Tales – Page 36 – The Kipling Society

A Deal in Cotton

(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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LONG and long ago, when Devadatta was King of Benares, I wrote some tales concerning Strickland of the Punjab Police (who married Miss Youghal), and Adam, his son. Strickland has finished his Indian Service, and lives now at a place in England called Weston-super-Mare, where his wife plays the organ in one of the churches. Semi-occasionally he comes up to London, and occasionally his wife makes him visit his friends. Otherwise he plays golf and follows the harriers for his figure’s sake.If you remember that Infant who told a tale to Eustace Cleever the novelist, you will remember that he became a baronet with a vast estate. He has, owing to cookery, a little lost his figure, but he never loses his friends. I have found a wing of his house turned into a hospital for sick men, and there I once spent a week in the company of two dismal nurses and a specialist in “Sprue.” Another time the place was full of schoolboys—sons of Anglo-Indians whom the Infant had collected for the holidays, and they nearly broke his keeper’s heart.

But my last visit was better. The Infant called me up by wire, and I fell into the arms of a friend of mine, Colonel A.L. Corkran, so that the years departed from us, and we praised Allah, who had not yet terminated the Delights, nor separated the Companions.

Said Corkran, when he had explained how it felt to command a native Infantry regiment on the border: “The Stricks are coming for to-night-with their boy.”

“I remember him. The little fellow I wrote a story about,” I said. “Is he in the Service?”

“No. Strick got him into the Centro-Euro-Africa Protectorate. He’s Assistant-Commissioner at Dupe—wherever that is. Somaliland, ain’t it, Stalky?” asked the Infant.

Stalky puffed out his nostrils scornfully. “You’re only three thousand miles out. Look at the atlas.”

“Anyhow, he’s as rotten full of fever as the rest of you,” said the Infant, at length on the big divan. “And he’s bringing a native servant with him. Stalky be an athlete, and tell Ipps to put him in the stable room.”

“Why? Is he a Yao—like the fellow Wade brought here—when your housekeeper had fits?” Stalky often visits the Infant, and has seen some odd things.

“No. He’s one of old Strickland’s Punjabi policemen—and quite European—I believe.”

“Hooray! Haven’t talked Punjabi for three months—and a Punjabi from Central Africa ought to be amusin’.”

We heard the chuff of the motor in the porch, and the first to enter was Agnes Strickland, whom the Infant makes no secret of adoring.

He is devoted, in a fat man’s placid way, to at least eight designing women; but she nursed him once through a bad bout of Peshawur fever, and when she is in the house, it is more than all hers.

“You didn’t send rugs enough,” she began. “Adam might have taken a chill.”

“It’s quite warm in the tonneau. Why did you let him ride in front? “

“Because he wanted to,” she replied, with the mother’s smile, and we were introduced to the shadow of a young man leaning heavily on the shoulder of a bearded Punjabi Mohammedan.

“That is all that came home of him,” said his father to me. There was nothing in it of the child with whom I had journeyed to Dalhousie centuries since.”

“And what is this uniform?” Stalky asked of Imam Din, the servant, who came to attention on the marble floor.

“The uniform of the Protectorate troops, Sahib. Though I am the Little Sahib’s body-servant, it is not seemly for us white men to be attended by folk dressed altogether as servants.”

“And—and you white men wait at table on horseback?” Stalky pointed to the man’s spurs.

“These I added for the sake of honour when I came to England,” said Imam Din Adam smiled the ghost of a little smile that I began to remember, and we put him on the big couch for refreshments. Stalky asked him how much leave he had, and he said “Six months.”

“But he’ll take another six on medical certificate,” said Agnes anxiously. Adam knit his brows.

“You don’t want to—eh? I know. Wonder what my second in command is doing.” Stalky tugged his moustache, and fell to thinking of his Sikhs.

“Ah!” said the Infant. “I’ve only a few thousand pheasants to look after. Come along and dress for dinner. We’re just ourselves. What flower is your honour’s ladyship commanding for the table?”

“Just ourselves?” she said, looking at the crotons in the great hall. “Then let’s have marigolds the little cemetery ones.”

So it was ordered.

Now, marigolds to us mean hot weather, discomfort, parting, and death. That smell in our nostrils, and Adam’s servant in waiting, we naturally fell back more and more on the old slang, recalling at each glass those who had gone before. We did not sit at the big table, but in the bay window overlooking the park, where they were carting the last of the hay. When twilight fell we would not have candles, but waited for the moon, and continued our talk in the dusk that makes one remember.

Young Adam was not interested in our past except where it had touched his future. I think his mother held his hand beneath the table. Imam Din—shoeless, out of respect to the floors—brought him his medicine, poured it drop by drop, and asked for orders.

“Wait to take him to his cot when he grows weary,” said his mother, and Imam Din retired into the shadow by the ancestral portraits.

“Now what d’you expect to get out of your country?” the Infant asked, when—our India laid aside we talked Adam’s Africa. It roused him at once.

“Rubber—nuts—gums—and so on,” he said. “But our real future is cotton. I grew fifty acres of it last year in my District.”

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“My District!” said his father. “Hear him, Mummy!”

“I did though! I wish I could show you the sample. Some Manchester chaps said it was as good as any Sea Island cotton on the market.”

“But what made you a cotton-planter, my son?” she asked.

“My Chief said every man ought to have a shouk (a hobby) of sorts, and he took the trouble to ride a day out of his way to show me a belt of black soil that was just the thing for cotton.”

“Ah! What was your Chief like?” Stalky asked, in his silkiest tones.

“The best man alive—absolutely. He lets you blow your own nose yourself. The people call him”—Adam jerked out some heathen phrase—“that means the Man with the Stone Eyes, you know.”

“I’m glad of that. Because I’ve heard from other quarters” Stalky’s sentence burned like a slow match, but the explosion was not long delayed. “Other quarters!” Adam threw out a thin hand. “Every dog has his fleas. If you listen to them, of course!” The shake of his head was as I remembered it among his father’s policemen twenty years before, and his mother’s eyes shining through the dusk called on me to adore it. I kicked Stalky on the shin. One must not mock a young man’s first love or loyalty.

A lump of raw cotton appeared on the table.

“I thought there might be a need. Therefore I packed it between our shirts,” said the voice of Imam Din.

“Does he know as much English as that?” cried the Infant, who had forgotten his East.

We all admired the cotton for Adam’s sake, and, indeed, it was very long and glossy.

“It’s—it’s only an experiment,” he said. “We’re such awful paupers we can’t even pay for a mailcart in my District. We use a biscuit-box on two bicycle wheels. I only got the money for that”—he patted the stuff—“by a pure fluke.”

“How much did it cost?” asked Strickland.

“With seed and machinery—about two hundred pounds. I had the labour done by cannibals.”

“That sounds promising.” Stalky reached for a fresh cigarette.

“No, thank you,” said Agnes. “I’ve been at Weston-super-Mare a little too long for cannibals. I’ll go to the music-room and try over next Sunday’s hymns.”

She lifted the boy’s hand lightly to her lips, and tripped across the acres of glimmering floor to the music-room that had been the Infant’s ancestors’ banqueting hall. Her grey and silver dress disappeared under the musicians’ gallery; two electrics broke out, and she stood backed against the lines of gilded pipes.

“There’s an abominable self-playing attachment here!” she called.

“Me!” the Infant answered, his napkin on his shoulder. “That’s how I play Parsifal.”

“I prefer the direct expression. Take it away, Ipps.”

We heard old Ipps skating obediently all over the floor.

“Now for the direct expression,” said Stalky, and moved on the Burgundy recommended by the faculty to enrich fever-thinned blood.

“It’s nothing much. Only the belt of cotton-soil my chief showed me ran right into the Sheshaheli country. We haven’t been able to prove cannibalism against that tribe in the courts; but when a Sheshaheli offers you four pounds of woman’s breast, tattoo marks and all, skewered up in a plantain leaf before breakfast, you—”

“Naturally burn the villages before lunch,” said Stalky.

Adam shook his head. “No troops,” he sighed. “I told my Chief about it, and he said we must wait till they chopped a white man. He advised me if ever I felt like it not to commit a—a barren felo de se, but to let the Sheshaheli do it. Then he could report, and then we could mop ’em up!”

“Most immoral! That’s how we got—” Stalky quoted the name of a province won by just such a sacrifice.

“Yes, but the beasts dominated one end of my cotton-belt like anything. They chivied me out of it when I went to take soil for analysis—me and Imam Din.”

“Sahib! Is there a need?” The voice came out of the darkness, and the eyes shone over Adam’s shoulder ere it ceased.

“None. The name was taken in talk.” Adam abolished him with a turn of the finger. “I couldn’t make a casus belli of it just then, because my Chief had taken all the troops to hammer a gang of slave kings up north. Did you ever hear of our war against Ibn Makarrah? He precious nearly lost us the Protectorate at one time, though he’s an ally of ours now.”

“Wasn’t he rather a pernicious brute, even as they go?” said Stalky. “Wade told me about him last year.”

“Well, his nickname all through the country was ‘The Merciful,’ and he didn’t get that for nothing. None of our people ever breathed his proper name. They said ‘He’ or ‘That One,’ and they didn’t say it aloud, either. He fought us for eight months.”

“I remember. There was a paragraph about it in one of the papers,” I said.

“We broke him, though. No—the slavers don’t come our way, because our men have the reputation of dying too much, the first month after they’re captured. That knocks down profits, you see.”

“What about your charming friends, the Sheshahelis?” said the Infant.

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“There’s no market for Sheshaheli. People would as soon buy crocodiles. I believe, before we annexed the country, Ibn Makarrah dropped down on ’em once—to train his young men—and simply hewed ’em in pieces. The bulk of my people are agriculturists just the right stamp for cotton-growers. What’s Mother playing?—‘Once in royal’?”

The organ that had been crooning as happily as a woman over her babe restored, steadied to a tune.

“Magnificent! Oh, magnificent! “ said the Infant loyally. I had never heard him sing but once, and then, though it was early in the tolerant morning, his mess had rolled him into a lotus pond.

“How did you get your cannibals to work for you?” asked Strickland.

“They got converted to civilization after my Chief smashed Ibn Makarrah—just at the time I wanted ’em. You see my Chief had promised me in writing that if I could scrape up a surplus he would not bag it for his roads this time, but I might have it for my cotton game. I only needed two hundred pounds. Our revenues didn’t run to it.”

“What is your revenue?” Stalky asked in the vernacular.

“With hut-tax, traders’ game and mining licenses, not more than fourteen thousand rupees; every penny of it ear-marked months ahead.” Adam sighed.

“Also there is a fine for dogs straying in the Sahib’s camp. Last year it exceeded three rupees,” Imam Din said quietly.

“Well, I thought that was fair. They howled so. We were rather strict on fines. I worked up my native clerk—Bulaki Ram—to a ferocious pitch of enthusiasm. He used to calculate the profits of our cotton-scheme to three points of decimals, after office. I tell you I envied your magistrates here hauling money out of motorists every week I had managed to make our ordinary revenue and expenditure just about meet, and I was crazy to get the odd two hundred pounds for my cotton. That sort of thing grows on a chap when he’s alone—and talks aloud!”

“Hul-lo! Have you been there already?” the father said, and Adam nodded.

“Yes. Used to spout what I could remember of ‘Marmion’ to a tree, sir. Well then my luck turned. One evening an English-speaking nigger came in towing a corpse by the feet. (You get used to little things like that.) He said he’d found it, and please would I identify, because if it was one of Ibn Makarrah’s men there might be a reward. It was an old Mohammedan, with a strong dash of Arab—a smallboned, bald-headed chap, and I was just wondering how it had kept so well in our climate when it sneezed. You ought to have seen the nigger! He fetched a howl and bolted like—like the dog in ‘Tom Sawyer,’ when he sat on the what’s-its-name beetle. He yelped as he ran, and the corpse went on sneezing. I could see it had been sarkied. (That’s a sort of gum-poison, pater, which attacks the nerve centres. Our chief medical officer is writing a monograph about it.) So Imam Din and I emptied out the corpse one time, with my shaving soap and trade gunpowder, and hot water.

“I’d seen a case of sarkie before; so when the skin peeled off his feet, and he stopped sneezing, I knew he’d live. He was bad, though; lay like a log for a week while Imam Din and I massaged the paralysis out of him. Then he told us he was a Hajji—had been three times to Mecca—come in from French Africa, and that he’d met the nigger by the wayside—just like a case of thuggee, in India—and the nigger had poisoned him. That seemed reasonable enough by what I knew of Coast niggers.”

“You believed him?” said his father keenly.

“There was no reason I shouldn’t. The nigger never came back, and the old man stayed with me for two months,” Adam returned. “You know what the best type of a Mohammedan gentleman can be, pater? He was that.”

“None finer, none finer,” was the answer.

“Except a Sikh,” Stalky grunted.

“He’d been to Bombay; he knew French Africa inside out; he could quote poetry and the Koran all day long. He played chess—you don’t know what that meant to me—like a master. We used to talk about the regeneration of Turkey and the Sheik-ul-Islam between moves. Oh, everything under the sun we talked about! He was awfully open-minded. He believed in slavery, of course, but he quite saw that it would have to die out. That’s why he agreed with me about developing the resources of the district by cotton-growing, you know.”

“You talked of that too?” said Strickland.

“Rather. We discussed it for hours. You don’t know what it meant to me. A wonderful man. Imam Din, was not our Hajji marvellous?”

“Most marvellous! It was all through the Hajji that we found the money for our cotton-play.” Imam Din had moved, I fancy, behind Strickland’s chair.

“Yes. It must have been dead against his convictions too. He brought me news when I was down with fever at Dupe that one of Ibn Makarrah’s men was parading through my District with a bunch of slaves—in the Fork!”

“What’s the matter with the Fork, that you can’t abide it?” said Stalky. Adam’s voice had risen at the last word.

“Local etiquette, sir,” he replied, too earnest to notice Stalky’s atrocious pun. “If a slaver runs slaves through British territory he ought to pretend that they’re his servants. Hawkin’ ’em about in the Fork—the forked stick that you put round their necks, you know—is insolence—same as not backing your topsails in the old days. Besides, it unsettles the District.”

“I thought you said slavers didn’t come your way,” I put in.

“They don’t. But my Chief was smoking ’em out of the North all that season, and they were bolting into French territory any road they could find. My orders were to take no notice so long as they circulated, but open slave-dealing in the Fork, was too much. I couldn’t go myself, so I told a couple of our Makalali police and Imam Din to make talk with the gentleman one time. It was rather risky, and it might have been expensive, but it turned up trumps. They were back in a few days with the slaver (he didn’t show fight) and a whole crowd of witnesses, and we tried him in my bedroom, and fined him properly. Just to show you how demoralized the brute must have been (Arabs often go dotty after a defeat), he’d snapped up four or five utterly useless Sheshaheli, and was offering ’em to all and sundry along the road. Why, he offered ’em to you, didn’t he, Imam Din?”

“I was witness that he offered man-eaters’ for sale,” said Imam Din.

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“Luckily for my cotton-scheme, that landed, him both ways. You see, he had slaved and exposed slaves for sale in British territory. That meant the double fine if I could get it out of him.”

“What was his defence?” said Strickland, late of the Punjab Police.

“As far as I remember—but I had a temperature of 104 degrees at the time—he’d mistaken the meridians of longitude. Thought he was in French territory. Said he’d never do it again, if we’d let him off with a fine. I could have shaken hands with the brute for that. He paid up cash like a motorist and went off one time.”

“Did you see him?”

“Ye-es. Didn’t I, Imam Din?”

“Assuredly the Sahib both saw and spoke to the slaver. And the Sahib also made a speech to the man-eaters when he freed them, and they swore to supply him with labour for all his cotton-play. The Sahib leaned on his own servant’s shoulder the while.”

“I remember something of that. I remember Bulaki Ram giving me the papers to sign, and I distinctly remember him locking up the money in the safe—two hundred and ten beautiful English sovereigns. You don’t know what that meant to me! I believe it cured my fever; and as soon as I could, I staggered off with the Hajji to interview the Sheshaheli about labour. Then I found out why they had been so keen to work! It wasn’t gratitude. Their big village had been hit by lightning and burned out a week or two before, and they lay flat in rows around me asking me for a job. I gave it ’em.”

“And so you were very happy?” His mother had stolen up behind us. “You liked your cotton, dear?” She tidied the lump away.

“By Jove, I was happy!” Adam yawned. “Now if any one,” he looked at the Infant, “cares to put a little money into the scheme, it’ll be the making of my District. I can’t give you figures, sir, but I assure—”

“You’ll take your arsenic, and Imam Din’ll take you up to bed, and I’ll come and tuck you in.”

Agnes leaned forward, her rounded elbows on his shoulders, hands joined across his dark hair, and “Isn’t he a darling?” she said to us, with just the same heart-rending lift to the left eyebrow and the same break of her voice as sent Strickland mad among the horses in the year ’84. We were quiet when they were gone. We waited till Imam Din returned to us from above and coughed at the door, as only dark-hearted Asia can.

“Now,” said Strickland, “tell us what truly befell, son of my servant.”

“All befell as our Sahib has said. Only—only there was an arrangement—a little arrangement on account of his cotton-play.”

“Tell! Sit! I beg your pardon, Infant,” said Strickland.

But the Infant had already made the sign, and we heard Imam Din hunker down on the floor: One gets little out of the East at attention.

“When the fever came on our Sahib in our roofed house at Dupe,” he began, “the Hajji listened intently to his talk. He expected the names of women; though I had already told him that Our virtue was beyond belief or compare, and that Our sole desire was this cotton-play. Being at last convinced, the Hajji breathed on our Sahib’s forehead, to sink into his brain news concerning a slave-dealer in his district who had made a mock of the law. Sahib,” Imam Din turned to Strickland, “our Sahib answered to those false words as a horse of blood answers to the spur. He sat up. He issued orders for the apprehension of the slave-dealer. Then he fell back. Then we left him.”

“Alone—servant of my son, and son of my servant?” said his father.

“There was an old woman which belonged to the Hajji. She had come in with the Hajji’s money-belt. The Hajji told her that if our Sahib died, she would die with him. And truly our Sahib had given me orders to depart.”

“Being mad with fever—eh?”

“What could we do, Sahib? This cotton-play was his heart’s desire. He talked of it in his fever. Therefore it was his heart’s desire that the Hajji went to fetch. Doubtless the Hajji could have given him money enough out of hand for ten cottonplays; but in this respect also our Sahib’s virtue was beyond belief or compare. Great Ones do not exchange moneys. Therefore the Hajji said—and I helped with my counsel—that we must make arrangements to get the money in all respects conformable with the English Law. It was great trouble to us, but—the Law is the Law. And the Hajji showed the old woman the knife by which she would die if our Sahib died. So I accompanied the Hajji.”

“Knowing who he was?” said Strickland.

“No! Fearing the man. A virtue went out from him overbearing the virtue of lesser persons. The Hajji told Bulaki Ram the clerk to occupy the seat of government at Dupe till our return. Bulaki Ram feared the Hajji, because the Hajji had often gloatingly appraised his skill in figures at five thousand rupees upon any slave-block. The Hajji then said to me: ‘Come, and we will make the man-eaters play the cotton-game for my delight’s delight’ The Hajji loved our Sahib with the love of a father for his son, of a saved for his saviour, of a Great One for a Great One. But I said: ‘We cannot go to that Sheshaheli place without a hundred rifles. We have here five.’ The Hajji said: ‘I have untied as knot in my head-handkerchief which will be more to us than a thousand.’ I saw that he had so loosed it that it lay flagwise on his shoulder. Then I knew that he was a Great One with virtue in him.

“We came to the highlands of the Sheshaheli on the dawn of the second day—about the time of the stirring of the cold wind. The Hajji walked delicately across the open place where their filth is, and scratched upon the gate which was shut. When it opened I saw the man-eaters lying on their cots under the eaves of the huts. They rolled off: they rose up, one behind the other the length of the street, and the fear on their faces was as leaves whitening to a breeze. The Hajji stood in the gate guarding his skirts from defilement. The Hajji said: ‘I am here once again. Give me six and yoke up.’ They zealously then pushed to us with poles six, and yoked them with a heavy tree. The Hajji then said: “Fetch fire from the morning hearth, and come to windward.’ The wind is strong on those headlands at sunrise, so when each had emptied his crock of fire in front of that which was before him, the broadside of the town roared into flame, and all went. The Hajji then said: ‘At the end of a time there will come here the white man ye once chased for sport. He will demand labour to plant such and such stuff. Ye are that labour, and your spawn after you.’ They said, lifting their heads a very little from the edge of the ashes: ‘ We are that labour, and our spawn after us.’ The Hajji said: ‘What is also my name?’ They said: ‘Thy name is also The Merciful’ The Hajji said: ‘Praise then my mercy’; and while they did this, the Hajji walked away, I following.”

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The Infant made some noise in his throat, and reached for more Burgundy.

“About noon one of our six fell dead. Fright only frights Sahib! None had—none could—touch him. Since they were in pairs, and the other of the Fork was mad and sang foolishly, we waited for some heathen to do what was needful. There came at last Angari men with goats. The Hajji said: ‘What do ye see? They said: ‘Oh, our Lord, we neither see nor hear.’ The Hajji said: ‘But I command ye to see and to hear and to say.’ They said: ‘Oh, our Lord, it is to our commanded eyes as though slaves stood in a Fork.’ The Hajji said: ‘So testify before the officer who waits you in the town of Dupe.’ They said: ‘What shall come to us after?’ The Hajji said: ‘The just reward for the informer. But if ye do not testify, then a punishment which shall cause birds, to fall from the trees in terror and monkeys to scream for pity.’ Hearing this, the Angari men hastened to Dupe. The Hajji then said to me: ‘Are those things sufficient to establish our case, or must I drive in a village full?’ I said that three witnesses amply established any case, but as yet, I said, the Hajji had not offered his slaves for sale. It is true, as our Sahib said just now, there is one fine for catching slaves, and yet another for making to sell them. And it was the double fine that we needed, Sahib, for our Sahib’s cotton-play. We had fore-arranged all this with Bulaki Ram, who knows the English Law, and, I thought the Hajji remembered, but he grew angry, and cried out: ‘O God, Refuge of the Afflicted, must I, who am what I am, peddle this’ dog’s meat by the roadside to gain his delight for my heart’s delight?” None the less, he admitted it was the English Law, and so he offered me the six—five—in a small voice, with an averted head. The Sheshaheli do not smell of sour milk as heathen should. They smell like leopards, Sahib. This is because they eat men.”

“Maybe,” said Strickland. “But where were thy wits? One witness is not sufficient to establish the fact of a sale.”

“What could we do, Sahib? There was the Hajji’s reputation to consider. We could not have called in a heathen witness for such a thing. And, moreover, the Sahib forgets that the defendant himself was making this case. He would not contest his own evidence. Otherwise, I know the law of evidence well enough.

“So then we went to Dupe, and while Bulaki Ram waited among the Angari men, ‘I ran to see our Sahib in bed. His eyes were very bright, and his mouth was full of upside-down orders, but the old woman had not loosened her hair for death. The Hajji said: ‘Be quick with my trial. I am not Job!’ The Hajji was a learned man. We made the trial swiftly to a sound of soothing voices round the bed. Yet—yet, because no man can be sure whether a Sahib of that blood sees, or does not see, we made it strictly in the manner of the forms of the English Law. Only the witnesses and the slaves and the prisoner we kept without for his nose’s sake.”

“Then he did not see the prisoner?” said Strickland.

“I stood by to shackle up an Angari in case he should demand it, but by God’s favour he was too far fevered to ask for one. It is quite true he signed the papers. It is quite true he saw the money put away in the safe—two hundred and ten English pounds and it is quite true that the gold wrought on him as a strong cure. But as to his seeing the prisoner, and having speech with the man-eaters—the Hajji breathed all that on his forehead to sink into his sick brain. A little, as ye have heard, has remained . . . . Ah, but when the fever broke, and our Sahib called for the fine-book, and the thin little picture-books from Europe with the pictures of ploughs and hoes, and cotton mills—ah, then he laughed as he used to laugh, Sahib. It was his heart’s desire, this cotton-play. The Hajji loved him, as who does not? It was a little, little arrangement, Sahib, of which—is it necessary to tell all the world?”

“And when didst thou know who the Hajji was?” said Strickland.

“Not for a certainty till he and our Sahib had returned from their visit to the Sheshaheli country. It is quite true as our Sahib says, the man-eaters lay, flat around his feet, and asked for spades to cultivate cotton. That very night, when I was cooking the dinner, the Hajji said to me: ‘I go to my own place, though God knows whether the Man with the Stone Eyes have left me an ox, a slave, or a woman.’ I said: ‘Thou art then That One?’ The Hajji said: ‘I am ten thousand rupees reward into thy hand. Shall we make another law-case and get more cotton machines for the boy?’ I said: ‘What dog am I to do this? May God prolong thy life a thousand years!’ The Hajji said: ‘Who has seen to-morrow? God has given me as it were a son in my old age, and I praise Him. See that the breed is not lost!’

“He walked then from the cooking-place to our Sahib’s office-table under the tree, where our Sahib held in his hand a blue envelope of Service newly come in by runner from the North. At this, fearing evil news for the Hajji, I would have restrained him, but he said: ‘We be both Great Ones. Neither of us will fail.’ Our Sahib looked up to invite the Hajji to approach before he opened the letter, but the Hajji stood off till our Sahib had well opened and well read the letter. Then the Hajji said: ‘Is it permitted to say farewell?’ Our Sahib stabbed the letter on the file with a deep and joyful breath and cried a welcome. The Hajji said: ‘I go to my own place,’ and he loosed from his neck a chained heart of ambergris set in soft gold and held it forth. Our Sahib snatched it swiftly in the closed fist, down turned, and said ‘If thy name be written hereon, it is needless, for a name is already engraved on my heart.’ The Hajji said: ‘And on mine also is a name engraved; but there is no name on the amulet.’ The Hajji stooped to our Sahib’s feet, but our Sahib raised and embraced him, and the Hajji covered his mouth with his shoulder-cloth, because it worked, and so he went away.”

“And what order was in the Service letter?” Stalky murmured.

“Only an order for our Sahib to write a report on some new cattle sickness. But all orders come in the same make of envelope. We could not tell what order it might have been.”

“When he opened the letter—my son—made he no sign? A cough? An oath?” Strickland asked.

“None, Sahib. I watched his hands. They did not shake. Afterward he wiped his face, but he was sweating before from the heat.”

“Did he know? Did he know who the Hajji was?” said the Infant in English.

“I am a poor man. Who can say what a Sahib of that get knows or does not know? But the Hajji is right. The breed should not be lost. It is not very hot for little children in Dupe, and as regards nurses, my sister’s cousin at Jull—”

“H’m! That is the boy’s own concern. I wonder if his Chief ever knew?” said Strickland.

“Assuredly,” said Imam Din. “On the night before our Sahib went down to the sea, the Great Sahib—the Man with the Stone Eyes—dined with him in his camp, I being in charge of the table. They talked a long while and the Great Sahib said: ‘What didst thou think of That One?’ (We do not say Ibn Makarrah yonder.) Our Sahib said: ‘Which one?’ The Great Sahib said: ‘That One which taught thy man-eaters to grow cotton for thee. He was in thy District three months to my certain knowledge, and I looked by every runner that thou wouldst send me in his head.’ Our Sahib said: ‘If his head had been needed, another man should have been appointed to govern my District, for he was my friend.’ The Great Sahib laughed and said: ‘If I had needed a lesser man in thy place be sure I would have sent him, as, if I had needed the head of That One, be sure I would have sent men to bring it to me. But tell me now, by what means didst thou twist him to thy use and our profit in this cotton-play?’ Our Sahib said: ‘By God, I did not use that man in any fashion whatever. He was my friend.’ The Great Sahib said: ‘ ’Toh Vac! (Bosh!) Tell!’ Our Sahib shook his head as he does—as he did when a child—and they looked at each other like sword-play men in the ring at a fair. The Great Sahib dropped his eyes first and he said: ‘So be it. I should perhaps have answered thus in my youth. No matter. I have made treaty with That One as an ally of the State. Some day he shall tell me the tale.’ Then I brought in fresh coffee, and they ceased. But I do not think That One will tell the Great Sahib more than our Sahib told him.”

“Wherefore?” I asked.

“Because they are both Great Ones, and I have observed in my life that Great Ones employ words very little between each other in their dealings; still less when they speak to a third concerning those dealings. Also they profit by silence . . . . Now I think that the mother has come down from the room, and I will go rub his feet till he sleeps.”

His ears had caught Agnes’s step at the stair-head and presently she passed us on her way to the music room humming the Magnificat.

Dayspring Mishandled

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IN the days beyond compare and before the Judgments, a genius called Graydon foresaw that the advance of education and the standard of living would submerge all mind-marks in one mudrush of standardised reading-matter, and so created the Fictional Supply Syndicate to meet the demand.Since a few days’ work for him brought them more money than a week’s elsewhere, he drew many young men—some now eminent—into his employ. He bade them keep their eyes on the Sixpenny Dream Book, the Army and Navy Stores Catalogue (this for backgrounds and furniture as they changed), and The Hearthstone Friend, a weekly publication which specialised unrivalledly in the domestic emotions. Yet, even so, youth would not be denied, and some of the collaborated love-talk in ‘Passion Hath Peril,’ and ‘Ena’s Lost Lovers,’ and the account of the murder of the Earl in ‘The Wickwire Tragedies’—to name but a few masterpieces now never mentioned for fear of blackmail—was as good as anything to which their authors signed their real names in more distinguished years.

Among the young ravens driven to roost awhile on Graydon’s ark was James Andrew Manallace—a darkish, slow northerner of the type that does not ignite, but must be detonated. Given written or verbal outlines of a plot, he was useless; but, with a half-dozen pictures round which to write his tale, he could astonish.

