—not fever—wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares.

Some of the dâk-bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have handy little cemeteries in their compound—witnesses to the “changes and chances of this mortal life” in the days when men drove from Calcutta to the Northwest. These bungalows are objectionable places to put up in. They are generally very old, always dirty, while the khansamah is as ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. In both moods he is useless. If you get angry with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and says that when he was in that Sahib’s service not a khansamah in the Province could touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and trembles and fidgets among the dishes, and you repent of your irritation.

In these dâk-bungalows, ghosts are most likely to be found, and when found, they should be made a note of. Not long ago it was my business to live in dâk-bungalows. I never inhabited the same house for three nights running, and grew to be learned in the breed. I lived in Government-built ones with red brick walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the furniture posted in every room, and an excited snake at the threshold to give welcome. I lived in “converted” ones—old houses officiating as dâk-bungalows—where nothing was in its proper place and there wasn’t even a fowl for dinner. I lived in second-hand palaces where the wind blew through open-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as through a broken pane. I lived in dâk-bungalows where the last entry in the visitors’ book was fifteen months old, and where they slashed off the curry-kid’s head with a sword. It was my good luck to meet all sorts of men, from sober traveling missionaries and deserters flying from British Regiments, to drunken loafers who threw whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still greater good fortune just to escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair proportion of the tragedy of our lives out here acted itself in dâk-bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a dâk-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died mad in dâk-bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.

In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of them. Up till that hour I had sympathized with Mr. Besant’s method of handling them, as shown in “The Strange Case of Mr. Lucraft and Other Stories.” I am now in the Opposition.

We will call the bungalow Katmal dâk-bungalow. But that was the smallest part of the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleep in dâk-bungalows. He should marry. Katmal dâk-bungalow was old and rotten and unrepaired. The floor was of worn brick, the walls were filthy, and the windows were nearly black with grime. It stood on a bypath largely used by native Sub-Deputy Assistants of all kinds, from Finance to Forests; but real Sahibs were rare. The khansamah, who was nearly bent double with old age, said so.

When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided rain on the face of the land, accompanied by a restless wind, and every gust made a noise like the rattling of dry bones in the stiff toddy palms outside. The khansamah completely lost his head on my arrival. He had served a Sahib once. Did I know that Sahib? He gave me the name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of that man in his prehistoric youth. I had seen a steel engraving of him at the head of a double volume of Memoirs a month before, and I felt ancient beyond telling.

The day shut in and the khansamah went to get me food. He did not go through the pretense of calling it “khana”—man’s victuals. He said “ratub,” and that means, among other things, “grub”—dog’s rations. There was no insult in his choice of the term. He had forgotten the other word, I suppose.

While he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals, I settled myself down, after exploring the dâk-bungalow. There were three rooms, beside my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving into the other through dingy white doors fastened with long iron bars. The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls. For this reason I shut the door. There were no lamps—only candles in long glass shades. An oil wick was set in the bathroom.

For bleak, unadulterated misery that dâk-bungalow was the worst of the many that I had ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and the windows would not open; so a brazier of charcoal would have been useless. The rain and the wind splashed and gurgled and moaned round the house, and the toddy palms rattled and roared. Half a dozen jackals went through the compound singing, and a hyena stood afar off and mocked them. A hyena would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection of the Dead—the worst sort of Dead. Then came the ratub—a curious meal, half native and half English in composition—with the old khansamah babbling behind my chair about dead and gone English people, and the wind-blown candles playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains. It was just the sort of dinner and evening to make a man think of every single one of his past sins, and of all the others that he intended to commit if he lived.

Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy. The lamp in the bath-room threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the wind was beginning to talk nonsense.

Just when the reasons were drowsy with blood-sucking I heard the regular—”Let-us-take-and-heave-him-over” grunt of doolie-bearers in the compound. First one doolie came in, then a second, and then a third. I heard the doolies dumped on the ground, and the shutter in front of my door shook.

“That’s some one trying to come in,” I said. But no one spoke, and I persuaded myself that it was the gusty wind. The shutter of the room next to mine was attacked, flung back, and the inner door opened. “That’s some Sub-Deputy Assistant,” I said, “and he has brought his friends with him. Now they’ll talk and spit and smoke for an hour.”

But there were no voices and no footsteps. No one was putting his luggage into the next room. The door shut, and I thanked Providence that I was to be left in peace. But I was curious to know where the doolies had gone. I got out of bed and looked into the darkness. There was never a sign of a doolie. Just as I was getting into bed again, I heard, in the next room, the sound that no man in his senses can possibly mistake—the whir of a billiard ball down the length of the slates when the striker is stringing for break. No other sound is like it. A minute afterwards there was another whir, and I got into bed. I was not frightened—indeed I was not. I was very curious to know what had become of the doolies. I jumped into bed for that reason.

Next minute I heard the double click of a cannon and my hair sat up. It is a mistake to say that hair stands up. The skin of the head tightens and you can feel a faint, prickly, bristling all over the scalp. That is the hair sitting up.

There was a whir and a click, and both sounds could only have been made by one thing—a billiard ball. I argued the matter out at great length with myself; and the more I argued the less probable it seemed that one bed, one table, and two chairs—all the furniture of the room next to mine—could so exactly duplicate the sounds of a game of billiards. After another cannon, a three-cushion one to judge by the whir, I argued no more. I had found my ghost and would have given worlds to have escaped from that dâk– bungalow. I listened, and with each listen the game grew clearer.

There was whir on whir and click on click. Sometimes there was a double click and a whir and another click. Beyond any sort of doubt, people were playing billiards in the next room. And the next room was not big enough to hold a billiard table!

Between the pauses of the wind I heard the game go forward—stroke after stroke. I tried to believe that I could not hear voices; but that attempt was a failure.

Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see—fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat—fear that makes you sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at work? This is a fine Fear—a great cowardice, and must be felt to be appreciated. The very improbability of billiards in a dâk-bungalow proved the reality of the thing. No man—drunk or sober—could imagine a game at billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a “screw-cannon.”

A severe course of dâk-bungalows has this disadvantage—it breeds infinite credulity. If a man said to a confirmed dâk-bungalow-haunter:—“There is a corpse in the next room, and there’s a mad girl in the next but one, and the woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles away,” the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in a dâk-bungalow.

This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person fresh from his own house would have turned on his side and slept. I did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My dominant fear was that the players might want a marker. It was an absurd fear; because creatures who could play in the dark would be above such superfluities. I only know that that was my terror; and it was real.

After a long, long while the game stopped, and the door banged. I slept because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have dropped the door-bar and peered into the dark of the next room.

When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and wisely, and inquired for the means of departure.

“By the way, khansamah,” I said, “what were those three doolies doing in my compound in the night?”

“There were no doolies,” said the khansamah.

I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door. I was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with the owner of the big Black Pool down below.

“Has this place always been a dâk-bungalow?” I asked.

“No,” said the khansamah. “Ten or twenty years ago, I have forgotten how long, it was a billiard room.”

“A what?”

“A billiard room for the Sahibs who built the Railway. I was khansamah then in the big house where all the Railway-Sahibs lived, and I used to come across with brandy-shrab. These three rooms were all one, and they held a big table on which the Sahibs played every evening. But the Sahibs are all dead now, and the Railway runs, you say, nearly to Kabul.”

“Do you remember anything about the Sahibs?”

“It is long ago, but I remember that one Sahib, a fat man and always angry, was playing here one night, and he said to me:— ‘Mangal Khan, brandy-pani do,’ and I filled the glass, and he bent over the table to strike, and his head fell lower and lower till it hit the table, and his spectacles came off, and when we—the Sahibs and I myself—ran to lift him he was dead. I helped to carry him out. Aha, he was a strong Sahib! But he is dead and I, old Mangal Khan, am still living, by your favor.”

That was more than enough! I had my ghost—a first-hand, authenticated article. I would write to the Society for Psychical Research—I would paralyze the Empire with the news! But I would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop land between myself and that dâk-bungalow before nightfall. The Society might send their regular agent to investigate later on.

I went into my own room and prepared to pack after noting down the facts of the case. As I smoked I heard the game begin again,— with a miss in balk this time, for the whir was a short one.

The door was open and I could see into the room. Click—c1ick! That was a cannon. I entered the room without fear, for there was sunlight within and a fresh breeze without. The unseen game was going on at a tremendous rate. And well it might, when a restless little rat was running to and fro inside the dingy ceiling-cloth, and a piece of loose window-sash was making fifty breaks off the window-bolt as it shook in the breeze!

Impossible to mistake the sound of billiard balls! Impossible to mistake the whir of a ball over the slate! But I was to be excused. Even when I shut my enlightened eyes the sound was marvelously like that of a fast game.

Entered angrily the faithful partner of my sorrows, Kadir Baksh.

“This bungalow is very bad and low-caste! No wonder the Presence was disturbed and is speckled. Three sets of doolie-bearers came to the bungalow late last night when I was sleeping outside, and said that it was their custom to rest in the rooms set apart for the English people! What honor has the khansamah? They tried to enter, but I told them to go. No wonder, if these Ooryas have been here, that the Presence is sorely spotted. It is shame, and the work of a dirty man!”

Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken from each gang two annas for rent in advance, and then, beyond my earshot, had beaten them with the big green umbrella whose use I could never before divine. But Kadir Baksh has no notions of morality.

There was an interview with the khansamah, but as he promptly lost his head, wrath gave place to pity, and pity led to a long conversation, in the course of which he put the fat Engineer-Sahib’s tragic death in three separate stations—two of them fifty miles away. The third shift was to Calcutta, and there the Sahib died while driving a dogcart.

If I had encouraged him the khansamah would have wandered all through Bengal with his corpse.

I did not go away as soon as I intended. I stayed for the night, while the wind and the rat and the sash and the window-bolt played a ding-dong “hundred and fifty up.” Then the wind ran out and the billiards stopped, and I felt that I had ruined my one genuine, hall-marked ghost story.

Had I only stopped at the proper time, I could have made anything out of it.

That was the bitterest thought of all!

My Lord the Elephant

(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

TOUCHING the truth of this tale there need be no doubt at all, for it was told to me by Mulvaney at the back of the elephant-lines, one warm evening when we were taking the dogs out for exercise. The twelve Government elephants rocked at their pickets outside the big mud-walled stables (one arch, as wide as a bridge-arch, to each restless beast), and the mahouts were preparing the evening meal. Now and again some impatient youngster would smell the cooking flour-cakes and squeal; and the naked little children, of the elephant-lines would strut down the row shouting and commanding silence, or, reaching up, would slap at the eager trunks. Then the elephants feigned to be deeply interested in pouring dust upon their heads, but, so soon as the children passed, the rocking, fidgeting, and muttering broke out again.The sunset was dying, and the elephants heaved and swayed dead black against the one sheet of rose-red low down in the dusty gray sky. It was at the beginning of the hot weather, just after the troops had changed into their white clothes, so Mulvaney and Ortheris looked like ghosts walking through the dusk. Learoyd had gone off to another barrack to buy sulphur ointment for his last dog under suspicion of mange, and with delicacy had put his kennel into quarantine at the back of the furnace where they cremate the anthrax cases.‘You wouldn’t like mange, little woman?’ said Ortheris, turning my terrier over on her fat white back with his foot. ‘You’re no end bloomin’ partic’lar, you are. ’Oo wouldn’t take no notice o’ me t’other day ’cause she was goin’ ’ome all alone in ’er dorg-cart, eh? Settin’ on the box-seat like a bloomin’ little tart, you was, Vicy. Now you run along an’ make them ’uttees ’oller. Sick ’em, Vicy, loo!’

Elephants loathe little dogs. Vixen barked herself down the pickets, and in a minute all the elephants were kicking and squealing and clucking together.

‘Oh, you soldier-men,’ said a mahout angrily, ‘call of your she-dog. She is frightening our elephant-folk.’

‘Rummy beggars!’ said Ortheris meditatively. ‘’Call ’em people, same as if they was. An’ they are too. Not so bloomin’ rummy when you come to think of it, neither.’

Vixen returned yapping to show that she could do it again if she liked, and established herself between Ortheris’s knees, smiling a large smile at his lawful dogs who dared not fly at her.

‘’Seed the battery this mornin’?’ said Ortheris. He meant the newly-arrived elephant-battery; otherwise he would have said simply ‘guns.’ Three elephants harnessed tandem go to each gun, and those who have not seen the big forty-pounders of position trundling along in the wake of their gigantic team have yet something to behold. The lead-elephant had behaved very badly on parade; had been cut loose, sent back to the lines in disgrace, and was at that hour squealing and lashing out with his trunk at the end of the line; a picture of blind, bound, bad temper. His mahout, standing clear of the flail-like blows, was trying to soothe him.

‘That’s the beggar that cut up on p’rade. ’E’s must,’ said Ortheris pointing. ‘There’ll be murder in the lines soon, and then, per’aps, ’e’ll get loose an’ we’ll ’ave to be turned out to shoot ’im, same as when one o’ they native king’s elephants musted last June. ’Ope ’e will.’

‘Must be sugared!’ said Mulvaney contemptuously from his resting-place on the pile of dried bedding. ‘He’s no more than in a powerful bad timper wid bein’ put upon. I’d lay my kit he’s new to the gun-team, an’ by natur’ he hates haulin’. Ask the mahout, sorr.’

I hailed the old white-bearded mahout who was lavishing pet words on his sulky red-eyed charge.

‘He is not musth,’ the man replied indignantly; ‘only his honour has been touched. Is an elephant an ox or a mule that he should tug at a trace? His strength is in his head—Peace, peace, my Lord! It was not my fault that they yoked thee this morning!—Only a low-caste elephant will pull a gun, and he is a Kumeria of the Doon. It cost a year and the life of a man to break him to burden. They of the Artillery put him in the gun-team because one of their base-born brutes had gone lame. No wonder that he was, and is wrath.’

‘Rummy! Most unusual rum,’ said Ortheris. ‘Gawd, ’e is in a temper, though! S’pose ’e got loose!’

Mulvaney began to speak but checked himself, and I asked the mahout what would happen if the heel-chains broke.

‘God knows, who made elephants,’ he said simply. ‘In his now state peradventure he might kill you three, or run at large till his rage abated. He would not kill me except he were musth. Then would he kill me before any one in the world, because he loves me. Such is the custom of the elephant-folk; and the custom of us mahout-people matches it for foolishness. We trust each our own elephant, till our own elephant kills us. Other castes trust women, but we the elephant-folk. I have seen men deal with enraged elephants and live; but never was man yet born of woman that met my lord the elephant in his musth and lived to tell of the taming. They are enough bold who meet him angry.’

I translated. Then said Terence: ‘Ask the heathen if he iver saw a man tame an elephint,—anyways—a white man.’

‘Once,’ said the mahout, ‘I saw a man astride of such a beast in the town of Cawnpore; a bareheaded man, a white man, beating it upon the head with a gun. It was said he was possessed of devils or drunk.’

‘Is ut like, think you, he’d be doin’ it sober?’ said Mulvaney after interpretation, and the chained elephant roared.

‘There’s only one man top of earth that would be the partic’lar kind o’ sorter bloomin’ fool to do it!’ said Ortheris. ‘When was that, Mulvaney?‘

‘As the naygur sez, in Cawnpore; an’ I was that fool—in the days av my youth. But it came about as naturil as wan thing leads to another, me an’ the elephint, and the elephint and me; an’ the fight betune us was the most naturil av all.’

‘That’s just wot it would ha’ been,’ said Ortheris. ‘Only you must ha’ been more than usual full. You done one queer trick with an elephant that I know of, why didn’t you never tell us the other one?’

‘Bekase, onless you had heard the naygur here say what he has said spontaneous, you’d ha’ called me for a liar, Stanley, my son, an’ it would ha’ bin my duty an’ my delight to give you the father an’ mother av a beltin’! There’s only wan fault about you, little man, an’ that’s thinking you know all there is in the world, an’ a little more. ’Tis a fault that has made away wid a few orf’cers I’ve served undher, not to spake av ivry man but two that I iver thried to make into a privit.’

‘Ho!’ said Ortheris with rufed plumes, ‘ an’ ’oo was your two bloomin’ little Sir Garnets, eh?’

‘Wan was mesilf,’ said Mulvaney with a grin that darkness could not hide; ‘an’—seein’ that he’s not here there’s no harm speakin’ av’ him—t’other was Jock.’

‘Jock’s no more than a ’ayrick in trousies. ’E be’aves like one; an’ ’e can’t ’it one at a ’undred; ’e was born on one, an’ s’welp me ’e’ll die under one for not bein’ able to say wot ’e wants in a Christian lingo,’ said Ortheris, jumping up from the piled fodder only to be swept off his legs. Vixen leaped upon his stomach, and the other dogs followed and sat down there.

page 2

‘I know what Jock is like,’ I said. ‘I want to hear about the elephant, though.’

‘It’s another o’ Mulvaney’s bloomin’ panoramas,’ said Ortheris, gasping under the dogs. ‘’Im an’ Jock for the ’ole bloomin’ British Army! You’ll be sayin’ you won Waterloo next,—you an’ Jock. Garn!’

Neither of us thought it worth while to notice Ortheris. The big gun-elephant threshed and muttered in his chains, giving tongue now and again in crashing trumpet-peals, and to this accompaniment Terence went on: ‘In the beginnin’,’ said he, ‘me bein’ what I was, there was a misunderstandin’ wid my sergeant that was then. He put his spite on me for various reasons,’—

The deep-set eyes twinkled above the glow of, the pipe-bowl, and Ortheris grunted, ‘ Another petticoat!’

—‘For various an’ promiscuous reasons; an’ the upshot av it was that he come into barricks wan afternoon whin’ I was settlin’ my cowlick before goin’ walkin’, called me a big baboon (which I was not), an’ a demoralisin’ beggar (which I was), an’ bid me go on fatigue thin an’ there, helpin’ shift E.P. tents, fourteen av thim from the rest-camps. At that, me bein’ set on my walk—’

‘Ah!’ from under the dogs, ‘’e’s a Mormon, Vic. Don’t you ’ave nothin’ to do with ’im, little dorg.’

—‘Set on my walk, I tould him a few things that came up in my mind, an’ wan thing led on to another, an’ betune talkin’ I made time for to hit the nose av him so that he’d be no Venus to any woman for a week to come. ’Twas a fine big nose, and well it paid for a little groomin’. Afther that I was so well pleased wid my handicraftfulness that I niver raised fist on the gyard that came to take me to Clink. A child might ha’ led me along, for I knew old Kearney’s nose was ruined. That summer the Ould Rig’ment did not use their own Clink, bekase the cholera was hangin’ about there like Mildew on wet boots, an’ ’twas murdher to confine in ut. We borrowed the Clink that belonged to the Holy Christians (the rig’ment that has never seen service yet), and that lay a matther av a mile away, acrost two p’rade-grounds an’ the main road, an’ all the ladies av Cawnpore goin’ out for their afternoon dhrive. So I moved in the best av society, my shadow dancin’ along forninst me, an’ the gyard as solemn as putty, the bracelets on my wrists, an’ my heart full contint wid the notion av Kearney’s pro—pro—probosculum in a shling.

‘In the middle av ut all I perceived a gunner-orf’cer in full rig’mentals perusin’ down the road, hell-for-leather, wid his mouth open. He fetched wan woild despairin’ look on the dog-kyarts an’ the polite society av Cawnpore, an’ thin he dived like a rabbut into a dhrain by the side av the road.

‘“Bhoys,” sez I, “that orf’cer’s dhrunk. ’Tis scand’lus. Let’s take him to Clink too.”

‘The corp’ril of the gyard made a jump for me, unlocked my stringers, an’ he sez: “If it comes to runnin’, run for your life. If it doesn’t, I’ll trust your honour. Anyways,” sez he, “come to Clink whin you can.”.

‘Then I behild him runnin’ wan way, stuffin’ the bracelets in his pocket, they bein’ Gov’ment property, and the gyard runnin’ another, an’ all the dog-kyarts runnin’ all ways to wanst, an’ me alone lookin’ down the red bag av a mouth av an elephint forty-two feet high at the shoulder, tin feet wide, wid tusks as long as the Ochterlony Monumint. That was my first reconnaissance. Maybe he was not quite so contagious, nor quite so tall, but I didn’t stop to throw out pickets. Mother av Hiven, how I ran down the road! The baste began to inveshtigate the dhrain wid the gunner-orf’cer in ut; an’ that was the makin’ av me. I tripped over wan of the rifles that my gyard had discarded (onsoldierly blackguards they was!), and whin I got up I was facin’ t’other way about an’ the elephint was huntin’ for the gunnerorf’cer. I can see his big fat back yet. Excipt that he didn’t dig, he car’ied on for all the world like little Vixen here at a rat-hole. He put his head down (by my sowl he nearly stood on ut!) to shquint down the dhrain; thin he’d grunt, and run round to the other ind in case the orf’cer was gone out by the back door; an’ he’d shtuff his trunk down the flue an’ get ut filled wid mud, an’ blow ut out, an’ grunt’, an’ swear! My troth, he swore all hiven down upon that orf’cer; an’ what a commissariat elephint had to do wid a gunner-orf’cer passed me. Me havin’ nowhere to go except to Clink, I stud in the road wid the rifle, a Snider an’ no amm’nition, philosophisin’ upon the rear ind av the animal. All round me, miles and miles, there was howlin’ desolation, for ivry human sowl wid two legs, or four for the matther av that, was ambuscadin’, an’ this ould rapparee stud on his head tuggin’ and gruntin’ above the dhrain, his tail stickin’ up to the sky, an’ he thryin’ to thrumpet through three feet av road-sweepin’s up his thrunk. Begad, ’twas wickud to behold!

‘Subsequint he caught sight av me standin’ alone in the wide, wide world lanin’ on the rifle. That dishcomposed him, bekase he thought I was the gunner-orf’cer got out unbeknownst. He looked betune his feet at the dhrain, an’ he looked at me, an’ I sez to myself: “Terence, my son, you’ve been watchin’ this Noah’s ark too long. Run for your life!” Dear knows I wanted to tell him I was only a poor privit on my way to Clink, an’ no orf’cer at all, at all; but he put his ears forward av his thick head, an’ I rethreated down the road grippin’ the rifle, my back as cowld as a tombstone, and the slack av my trousies, where I made sure he’d take hould, crawlin’ wid,—wid invidjus apprehension.

‘I might ha’ run till I dhropped, bekase I was betune the two straight lines av the road, an’ a man, or a thousand men for the matther av that, are the like av sheep in keepin’ betune right an’ left marks.’

‘Same as canaries,’ said Ortheris from the darkness. ‘Draw a line on a bloomin’ little board, put their bloomin’ little beakses there; stay so for hever and hever, amen, they will. ’Seed a ¥ole reg’ment, I ’ave, walk crabways along the edge of a two-foot water-cut ’stid o’ thinkin’ to cross it. Men is sheep-bloomin’ sheep. Go on.’

‘But I saw his shadow wid the tail av my eye,’ continued the man of experiences, ‘an’ “Wheel,” I sez, “Terence, wheel!” an’ I wheeled. ’Tis truth that I cud hear the shparks flyin’ from my heels; an’ I shpun into the nearest compound, fetched wan jump from the gate to the verandah av the house, an’ fell over a tribe of naygurs wid a half-caste boy at a desk, all manufacturin’ harness. ’Twas Antonio’s Carriage Emporium at Cawnpore. You know ut, sorr?

‘Ould Grambags must ha’ wheeled abreast wid me, for his trunk came lickin’ into the verandah like a belt in a barrick-room row, before I was in the shop. The naygurs an’ the half-caste boy howled an’ wint out at the backdoor, an’ I stud lone as Lot’s wife among the harness. A powerful thirsty thing is harness, by reason av the smell to ut.

‘I wint into the backroom, nobody bein’ there to invite, an’ I found a bottle av whisky and a goglet av wather. The first an’ the second dhrink I never noticed bein’ dhry, but the fourth an’ the fifth tuk good hould av me an’ I began to think scornful av elephints. “Take the upper ground in manoe’vrin’, Terence,” I sez; “an’ you’ll be a gen’ral yet,” sez I. An’ wid that I wint up to the flat mud roof av the house an’ looked over the edge av the parapit, threadin’ delicate. Ould Barrel-belly was in the compound, walkin’ to an’ fro, pluckin’ a piece av grass here an’ a weed there, for all the world like our colonel that is now whin his wife’s given him a talkin’ down an’ he’s prom’nadin’ to ease his timper. His back was to me, an’ by the same token I hiccupped. He checked in his walk, wan ear forward like a deaf ould lady wid an ear-thrumpet, an’ his thrunk hild out in a kind av fore-reaching hook. Thin he wagged his ear sayin’, “Do my sinses deceive me? ” as plain as print, an’ he recomminst promenadin’. You know Antonio’s compound? ’Twas as full thin as ’tis now av new kyarts and ould kyarts, an’ second-hand kyarts an’ kyarts for hire,—landos, an’ b’rooshes, an’ brooms, an’ wag’nettes av ivry description. Thin I hiccupped again, an’ he began to study the ground beneath him, his tail whistlin’ wid emotion. Thin he lapped his thrunk round the shaft av a wag’nette an’ dhrew it out circumspectuous an’ thoughtful. “He’s not there,” he sez, fumblin’ in the cushions wid his thrunk. Thin I hiccupped again, an’ wid that he lost his patience good an’ all, same as this wan in the lines here.’

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The gun-elephant was breaking into peal after peal of indignant trumpetings, to the disgust of the other animals who had finished their food and wished to drowse. Between the outcries we could hear him picking restlessly at his ankle ring.

‘As I was sayin’,’ Mulvaney went on, ‘he behaved dishgraceful. He let out wid his fore-fut like a steam-hammer, bein’ convinced that I was in ambuscade adjacent; an’ that wag’nette ran back among the other carriages like a field-gun in charge. Thin he hauled ut out again an’ shuk ut, an’ by nature it came all to little pieces. Afther that he went sheer damn, slam, dancin’, lunatic, double-shuffle demented wid the whole of Antonio’s shtock for the season. He kicked, an’ he straddled, and he stamped, an’ he pounded all at wanst, his big bald head bobbin’ up an’ down, solemn as a rigadoon. He tuk a new shiny broom an’ kicked ut on wan corner, an’ ut opened out like a blossomin’ lily; an’ he shtuck wan fool-foot through the flure av ut an’ a wheel was shpinnin’ on his tusk. At that he got scared, an’ by this an’ that he fair sat down plump among the carriages, an’ they pricked ’im wid splinters till he was a boundin’ pincushin. In the middle av the mess, whin the kyarts was climbin’ wan on top av the other, an’ rickochettin’ off the mud walls, an’ showin’ their agility, wid him tearin’ their wheels off, I heard the sound av distrestful wailin’ on the housetops, an’ the whole Antonio firm an’ fam’ly was cursin’ me an’ him from the roof next door; me bekase I’d taken refuge wid them, and he bekase he was playin’ shtep-dances wid the carriages av the aristocracy.

‘“Divart his attention,” sez Antonio, dancin’ on the roof in his big white waistcoat. “Divart his attention,” he sez, “or I’ll prosecute you.” An’ the whole fam’1y shouts, “Hit him a kick, mister soldier.”

‘“He’s divartin’ himself,” I sez, for it was just the worth av a man’s life to go down into the compound. But by way av makin’ show I threw the whisky-bottle (’twas not full whin I came there) at him. He shpun round from what was left av the last kyart, an’ shtuck his head into the verandah not three feet below me. Maybe ’twas the temptin’ness av his back or the whisky. Anyways, the next thing I knew was me, wid my hands full av mud an’ mortar, all fours on his back, an’ the Snider just slidin’ off the slope av his head. I grabbed that an’ scuffled on his neck, dhruv my knees undher his big flappin’ ears, an’ we wint to glory out av that compound wid a shqueal that crawled up my back an’ down my belly. Thin I remimbered the Snider, an’ I grup ut by the muzzle an’ hit him on the head. ’Twas most forlorn—like tappin’ the deck av a throopship wid a cane to stop the engines whin you’re sea-sick. But I parsevered till I sweated, an’ at last from takin’ no notice at all he began to grunt. I hit wid the full strength that was in me in those days, an’ it might ha’ discommoded him. We came back to the p’rade-groun’ forty miles an hour, trumpetin’ vainglorious. I never stopped hammerin’ him for a minut’; ’twas by way av divartin’ him from runnin’ undher the trees an’ scrapin’ me off like a poultice. The p’rade-groun’ an’ the road was all empty, but the throops was on the roofs av the barricks, an’ betune Ould Thrajectory’s gruntin’ an’ mine (for I was winded wid my stone-breakin’), I heard them clappin’ an’ cheerin’. He was growin’ more confused an’ tuk to runnin’ in circles.

‘“ Begad,” sez I to mysilf, “there’s dacincy in all things, Terence. ’Tis like you’ve shplit his head, and whin you come out av Clink you’ll be put under stoppages for killin’ a Gov’ment elephint.” At that I caressed him.’

‘’Ow the devil did you do that? Might as well pat a barrick,’ said Ortheris.