And he adored that woman who afterwards became the mother of Vidal Benzaquen, and who suffered and died because she loved one unworthy. There was, also, among the company a mannered, bellied person called Alured Castorley, who talked and wrote about ‘Bohemia,’ but was always afraid of being ‘compromised’ by the weekly suppers at Neminaka’s Cafes in Hestern Square, where the Syndicate work was apportioned, and where everyone looked out for himself. He, too, for a time, had loved Vidal’s mother, in his own way.

Now, one Saturday at Neminaka’s, Graydon, who had given Manallace a sheaf of prints—torn from an extinct children’s book called Philippa’s Queen—on which to improvise, asked for results. Manallace went down into his ulster-pocket, hesitated a moment, and said the stuff had turned into poetry on his hands.

‘Bosh!’

‘That’s what it isn’t,’ the boy retorted. ‘It’s rather good.’

‘Then it’s no use to us.’ Graydon laughed. ‘Have you brought back the cuts?’

Manallace handed them over. There was a castle in the series; a knight or so in armour; an old lady in a horned head-dress; a young ditto; a very obvious Hebrew; a clerk, with pen and inkhorn, checking wine-barrels on a wharf; and a Crusader. On the back of one of the prints was a note, ‘If he doesn’t want to go, why can’t he be captured and held to ransom?’ Graydon asked what it all meant.

‘I don’t know yet. A comic opera, perhaps,’ said Manallace.

Graydon, who seldom wasted time, passed the cuts on to someone else, and advanced Manallace a couple of sovereigns to carry on with, as usual; at which Castorley was angry and would have said something unpleasant but was suppressed. Half-way through supper, Castorley told the company that a relative had died and left him an independence; and that he now withdrew from ‘hackwork’ to follow ‘Literature.’ Generally, the Syndicate rejoiced in a comrade’s good fortune, but Castorley had gifts of waking dislike. So the news was received with a vote of thanks, and he went out before the end, and, it was said, proposed to ’Dal Benzaquen’s mother, who refused him. He did not come back. Manallace, who had arrived a little exalted, got so drunk before midnight that a man had to stay and see him home. But liquor never touched him above the belt, and when he had slept awhile, he recited to the gas-chandelier the poetry he had made out of the pictures; said that, on second thoughts, he would convert it into comic opera; deplored the Upas-tree influence of Gilbert and Sullivan; sang somewhat to illustrate his point; and—after words, by the way, with a negress in yellow satin—was steered to his rooms.

In the course of a few years, Graydon’s foresight and genius were rewarded. The public began to read and reason upon higher planes, and the Syndicate grew rich. Later still, people demanded of their printed matter what they expected in their clothing and furniture. So, precisely as the three guinea hand-bag is followed in three weeks by its thirteen and sevenpence ha’penny, indistinguishable sister, they enjoyed perfect synthetic substitutes for Plot, Sentiment, and Emotion. Graydon died before the Cinemacaption school came in, but he left his widow twenty-seven thousand pounds.

Manallace made a reputation, and, more important, money for Vidal’s mother when her husband ran away and the first symptoms of her paralysis showed. His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation.

As he once said when urged to ‘write a real book’: ‘I’ve got my label, and I’m not going to chew it off. If you save people thinking, you can do anything with ’em.’ His output apart, he was genuinely a man of letters. He rented a small cottage in the country and economised on everything, except the care and charges of Vidal’s mother.

Castorley flew higher. When his legacy freed him from ‘hackwork,’ he became first a critic—in which calling he loyally scalped all his old associates as they came up—and then looked for some speciality. Having found it (Chaucer was the prey), he consolidated his position before he occupied it, by his careful speech, his cultivated bearing, and the whispered words of his friends whom he, too, had saved the trouble of thinking. It followed that, when he published his first serious articles on Chaucer, all the world which is interested in Chaucer said: ‘This is an authority.’ But he was no impostor. He learned and knew his poet and his age; and in a month-long dogfight in an austere literary weekly, met and mangled a recognised Chaucer expert of the day. He also, ‘for old sake’s sake,’ as he wrote to a friend, went out of his way to review one of Manallace’s books with an intimacy of unclean deduction (this was before the days of Freud) which long stood as a record. Some member of the extinct Syndicate took occasion to ask him if he would—for old sake’s sake—help Vidal’s mother to a new treatment. He answered that he had ‘known the lady very slightly and the calls on his purse were so heavy that,’ etc. The writer showed the letter to Manallace, who said he was glad Castorley hadn’t interfered. Vidal’s mother was then wholly paralysed. Only her eyes could move, and those always looked for the husband who had left her. She died thus in Manallace’s arms in April of the first year of the War.

During the War he and Castorley worked as some sort of departmental dishwashers in the Office of Co-ordinated Supervisals. Here Manallace came to know Castorley again. Castorley, having a sweet tooth, cadged lumps of sugar for his tea from a typist, and when she took to giving them to a younger man, arranged that she should be reported for smoking in unauthorised apartments. Manallace possessed himself of every detail of the affair, as compensation for the review of his book. Then there came a night when, waiting for a big air-raid, the two men had talked humanly, and Manallace spoke of Vidal’s mother. Castorley said something in reply, and from that hour—as was learned several years later—Manallace’s real life-work and interests began.

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The War over, Castorley set about to make himself Supreme Pontiff on Chaucer by methods not far removed from the employment of poison-gas. The English Pope was silent, through private griefs, and influenza had carried off the learned Hun who claimed continental allegiance. Thus Castorley crowed unchallenged from Upsala to Seville, while Manallace went back to his cottage with the photo of Vidal’s mother over the mantelpiece. She seemed to have emptied out his life, and left him only fleeting interests in trifles. His private diversions were experiments of uncertain outcome, which, he said, rested him after a day’s gadzooking and vitalstapping. I found him, for instance, one week-end, in his toolshed-scullery, boiling a brew of slimy barks which were, if mixed with oak-galls, vitriol and wine, to become an ink-powder. We boiled it till the Monday, and it turned into an adhesive stronger than birdlime, and entangled us both.

At other times, he would carry me off, once in a few weeks, to sit at Castorley’s feet, and hear him talk about Chaucer. Castorley’s voice, bad enough in youth, when it could be shouted down, had, with culture and tact, grown almost insupportable. His mannerisms, too, had multiplied and set. He minced and mouthed, postured and chewed his words throughout those terrible evenings; and poisoned not only Chaucer, but every shred of English literature which he used to embellish him. He was shameless, too, as regarded self-advertisement and ‘recognition’—weaving elaborate intrigues; forming petty friendships and confederacies, to be dissolved next week in favour of more promising alliances; fawning, snubbing, lecturing, organising and lying as unrestingly as a politician, in chase of the Knighthood due not to him (he always called on his Maker to forbid such a thought) but as tribute to Chaucer. Yet, sometimes, he could break from his obsession and prove how a man’s work will try to save the soul of him. He would tell us charmingly of copyists of the fifteenth century in England and the Low Countries, who had multiplied the Chaucer MSS., of which there remained—he gave us the exact number—and how each scribe could by him (and, he implied, by him alone) be distinguished from every other by some peculiarity of letter-formation, spacing or like trick of pen-work; and how he could fix the dates of their work within five years. Sometimes he would give us an hour of really interesting stuff and then return to his overdue ‘recognition.’ The changes sickened me, but Manallace defended him, as a master in his own line who had revealed Chaucer to at least one grateful soul.

This, as far as I remembered, was the autumn when Manallace holidayed in the Shetlands or the Faroes, and came back with a stone ‘quern’—a hand corn-grinder. He said it interested him from the ethnological standpoint. His whim lasted till next harvest, and was followed by a religious spasm which, naturally, translated itself into literature. He showed me a battered and mutilated Vulgate of 1485, patched up the back with bits of legal parchments, which he had bought for thirty-five shillings. Some monk’s attempt to rubricate chapter-initials had caught, it seemed, his forlorn fancy, and he dabbled in shells of gold and silver paint for weeks.

That also faded out, and he went to the Continent to get local colour for a love-story, about Alva and the Dutch, and the next year I saw practically nothing of him. This released me from seeing much of Castorley, but, at intervals, I would go there to dine with him, when his wife—an unappetising, ash-coloured woman—made no secret that his friends wearied her almost as much as he did. But at a later meeting, not long after Manallace had finished his Low Countries’ novel, I found Castorley charged to bursting-point with triumph and high information hardly withheld. He confided to me that a time was at hand when great matters would be made plain, and ‘recognition’ would be inevitable. I assumed, naturally, that there was fresh scandal or heresy afoot in Chaucer circles, and kept my curiosity within bounds.

In time, New York cabled that a fragment of a hitherto unknown Canterbury Tale lay safe in the steel-walled vaults of the seven-million-dollar Sunnapia Collection. It was news on an international scale—the New World exultant—the Old deploring the ‘burden of British taxation which drove such treasures, etc.,’ and the lighterminded journals disporting themselves according to their publics; for ‘our Dan,’ as one earnest Sunday editor observed, ‘lies closer to the national heart than we wot of.’ Common decency made me call on Castorley, who, to my surprise, had not yet descended into the arena. I found him, made young again by joy, deep in just-passed proofs.

Yes, he said, it was all true. He had, of course, been in it from the first. There had been found one hundred and seven new lines of Chaucer tacked on to an abridged end of The Persone’s Tale, the whole the work of Abraham Mentzius, better known as Mentzel of Antwerp (1388 – 1438/9)—I might remember he had talked about him—whose distinguishing peculiarities were a certain Byzantine formation of his g’s, the use of a ‘sickle-slanted’ reed-pen, which cut into the vellum at certain letters; and, above all, a tendency to spell English words on Dutch lines, whereof the manuscript carried one convincing proof. For instance (he wrote it out for me), a girl praying against an undesired marriage, says:—

‘Ah Jesu-Moder, pitie my oe peyne.
Daiespringe mishandeelt cometh nat agayne.’

Would I, please, note the spelling of ‘mishandeelt’? Stark Dutch and Mentzel’s besetting sin! But in his position one took nothing for granted. The page had been part of the stiffening of the side of an old Bible, bought in a parcel by Dredd, the big dealer, because it had some rubricated chapter-initials, and by Dredd shipped, with a consignment of similar odds and ends, to the Sunnapia Collection, where they were making a glass-cased exhibit of the whole history of illumination and did not care how many books they gutted for that purpose. There, someone who noticed a crack in the back of the volume had unearthed it. He went on: ‘They didn’t know what to make of the thing at first. But they knew about me! They kept quiet till I’d been consulted. You might have noticed I was out of England for three months.

‘ I was over there, of course. It was what is called a “spoil”—a page Mentzel had spoiled with his Dutch spelling—I expect he had had the English dictated to him—then had evidently used the vellum for trying out his reeds; and then, I suppose, had put it away. The “spoil” had been doubled, pasted together, and slipped in as stiffening to the old book-cover. I had it steamed open, and analysed the wash. It gave the flour-grains in the paste-coarse, because of the old millstone—and there were traces of the grit itself. What? Oh, possibly a handmill of Mentzel’s own time. He may have doubled the spoilt page and used it for part of a pad to steady wood-cuts on. It may have knocked about his workshop for years. That, indeed, is practically certain because a beginner from the Low Countries has tried his reed on a few lines of some monkish hymn—not a bad lilt tho’—which must have been common form. Oh yes, the page may have been used in other books before it was used for the Vulgate. That doesn’t matter, but this does. Listen! I took a wash, for analysis, from a blot in one corner—that would be after Mentzel had given up trying to make a possible page of it, and had grown careless—and I got the actual ink of the period! It’s a practically eternal stuff compounded on—I’ve forgotten his name for the minute—the scribe at Bury St. Edmunds, of course—hawthorn bark and wine. Anyhow, on his formula. That wouldn’t interest you either, but, taken with all the other testimony, it clinches the thing. (You’ll see it all in my Statement to the Press on Monday.) Overwhelming, isn’t it?’

‘Overwhelming,’ I said, with sincerity. ‘Tell me what the tale was about, though. That’s more in my line.’

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‘I know it; but I have to be equipped on all sides. The verses are relatively easy for one to pronounce on. The freshness, the fun, the humanity, the fragrance of it all, cries—no, shouts—itself as Dan’s work. Why “Daiespringe mishandled” alone stamps it from Dan’s mint. Plangent as doom, my dear boy—plangent as doom! It’s all in my Statement. Well, substantially, the fragment deals with a girl whose parents wish her to marry an elderly suitor. The mother isn’t so keen on it, but the father, an old Knight, is. The girl, of course, is in love with a younger and a poorer man. Common form? Granted. Then the father, who doesn’t in the least want to, is ordered off to a Crusade and, by way of passing on the kick, as we used to say during the War, orders the girl to be kept in duresse till his return or her consent to the old suitor. Common form, again? Quite so. That’s too much for her mother. She reminds the old Knight of his age and infirmities, and the discomforts of Crusading. Are you sure I’m not boring you?’

‘Not at all,’ I said, though time had begun to whirl backward through my brain to a red-velvet, pomatum-scented side-room at Neminaka’s and Manallace’s set face intoning to the gas.

‘You’ll read it all in my Statement next week. The sum is that the old lady tells him of a certain Knight-adventurer on the French coast, who, for a consideration, waylays Knights who don’t relish crusading and holds them to impossible ransoms till the trooping-season is over, or they are returned sick. He keeps a ship in the Channel to pick ’em up and transfers his birds to his castle ashore, where he has a reputation for doing ’em well. As the old lady points out:

‘And if perchance thou fall into his honde
By God how canstow ride to Holilonde?’

‘You see? Modern in essence as Gilbert and Sullivan, but handled as only Dan could! And she reminds him that “Honour and olde bones” parted company long ago. He makes one splendid appeal for the spirit of chivalry:

Lat all men change as Fortune may send,
But Knighthood beareth service to the end,

and then, of course, he gives in

For what his woman willeth to be don
Her manne must or wauken Hell anon.

‘Then she hints that the daughter’s young lover, who is in the Bordeaux wine-trade, could open negotiations for a kidnapping without compromising him. And then that careless brute Mentzel spoils his page and chucks it! But there’s enough to show what’s going to happen. You’ll see it all in my Statement. Was there ever anything in literary finds to hold a candle to it? .. . And they give grocers Knighthoods for selling cheese!’

I went away before he could get into his stride on that course. I wanted to think, and to see Manallace. But I waited till Castorley’s Statement came out. He had left himself no loophole. And when, a little later, his (nominally the Sunnapia people’s) ‘scientific’ account of their analyses and tests appeared, criticism ceased, and some journals began to demand ‘public recognition.’ Manallace wrote me on this subject, and I went down to his cottage, where he at once asked me to sign a Memorial on Castorley’s behalf. With luck, he said, we might get him a K.B.E. in the next Honours List. Had I read the Statement?

‘I have,’ I replied. ‘But I want to ask you something first. Do you remember the night you got drunk at Neminaka’s, and I stayed behind to look after you?’

‘Oh, that time,’ said he, pondering. ‘Wait a minute! I remember Graydon advancing me two quid. He was a generous paymaster. And I remember—now, who the devil rolled me under the sofa—and what for?’

‘We all did,’ I replied. ‘You wanted to read us what you’d written to those Chaucer cuts.’

‘I don’t remember that. No! I don’t remember anything after the sofa-episode…. You always said that you took me home—didn’t you?’

‘I did, and you told Kentucky Kate outside the old Empire that you had been faithful, Cynara, in your fashion.’

‘Did I?’ said he. ‘My God! Well, I suppose I have.’ He stared into the fire. ‘What else?’

‘Before we left Neminaka’s you recited me what you had made out of the cuts—the whole tale! So—you see?’

‘Ye-es.’ He nodded. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘What are you?’

‘I’m going to help him get his Knighthood—first.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ll tell you what he said about ’Dal’s mother—the night there was that air-raid on the offices.’

He told it.

‘That’s why,’ he said. ‘Am I justified?’

He seemed to me entirely so.

‘But after he gets his Knighthood?’ I went on.

‘That depends. There are several things I can think of. It interests me.’

‘Good Heavens! I’ve always imagined you a man without interests.’

‘So I was. I owe my interests to Castorley. He gave me every one of ’em except the tale itself.’

‘How did that come?’

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‘Something in those ghastly cuts touched off something in me—a sort of possession, I suppose. I was in love too. No wonder I got drunk that night. I’d been Chaucer for a week! Then I thought the notion might make a comic opera. But Gilbert and Sullivan were too strong.’

‘So I remember you told me at the time.’

‘I kept it by me, and it made me interested in Chaucer—philologically and so on. I worked on it on those lines for years. There wasn’t a flaw in the wording even in ’14. I hardly had to touch it after that.’

‘Did you ever tell it to anyone except me?’

‘No, only ’Dal’s mother—when she could listen to anything—to put her to sleep. But when Castorley said—what he did about her, I thought I might use it. ’Twasn’t difficult. He taught me. D’you remember my birdlime experiments, and the stuff on our hands? I’d been trying to get that ink for more than a year. Castorley told me where I’d find the formula. And your falling over the quern, too?’

‘That accounted for the stone-dust under the microscope?’

‘Yes. I grew the wheat in the garden here, and ground it myself. Castorley gave me Mentzel complete. He put me on to an MS. in the British Museum which he said was the finest sample of his work. I copied his “Byzantine g’s” for months.’

‘And what’s a “sickle-slanted” pen?’ I asked.

‘You nick one edge of your reed till it drags and scratches on the curves of the letters. Castorley told me about Mentzel’s spacing and margining. I only had to get the hang of his script.’

‘How long did that take you?’

‘On and off—some years. I was too ambitious at first—I wanted to give the whole poem. That would have been risky. Then Castorley told me about spoiled pages and I took the hint. I spelt “Dayspring mishandeelt” Mentzel’s way—to make sure of him. It’s not a bad couplet in itself. Did you see how he admires the “plangency” of it?’

‘Never mind him. Go on!’ I said.

He did. Castorley had been his unfailing guide throughout, specifying in minutest detail every trap to be set later for his own feet. The actual vellum was an Antwerp find, and its introduction into the cover of the Vulgate was begun after a long course of amateur bookbinding. At last, he bedded it under pieces of an old deed, and a printed page (1686) of Horace’s Odes, legitimately used for repairs by different owners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and at the last moment, to meet Castorley’s theory that spoiled pages were used in workshops by beginners, he had written a few Latin words in fifteenth century script the Statement gave the exact date—across an open part of the fragment. The thing ran: ‘Illa alma Mater ecca, secum afferens me acceptum. Nicolaus Atrib.’ The disposal of the thing was easiest of all. He had merely hung about Dredd’s dark bookshop of fifteen rooms, where he was well known, occasionally buying but generally browsing, till, one day, Dredd Senior showed him a case of cheap black-letter stuff, English and Continental—being packed for the Sunnapia people—into which Manallace tucked his contribution, taking care to wrench the back enough to give a lead to an earnest seeker.

‘And then?’ I demanded.

‘After six months or so Castorley sent for me. Sunnapia had found it, and as Dredd had missed it, and there was no money-motive sticking out, they were half convinced it was genuine from the start. But they invited him over. He conferred with their experts, and suggested the scientific tests. I put that into his head, before he sailed. That’s all. And now, will you sign our Memorial?’

I signed. Before we had finished hawking it round there was a host of influential names to help us, as well as the impetus of all the literary discussion which arose over every detail of the glorious trove. The upshot was a K.B.E. for Castorley in the next Honours List; and Lady Castorley, her cards duly printed, called on friends that same afternoon.

Manallace invited me to come with him, a day or so later, to convey our pleasure and satisfaction to them both. We were rewarded by the sight of a man relaxed and ungirt—not to say wallowing naked—on the crest of Success. He assured us that ‘The Title’ should not make any difference to our future relations, seeing it was in no sense personal, but, as he had often said, a tribute to Chaucer; ‘and, after all,’ he pointed out, with a glance at the mirror over the mantelpiece, ‘Chaucer was the prototype of the “veray parfit gentil Knight” of the British Empire so far as that then existed.’

On the way back, Manallace told me he was considering either an unheralded revelation in the baser Press which should bring Castorley’s reputation about his own ears some breakfast-time, or a private conversation, when he would make clear to Castorley that he must now back the forgery as long as he lived, under threat of Manallace’s betraying it if he flinched.

He favoured the second plan. ‘If I pull the string of the shower-bath in the papers,’ he said, ‘Castorley might go off his veray parfit gentil nut. I want to keep his intellect.’

‘What about your own position? The forgery doesn’t matter so much. But if you tell this you’ll kill him,’ I said.

‘I intend that. Oh—my position? I’ve been dead since—April, Fourteen, it was. But there’s no hurry. What was it she was saying to you just as we left?’

‘She told me how much your sympathy and understanding had meant to him. She said she thought that even Sir Alured did not realise the full extent of his obligations to you.’

‘She’s right, but I don’t like her putting it that way.’

‘It’s only common form—as Castorley’s always saying.’

‘Not with her. She can hear a man think.’

‘She never struck me in that light.’

‘You aren’t playing against her.’

‘’Guilty conscience, Manallace?’

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‘H’m! I wonder. Mine or hers? I wish she hadn’t said that. “More even than he realises it.” I won’t call again for awhile.’

He kept away till we read that Sir Alured, owing to slight indisposition, had been unable to attend a dinner given in his honour.

Inquiries brought word that it was but natural reaction, after strain, which, for the moment, took the form of nervous dyspepsia, and he would be glad to see Manallace at any time. Manallace reported him as rather pulled and drawn, but full of his new life and position, and proud that his efforts should have martyred him so much. He was going to collect, collate, and expand all his pronouncements and inferences into one authoritative volume.

‘I must make an effort of my own,’ said Manallace. ‘I’ve collected nearly all his stuff about the Find that has appeared in the papers, and he’s promised me everything that’s missing. I’m going to help him. It will be a new interest.’

‘How will you treat it?’ I asked.

‘I expect I shall quote his deductions on the evidence, and parallel ’em with my experiments—the ink and the paste and the rest of it. It ought to be rather interesting.’

‘But even then there will only be your word. It’s hard to catch up with an established lie,’ I said. ‘Especially when you’ve started it yourself.’

He laughed. ‘I’ve arranged for that—in case anything happens to me. Do you remember the “Monkish Hymn”?’

‘Oh yes! There’s quite a literature about it already.’

‘Well, you write those ten words above each other, and read down the first and second letters of ’em; and see what you get. My Bank has the formula.’

              Illa
              alma
              Mater
              ecca
              secum
              afferens
              me
              acceptum
              Nicolaus
              Atrub.

He wrapped himself lovingly and leisurely round his new task, and Castorley was as good as his word in giving him help. The two practically collaborated, for Manallace suggested that all Castorley’s strictly scientific evidence should be in one place, with his deductions and dithyrambs as appendices. He assured him that the public would prefer this arrangement, and, after grave consideration, Castorley agreed.

‘That’s better,’ said Manallace to me. ‘Now I sha’n’t have so many hiatuses in my extracts. Dots always give the reader the idea you aren’t dealing fairly with your man. I shall merely quote him solid, and rip him up, proof for proof, and date for date, in parallel columns. His book’s taking more out of him than I like, though. He’s been doubled up twice with tummy attacks since I’ve worked with him. And he’s just the sort of flatulent beast who may go down with appendicitis.’

We learned before long that the attacks were due to gall-stones, which would necessitate an operation. Castorley bore the blow very well. He had full confidence in his surgeon, an old friend of theirs; great faith in his own constitution; a strong conviction that nothing would happen to him till the book was finished, and, above all, the Will to Live.

He dwelt on these assets with a voice at times a little out of pitch and eyes brighter than usual beside a slightly-sharpening nose.

I had only met Gleeag, the surgeon, once or twice at Castorley’s house, but had always heard him spoken of as a most capable man. He told Castorley that his trouble was the price exacted, in some shape or other, from all who had served their country; and that, measured in units of strain, Castorley had practically been at the front through those three years he had served in the Office of Co-ordinated Supervisals. However, the thing had been taken betimes, and in a few weeks he would worry no more about it.

‘But suppose he dies?’ I suggested to Manallace.

‘He won’t. I’ve been talking to Gleeag. He says he’s all right.’

‘Wouldn’t Gleeag’s talk be common form?’

‘I wish you hadn’t said that. But, surely, Gleeag wouldn’t have the face to play with me—or her.’

‘Why not? I expect it’s been done before.’ But Manallace insisted that, in this case, it would be impossible.

The operation was a success and, some weeks later, Castorley began to recast the arrangement and most of the material of his book. ‘Let me have my way,’ he said, when Manallace protested. ‘They are making too much of a baby of me. I really don’t need Gleeag looking in every day now.’ But Lady Castorley told us that he required careful watching. His heart had felt the strain, and fret or disappointment of any kind must be avoided. ‘Even,’ she turned to Manallace, ‘though you know ever so much better how his book should be arranged than he does himself.’

‘But really,’ Manallace began. ‘I’m very careful not to fuss——’

She shook her finger at him playfully. ‘You don’t think you do; but, remember, he tells me everything that you tell him, just the same as he told me everything that he used to tell you. Oh, I don’t mean the things that men talk about. I mean about his Chaucer.’

‘I didn’t realise that,’ said Manallace, weakly.

‘I thought you didn’t. He never spares me anything; but I don’t mind,’ she replied with a laugh, and went off to Gleeag, who was paying his daily visit. Gleeag said he had no objection to Manallace working with Castorley on the book for a given time—say, twice a week—but supported Lady Castorley’s demand that he should not be over-taxed in what she called ‘the sacred hours.’ The man grew more and more difficult to work with, and the little check he had heretofore set on his self-praise went altogether.

‘He says there has never been anything in the History of Letters to compare with it,’ Manallace groaned. ‘He wants now to inscribe—he never dedicates, you know—inscribe it to me, as his “most valued assistant.” The devil of it is that she backs him up in getting it out soon. Why? How much do you think she knows?’

‘Why should she know anything at all?’

‘You heard her say he had told her everything that he had told me about Chaucer? (I wish she hadn’t said that!) If she puts two and two together, she can’t help seeing that every one of his notions and theories has been played up to. But then—but then . . . Why is she trying to hurry publication? She talks about me fretting him. She’s at him, all the time, to be quick.’

Castorley must have over-worked, for, after a couple of months, he complained of a stitch in his right side, which Gleeag said was a slight sequel, a little incident of the operation. It threw him back awhile, but he returned to his work undefeated.

The book was due in the autumn. Summer was passing, and his publisher urgent, and—he said to me, when after a longish interval I called—Manallace had chosen this time, of all, to take a holiday. He was not pleased with Manallace, once his indefatigable aide, but now dilatory, and full of time-wasting objections. Lady Castorley had noticed it, too.

Meantime, with Lady Castorley’s help, he himself was doing the best he could to expedite the book; but Manallace had mislaid (did I think through jealousy?) some essential stuff which had been dictated to him. And Lady Castorley wrote Manallace, who had been delayed by a slight motor accident abroad, that the fret of waiting was prejudicial to her husband’s health. Manallace, on his return from the Continent, showed me that letter.

‘He has fretted a little, I believe,’ I said.

Manallace shuddered. ‘If I stay abroad, I’m helping to kill him. If I help him to hurry up the book, I’m expected to kill him. She knows,’ he said.

page 6

‘You’re mad. You’ve got this thing on the brain.’

‘I have not! Look here! You remember that Gleeag gave me from four to six, twice a week, to work with him. She called them the “sacred hours.” You heard her? Well, they are! They are Gleeag’s and hers. But she’s so infernally plain, and I’m such a fool, it took me weeks to find it out.’

‘That’s their affair,’ I answered. ‘It doesn’t prove she knows anything about the Chaucer.’

‘She does! He told her everything that he had told me when I was pumping him, all those years. She put two and two together when the thing came out. She saw exactly how I had set my traps. I know it! She’s been trying to make me admit it.’

‘What did you do?’

‘’Didn’t understand what she was driving at, of course. And then she asked Gleeag, before me, if he didn’t think the delay over the book was fretting Sir Alured. He didn’t think so. He said getting it out might deprive him of an interest. He had that much decency. She’s the devil!’

‘What do you suppose is her game, then?’

‘If Castorley knows he’s been had, it’ll kill him. She’s at me all the time, indirectly, to let it out. I’ve told you she wants to make it a sort of joke between us. Gleeag’s willing to wait. He knows Castorley’s a dead man. It slips out when they talk. They say “He was,” not “He is.” Both of ’em know it. But she wants him finished sooner.’

‘I don’t believe it. What are you going to do?’

‘What can I? I’m not going to have him killed, though.’

Manlike, he invented compromises whereby Castorley might be lured up by-paths of interest, to delay publication. This was not a success. As autumn advanced Castorley fretted more, and suffered from returns of his distressing colics. At last, Gleeag told him that he thought they might be due to an overlooked gallstone working down. A second comparatively trivial operation would eliminate the bother once and for all. If Castorley cared for another opinion, Gleeag named a surgeon of eminence. ‘And then,’ said he, cheerily, ‘the two of us can talk you over.’ Castorley did not want to be talked over. He was oppressed by pains in his side, which, at first, had yielded to the liver-tonics Gleeag prescribed; but now they stayed—like a toothache—behind everything. He felt most at ease in his bedroom-study, with his proofs round him. If he had more pain than he could stand, he would consider the second operation. Meantime Manallace—‘the meticulous Manallace,’ he called him—agreed with him in thinking that the Mentzel page-facsimile, done by the Sunnapia Library, was not quite good enough for the great book, and the Sunnapia people were, very decently, having it re-processed. This would hold things back till early spring, which had its advantages, for he could run a fresh eye over all in the interval.

One gathered these news in the course of stray visits as the days shortened. He insisted on Manallace keeping to the ‘sacred hours,’ and Manallace insisted on my accompanying him when possible. On these occasions he and Castorley would confer apart for half an hour or so, while I listened to an unendurable clock in the drawing-room. Then I would join them and help wear out the rest of the time, while Castorley rambled. His speech, now, was often clouded and uncertain—the result of the ‘liver-tonics’; and his face came to look like old vellum.