‘Thried all manner av endearin’ epitaphs, but bein’ more than a little shuk up I disremimbered what the divil would answer to. So, “Good dog,” I sez; “Pretty puss,” sez I; “Whoa mare,” I sez; an’ at that I fetched him a shtroke av the butt for to conciliate him, an’ he stud still among the barricks.

‘“Will no one take me off the top av this murderin’ volcano?” I sez at the top av my shout; an’ I heard a man yellin’, “Hould on, faith an’ patience, the other elephints are comin’.” “Mother av Glory,” I sez, “will I rough-ride the whole stud.? Come an’ take me down, ye cowards!”

‘Thin a brace av fat she-elephints wid mahouts an’ a commissariat sergint came shuffling round the corner av the barricks; an’ the mahouts was abusin’ ould Potiphar’s mother an’ blood-kin.

‘“Obsarve my reinforcemints,” I sez. “The’re goin’ to take you to Clink, my son;” an’ the child av calamity put his ears forward an’ swung head on to those females. The pluck av him, afther my oratorio on his brain-pan, wint to the heart av me. “I’m in dishgrace mesilf,” I sez, “but I’ll do what I can for ye. Will ye go to Clink like a man, or fight like a fool whin there’s no chanst?” Wid that I fetched him wan last lick on the head, an’ he fetched a tremenjus groan an’ dhropped his thrunk. “Think,” sez I to him, an’ “Halt!” I sez to the mahouts. They was anxious so to do. I could feel the ould reprobit meditating undher me. At last he put his thrunk straight out an’ gave a most melancholious toot (the like av a sigh wid an elephint); an’ by that I knew the white flag was up an’ the rest was no more than considherin’ his feelin’s.

‘“He’s done,” I sez. “Kape open ordher left an’ right alongside. We’ll go to Clink quiet.”

‘Sez the commissariat sergeant to me from his elephant, “Are you a man or a mericle?” sez he.

‘“I’m betwixt an’ betune,” I sez, thryin’ to set up stiff back. “An’ what,” sez I, “may ha’ set this animal off in this opprobrious shtyle?” I sez, the gun-butt light an’ easy on my hip an’ my left hand dhropped, such as throopers behave. We was bowlin’ on to the elephint-lines under escort a11 this time.

‘“I was not in the lines whin the throuble; began,” sez the sergeant. “They tuk him off carryin’ tents an’ such like, an’ put him to the gun-team. I knew he would not like ut, but by token it fair tore his heart out.”

‘“Faith, wan man’s meat is another’s poison,” I sez. “’Twas bein’ put on to carry tents that was the ruin av me.” An’ my heart warrumed to Ould Double Ends bekase he had been put upon.

‘“We’ll close on him here,” sez the sergeant, whin we got to the elephint-lines. All the mahouts an’ their childher was round the pickets cursin’ my poney from a mile to hear. “You skip off on to my elephint’s back,” he sez. “There’ll be throuble.”

‘“Sind that howlin’ crowd away,” I sez, “or he’ll thrample the life out av thim.” I cud feel his ears beginnin’ to twitch. “An’ do you an’ your immoril she-elephints go well clear away. I will get down here. He’s an Irishman,” I sez, “for all his long Jew’s nose, an’ he shall be threated like an Irishman.”

‘“Are ye tired av life?” sez the sergeant.

‘“Divil a bit,” I sez; “but wan av us has to win, an’ I’m av opinion ’tis me. Get back,” I sez.

‘The two elephints wint off, an’ Smith O’Brine came to a halt dead above his own pickuts. “Down,” sez I, whackin’ him on the head, an’ down he wint, shouldher over shouldher like a hill-side slippin’ afther rain. “Now,” sez I, slidin’ down his nose an’ runnin’ to the front av him, “you will see the man that’s betther than you.”

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‘His big head was down betune his big forefeet, an’ they was twisted in sideways like a kitten’s. He looked the picture av innocince an’ forlornsomeness, an’ by this an’ that his big hairy undherlip was thremblin’, an’ he winked his eyes together to kape from cryin’. “For the love av God,” I sez, clean forgettin’ he was a dumb baste, “don’t take ut to heart so! Aisy, be aisy,” I sez; an’ wid that I rubbed his cheek an’ betune his eyes an’ the top av his thrunk, talkin’ all the time. “Now,” sez I, “I’ll make you comfortable for the night. Send wan or two childher here,” I sez to the sergeant who was watchin’ for to see me killed. “He’ll rouse at the sight av a man.”’

‘You got bloomin’ clever all of a sudden,’ said Ortheris. ‘’Ow did you come to know ’is funny little ways that soon?’

‘Bekase,’ said Terence with emphasis, ‘bekase I had conquered the beggar, my son.’

‘Ho!’ said Ortheris between doubt and derision. ‘G’on.’

‘His mahout’s child an’ wan or two other line-babies came runnin’ up, not bein’ afraid av anything, an’ some got wather, an’ I washed the top av his poor sore head (begad, I had done him to a turn!), an’ some picked the pieces av carts out av his hide, an’ we scraped him, an’ handled him all over, an’ we put a thunderin’ big poultice av neem-leaves (the same that we stick on a pony’s gall) on his head, an’ it looked like a smokin’-cap, an’ we put a pile av young sugar-cane forninst him, an’ he began to pick at ut. “Now,” sez I, settin’ down on his fore-foot, “we’ll have a dhrink, an’ let bygones be.” I sent a naygur-child for a quart av arrack, an’ the sergeant’s wife she sint me out four fingers av whisky, an’ when the liquor came I cud see by the twinkle in Ould Typhoon’s eye that he was no more a stranger to ut than me,—worse luck, than me! So he tuk his quart like a Christian, an’ thin I put his shackles on, chained him fore an’ aft to the pickets, an’ gave him my blessin’ an wint back to barricks.’

‘And after?’ I said in the pause.

‘Ye can guess,’ said Mulvaney. ‘There was confusion, an’ the colonel gave me ten rupees, an’ the adj’tant gave me five, an’ my comp’ny captain gave me five, an’ the men carried me round the barricks shoutin’.’

‘Did you go to Clink?’ said Ortheris.

‘I niver heard a word more about the misundherstandin’ wid Kearney’s beak, if that’s what you mane; but sev’ril av the bhoys was tuk off sudden to the Holy Christians’ Hotel that night. Small blame to thim,—they had twenty rupees in dhrinks. I wint to lie down an’ sleep ut off, for I was as done an’ double done as him there in the lines. ’Tis no small thing to go ride elephants.

‘Subsequint, me an’ the Venerable Father av Sin became mighty friendly. I wud go down to the lines, whin I was in dishgrace, an’ spend an afthernoon collogin’ wid him; he chewin’ wan stick av sugar-cane an’ me another, as thick as thieves. He’d take all I had out av my pockets an’ put ut back again, an’ now an’ thin I’d bring him beer for his dijistin’, an’ I’d give him advice about bein’ well behaved an’ keepin’ off the books. Afther that he wint the way av the Army, an’ that’s bein’ thransferred as soon as you’ve made a good friend.’

‘So you never saw him again?’ I demanded.

‘Do you belave the first half av the affair?’ said Terence.

‘I’ll wait till Learoyd comes,’ I said evasively. Except when he was carefully tutored by the other two and the immediate money-benefit explained, the Yorkshireman did not tell lies; and Terence, I knew, had a profligate imagination.

‘There’s another. part still,’ said Mulvaney. ‘Ortheris was in that.’

‘Then I’ll believe it all,’ I answered, not from any special belief in Ortheris’s word, but from desire to learn the rest. Ortheris stole a pup from me when our acquaintance was new, and with the little beast stifling under his overcoat, denied not only the theft, but that he ever was interested in dogs.

‘That was at the beginnin’ av the Afghan business,’ said Mulvaney; ‘years afther the men that had seen me do the thrick was dead or gone home. I came not to speak av ut at the last,—bekase I do not care to knock the face av ivry man that calls me a liar. At the very beginnin’ av the marchin’ I wint sick like a fool. I had a bootgall, but I was all for keepin’ up wid the rig’mint and such like foolishness. So I finished up wid a hole in my heel that you cud ha’ dhruv a tent-peg into. Faith, how often have I preached that to recruities since, for a warnin’ to thim to look afther their feet! Our docthor, who knew our business as well as his own, he sez to me, in the middle av the Tangi Pass it was: “That’s sheer damned carelessness,” sez he. “How often have I tould you that a marchin’ man is no stronger than his feet,—his feet,—his feet! ” he sez. “Now to hospital you go,” he sez, “for three weeks, an expense to your Quane an’ a nuisince to your counthry. Next time,” sez he, “perhaps you’ll put some av the whisky you pour down your throat, an’ some av the tallow you put into your hair, into your socks,” sez he. Faith he was a just man. So soon as we come to the head av the Tangi I wint to hospital, hoppin’ on wan fut, woild wid disappointment. ’Twas a field-hospital (all flies an’ native apothecaries an’ liniment) dhropped, in a way av speakin’, close by the head av the Tangi. The hospital guard was ravin’ mad wid us sick for keepin’ thim there, an’ we was ravin’ mad at bein’ kept; an’ through the Tangi, day an’ night an’ night an’ day, the fut an’ horse an’ guns an’ commissariat an’ tents an’ followers av the brigades was pourin’ like a coffee-mill. The doolies came dancin’ through, scores an’ scores av thim, an’ they’d turn up the hill to hospital wid their sick, an’ I lay in bed nursin’ my heel, an’ hearin’ the men bein’ tuk out. I remimber wan night (the time I was tuk wid fever) a man came rowlin’ through the tents an,’ “Is there any room to die here?” he sez; “there’s none wid the columns”; an’ at that he dhropped dead acrost a cot, an’ thin the man in ut began to complain against dyin’ all alone in the dust undher dead men. Thin I must ha’ turned mad wid the fever, an’ for a week I was prayin’ the
saints to stop the noise av the columns movin’ through the Tangi. Gun-wheels it was that wore my head thin. Ye know how ’tis wid fever?’

We nodded; there was no need to explain.

‘Gun-wheels an’ feet an’ people shoutin’, but mostly gun-wheels. ‘Twas neither night nor day to me for a week. In the mornin’ they’d rowl up the tent-flies, an’ we sick cud look at the Pass an’ considher what was comin’ next. Horse, fut, or guns, they’d be sure to dhrop wan or two sick wid us an’ we’d get news. Wan mornin,’ whin the fever hild off of me, I was watchin’ the Tangi, an’ ’twas just like the picture on the backside av the Afghan medal,—men an’ elephints an’ guns comin’ wan at a time crawlin’ out of a dhrain.’

‘It were a dhrain,’ said Ortheris with feeling. ‘I’ve fell out an’ been sick in the Tangi twice; an’ wot turns my innards ain’t no bloomin’ vi’lets neither.’

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‘The Pass gave a twist at the ind, so everything shot out suddint an’ they’d built a throop-bridge (mud an’ dead mules) over a nullah at the head av ut. I lay an’ counted the elephints (gun-elephints) thryin’ the bridge wid their thrunks an’ rolling out sagacious. The fifth elephint’s head came round the corner, an’ he threw up his thrunk, an’ he fetched a toot, an’ there he shtuck at the head of the Tangi like a cork in a bottle. “Faith,” thinks I to mysilf, “he will not thrust the bridge; there will be throuble.”’

‘Trouble! My Gawd!’ said Ortheris. ‘Terence, I was be’ind that blooming ’uttee up to my stock in dust. Trouble!’

‘Tell on then, little man; I only saw the hospital ind av ut.’ Mulvaney knocked the ashes out of his pipe, as Ortheris heaved the dogs aside and went on.

‘We was escort to them guns, three comp’nies of us,’ he said. ‘Dewcy was our major, an’ our orders was to roll up anything we come across in the Tangi an’ shove it out t’other end. Sort o’ pop-gun picnic, see? We’d rolled up a lot o’ lazy beggars o’ native followers, an’ some commissariat supplies that was bivoo-whackin’ for ever seemin’ly, an’ all the sweepin’s of ’arf a dozen things what ought to ’ave bin at the front weeks ago, an’ Dewcy, he sez to us: “You’re most ’eart-breakin’ sweeps,” ‘e sez. “For ’eving’s sake,” sez ‘e, “do a little sweepin’ now.” So we swep’,—s’welp me, ’ow we did sweep ’em along! There was a full reg’ment be’ind us; most anxious to get on they was; an’ they kep’ on sendin’ to us with the colonel’s compliments, an’ what in ’ell was we stoppin’ the way for, please? Oh, they was partic’lar polite! So was Dewcy! ’E sent ’em back wot-for, an’ ’e give us wot-for, an’ we give the guns wot-for, an’ they give the commissariat wot-for, an’ the commissariat give first-class extry wot-for to the native followers, an’ on we’d go again till we was stuck, an’ the ’ole Pass ’ud be swimmin’ Allelujah for a mile an’ a ’arf. We ’adn’t no tempers, nor no seats to our trousies, an’ our coats an’ our rifles was chucked in the carts, so as we might ha’ been cut up any minute, an’ we was doin’ droverwork. That was wot it was; drovin’ on the Islin’ton road!

‘I was close up at the lead of the column when we saw the end of the Tangi openin’ out ahead of us, an’ I sez : “The door’s open, boys. ’Oo’ll git to the gall’ry fust?” I sez. Then I saw Dewcy screwin’ ’is bloomin’ eyeglass in ’is eye an’ lookin’ straight on. “Propped,—ther beggar!

“he sez; an’ the be’ind end o’ that bloomin’ old ’uttee was shinin’ through the dust like a bloomin’ old moon made o’ tarpaulin. Then we ’alted, all chock-ablock, one atop o’ the other, an’ right at the back o’ the guns there sails in a lot o’ silly grinnin’ camels, what the commissariat was in charge of—sailin’ away as if they was at the Zoological Gardens an’ squeezin’ our men most awful. The dust was that up you couldn’t see your ’and ; an’ the more we ’it ’em on the lead the more their drivers sez, “Accha! Accha!” an’ by Gawd it was “at yer” before you knew where you was. An’ that ’uttee’s Wind end stuck in the Pass good an’ tight, an’ no one knew wot for.

‘Fust thing we ’ad to do was to fight they bloomin’ camels. I wasn’t goin’ to be eat by no bull-oont; so I ’eld up my trousies with one ’and; standin’ on a rock, an’ ’it away with my belt at every nose I saw bobbin’ above me. Then the camels fell back, an’ they ’ad to fight to keep the rear-guard an’ the native followers from crushin’ into them; an’ the rearguard ’ad to send down the Tangi to warn the other reg’ment that we was blocked. I ’eard the mahouts shoutin’ in front that the ’uttee wouldn’t cross the bridge; an’ I saw Dewcy skippin’ about through the dust like a musquito worm in a tank. Then our comp’nies got tired o’ waitin’ an’ begun to mark time, an’ some goat struck up Tommy, make room for your Uncle. After that, you couldn’t neither see nor breathe nor ’ear; an’ there we was, singin’ bloomin’ serenades to the end of a’ elephant that don’t care for tunes! I sung too; I couldn’t do nothin’ else. They was strengthenin’ the bridge in front, all for the sake of the ’uttee. By an’ by a’ orf’cer caught me by the throat an’ choked the sing out of me. So I caught the next man I could see by the throat an’ choked the sing out of ’im.’