It was a few days after Christmas—the operation had been postponed till the following Friday—that we called together. She met us with word that Sir Alured had picked up an irritating little winter cough, due to a cold wave, but we were not, therefore, to abridge our visit. We found him in steam perfumed with Friar’s Balsam. He waved the old Sunnapia facsimile at us. We agreed that it ought to have been more worthy. He took a dose of his mixture, lay back and asked us to lock the door. There was, he whispered, something wrong somewhere. He could not lay his finger on it, but it was in the air. He felt he was being played with. He did not like it. There was something wrong all round him. Had we noticed it? Manallace and I severally and slowly denied that we had noticed anything of the sort.

With no longer break than a light fit of coughing, he fell into the hideous, helpless panic of the sick—those worse than captives who lie at the judgment and mercy of the hale for every office and hope. He wanted to go away. Would we help him to pack his Gladstone? Or, if that would attract too much attention in certain quarters, help him to dress and go out? There was an urgent matter to be set right, and now that he had The Title and knew his own mind it would all end happily and he would be well again. Please would we let him go out, just to speak to—he named her; he named her by her ‘little’ name out of the old Neminaka days? Manallace quite agreed, and recommended a pull at the ‘liver-tonic’ to brace him after so long in the house. He took it, and Manallace suggested that it would be better if, after his walk, he came down to the cottage for a week-end and brought the revise with him. They could then re-touch the last chapter. He answered to that drug and to some praise of his work, and presently simpered drowsily. Yes, it was good—though he said it who should not. He praised himself awhile till, with a puzzled forehead and shut eyes, he told us that she had been saying lately that it was too good—the whole thing, if we understood, was too good. He wished us to get the exact shade of her meaning. She had suggested, or rather implied, this doubt. She had said—he would let us draw our own inferences—that the Chaucer find had ‘anticipated the wants of humanity.’ Johnson, of course. No need to tell him that. But what the hell was her implication? Oh God! Life had always been one long innuendo! And she had said that a man could do anything with anyone if he saved him the trouble of thinking. What did she mean by that? He had never shirked thought. He had thought sustainedly all his life. It wasn’t too good, was it? Manallace didn’t think it was too good—did he? But this pick-pick-picking at a man’s brain and work was too bad, wasn’t it? What did she mean? Why did she always bring in Manallace, who was only a friend—no scholar, but a lover of the game—Eh?—Manallace could confirm this if he were here, instead of loafing on the Continent just when he was most needed.

‘I’ve come back,’ Manallace interrupted, unsteadily. ‘I can confirm every word you’ve said. You’ve nothing to worry about. It’s your find—your credit—your glory and—all the rest of it.’

‘Swear you’ll tell her so then,’ said Castorley. ‘She doesn’t believe a word I say. She told me she never has since before we were married. Promise!’

Manallace promised, and Castorley added that he had named him his literary executor, the proceeds of the book to go to his wife. ‘All profits without deduction,’ he gasped. ‘Big sales if it’s properly handled. You don’t need money . . . . Graydon’ll trust you to any extent. It ’ud be a long . . .’

He coughed, and, as he caught breath, his pain broke through all the drugs, and the outcry filled the room. Manallace rose to fetch Gleeag, when a full, high, affected voice, unheard for a generation, accompanied, as it seemed, the clamour of a beast in agony, saying: ‘I wish to God someone would stop that old swine howling down there! I can’t . . . I was going to tell you fellows that it would be a dam’ long time before Graydon advanced me two quid.’

We escaped together, and found Gleeag waiting, with Lady Castorley, on the landing. He telephoned me, next morning, that Castorley had died of bronchitis, which his weak state made it impossible for him to throw off. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ he added, in reply to the condolences I asked him to convey to the widow. ‘We might have come across something we couldn’t have coped with.’

Distance from that house made me bold.

‘You knew all along, I suppose? What was it, really?’

‘Malignant kidney-trouble—generalised at the end. ‘No use worrying him about it. We let him through as easily as possible. Yes! A happy release. . What? . . . Oh! Cremation. Friday, at eleven.’

There, then, Manallace and I met. He told me that she had asked him whether the book need now be published; and he had told her this was more than ever necessary, in her interests as well as Castorley’s.

‘She is going to be known as his widow—for a while, at any rate. Did I perjure myself much with him?’

‘Not explicitly,’ I answered.

‘Well, I have now—with her—explicitly,’ said he, and took out his black gloves. . . .

As, on the appointed words, the coffin crawled sideways through the noiselessly-closing doorflaps, I saw Lady Castorley’s eyes turn towards Gleeag.

The Daughter of the Regiment

Jain ’Ardin’ was a Sarjint’s wife,
     A Sarjint’s wife wus she.
She married of ’im in Orldershort
     An’ comed acrost the sea.
                    (Chorus) 
’Ave you never ’eard tell o’ Jain ’Ardin’?
     Jain ’Ardin’? Jain ’Ardin’?
’Ave you never ’eard tell o’ Jain ’Ardin’?
     The pride o’ the Companee?
         - Old Barrack-Room Ballad.

[a short tale]

‘A GENTLEMAN who doesn’t know the Circassian Circle ought not to stand up for it—puttin’ everybody out.’ That was what Miss McKenna said, and the Sergeant who was my vis-à-vis looked the same thing. I was afraid of Miss McKenna. She was six feet high, all yellow freckles and red hair, and was simply clad in white satin shoes, a pink muslin dress, an apple-green stuff sash, and black silk gloves, with yellow roses in her hair. Wherefore I fled from Miss McKenna and sought my friend Private Mulvaney, who was at the cant—refreshment-table.

‘So you’ve been dancin’ with little Jhansi McKenna, Sorr—she that’s goin’ to marry Corp’ril Slane? Whin you next conversh wid your lorruds an’ your ladies, tell thim you’ve danced wid little Jhansi. ’Tis a thing to be proud av.’

But I wasn’t proud. I was humble. I saw a story in Private Mulvaney’s eye; and besides, if he stayed too long at the bar, he would, I knew, qualify for more pack-drill. Now to meet an esteemed friend doing pack-drill outside the guardroom is embarrassing, especially if you happen to be walking with his Commanding Officer.

‘Come on to the parade-ground, Mulvaney, it’s cooler there, and tell me about Miss McKenna. What is she, and who is she, and why is she called “Jhansi”?’

‘D’ye mane to say you’ve niver heard av Ould Pummeloe’s daughter? An’ you thinkin’ you know things! I’m wid ye in a minut’ whin me poipe’s lit.’

We came out under the stars. Mulvaney sat down on one of the artillery bridges, and began in the usual way: his pipe between his teeth, his big hands clasped and dropped between his knees, and his cap well on the back of his head—

‘Whin Mrs. Mulvaney, that is, was Miss Shad that was, you were a dale younger than you are now, an’ the Army was dif’rint in sev’ril e-sen-shuls. Bhoys have no call for to marry nowadays, an’ that’s why the Army has so few rale, good, honust, swearin’, strapagin’, tinder-hearted, heavy-futted wives as ut used to have whin I was a Corp’ril. I was rejuced aftherwards—but no matther—I was a Corp’ril wanst. In thim times a man lived an’ died wid his regiment; an’ by natur’, he married whin he was a man. Whin I was Corp’ril—Mother av Hivin, how the rigimint has died an’ been borrun since that day!—my Colour-Sar’jint was Ould McKenna, an’ a married man tu. An’ his woife—his first woife, for he married three times did McKenna—was Bridget McKenna, from Portarlington, like mesilf. I’ve misremembered fwhat her first name was; but in B Comp’ny we called her “Ould Pummeloe,” by reason av her figure, which was entirely cir-cum-fe-renshill. Like the big dhrum! Now that woman—God rock her sowl to rest in glory!—was for everlastin’ havin’ childher; an’ McKenna, whin the fifth or sixth come squallin’ on to the musther-roll, swore he wud number thim off in future. But Ould Pummeloe she prayed av him to christen them after the names av the stations they was borrun in. So there was Colaba McKenna, an’ Muttra McKenna, an’ a whole Presidincy av other McKennas, an’ little Jhansi, dancin’ over yonder. Whin the childher wasn’t bornin’, they was dying; for, av our childher die like sheep in these days, they died like flies thin. I lost me own little Shad—but no matther. ’Tis long ago, and Mrs. Mulvaney niver had another.

‘I’m digresshin. Wan divil’s hot summer there come an order from some mad ijjit, whose name I misremember, for the rigimint to go upcountry. Maybe they wanted to know how the new rail carried throops. They knew! On me sowl, they knew before they was done! Old Pummeloe had just buried Muttra McKenna; an’, the season bein’ onwholesim, only little Jhansi McKenna, who was four year ould thin, was left on hand.

‘Five children gone in fourteen months. ’Twas harrd, wasn’t ut?’

So we wint up to our new station in that blazin’ heat—may the curse av Saint Lawrence conshume the man who gave the ordher! Will I iver forget that move? They gave us two wake thrains to the rigimint; an’ we was eight hundher’ and sivinty strong. There was A, B, C, an’ D Companies in the secon’ thrain, wid twelve women, no orficers’ ladies, an’ thirteen childher. We was to go six hundher’ miles, an’ railways was new in thim days. Whin we had been a night in the belly av the thrain—the men ragin’ in their shirts an’ dhrinkin’ anything they cud find, an’ eatin’ bad fruit-stuff whin they cud, for we cudn’t stop ’em—I was a Corp’ril thin—the cholera bruk out wid the dawnin’ av the day.

‘Pray to the Saints you may niver see cholera in a throop-thrain! ’Tis like the judgmint av God hittin’ down from the nakid sky! We run into a rest-camp—as ut might have been Ludianny, but not by any means so comfortable. The Orficer Commandin’ sent a telegrapt up the line, three hundher’ mile up, askin’ for help. Faith, we wanted ut, for ivry sowl av the followers ran for the dear life as soon as the thrain stopped; an’ by the time that telegrapt was writ, there wasn’t a naygur in the station exceptin’ the telegrapt-clerk—an’ he only bekaze he was held down to his chair by the scruff av his sneakin’ black neck. Thin the day began wid the noise in the carr’ges, an’ the rattle av the men on the platform fallin’ over, arms an’ all, as they stud for to answer the Comp’ny muster-roll before goin’ over to the camp. ’Tisn’t for me to say what like the cholera was like. May be the Doctor cud ha’ tould, av he hadn’t dropped on to the platform from the door av a carriage where we was takin’ out the dead. He died wid the rest. Some bhoys had died in the night. We tuk out siven, and twenty more was sickenin’ as we tuk thim. The women was huddled up anyways, screamin’ wid fear.

‘Sez the Commandin’ Orficer whose name I misremember, “Take the women over to that tope av trees yonder. Get thim out av the camp. ’Tis no place for thim.”

‘Ould Pummeloe was sittin’ on her beddin’-rowl, thryin’ to kape little Jhansi quiet. “Go off to that tope!” sez the Orficer. “Go out av the men’s way!”

‘“Be damned av I do!” sez Ould Pummeloe, an’ little Jhansi, squattin’ by her mother’s side, squeaks out, “Be damned av I do,” tu. Thin Ould Pummeloe turns to the women an’ she sez,“ Are ye goin’ to let the bhoys die while you’re picnickin’, ye sluts?” sez she. “’Tis wather they want. Come on an’ help.”

‘Wid that, she turns up her sleeves an’ steps out for a well behind the rest-camp—little Jhansi trottin’ behind wid a lotah an’ string, an’ the other women followin’ like lambs, wid horse-buckets and cookin’ pots. Whin all the things was full, Ould Pummeloe marches back into camp—’twas like a battlefield wid all the glory missin’—at the hid av the rigimint av women.

‘“McKenna, me man!” she sez, wid a voice on her like grand-roun’s challenge, “tell the bhoys to be quiet. Ould Pummeloe’s comin’ to look afther thim—wid free dhrinks.”

‘Thin we cheered, an’ the cheerin’ in the lines was louder than the noise av the poor divils wid the sickness on thim. But not much.’

‘You see, we was a new an’ raw rigimint in those days, an’ we cud make neither head nor tail av the sickness; an’ so we was useless. The men was goin’ roun’ an’ about like dumb sheep, waitin’ for the nex’ man to fall over, an’ sayin’ undher their spache, “Fwhat is ut? In the name av God, fwhat is ut?” ’Twas horrible. But through ut all, up an’ down, an’ down an’ up, wint Ould Pummeloe an’ little Jhansi—all we cud see av the baby, undher a dead man’s helmut wid the chinstrap swingin’ about her little stummick—up an’ down wid the wather an’ fwhat brandy there was.

‘Now an’ thin Ould Pummeloe, the tears runnin’ down her fat, red face, sez, “Me bhoys, me poor, dead, darlin’ bhoys!” But, for the most, she was thryin’ to put heart into the men an’ kape thim stiddy; and little Jhansi was tellin’ thim all they wud be “betther in the mornin’.” ’Twas a thrick she’d picked up from hearin’ Ould Pummeloe whin Muttra was burnin’ out wid fever. In the mornin’! ’Twas the iverlastin’ mornin’ at St. Pether’s Gate was the mornin’ for seven-an’-twenty good men; and twenty more was sick to the death in that bitter, burnin’ sun. But the women worked like angils as I’ve said, an’ the men like divils, till two doctors come down from above, and we was rescued.

‘But, just before that, Ould Pummeloe, on her knees over a bhoy in my squad—right-cot man to me he was in the barrick—tellin’ him the worrud av the Church that niver failed a man yet, sez, “Hould me up, bhoys! I’m feelin’ bloody sick!” ’Twas the sun, not the cholera, did ut. She misremembered she was only wearin’ her ould black bonnet, an’ she died wid “McKenna, me man,” houldin’ her up, an’ the bhoys howled whin they buried her.

‘That night a big wind blew, an’ blew, an’ blew, an’ blew the tents flat. But it blew the cholera away, an’ niver another case there was all the while we was waitin’—ten days in quarintin’. Av you will belave me, the thrack av the sickness in the camp was for all the wurruld the thrack av a man walkin’ four times in a figur-av-eight through the tents. They say ’tis the Wandherin’ Jew takes the cholera wid him. I believe ut.’

‘An’ that,’ said Mulvaney illogically, ‘is the cause why little Jhansi McKenna is fwhat she is. She was brought up by the Quartermaster Sergeant’s wife whin McKenna died, but she b’longs to B Comp’ny; and this tale I’m tellin’ you—wid a proper appreciashin av Jhansi McKenna — I’ve belted into ivry recruity av the Comp’ny as he was drafted. ’Faith, ’twas me belted Corp’ril Slane into askin’ the girl!’

‘Not really?’

‘Man, I did! She’s no beauty to look at, but she’s Ould Pummeloe’s daughter, an’ ’tis my juty to provide for her. Just before Slane got his promotion I sez to him, “Slane,” sez I,” tomorrow ’twill be insubordinashin av me to chastise you; but, by the sowl av Ould Pummeloe, who is now in glory, av you don’t give me your wurrud to ask Jhansi McKenna at wanst, I’ll peel the flesh off yer bones wid a brass huk to-night. Tis a dishgrace to B Comp’ny she’s been single so long!” sez I. Was I goin’ to let a three-year-ould preshume to discoorse wid me—my will bein’ set? No! Slane wint an’ asked her. He’s a good bhoy is Slane. Wan av these days he’ll get into the Com’ssariat an’ dhrive a buggy wid his—savin’s. So I provided for Ould Pummeloe’s daughter; an’ now you go along an’ dance agin wid her.’

And I did.

I felt a respect for Miss Jhansi McKenna; and I went to her wedding later on.

Perhaps I will tell you about that one of these days.

The Comprehension of Private Copper

(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 4

PRIVATE COPPER’S father was a Southdown shepherd; in early youth Copper had studied under him. Five years’ army service had somewhat blunted Private Copper’s pastoral instincts, but it occurred to him as a memory of the Chalk that sheep, or in this case buck, do not move towards one across turf, or in this case, the Colesberg kopjes unless a stranger, or in this case an enemy, is in the neighbourhood. Copper, helmet back-first, advanced with caution, leaving his mates of the picket full a mile behind. The picket, concerned for its evening meal, did not protest. A year ago it would have been an officer’s command, moving as such. To-day it paid casual allegiance to a Canadian, nominally a sergeant, actually a trooper of Irregular Horse, discovered convalescent in Naauwport Hospital, and forthwith employed on odd jobs. Private Copper crawled up the side of a bluish rock-strewn hill thinly fringed with brush a-top, and remembering how he had peered at Sussex conies through the edge of furze-clumps, cautiously parted the dry stems before his face. At the foot of the long slope sat three farmers smoking. To his natural lust for tobacco was added personal wrath because spiky plants were pricking his belly, and Private Copper slid the backsight up to fifteen hundred yards . . . .‘Good evening, khaki. Please don’t move,’ said a voice on his left, and as he jerked his head round he saw entirely down the barrel of a well-kept Lee-Metford protruding from an insignificant tuft of thorn. Very few graven images have moved less than did Private Copper through the next ten seconds.

‘It’s nearer seventeen hundred than fifteen,’ said a young man in an obviously ready-made suit of grey tweed, possessing himself of Private Copper’s rifle. ‘Thank you. We’ve got a post of thirty-seven men out yonder. You’ve eleven—eh? We don’t want to kill ’em. We have no quarrel with poor uneducated khakis, and we do not want prisoners we do not keep. It is demoralising to both sides—eh?’

Private Copper did not feel called upon to lay down the conduct of guerilla warfare. This dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed stranger was his first intimate enemy. He spoke, allowing for a clipped cadence that recalled to Copper vague memories of Umballa, in precisely the same offensive accent that the young squire of Wilmington had used fifteen years ago when he caught and kicked Alf Copper, a rabbit in each pocket, out of the ditches of Cuckmere. The enemy looked Copper up and down, folded and repocketed a copy of an English weekly which he had been reading, and said: ‘You seem an inarticulate sort of swinel—ike the rest of them—eh?’

‘You,’ said Copper, thinking, somehow, of the crushing answers he had never given to the young squire, ‘are a renegid. Why, you ain’t Dutch. You’re English, same as me.’

‘No, khaki. If you cannot talk civilly to a gentleman I will blow your head off.’

Copper cringed, and the action overbalanced him so that he rolled some six or eight feet downhill, under the lee of a rough rock. His brain was working with a swiftness and clarity strange in all his experience of Alf Copper. While he rolled he spoke, and the voice from his own jaws amazed him: ‘If you did, ’twouldn’t make you any less of a renegid.’ As a useful afterthought he added ‘I’ve sprained my ankle.’

The young man was at his side in a flash. Copper made no motion to rise, but, cross-legged under the rock, grunted: ‘’Ow much did old Krujer pay you for this? What was you wanted for at ’ome? Where did you desert from?’

‘Khaki,’ said the young man, sitting down in his turn, ‘you are a shade better than your mates. You did not make much more noise than a yoke of oxen when you tried to come up this hill, but you are an ignorant diseased beast like the rest of your people—eh? When you were at the Ragged Schools did they teach you any history, Tommy—’istory, I mean?’

‘Don’t need no schoolin’ to know a renegid,’ said Copper. He had made three yards down the hill—out of sight, unless they could see through rocks, of the enemy’s smoking party.

The young man laughed; and tossed the soldier a black sweating stick of ‘True Affection.’ (Private Copper had not smoked a pipe for three weeks.)

‘You don’t get this—eh?’ said the young man. ‘We do. We take it from the trains as we want it. You can keep the cake—you po-ah Tommee.’ Copper rammed the good stuff into his long-cold pipe and puffed luxuriously. Two years ago the sister of gunner-guard De Souza, East India Railway, had, at a dance given by the sergeants to the Allahabad Railway Volunteers, informed Copper that she could not think of waltzing with ‘a poo-ah Tommee.’ Private Copper wondered why that memory should have returned at this hour.

‘I’m going to waste a little trouble on you before I send you back to your picket quite naked—eh? Then you can say how you were overpowered by twenty of us and fired off your last round—like the men we picked up at the drift playing cards at Stryden’s farm-eh? What’s your name—eh?’

Private Copper thought for a moment of a faraway housemaid who might still, if the local postman had not gone too far, be interested in his fate. On the other hand, he was, by temperament, economical of the truth. ‘Pennycuik,’ he said, ‘John Pennycuik.’

‘Thank you. Well, Mr. John Pennycuik, I’m going to teach you a little ’istory, as you’d call it—eh?’

‘Ow !’ said Copper, stuffing his left hand in his mouth. ‘So long since I’ve smoked I’ve burned my ’and—an’ the pipe’s dropped too. No objection to my movin’ down to fetch it, is there—Sir?’

‘I’ve got you covered,’ said the young man, graciously, and Private Copper, hopping on one leg, because of his sprain, recovered the pipe yet another three yards downhill and squatted under another rock slightly larger than the first. A roundish boulder made a pleasant rest for his captor, who sat cross-legged once more, facing Copper, his rifle across his knee, his hand on the trigger-guard.

‘Well, Mr. Pennycuik, as I was going to tell you. A little after you were born in your English workhouse, your kind, honourable, brave country, England, sent an English gentleman, who could not tell a lie, to say that so long as the sun rose and the rivers ran in their courses the Transvaal would belong to England. Did you ever hear that, khaki—eh?’

‘Oh no, Sir,’ said Copper. This sentence about the sun and the rivers happened to be a very aged jest of McBride, the professional humorist of D Company, when they discussed the probable length of the war. Copper had thrown beef-tins at McBride in the grey dawn of many wet and dry camps for intoning it.

‘Of course you would not. Now, mann, I tell you, listen.’ He spat aside and cleared his throat. ‘Because of that little promise, my father he moved into the Transvaal and bought a farm—a little place of twenty or thirty thousand acres, don’t—you—know.’

The tone, in spite of the sing-song cadence fighting with the laboured parody of the English drawl, was unbearably like the young Wilmington squire’s, and Copper found himself saying: ‘I ought to. I’ve ’elped burn some.’

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‘Yes, you’ll pay for that later. And he opened a store.’

‘Ho! Shopkeeper was he?’

‘The kind you call “Sir” and sweep the floor for, Pennycuik . . . . You see, in those days one used to believe in the British Government. My father did. Then the Transvaal wiped thee earth with the English. They beat them six times running. You know thatt—eh?’

‘Isn’t what we’ve come ’ere for.’

‘But my father (he knows better now) kept on believing in the English. I suppose it was the pretty talk about rivers and suns that cheated him—eh? Anyhow, he believed in his own country. Inn his own country. So—you see—he was a little startled when he found himself handed over to the Transvaal as a prisoner of war. That’s what it came to, Tommy—a prisoner of war. You know what that is—eh? England was too honourable and too gentlemanly to take trouble. There were no terms made for my father.’

‘So ’e made ’em ’imself. Useful old bird.’ Private Copper sliced up another pipeful and looked out across the wrinkled sea of kopjes, through which came the roar of the rushing Orange River, so unlike quiet Cuckmere.

The young man’s face darkened. ‘I think I shall sjambok you myself when I’ve quite done with you. No, my father (he was a fool) made no terms for eight years—ninety-six months—and for every day of them the Transvaal made his life hell for my father and—his people.’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said the impenitent Copper.

‘Are you? You can think of it when I’m taking the skin off your back—eh? . . . My father, he lost everything—everything down to his self-respect. You don’t know what thatt means—eh?’

‘Why?’ said Copper. ‘I’m smokin’ baccy stole by a renegid. Why wouldn’t I know?’

If it came to a flogging on that hillside there might be a chance of reprisals. Of course, he might be marched to the Boer camp in the next valley and there operated upon; but Army life teaches no man to cross bridges unnecessarily.

‘Yes, after eight years, my father, cheated by your bitch of a country, he found out who was the upper dog in South Africa.’

‘That’s me,’ said Copper valiantly. ‘If it takes another ’alf-century, it’s me an’ the likes of me.’

‘You? Heaven help you! You’ll be screaming at a wagon-wheel in an hour . . . . Then it struck my father that he’d like to shoot the people who’d betrayed him. You—you—you! He told his son all about it. He told him never to trust the English. He told him to do them all the harm he could. Mann, I tell you, I don’t want much telling. I was born in the Transvaal—I’m a burgher. If my father didn’t love the English, by the Lord, mann, I tell you, I hate them from the bottom of my soul.’

The voice quavered and ran high. Once more, for no conceivable reason, Private Copper found his inward eye turned upon Umballa cantonments of a dry dusty afternoon, when the saddle-coloured son of a local hotel-keeper came to the barracks to complain of a theft of fowls. He saw the dark face, the plover’s-egg-tinted eyeballs, and the thin excited hands. Above all, he remembered the passionate, queerly-strung words. Slowly he returned to South Africa, using the very sentence his sergeant had used to the poultry man.

‘Go on with your complaint. I’m listenin’.’

‘Complaint! Complaint about you, you ox! We strip and kick your sort by thousands.’

The young man rocked to and fro above the rifle, whose muzzle thus deflected itself from the pit of Private Copper’s stomach. His face was dusky with rage.

‘Yess, I’m a Transvaal burgher. It took us about twenty years to find out how rotten you were. We know and you know it now. Your Army—it is the laughing-stock of the Continent.’ He tapped the newspaper in his pocket. ‘You think you’re going to win, you poor fools! Your people—your own people—your silly rotten fools of people will crawl out of it as they did after Majuba. They are beginning now. Look what your own working classes, the diseased, lying, drinking white stuff that you come out of, are saying.’ He thrust the English weekly, doubled at the leading article, on Copper’s knee. ‘See what dirty dogs your masters are. They do not even back you in your dirty work. We cleared the country down to Ladysmith—to Estcourt. We cleared the country down to Colesberg.’

‘Yes. We ’ad to clean up be’ind you. Messy, I call it.’

‘You’ve had to stop farm-burning because your people daren’t do it. They were afraid. You daren’t kill a spy. You daren’t shoot a spy when you catch him in your own uniform. You daren’t touch our loyall people in Cape Town! Your masters won’t let you. You will feed our women and children till we are quite ready to take them back. You can’t put your cowardly noses out of the towns you say you’ve occupied. You daren’t move a convoy twenty miles. You think you’ve done something? You’ve done nothing, and you’ve taken a quarter of a million of men to do it! There isn’t a nigger in South Africa that doesn’t obey us if we lift our finger. You pay the stuff four pounds a month and they lie to you. We flog ’em, as I shall flog you.’

He clasped his hands together and leaned forward his out-thrust chin within two feet of Copper’s left or pipe hand.

‘Yuss,’ said Copper, ‘it’s a fair knock-out.’ The fist landed to a hair on the chin-point, the neck snicked like a gun-lock, and the back of the head crashed on the boulder behind.

Copper grabbed up both rifles, unshipped the cross-bandoliers, drew forth the English weekly, and picking up the lax hands, looked long and intently at the finger-nails.

‘No! Not a sign of it there,’ he said. ‘’Is nails are as clean as mine—but he talks just like ’em though. And he’s a landlord too! A landed proprietor! Shockin’, I call it.’

The arms began to flap with returning consciousness. Private Copper rose up and whispered ‘If you open your head, I’ll bash it.’ There was no suggestion of sprain in the flung-back left boot. ‘Now walk m front of me, both arms perpendicularly elevated. I’m only a third-class shot, so, if you don’t object, I’ll rest the muzzle of my rifle lightly but firmly on your collar-button—coverin’ the serviceable vertebree. If your friends see us thus engaged, you pray—’ard.’

Private and prisoner staggered downhill. No shots broke the peace of the afternoon, but once the young man checked and was sick.

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‘There’s a lot of things I could say to you,’ Copper observed, at the close of the paroxysm, ‘but it doesn’t matter. Look ’ere, you call me “pore Tommy”again.’

The prisoner hesitated.

‘Oh, I ain’t goin’ to do anythin’ to you. I’m reconnoiterin’ on my own. Say “pore Tommy” ’alf-a-dozen times.’

The prisoner obeyed.

‘That’s what’s been puzzlin’ me since I ’ad the pleasure o’ meetin’ you,’ said Copper. ‘You ain’t ’alf-caste, but you talk chee-chee—pukka bazar chee-chee. Proceed.’

‘Hullo,’ said the Sergeant of the picket, twenty minutes later, ‘where did you round him up?’

‘On the top o’ yonder craggy mounting. There’s a mob of ’em sitting round their Bibles seventeen ’undred yards (you said it was seventeen ’undred ?) t’other side—an’ I want some coffee.’ He sat down on the smoke-blackened stones by the fire.

‘’Ow did you get ’im ?’ said McBride, professional humorist, quietly filching the English weekly from under Copper’s armpit.

‘On the chin—while ’e was waggin’ it at me.’

‘What is ’e? ’Nother Colonial rebel to be ’orribly disenfranchised, or a Cape Minister, or only a loyal farmer with dynamite in both boots? Tell us all about it, Burjer!’

‘You leave my prisoner alone,’ said Private Copper. ‘’E’s ’ad losses an’ trouble; an’ it’s in the family too. ’E thought I never read the papers, so ’e kindly lent me his very own Jerrold’s Weekly—an’ ’e explained it to me as patronisin’ as a—as a militia subaltern doin’ Railway Staff Officer. ’E’s a left-over from Majuba—one of the worst kind, an’ ’earin’ the evidence as I did, I don’t exactly blame ’im. It was this way.’

To the picket Private Copper held forth for ten minutes on the life-history of his captive. Allowing for some purple patches, it was an absolutely fair rendering.

‘But what I dis-liked was this baccy-priggin’ beggar, ’oo’s people, on ’is own showin’, couldn’t ’ave been more than thirty or forty years in the coun—on this Gawd-forsaken dust-’eap, comin’ the squire over me. They’re all parsons—we know that, but parson an’ squire is a bit too thick for Alf Copper. Why, I caught ’im in the shameful act of tryin’ to start a aristocracy on a gun an’ a wagon an’ a shambuk! Yes; that’s what it was: a bloomin’ aristocracy.’