‘What’s the difference between being choked by an officer and being hit?’ I asked, remembering a little affair in which Ortheris’s honour had been injured by his lieutenant.

‘One’s a bloomin’ lark, an’ one’s a bloomin’ insult!’ said Ortheris. ‘Besides, we was on service, an’ no one cares what an orf’cer does then, s’long as ’e gets our rations an’ don’t get us unusual cut up. After that we got quiet, an’ I ’eard Dewcy say that ’e’d court-martial the lot of us soon as we was out of the Tangi. Then we give three cheers for Dewcy an’ three more for the Tangi; an’ the ’uttee’s be’ind end was stickin’ in the Pass, so we cheered that. Then they said the bridge had been strengthened, an’ we give three cheers for the bridge; but the ’uttee wouldn’t move a bloomin’ hinch. Not ’im! Then we cheered ’im again, an’ Kite Dawson, that was corner-man at all the singsongs (’e died on the way down), began to give a nigger lecture on the be’ind ends of elephants, an’ Dewcy, ’e tried to keep ’is face for a minute, but, Lord, you couldn’t do such when Kite was playin’ the fool an’ askin’ whether ’e mightn’t ’ave leave to rent a villa an’ raise ’is orphan children in the Tangi, ’cos ’e couldn’t get ’ome no more. Then up come a orf’cer (mounted, like a fool, too) from the reg’mint at the back with some more of his colonel’s pretty little compliments, an’ what was this delay, please. We sung ’im There’s another bloomin’ row downstairs till ’is ’orse bolted, an’ then we give ’im three cheers; an’ Kite Dawson sez ’e was goin’ to write to The Times about the awful state of the streets in Afghanistan. The ’uttee’s be’ind end was stickin’ in the Pass all the time. At last one o’ the mahouts came to Dewcy an’ sez something. “Oh Lord!

“sez Dewcy, “I don’t know the beggar’s visiting-list! I’ll give ’im another ten minutes an’ then I’ll shoot ’im.” Things was gettin’ pretty dusty in the Tangi, so we all listened. “’E wants to see a friend,” sez Dewcy out loud to the men, an’ ’e mopped ‘is forehead an’ sat down on a gun-tail.

‘I leave it to you to judge ’ow the reg’ment shouted. “That’s all right,” we sez. “Three cheers for Mister Winterbottom’s friend,” sez we. “Why didn’t you say so at first? Pass the word for old Swizzletail’s wife,”—and such like. Some o’ the men they didn’t laugh. They took it same as if it might have been a’ introduction like, ’cos they knew about ’uttees. Then we all run forward over the guns an’ in an’ out among the elephants’ legs,—Lord, I wonder ’arf the comp’nies wasn’t squashed—an’ the next thing I saw was Terence ’ere, lookin’ like a sheet o’ wet paper, comin’ down the ’illside wid a sergeant. “’Strewth,.” I sez. “I might ha’ knowed ’e’d be at the bottom of any cat’s trick,” sez I. Now you tell wot ‘appened your end?’

‘I lay be the same as you did, little man, listenin’ to the noises an’ the bhoys singin’. Presintly I heard whisperin’ an’ the doctor sayin’, “Get out av this, wakin’ my sick wid your jokes about elephints.” An’ another man sez, all angry “’Tis a joke that is stoppin’ two thousand men in the Tangi. That son av sin av a haybag av an elephint sez, or the mahouts sez for him, that he wants to see a friend, an’ he’ll not lift hand or fut till he finds him. I’m wore out wid inthrojucin’ sweepers an’ coolies to him, an’ his hide’s as full o’ bay’net pricks as a musquito-net av holes, an’ I’m here undher ordhers, docther dear, to ask if any one, sick or well, or alive or dead, knows an elephint. I’m not mad,” he sez, settin’ on a box av medical comforts. “’Tis my ordhers, an’ ’tis my mother,” he sez, “that would laugh at me for the father av all fools to-day. Does any wan here know an elephint?” We sick was all quiet.

‘“Now you’ve had your answer,” sez the doctor. “Go away.”

‘“Hould on,” I sez, thinkin’ mistiways in my cot, an’ I did not know my own voice. “I’m by way av bein’ acquainted wid an elephant, myself,” I sez.

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‘“That’s delirium,” sez the doctor. “See what you’ve done, sergeant. Lie down, man,” he sez, seein’ me thryin’ to get up.

‘“’Tis not,” I sez. “I rode him round Cawnpore barricks. He will not ha’ forgotten. I bruk his head wid a rifle.”

‘“Mad as a coot,” sez the doctor, an’ thin he felt my head. “It’s quare,” sez he. “Man,” he sez, “if you go, d’you know ’twill either kill or cure?”

‘“What do I care?” sez I. “If I’m mad, ’tis better dead.”

‘“Faith, that’s sound enough,” sez the doctor. “You’ve no fever on you now.”

‘“Come on,” sez the sergeant. “We’re all mad to-day, an’ the throops are wantin’ their dinner.” He put his arm round av me an’ I came into the sun, the hills an’ the rocks skippin’ big giddy-go-rounds. “Seventeen years have I been in the army,” sez the sergeant, “an’ the days av mericles are not done. They’ll be givin’ us more pay next. Begad,” he sez, “the brute knows you!”

‘Ould Obstructionist was screamin’ like all possist whin I came up, an’ I heard forty million men up the Tangi shoutin’, “He knows him!” Thin the big thrunk came round me an’ I was nigh fainting wid weakness. “Are you well, Malachi?” I sez, givin’ him the name he answered to in the lines. “Malachi, my son, are you well?” sez I, “for I am not.” At that he thrumpeted again till the Pass rang to ut, an’ the other elephints tuk it up. Thin I got a little strength back. “Down, Malachi,” I sez, “an’ put me up, but touch me tendher for I am not good.” He was on his knees in a minut an’ he slung me up as gentle as a girl. “Go on now, my son,” I sez. “You’re blockin’ the road.” He fetched wan more joyous toot, an’ swung grand out av the head av the Tangi, his gungear clankin’ on his back; an’ at the back av him there wint the most amazin’ shout I iver heard. An’ thin I felt my head shpin, an’ a mighty sweat bruk out on me, an’ Malachi was growin’ taller an’ taller to me settin’ on his back, an’ I sez, foolish like an’ weak, smilin’ all round an’ about, “Take me down,” I sez, “or I’ll fall.”

‘The next I remimber was lyin’ in my cot again, limp as a chewed rag, but, cured av the fever, an’ the Tangi as empty as the back av my hand. They’d all gone up to the front, an’ ten days later I wint up too, havin’ blocked an’ unblocked an entire army corps. What do you think av ut, sorr?’

‘I’ll wait till I see Learoyd,’ I repeated.

‘Ah’m here,’ said a shadow from among the shadows. ‘Ah’ve heard t’ tale too.’

‘Is it true, Jock?’

‘Ay; true as t’owd bitch has getten t’mange. Orth’ris, yo’ maun’t let t’dawgs hev owt to do wi’ her.’

The Mutiny of the Mavericks

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

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Sec. 7 (1) – Causing or Conspiring with other persons to cause a mutiny or sedition in forces belonging to Her Majesty’s Regular forces, Reserve forces, Auxiliary forces, or Navy.

WHEN three obscure gentlemen in San Francisco argued on insufficient premises they condemned a fellow-creature to a most unpleasant death in a far country which had nothing whatever to do with the United States. They foregathered at the top of a tenement-house in Tehama Street, an unsavoury quarter of the city, and, there calling for certain drinks, they conspired because they were conspirators by trade, officially known as the Third Three of the I.A.A.—an institution for the propagation of pure light, not to be confounded with any others, though it is affiliated to many. The Second Three live in Montreal, and work among the poor there; the First Three have their home in New York, not far from Castle Garden, and write regularly once a week to a small house near one of the big hotels at Boulogne. What happens after that, a particular section of Scotland Yard knows too well and laughs at. A conspirator detests ridicule. More men have been stabbed with Lucrezia Borgia daggers and dropped into the Thames for laughing at Head Centres and Triangles than for betraying secrets; for this is human nature.The Third Three conspired over whiskey cocktails and a clean sheet of note-paper against the British Empire and all that lay therein. This work is very like what men without discernment call politics before a general election. You pick out and discuss, in the company of congenial friends, all the weak points in your opponents’ organisation, and unconsciously dwell upon and exaggerate all their mishaps, till it seems to you a miracle that the hated party holds together for an hour.

“Our principle is not so much active demonstration—that we leave to others—as passive embarrassment, to weaken and unnerve,” said the first man. “Wherever an organisation is crippled, wherever confusion is thrown into any branch of any department, we gain a step for those who take on the work; we are but the forerunners.” He was a German enthusiast, and editor of a newspaper, from whose leading articles he quoted frequently.

“That cursed Empire makes so many blunders of her own that unless we doubled the year’s average I guess it wouldn’t strike her anything special had occurred,” said the second man. “Are you prepared to say that all our resources are equal to blowing off the muzzle of a hundred-ton gun or spiking a ten-thousand-ton ship on a plain rock in clear daylight? They can beat us at our own game. Better join hands with the practical branches; we’re in funds now. Try a direct scare in a crowded street. They value their greasy hides.” He was the drag upon the wheel, and an Americanised Irishman of the second generation, despising his own race and hating the other. He had learned caution.

The third man drank his cocktail and spoke no word. He was the strategist, but unfortunately his knowledge of life was limited. He picked a letter from his breast-pocket and threw it across the table. That epistle to the heathen contained some very concise directions from the First Three in New York. It said—

“The boom in black iron has already affected the eastern markets, where our agents have been forcing down the English-held stock among the smaller buyers who watch the turn of shares. Any immediate operations, such as western bears, would increase their willingness to unload. This, however, cannot be expected till they see clearly that foreign iron-masters are willing to co-operate. Mulcahy should be dispatched to feel the pulse of the market, and act accordingly. Mavericks are at present the best for our purpose.—P.D.Q.”

As a message referring to an iron crisis in Pennsylvania, it was interesting, if not lucid. As a new departure in organized attack on an outlying English dependency, it was more than interesting.

The second man read it through and murmured—“Already? Surely they are in too great a hurry. All that Dhulip Singh could do in India he has done, down to the distribution of his photographs among the peasantry. Ho! Ho! The Paris firm arranged that, and he has no substantial money backing from the Other Power. Even our agents in India know he hasn’t. What is the use of our organisation wasting men on work that is already done? Of course the Irish regiments in India are half mutinous as they stand.”

This shows how near a lie may come to the truth. An Irish regiment, for just so long as it stands still, is generally a hard handful to control, being reckless and rough. When, however, it is moved in the direction of musketry-firing, it becomes strangely and unpatriotically content with its lot. It has even been heard to cheer the Queen with enthusiasm on these occasions.

But the notion of tampering with the army was, from the point of view of Tehama Street, an altogether sound one. There is no shadow of stability in the policy of an English Government, and the most sacred oaths of England would, even if engrossed on vellum, find very few buyers among colonies and dependencies that have suffered from vain beliefs. But there remains to England always her army. That cannot change except in the matter of uniform and equipment. The officers may write to the papers demanding the heads of the Horse Guards in default of cleaner redress for grievances; the men may break loose across a country town and seriously startle the publicans; but neither officers nor men have it in their composition to mutiny after the continental manner. The English people, when they trouble to think about the army at all, are, and with justice, absolutely assured that it is absolutely trustworthy. Imagine for a moment their emotions on realising that such and such a regiment was in open revolt from causes directly due to England’s management of Ireland. They would probably send the regiment to the polls forthwith and examine their own consciences as to their duty to Erin; but they would never be easy any more. And it was this vague, unhappy mistrust that the I.A.A. were labouring to produce.

“Sheer waste of breath,” said the second man after a pause in the council. “I don’t see the use of tampering with their fool-army, but it has been tried before and we must try it again. It looks well in the reports. If we send one man from here you may bet your life that other men are going too. Order up Mulcahy.”

They ordered him up—a slim, slight, dark-haired young man, devoured with that blind rancorous hatred of England that only reaches its full growth across the Atlantic. He had sucked it from his mother’s breast in the little cabin at the back of the northern avenues of New York; he had been taught his rights and his wrongs, in German and Irish, on the canal fronts of Chicago; and San Francisco held men who told him strange and awful things of the great blind power over the seas. Once, when business took him across the Atlantic, he had served in an English regiment, and being insubordinate had suffered extremely. He drew all his ideas of England that were not bred by the cheaper patriotic prints from one iron-fisted colonel and an unbending adjutant. He would go to the mines if need be to teach his gospel. And he went, as his instructions advised, p.d.q.—which means “with speed”—to introduce embarrassment into an Irish regiment, “already half-mutinous, quartered among Sikh peasantry, all wearing miniatures of His Highness Dhulip Singh, Maharaja of the Punjab, next their hearts, and all eagerly expecting his arrival.” Other information equally valuable was given him by his masters. He was to be cautious, but never to grudge expense in winning the hearts of the men in the regiment. His mother in New York would supply funds, and he was to write to her once a month. Life is pleasant for a man who has a mother in New York to send him two hundred pounds a year over and above his regimental pay.

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In process of time, thanks to his intimate knowledge of drill and musketry exercise, the excellent Mulcahy, wearing the corporal’s stripe, went out in a troopship and joined Her Majesty’s Royal Loyal Musketeers, commonly known as the “Mavericks,” because they were masterless and unbranded cattle—sons of small farmers in County Clare, shoeless vagabonds of Kerry, herders of Ballyvegan, much wanted “moonlighters” from the bare rainy headlands of the south coast, officered by O’Mores, Bradys, Hills, Kilreas, and the like. Never to outward seeming was there more promising material to work on. The First Three had chosen their regiment well. It feared nothing that moved or talked save the colonel and the regimental Roman Catholic chaplain, the fat Father Dennis, who held the keys of heaven and hell, and blared like an angry bull when he desired to be convincing. Him also it loved because on occasions of stress he was used to tuck up his cassock and charge with the rest into the merriest of the fray, where he always found, good man, that the saints sent him a revolver when there was a fallen private to be protected, or—but this came as an afterthought his own gray head to be guarded.