‘No, it weren’t,’ said McBride, at length, on the dirt, above the purloined weekly. ‘You’re the aristocrat, Alf. Old Jerrold’s givin’ it you lot. You’re the uneducated ’ireling of a calcallous aristocracy which ’as sold itself to the ’Ebrew financeer. Meantime, Ducky’—he ran his finger down a column of assorted paragraphs—‘you’re slakin’ your brutal instincks in furious excesses. Shriekin’ women an’ desolated ’omesteads is what you enjoy, Alf . . . . Halloa! What’s a smokin’ ’ektacomb?’

‘’Ere! Let’s look. ’Aven’t seen a proper spicy paper for a year. Good old Jerrold’s!’ Pinewood and Moppet, reservists, flung themselves on McBride’s shoulders, pinning him to the ground.

‘Lie over your own bloomin’ side of the bed, an’ we can all look,’ he protested.

‘They’re only po-ah Tommies,’ said Copper, apologetically, to the prisoner. ‘Po-ah unedicated khakis. They don’t know what they’re fightin’ for. They’re lookin’ for what the diseased, lying, drinkin’ white stuff that they come from is sayin’ about ’em!’

The prisoner set down his tin of coffee and stared helplessly round the circle.

‘I—I don’t understand them.’

The Canadian sergeant, picking his teeth with a thorn, nodded sympathetically.

‘If it comes to that, we don’t in my country! . . . Say, boys, when you’re through with your English mail you might ’s well provide an escort for your prisoner. He’s waitin’.’

‘Arf a mo’ Sergeant,’ said McBride, still reading. ‘’Ere’s Old Barbarity on the ramp again with some of ’is lady friends, ’oo don’t like concentration camps. Wish they’d visit ours. Pinewood’s a married man. He’d know how to be’ave!’

‘Well, I ain’t goin’ to amuse my prisoner alone. ’E’s gettin’ ’omesick,’ cried Copper. ‘One of you thieves read out what’s vexin’ Old Barbarity an’ ’is ’arem these days. You’d better listen, Burjer, because, afterwards, I’m goin’ to fall out an’ perpetrate those nameless barbarities all over you to keep up the reputation of the British Army.’

From that English weekly, to bar out which a large and perspiring staff of Press censors toiled seven days of the week at Cape Town, did Pinewood of the Reserve read unctuously excerpts of the speeches of the accredited leaders of His Majesty’s Opposition. The night-picket arrived in the middle of it, but stayed entranced without paying any compliments, till Pinewood had entirely finished the leading article, and several occasional notes.

‘Gentlemen of the jury,’ said Alf Copper, hitching up what war had left to him of trousers—‘you’ve ’eard what ’e’s been fed up with. Do you blame the beggar? ’Cause I don’t! . . . Leave ’im alone, McBride. He’s my first and only cap-ture, an’ I’m goin’ to walk ’ome with ’im, ain’t I, Ducky? . . . Fall in, Burjer. It’s Bermuda, or Umballa, or Ceylon for you—and I’d give a month’s pay to be in your little shoes.’

As not infrequently happens, the actual moving off the ground broke the prisoner’s nerve. He stared at the tinted hills round him, gasped and began to struggle—kicking, swearing, weeping, and fluttering all together.

‘Pore beggar—oh, pore, pore beggar!’ said Alf, leaning in on one side of him, while Pinewood blocked him on the other.

‘Let me go! Let me go! Mann, I tell you, let me go——’

‘’E screams like a woman!’ said McBride. ‘They’ll ’ear ’im five miles off.’

‘There’s one or two ought to ’ear ’im—in England,’ said Copper, putting aside a wildly waving arm.

‘Married, ain’t ’e?’ said Pinewood. ‘I’ve seen ’em go like this before just at the last. ‘Old on, old man. No one’s goin’ to ’urt you.’

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The last of the sun threw the enormous shadow of a kopje over the little, anxious, wriggling group.

‘Quit that,’ said the Sergeant of a sudden. ‘You’re only making him worse. Hands up, prisoner! Now you get a holt of yourself, or this’ll go off.’

And indeed the revolver-barrel square at the man’s panting chest seemed to act like a tonic; he choked, recovered himself, and fell in between Copper and Pinewood.

As the picket neared the camp it broke into song that was heard among the officers’ tents:

’E sent us ’is blessin’ from London town
(The beggar that kep’ the cordite down),
But what do we care if ’e smile or frown,
The beggar that kep’ the cordite down?
The mildly nefarious
Wildly barbarious
Beggar that kep’ the cordite down!

Said a captain a mile away: ‘Why are they singing that? We haven’t had a mail for a month, have we?’

An hour later the same captain said to his servant: ‘Jenkins, I understand the picket have got a—got a newspaper off a prisoner to-day. I wish you could lay hands on it, Jenkins. Copy of the Times, I think.’

‘Yes, Sir. Copy of the Times, Sir,’ said Jenkins, without a quiver, and went forth to make his own arrangements.

‘Copy of the Times?’ said the blameless Alf, from beneath his blanket. ‘I ain’t a member of the Soldiers’ Institoot. Go an’ look in the reg’mental Readin’-room—Veldt Row, Kopje Street, second turnin’ to the left between ’ere an’ Naauwport.’

Jenkins summarised briefly in a tense whisper the thing that Alf Copper need not be.

‘But my particular copy of the Times is specially pro’ibited by the censor from corruptin’ the morals of the Army. Get a written order from K. o’ K., properly countersigned, an’ I’ll think about it.’

‘I’ve got all you want,’ said Jenkins. ‘’Urry up. I want to ’ave a squint myself.’

Something gurgled in the darkness, and Private Copper fell back smacking his lips.

‘Gawd bless my prisoner, and make me a good boy. Amen. ’Ere you are, Jenkins. It’s dirt cheap at a tot.’

The Church that was at Antioch

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HIS mother, a devout and well-born Roman widow, decided that he was doing himself no good in an Eastern Legion so near to free-thinking Constantinople, and got him seconded for civil duty in Antioch, where his uncle, Lucius Sergius, was head of the urban Police. Valens obeyed as a son and as a young man keen to see life, and, presently, cast up at his uncle’s door.‘That sister-in-law of mine,’ said the elder, ‘never remembers me till she wants something. What have you been doing?’

‘Nothing, Uncle.’

‘Meaning everything?’

‘That’s what mother thinks. But I haven’t.’

‘We shall see. Your quarters are across the inner courtyard. Your—er—baggage is there already. . . . Oh, I shan’t interfere with your private arrangements! I’m not the uncle with the rough tongue. Get your bath. We’ll talk at supper.’

But before that hour ‘Father Serga,’ as the Prefect of Police was called, learned from the Treasury that his nephew had marched overland from Constantinople in charge of a treasure-convoy which, after a brush with brigands in the pass outside Tarsus, he had duly delivered.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about it?’ his uncle asked at the meal.

‘I had to report to the Treasury first,’ was the answer.

Serga looked at him. ‘Gods! You are like your father,’ said he. ‘Cilicia is scandalously policed.’

‘So I noticed. They ambushed us not five miles from Tarsus town. Are we given to that sort of thing here?’

‘You make yourself at home early. No. We are not, but Syria is a Non-regulation Province—under the Emperor—not the Senate. We’ve the entire unaccountable East to one side; the scum of the Mediterranean on the other; and all hellicat Judaea southward. Anything can happen in Syria. D’you like the prospect?’

‘I shall—under you.’

‘It’s in the blood. The same with men as horses. Now what have you done that distresses your mother so?’

‘She’s a little behind the times, sir. She follows the old school, of course—the home-worships, and the strict Latin Trinity. I don’t think she recognises any Gods outside Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.’

‘I don’t either—officially.’

‘Nor I, as an officer, sir. But one wants more than that, and—and—what I learned in Byzant squared with what I saw with the Fifteenth.’

‘You needn’t go on. All Eastern Legions are alike. You mean you follow Mithras—eh?’

The young man bowed his head slightly.

‘No harm, boy. It’s a soldier’s religion, even if it comes from outside.’

‘So I thought. But Mother heard of it. She didn’t approve and—I suppose that’s why I’m here.’

‘Off the trident and into the net! Just like a woman! All Syria is stuffed with Mithraism. My objection to fancy religions is that they mostly meet after dark, and that means more work for the Police. We’ve a College here of stiff-necked Hebrews who call themselves Christians.’

‘I’ve heard of them,’ said Valens. ‘There isn’t a ceremony or symbol they haven’t stolen from the Mithras ritual.’

‘’No news to me! Religions are part of my office-work; and they’ll be part of yours. Our Synagogue Jews are fighting like Scythians over this new faith.’

‘Does that matter much?’

‘So long as they fight each other, we’ve only to keep the ring. Divide and rule—especially with Hebrews. Even these Christians are divided now. You see—one part of their worship is to eat together.’

‘Another theft! The Supper is the essential Symbol with us,’ Valens interrupted.

‘With us, it’s the essential symbol of trouble for your uncle, my dear. Anyone can become a Christian. A Jew may; but he still lives by his Law of Moses (I’ve had to master that cursed code, too), and it regulates all his doings. Then he sits down at a Christian love-feast beside a Greek or Westerner, who doesn’t kill mutton or pig—No! No! Jews don’t touch pork—as the Jewish Law lays down. Then the tables are broken up—but not by laughter—No! No! Riot!’

‘That’s childish,’ said Valens.

‘’Wish it were. But my lictors are called in to keep order, and I have to take the depositions of Synagogue Jews, denouncing Christians as traitors to Caesar. If I chose to act on half the stuff their Rabbis swear to, I’d have respectable little Jew shop-keepers up every week for conspiracy. Never decide on the evidence, when you’re dealing with Hebrews! Oh, you’ll get your bellyful of it! You’re for Market-duty to-morrow in the Little Circus ward, all among ’em. And now, sleep you well! I’ve been on this frontier as far back. as anyone remembers—that’s why they call me the Father of Syria—and oh—it’s good to see a sample of the old stock again!’

Next morning, and for many weeks after, Valens found himself on Market-inspection duty with a fat Aedile, who flew into rages because the stalls were not flushed down at the proper hour. A couple of his uncle’s men were told off to him, and, of course, introduced him to the thieves’ and prostitutes’ quarters, to the leading gladiators, and so forth.

One day, behind the Little Circus, near Singon Street, he ran into a mob, where a race-course gang were trying to collect, or evade, some bets on recent chariot-races. The Aedile said it was none of his affair and turned back. The lictors closed up behind Valens, but left the situation in his charge. Then a small hard man with eyebrows was punted on to his chest, amid howls from all around that he was the ringleader of a conspiracy. ‘Yes,’ said Valens, ‘that was an old trick in Byzant; but I think we’ll take you, my friend.’ Turning the small man loose, he gathered in the loudest of his accusers to appear before his uncle.

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‘You were quite right,’ said Serga next day.

‘That gentleman was put up to the job—by someone else. I ordered him one Roman dozen. Did you get the name of the man they were trying to push off on you?’

‘Yes. Gaius Julius Paulus. Why?’

‘I guessed as much. He’s an old acquaintance of mine, a Cilician from Tarsus. Well-born—a citizen by descent, and well-educated, but his people have disowned him. So he works for his living.’

‘He spoke like a well-born. He’s in splendid training, too. ’Felt him. All muscle.’

‘Small wonder. He can outmarch a camel. He is really the Prefect of this new sect. He travels all over our Eastern Provinces starting their Colleges and keeping them up to the mark. That’s why the Synagogue Jews are hunting him. If they could run him in on the political charge, it would finish him.’

‘Is he seditious, then?’

‘Not in the least. Even if he were, I wouldn’t feed him to the Jews just because they wanted it. One of our Governors tried that game down-coast—for the sake of peace—some years ago. He didn’t get it. Do you like your Market-work, my boy?’

‘It’s interesting. D’you know, uncle, I think the Synagogue Jews are better at their slaughter-house arrangements than we.’

‘They are. That’s what makes ’em so tough. A dozen stripes are nothing to Apella, though he’ll howl the yard down while he’s getting ’em. You’ve the Christians’ College in your quarter. How do they strike you?’

‘’Quiet enough. They’re worrying a bit over what they ought to eat at their love-feasts.’

‘I know it. Oh, I meant to tell you—we mustn’t try ’em too high just now, Valens. My office reports that Paulus, your small friend, is going down-country for a few days to meet another priest of the College, and bring him back to help smooth over their difficulties about their victuals. That means their congregation will be at loose ends till they return. Mass without mind always comes a cropper. So, now is when the Synagogue Jews will try to compromise them. I don’t want the poor devils stampeded into what can be made to look like political crime. ‘’Understand?’

Valens nodded. Between his uncle’s discursive evening talks, studded with kitchen-Greek and out-of-date Roman society-verses; his morning tours with the puffing Aedile; and the confidences of his lictors at all hours; he fancied he understood Antioch.

So he kept an eye on the rooms in the colonnade behind the Little Circus, where the new faith gathered. One of the many Jew butchers told him that Paulus had left affairs in the hands of some man called Barnabas, but that he would come back with one, Petrus—evidently a well-known character—who would settle all the food-differences between Greek and Hebrew Christians. The butcher had no spite against Greek Christians as such, if they would only kill their meat like decent Jews.

Serga laughed at this talk, but lent Valens an extra man or two, and said that this lion would be his to tackle, before long.

The boy found himself rushed into the arena one hot dusk, when word had come that this was to be a night of trouble. He posted his lictors in an alley within signal, and entered the common-room of the College, where the love-feasts were held. Everyone seemed as friendly as a Christian—to use the slang of the quarter—and Barnabas, a smiling, stately man by the door, specially so.

‘I am glad to meet you,’ he said. ‘You helped our Paulus in that scuffle the other day. We can’t afford to lose him. I wish he were back!’

He looked nervously down the hall, as it filled with people, of middle and low degree, setting out their evening meal on the bare tables, and greeting each other with a special gesture.

‘I assure you,’ he went on, his eyes still astray, ‘we’ve no intention of offending any of the brethren. Our differences can be settled if only——’

As though on a signal, clamour rose from half a dozen tables at once, with cries of ‘Pollution! Defilement! Heathen! The Law! The Law! Let Caesar know!’ As Valens backed against the wall, the crowd pelted each other with broken meats and crockery, till at last stones appeared from nowhere.

‘It’s a put-up affair,’ said Valens to Barnabas.

‘Yes. They come in with stones in their breasts. Be careful! They’re throwing your way,’ Barnabas replied. The crowd was well-embroiled now. A section of it bore down to where they stood, yelling for the justice of Rome. His two lictors slid in behind Valens, and a man leaped at him with a knife.

Valens struck up the hand, and the lictors had the man helpless as the weapon fell on the floor. The clash of it stilled the tumult a little. Valens caught the lull, speaking slowly: ‘Oh, citizens,’ he called, ‘must you begin your love-feasts with battle? Our tripe-sellers’ burial-club has better manners.’

A little laughter relieved the tension.

‘The Synagogue has arranged this,’ Barnabas muttered. ‘The responsibility will be laid on me.’

‘Who is the Head of your College?’ Valens called to the crowd.

The cries rose against each other.

‘Paulus! Saul! He knows the world —— No! No! Petrus! Our Rock! He won’t betray us. Petrus, the Living Rock.’

‘When do they come back?’ Valens asked. Several dates were given, sworn to, and denied.

‘Wait to fight till they return. I’m not a priest; but if you don’t tidy up these rooms, our Aedile (Valens gave him his gross nick-name in the quarter) will fine the sandals off your feet. And you mustn’t trample good food either. When you’ve finished, I’ll lock up after you. Be quick. I know our Prefect if you don’t.’

They toiled, like children rebuked. As they passed out with baskets of rubbish, Valens smiled. The matter would not be pressed further.

page 3

‘Here is our key,’ said Barnabas at the end. ‘The Synagogue will swear I hired this man to kill you.’

‘Will they? Let’s look at him.’

The lictors pushed their prisoner forward.

‘Ill-fortune!’ said the man. ‘I owed you for my brother’s death in Tarsus Pass.’

‘Your brother tried to kill me,’ Valens retorted.

The fellow nodded.

‘Then we’ll call it even-throws,’ Valens signed to the lictors, who loosed hold. ‘Unless you really want to see my uncle?’

The man vanished like a trout in the dusk. Valens returned the key to Barnabas, and said:

‘If I were you, I shouldn’t let your people in again till your leaders come back. You don’t know Antioch as I do.’

He went home, the grinning lictors behind him, and they told his uncle, who grinned also, but said that he had done the right thing—even to patronising Barnabas.

‘Of course, I don’t know Antioch as you do; but, seriously, my dear, I think you’ve saved their Church for the Christians this time. I’ve had three depositions already that your Cilician friend was a Christian hired by Barnabas. ’Just as well for Barnabas that you let the brute go.’

‘You told me you didn’t want them stampeded into trouble. Besides, it was fair-throws. I may have killed his brother after all. We had to kill two of ’em.’

‘Good! You keep a level head in a tight corner. You’ll need it. There’s no lying about in secluded parks for us! I’ve got to see Paulus and Petrus when they come back, and find out what they’ve decided about their infernal feasts. Why can’t they all get decently drunk and be done with it?’

‘They talk of them both down-town as though they were Gods. By the way, uncle, all the riot was worked up by Synagogue Jews sent from Jerusalem—not by our lot at all.’

‘You don’t say so? Now, perhaps, you understand why I put you on market-duty with old Sow-Belly! You’ll make a Police-officer yet.’

Valens met the scared, mixed congregation round the fountains and stalls as he went about his quarter. They were rather relieved at being locked out of their rooms for the time; as well as by the news that Paulus and Petrus would report to the Prefect of Police before addressing them on the great food-question.

Valens was not present at the first part of that interview, which was official. The second, in the cool, awning-covered courtyard, with drinks and hors-d’œuvre, all set out beneath the vast lemon and lavender sunset, was much less formal.

‘You have met, I think,’ said Serga to the little lean Paulus as Valens entered.

‘Indeed, yes. Under God, we are twice your debtors,’ was the quick reply.

‘Oh, that was part of my duty. I hope you found our roads good on your journey,’ said Valens.

‘Why, yes. I think they were.’ Paulus spoke as if he had not noticed them.

‘We should have done better to come by boat,’ said his companion, Petrus, a large fleshy man, with eyes that seemed to see nothing, and a half-palsied right hand that lay idle in his lap.

‘Valens came overland from Byzant,’ said his uncle. ‘He rather fancies his legs.’

‘He ought to at his age. What was your best day’s march on the Via Sebaste?’ Paulus asked interestedly, and, before he knew, Valens was reeling off his mileage on mountain-roads every step of which Paulus seemed to have trod.

‘That’s good,’ was the comment. ‘And I expect you march in heavier order than I.’

‘What would you call your best day’s work? ‘ Valens asked in turn.

‘I have covered . . .’ Paulus checked himself. ‘And yet not I but the God,’ he muttered. ‘It’s hard to cure oneself of boasting.’

A spasm wrenched Petrus’ face.

‘Hard indeed,’ said he. Then he addressed himself to Paulus as though none other were present. ‘It is true I have eaten with Gentiles and as the Gentiles ate. Yet, at the time, I doubted if it were wise.’

‘That is behind us now,’ said Paulus gently.

‘The decision has been taken for the Church—that little Church which you saved, my son.’ He turned on Valens with a smile that half-captured the boy’s heart. ‘Now—as a Roman and a Police-officer—what think you of us Christians?’

‘That I have to keep order in my own ward.’

‘Good! Caesar must be served. But—as a servant of Mithras, shall we say—how think you about our food-disputes?’

Valens hesitated. His uncle encouraged him with a nod. ‘As a servant of Mithras I eat with any initiate, so long as the food is clean,’ said Valens.

‘But,’ said Petrus, ‘that is the crux.’

‘Mithras also tells us,’ Valens went on, ‘to share a bone covered with dirt, if better cannot be found.’

‘You observe no difference, then, between peoples at your feasts?’ Paulus demanded.

‘How dare we? We are all His children. Men make laws. Not Gods,’ Valens quoted from the old Ritual.

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‘Say that again, child!’

‘Gods do not make laws. They change men’s hearts. The rest is the Spirit.’

‘You heard it, Petrus? You heard that? It is the utter Doctrine itself!’ Paulus insisted to his dumb companion.

Valens, a little ashamed of having spoken of his faith, went on:

‘They tell me the Jew butchers here want the monopoly of killing for your people. Trade feeling’s at the bottom of most of it.’

‘A little more than that perhaps,’ said Paulus. ‘Listen a minute.’ He threw himself into a curious tale about the God of the Christians, Who, he said, had taken the shape of a Man, and Whom the Jerusalem Jews, years ago, had got the authorities to deal with as a conspirator. He said that he himself, at that time a right Jew, quite agreed with the sentence, and had denounced all who followed the new God. But one day the Light and the Voice of the God broke over him, and he experienced a rending change of heart—precisely as in the Mithras creed. Then he met, and had been initiated by, some men who had walked and talked and, more particularly, had eaten, with the new God before He was killed, and who had seen Him after, like Mithras, He had risen from His grave. Paulus and those others—Petrus was one of them—had next tried to preach Him to the Jews, but that was no success; and, one thing leading to another, Paulus had gone back to his home at Tarsus, where his people disowned him for a renegade. There he had broken down with overwork and despair. Till then, he said, it had never occurred to any of them to show the new religion to any except right Jews; for their God had been born in the shape of a Jew. Paulus himself only came to realise the possibilities of outside work, little by little. He said he had all the foreign preaching in his charge now, and was going to change the whole world by it.

Then he made Petrus finish the tale, who explained, speaking very slowly, that he had, some years ago, received orders from the God to preach to a Roman officer of Irregulars down-country; after which that officer and most of his people wanted to become Christians. So Petrus had initiated them the same night, although none of them were Hebrews. ‘And,’ Petrus ended, ‘I saw there is nothing under heaven that we dare call unclean.’

Paulus turned on him like a flash and cried ‘You admit it! Out of your own mouth it is evident.’ Petrus shook like a leaf and his right hand almost lifted.

‘Do you too twit me with my accent?’ he began, but his face worked and he choked.

‘Nay! God forbid! And God once more forgive me!’ Paulus seemed as distressed as he, while Valens stared at the extraordinary outbreak.

‘Talking of clean and unclean,’ his uncle said tactfully, ‘there’s that ugly song come up again in the City. They were singing it on the city-front yesterday, Valens. Did you notice?’

He looked at his nephew, who took the hint.

‘If it was “Pickled Fish,” sir, they were. Will it make trouble?’

‘As surely as these fish’—-a jar of them stood on the table—‘make one thirsty. How does it go? Oh yes.’ Serga hummed

Oie-eaah!
’From the Shark and the Sardine—
the clean and the unclean—
To the Pickled Fish of Galilee,
said Petrus, shall be mine.

He twanged it off to the proper gutter-drawl.

(Ha-ow?)
In the nets or on the line,
Till the Gods Themselves decline.
(Whe-en?)
When the Pickled Fish of Galilee
ascend the Esquiline!

That’ll be something of a flood—worse than live fish in trees! Hey?’

‘It will happen one day,’ said Paulus.

He turned from Petrus, whom he had been soothing tenderly, and resumed in his natural, hardish voice:

‘Yes. We owe a good deal to that Centurion being converted when he was. It taught us that the whole world could receive the God; and it showed me my next work. I came over from Tarsus to teach here for a while. And I shan’t forget how good the Prefect of Police was to us then.’

‘For one thing, Cornelius was an early colleague,’ Serga smiled largely above his strong cup. ‘“Prime companion”—how does it go?—“we drank the long, long Eastern day out together,” and so on. For another, I know a good workman when I see him. That camel-kit you made for my desert-tours, Paul, is as sound as ever. And for a third—which to a man of my habits is most important—that Greek doctor you recommended me is the only one who understands my tumid liver.’

He passed a cup of all but unmixed wine, which Paulus handed to Petrus, whose lips were flaky white at the corners.

‘But your trouble,’ the Prefect went on, ‘will come from your own people. Jerusalem never forgives. They’ll get you run in on the charge of laesa majestatis soon or late.’

‘Who knows better than I?’ said Petrus. ‘And the decision we all have taken about our love-feasts may unite Hebrew and Greek against us. As I told you, Prefect, we are asking Christian Greeks not to make the feasts difficult for Christian Hebrews by eating meat that has not been lawfully killed. (Our way is much more wholesome, anyhow.) Still, we may get round that. But there’s one vital point. Some of our Greek Christians bring food to the love-feasts that they’ve bought from your priests, after your sacrifices have been offered. That we can’t allow.’

Paulus turned to Valens imperiously.

‘You mean they buy Altar-scraps,’ the boy said. ‘But only the very poor do it; and it’s chiefly block-trimmings. The sale’s a perquisite of the Altar-butchers. They wouldn’t like its being stopped.’

‘Permit separate tables for Hebrew and Greek, as I once said,’ Petrus spoke suddenly.

‘That would end in separate churches. There shall be but one Church,’ Paulus spoke over his shoulder, and the words fell like rods. ‘You think there may be trouble, Valens?’

‘My uncle——’ Valens began.

‘No, no!’ the Prefect laughed. ‘Singon Street Markets are your Syria. Let’s hear what our Legate thinks of his Province.’

Valens flushed and tried to pull his wits together.

‘Primarily,’ he said, ‘it’s pig, I suppose. Hebrews hate pork.’

‘Quite right, too. Catch me eating pig east the Adriatic! I don’t want to die of worms. Give me a young Sabine tush-ripe boar! I have spoken!’

Serga mixed himself another raw cup and took some pickled Lake fish to bring out the flavour.

‘But, still,’ Petrus leaned forward like a deaf man, ‘if we admitted Hebrew and Greek Christians to separate tables we should escape——’

‘Nothing, except salvation,’ said Paulus. ‘We have broken with the whole Law of Moses. We live in and through and by our God only. Else we are nothing. What is the sense of harking back to the Law at meal-times? Whom do we deceive? Jerusalem? Rome? The God? You yourself have eaten with Gentiles! You yourself have said——’

‘One says more than one means when one is carried away,’ Petrus answered, and his face worked again.

‘This time you will say precisely what is meant,’ Paulus spoke between his teeth. ‘We will keep the Churches one—in and through the Lord. You dare not deny this?’

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‘I dare nothing—the God knows! But I have denied Him. . . . I denied Him. . . . And He said—He said I was the Rock on which His Church should stand.’

‘I will see that it stands, and yet not I——’ Paulus’ voice dropped again. ‘To-morrow you will speak to the one Church of the one Table the world over.’

‘That’s your business,’ said the Prefect. ‘But I warn you again, it’s your own people who will make you trouble.’

Paulus rose to say farewell, but in the act he staggered, put his hand to his forehead and, as Valens steered him to a divan, collapsed in the grip of that deadly Syrian malaria which strikes like a snake. Valens, having suffered, called to his rooms for his heavy travelling-fur. His girl, whom he had bought in Constantinople a few months before, fetched it. Petrus tucked it awkwardly round the shivering little figure; the Prefect ordered lime juice and hot water, and Paulus thanked them and apologised, while his teeth rattled on the cup.

‘Better to-day than to-morrow,’ said the Prefect. ‘Drink—sweat—and sleep here the night. Shall I send for my doctor?’

But Paulus said that the fit would pass naturally, and as soon as he could stand he insisted on going away with Petrus, late though it was, to prepare their announcement to the Church.

‘Who was that big, clumsy man?’ his girl asked Valens as she took up the fur. ‘He made more noise than the small one, who was really suffering.’

‘He’s a priest of the new College by the Little Circus, dear. He believes, uncle told me, that he once denied his God, Who, he says, died for him.’

She halted in the moonlight, the glossy jackal skins over her arm.

‘Does he? My God bought me from the dealers like a horse. Too much, too, he paid. Didn’t he? ’Fess, thou?’

‘No, thee!’ emphatically.

‘But I wouldn’t deny my God—living or dead! … Oh—but not dead! My God’s going to live—for me. Live—live Thou, my heart’s blood, for ever!’

It would have been better had Paulus and Petrus not left the Prefect’s house so late; for the rumour in the city, as the Prefect knew, and as the long conference seemed to confirm, was that Caesar’s own Secretary of State in Rome was, through Paulus, arranging for a general defilement of the Hebrew with the Greek Christians, and that after this had been effected, by promiscuous eating of unlawful foods, all Jews would be lumped together as Christians—members, that is, of a mere free-thinking sect instead of the very particular and troublesome ‘Nation of Jews within the Empire.’ Eventually, the story went, they would lose their rights as Roman citizens, and could then be sold on any slave-stand.

‘Of course,’ Serga explained to Valens next day, ‘that has been put about by the Jerusalem Synagogue. Our Antioch Jews aren’t clever enough. Do you see their game? Petrus is a defiler of the Hebrew nation. If he is cut down to-night by some properly primed young zealot so much the better.’

‘He won’t be,’ said Valens. ‘I’m looking after him.’

‘‘Hope so. But, if he isn’t knifed,’ Serga went on, ‘they’ll try to work up city riots on the grounds that, when all the Jews have lost their civil rights, he’ll set up as a sort of King of the Christians.’

‘At Antioch? In the present year of Rome? That’s crazy, Uncle.’

‘Every crowd is crazy. What else do we draw pay for? But, listen. Post a Mounted Police patrol at the back of the Little Circus. Use ’em to keep the people moving when the congregation comes out. Post two of your men in the Porch of their College itself. Tell Paulus and Petrus to wait there with them, till the streets are clear. Then fetch ’em both over here. Don’t hit till you have to. Hit hard before the stones fly. Don’t get my little horses knocked about more than you can help, and—look out for “Pickled Fish”!’

Knowing his own quarter, it seemed to Valens as he went on duty that evening, that his uncle’s precautions had been excessive. The Christian Church, of course, was full, and a large crowd waited outside for word of the decision about the feasts. Most of them seemed to be Christians of sorts, but there was an element of gesticulating Antiochene loafers, and like all crowds they amused themselves with popular songs while they waited. Things went smoothly, till a group of Christians raised a rather explosive hymn, which ran

‘Enthroned above Caesar
and Judge of the Earth!
We wait on Thy coming—oh tarry not long!
As the Kings of the Sunrise
Drew sword at Thy Birth,
So we arm in this midnight of insult and wrong!’