Cautiously as he had been instructed, tenderly and with much beer, Mulcahy opened his projects to such as he deemed fittest to listen. And these were, one and all, of that quaint, crooked, sweet, profoundly irresponsible and profoundly lovable race that fight like fiends, argue like children, reason like women, obey like men, and jest like their own goblins of the rath through rebellion, loyalty, want, woe, or war. The underground work of a conspiracy is always dull and very much the same the world over. At the end of six months—the seed always falling on good ground—Mulcahy spoke almost explicitly, hinting darkly in the approved fashion at dread powers behind him, and advising nothing more nor less than mutiny. Were they not dogs, evilly treated? Had they not all their own and their national revenges to satisfy? Who in these days would do aught to nine hundred men in rebellion? Who, again, could stay them if they broke for the sea, licking up on their way other regiments only too anxious to join? And afterwards . . . here followed windy promises of gold and preferment, office and honour, ever dear to a certain type of Irishman.

As he finished his speech, in the dusk of a twilight, to his chosen associates, there was a sound of a rapidly unslung belt behind him. The arm of one Dan Grady flew out in the gloom and arrested something. Then said Dan—

“Mulcahy, you’re a great man, an’ you do credit to whoever sent you. Walk about a bit while we think of it.” Mulcahy departed elate. He knew his words would sink deep.

“Why the triple-dashed asterisks did ye not let me belt him’?” grunted a voice.

“Because I’m not a fat-headed fool. Boys, ’Tis what he’s been driving at these six months—our superior corp’ril with his education and his copies of the Irish papers and his everlasting beer. He’s been sent for the purpose, and that’s where the money comes from. Can ye not see? That man’s a gold-mine, which Horse Egan here would have destroyed with a belt-buckle. It would be throwing away the gifts of Providence not to fall in with his little plans. Of coorse we’ll mut’ny till all’s dry. Shoot the colonel on the parade-ground, massacree the company officers, ransack the arsenal, and then—Boys, did he tell you what next? He told me the other night when he was beginning to talk wild. Then we’re to join with the niggers, and look for help from Dhulip Singh and the Russians!”

“And spoil the best campaign that ever was this side of Hell! Danny, I’d have lost the beer to ha’ given him the belting he requires.”

“Oh, let him go this awhile, man! He’s got no—no constructiveness, but that’s the egg-meat of his plan, and you must understand that I’m in with it, an’ so are you. We’ll want oceans of beer to convince us—firmaments full. We’ll give him talk for his money, and one by one all the boys’ll come in and he’ll have a nest of nine hundred mutineers to squat in an’ give drink to.”

“What makes me killing-mad is his wanting us to do what the niggers did thirty years gone. That an’ his pig’s cheek in saying that other regiments would come along,” said a Kerry man.

“That’s not so bad as hintin’ we should loose off on the colonel.”

“Colonel be sugared! I’d as soon as not put a shot through his helmet to see him jump and clutch his old horse’s head. But Mulcahy talks o’ shootin’ our comp’ny orf’cers accidental.”

“He said that, did he?” said Horse Egan.

“Somethin’ like that, anyways. Can’t ye fancy ould Barber Brady wid a bullet in his lungs, coughin’ like a sick monkey, an’ sayin’, ‘Bhoys, I do not mind your gettin’ dhrunk, but you must hould your liquor like men. The man that shot me is dhrunk. I’ll suspend investigations for six hours, while I get this bullet cut out, and then—’”

“‘An’ then,” continued Horse Egan, for the peppery Major’s peculiarities of speech and manner were as well known as his tanned face; “‘an’ then, ye dissolute, half-baked, putty-faced scum o’ Connemara, if I find a man so much as lookin’ confused, begad, I’ll coort-martial the whole company. A man that can’t get over his liquor in six hours is not fit to belong to the Mavericks!’”

A shout of laughter bore witness to the truth of the sketch.

“It’s pretty to think of,” said the Kerry man slowly. “Mulcahy would have us do all the devilmint, and get clear himself, someways. He wudn’t be takin’ all this fool’s throuble in shpoilin’ the reputation of the regimint—”

“Reputation of your grandmother’s pig!” said Dan.

“Well, an’ he had a good reputation tu; so it’s all right. Mulcahy must see his way to clear out behind him, or he’d not ha’ come so far, talkin’ powers of darkness.”

“Did you hear anything of a regimental coortmartial among the Black Boneens, these days? Half a company of ’em took one of the new draft an’ hanged him by his arms with a tent-rope from a third-story verandah. They gave no reason for so doin’, but he was half dead. I’m thinking that the Boneens are short-sighted. It was a friend of Mulcahy’s, or a man in the same trade. They’d a deal better ha’ taken his beer,” returned Dan reflectively.

“Better still ha’ handed him up to the Colonel,” said Horse Egan, “onless—but sure the news wud be all over the counthry an’ give the reg’ment a bad name.”

“An’ there’d be no reward for that man—he but went about talkin’,” said the Kerry man artlessly.

“You speak by your breed,” said Dan, with a laugh. “There was never a Kerry man yet that wudn’t sell his brother for a pipe o’ tobacco an’ a pat on the back from a p’liceman.”

“Praise God I’m not a bloomin’ Orangeman,” was the answer.

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“No, nor never will be,” said Dan. “They breed men in Ulster. Would you like to thry the taste of one?”

The Kerry man looked and longed, but forbore. The odds of battle were too great. “Then you’ll not even give Mulcahy a—a strike for his money,” said the voice of Horse Egan, who regarded what he called “trouble” of any kind as the pinnacle of felicity.

Dan answered not at all, but crept on tip-toe, with long strides, to the mess-room, the men following. The room was empty. In a corner, cased like the King of Dahomey’s state umbrella, stood the regimental Colours. Dan lifted them tenderly and unrolled in the light of the candles the record of the Mavericks—tattered, worn, and hacked. The white satin was darkened everywhere with big brown stains, the gold threads on the crowned harp were frayed and discoloured, and the Red Bull, the totem of the Mavericks, was coffee-hued. The stiff, embroidered folds, whose price is human life, rustled down slowly. The Mavericks keep their colours long and guard them very sacredly.

“Vittoria, Salamanca, Toulouse, Waterloo, Moodkee, Ferozshah, an’ Sobraon—that was fought close next door here, against the very beggars he wants us to join. Inkerman, The Alma, Sebastopol! ‘What are those little businesses compared to the campaigns of General Mulcahy? The Mut’ny, think o’ that; the Mut’ny an’ some dirty little matters in Afghanistan; an’ for that an’ these an’ those”—Dan pointed to the names of glorious battles—“that Yankee man with the partin’ in his hair comes an’ says as easy as ‘have a drink’ . . . Holy Moses, there’s the captain!”

But it was the mess-sergeant who came in just as the men clattered out, and found the colours uncased.

From that day dated the mutiny of the Mavericks, to the joy of Mulcahy and the pride of his mother in New York—the good lady who sent the money for the beer. Never, so far as words went, was such a mutiny. The conspirators, led by Dan Grady and Horse Egan, poured in daily. They were sound men, men to be trusted, and they all wanted blood; but first they must have beer. They cursed the Queen, they mourned over Ireland, they suggested hideous plunder of the Indian country-side, and then, alas—some of the younger men would go forth and wallow on the ground in spasms of wicked laughter The genius of the Irish for conspiracies is remarkable. None the less they would swear no oaths but those of their own making, which were rare and curious, and they were always at pains to impress Mulcahy with the risks they ran. Naturally the flood of beer wrought demoralisation. But Mulcahy confused the causes of things, and when a very muzzy Maverick smote a sergeant on the nose or called his commanding officer a bald-headed old lard-bladder and even worse names, he fancied that rebellion and not liquor was at the bottom of the outbreak. Other gentlemen who have concerned themselves in larger conspiracies have made the same error.

The hot season, in which they protested no man could rebel, came to an end, and Mulcahy suggested a visible return for his teachings. As to the actual upshot of the mutiny he cared nothing. It would be enough if the English, infatuatedly trusting to the integrity of their army, should be startled with news of an Irish regiment revolting from political considerations. His persistent demands would have ended, at Dan’s instigation, in a regimental belting which in all probability would have killed him and cut off the supply of beer, had not he been sent on special duty some fifty miles away from the Cantonment to cool his heels in a mud fort and dismount obsolete artillery. Then the colonel of the Mavericks, reading his newspaper diligently, and scenting Frontier trouble from afar, posted to the army headquarters and pled with the Commander-in-chief for certain privileges, to be granted under certain contingencies,; which contingencies came about only a week later, when the annual little war on the border developed itself and the colonel returned to carry the good news to the Mavericks. He held the promise of the Chief for active service, and the men must get ready.

On the evening of the same day, Mulcahy, an unconsidered corporal—yet great in conspiracy—returned to cantonments, and heard sounds of strife and howlings from afar off. The mutiny had broken out and the barracks of the Mavericks were one white-washed pandemonium. A private tearing through the barrack-square, gasped in his ear, “Service! Active service. It’s a burnin’ shame.” Oh joy, the Mavericks had risen on the eve of battle! They would not—noble and loyal sons of Ireland—serve the Queen longer. The news would flash through the country-side and over to England, and he—Mulcahy—the trusted of the Third Three, had brought about the crash. The private stood in the middle of the square and cursed colonel, regiment, officers, and doctor, particularly the doctor, by his gods. An orderly of the native cavalry regiment clattered through the mob of soldiers. He was half lifted, half dragged from his horse, beaten on the back with mighty hand-claps till his eyes watered, and called all manner of endearing names. Yes, the Mavericks had fraternized with the native troops. Who then was the agent among the latter that had blindly wrought with Mulcahy so well?

An officer slunk, almost ran, from the mess to a barrack. He was mobbed by the infuriated soldiery, who closed round but did not kill him, for he fought his way to shelter, flying for the life. Mulcahy could have wept with pure joy and thankfulness. The very prisoners in the guard-room were shaking the bars of their cells and howling like wild beasts, and from every barrack poured the booming as of a big war-drum.

Mulcahy hastened to his own barrack. He could hardly hear himself speak. Eighty men were pounding with fist and heel the tables and trestles—eighty men, flushed with mutiny, stripped to their shirt sleeves, their knapsacks half-packed for the march to the sea, made the two-inch boards thunder again as they chanted, to a tune that Mulcahy knew well, the Sacred War Song of the Mavericks—

Listen in the north, my boys, there’s trouble on the wind;
Tramp o’ Cossack hooves in front, gray great-coats behind,
Trouble on the Frontier of a most amazin’ kind,
Trouble on the waters o’ the Oxus!

Then, as the table broke under the furious accompaniment—

Hurrah! hurrah! it’s north by west we go;
Hurrah! hurrah! the chance we wanted so;
Let ’em hear the chorus from Umballa to Moscow,
As we go marchin’ to the Kremling.

“Mother of all the saints in bliss and all the devils in cinders, where’s my fine new sock widout the heel?” howled Horse Egan, ransacking everybody’s valise but his own. He was engaged in making up deficiencies of kit preparatory to a campaign, and in that work he steals best who steals last. “Ah, Mulcahy, you’re in good time,” he shouted, “We’ve got the route, and we’re off on Thursday for a picnic wid the Lancers next door.”

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An ambulance orderly appeared with a huge basket full of lint rolls, provided by the forethought of the Queen for such as might need them later on. Horse Egan unrolled his bandage, and flicked it under Mulcahy’s nose, chanting—

“Sheepskin an’ bees’ wax, thunder, pitch, and plaster. The more you try to pull it off, the more it sticks the faster. As I was goin’ to New Orleans—

“You know the rest of it, my Irish American-Jew boy. By gad, ye have to fight for the Queen in the inside av a fortnight, my darlin’”

A roar of laughter interrupted. Mulcahy looked vacantly down the room. Bid a boy defy his father when the pantomime-cab is at the door, or a girl develop a will of her own when her mother is putting the last touches to the first ball-dress, but do not ask an Irish regiment to embark upon mutiny on the eve of a campaign, when it has fraternised with the native regiment that accompanies it, and driven its officers into retirement with ten thousand clamorous questions, and the prisoners dance for joy, and the sick men stand in the open calling down all known diseases on the head of the doctor, who has certified that they are “medically unfit for active service.” At even the Mavericks might have been mistaken for mutineers by one so unversed in their natures as Mulcahy. At dawn a girls’ school might have learned deportment from them. They knew that their colonel’s hand had closed, and that he who broke that iron discipline would not go to the front: nothing in the world will persuade one of our soldiers, when he is ordered to the north on the smallest of affairs, that he is not immediately going gloriously to slay Cossacks and cook his kettles in the palace of the Czar. A few of the younger men mourned for Mulcahy’s beer, because the campaign was to be conducted on strict temperance principles, but as Dan and Horse Egan said sternly, “We’ve got the beer-man with us. He shall drink now on his own hook.”

Mulcahy had not taken into account the possibility of being sent on active service. He had made up his mind that he would not go under any circumstances, but fortune was against him.

“Sick-you?” said the doctor, who had served an unholy apprenticeship to his trade in Tralee poorhouses. “You’re only home-sick, and what you call varicose veins come from over-eating. A little gentle exercise will cure that.” And later, “Mulcahy, my man, everybody is allowed to apply for a sick-certificate once. If he tries it twice we call him by an ugly name. Go back to your duty, and let’s hear no more of your diseases.”

I am ashamed to say that Horse Egan enjoyed the study of Mulcahy’s soul in those days, and Dan took an equal interest. Together they would communicate to their corporal all the dark lore of death which is the portion of those who have seen men die. Egan had the larger experience, but Dan the finer imagination. Mulcahy shivered when the former spoke of the knife as an intimate acquaintance, or the latter dwelt with loving particularity on the fate of those who, wounded and helpless, had been overlooked by the ambulances, and had fallen into the hands of the Afghan women-folk.

Mulcahy knew that the mutiny, for the present at least, was dead; knew, too, that a change had come over Dan’s usually respectful attitude towards him, and Horse Egan’s laughter and frequent allusions to abortive conspiracies emphasised all that the conspirator had guessed. The horrible fascination of the death-stories, however, made him seek the men’s society. He learned much more than he had bargained for; and in this manner. It was on the last night before the regiment entrained to the front. The barracks were stripped of everything movable, and the men were too excited to sleep. The bare walls gave out a heavy hospital smell of chloride of lime.

“And what,” said Mulcahy in an awe-stricken whisper, after some conversation on the eternal subject, “are you going to do to me, Dan?” This might have been the language of an able conspirator conciliating a weak spirit.

“You’ll see,” said Dan grimly, turning over in his cot, “or I rather shud say you’ll not see.”

This was hardly the language of a weak spirit. Mulcahy shook under the bed-clothes.