‘Yes—and if one of their fish-stalls is bumped over by a camel—it’s my fault!’ said Valens. ‘Now they’ve started it!’

Sure enough, voices on the outskirts broke into ‘Pickled Fish,’ but before Valens could speak, they were suppressed by someone crying:

‘Quiet there, or you’ll get your pickle before your fish.’

It was close on twilight when a cry rose from within the packed Church, and its congregation breasted out into the crowd. They all talked about the new orders for their love-feasts, most of them agreeing that they were sensible and easy. They agreed, too, that Petrus (Paulus did not seem to have taken much part in the debate) had spoken like one inspired, and they were all extremely proud of being Christians. Some of them began to link arms across the alley, and strike into the ‘Enthroned above Caesar’ chorus.

‘And this, I think,’ Valens called to the young Commandant of the Mounted Patrol, ‘is where we’ll begin to steer ’em home. Oh! And “Let night also have her well-earned hymn,” as Uncle ’ud say.’

There filed out from behind the Little Circus four blaring trumpets, a standard, and a dozen Mounted Police. Their wise little grey Arabs sidled, passaged, shouldered, and nosed softly into the mob, as though they wanted petting, while the trumpets deafened the narrow street. An open square, near by, eased the pressure before long. Here the Patrol broke into fours, and gridironed it, saluting the images of the Gods at each corner and in the centre. People stopped, as usual, to watch how cleverly the incense was cast down over the withers into the spouting cressets; children reached up to pat horses which they said they knew; family groups re-found each other in the smoky dusk; hawkers offered cooked suppers; and soon the crowd melted into the main traffic avenues. Valens went over to the Church porch, where Petrus and Paulus waited between his lictors.

‘That was well done,’ Paulus began.

‘How’s the fever?’ Valens asked.

‘I was spared for to-day. I think, too, that by The Blessing we have carried our point.’

‘Good hearing! My uncle bids me say you are welcome at his house.’

‘That is always a command,’ said Paulus, with a quick down-country gesture. ‘Now that this day’s burden is lifted, it will be a delight.’

Petrus joined up like a weary ox. Valens greeted him, but he did not answer.

‘Leave him alone,’ Paulus whispered. ‘The virtue has gone out of me—him—for the while.’ His own face looked pale and drawn.

The street was empty, and Valens took a short cut through an alley, where light ladies leaned out of windows and laughed. The three strolled easily together, the lictors behind them, and far off they heard the trumpets of the Night Horse saluting some statue of a Caesar, which marked the end of their round. Paulus was telling Valens how the whole Roman Empire would be changed by what the Christians had agreed to about their love-feasts, when an impudent little Jew boy stole up behind them, playing ‘Pickled Fish’ on some sort of desert bag-pipe.

page 6

‘Can’t you stop that young pest, one of you?’ Valens asked laughing. ‘You shan’t be mocked on this great night of yours, Paulus.’

The lictors turned back a few paces, and shook a torch at the brat, but he retreated and drew them on. Then they heard Paulus shout, and when they hurried back, found Valens prostrate and coughing—his blood on the fringe of the kneeling Paul’s robe. Petrus stooped, waving a helpless hand above them.

‘Someone ran out from behind that well-head. He stabbed him as he ran, and ran on. Listen!’ said Paulus.

But there was not even the echo of a footfall for clue, and the Jew boy had vanished like a bat. Said Valens from the ground

‘Home! Quick! I have it!’

They tore a shutter out of a shop-front, lifted and carried him, while Paulus walked beside. They set him down in the lighted inner courtyard of the Prefect’s house, and a lictor hurried for the Prefect’s physician.

Paulus watched the boy’s face, and, as Valens shivered a little, called to the girl to fetch last night’s fur rug. She brought it, laid the head on her breast, and cast herself beside Valens.

‘It isn’t bad. It doesn’t bleed much. So it can’t be bad—can it?’ she repeated. Valens’ smile reassured her, till the Prefect came and recognised the deadly upward thrust under the ribs. He turned on the Hebrews.

‘To-morrow you will look for where your Church stood,’ said he.

Valens lifted the hand that the girl was not kissing.

‘No—no!’ he gasped. ‘The Cilician did it! For his brother! He said it.’

‘The Cilician you let go to save these Christians because I——?’ Valens signed to his uncle that it was so, while the girl begged him to steal strength from her till the doctor should come.

‘Forgive me,’ said Serga to Paulus. ‘None the less I wish your God in Hades once for all. . . . But what am I to write his mother? Can’t either of you two talking creatures tell me what I’m to tell his mother?’

‘What has she to do with him?’ the slave-girl cried. ‘He is mine—mine! I testify before all Gods that he bought me! I am his. He is mine.’

‘We can deal with the Cilician and his friends later,’ said one of the lictors. ‘ But what now?’

For some reason, the man, though used to butcher-work, looked at Petrus.

‘Give him drink and wait,’ said Petrus. ‘I have—seen such a wound.’ Valens drank and a shade of colour came to him. He motioned the Prefect to stoop.

‘What is it? Dearest of lives, what troubles?’

‘The Cilician and his friends. . . . Don’t be hard on them. . . . They get worked up. . . . They don’t know what they are doing. . . . Promise!’

‘This is not I, child. It is the Law.’

‘’No odds. You’re Father’s brother. . . . Men make laws—not Gods. . . . Promise! . . . It’s finished with me.’

Valens’ head eased back on its yearning pillow.

Petrus stood like one in a trance. The tremor left his face as he repeated

‘“Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Heard you that, Paulus? He, a heathen and an idolator, said it!’

‘I heard. What hinders now that we should baptize him?’ Paulus answered promptly.

Petrus stared at him as though he had come up out of the sea.

‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘It is the little maker of tents. . . . And what does he now—command?’

Paulus repeated the suggestion.

Painfully, that other raised the palsied hand that he had once held up in a hall to deny a charge.

‘Quiet!’ said he. ‘Think you that one who has spoken Those Words needs such as we are to certify him to any God?’

Paulus cowered before the unknown colleague, vast and commanding, revealed after all these years.

‘As you please—as you please,’ he stammered, overlooking the blasphemy. ‘Moreover there is the concubine.’

The girl did not heed, for the brow beneath her lips was chilling, even as she called on her God who had bought her at a price that he should not die but live.

The Children of the Zodiac

Though thou love her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dim the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know
When half Gods go 
The Gods arrive.
–Emerson.

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THOUSANDS of years ago, when men were greater than they are to-day, the Children of the Zodiac lived in the world. There were six Children of the Zodiac—the Ram, the Bull, Leo, the Twins, and the Girl; and they were afraid of the Six Houses which belonged to the Scorpion, the Balance, the Crab, the Fishes, the Archer, and the Waterman. Even when they first stepped down upon the earth and knew that they were immortal Gods, they carried this fear with them; and the fear grew as they became better acquainted with mankind and heard stories of the Six Houses. Men treated the Children as Gods and came to them with prayers and long stories of wrong, while the Children of the Zodiac listened and could not understand.A mother would fling herself before the feet of the Twins, or the Bull, crying: ‘My husband was at work in the fields and the Archer shot him and he died; and my son will also be killed by the Archer. Help me!’ The Bull would lower his huge head and answer: ‘What is that to me?’ Or the Twins would smile and continue their play, for they could not understand why the water ran out of people’s eyes. At other times a man and a woman would come to Leo or the Girl crying: ‘We two are newly married and we are very happy. Take these flowers.’ As they threw the flowers they would make mysterious sounds to show that they were happy, and Leo and the Girl wondered even more than the Twins why people shouted ‘Ha! ha! ha!’ for no cause.

This continued for thousands of years by human reckoning, till on a day, Leo met the Girl walking across the hills and saw that she had changed entirely since he had last seen her. The Girl, looking at Leo, saw that he too had changed altogether. Then they decided that it would be well never to separate again, in case even more startling changes should occur when the one was not at hand to help the other. Leo kissed the Girl and all Earth felt that kiss, and the Girl sat down on a hill and the water ran out of her eyes; and this had never happened before in the memory of the Children of the Zodiac.

As they sat together a man and a woman came by, and the man said to the woman:

‘What is the use of wasting flowers on those dull Gods? They will never understand, darling.’

The Girl jumped up and put her arms round the woman, crying, ‘I understand. Give me the flowers and I will give you a kiss.’

Leo said beneath his breath to the man ‘What was the new name that I heard you give to your woman just now?’

The man answered, ‘Darling, of course.’

‘Why “of course”?’ said Leo; ‘and if of course, what does it mean?’

‘It means “very dear,” and you have only to look at your wife to see why.’

‘I see,’ said Leo; ‘you are quite right’; and when the man and the woman had gone on he called the Girl ‘darling wife’; and the Girl wept again from sheer happiness.

‘I think,’ she said at last, wiping her eyes, ‘I think that we two have neglected men and women too much. What did you do with the sacrifices they made to you, Leo?’

‘I let them burn,’ said Leo; ‘I could not eat them. What did you do with the flowers?’

‘I let them wither. I could not wear them, I had so many of my own,’ said the Girl, ‘and now I am sorry.’

‘There is nothing to grieve for,’ said Leo; ‘we belong to each other.’

As they were talking the years of men’s life slipped by unnoticed, and presently the man and the woman came back, both white-headed, the man carrying the woman.

‘We have come to the end of things,’ said the man quietly. ‘This that was my wife—’

‘As I am Leo’s wife,’ said the Girl quickly, her eyes staring.

‘—was my wife, has been killed by one of your Houses.’ The man set down his burden, and laughed.

‘Which House?’ said Leo angrily, for he hated all the Houses equally.

‘You are Gods, you should know,’ said the man. ‘We have lived together and loved one another, and I have left a good farm for my son. What have I to complain of except that I still live?’

As he was bending over his wife’s body there came a whistling through the air, and he started and tried to run away, crying, ‘It is the arrow of the Archer. Let me live a little longer—only a little longer!’ The arrow struck him and he died. Leo looked at the Girl and she looked at him, and both were puzzled.

‘He wished to die,’ said Leo. ‘He said that he wished to die, and when Death came he tried to run away. He is a coward.’

‘No, he is not,’ said the Girl; ‘I think I feel what he felt. Leo, we must learn more about this for their sakes.’

‘For their sakes,’ said Leo, very loudly.

‘Because we are never going to die,’ said the Girl and Leo together, still more loudly.

‘Now sit you still here, darling wife,’ said Leo, ‘while I go to the Houses whom we hate, and learn how to make these men and women live as we do.’

‘And love as we do,’ said the Girl.

‘I do not think they need to be taught that,’ said Leo, and he strode away very angry, with his lion-skin swinging from his shoulder, till he came to the House where the Scorpion lives in the darkness, brandishing his tail over his back.

‘Why do you trouble the children of men?’ said Leo, with his heart between his teeth.

‘Are you so sure that I trouble the children of men alone?’ said the Scorpion. ‘Speak to your brother the Bull, and see what he says.’

‘I come on behalf of the children of men,’ said Leo. ‘I have learned to love as they do, and I wish them to live as I—as we do.’

‘Your wish was granted long ago. Speak to the Bull. He is under my special care,’ said the Scorpion.

Leo dropped back to the earth again, and saw the great star Aldebaran, that is set in the forehead of the Bull, blazing very near to the earth. When he came up to it he saw that his brother the Bull, yoked to a countryman’s plough, was toiling through a wet rice-field with his head bent down, and the sweat streaming from his flanks. The countryman was urging him forward with a goad.

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‘Gore that insolent to death,’ cried Leo, ‘and for the sake of our honour come out of the mire.’

‘I cannot,’ said the Bull, ‘the Scorpion has told me that some day, of which I cannot be sure, he will sting me where my neck is set on my shoulders, and that I shall die bellowing.’

‘What has that to do with this disgraceful work?’ said Leo, standing on the dyke that bounded the wet field.

‘Everything. This man could not plough without my help. He thinks that I am a stray beast.’

‘But he is a mud-crusted cottar with matted hair,’ insisted Leo. ‘We are not meant for his use.’

‘You may not be; I am. I cannot tell when the Scorpion may choose to sting me to death—perhaps before I have turned this furrow.’ The Bull flung his bulk into the yoke, and the plough tore through the wet ground behind him, and the countryman goaded him till his flanks were red.

‘Do you like this?’ Leo called down the dripping furrows.

‘No,’ said the Bull over his shoulder as he lifted his hind legs from the clinging mud and cleared his nostrils.

Leo left him scornfully and passed to another country, where he found his brother the Ram in the centre of a crowd of country people who were hanging wreaths round his neck and feeding him on freshly-plucked green corn.

‘This is terrible,’ said Leo. ‘Break up that crowd and come away, my brother. Their hands are spoiling your fleece.’

‘I cannot,’ said the Ram. ‘The Archer told me that on some day of which I had no knowledge, he would send a dart through me, and that I should die in very great pain.’

‘What has that to do with this disgraceful show?’ said Leo, but he did not speak as confidlently as before.

‘Everything in the world,’ said the Ram. ‘These people never saw a perfect sheep before. They think that I am a stray, and they will carry me from place to place as a model to all their flocks.’

‘But they are greasy shepherds; we are not intended to amuse them,’ said Leo.

‘You may not be, I am,’ said the Ram. ‘I cannot tell when the Archer may choose to send his arrow at me—perhaps before the people a mile down the road have seen me.’ The Ram lowered his head that a yokel newly arrived might throw a wreath of wild garlic-leaves over it, and waited patiently while the farmers tugged his fleece.

‘Do you like this?’ cried Leo over the shoulders of the crowd.

‘No,’ said the Ram, as the dust of the trampling feet made him sneeze, and he snuffed at the fodder piled before him.

Leo turned back intending to retrace his steps to the Houses, but as he was passing down a street he saw two small children, very dusty, rolling outside a cottage door, and playing with a cat. They were the Twins.

‘What are you doing here?’said Leo, indignant.

‘Playing,’ said the Twins calmly.

‘Cannot you play on the banks of the Milky Way?’ said Leo.

‘We did,’ said they, ‘till the Fishes swam down and told us that some day they would come for us and not hurt us at all and carry us away. So now we are playing at being babies down here. The people like it.’

‘Do you like it?’ said Leo.

‘No,’ said the Twins, ‘but there are no cats in the Milky Way,’ and they pulled the cat’s tail thoughtfully. A woman came out of the doorway and stood behind them, and Leo saw in her face a look that he had sometimes seen in the Girl’s.

‘She thinks that we are foundlings,’ said the Twins, and they trotted indoors to the evening meal.

Then Leo hurried as swiftly as possible to all the Houses one after another; for he could not understand the new trouble that had come to his brethren. He spoke to the Archer, and the Archer assured him that so far as that House was concerned Leo had nothing to fear. The Waterman, the Fishes, and the Scorpion gave the same answer. They knew nothing of Leo, and cared less. They were the Houses, and they were busied in killing men.

At last he came to that very dark House where Cancer the Crab lies so still that you might think he was asleep if you did not see the ceaseless play and winnowing motion of the feathery branches round his mouth. That movement never ceases. It is like the eating of a smothered fire into rotten timber in that it is noiseless and without haste.

Leo stood in front of the Crab, and the half darkness allowed him a glimpse of that vast blue-black back and the motionless eyes. Now and again he thought that he heard some one sobbing, but the noise was very faint.

‘Why do you trouble the children of men?’ said Leo. There was no answer, and against his will Leo cried, ‘Why do you trouble us? What have we done that you should trouble us?’

This time Cancer replied, ‘What do I know or care? You were born into my House, and at the appointed time I shall come for you.’

‘When is the appointed time?’ said Leo, stepping back from the restless movement of the mouth.

‘When the full moon fails to call the full tide,’ said the Crab, ‘I shall come for the one. When the other has taken the earth by the shoulders, I shall take that other by the throat.’

Leo lifted his hand to the apple of his throat, moistened his lips, and recovering himself, said:

‘Must I be afraid for two, then?’

‘For two,’ said the Crab, ‘and as many more as may come after.’

page 3

‘My brother, the Bull, had a better fate,’ said Leo, sullenly; ‘he is alone.’

A hand covered his mouth before he could finish the sentence, and he found the Girl in his arms. Womanlike, she had not stayed where Leo had left her, but had hastened off at once to know the worst, and passing all the other Houses, had come straight to Cancer.

‘That is foolish,’ said the Girl, whispering. ‘I have been waiting in the dark for long and long before you came. Then I was afraid. But now——’ She put her head down on his shoulder and sighed a sigh of contentment.

‘I am afraid now,’ said Leo.

‘That is on my account,’ said the Girl. ‘Iknow it is, because I am afraid for your sake. Let us go, husband.’

They went out of the darkness together and came back to, the Earth, Leo very silent, and the Girl striving to cheer him. ‘My brother’s fate is the better one,’ Leo would repeat from time to time, and at last he said : ‘Let us each go our own way and live alone till we die. We were born into the House of Cancer, and he will come for us.’

‘I know; I know. But where shall I go? And where will you sleep in the evening? But let us try. I will stay here. Do you go on?’

Leo took six, steps forward very slowly, and three long steps backward very quickly, and the third step set him again at the Girl’s side. This time it was she who was begging him to go away and leave her, and he was forced to comfort her all through the night. That night decided them both never to leave each other for an instant, and when they had come to this decision they looked back at the darkness of the House of Cancer high above their heads, and with their arms round each other’s necks laughed, ‘Ha! ha! ha!’ exactly as the children of men laughed. And that was the first time in their lives that they had ever laughed.

Next morning they returned to their proper home, and saw the flowers and the sacrifices that had been laid before their doors by the villagers of the hills. Leo stamped down the fire with his heel, and the Girl flung the flower-wreaths out of sight, shuddering as she did so. When the villagers returned, as of custom, to see what had become of their offerings, they found neither roses nor burned flesh on the altars, but only a man and a woman, with frightened white faces, sitting hand in hand on the altar-steps.

‘Are you not Virgo?’ said a woman to the Girl. ‘I sent you flowers yesterday.’

‘Little sister,’ said the Girl, flushing to her forehead, ‘do not send any more flowers, for I am only a woman like yourself.’ The man and the woman went away doubtfully.

‘Now, what shall we do?’ said Leo.

‘We must try to be cheerful, I think,’ said the Girl. ‘We know the very worst that can happen to us, but we do not know the best that love can bring us. We have a great deal to be glad of.’

‘The certainty of death,’ said Leo.

‘ All the children of men have that certainty also; yet they laughed long before we ever knew how to laugh. We must learn to laugh, Leo. We have laughed once already.’

People who consider themselves Gods, as the Children of the Zodiac did, find it hard to laugh, because the Immortals know nothing worth laughter or tears. Leo rose up with a very heavy heart, and he and the Girl together went to and fro among men; their new fear of death behind them. First they laughed at a naked baby attempting to thrust its fat toes into its foolish pink mouth; next they laughed at a kitten chasing her own tail; and then they laughed at a boy trying to steal a kiss from a girl, and getting his ears boxed. Lastly, they laughed because the wind blew in their faces as they ran down a hill-side together, and broke panting and breathless into a knot of villagers at the bottom. The villagers laughed too at their flying clothes and wind-reddened faces; and in the evening gave them food and invited them to a dance on the grass, where everybody laughed through the mere joy of being able to dance.

That night Leo jumped up from the Girl’s side crying: ‘Every one of those people we met just now will die——’

‘So shall we,’ said the Girl sleepily. ‘Lie down again, dear.’ Leo could not see that her face was wet with tears.

But Leo was up and far across the fields, driven forward by the fear of death for himself and for the Girl, who was dearer to him than himself. Presently he came across the Bull drowsing in the moonlight after a hard day’s work, and looking through half-shut eyes at the beautiful straight furrows that he had made.

‘Ho!’ said the Bull, ‘so you have been told these things too. Which of the Houses holds your death?’

Leo pointed upwards to the dark House of the Crab and groaned: ‘And he will come for the Girl too,’ he said.

‘Well,’ said the Bull, ‘what will you do?’

Leo sat down on the dyke and said that he did not know.

‘You cannot pull a plough,’ said the Bull, with a little touch of contempt. ‘I can, and that prevents me from thinking of the Scorpion.’

Leo was angry and said nothing till the dawn broke, and the cultivator came to yoke the Bull to his work.

‘Sing,’ said the Bull, as the stiff muddy ox-bow creaked and strained. ‘My shoulder is galled. Sing one of the songs that we sang when we thought we were all Gods together.’

Leo stepped back into the cane-brake and lifted up his voice in a song of the Children of the Zodiac—the war-whoop of the young Gods who are afraid of nothing. At first he dragged the song along unwillingly, and then the song dragged him, and his voice rolled across the fields, and the Bull stepped to the tune, and the cultivator banged his flanks out of sheer light-heartedness, and the furrows rolled away behind the plough more and more swiftly. Then the Girl came across the fields looking for Leo and found him singing in the cane. She joined her voice to his, and the cultivator’s wife brought her spinning into the open and listened with all her children round her. When it was time for the nooning, Leo and the Girl had sung themselves both thirsty and hungry, but the cultivator and his wife gave them rye-bread and milk, and many thanks, and the Bull found occasion to say: ‘You have helped me to do a full half-field more than I should have done. But the hardest part of the day is to come, brother.’

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Leo wished to lie down and brood over the words of the Crab. The Girl went away to talk to the cultivator’s wife and baby, and the afternoon ploughing began.

‘Help us now,’ said the Bull. ‘The tides of the day are running down. My legs are very stiff. Sing if you never sang before.’

‘To a mud-spattered villager?’ said Leo.

‘He is under the same doom as ourselves. Are you a coward?’ said the Bull. Leo flushed and began again with a sore throat and a bad temper. Little by little he dropped away from the songs of the Children and made up a song as he went along; and this was a thing he could never have done had he not met the Crab face to face. He remembered facts concerning cultivators, and bullocks, and rice-fields, that he had not particularly noticed before the interview, and he strung them all together, growing more interested as he sang, and he told the cultivator much more about himself and his work than the cultivator knew. The Bull grunted approval as he toiled down the furrows for the last time that day, and the song ended, leaving the cultivator with a very good opinion of himself in his aching bones. The Girl came out of the hut where she had been keeping the children quiet, and talking woman-talk to the wife, and they all ate the evening meal together.

‘Now yours must be a very pleasant life,’ said the cultivator, ‘sitting as you do on a dyke all day and singing just what comes into your head. Have you been at it long, you two—gipsies?’

‘Ah!’ lowed the Bull from his byre. ‘That’s all the thanks you will ever get from men, brother.’

‘No. We have only just begun it,’ said the Girl; ‘but we are going to keep to it as long as we live. Are we not, Leo?

‘Yes,’ said he, and they went away hand-in-hand.

‘You can sing beautifully, Leo,’ said she, as a wife will to her husband.

‘What were you doing?’ said he.

‘I was talking to the, mother and the babies,’ she said. ‘You would not understand the little things that make us women laugh.’

‘And—and I am to go on with this—this gipsy-work?’ said Leo.

‘Yes, dear, and I will help you.’

There is no written record of the life of Leo and of the Girl, so we cannot tell how Leo took to his new employment which he detested. We are only sure that the Girl loved him when and wherever he sang; even when, after the song was done, she went round with the equivalent of a tambourine, and collected the pence for the daily bread. There were times too when it was Leo’s very hard task to console the Girl for the indignity of horrible praise that people gave him and her—for the silly wagging peacock feathers that they stuck in his cap, and the buttons and pieces of cloth that they sewed on his coat. Woman-like, she could advise and help to the end, but the meanness of the means revolted.

‘What does it matter,’ Leo would say, ‘so long as the songs make them a little happier?’ And they would go down the road and begin again on the old old refrain: that whatever came or did not come the children of men must not be afraid. It was heavy teaching at first, but in process of years Leo discovered that he could make men laugh and hold them listening to him even when the rain fell. Yet there were people who would sit down and cry softly, though the crowd was yelling with delight, and there were people who maintained that Leo made them do this; and the Girl would talk to them in the pauses of the performance and do her best to comfort them. People would die too, while Leo was talking, and singing, and laughing, for the Archer, and the Scorpion, and the Crab, and the other Houses were as busy as ever. Sometimes the crowd broke, and were frightened, and Leo strove to keep them steady by telling them that this was cowardly; and sometimes they mocked at the Houses that were killing them, and Leo explained that this was even more cowardly than running away.

In their wanderings they came across the Bull, or the Ram, or the Twins, but all were too busy to do more than nod to each other across the crowd, and go on with their work. As the years rolled on even that recognition ceased, for the Children of the Zodiac had forgotten that they had ever been Gods working for the sake of men. The Star Aldebaran was crusted with caked dirt on the Bull’s forehead, the Ram’s fleece was dusty and torn, and the Twins were only babies fighting over the cat on the doorstep. It was then that Leo said: ‘Let us stop singing and making jokes.’ And it was then that the Girl said ‘No—’but she did not know why she said ‘No’ so energetically. Leo maintained that it was perversity, till she herself, at the end of a dusty day, made the same suggestion to him, and he said ‘most certainly not,’ and they quarrelled miserably between the hedgerows, forgetting the meaning of the stars above them. Other singers and other talkers sprang up in the course of the years, and Leo, forgetting that there could never be too many of these, hated them for dividing the applause of the children of men, which he thought should be all his own. The Girl would grow angry too, and then the songs would be broken, and the jests fall flat for weeks to come, and the children of men would shout: ‘Go home, you two gipsies. Go home and learn something worth singing!’

After one of these sorrowful shameful days, the Girl, walking by Leo’s side through the fields, saw the full moon coming up over the trees, and she clutched Leo’s arm, crying: ‘The time has come now. Oh, Leo, forgive me!’

‘What is it?’ said Leo. He was thinking of the other singers.

‘My husband!’ she answered, and she laid his hand upon her breast, and the breast that he knew so well was hard as stone. Leo groaned, remembering what the Crab had said.

‘Surely we were Gods once,’ he cried.

‘Surely we are Gods still,’ said the Girl. ‘Do you not remember when you and I went to the house of the Crab and—were not very much afraid? And since then . . . we have forgotten what we were singing for—we sang for the pence, and, oh, we fought for them!—We, who are the Children of the Zodiac.’

‘It was my fault,’ said Leo.

‘How can there be any fault of yours that is not mine too?’ said the Girl. ‘My time has come, but you will live longer, and . . .’ The look in her eyes said all she could not say.

‘Yes, I will remember that we are Gods,’ said Leo.

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It is very hard, even for a child of the Zodiac, who has forgotten his Godhead, to see his wife dying slowly and to know that he cannot help her. The Girl told Leo in those last months of all that she had said and done among the wives and the babies at the back of the roadside performances, and Leo was astonished that he knew so little of her who had been so much to him. When she was dying she told him never to fight for pence or quarrel with the other singers; and, above all, to go on with his singing immediately after she was dead.

Then she died, and after he had buried her he went down the road to a village that he knew, and the people hoped that he would begin quarrelling with a new singer that had sprung up while he had been away. But Leo called him ‘my brother.’ The new singer was newly married—and Leo knew it—and when he had finished singing, Leo straightened himself and sang the ‘Song of the Girl,’ which he had made coming down the road. Every man who was married or hoped to be married, whatever his rank or colour, understood that song—even the bride leaning on the new husband’s arm understood it too—and presently when the song ended, and Leo’s heart was bursting in him, the men sobbed. ‘That was a sad tale,’ they said at last, ‘now make us laugh.’ Because Leo had known all the sorrow that a man could know, including the full knowledge of his own fall who had once been a God—he, changing his song quickly, made the people laugh till they could laugh no more. They went away feeling ready for any trouble in reason, and they gave Leo more peacock feathers and pence than he could count. Knowing that pence led to quarrels and that peacock feathers were hateful to the Girl, he put them aside and went away to look for his brothers, to remind them that they too were Gods.

He found the Bull goring the undergrowth in a ditch, for the Scorpion had stung him, and he was dying, not slowly, as the Girl had died, but quickly.

‘I know all,’ the Bull groaned, as Leo came up. ‘Ihad forgotten too, but I remember now. Go and look at the fields I ploughed. The furrows are straight. I forgot that I was a God, but I drew the plough perfectly straight, for all that. And you, brother?’

‘I am not at the end of the ploughing,’ said Leo. ‘Does Death hurt?’

‘No, but dying does,’ said the Bull, and he died. The cultivator who then owned him was much annoyed, for there was a field still unploughed.

It was after this that Leo made the Song of the Bull who had been a God and forgotten the fact, and he sang it in such a manner that half the young men in the world conceived that they too might be Gods without knowing it. A half of that half grew impossibly conceited, and died early. A half of the remainder strove to be Gods and failed, but the other half accomplished four times more work than they would have done under any other delusion.

Later, years later, always wandering up and down and making the children of men laugh, he
found the Twins sitting on the bank of a stream waiting for the Fishes to come and carry them away. They were not in the least afraid, and they told Leo that the woman of the House had a real baby of her own, and that when that baby grew old enough to be mischievous he would find a well-educated cat waiting to have its tail pulled. Then the Fishes came for them, but all that the people saw was two children drowned in a brook; and though their foster-mother was very sorry, she hugged her own real baby to her breast and was grateful that it was only the foundlings.

Then Leo made the Song of the Twins, who had forgotten that they were Gods and had played in the dust to amuse a foster-mother. That song was sung far and wide among the women. It caused them to laugh and cry and hug their babies closer to their hearts all in one breath; and some of the women who remembered the Girl said ‘Surely that is the voice of Virgo. Only she could know so much about ourselves.’

After those three songs were made, Leo sang them over and over again till he was in danger of looking upon them as so many mere words, and the people who listened grew tired, and there came back to Leo the old temptation to stop singing once and for all. But he remembered the Girl’s dying words and persisted.

One of his listeners interrupted him as he was singing. ‘Leo,’ said he, ‘I have heard you telling us not to be afraid for the past forty years. Can you not sing something new now?’