“Be easy with him,” put in Egan from the next cot. “He has got his chanst o’ goin’ clean. Listen, Mulcahy, all we want is for the good sake of the regiment that you take your death standing up, as a man shud. There’s be heaps an’ heaps of enemy—plenshus heaps. Go there an’ do all you can and die decent. You’ll die with a good name there. ’Tis not a hard thing considerin’.”—Again Mulcahy shivered.

“An’ how could a man wish to die better than fightin’?” added Dan consolingly.

“And if I won’t?” said the corporal in a dry whisper.

“There’ll be a dale of smoke,” returned Dan, sitting up and ticking off the situation on his fingers, “sure to be, an’ the noise of the firin’ll be tremenjus, an’ we’ll be running about up and down, the regiment will. But we, Horse and I—we’ll stay by you, Mulcahy, and never let you go. Maybe there’ll be an accident.”

“It’s playing it low on me. Let me go. For pity’s sake, let me go. I never did you harm, and—and I stood you as much beer as I could. Oh, don’t be hard on me, Dan! You are—you were in it too. You won’t kill me up there, will you?”

“I’m not thinkin’ of the treason; though you shud be glad any honest boys drank with you. It’s for the regiment. We can’t have the shame o’ you bringin’ shame on us. You went to the doctor quiet as a sick cat to get and stay behind an’ live with the women at the depot—you that wanted us to run to the sea in wolf-packs like the rebels none of your black blood dared to be! But we knew about your goin’ to the doctor, for he told in mess, and it’s all over the regiment. Bein’, as we are, your best friends, we didn’t allow any one to molest you yet. We will see to you ourselves. Fight which you will—us or the enemy you’ll never lie in that cot again, and there’s more glory and maybe less kicks from fightin’ the enemy. That’s fair speakin’.”—“And he told us by word of mouth to go and join with the niggers—you’ve forgotten that, Dan,” said Horse Egan, to justify sentence.

“What’s the use of plaguin’ the man? One shot pays for all. Sleep ye sound, Mulcahy. But you onderstand, do ye not?”

Mulcahy for some weeks understood very little of anything at all save that ever at his elbow, in camp or at parade, stood two big men with soft voices adjuring him to commit hari-kari lest a worse thing should happen—to die for the honour of the regiment in decency among the nearest knives. But Mulcahy dreaded death. He remembered certain things that priests had said in his infancy, and his mother—not the one at New York—starting from her sleep with shrieks to pray for a husband’s soul in torment. It is well to be of a cultured intelligence, but in time of trouble the weak human mind returns to the creed it sucked in at the breast, and if that creed be not a pretty one trouble follows. Also, the death he would have to face would be physically painful. Most conspirators have large imaginations. Mulcahy could see himself, as he lay on the earth in the night, dying by various causes. They were all horrible; the mother in New York was very far away, and the Regiment, the engine that, once you fall in its grip, moves you forward whether you will or won’t, was daily coming closer to the enemy!

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They were brought to the field of MarzunKatai, and with the Black Boneens to aid, they fought a fight that has never been set down in the newspapers. In response, many believe, to the fervent prayers of Father Dennis, the enemy not only elected to fight in the open, but made a beautiful fight, as many weeping Irish mothers knew later. They gathered behind walls or flickered across the open in shouting masses, and were pot-valiant in artillery. It was expedient to hold a large reserve and wait for the psychological moment that was being prepared by the shrieking shrapnel. Therefore the Mavericks lay down in open order on the brow of a hill to watch the play till their call should come. Father Dennis, whose duty was in the rear, to smooth the trouble of the wounded, had naturally managed to make his way to the foremost of his boys, and lay like a black porpoise, at length on the grass. To him crawled Mulcahy, ashen-gray, demanding absolution.

“’Wait till you’re shot,” said Father Dennis sweetly. “There’s a time for everything.”

Dan Grady chuckled as he blew for the fiftieth time into the breech of his speckless rifle. Mulcahy groaned and buried his head in his arms till a stray shot spoke like a snipe immediately above his head, and a general heave and tremour rippled the line. Other shots followed and a few took effect, as a shriek or a grunt attested. The officers, who had been lying down with the men, rose and began to walk steadily up and down the front of their companies.

This manoeuvre, executed, not for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith, to soothe men, demands nerve. You must not hurry, you must not look nervous, though you know that you are a mark for every rifle within extreme range, and above all if you are smitten you must make as little noise as possible and roll inwards through the files. It is at this hour, when the breeze brings the first salt whiff of the powder to noses rather cold at the tip, and the eye can quietly take in the appearance of each red casualty, that the strain on the nerves is strongest. Scotch regiments can endure for half a day and abate no whit of their zeal at the end; English regiments sometimes sulk under punishment, while the Irish, like the French, are apt to run forward by ones and twos, which is just as bad as running back. The truly wise commandant of highly-strung troops allows them, in seasons of waiting, to hear the sound of their own voices uplifted in song. There is a legend of an English regiment that lay by its arms under fire chaunting “Sam Hall,” to the horror of its newly appointed and pious colonel. The Black Boneens, who were suffering more than the Mavericks, on a hill half a mile away, began presently to explain to all who cared to listen—

We’ll sound the jubilee, from the centre to the sea,
And Ireland shall be free, says the Shan-van Vogh.

“Sing, boys,” said Father Dennis softly. “It looks as if we cared for their Afghan peas.”

Dan Grady raised himself to his knees and opened his mouth in a song imparted to him, as to most of his comrades, in the strictest confidence by Mulcahy—that Mulcahy then lying limp and fainting on the grass, the chill fear of death upon him.

Company after company caught up the words which, the I.A.A. say, are to herald the general rising of Erin, and to breathe which, except to those duly appointed to hear, is death. Wherefore they are printed in this place.

The Saxon in Heaven’s just balance is weighed,
His doom like Belshazzar’s in death has been cast,
And the hand of the venger shall never be stayed
Till his race, faith, and speech are a dream of the past.

They were heart-filling lines and they ran with a swirl; the I.A.A. are better served by their pens than their petards. Dan clapped Mulcahy merrily on the back, asking him to sing up. The officers lay down again. There was no need to walk any more. Their men were soothing themselves thunderously, thus—

St. Mary in Heaven has written the vow
That the land shall not rest till the heretic blood,
From the babe at the breast to the hand at the plough,
Has rolled to the ocean like Shannon in flood!

“I’ll speak to you after all’s over,” said Father Dennis authoritatively in Dan’s ear. “What’s the use of confessing to me when you do this foolishness? Dan, you’ve been playing with fire! I’ll lay you more penance in a week than—”

“Come along to Purgatory with us, Father dear. The Boneens are on the move; they’ll let us go now!”

The regiment rose to the blast of the bugle as one man; but one man there was who rose more swiftly than all the others, for half an inch of bayonet was in the fleshy part of his leg.

“You’ve got to do it,” said Dan grimly. “Do it decent, anyhow;” and the roar of the rush drowned his words, for the rear companies thrust forward the first, still singing as they swung down the slope—

From the child at the breast to the hand at the plough
Shall roll to the ocean like Shannon in flood!

They should have sung it in the face of England, not of the Afghans, whom it impressed as much as did the wild Irish yell.

“They came down singing,” said the unofficial report of the enemy, borne from village to village the next day. “They continued to sing, and it was written that our men could not abide when they came. It is believed that there was magic in the aforesaid song.”

Dan and Horse Egan kept themselves in the neighbourhood of Mulcahy. Twice the man would have bolted back in the confusion. Twice he was heaved, kicked, and shouldered back again into the unpaintable inferno of a hotly contested charge.

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At the end, the panic excess of his fear drove him into madness beyond all human courage. His eyes staring at nothing, his mouth open and frothing, and breathing as one in a cold bath, he went forward demented, while Dan toiled after him. The charge checked at a high mud wall. It was Mulcahy who scrambled up tooth and nail and hurled down among the bayonets the amazed Afghan who barred his way. It was Mulcahy, keeping to the straight line of the rabid dog, who led a collection of ardent souls at a newly unmasked battery and flung himself on the muzzle of a gun as his companions danced among the gunners. It was Mulcahy who ran wildly on from that battery into the open plain, where the enemy were retiring in sullen groups. His hands were empty, he had lost helmet and belt, and he was bleeding from a wound in the neck. Dan and Horse Egan, panting and distressed, had thrown themselves down on the ground by the captured guns, when they noticed Mulcahy’s charge.

“Mad,” said Horse Egan critically. “Mad with fear! He’s going straight to his death, an’ shouting’s no use.”

“Let him go. Watch now! If we fire we’ll hit him maybe.”

The last of a hurrying crowd of Afghans turned at the noise of shod feet behind him, and shifted his knife ready to hand. This, he saw, was no time to take prisoners. Mulcahy tore on, sobbing; the straight-held blade went home through the defenceless breast, and the body pitched forward almost before a shot from Dan’s rifle brought down the slayer and still further hurried the Afghan retreat. The two Irishmen went out to bring in their dead.

“He was given the point, and that was an easy death,” said Horse Egan, viewing the corpse. “But would you ha’ shot him, Danny, if he had lived?”

“He didn’t live, so there’s no sayin’. But I doubt I wud have bekaze of the fun he gave us—let alone the beer. Hike up his legs, Horse, and we’ll bring him in. Perhaps ’tis better this way.”

They bore the poor limp body to the mass of the regiment, lolling open-mouthed on their rifles; and there was a general snigger when one of the younger subalterns said, “That was a good man!”

“Phew,” said Horse Egan, when a burial-party had taken over the burden. “I’m powerful dhry, and this reminds me there’ll be no more beer at all.”

“Fwhy not?” said Dan, with a twinkle in his eye as he stretched himself for rest. “Are we not conspirin’ all we can, an’ while we conspire are we not entitled to free dhrinks? Sure his ould mother in New York would not let her son’s comrades perish of drouth—if she can be reached at the end of a letter.”

“You’re a janius,” said Horse Egan. “0’ coorse she will not. I wish this crool war was over, an’ we’d get back to canteen. Faith, the Commander-in-chief ought to be hanged in his own little sword-belt for makin’ us work on wather.”

The Mavericks were generally of Horse Egan’s opinion. So they made haste to get their work done as soon as possible, and their industry was rewarded by unexpected peace. “We can fight the sons of Adam,” said the tribesmen, “but we cannot fight the sons of Eblis, and this regiment never stays still in one place. Let us therefore come in.” They came in, and “this regiment” withdrew to conspire under the leadership of Dan Grady.

Excellent as a subordinate, Dan failed altogether as a chief-in- command—possibly because he was too much swayed by the advice of the only man in the regiment who could manufacture more than one kind of handwriting. The same mail that bore to Mulcahy’s mother in New York a letter from the colonel telling her how valiantly her son had fought for the Queen, and how assuredly he would have been recommended for the Victoria Cross had he survived, carried a communication signed, I grieve to say, by that same colonel and all the officers of the regiment, explaining their willingness to do “anything which is contrary to the regulations and all kinds of revolutions” if only a little money could be forwarded to cover incidental expenses. Daniel Grady, Esquire, would receive funds, vice Mulcahy, who “was unwell at this present time of writing.”

Both letters were forwarded from New York to Tehama Street, San Francisco, with marginal comments as brief as they were bitter. The Third Three read and looked at each other. Then the Second Conspirator—he who believed in “joining hands with the practical branches”—began to laugh, and on recovering his gravity said, “Gentlemen, I consider this will be a lesson to us. We’re left again. Those cursed Irish have let us down. I knew they would, but”—here he laughed afresh—“I’d give considerable to know what was at the back of it all.”

His curiosity would have been satisfied had he seen Dan Grady, discredited regimental conspirator, trying to explain to his thirsty comrades in India the non-arrival of funds from New York.

Mowgli’s Brothers

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Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free—
The herds are shut in byre and hut,
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!
(Night-Song in the Jungle)

IT was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day’s rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big grey nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. ‘Augrh!’ said Father Wolf, ‘it is time to hunt again’; and he was going to spring, downhill when a little shadow with a bushy tail crossed the threshold and whined: ‘Good luck go with you, O Chief of the Wolves; and good luck and strong white teeth go with the noble children, that they may never forget the hungry in this world.’

It was the jackal—Tabaqui, the Dish-licker—and the wolves of India despise Tabaqui because he runs about making mischief, and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the village rubbish-heaps. But they are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui, more than any one else in the Jungle, is apt to go mad, and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of any one, and runs through the forest biting everything in his way. Even the tiger runs and hides when little Tabaqui goes mad, for madness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature. We call it hydrophobia, but they call it dewanee—the madness—and run.

‘Enter, then, and look,’ said Father Wolf stiffly; ‘but there is no food here.’

‘For a wolf, no,’ said Tabaqui; ‘but for so mean a person as myself a dry bone is a good feast. Who are we, the Gidur-log [the Jackal-People], to pick and choose?’ He scuttled to the back of the cave, where he found the bone of a buck with some meat on it, and sat, cracking the end merrily.

‘All thanks for this good meal,’ he said, licking his lips: ‘How beautiful are the noble children! How large are their eyes! And so young too! Indeed, indeed, I might have remembered that the children of Kings are men from the beginning.’

Now, Tabaqui knew as well as any one else that there is nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces; and it pleased him to see Mother and Father Wolf look uncomfortable.

Tabaqui sat still, rejoicing in the mischief that he had made: then he said spitefully:

‘Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting-grounds. He will hunt among these hills for the next moon, so he has told me.’

Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga River, twenty miles away.

‘He has no right!’ Father Wolf began angrily —‘By the Law of the jungle he has no right to change his quarters without due warning. He will frighten every head of game within ten miles, and I—I have to kill for two, these days.’

‘His mother did not call him Lungri [the Lame One] for nothing,’ said Mother Wolf quietly. ‘He has been lame in one foot from his birth. That is why he has only killed cattle. Now the villagers of the Waingunga are angry with him, and he has come here to make our villagers angry. They will scour the Jungle for him when he is far away, and we and our children must run when the grass is set alight. Indeed, we are very grateful to Shere Khan!’

‘Shall I tell him of your gratitude?’ said Tabaqui.

‘Out!’ snapped Father Wolf. ‘Out and hunt with thy master. Thou hast done harm enough for one night.’

‘I go,’ said Tabaqui quietly. ‘Ye can hear Shere Khan below in the thickets. I might have saved myself the message.’

Father Wolf listened, and below in the valley that ran down to a little river, he heard the dry, angry, snarly, singsong whine of a tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all the jungle knows it.

‘The fool!’ said Father Wolf. ‘To begin a night’s work with that noise! Does he think that our buck are like his fat Waingunga bullocks?’

‘H’sh! It is neither bullock nor buck he hunts to-night,’ said Mother Wolf. ‘It is Man.’ The whine had changed to a sort of humming purr that seemed to come from every quarter of the compass. It was the noise that bewilders woodcutters and gipsies sleeping in the open, and makes them run sometimes into the very mouth of the tiger.