‘No,’ said Leo, ‘it is the only song that I am allowed to sing. You must not be afraid of the Houses, even when they kill you.’ The man turned to go, wearily, but there came a whistling through the air, and the arrow of the Archer was seen skimming low above the earth, pointing to the man’s heart. He drew himself up, and stood still waiting till the arrow struck home.

‘I die,’ he said quietly. ‘It is well for me, Leo, that you sang for forty years.’

‘Are you afraid?’ said Leo, bending over him.

‘I am a man, not a God,’ said the man. ‘I should have run away but for your songs. My work is done, and I die without making a show of my fear.’

‘I am very well paid,’ said Leo to himself. ‘Now that I see what my songs are doing, I will sing better ones.’

He went down the road, collected his little knot of listeners, and began the Song of the Girl. In the middle of his singing he felt the cold touch of the Crab’s claw on the apple of his throat. He lifted his hand, choked, and stopped for an instant.

‘Sing on, Leo,’ said the crowd. ‘The old song runs as well as ever it did.’

Leo went on steadily till the end with the cold fear at his heart. When his song was ended, he felt the grip on his throat tighten. He was old, he had lost the Girl, he knew that he was losing more than half his power to sing, he could scarcely walk to the diminishing crowds that waited for him, and could not see their faces when they stood about him. None the less, he cried angrily to the Crab:

‘Why have you come for me now?’

‘You were born under my care. How can I help coming for you?’ said the Crab wearily. Every human being whom the Crab killed had asked that same question.

‘But I was just beginning to know what my songs were doing,’ said Leo.

‘Perhaps that is why,’ said the Crab, and the grip tightened.

‘You said you would not come till I had taken the world by the shoulders,’ gasped Leo, falling back.

‘I always keep my word. You have done that three times with three songs. What more do you desire?’

‘Let me live to see the world know it,’ pleaded Leo. ‘Let me be sure that my songs——’

‘Make men brave?’ said the Crab. ‘Even then there would be one man who was afraid. The Girl was braver than you are. Come.’

Leo was standing close to the restless, insatiable mouth.

‘I forgot,’ said he simply. ‘The Girl was braver. But I am a God too, and I am not afraid.’

‘What is that to me?’ said the Crab.

Then Leo’s speech was taken from him and he lay still and dumb, watching Death till he died.

Leo was the last of the Children of the Zodiac. After his death there sprang up a breed of little mean men, whimpering and flinching and howling because the Houses killed them and theirs, who wished to live for ever without any pain. They did not increase their lives, but they increased their own torments miserably, and there were no Children of the Zodiac to guide them; and the greater part of Leo’s songs were lost.

Only he had carved on the Girl’s tombstone the last verse of the Song of the Girl, which stands at the head of this story.

One of the children of men, coming thousands of years later, rubbed away the lichen, read the lines, and applied them to a trouble other than the one Leo meant. Being a man, men believed that he had made the verses himself; but they belong to Leo, the Child of the Zodiac, and teach, as he taught, that whatever comes or does not come we men must not be afraid.

The Captive

(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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‘He that believeth shall not make haste.’—Isaiah.

THE guard-boat lay across the mouth of the bathing-pool, her crew idly spanking the water with the flat of their oars. A red-coated militiaman, rifle in hand, sat at the bows, and a petty officer at the stern. Between the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped, honey-coloured rocks on the beach the green water was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war bathing. Behind their orderly tin camp and the electric-light poles rose those stone-dotted spurs that throw heat on Simonstown. Beneath them the little Barracouta nodded to the big Gibraltar, and the old Penelope, that in ten years has been bachelors’ club, natural history museum, kindergarten, and prison, rooted and dug at her fixed moorings. Far out, a threefunnelled Atlantic transport with turtle bow and stern waddled in from the deep sea.Said the sentry, assured of the visitor’s good faith, ‘Talk to ’em? You can, to any that speak English. You’ll find a lot that do.’

Here and there earnest groups gathered round ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, who doubtless preached conciliation, but the majority preferred their bath. The God who Looks after Small Things had caused the visitor that day to receive two weeks’ delayed mails in one from a casual postman, and the whole heavy bundle of newspapers, tied with a strap, he dangled as bait. At the edge of the beach, cross-legged, undressed to his sky-blue army shirt, sat a lean, ginger-haired man, on guard over a dozen heaps of clothing. His eyes followed the incoming Atlantic boat.

‘Excuse me, Mister,’ he said, without turning (and the speech betrayed his nationality), ‘would you mind keeping away from these garments? I’ve been elected janitor—on the Dutch vote.’

The visitor moved over against the barbedwire fence and sat down to his mail. At the rustle of the newspaper-wrappers the ginger-coloured man turned quickly, the hunger of a press-ridden people in his close-set iron-grey eyes.

‘Have you any use for papers?’ said the visitor.

‘Have I any use? ‘A quick, curved forefinger was already snicking off the outer covers. ‘Why, that’s the New York postmark! Give me the ads. at the back of Harper’s and M’Clure’s and I’m in touch with God’s Country again! Did you know how I was aching for papers? ‘

The visitor told the tale of the casual postman.

‘Providential!’ said the ginger-coloured man, keen as a terrier on his task; ‘both in time and matter. Yes ! . . . The Scientific American yet once more! Oh, it’s good! it’s good!’ His voice broke as he pressed his hawk-like nose against the heavily-inked patent-specifications at the end. ‘Can I keep it? I thank you—I thank you! Why—why—well—well! The American Tyler of all things created! Do you subscribe to that?’

‘I’m on the free list,’ said the visitor, nodding. He extended his blue-tanned hand with that air of Oriental spaciousness which distinguishes the native-born American, and met the visitor’s grasp expertly. ‘I can only say that you have treated me like a Brother (yes, I’ll take every last one you can spare), and if ever—’ He plucked at the bosom of his shirt. ’Psha! I forgot I’d no card on me; but my name’s Zigler—Laughton O. Zigler. An American? If Ohio’s still in the Union, I am, Sir. But I’m no extreme States’rights man. I’ve used all of my native country and a few others as I have found occasion, and now I am the captive of your bow and spear. I’m not kicking at that. I am not a coerced alien, nor a naturalised Texas mule-tender, nor an adventurer on the instalment plan. I don’t tag after our Consul when he comes around, expecting the American Eagle to lift me out o’ this by the slack of my pants. No, Sir! If a Britisher went into Indian Territory and shot up his surroundings with a Colt automatic (not that she’s any sort of weapon, but I take her for an illustration), he’d be strung up quicker’n a snowflake ’ud melt in hell. No ambassador of yours ’ud save him. I’m my neck ahead on this game, anyway. That’s how I regard the proposition.

‘Have I gone gunning against the British? To a certain extent. I presume you never heard tell of the Laughton-Zigler automatic two-inch field-gun, with self-feeding hopper, single oil-cylinder recoil, and ballbearing gear throughout? Or Laughtite, the new explosive? Absolutely uniform in effect, and one-ninth the bulk of any present effete charge—flake, cannonite, cordite, troisdorf, cellulose, cocoa, cord, or prism—I don’t care what it is. Laughtite’s immense; so’s the Zigler automatic. It’s me. It’s fifteen years of me. You are not a gun-sharp? I am sorry. I could have surprised you. Apart from my gun, my tale don’t amount to much of anything. I thank you, but I don’t use any tobacco you’d be likely to carry . . . Bull Durham? Bull Durham! I take it all back-every last word. Bull Durham-here! If ever you strike Akron, Ohio, when this fool-war’s over, remember you’ve Laughton O. Zigler in your vest pocket. Including the city of Akron. We’ve a little club there . . . Hell! What’s the sense of talking Akron with no pants?

‘My gun? . . . For two cents I’d have shipped her to our Filipeens. ’Came mighty near it too; but from what I’d read in the papers, you can’t trust Aguinaldo’s crowd on scientific matters. Why don’t I offer it to our army? Well, you’ve an effete aristocracy running yours, and we’ve a crowd of politicians. The results are practically identical. I am not taking any U.S. Army in mine.

‘I went to Amsterdam with her—to this Dutch junta that supposes it’s bossing the war. I wasn’t brought up to love the British for one thing, and for another I knew that if she got in her fine work (my gun) I’d stand more chance of receiving an unbiassed report from a crowd o’ dam-fool British officers than from a hatful of politicians’ nephews doing duty as commissaries and ordnance sharps. As I said, I put the brown man out of the question. That’s the way I regarded the proposition.

‘The Dutch in Holland don’t amount to a row of pins. Maybe I misjudge ’em. Maybe they’ve been swindled too often by self-seeking adventurers to know a enthusiast when they see him. Anyway, they’re slower than the Wrath o’ God. But on delusions—as to their winning out next Thursday week at 9 a.m.—they are—if I may say so—quite British.

‘I’ll tell you a curious thing, too. I fought ’em for ten days before I could get the financial side of my game fixed to my liking. I knew they didn’t believe in the Zigler, but they’d no call to be crazy-mean. I fixed it—free passage and freight for me and the gun to Delagoa Bay, and beyond by steam and rail. Then I went aboard to see her crated, and there I struck my fellow-passengers—all deadheads, same as me. Well, Sir, I turned in my tracks where I stood and besieged the ticket-office, and I said, “Look at here, Van Dunk. I’m paying for my passage and her room in the hold-every square and cubic foot.” ’Guess he knocked down the fare to himself ; but I paid. I paid. I wasn’t going to deadhead along o’ that crowd of Pentecostal sweepings. ’Twould have hoodooed my gun for all time. That was the way I regarded the proposition. No, Sir, they were not pretty company.

‘When we struck Pretoria I had a hell-and-a-half of a time trying to interest the Dutch vote in my gun an’ her potentialities. The bottom was out of things rather much just about that time. Kruger was praying some and stealing some, and the Hollander lot was singing, “If you haven’t any money you needn’t come round.” Nobody was spending his dough on anything except tickets to Europe: We were both grossly neglected. When I think how I used to give performances in the public streets with dummy cartridges, filling the hopper and turning the handle till the sweat dropped off me, I blush, Sir. I’ve made her do her stunts before Kaffirs—naked sons of Ham—in Commissioner Street, trying to get a holt somewhere.

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‘Did I talk? I despise exaggeration—’tain’t American or scientific—but as true as I’m sitting here like a blue-ended baboon in a kloof, Teddy Roosevelt’s Western tour was a maiden’s sigh compared to my advertising work.

‘’Long in the spring I was rescued by a commandant called Van Zyl—a big, fleshy man with a lame leg. Take away his hair and his gun and he’d make a first-class Schenectady bar-keep. He found me and the Zigler on the veldt (Pretoria wasn’t wholesome at that time), and he annexed me in a somnambulistic sort o’ way. He was dead against the war from the start, but, being a Dutchman, he fought a sight better than the rest of that “God and the Mauser” outfit. Adrian Van Zyl. Slept a heap in the daytime—and didn’t love niggers. I liked him. I was the only foreigner in his commando. The rest was Georgia Crackers and Pennsylvania Dutch—with a dash o’ Philadelphia lawyer. I could tell you things about them would surprise you. Religion for one thing; women for another; but I don’t know as their notions o’ geography weren’t the craziest. ’Guess that must be some sort of automatic compensation. There wasn’t one blamed ant-hill in their district they didn’t know and use; but the world was flat, they said, and England was a day’s trek from Cape Town.

‘They could fight in their own way, and don’t you forget it. But I guess you will not. They fought to kill, and, by what I could make out, the British fought to be killed. So both parties were accommodated.

‘I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir. The position has its obligations—on both sides. You could not be offensive or partisan to me. I cannot, for the same reason, be offensive to you. Therefore I will not give you my opinions on the conduct of your war.

‘Anyway, I didn’t take the field as an offensive partisan, but as an inventor. It was a condition and not a theory that confronted me. (Yes, Sir, I’m a Democrat by conviction, and that was one of the best things Grover Cleveland ever got off.)

‘After three months’ trek, old man Van Zyl had his commando in good shape and refitted off the British, and he reckoned he’d wait on a British General of his acquaintance that did business on a circuit between Stompiesneuk, Jackhalputs, Vrelegen, and Odendaalstroom, year in and year out. He was a fixture in that section.

‘“He’s a dam good man,” says Van Zyl. “He’s a friend of mine. He sent in a fine doctor when I was wounded and our Hollander doc. wanted to cut my leg off. Ya, I’ll guess we’ll stay with him.” Up to date, me and my Zigler had lived in innocuous desuetude owing to little odds and ends riding out of gear. How in thunder was I to know there wasn’t the ghost of any road in the country? But raw hide’s cheap and lastin’. I guess I’ll make my next gun a thousand pounds heavier, though.

‘Well, Sir, we struck the General on his beat—Vrelegen it was—and our crowd opened with the usual compliments at two thousand yards. Van Zyl shook himself into his greasy old saddle and says, “Now we shall be quite happy, Mr. Zigler. No more trekking. Joost twelve miles a day till the apricots are ripe.”

‘Then we hitched on to his outposts, and vedettes, and Cossack-picquets, or whatever they was called, and we wandered around the veldt arm in arm like brothers.

‘The way we worked lodge was this way. The General, he had his breakfast at 8.45 a.m. to the tick. He might have been a Long Island commuter. At 8.42 a.m. I’d go down to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry to meet him—I mean I’d see the Zigler into position at two thousand (I began at three thousand, but that was cold and distant)—and blow him off to two full hoppers—eighteen rounds just as they were bringing in his coffee. If his crowd was busy celebrating the anniversary of Waterloo or the last royal kid’s birthday, they’d open on me with two guns (I’ll tell you about them later on), but if they were disengaged they’d all stand to their horses and pile on the ironmongery, and washers, and typewriters, and five weeks’ grub, and in half an hour they’d sail out after me and the rest of Van Zyl’s boys; lying down and firing till 11.45 a.m. or maybe high noon. Then we’d go from labour to refreshment, resooming at 2 p.m. and battling till tea-time. Tuesday and Friday was the General’s moving days. He’d trek ahead ten or twelve miles, and we’d loaf around his flankers and exercise the ponies a piece. Sometimes he’d get hung up in a drift—stalled crossin’ a crick—and we’d make playful snatches at his wagons. First time that happened I turned the Zigler loose with high hopes, Sir; but the old man was well posted on rearguards with a gun to ’em, and I had to haul her out with three mules instead o’ six. I was pretty mad. I wasn’t looking for any experts back of the Royal British Artillery. Otherwise, the game was mostly even. He’d lay out three or four of our commando, and we’d gather in four or five of his once a week or thereon. One time, I remember, ’long towards dusk we saw ’em burying five of their boys. They stood pretty thick around the graves. We wasn’t more than fifteen hundred yards off, but old Van Zyl wouldn’t fire. He just took off his hat at the proper time. He said if you stretched a man at his prayers you’d have to hump his bad luck before the Throne as well as your own. I am inclined to agree with him. So we browsed along week in and week out. A war-sharp might have judged it sort of docile, but for an inventor needing practice one day and peace the next for checking his theories, it suited Laughton O. Zigler.

‘And friendly? Friendly was no word for it. We was brothers in arms.

‘Why, I knew those two guns of the Royal British Artillery as well as I used to know the old Fifth Avenoo stages. They might have been brothers too.

‘They’d jolt into action, and wiggle around and skid and spit and cough and prise ’emselves back again during our hours of bloody battle till I could have wept, Sir, at the spectacle of modern white men chained up to these old handpower, back-number, flint-and-steel reaping machines. One of ’em—I called her Baldy—she’d a long white scar all along her barrel—I’d made sure of twenty times. I knew her crew by sight, but she’d come switching and teetering out of the dust of my shells like—like a hen from under a buggy—and she’d dip into a gully, and next thing I’d know ’ud be her old nose peeking over the ridge sniffin’ for us. Her runnin’ mate had two grey mules in the lead, and a natural wood wheel repainted, and a whole raft of rope-ends trailin’ around. ’J’ever see Tom Reed with his vest off, steerin’ Congress through a heat-wave? I’ve been to Washington often—too often—filin’ my patents. I called her Tom Reed. We three ’ud play pussy-wants-a-corner all round the outposts on off-days—cross-lots through the sage and along the mezas till we was short-circuited by canons. Oh, it was great for me and Baldy and Tom Reed! I don’t know as we didn’t neglect the legitimate interests of our respective commandoes sometimes for this ball-play. I know I did.

‘’Long towards the fall the Royal British Artillery grew shy—hung back in their breeching sort of—and their shooting was way—way off. I observed they wasn’t taking any chances, not though I acted kitten almost underneath ’em.

‘I mentioned it to Van Zyl, because it struck me I had about knocked their Royal British morale endways.

‘“No,” says he, rocking as usual on his pony. “My Captain Mankeltow he is sick. That is all.”

‘“So’s your Captain Mankeltow’s guns,” I said. “But I’m going to make ’em a heap sicker before he gets well.”

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‘“No,” says Van Zyl. “He has had the enteric a little. Now he is better, and he was let out from hospital at Jackhalputs. Ah, that Mankeltow! He always makes me laugh so. I told him—long back—at Colesberg, I had a little home for him at Nooitgedacht. But he would not come—no! He has been sick, and I am sorry.”

‘“How d’you know that?” I says.

‘“Why, only to-day he sends back his love by Johanna Van der Merwe, that goes to their doctor for her sick baby’s eyes. He sends his love, that Mankeltow, and he tells her tell me he has a little garden of roses all ready for me in the Dutch Indies—Umballa. He is very funny, my Captain Mankeltow.”

‘The Dutch and the English ought to fraternise, Sir. They’ve the same notions of humour, to my thinking.’

‘“When he gets well,” says Van Zyl, “you look out, Mr. Americaan. He comes back to his guns next Tuesday. Then they shoot better.”

‘I wasn’t so well acquainted with the Royal British Artillery as old man Van Zyl. I knew this Captain Mankeltow by sight, of course, and, considering what sort of a man with the hoe he was, I thought he’d done right well against my Zigler. But nothing epoch-making.

‘Next morning at the usual hour I waited on the General, and old Van Zyl come along with some of the boys. Van Zyl didn’t hang round the Zigler much as a rule, but this was his luck that day.

‘He was peeking through his glasses at the camp, and I was helping pepper the General’s sow-belly-just as usual-when he turns to me quick and says, “Almighty! How all these Englishmen are liars! You cannot trust one,” he says. “Captain Mankeltow tells our Johanna he comes not back till Tuesday, and to-day is Friday, and there he is! Almighty! The English are all Chamberlains!”

‘If the old man hadn’t stopped to make political speeches he’d have had his supper in laager that night, I guess. I was busy attending to Tom Reed at two thousand when Baldy got in her fine work on me. I saw one sheet of white flame wrapped round the hopper, and in the middle of it there was one o’ my mules straight on end. Nothing out of the way in a mule on end, but this mule hadn’t any head. I remember it struck me as incongruous at the time, and when I’d ciphered it out I was doing the Santos-Dumont act without any balloon and my motor out of gear. Then I got to thinking about Santos-Dumont and how much better my new way was. Then I thought about Professor Langley and the Smithsonian, and wished I hadn’t lied so extravagantly in some of my specifications at Washington. Then I quit thinking for quite a while, and when I resumed my train of thought I was nude, Sir, in a very stale stretcher, and my mouth was full of fine dirt all flavoured with Laughtite.

‘I coughed up that dirt.

‘“Hullo!” says a man walking beside me. “You’ve spoke almost in time. Have a drink?”

‘I don’t use rum as a rule, but I did then, because I needed it.

‘“What hit us? “I said.

‘“Me,” he said. “I got you fair on the hopper as you pulled out of that donga; but I’m sorry to say every last round in the hopper’s exploded and your gun’s in a shocking state. I’m real sorry,” he says. “I admire your gun, Sir.”

‘“Are you Captain Mankeltow?” I says.

‘“Yes,” he says. “I presoom you’re Mister Zigler. Your commanding officer told me about you.”

‘“Have you gathered in old man Van Zyl?” I said.

‘“Commandant Van Zyl,” he says very stiff, “was most unfortunately wounded, but I am glad to say it’s not serious. We hope he’ll be able to dine with us to-night; and I feel sure,” he says, “the General would be delighted to see you too, though he didn’t expect,” he says, “and no one else either, by Jove!” he says, and blushed like the British do when they’re embarrassed.

‘I saw him slide an Episcopalian Prayer-book up his sleeve, and when I looked over the edge of the stretcher there was half-a-dozen enlisted men—privates—had just quit digging and was standing to attention by their spades. I guess he was right on the General not expecting me to dinner; but it was all of a piece with their sloppy British way of doing business. Any God’s quantity of fuss and flubdub to bury a man, and not an ounce of forehandedness in the whole outfit to find out whether he was rightly dead. And I am a Congregationalist anyway !

‘Well, Sir, that was my introduction to the British Army. I’d write a book about it if anyone would believe me. This Captain Mankeltow, Royal British Artillery, turned the doctor on me (I could write another book about him) and fixed me up with a suit of his own clothes, and fed me canned beef and biscuits, and give me a cigar—a Henry Clay and a whisky-and-sparklet. He was a white man.

‘“Ye-es, by Jove,” he said, dragging out his words like a twist of molasses, “we’ve all admired your gun and the way you’ve worked it. Some of us betted you was a British deserter. I won a sovereign on that from a yeoman. And, by the way,” he says, “you’ve disappointed me groom pretty bad.”

‘“Where does your groom come in?” I said.

‘“Oh, he was the yeoman. He’s a dam poor groom,” says my captain, “but he’s a way-up barrister when he’s at home. He’s been running around the camp with his tongue out, waiting for the chance of defending you at the court-martial.”

‘“What court-martial?” I says.

‘“On you as a deserter from the Artillery. You’d have had a good run for your money. Anyway, you’d never have been hung after the way you worked your gun. Deserter ten times over,” he says, “I’d have stuck out for shooting you like a gentleman.”

‘Well, Sir, right there it struck me at the pit of my stomach—sort of sickish, sweetish feeling—that my position needed regularising pretty bad. I ought to have been a naturalised burgher of a year’s standing; but Ohio’s my State, and I wouldn’t have gone back on her for a desertful of Dutchmen. That and my enthoosiasm as an inventor had led me to the existing crisis; but I couldn’t expect this Captain Mankeltow to regard the proposition that way. There I sat, the rankest breed of unreconstructed American citizen, caught red-handed squirting hell at the British Army for months on end. I tell you, Sir, I wished I was in Cincinnatah that summer evening. I’d have compromised on Brooklyn.

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‘“What d’you do about aliens?” I said, and the dirt I’d coughed up seemed all back of my tongue again.

‘“Oh,” says he, “we don’t do much of anything. They’re about all the society we get. I’m a bit of a pro-Boer myself,” he says, “but between you and me the average Boer ain’t over and above intellectual. You’re the first American we’ve met up with, but of course you’re a burgher.”

‘It was what I ought to have been if I’d had the sense of a common tick, but the way he drawled it out made me mad.

‘“Of course I am not,” I says. “Would you be a naturalised Boer?”

‘“I’m fighting against ’em,” he says, lighting a cigarette, “but it’s all a matter of opinion.”

‘“Well,” I says, “you can hold any blame opinion you choose, but I’m a white man, and my present intention is to die in that colour.”

‘He laughed one of those big, thick-ended, British laughs that don’t lead anywhere, and whacked up some sort of compliment about America that made me mad all through.

‘I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir, but I do not understand the alleged British joke. It is depressing.

‘I was introdooced to five or six officers that evening, and every blame one of ’em grinned and asked me why I wasn’t in the Filipeens suppressing our war! And that was British humour! They all had to get it off their chests before they’d talk sense. But they was sound on the Zigler. They had all admired her. I made out a fairystory of me being wearied of the war, and having pushed the gun at them these last three months in the hope they’d capture it and let me go home. That tickled ’em to death. They made me say it three times over, and laughed like kids each time. But half the British are kids; specially the older men. My Captain Mankeltow was less of it than the others. He talked about the Zigler like a lover, Sir, and I drew him diagrams of the hopperfeed and recoil-cylinder in his note-book. He asked the one British question I was waiting for, “Hadn’t I made my working-parts too light?” The British think weight’s strength.

‘At last—I’d been shy of opening the subject before—at last I said, “Gentlemen, you are the unprejudiced tribunal I’ve been hunting after. I guess you ain’t interested in any other gun-factory, and politics don’t weigh with you. How did it feel your end of the game? What’s my gun done, anyway?”

‘“I hate to disappoint you,” says Captain Mankeltow, “because I know how you feel as an inventor.” I wasn’t feeling like an inventor just then. I felt friendly, but the British haven’t more tact than you can pick up with a knife out of a plate of soup.

‘“The honest truth,” he says, “is that you’ve wounded about ten of us one way and another, killed two battery horses and four mules, and—oh, yes,” he said, “you’ve bagged five Kaffirs. But, buck up,” he says, “we’ve all had mighty close calls”—shaves, he called ’em, I remember. “Look at my pants.”

‘They was repaired right across the seat with Minneapolis flour-bagging. I could see the stencil.

‘“I ain’t bluffing,” he says. “Get the hospital returns, Doc.”

‘The doctor gets ’em and reads ’em out under the proper dates. That doctor alone was worth the price of admission.

‘I was pleased right through that I hadn’t killed any of these cheerful kids; but none the less I couldn’t help thinking that a few more Kaffirs would have served me just as well for advertising purposes as white men. No, Sir. Anywhichway you regard the proposition, twenty-one casualties after months of close friendship like ours was—paltry.

‘They gave me taffy about the gun—the British use taffy where we use sugar. It’s cheaper, and gets there just the same. They sat around and proved to me that my gun was too good, too uniform—shot as close as a Männlicher rifle.

‘Says one kid chewing a bit of grass: “I counted eight of your shells, Sir, burst in a radius of ten feet. All of ’em would have gone through one waggon-tilt. It was beautiful,” he says. “It was too good.”

‘I shouldn’t wonder if the boys were right. My Laughtite is too mathematically uniform in propelling power. Yes; she was too good for this refractory fool of a country. The training-gear was broke, too, and we had to swivel her around by the trail. But I’ll build my next Zigler fifteen hundred pounds heavier. Might work in a gasoline motor under the axles. I must think that up.

‘“Well, gentlemen,” I said, “I’d hate to have been the death of any of you; and if a prisoner can deed away his property, I’d love to present the Captain here with what he’s seen fit to leave of my Zigler.”

‘“Thanks awf’ly,” says my Captain. “I’d like her very much. She’d look fine in the mess at Woolwich. That is, if you don’t mind, Mr. Zigler.”

‘“Go right ahead,” I says. “I’ve come out of all the mess I’ve any use for; but she’ll do to spread the light among the Royal British Artillery.”

‘I tell you, Sir, there’s not much of anything the matter with the Royal British Artillery. They’re brainy men languishing under an effete system which, when you take good holt of it, is England just all England. ’Times I’d feel I was talking with real live citizens, and times I’d feel I’d struck the Beef-eaters in the Tower.

‘How? Well, this way. I was telling my Captain Mankeltow what Van Zyl had said about the British being all Chamberlains when the old man saw him back from hospital four days ahead of time.

‘“Oh, dam it all!” he says, as serious as the Supreme Court. “It’s too bad,” he says. “Johanna must have misunderstood me, or else I’ve got the wrong Dutch word for these blarsted days of the week. I told Johanna I’d be out on Friday. The woman’s a fool. Oah, da-am it all!” he says. “I wouldn’t have sold old Van Zyl a pup like that,” he says. “I’ll hunt him up and apologise.”

‘He must have fixed it all right, for when we sailed over to the General’s dinner my Captain had Van Zyl about half-full of sherry and bitters, as happy as a clam. The boys all called him Adrian, and treated him like their prodigal father. He’d been hit on the collar-bone by a wad of shrapnel, and his arm was tied up.

‘But the General was the peach. I presume you’re acquainted with the average run of British generals, but this was my first. I sat on his left hand, and he talked like—like the Ladies’ Home Journal. ’J’ever read that paper? It’s refined, Sir—and innocuous, and full of nickel-plated sentiments guaranteed to improve the mind. He was it. He began by a Lydia Pinkham heart-to-heart talk about my health, and hoped the boys had done me well, and that I was enjoying my stay in their midst. Then he thanked me for the interesting and valuable lessons that I’d given his crowd—specially in the matter of placing artillery and

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rearguard attacks. He’d wipe his long thin moustache between drinks—lime-juice and water he used—and blat off into a long “a-aah,” and ladle out more taffy for me or old man Van Zyl on his right. I told him how I’d had my first Pisgah-sight of the principles of the Zigler when I was a fourth-class postmaster on a star-route in Arkansas. I told him how I’d worked it up by instalments when I was machinist in Waterbury, where the dollar-watches come from. He had one on his wrist then. I told him how I’d met Zalinski (he’d never heard of Zalinski!) when I was an extra clerk in the Naval Construction Bureau at Washington. I told him how my uncle, who was a truck-farmer in Noo Jersey (he loaned money on mortgage too, for ten acres ain’t enough now m Noo Jersey), how he’d willed me a quarter of a million dollars, because I was the only one of our kin that called him down when he used to come home with a hard-cider jag on him and heave ox-bows at his nieces. I told him how I’d turned in every red cent on the Zigler, and I told him the whole circus of my coming out with her, and so on, and so following; and every forty seconds he’d wipe his moustache and blat, “How interesting. Really, now? How interesting.”

‘It was like being in an old English book, Sir. Like Bracebridge Hall. But an American wrote that! I kept peeking around for the Boar’s Head and the Rosemary and Magna Charta and the Cricket on the Hearth, and the rest of the outfit. Then Van Zyl whirled in. He was no ways jagged, but thawed—thawed, Sir, and among friends. They began discussing previous scraps all along the old man’s beat—about sixty of ’em—as well as side-shows with other generals and columns. Van Zyl told ’im of a big beat he’d worked on a column a week or so before I’d joined him. He demonstrated his strategy with forks on the table.

‘“There!” said the General, when he’d finished. “That proves my contention to the hilt. Maybe I’m a bit of a pro-Boer, but I stick to it,” he says, “that under proper officers, with due regard to his race prejudices, the Boer ’ud make the finest mounted infantry in the Empire. Adrian,” he says, “you’re simply squandered on a cattle-run. You ought to be at the Staff College with De Wet.”