‘Man!’ said Father Wolf, showing all his white teeth. ‘Faugh! Are there not enough beetles and frogs in the tanks that he must eat Man, and on our ground too?’

The Law of the jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting-grounds of his pack or tribe. The real reason for this is that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the Jungle suffers. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenceless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him. They say too—and it is true—that man-eaters become mangy, and lose their teeth.

The purr grew louder, and ended in the fullthroated ‘Aaarh!’ of the tiger’s charge.

Then there was a howl—an untigerish howl—from Shere Khan. ‘He has missed,’ said Mother Wolf. ‘What is it?’

Father Wolf ran out a few paces and heard Shere Khan muttering and mumbling savagely, as he tumbled about in the scrub.

‘The fool has had no more sense than to jump at a woodcutter’s camp-fire, and has burned his feet,’ said Father Wolf, with a grunt. ‘Tabaqui is with him.’

‘Something is coming uphill,’ said Mother Wolf, twitching one ear. ‘Get ready.’

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The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf dropped with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then, if you had been watching, you would have seen the most wonderful thing in the world—the wolf checked in midspring. He made his bound before he saw what it was he was jumping at, and then he tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot up straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost where he left ground.

‘Man!’ he snapped. ‘A man’s cub. Look!’

Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a naked brown baby who could just walk—as soft and as dimpled a little atom as ever came to a wolf’s cave at night. He looked up into Father Wolf’s face, and laughed.

‘Is that a man’s cub?’ said Mother Wolf. ‘I have never seen one. Bring it here.’

A wolf accustomed to moving his own cubs can, if necessary, mouth an egg without breaking it, and though Father Wolf’s jaws closed right on the child’s back not a tooth even scratched the skin, as he laid it down among the cubs.

‘How little! How naked, and—how bold!’ said Mother Wolf softly. The baby was pushing his way between the cubs to get close to the warm hide. ‘Ahai! He is taking his meal with the others. And so this is a man’s cub. Now, was there ever a wolf that could boast of a man’s cub among her children?’

‘I have heard now and again of such a thing, but never in our Pack or in my time,’ said Father Wolf. ‘He is altogether without hair, and I could kill him with a touch of my foot. But see, he looks up and is not afraid.’

The moonlight was blocked out of the mouth of the cave, for Shere Khan’s great square head and shoulders were thrust into the entrance. Tabaqui, behind him, was squeaking: ‘My lord, my lord, it went in here!’

‘Shere Khan does us great honour,’ said Father Wolf, but his eyes were very angry. ‘What does Shere Khan need? ’

‘My quarry. A man’s cub went this way,’ said Shere Khan. ‘Its parents have run off. Give it to me.’

Shere Khan had jumped at a woodcutter’s camp-fire, as Father Wolf had said, and was furious from the pain of his burned feet. But Father Wolf knew that the mouth of the cave was too narrow for a tiger to come in by. Even where he was, Shere Khan’s shoulders and forepaws were cramped for want of room, as a man’s would be if he tried to fight in a barrel.

‘The Wolves are a free people,’ said Father Wolf. ‘They take orders from the Head of the Pack, and not from any striped cattle-killer. The man’s cub is ours—to kill if we choose.’

‘Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak!’

The tiger’s roar filled the cave with thunder. Mother Wolf shook herself clear of the cubs and sprang forward, her eyes, like two green moons in the darkness, facing the blazing eyes of Shere Khan.

‘And it is I, Raksha [The Demon], who answer. The man’s cub is mine, Lungri—mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs—frog-eater—fish-killer—he shall hunt thee! Now get hence, or by the Sambhur that I killed (I eat no starved cattle), back thou goest to thy mother, burned beast of the jungle, lamer than ever thou camest into the world! Go!’

Father Wolf looked on amazed. He had almost forgotten the days when he won Mother Wolf in fair fight from five other wolves, when she ran in the Pack and was not called The Demon for compliment’s sake. Shere Khan might have faced Father Wolf, but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for he knew that where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and would fight to the death. So he backed out of the cave-mouth growling, and when he was clear he shouted:—

‘Each dog barks in his own yard! We will see what the Pack will say to this fostering of man cubs. The cub is mine, and to my teeth he will come in the end, O bush-tailed thieves!’

Mother Wolf threw herself down panting among the cubs, and Father Wolf said to her gravely:—

‘Shere Khan speaks this much truth. The cub must be shown to the Pack. Wilt thou still keep him, Mother?’

‘Keep him!’ she gasped. ‘He came naked, by night, alone and very hungry; yet he was not afraid! Look, he has pushed one of my babes to one side already. And that lame butcher would have killed him and would have run off to the Waingunga while the villagers here hunted through all our lairs in revenge! Keep him? Assuredly I will keep him. Lie still, little frog. O thou Mowgli—for Mowgli the Frog I will call thee—the time will come when thou wilt hunt Shere Khan as he has hunted thee.’

‘But what will our Pack say?’ said Father Wolf.

The Law of the Jungle lays down very clearly that any wolf may, when he marries, withdraw from the Pack he belongs to; but as soon as his cubs are old enough to stand on their feet he must bring them to the Pack Council, which is generally held once a month at full moon, in order that the other wolves may identify them. After that inspection the cubs are free to run where they please, and until they have killed their first buck no excuse is accepted if a grown wolf of the Pack kills one of them. The punishment is death where the murderer can be found; and if you think for a minute you will see that this must be so.

Father Wolf waited till his cubs could run a little, and then on the night of the Pack Meeting took them and Mowgli and Mother Wolf to the Council Rock—a hilltop covered with stones and boulders where a hundred wolves could hide. Akela, the great grey Lone Wolf, who led all the Pack by strength and cunning, lay out at full length on his rock, and below him sat forty or more wolves of every size and colour, from badger-coloured veterans who could handle a buck alone, to young black three-year-olds who thought they could. The Lone Wolf had led them for a year now. He had fallen twice into a wolf-trap in his youth, and once he had been beaten and left for dead; so he knew the manners and customs of men. There was very little talking at the Rock. The cubs tumbled over each other in the centre of the circle where their mothers and fathers sat, and now and again a senior wolf would go quietly up to a cub, look at him carefully, and return to his place on noiseless feet. Sometimes a mother would push her cub far out into the moonlight, to be sure that he had not been overlooked. Akela from his rock would cry: ‘Ye know the Law—ye know the Law. Look well, O Wolves!’ and the anxious mothers would take up the call: ‘Look—look well, O Wolves!’

At last—and Mother Wolf’s neck-bristles lifted as the time came—Father Wolf pushed ‘Mowgli the Frog,’ as they called him, into the centre, where he sat laughing and playing with some pebbles that glistened in the moonlight.

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Akela never raised his head from his paws, but went on with the monotonous cry: ‘Look well!’ A muffled roar came up from behind the rocks—the voice of Shere Khan crying: ‘The cub is mine. Give him to me. What have the Free People to do with a man’s cub?’ Akela never even twitched his ears: all he said was: ‘Look well, O Wolves! What have the Free People to do with the orders of any save the Free People? Look well!’

There was a chorus of deep growls, and a young wolf in his fourth year flung back Shere Khan’s question to Akela: ‘What have the Free People to do with a man’s cub?’ Now, the Law of the jungle lays down that if there is any dispute as to the right of a cub to be accepted by the Pack, he must be spoken for by at least two members of the Pack who are not his father and mother.

‘Who speaks for this cub?’ said Akela. ‘Among the Free People who speaks?’ There was no answer, and Mother Wolf got ready for what she knew would be her last fight, if things came to fighting.

Then the only other creature who is allowed at the Pack Council—Baloo, the sleepy brown bear who teaches the wolfcubs the Law of the Jungle: old Baloo, who can come and go where he pleases because he eats only nuts and roots and honey—rose up on his hindquarters and grunted.

‘The man’s cub—the man’s cub?’ he said. ‘I speak for the man’s cub. There is no harm in a man’s cub. I have no gift of words, but I speak the truth. Let him run with the Pack, and be entered with the others. I myself will teach him.’

‘We need yet another,’ said Akela. ‘Baloo has spoken, and he is our teacher for the young cubs. Who speaks besides Baloo? ’

A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.

‘O Akela, and ye the Free People,’ he purred, ‘I have no right in your assembly; but the Law of the Jungle says that if there is a doubt which is not a killing matter in regard to a new cub, the life of that cub may be bought at a price. And the Law does not say who may or may not pay that price. Am I right?’

‘Good! good!’ said the young wolves, who are always hungry. ‘Listen to Bagheera. The cub can be bought for a price. It is the Law.’

‘Knowing that I have no right to speak here, I ask your leave.’

‘Speak then,’ cried twenty voices.

‘To kill a naked cub is shame. Besides, he may make better sport for you when he is grown. Baloo has spoken in his behalf. Now to Baloo’s word I will add one bull, and a fat one, newly killed, not half a mile from here, if ye will accept the man’s cub according to the Law. Is it difficult?’

There was a clamour of scores of voices, saying: ‘What matter? He will die in the winter rains. He will scorch in the sun. What harm can a naked frog do us? Let him run with the Pack. Where is the bull, Bagheera? Let him be accepted.’ And then came Akela’s deep bay, crying: ‘Look well—look well, O Wolves!’

Mowgli was still deeply interested in the pebbles and he did not notice when the wolves came and looked at him one by one. At last they all went down the hill for the dead bull, and only Akela, Bagheera, Baloo, and Mowgli’s own wolves were left. Shere Khan roared still in the night, for he was very angry that Mowgli had not been handed over to him.

‘Ay, roar well,’ said Bagheera, under his whiskers; ‘for the time comes when this naked thing will make thee roar to another tune, or I know nothing of Man.’

‘It was well done,’ said Akela. ‘Men and their cubs are very wise. He may be a help in time.’

‘Truly, a help in time of need; for none can hope to lead the Pack for ever,’ said Bagheera.

Akela said nothing. He was thinking of the time that comes to every leader of every pack when his strength goes from him and he gets feebler and feebler, till at last he is killed by the wolves and a new leader comes up—to be killed in his turn.

‘Take him away,’ he said to Father Wolf, ‘and train him as befits one of the Free People.’

And that is how Mowgli was entered into the Seeonee Wolf-Pack at the price of a bull and on Baloo’s good word.

.     .     .    .     .

Now you must be content to skip ten or eleven whole years, and only guess at all the wonderful life that Mowgli led among the wolves, because if it were written out it would fill ever so many books. He grew up with the cubs, though they, of course, were grown wolves almost before he was a child, and Father Wolf taught him his business, and the meaning of things in the Jungle, till every rustle in the grass, every breath of the warm night air, every note of the owls above his head, every scratch of a bat’s claws as it roosted for a while in a tree, and every splash of every little fish jumping in a pool, meant just as much to him as the work of his office means to a business man. When he was not learning, he sat out in the sun and slept, and ate and went to sleep again; when he felt dirty or hot he swam in the forest pools; and when he wanted honey (Baloo told him that honey and nuts were just as pleasant to eat as raw meat) he climbed up for it, and that Bagheera showed him how to do. Bagheera would lie out on a branch and call, ‘Come along, Little Brother,’ and at first Mowgli would cling like the sloth, but afterward he would fling himself through the branches almost as boldly as the grey ape. He took his place at the Council Rock, too, when the Pack met, and there he discovered that if he stared hard at any wolf, the wolf would be forced to drop his eyes, and so he used to stare for fun. At other times he would pick the long thorns out of the pads of his friends, for wolves suffer terribly from thorns and burrs in their coats. He would go down the hillside into the cultivated lands by night, and look very curiously at the villagers in their huts, but he had a mistrust of men because Bagheera showed him a square box with a drop-gate so cunningly hidden in the Jungle that he nearly walked into it, and told him that it was a trap. He loved better than anything else to go with Bagheera into the dark warm heart of the forest, to sleep all through the drowsy day, and at night to see how Bagheera did his killing. Bagheera killed right and left as he felt hungry, and so did Mowgli—with one exception. As soon as he was old enough to understand things, Bagheera told him that he must never touch cattle because he had been bought into the Pack at the price of a bull’s life. ‘All the Jungle is thine,’ said Bagheera, ‘and thou canst kill everything that thou art strong enough to kill; but for the sake of the bull that bought thee thou must never kill or eat any cattle young or old. That is the Law of the Jungle.’ Mowgli obeyed faithfully.

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And he grew and grew strong as a boy must grow who does not know that he is learning any lessons, and who has nothing in the world to think of except things to eat.

Mother Wolf told him once or twice that Shere Khan was not a creature to be trusted, and that some day he must kill Shere Khan; but though a young wolf would have remembered that advice every hour, Mowgli forgot it because he was only a boy—though he would have called himself a wolf if he had been able to speak in any human tongue.

Shere Khan was always crossing his path in the Jungle, for as Akela grew older and feebler the lame tiger had come to be great friends with the younger wolves of the Pack, who followed him for scraps, a thing that Akela would never have allowed if he had dared to push his authority to the proper bounds. Then Shere Khan would flatter them and wonder that such fine young hunters were content to be led by a dying wolf and a man’s cub. ‘They tell me,’ Shere Khan would say, ‘that at Council ye dare not look him between the eyes’; and the young wolves would growl and bristle.

Bagheera, who had eyes and ears everywhere, knew something of this, and once or twice he told Mowgli in so many words that Shere Khan would kill him some day; and Mowgli would laugh and answer: ‘I have the Pack and I have thee; and Baloo, though he is so lazy, might strike a blow or two for my sake. Why should I be afraid?’

It was one very warn day that a new notion came to Bagheera—born of something that he had heard. Perhaps Ikki the Porcupine had told him; but he said to Mowgli when they were deep in the Jungle, as the boy lay with his head on Bagheera’s beautiful black skin: ‘Little Brother, how often have I told thee that Shere Khan is thy enemy?’

‘As many times as there are nuts on that palm,’ said Mowgli, who, naturally, could not count. ‘What of it? I am sleepy, Bagheera, and Shere Khan is all long tail and loud talk—like Mao, the Peacock.’

‘But this is no time for sleeping. Baloo knows it; I know it; the Pack know it; and even the foolish, foolish deer know. Tabaqui has told thee, too.’

‘Ho! ho!’ said Mowgli. ‘Tabaqui came to me not long ago with some rude talk that I was a naked man’s cub and not fit to dig pig-nuts; but I caught Tabaqui by the tail and swung him twice against a palm-tree to teach him better manners.’

‘That was foolishness; for though Tabaqui is a mischief-maker, he would have told thee of something that concerned thee closely. Open those eyes, Little Brother. Shere Khan dare not kill thee in the Jungle; but remember, Akela is very old, and soon the day comes when he cannot kill his buck, and then he will be leader no more. Many of the wolves that looked thee over when thou wast brought to the Council first are old too, and the young wolves believe, as Shere Khan has taught them, that a man-cub has no place with the Pack. In a little time thou wilt be a man.’