‘“You catch De Wet and I come to your Staff College—eh,” says Adrian, laughing. “But you are so slow, Generaal. Why are you so slow? For a month,” he says, “you do so well and strong that we say we shall hands-up and come back to our farms. Then you send to England and make us a present of two—three—six hundred young men, with rifles and wagons and rum and tobacco, and such a great lot of cartridges, that our young men put up their tails and start all over again. If you hold an ox by the horn and hit him by the bottom he runs round and round. He never goes anywhere. So, too, this war goes round and round. You know that, Generaal!”

‘“Quite right, Adrian,” says the General ; “but you must believe your Bible.”

‘“Hooh!” says Adrian, and reaches for the whisky. I’ve never known a Dutchman a professing Atheist, but some few have been rather active Agnostics since the British sat down in Pretoria. Old man Van Zyl—he told me—had soured on religion after Bloemfontein surrendered. He was a Free Stater for one thing.

‘“He that believeth,” says the General, “shall not make haste. That’s in Isaiah. We believe we’re going to win, and so we don’t make haste. As far as I’m concerned I’d like this war to last another five years. We’d have an army then. It’s just this way, Mr. Zigler,” he says, “our people are brim-full of patriotism, but they’ve been born and brought up between houses, and England ain’t big enough to train ’em—not if you expect to preserve.”

‘“Preserve what?” I says. “England?”

‘“No. The game,” he says; “and that reminds me, gentlemen, we haven’t drunk the King and Fox-hunting.”

‘So they drank the King and Fox-hunting. I drank the King because there’s something about Edward that tickles me (he’s so blame British); but I rather stood out on the Fox-hunting. I’ve ridden wolves in the cattle-country, and needed a drink pretty bad afterwards, but it never struck me as I ought to drink about it—he-red-it-arily.

‘“No, as I was saying, Mr. Zigler,” he goes on, “we have to train our men in the field to shoot and ride. I allow six months for it; but many column-commanders—not that I ought to say a word against ’em, for they’re the best fellows that ever stepped, and most of ’em are my dearest friends—seem to think that if they have men and horses and guns they can take tea with the Boers. It’s generally the other way about, ain’t it, Mr. Zigler?”

‘“To some extent, Sir,” I said.

‘“I’m so glad you agree with me,” he says. “My command here I regard as a training depot, and you, if I may say so, have been one of my most efficient instructors. I mature my men slowly but thoroughly. First I put ’em in a town which is liable to be attacked by night, where they can attend riding-school in the day. Then I use ’em with a convoy, and last I put ’em into a column. It takes time,” he says, “but I flatter myself that any men who have worked under me are at least grounded in the rudiments of their profession. Adrian,” he says, “was there anything wrong with the men who upset Van Besters’ applecart last month when he was trying to cross the line to join Piper with those horses he’d stole from Gabbitas?”

‘“No, Generaal,” says Van Zyl. “Your men got the horses back and eleven dead; and Van Besters, he ran to Delarey in his shirt. They was very good, those men. They shoot hard.”

‘“So pleased to hear you say so. I laid ’em down at the beginning of this century—a 1900 vintage. You remember ’em, Mankletow?” he says. “The Central Middlesex Broncho Busters—clerks and floor-walkers mostly,” and he wiped his moustache. “It was just the same with the Liverpool Buckjumpers, but they were stevedores. Let’s see—they were a last-century draft, weren’t they? They did well after nine months. You know ’em, Van Zyl? You didn’t get much change out of ’em at Pootfontein?”

‘“No,” says Van Zyl. “At Pootfontein I lost my son Andries.”

‘“I beg your pardon, Commandant,” says the General ; and the rest of the crowd sort of cooed over Adrian.

‘“Excoose,” says Adrian. “It was all right. They were good men those, but it is just what I say. Some are so dam good we want to hands-up, and some are so dam bad, we say, ‘Take the Vierkleur into Cape Town.’ It is not upright of you, Generaal. It is not upright of you at all. I do not think you ever wish this war to finish.”

‘“It’s a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon,” says the General. “With luck, we ought to run half a million men through the mill. Why, we might even be able to give our Native Army a look in. Oh, not here, of course, Adrian, but down in the Colony—say a camp-of-exercise at Worcester. You mustn’t be prejudiced, Adrian. I’ve commanded a district in India, and I give you my word the native troops are splendid men.”

‘“Oh, I should not mind them at Worcester,” says Adrian. “I would sell you forage for them at Worcester—yes, and Paarl and Stellenbosch; but Almighty!” he says, “must I stay with Cronje till you have taught half a million of these stupid boys to ride? I shall be an old man.”

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‘Well, Sir, then and there they began arguing whether St. Helena would suit Adrian’s health as well as some other places they knew about, and fixing up letters of introduction to Dukes and Lords of their acquaintance, so’s Van Zyl should be well looked after. We own a fair-sized block of real estate—America does—but it made me sickish to hear this crowd fluttering round the Atlas (oh yes, they had an Atlas), and choosing stray continents for Adrian to drink his coffee in. The old man allowed he didn’t want to roost with Cronje, because one of Cronje’s kin had jumped one of his farms after Paardeberg. I forget the rights of the case, but it was interesting. They decided on a place called Umballa in India, because there was a first-class doctor there.

‘So Adrian was fixed to drink the King and Fox-hunting, and study up the Native Army in India (I’d like to see ’em myself), till the British General had taught the male white citizens of Great Britain how to ride. Don’t misunderstand me, Sir. I loved that General. After ten minutes I loved him, and I wanted to laugh at him; but at the same time, sitting there and hearing him talk about the centuries, I tell you, Sir, it scared me. It scared me cold ! He admitted everything—he acknowledged the corn before you spoke—he was more pleased to hear that his men had been used to wipe the veldt with than I was when I knocked out Tom Reed’s two lead-horses—and he sat back and blew smoke through his nose and matured his men like cigars and—he talked of the everlastin’ centuries

‘I went to bed nearer nervous prostration than I’d come in a long time. Next morning me and Captain Mankeltow fixed up what his shrapnel had left of my Zigler for transport to the railroad. She went in on her own wheels, and I stencilled her “Royal Artillery Mess, Woolwich,” on the muzzle, and he said he’d be grateful if I’d take charge of her to Cape Town, and hand her over to a man in the Ordnance there. “How are you fixed financially? You’ll need some money on the way home,” he says at last.

‘“For one thing, Cap,” I said, “I’m not a poor man, and for another I’m not going home. I am the captive of your bow and spear. I decline to resign office.”

‘“Skittles!” he says (that was a great word of his), “you’ll take parole, and go back to America and invent another Zigler, a trifle heavier in the working-parts—I would. We’ve got more prisoners than we know what to do with as it is,” he says. “You’ll only be an additional expense to me as a taxpayer. Think of Schedule D,” he says, “and take parole.”

‘“I don’t know anything about your tariffs,” I said, “but when I get to Cape Town I write home for money, and I turn in every cent my board ’ll cost your country to any ten-century-old department that’s been ordained to take it since William the Conqueror came along.”

‘“But, confound you for a thick-headed mule,” he says, “this war ain’t any more than just started! Do you mean to tell me you’re going to play prisoner till it’s over?”

‘“That’s about the size of it,” I says, “if an Englishman and an American could ever understand each other.”

‘“But, in Heaven’s Holy Name, why?” he says, sitting down of a heap on an ant-hill.

‘“Well, Cap,” I says, “I don’t pretend to follow your ways of thought, and I can’t see why you abuse your position to persecute a poor prisoner o’ war on his!”

‘“My dear fellow,” he began, throwing up his hands and blushing, “I’ll apologise.”

‘“But if you insist,” I says, “there are just one and a half things in this world I can’t do. The odd half don’t matter here; but taking parole, and going home, and being interviewed by the boys, and giving lectures on my single-handed campaign against the hereditary enemies of my beloved country happens to be the one. We’ll let it go at that, Cap.”

‘“But it’ll bore you to death,” he says. The British are a heap more afraid of what they call being bored than of dying, I’ve noticed.

‘“I’ll survive,” I says, “I ain’t British. I can think,” I says.

‘“By God,” he says, coming up to me, and extending the right hand of fellowship, “you ought to be English, Zigler!”

‘It’s no good getting mad at a compliment like that. The English all do it. They’re a crazy breed. When they don’t know you they freeze up tighter’n the St. Lawrence. When they do, they go out like an ice jam in April. Up till we prisoners left—four days—my Captain Mankeltow told me pretty much all about himself there was;—his mother and sisters, and his bad brother that was a trooper in some Colonial corps, and how his father didn’t get on with him, and—well, everything, as I’ve said. They’re undomesticated, the British, compared with us. They talk about their own family affairs as if they belonged to someone else. ’Tain’t as if they hadn’t any shame, but it sounds like it. I guess they talk out loud what we think, and we talk out loud what they think.

‘I liked my Captain Mankeltow. I liked him as well as any man I’d ever struck. He was white. He gave me his silver drinking-flask, and I gave him the formula of my Laughtite. That’s a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in his vestpocket, on the lowest count, if he has the knowledge to use it. No, I didn’t tell him the money-value. He was English. He’d send his valet to find out.

‘Well, me and Adrian and a crowd of dam Dutchmen was sent down the road to Cape Town in first-class carriages under escort. (What did I think of your enlisted men? They are largely different from ours, Sir: very largely.) As I was saying, we slid down south, with Adrian looking out of the car-window and crying. Dutchmen cry mighty easy for a breed that fights as they do; but I never understood how a Dutchman could curse till we crossed into the Orange Free State Colony, and he lifted up his hand and cursed Steyn for a solid ten minutes. Then we got into the Colony, and the rebs—ministers mostly and schoolmasters—came round the cars with fruit and sympathy and texts. Van Zyl talked to ’em in Dutch, and one man, a big red-bearded minister, at Beaufort West, I remember, he jest wilted on the platform.

‘“Keep your prayers for yourself,” says Van Zyl, throwing back a bunch of grapes. “You’ll need ’em, and you’ll need the fruit too, when the war comes down here. You done it,” he says. “You and your picayune Church that’s deader than Cronje’s dead horses! What sort of a God have you been unloading on us, you black aasvogels? The British came, and we beat ’em,” he says, “and you sat still and prayed. The British beat us, and you sat still,” he says. “You told us to hang on, and we hung on, and our farms was burned, and you sat still—you and your God. See here,” he says, “I shot my Bible full of bullets after Bloemfontein went, and you and God didn’t say anything. Take it and pray over it before we Federals help the British to knock hell out of you rebels.”

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‘Then I hauled him back into the car. I judged he’d had a fit. But life’s curious—and sudden—and mixed. I hadn’t any more use for a reb than Van Zyl, and I knew something of the lies they’d fed us up with from the Colony for a year and more. I told the minister to pull his freight out of that, and went on with my lunch, when another roan come along and shook hands with Van Zyl. He’d known him at close range in the Kimberley siege and before. Van Zyl was well seen by his neighbours, I judge. As soon as this other man opened his mouth I said, “You’re Kentucky, ain’t you?” “I am,” he says; “and what may you be?” I told him right off, for I was pleased to hear good United States in any man’s mouth; but he whipped his hands behind him and said, “I’m not knowing any man that fights for a Tammany Dutchman. But I presoom you’ve been well paid, you dam gun-runnin’ Yank.”

‘Well, Sir, I wasn’t looking for that, and it near knocked me over, while old man Van Zyl started in to explain.

‘“Don’t you waste your breath, Mister Van Zyl,” the man says. “I know this breed. The South’s full of ’em.” Then he whirls round on me and says, “Look at here, you Yank. A little thing like a King’s neither here nor there, but what you’ve done,” he says, “is to go back on the White Man in six places at once—two hemispheres and four continents—America, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Don’t open your head,” he says. “You know right well if you’d been caught at this game in our country you’d have been jiggling in the bight of a lariat before you could reach for your naturalisation papers. Go on and prosper,” he says, “and you’ll fetch up by fighting for niggers, as the North did.” And he threw me half-a-crown—English money.

‘Sir, I do not regard the proposition in that light, but I guess I must have been somewhat shook by the explosion. They told me at Cape Town one rib was driven in on to my lungs. I am not adducing this as an excuse, but the cold God’s truth of the matter is—the money on the floor did it . . . . I give up and cried. Put my head down and cried.

‘I dream about this still sometimes. He didn’t know the circumstances, but I dream about it. And it’s Hell!

‘How do you regard the proposition—as a Brother? If you’d invented your own gun, and spent fifty-seven thousand dollars on her—and had paid your own expenses from the word “go”? An American citizen has a right to choose his own side in an unpleasantness, and Van Zyl wasn’t any Krugerite . . , and I’d risked my hide at my own expense. I got that man’s address from Van Zyl; he was a mining man at Kimberley, and I wrote him the facts. But he never answered. Guess he thought I lied …. Damned Southern rebel

‘Oh, say. Did I tell you my Captain gave me a letter to an English Lord in Cape Town, and he fixed things so’s I could lie up a piece in his house? I was pretty sick, and threw up some blood from where the rib had gouged into the lung—here. This Lord was a crank on guns, and he took charge of the Zigler. He had his knife into the British system as much as any American. He said he wanted revolution, and not reform, in your army. He said the British soldier had failed in every point except courage. He said England needed a Monroe Doctrine worse than America—a new doctrine, barring out all the Continent, and strictly devoting herself to developing her own Colonies. He said he’d abolish half the Foreign Office, and take all the old hereditary families clean out of it, because, he said, they was expressly trained to fool around with continental diplomats, and to despise the Colonies. His own family wasn’t more than six hundred years old. He was a very brainy man, and a good citizen. We talked politics and inventions together when my lung let up on me.

‘Did he know my General? Yes. He knew ’em all. Called ’em Teddie and Gussie and Willie. They was all of the very best, and all his dearest friends; but he told me confidentially they was none of ’em fit to command a column in the field. He said they were too fond of advertising. Generals don’t seem very different from actors or doctors or—yes, Sir—inventors.

‘He fixed things for me lovelily at Simonstown. Had the biggest sort of pull—even for a Lord. At first they treated me as a harmless lunatic; but after a while I got ’em to let me keep some of their books. If I was left alone in the world with the British system of book-keeping, I’d reconstruct the whole British Empire—beginning with the Army. Yes, I’m one of their most trusted accountants, and I’m paid for it. As much as a dollar a day. I keep that. I’ve earned it, and I deduct it from the cost of my board. When the war’s over I’m going to pay up the balance to the British Government. Yes, Sir, that’s how I regard the proposition.

‘Adrian? Oh, he left for Umballa four months back. He told me he was going to apply to join the National Scouts if the war didn’t end in a year. ’Tisn’t in nature for one Dutchman to shoot another, but if Adrian ever meets up with Steyn there’ll be an exception to the rule. Ye-es, when the war’s over it’ll take some of the British Army to protect Steyn from his fellow-patriots. But the war won’t be over yet awhile. He that believeth don’t hurry, as Isaiah says. The ministers and the school-teachers and the rebs ’ll have a war all to themselves long after the north is quiet.

‘I’m pleased with this country—it’s big. Not so many folk on the ground as in America. There’s a boom coming sure. I’ve talked it over with Adrian, and I guess I shall buy a farm somewhere near Bloemfontein and start in cattle-raising. It’s big and peaceful—a ten-thousand-acre farm. I could go on inventing there, too. I’ll sell my Zigler, I guess. I’ll offer the patent rights to the British Government; and if they do the “reelly-now-how-interesting “act over her, I’ll turn her over to Captain Mankeltow and his friend the Lord. They’ll pretty quick find some Gussie, or Teddie, or Algie who can get her accepted in the proper quarters. I’m beginning to know my English.

‘And now I’ll go in swimming, and read the papers after lunch. I haven’t had such a good time since Willie died.’

He pulled the blue shirt over his head as the bathers returned to their piles of clothing, and, speaking through the folds, added:

‘But if you want to realise your assets, you should lease the whole proposition to America for ninety-nine years.’

By Word of Mouth

(a short tale)

Not though you die to-night, O Sweet, and wail,
A spectre at my door,
Shall mortal Fear make Love immortal fail—
I shall but love you more,
Who, from Death’s house returning, give me still
One moment’s comfort in my matchless ill.
(Shadow Houses)

THIS tale may be explained by those who know how souls are made, and where the bounds of the Possible are put down. I have lived long enough in this India to know that it is best to know nothing, and can only write the story as it happened.

Dumoise was our Civil Surgeon at Meridki, and we called him ‘Dormouse,’ because he was a round little, sleepy little man. He was a good Doctor and never quarrelled with any one, not even with our Deputy Commissioner who had the manners of a bargee and the tact of a horse. He married a girl as round and as sleepy-looking as himself. She was a Miss Hillardyce, daughter of ‘Squash’ Hillardyce of the Berars, who married his Chief’s daughter by mistake. But that is another story.

A honeymoon in India is seldom more than a week long; but there is nothing to hinder a couple from extending it over two or three years. India is a delightful country for married folk who are wrapped up in one another. They can live absolutely alone and without interruption just as the Dormice did. Those two little people retired from the world after their marriage, and were very happy. They were forced, of course, to give occasional dinners, but they made no friends thereby, and the Station went its own way and forgot them; only saying, occasionally, that Dormouse was the best of good fellows though dull. A Civil Surgeon who never quarrels is a rarity, appreciated as such.

Few people can afford to play Robinson Crusoe anywhere—least of all in India, where we are few in the land and very much dependent on each other’s kind offices. Dumoise was wrong in shutting himself from the world for a year, and he discovered his mistake when an epidemic of typhoid broke out in the Station in the heart of the cold weather, and his wife went down. He was a shy little man, and five days were wasted before he realised that Mrs. Dumoise was burning with something worse than simple fever, and three days more passed before he ventured to call on Mrs. Shute, the Engineer’s wife, and timidly speak about his trouble. Nearly every household in India knows that Doctors are very helpless in typhoid. The battle must be fought out between Death and the Nurses minute by minute and degree by degree. Mrs. Shute almost boxed Dumoise’s ears for what she called his ‘criminal delay,’ and went off at once to look after the poor girl. We had seven cases of typhoid in the Station that winter and, as the average of death is about one in every five cases, we felt certain that we should have to lose somebody. But all did their best. The women sat up nursing the women, and the men turned to and tended the bachelors who were down, and we wrestled with those typhoid cases for fifty-six days, and brought them through the Valley of the Shadow in triumph. But, just when we thought all was over, and were going to give a dance to celebrate the victory, little Mrs. Dumoise got a relapse and died in a week, and the Station went to the funeral. Dumoise broke down utterly at the brink of the grave, and had to be taken away.

After the death Dumoise crept into his own house and refused to be comforted. He did his duties perfectly, but we all felt that he should go on leave, and the other men of his own Service told him so. Dumoise was very thankful for the suggestion—he was thankful for anything in those days—and went to Chini on a walking-tour. Chini is some twenty marches from Simla, in the heart of the Hills, and the scenery is good if you are in trouble. You pass through big, still deodar forests, and under big, still cliffs, and over big, still grass-downs swelling like a woman’s breasts; and the wind across the grass, and the rain among the deodars say–‘Hush-hush-hush.’ So little Dumoise was packed off to Chini, to wear down his grief with a full-plate camera and a rifle. He took also a useless bearer, because the man had been his wife’s favourite servant. He was idle and a thief, but Dumoise trusted everything to him.

On his way back from Chini, Dumoise turned aside to Bagi, through the Forest Reserve which is on the spur of Mount Huttoo. Some men who have travelled more than a little say that the march from Kotegarh to Bagi is one of the finest in creation. It runs through dark wet forest, and ends suddenly in bleak, nipped hillside and black rocks. Bagi dâk-bungalow is open to all the winds and is bitterly cold. Few people go to Bagi. Perhaps that was the reason why Dumoise went there. He halted at seven in the evening, and his bearer went down the hillside to the village to engage coolies for the next day’s march. The sun had set, and the night-winds were beginning to croon among the rocks. Dumoise leaned on the railing of the verandah, waiting for his bearer to return. The man came back almost immediately after he had disappeared, and at such a rate that Dumoise fancied he must have crossed a bear. He was running as hard as he could up the face of the hill.

But there was no bear to account for his terror. He raced to the verandah and fell down, the blood spurting from his nose and his face iron-gray. Then he gurgled—‘I have seen the Memsahib! I have seen the Memsahib!’

‘Where?’ said Dumoise.

‘Down there, walking on the road to the village. She was in a blue dress, and she lifted the veil of her bonnet and said—“Ram Dass, give my salaams to the Sahib, and tell him that I shall meet him next month at Nuddea.” Then I ran away, because I was afraid.’

What Dumoise said or did I do not know. Ram Dass declares that he said nothing, but walked up and down the verandah all the cold night, waiting for the Memsahib to come up the hill, and stretching out his arms into the dark like a madman. But no Memsahib came, and, next day, he went on to Simla cross-questioning the bearer every hour.

Ram Dass could only say that he had met Mrs. Dumoise, and that she had lifted up her veil and given him the message which he had faithfully repeated to Dumoise. To this statement Ram Dass adhered. He did not know where Nuddea was, had no friends at Nuddea, and would most certainly never go to Nuddea, even though his pay were doubled.

Nuddea is in Bengal, and has nothing whatever to do with a Doctor serving in the Punjab. It must be more than twelve hundred miles south of Meridki.

Dumoise went through Simla without halting, and returned to Meridki, there to take over charge from the man who had been officiating for him during his tour. There were some Dispensary accounts to be explained, and some recent orders of the Surgeon-General to be noted, and, altogether, the taking-over was a full day’s work. In the evening Dumoise told his locum tenens, who was an old friend of his bachelor days, what had happened at Bagi; and the man said that Ram Dass might as well have chosen Tuticorin while he was about it.

At that moment a telegraph-peon came in with a telegram from Simla, ordering Dumoise not to take over charge at Meridki, but to go at once to Nuddea on special duty. There was a nasty outbreak of cholera at Nuddea, and the Bengal Government being shorthanded, as usual, had borrowed a Surgeon from the Punjab.

Dumoise threw the telegram across the table and said—‘Well?’

The other Doctor said nothing. It was all that he could say.

Then he remembered that Dumoise had passed through Simla on his way from Bagi; and thus might, possibly, have heard first news of the impending transfer.

He tried to put the question and the implied suspicion into words, but Dumoise stopped him with—‘If I had desired that, I should never have come back from Chini. I was shooting there. I wish to live, for I have things to do . . . but I shall not be sorry.’

The other man bowed his head, and helped, in the twilight, to pack up Dumoise’s just opened trunks. Ram Dass entered with the lamps.

‘Where is the Sahib going?’ he asked.

‘To Nuddea,’ said Dumoise softly.

Ram Dass clawed Dumoise’s knees and boots and begged him not to go. Ram Dass wept and howled till he was turned out of the room. Then he wrapped up all his belongings and came back to ask for a character. He was not going to Nuddea to see his Sahib die and, perhaps, to die himself.

So Dumoise gave the man his wages and went down to Nuddea alone, the other Doctor bidding him good-bye as one under sentence of death.

Eleven days later he had joined his Memsahib; and the Bengal Government had to borrow a fresh Doctor to cope with that epidemic at Nuddea. The first importation lay dead in Chooadanga Dâk-Bungalow.

The Bull that Thought

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WESTWARD from a town by the Mouths of the Rhône, runs a road so mathematically straight, so barometrically level, that it ranks among the world’s measured miles and motorists use it for records. I had attacked the distance several times, but always with a Mistral blowing, or the unchancy cattle of those parts on the move. But once, running from the East, into a high-piled, almost Egyptian, sunset, there came a night which it would have been sin to have wasted. It was warm with the breath of summer in advance; moonlit till the shadow of every rounded pebble and pointed cypress wind-break lay solid on that vast flat-floored waste; and my Mr. Leggatt, who had slipped out to make sure, reported that the roadsurface was unblemished.

‘Now,’ he suggested, ‘we might see what she’ll do under strict road-conditions. She’s been pullin’ like the Blue de Luxe all day. Unless I’m all off, it’s her night out.’

We arranged the trial for after dinner—thirty kilometres as near as might be; and twenty-two of them without even a level crossing.

There sat beside me at table d’hôte an elderly, bearded Frenchman wearing the rosette of by no means the lowest grade of the Legion of Honour, who had arrived in a talkative Citroën. I gathered that he had spent much of his life in the French Colonial Service in Annam and Tonquin. When the war came, his years barring him from the front line, he had supervised Chinese wood-cutters who, with axe and dynamite, deforested the centre of France for trench-props. He said my chauffeur had told him that I contemplated an experiment. He was interested in cars—had admired mine—would, in short, be greatly indebted to me if I permitted him to assist as an observer. One could not well refuse; and, knowing my Mr. Leggatt, it occurred to me there might also be a bet in the background.

While he went to get his coat, I asked the proprietor his name. ‘Voiron—Monsieur André Voiron,’ was the reply. ‘And his business?’ ‘Mon Dieu! He is Voiron! He is all those things, there!’ The proprietor waved his hands at brilliant advertisements on the dining-room walls, which declared that Voiron Frères dealt in wines, agricultural implements, chemical manures, provisions and produce throughout that part of the globe.

He said little for the first five minutes of our trip, and nothing at all for the next ten—it being, as Leggatt had guessed, Esmeralda’s night out. But, when her indicator climbed to a certain figure and held there for three blinding kilometres, he expressed himself satisfied, and proposed to me that we should celebrate the event at the hotel. ‘I keep yonder,’ said he, ‘a wine on which I should value your opinion.’

On our return, he disappeared for a few minutes, and I heard him rumbling in a cellar. The proprietor presently invited me to the dining-room, where, beneath one frugal light, a table had been set with local dishes of renown. There was, too, a bottle beyond most known sizes, marked black on red, with a date. Monsieur Voiron opened it, and we drank to the health of my car. The velvety, perfumed liquor, between fawn and topaz, neither too sweet nor too dry, creamed in its generous glass. But I knew no wine composed of the whispers of angels’ wings, the breath of Eden and the foam and pulse of Youth renewed. So I asked what it might be.

‘It is champagne,’ he said gravely.

‘Then what have I been drinking all my life?’

‘If you were lucky, before the War, and paid thirty shillings a bottle, it is possible you may have drunk one of our better-class tisanes.’

‘And where does one get this?’

‘Here, I am happy to say. Elsewhere, perhaps, it is not so easy. We growers exchange these real wines among ourselves.’

I bowed my head in admiration, surrender, and joy. There stood the most ample bottle, and it was not yet eleven o’clock. Doors locked and shutters banged throughout the establishment. Some last servant yawned on his way to bed. Monsieur Voiron opened a window and the moonlight flooded in from a small pebbled court outside. One could almost hear the town of Chambres breathing in its first sleep. Presently, there was a thick noise in the air, the passing of feet and hooves, lowings, and a stifled bark or two. Dust rose over the courtyard wall, followed by the strong smell of cattle.

‘They are moving some beasts,’ said Monsieur Voiron, cocking an ear. ‘Mine, I think. Yes, I hear Christophe. Our beasts do not like automobiles—so we move at night. You do not know our country—the Crau, here, or the Camargue? I was—I am now, again—of it. All France is good; but this is the best.’ He spoke, as only a Frenchman can, of his own loved part of his own lovely land.

‘For myself, if I were not so involved in all these affairs’—he pointed to the advertisements—‘I would live on our farm with my cattle, and worship them like a Hindu. You know our cattle of the Camargue, Monsieur? No? It is not an acquaintance to rush upon lightly. There are no beasts like them. They have a mentality superior to that of others. They graze and they ruminate, by choice, facing our Mistral, which is more than some automobiles will do. Also they have in them the potentiality of thought—and when cattle think—I have seen what arrives.’

‘Are they so clever as all that?’ I asked idly.

‘Monsieur, when your sportif chauffeur camouflaged your limousine so that she resembled one of your Army lorries, I would not believe her capacities. I bet him—ah—two to one—she would not touch ninety kilometres. It was proved that she could. I can give you no proof, but will you believe me if I tell you what a beast who thinks can achieve?’

‘After the War,’ said I spaciously, ‘everything is credible.’

‘That is true! Everything inconceivable has happened; but still we learn nothing and we believe nothing. When I was a child in my father’s house—before I became a Colonial Administrator—my interest and my affection were among our cattle. We of the old rock live here—have you seen?—in big farms like castles. Indeed, some of them may have been Saracenic. The barns group round them—great white-walled barns, and yards solid as our houses. One gate shuts all. It is a world apart; an administration of all that concerns beasts. It was there I learned something about cattle. You see, they are our playthings in the Camargue and the Crau. The boy measures his strength against the calf that butts him in play among the manure-heaps. He moves in and out among the cows, who are—not so amiable. He rides with the herdsmen in the open to shift the herds. Sooner or later, he meets as bulls the little calves that knocked him over. So it was with me—till it became necessary that I should go to our Colonies.’ He laughed. ‘Very necessary. That is a good time in youth, Monsieur, when one does these things which shock our parents. Why is it always Papa who is so shocked and has never heard of such things—and Mamma who supplies the excuses? . . .

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And when my brother—my elder who stayed and created the business—begged me to return and help him, I resigned my Colonial career gladly enough. I returned to our own lands, and my well-loved, wicked white and yellow cattle of the Camargue and the Crau. My Faith, I could talk of them all night, for this stuff unlocks the heart, without making repentance in the morning . . . . Yes! It was after the War that this happened. There was a calf, among Heaven knows how many of ours—a bull-calf—an infant indistinguishable from his companions. He was sick, and he had been taken up with his mother into the big farmyard at home with us. Naturally the children of our herdsmen practised on him from the first. It is in their blood. The Spaniards make a cult of bull-fighting. Our little devils down here bait bulls as automatically as the English child kicks or throws balls. This calf would chase them with his eyes open, like a cow when she hunts a man. They would take refuge behind our tractors and wine-carts in the centre of the yard: he would chase them in and out as a dog hunts rats. More than that, he would study their psychology, his eyes in their eyes. Yes, he watched their faces to divine which way they would run. He himself, also, would pretend sometimes to charge directly at a boy. Then he would wheel right or left—one could never tell—and knock over some child pressed against a wall who thought himself safe. After this, he would stand over him, knowing that his companions must come to his aid; and when they were all together, waving their jackets across his eyes and pulling his tail, he would scatter them—how he would scatter them! He could kick, too, sideways like a cow. He knew his ranges as well as our gunners, and he was as quick on his feet as our Carpentier. I observed him often. Christophe—the man who passed just now—our chief herdsman, who had taught me to ride with our beasts when I was ten—Christophe told me that he was descended from a yellow cow of those days that had chased us once into the marshes. “He kicks just like her,” said Christophe. “He can side-kick as he jumps. Have you seen, too, that he is not deceived by the jacket when a boy waves it? He uses it to find the boy. They think they are feeling him. He is feeling them always. He thinks, that one.” I had come to the same conclusion. Yes—the creature was a thinker along the lines necessary to his sport; and he was a humorist also, like so many natural murderers. One knows the type among beasts as well as among men. It possesses a curious truculent mirth—almost indecent but infallibly significant——’

Monsieur Voiron replenished our glasses with the great wine that went better at each descent.

‘They kept him for some time in the yards to practise upon. Naturally he became a little brutal; so Christophe turned him out to learn manners among his equals in the grazing lands, where the Camargue joins the Crau. How old was he then? About eight or nine months, I think. We met again a few months later—he and I. I was riding one of our little half-wild horses, along a road of the Crau, when I found myself almost unseated. It was he! He had hidden himself behind a wind-break till we passed, and had then charged my horse from behind. Yes, he had deceived even my little horse! But I recognised him. I gave him the whip across the nose, and I said: “Apis, for this thou goest to Arles! It was unworthy of thee, between us two.” But that creature had no shame. He went away laughing, like an Apache. If he had dismounted me, I do not think it is I who would have laughed—yearling as he was.’

‘Why did you want to send him to Arles?’ I asked.

‘For the bull-ring. When your charming tourists leave us, we institute our little amusements there. Not a real bull-fight, you understand, but young bulls with padded horns, and our boys from hereabouts and in the city go to play with them. Naturally, before we send them we try them in our yards at home. So we brought up Apis from his pastures. He knew at once that he was among the friends of his youth—he almost shook hands with them—and he submitted like an angel to padding his horns. He investigated the carts and tractors in the yards, to choose his lines of defence and attack. And then—he attacked with an élan, and he defended with a tenacity and forethought that delighted us. In truth, we were so pleased that I fear we trespassed upon his patience. We desired him to repeat himself, which no true artist will tolerate. But he gave us fair warning. He went out to the centre of the yard, where there was some dry earth; he kneeled down and—you have seen a calf whose horns fret him thrusting and rooting into a bank? He did just that, very deliberately, till he had rubbed the pads off his horns. Then he rose, dancing on those wonderful feet that twinkled, and he said: “Now, my friends, the buttons are off the foils. Who begins?” We understood. We finished at once. He was turned out again on the pastures till it should be time to amuse them at our little metropolis. But, some time before he went to Arles—yes, I think I have it correctly—Christophe, who had been out on the Crau, informed me that Apis had assassinated a young bull who had given signs of developing into a rival. That happens, of course, and our herdsmen should prevent it. But Apis had killed in his own style—at dusk, from the ambush of a wind-break—by an oblique charge from behind which knocked the other over. He had then disembowelled him. All very possible, but—the murder accomplished—Apis went to the bank of a wind-break, knelt, and carefully, as he had in our yard, cleaned his horns in the earth. Christophe, who had never seen such a thing, at once borrowed (do you know, it is most efficacious when taken that way?) some Holy Water from our little chapel in those pastures, sprinkled Apis (whom it did not affect), and rode in to tell me. It was obvious that a thinker of that bull’s type would also be meticulous in his toilette; so, when he was sent to Arles, I warned our consignees to exercise caution with him. Happily, the change of scene, the music, the general attention, and the meeting again with old friends—all our bad boys attended—agreeably distracted him. He became for the time a pure farceur again; but his wheelings, his rushes, his rat-huntings were more superb than ever. There was in them now, you understand, a breadth of technique that comes of reasoned art, and, above all, the passion that arrives after experience. Oh, he had learned, out there on the Crau! At the end of his little turn, he was, according to local rules, to be handled in all respects except for the sword, which was a stick, as a professional bull who must die. He was manoeuvred into, or he posed himself in, the proper attitude; made his rush; received the point on his shoulder and then—turned about and cantered toward the door by which he had entered the arena. He said to the world: “My friends, the representation is ended. I thank you for your applause. I go to repose myself.” But our Arlesians, who are—not so clever as some, demanded an encore, and Apis was headed back again. We others from his country, we knew what would happen. He went to the centre of the ring, kneeled, and, slowly, with full parade, plunged his horns alternately in the dirt till the pads came off. Christophe shouts: “Leave him alone, you straight-nosed imbeciles! Leave him before you must.” But they required emotion; for Rome has always debauched her loved Provincia with bread and circuses. It was given. Have you, Monsieur, ever seen a servant, with pan and broom, sweeping round the base-board of a room? In a half-minute Apis has them all swept out and over the barrier. Then he demands once more that the door shall be opened to him. It is opened and he retires as though—which, truly, is the case—loaded with laurels.’

Monsieur Voiron refilled the glasses, and allowed himself a cigarette, which he puffed for some time.

‘And afterwards?’ I said.

‘I am arranging it in my mind. It is difficult to do it justice. Afterwards—yes, afterwards—Apis returned to his pastures and his mistresses and I to my business. I am no longer a scandalous old “sportif” in shirt-sleeves howling encouragement to the yellow son of a cow. I revert to Voiron Frères—wines, chemical manures, et cetera. And next year, through some chicane which I have not the leisure to unravel, and also, thanks to our patriarchal system of paying our older men out of the increase of the herds, old Christophe possesses himself of Apis. Oh, yes, he proves it through descent from a certain cow that my father had given his father before the Republic. Beware, Monsieur, of the memory of the illiterate man! An ancestor of Christophe had been a soldier under our Soult against your Beresford, near Bayonne. He fell into the hands of Spanish guerrillas. Christophe and his wife used to tell me the details on certain Saints’ Days when I was a child. Now, as compared with our recent war, Soult’s campaign and retreat across the Bidassoa——’

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‘But did you allow Christophe just to annex the bull?’ I demanded.

‘You do not know Christophe. He had sold him to the Spaniards before he informed me. The Spaniards pay in coin—douros of very pure silver. Our peasants mistrust our paper. You know the saying: “A thousand francs paper; eight hundred metal, and the cow is yours.” Yes, Christophe sold Apis, who was then two and a half years old, and to Christophe’s knowledge thrice at least an assassin.’

‘How was that?’ I said.

‘Oh, his own kind only; and always, Christophe told me, by the same oblique rush from behind, the same sideways overthrow, and the same swift disembowelment, followed by this levitical cleaning of the horns. In human life he would have kept a manicurist—this Minotaur. And so, Apis disappears from our country. That does not trouble me. I know in due time I shall be advised. Why? Because, in this land, Monsieur, not a hoof moves between Berre and the Saintes Maries without the knowledge of specialists such as Christophe. The beasts are the substance and the drama of their lives to them. So when Christophe tells me, a little before Easter Sunday, that Apis makes his debut in the bull-ring of a small Catalan town on the road to Barcelona, it is only to pack my car and trundle there across the frontier with him. The place lacked importance and manufactures, but it had produced a matador of some reputation, who was condescending to show his art in his native town. They were even running one special train to the place. Now our French railway system is only execrable, but the Spanish——’

‘You went down by road, didn’t you?’ said I.

‘Naturally. It was not too good. Villamarti was the matador’s name. He proposed to kill two bulls for the honour of his birthplace. Apis, Christophe told me, would be his second. It was an interesting trip, and that little city by the sea was ravishing. Their bull-ring dates from the middle of the seventeenth century. It is full of feeling. The ceremonial too—when the horsemen enter and ask the Mayor in his box to throw down the keys of the bull-ring—that was exquisitely conceived. You know, if the keys are caught in the horseman’s hat, it is considered a good omen. They were perfectly caught. Our seats were in the front row beside the gates where the bulls enter, so we saw everything.

‘Villamarti’s first bull was not too badly killed. The second matador, whose name escapes me, killed his without distinction—a foil to Villamarti. And the third, Chisto, a laborious, middle-aged professional who had never risen beyond a certain dull competence, was equally of the background. Oh, they are as jealous as the girls of the Comédie Française, these matadors! Villamarti’s troupe stood ready for his second bull. The gates opened, and we saw Apis, beautifully balanced on his feet, peer coquettishly round the corner, as though he were at home. A picador—a mounted man with the long lance-goad—stood near the barrier on his right. He had not even troubled to turn his horse, for the capeadors—the men with the cloaks—were advancing to play Apis—to feel his psychology and intentions, according to the rules that are made for bulls who do not think . . . . I did not realise the murder before it was accomplished! The wheel, the rush, the oblique charge from behind, the fall of horse and man were simultaneous. Apis leaped the horse, with whom he had no quarrel, and alighted, all four feet together (it was enough), between the man’s shoulders, changed his beautiful feet on the carcass, and was away, pretending to fall nearly on his nose. Do you follow me? In that instant, by that stumble, he produced the impression that his adorable assassination was a mere bestial blunder. Then, Monsieur, I began to comprehend that it was an artist we had to deal with. He did not stand over the body to draw the rest of the troupe. He chose to reserve that trick. He let the attendants bear out the dead, and went on to amuse himself among the capeadors. Now to Apis, trained among our children in the yards, the cloak was simply a guide to the boy behind it. He pursued, you understand, the person, not the propaganda—the proprietor, not the journal. If a third of our electors of France were as wise, my friend! . . . But it was done leisurely, with humour and a touch of truculence. He romped after one man’s cloak as a clumsy dog might do, but I observed that he kept the man on his terrible left side. Christophe whispered to me: “Wait for his mother’s kick. When he has made the fellow confident it will arrive.” It arrived in the middle of a gambol. My God! He lashed out in the air as he frisked. The man dropped like a sack, lifted one hand a little towards his head, and—that was all. So you see, a body was again at his disposition; a second time the cloaks ran up to draw him off, but, a second time, Apis refused his grand scene. A second time he acted that his murder was accident and he convinced his audience! It was as though he had knocked over a bridge-gate in the marshes by mistake. Unbelievable? I saw it.’

The memory sent Monsieur Voiron again to the champagne, and I accompanied him.

‘But Apis was not the sole artist present. They say Villamarti comes of a family of actors. I saw him regard Apis with a new eye. He, too, began to understand. He took his cloak and moved out to play him before they should bring on another picador. He had his reputation. Perhaps Apis knew it. Perhaps Villamarti reminded him of some boy with whom he had practised at home. At any rate Apis permitted it—up to a certain point; but he did not allow Villamarti the stage. He cramped him throughout. He dived and plunged clumsily and slowly, but always with menace and always closing in. We could see that the man was conforming to the bull—not the bull to the man; for Apis was playing him towards the centre of the ring, and, in a little while—I watched his face—Villamarti knew it. But I could not fathom the creature’s motive. “Wait,” said old Christophe. “He wants that picador on the white horse yonder. When he reaches his proper distance he will get him. Villamarti is his cover. He used me once that way.” And so it was, my friend! With the clang of one of our own Seventy-fives, Apis dismissed Villamarti with his chest—breasted him over—and had arrived at his objective near the barrier. The same oblique charge; the head carried low for the sweep of the horns; the immense sideways fall of the horse, broken-legged and half-paralysed; the senseless man on the ground, and—behold Apis between them, backed against the barrier—his right covered by the horse; his left by the body of the man at his feet. The simplicity of it! Lacking the carts and tractors of his early parade-grounds he, being a genius, had extemporised with the materials at hand, and dug himself in. The troupe closed up again, their left wing broken by the kicking horse, their right immobilised by the man’s body which Apis bestrode with significance. Villamarti almost threw himself between the horns, but—it was more an appeal than an attack. Apis refused him. He held his base. A picador was sent at him—necessarily from the front, which alone was open. Apis charged—he who, till then, you realise, had not used the horn! The horse went over backwards, the man half beneath him. Apis halted, hooked him under the heart, and threw him to the barrier. We heard his head crack, but he was dead before he hit the wood. There was no demonstration from the audience. They, also, had begun to realise this Foch among bulls! The arena occupied itself again with the dead. Two of the troupe irresolutely tried to play him—God knows in what hope!—but he moved out to the centre of the ring. “Look!” said Christophe. “Now he goes to clean himself. That always frightened me.” He knelt down; he began to clean his horns. The earth was hard. He worried at it in an ecstasy of absorption. As he laid his head along and rattled his ears, it was as though he were interrogating the Devils themselves upon their secrets, and always saying impatiently: “Yes, I know that—and that—and that! Tell me more—more!’ In the silence that covered us, a woman cried: “He digs a grave! Oh, Saints, he digs a grave!” Some others echoed this—not loudly—as a wave echoes in a grotto of the sea.

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And when his horns were cleaned, he rose up and studied poor Villamarti’s troupe, eyes in eyes, one by one, with the gravity of an equal in intellect and the remote and merciless resolution of a master in his art. This was more terrifying than his toilette.’

‘And they—Villamarti’s men?’ I asked.

‘Like the audience, were dominated. They had ceased to posture, or stamp, or address insults to him. They conformed to him. The two other matadors stared. Only Chisto, the oldest, broke silence with some call or other, and Apis turned his head towards him. Otherwise he was isolated, immobile—sombre—meditating on those at his mercy. Ah!

For some reason the trumpet sounded for the banderillas—those gay hooked darts that are planted in the shoulders of bulls who do not think, after their neck-muscles are tired by lifting horses. When such bulls feel the pain, they check for an instant, and, in that instant, the men step gracefully aside. Villamarti’s banderillero answered the trumpet mechanically—like one condemned. He stood out, poised the darts and stammered the usual patter of invitation . . . . And after? I do not assert that Apis shrugged his shoulders, but he reduced the episode to its lowest elements, as could only a bull of Gaul. With his truculence was mingled always—owing to the shortness of his tail—a certain Rabelaisian abandon, especially when viewed from the rear. Christophe had often commented upon it. Now, Apis brought that quality into play. He circulated round that boy, forcing him to break up his beautiful poses. He studied him from various angles, like an incompetent photographer. He presented to him every portion of his anatomy except his shoulders. At intervals he feigned to run in upon him. My God, he was cruel! But his motive was obvious. He was playing for a laugh from the spectators which should synchronise with the fracture of the human morale. It was achieved. The boy turned and ran towards the barrier. Apis was on him before the laugh ceased; passed him; headed him—what do I say?—herded him off to the left, his horns beside and a little in front of his chest: he did not intend him to escape into a refuge. Some of the troupe would have closed in, but Villamarti cried: “If he wants him he will take him. Stand!” They stood. Whether the boy slipped or Apis nosed him over I could not see. But he dropped, sobbing. Apis halted like a car with four brakes, struck a pose, smelt him very completely and turned away. It was dismissal more ignominious than degradation at the head of one’s battalion. The representation was finished. Remained only for Apis to clear his stage of the subordinate characters.

‘Ah! His gesture then! He gave a dramatic start—this Cyrano of the Camargue—as though he was aware of them for the first time. He moved. All their beautiful breeches twinkled for an instant along the top of the barrier. He held the stage alone! But Christophe and I, we trembled! For, observe, he had now involved himself in a stupendous drama of which he only could supply the third act. And, except for an audience on the razor-edge of emotion, he had exhausted his material. Molière himself—we have forgotten, my friend, to drink to the health of that great soul—might have been at a loss. And Tragedy is but a step behind Failure. We could see the four or five Civil Guards, who are sent always to keep order, fingering the breeches of their rifles. They were but waiting a word from the Mayor to fire on him, as they do sometimes at a bull who leaps the barrier among the spectators. They would, of course, have killed or wounded several people—but that would not have saved Apis.’

Monsieur Voiron drowned the thought at once, and wiped his beard.

‘At that moment Fate—the Genius of France, if you will—sent to assist in the incomparable finale, none other than Chisto, the eldest, and I should have said (but never again will I judge!) the least inspired of all; mediocrity itself, but at heart—and it is the heart that conquers always, my friend—at heart an artist. He descended stiffly into the arena, alone and assured. Apis regarded him, his eyes in his eyes. The man took stance, with his cloak, and called to the bull as to an equal: “Now, Señor, we will show these honourable caballeros something together.” He advanced thus against this thinker who at a plunge—a kick—a thrust—could, we all knew, have extinguished him. My dear friend, I wish I could convey to you something of the unaffected bonhomie, the humour, the delicacy, the consideration bordering on respect even, with which Apis, the supreme artist, responded to this invitation. It was the Master, wearied after a strenuous hour in the atelier, unbuttoned and at ease with some not inexpert but limited disciple. The telepathy was instantaneous between them. And for good reason! Christophe said to me: “All’s well. That Chisto began among the bulls. I was sure of it when I heard him call just now. He has been a herdsman. He’ll pull it off.” There was a little feeling and adjustment, at first, for mutual distances and allowances.

Oh, yes! And here occurred a gross impertinence of Villamarti. He had, after an interval, followed Chisto—to retrieve his reputation. My Faith! I can conceive the elder Dumas slamming his door on an intruder precisely as Apis did. He raced Villamarti into the nearest refuge at once. He stamped his feet outside it, and he snorted: “Go! I am engaged with an artist.” Villamarti went—his reputation left behind for ever.

‘Apis returned to Chisto saying: “Forgive the interruption. I am not always master of my time, but you were about to observe, my dear confrere . . . ?” Then the play began. Out of compliment to Chisto, Apis chose as his objective (every bull varies in this respect) the inner edge of the cloak—that nearest to the man’s body. This allows but a few millimetres clearance in charging. But Apis trusted himself as Chisto trusted him, and, this time, he conformed to the man, with inimitable judgment and temper. He allowed himself to be played into the shadow or the sun, as the delighted audience demanded. He raged enormously; he feigned defeat; he despaired in statuesque abandon, and thence flashed into fresh paroxysms of wrath—but always with the detachment of the true artist who knows he is but the vessel of an emotion whence others, not he, must drink. And never once did he forget that honest Chisto’s cloak was to him the gauge by which to spare even a hair on the skin. He inspired Chisto too. My God! His youth returned to that meritorious beef-sticker—the desire, the grace, and the beauty of his early dreams. One could almost see that girl of the past for whom he was rising, rising to these present heights of skill and daring. It was his hour too—a miraculous hour of dawn returned to gild the sunset. All he knew was at Apis’ disposition. Apis acknowledged it with all that he had learned at home, at Arles and in his lonely murders on our grazing-grounds. He flowed round Chisto like a river of death—round his knees, leaping at his shoulders, kicking just clear of one side or the other of his head; behind his back, hissing as he shaved by; and once or twice—inimitable!—he reared wholly up before him while Chisto slipped back from beneath the avalanche of that instructed body. Those two, my dear friend, held five thousand people dumb with no sound but of their breathings—regular as pumps. It was unbearable. Beast and man realised together that we needed a change of note—a détente. They relaxed to pure buffoonery. Chisto fell back and talked to him outrageously. Apis pretended he had never heard such language. The audience howled with delight. Chisto slapped him; he took liberties with his short tail, to the end of which he clung while Apis pirouetted; he played about him in all postures; he had become the herdsman again—gross, careless, brutal, but comprehending. Yet Apis was always the more consummate clown. All that time (Christophe and I saw it) Apis drew off towards the gates of the toril where so many bulls enter but—have you ever heard of one that returned? We knew that Apis knew that as he had saved Chisto, so Chisto would save him. Life is sweet to us all; to the artist who lives many lives in one, sweetest. Chisto did not fail him. At the last, when none could laugh any longer, the man threw his cape across the bull’s back, his arm round his neck. He flung up a hand at the gate, as Villamarti, young and commanding but not a herdsman, might have raised it, and he cried: “Gentlemen, open to me and my honourable little donkey.” They opened—I have misjudged Spaniards in my time!—those gates opened to the man and the bull together, and closed behind them. And then? From the Mayor to the Guardia Civil they went mad for five minutes, till the trumpets blew and the fifth bull rushed out—an unthinking black Andalusian. I suppose some one killed him. My friend, my very dear friend, to whom I have opened my heart, I confess that I did not watch. Christophe and I, we were weeping together like children of the same Mother. Shall we drink to Her?’

The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case

(a short tale)

In the daytime, when she moved about me,
In the night, when she was sleeping at my side,—
I was wearied, I was wearied of her presence,
Day by day and night by night I grew to hate her—
Would God that she or I had died!
(Confessions)

THERE was a man called Bronckhorst—a three-cornered, middle-aged man in the Army—gray as a badger, and, some people said, with a touch of country-blood in him. That, however, cannot be proved. Mrs. Bronckhorst was not exactly young, though fifteen years younger than her husband. She was a large, pale, quiet woman, with heavy eyelids over weak eyes, and hair that turned red or yellow as the lights fell on it.

Bronckhorst was not nice in any way. He had no respect for the pretty public and private lies that make life a little less nasty than it is. His manner towards his wife was coarse. There are many things—including actual assault with the clenched fist—that a wife will endure; but seldom a wife can bear—as Mrs. Bronckhorst bore—with a long course of brutal, hard chaff, making light of her weaknesses, her headaches, her small fits of gaiety, her dresses, her queer little attempts to make herself attractive to her husband when she knows that she is not what she has been, and—worst of all—the love that she spends on her children. That particular sort of heavy-handed jest was specially dear to Bronckhorst. I suppose that he had first slipped into it, meaning no harm, in the honeymoon, when folk find their ordinary stock of endearments run short, and so go to the other extreme to express their feelings. A similar impulse makes a man say, ‘Hutt, you old beast!’ when a favourite horse nuzzles his coat-front. Unluckily, when the reaction of marriage sets in, the form of speech remains, and, the tenderness having died out, hurts the wife more than she cares to say. But Mrs. Bronckhorst was devoted to her ‘Teddy’ as she called him. Perhaps that was why he objected to her. Perhaps—this is only a theory to account for his infamous behaviour later on—he gave way to the queer, savage feeling that sometimes takes by the throat a husband twenty years married, when he sees, across the table, the same, same face of his wedded wife, and knows that, as he has sat facing it, so must he continue to sit until the day of its death or his own. Most men and all women know the spasm. It only lasts for three breaths as a rule, must be a ‘throw-back’ to times when men and women were rather worse than they are now, and is too unpleasant to be discussed.

Dinner at the Bronckhorsts’ was an infliction few men cared to undergo. Bronckhorst took a pleasure in saying things that made his wife wince. When their little boy came in at dessert, Bronckhorst used to give him half a glass of wine, and, naturally enough, the poor little mite got first, riotous, next miserable, and was removed screaming. Bronckhorst asked if that was the way Teddy usually behaved, and whether Mrs. Bronckhorst could not spare some of her time ‘to teach the little beggar decency.’ Mrs. Bronckhorst, who loved the boy more than her own life, tried not to cry—her spirit seemed to have been broken by her marriage. Lastly, Bronckhorst used to say, ‘There! That’ll do, that’ll do. For God’s sake try to behave like a rational woman. Go into the drawing-room.’ Mrs. Bronckhorst would go, trying to carry it all off with a smile; and the guest of the evening would feel angry and uncomfortable.

After three years of this cheerful life—for Mrs. Bronckhorst had no women-friends to talk to—the Station was startled by the news that Bronckhorst had instituted proceedings on the criminal count, against a man called Biel, who certainly had been rather attentive to Mrs. Bronckhorst whenever she had appeared in public. The utter want of reserve with which Bronckhorst treated his own dishonour helped us to know that the evidence against Biel would be entirely circumstantial and native. There were no letters; but Bronckhorst said openly that he would rack Heaven and Earth until he saw Biel superintending the manufacture of carpets in the Central Jail. Mrs. Bronckhorst kept entirely to her house, and let charitable folks say what they pleased. Opinions were divided. Some two-thirds of the Station jumped at once to the conclusion that Biel was guilty; but a dozen men who knew and liked him held by him. Biel was furious and surprised. He denied the whole thing, and vowed that he would thrash Bronckhorst within an inch of his life. No jury, we knew, would convict a man on the criminal count on native evidence in a land where you can buy a murder-charge, including the corpse, all complete for fifty-four rupees; but Biel did not care to scrape through by the benefit of a doubt. He wanted the whole thing cleared; but, as he said one night—‘He can prove anything with servants’ evidence, and I’ve only my bare word.’ This was almost a month before the case came on; and beyond agreeing with Biel, we could do little. All that we could be sure of was that the native evidence would be bad enough to blast Biel’s character for the rest of his service; for when a native begins perjury he perjures himself thoroughly. He does not boggle over details.

Some genius at the end of the table whereat the affair was being talked over, said, ‘Look here! I don’t believe lawyers are any good. Get a man to wire to Strickland, and beg him to come down and pull us through.’

Strickland was about a hundred and eighty miles up the line. He had not long been married to Miss Youghal, but he scented in the telegram a chance of return to the old detective work that his soul lusted after, and next night he came in and heard our story. He finished his pipe and said oracularly, ‘We must get at the evidence. Oorya bearer, Mussulman khit and sweeper ayah, I suppose, are the pillars of the charge. I am on in this piece; but I’m afraid I’m getting rusty in my talk.’

He rose and went into Biel’s bedroom, where his trunk had been put, and shut the door. An hour later, we heard him say, ‘I hadn’t the heart to part with my old make-ups when I married. Will this do?’ There was a lothely faquir salaaming in the doorway.

‘Now lend me fifty rupees,’ said Strickland, ‘and give me your Words of Honour that you won’t tell my wife.’

He got all that he asked for, and left the house while the table drank his health. What he did only he himself knows. A faquir hung about Bronckhorst’s compound for twelve days. Then a sweeper appeared, and when Biel heard of him, he said that Strickland was an angel full-fledged. Whether the sweeper made love to Janki, Mrs. Bronckhorst’s ayah, is a question which concerns Strickland exclusively.

He came back at the end of three weeks, and said quietly, ‘You spoke the truth, Biel. The whole business is put up from beginning to end. ’Jove! It almost astonishes me! That Bronckhorst-beast isn’t fit to live.’

There was uproar and shouting, and Biel said, ‘How are you going to prove it? You can’t say that you’ve been trespassing on Bronckhorst’s compound in disguise!’

‘No,’ said Strickland. ‘Tell your lawyer-fool, whoever he is, to get up something strong about “inherent improbabilities” and “discrepancies of evidence.” He won’t have to speak, but it will make him happy. I’m going to run this business.’

Biel held his tongue, and the other men waited to see what would happen. They trusted Strickland as men trust quiet men. When the case came off the Court was crowded. Strickland hung about in the verandah of the Court, till he met the Mahommedan khitmatgar. Then he murmured a faquir’s blessing in his ear, and asked him how his second wife did. The man spun round, and, as he looked into the eyes of ‘Estreeken Sahib,’ his jaw dropped. You must remember that before Strickland was married, he was, as I have told you already, a power among natives. Strickland whispered a rather coarse vernacular proverb to the effect that he was abreast of all that was going on, and went into the Court armed with a gut trainer’s-whip.

The Mahommedan was the first witness and, Strickland beamed upon him from the back of the Court. The man moistened his lips with his tongue and, in his abject fear of ‘Estreeken Sahib,’ the faquir, went back on every detail of his evidence—said he was a poor man, and God was his witness that he had forgotten everything that Bronckhorst Sahib had told him to say. Between his terror of Strickland, the Judge, and Bronckhorst he collapsed weeping.

Then began the panic among the witnesses. Janki, the ayah, leering chastely behind her veil, turned gray, and the bearer left the Court. He said that his Mamma was dying, and that it was not wholesome for any man to lie unthriftily in the presence of ‘Estreeken Sahib.’

Biel said politely to Bronckhorst, ‘Your witnesses don’t seem to work. Haven’t you any forged letters to produce?’ But Bronckhorst was swaying to and fro in his chair, and there was a dead pause after Biel had been called to order.

Bronckhorst’s Counsel saw the look on his client’s face, and without more ado, pitched his papers on the little green baize table, and mumbled something about having been misinformed. The whole court applauded wildly, like soldiers at a theatre, and the Judge began to say what he thought.

. . . . .

Biel came out of the Court, and Strickland dropped a gut trainer’s-whip in the verandah. Ten minutes later, Biel was cutting Bronckhorst into ribbons behind the old Court cells, quietly and without scandal. What was left of Bronckhorst was sent home in a carriage; and his wife wept over it and nursed it into a man again.

Later on, after Biel had managed to hush up the counter-charge against Bronckhorst of fabricating false evidence, Mrs. Bronckhorst, with her faint, watery smile, said that there had been a mistake, but it wasn’t her Teddy’s fault altogether. She would wait till her Teddy came back to her. Perhaps he had grown tired of her, or she had tried his patience, and perhaps we wouldn’t cut her any more, and perhaps the mothers would let their children play with ‘little Teddy’ again. He was so lonely. Then the Station invited Mrs. Bronckhorst everywhere, until Bronckhorst was fit to appear in public, when he went Home and took his wife with him. According to latest advices, her Teddy did come back to her, and they are moderately happy. Though, of course, he can never forgive her the thrashing that she was the indirect means of getting for him.

. . . . .

What Biel wants to know is, ‘Why didn’t I press home the charge against the Bronckhorst-brute, and have him run in?’

What Mrs. Strickland wants to know is, ‘How did my husband bring such a lovely, lovely Waler from your Station? I know all his money-affairs; and I’m certain he didn’t buy it.’

What I want to know is, ‘How do women like Mrs. Bronckhorst come to marry men like Bronckhorst?’

And my conundrum is the most unanswerable of the three.