‘And what is a man that he should not run with his brothers?’ said Mowgli. ‘I was born in the Jungle. I have obeyed the Law of the Jungle, and there is no wolf of ours from whose paws I have not pulled a thorn. Surely they are my brothers!’

Bagheera stretched himself at full length and half shut his eyes. ‘Little Brother,’ said he, ‘feel under my jaw.’

Mowgli put up his strong brown hand, and just under Bagheera’s silky chin, where the giant rolling muscles were all hid by the glossy hair, he came upon a little bald spot.

‘There is no one in the Jungle that knows that I, Bagheera, carry that mark—the mark of the collar; and yet, Little Brother, I was born among men, and it was among men that my mother died—in the cages of the King’s Palace at Oodeypore. It was because of this that I paid the price for thee at the Council when thou wast a little naked cub. Yes, I too was born among men. I had never seen the Jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera—the Panther—and no man’s plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away; and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the Jungle than Shere Khan. Is it not so?’

‘Yes,’ said Mowgli; ‘all the Jungle fear Bagheera—all except Mowgli.’

‘Oh, thou art a man’s cub,’ said the Black Panther, very tenderly; ‘and even as I returned to my Jungle, so thou must go back to men at last,—to the men who are thy brothers,—if thou art not killed in the Council.’

‘But why—but why should any wish to kill me?’ said Mowgli.

‘Look at me,’ said Bagheera; and Mowgli looked at him steadily between the eyes. The big panther turned his head away in half a minute.

‘That is why,’ he said, shifting his paw on the leaves. ‘Not even I can look thee between the eyes, and I was born among men, and I love thee, Little Brother. The others they hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine—because thou art wise—because thou hast pulled out thorns from their feet—because thou art a man.’

‘I did not know these things,’ said Mowgli sullenly; and he frowned under his heavy black eyebrows.

‘What is the Law of the Jungle? Strike first and then give tongue. By thy very carelessness they know that thou art a man. But be wise. It is in my heart that when Akela misses his next kill,—and at each hunt it costs him more to pin the buck,—the Pack will turn against him and against thee. They will hold a Jungle Council at the Rock, and then—and then—I have it!’ said Bagheera, leaping up. ‘Go thou down quickly to the men’s huts in the valley, and take some of the Red Flower which they grow there, so that when the time comes thou mayest have even a stronger friend than I or Baloo or those of the Pack that love thee. Get the Red Flower.’

By Red Flower Bagheera meant fire, only no creature in the Jungle will call fire by its proper name. Every beast lives in deadly fear of it, and invents a hundred ways of describing it.

‘The Red Flower?’ said Mowgli. ‘That grows outside their huts in the twilight. I will get some.’

‘There speaks the man’s cub,’ said Bagheera proudly. ‘Remember that it grows in little pots. Get one swiftly, and keep it by thee for time of need.’

‘Good!’ said Mowgli. ‘I go. But art thou sure, O my Bagheera’—he slipped his arm round the splendid neck, and looked deep into the big eyes—‘art thou sure that all this is Shere Khan’s doing?’

‘By the Broken Lock that freed me, I am sure, Little Brother.’

‘Then, by the Bull that bought me, I will pay Shere Khan full tale for this, and it may be a little over,’ said Mowgli; and he bounded away.

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‘That is a man. That is all a man,’ said Bagheera to himself, lying down again. ‘Oh, Shere Khan, never was a blacker hunting than that frog-hunt of thine ten years ago!’

Mowgli was far and far through the forest, running hard, and his heart was hot in him. He came to the cave as the evening mist rose, and drew breath, and looked down the valley. The cubs were out, but Mother Wolf, at the back of the cave, knew by his breathing that something was troubling her frog.

‘What is it, Son?’ she said.

‘Some bat’s chatter of Shere Khan,’ he called back. ‘I hunt among the ploughed fields tonight,’ and he plunged downward through the bushes, to the stream at the bottom of the valley. There he checked, for he heard the yell of the Pack hunting, heard the, bellow of a hunted sambhur, and the snort as the buck turned at bay. Then there were wicked, bitter howls from the young wolves: ‘Akela! Akela! Let the Lone Wolf show his strength. Room for the leader of the Pack! Spring, Akela!’

The Lone Wolf must have sprung and missed his hold, for Mowgli heard the snap of his teeth and then a yelp as the sambhur knocked him over with his fore-foot.

He did not wait for anything more, but dashed on; and the yells grew fainter behind him as he ran into the crop-lands where the villagers lived.

‘Bagheera spoke truth,’ he panted, as he nestled down in some cattle-fodder by the window of a hut. ‘To-morrow is one day both for Akela and for me.’

Then he pressed his face close to the window and watched the fire on the hearth. He saw the husbandman’s wife get up and feed it in the night with black lumps; and when the morning came and the mists were all white and cold, he saw the man’s child pick up a wicker pot plastered inside with earth, fill it with lumps of red-hot charcoal, put it under his blanket, and go out to tend the cows in the byre.

‘Is that all?’ said Mowgli. ‘If a cub can do it, there is nothing to fear’; so he strode round the corner and met the boy, took the pot from his hand, and disappeared into the mist while the boy howled with fear.

‘They are very like me,’ said Mowgli, blowing into the pot, as he had seen the woman do. ‘This thing will die if I do not give it things to eat’; and he dropped twigs and dried bark on the red stuff. Half-way up the hill he met Bagheera with the morning dew shining like moonstones on his coat.

‘Akela has missed,’ said the Panther. ‘They would have killed him last night, but they needed thee also. They were looking for thee on the hill.’

‘I was among the ploughed lands. I am ready. See!’ Mowgli held up the fire-pot.

‘Good! Now, I have seen men thrust a dry branch into that stuff, and presently the Red Flower blossomed at the end of it. Art thou not afraid?’

‘No. Why should I fear? I remember now—if it is not a dream—how, before I was a Wolf, I lay beside the Red Flower, and it was warm and pleasant.’

All that day Mowgli sat in the cave tending his fire-pot and dipping dry branches into it to see how they looked. He found a branch that satisfied him, and in the evening when Tabaqui came to the cave and told him rudely enough that he was wanted at the Council Rock, he laughed till Tabaqui ran away. Then Mowgli went to the Council, still laughing.

Akela the Lone Wolf lay by the side of his rock as a sign that the leadership of the Pack was open, and Shere Khan with his following of scrapfed wolves walked to and fro openly, being flattered. Bagheera lay close to Mowgli, and the fire-pot was between Mowgli’s knees. When they were all gathered together, Shere Khan began to speak—a thing he would never have dared to do when Akela was in his prime.

‘He has no right,’ whispered Bagheera. ‘Say so. He is a dog’s son. He will be frightened.’

Mowgli sprang to his feet. ‘Free People,’ he cried, ‘does Shere Khan lead the Pack? What has a tiger to do with our leadership?’

‘Seeing that the leadership is yet open, and being asked to speak—’ Shere Khan began.

‘By whom?’ said Mowgli. ‘Are we all jackals, to fawn on this cattle-butcher? The leadership of the Pack is with the Pack alone.’

There were yells of ‘Silence, thou man’s cub!’ ‘Let him speak. He has kept our Law’; and at last the seniors of the Pack thundered: ‘Let the Dead Wolf speak.’ When a leader of the Pack has missed his kill, he is called the Dead Wolf as long as he lives, which is not long, as a rule.

Akela raised his old head wearily:—

‘Free People, and ye too, jackals of Shere Khan, for many seasons I have led ye to and from the kill, and in all my time not one has been trapped or maimed. Now I have missed my kill. Ye know how that plot was made. Ye know how ye brought me up to an untried buck to make my weakness known. It was cleverly done. Your right is to kill me here on the Council Rock now. Therefore, I ask, who comes to make an end of the Lone Wolf? For it is my right, by the Law of the Jungle, that ye come one by one.’

There was a long hush, for no single wolf cared to fight Akela to the death. Then Shere Khan roared: ‘Bah! what have we to do with this toothless fool? He is doomed to die! It is the man-cub who has lived too long. Free People, he was my meat from the first. Give him to me. I am weary of this man-wolf folly. He has troubled the Jungle for ten seasons. Give me the man-cub, or I will hunt here always, and not give you one bone. He is a man, a man’s child, and from the marrow of my bones I hate him!’

Then more than half the Pack yelled: ‘A man! a man! What has a man to do with us? Let him go to his own place.’

‘And turn all the people of the villages against us?’ clamoured Shere Khan. ‘No; give him to me. He is a man, and none of us can look him between the eyes.’

Akela lifted his head again, and said: ‘He has eaten our food. He has slept with us. He has driven game for us. He has broken no word of the Law of the Jungle.’

‘Also, I paid for him with a bull when he was accepted. The worth of a bull is little, but Bagheera’s honour is something that he will perhaps fight for,’ said Bagheera, in his gentlest voice.

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‘A bull paid ten years ago!’ the Pack snarled. ‘What do we care for bones ten years old?’

‘Or for a pledge?’ said Bagheera, his white teeth bared under his lip. ‘Well are ye called the Free People!’

‘No man’s cub can run with the people of the Jungle,’ howled Shere Khan. ‘Give him to me!’

‘He is our brother in all but blood,’ Akela went on; ‘and ye would kill him here! In truth, I have lived too long. Some of ye are eaters of cattle, and of others I have heard that, under Shere Khan’s teaching, ye go by dark night and snatch children from the villager’s door-step. Therefore I know ye to be cowards, and it is to cowards I speak. It is certain that I must die, and my life is of no worth, or I would offer that in the Man-cub’s place. But for the sake of the Honour of the Pack,—a little matter that by being without a leader ye have forgotten,—I promise that if ye let the Man-cub go to his own place, I will not, when my time comes to die, bare one tooth against ye. I will die without fighting. That will at least save the Pack three lives. More I cannot do; but if ye will, I can save ye the shame that comes of killing a brother against whom there is no fault,—a brother spoken for and bought into the Pack according to the Law of the Jungle.’

‘He is a man—a man—a man!’ snarled the Pack; and most of the wolves began to gather round Shere Khan, whose tail was beginning to switch.

‘Now the business is in thy hands,’ said Bagheera to Mowgli. ‘We can do no more except fight.’

Mowgli stood upright—the fire-pot in his hands. Then he stretched out his arms, and yawned in the face of the Council; but he was furious with rage and sorrow, for, wolf-like, the wolves had never told him how they hated him. ‘Listen, you!’ he cried. ‘There is no need for this dog’s jabber. Ye have told me so often tonight that I am a man (and indeed I would have been a wolf with you to my life’s end), that I feel your words are true. So I do not call ye my brothers any more, but sag [dogs], as a man should. What ye will do, and what ye will not do, is not yours to say. That matter is with me; and that we may see the matter more plainly, I, the man, have brought here a little of the Red Flower which ye, dogs, fear.’

He flung the fire-pot on the ground, and some of the red coals lit a tuft of dried moss that flared up, as all the Council drew back in terror before the leaping flames.

Mowgli thrust his dead branch into the fire till the twigs lit and crackled, and whirled it above his head among the cowering wolves.

‘Thou art the master,’ said Bagheera, in an undertone. ‘Save Akela from the death. He was ever thy friend.’

Akela, the grim old wolf who had never asked for mercy in his life, gave one piteous look at Mowgli as the boy stood all naked, his long black hair tossing over his shoulders in the light of the blazing branch that made the shadows jump and quiver.

‘Good!’ said Mowgli, staring round slowly. ‘I see that ye are dogs. I go from you to my own people—if they be my own people. The Jungle is shut to me, and I must forget your talk and your companionship; but I will be more merciful than ye are. Because I was all but your brother in blood, I promise that when I am a man among men I will not betray ye to men as ye have betrayed me.’ He kicked the fire with his foot, and the sparks flew up. ‘There shall be no war between any of us and the Pack. But here is a debt to pay before I go.’ He strode forward to where Shere Khan sat blinking stupidly at the flames, and caught him by the tuft on his chin. Bagheera followed in case of accidents. ‘Up, dog!’ Mowgli cried. ‘Up, when a man speaks, or I will set that coat ablaze!’

Shere Khan’s ears lay flat back on his head, and he shut his eyes, for the blazing branch was very near.

‘This cattle-killer said he would kill me in the Council because he had not killed me when I was a cub. Thus and thus, then, do we beat dogs when we are men. Stir a whisker, Lungri, and I ram the Red Flower down thy gullet!’ He beat Shere Khan over the head with the branch, and the tiger whimpered and whined in an agony of fear.

‘Pah! Singed jungle-cat’go now! But remember when next I come to the Council Rock, as a man should come, it will be with Shere Khan’s hide on my, head. For the rest, Akela goes free to live as he pleases. Ye will not kill him, because that is not my will. Nor do I think that ye will sit here any longer, lolling out your tongues as though ye were somebodies, instead of dogs whom I drive out—thus! Go!,’ The fire was burning furiously at the end of the branch, and Mowgli struck right and left round the circle, and the wolves ran howling with the sparks burning their fur. At last there were only Akela, Bagheera, and perhaps ten wolves that had taken Mowgli’s part. Then something began to hurt Mowgli inside him, as he had never been hurt in his life before, and he caught his breath and sobbed, and the tears ran down his face.

‘What is it? What is it?’ he said. ‘I do not wish to leave the Jungle, and I do not know what this is. Am I dying, Bagheera?’

‘No, Little Brother. Those are only tears such as men use,’ said Bagheera. ‘Now I know thou art a man, and a man’s cub no longer. The Jungle is shut indeed to thee henceforward. Let them fall, Mowgli. They are only tears.’ So Mowgli sat and cried as though his heart would break; and he had never cried in all his life before.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘I will go to men. But first I must say farewell to my mother’; and he went to the cave where she lived with Father Wolf, and he cried on her coat, while the four cubs howled miserably.

‘Ye will not forget me?’ said Mowgli.

‘Never while we can follow a trail,’ said the cubs. ‘Come to the foot of the hill when thou art a man, and we will talk to thee; and we will come into the crop-lands to play with thee by night.’

‘Come soon!’ said Father Wolf. ‘Oh, wise little frog, come again soon; for we be old, thy mother and I’

‘Come soon,’ said Mother Wolf, ‘little naked son of mine; for, listen, child of man, I loved thee more than ever I loved my cubs.’

‘I will surely come,’ said Mowgli; ‘and when I come it will be to lay out Shere Khan’s hide upon the Council Rock. Do not forget me! Tell them in the Jungle never to forget me!’

The dawn was beginning to break when Mowgli went down the hillside alone, to meet those mysterious things that are called men.