Tales – Page 6 – The Kipling Society

On the Gate

(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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IF the Order Above be but the reflection of the Order Below (as that Ancient affirms, who had some knowledge of the Order), it is not outside the Order of Things that there should have been confusion also in the Department of Death. The world’s steadily falling death-rate, the rising proportion of scientifically prolonged fatal illnesses, which allowed months of warning to all concerned, had weakened initiative throughout the Necrological Departments. When the War came, these were as unprepared as civilised mankind; and, like mankind, they improvised and recriminated in the face of Heaven.As Death himself observed to St. Peter, who had just come off The Gate for a rest: ‘One does the best one can with the means at one’s disposal, but——’

‘I know,’ said the good Saint sympathetically. ‘Even with what help I can muster, I’m on The Gate twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four.’

‘Do you find your volunteer staff any real use?’ Death went on. ‘Isn’t it easier to do the work oneself than——’

‘One must guard against that point of view,’ St. Peter returned, ‘but I know what you mean. Office officialises the best of us . . . What is it now?’ He turned to a prim-lipped Seraph who had followed him with an expulsion-form for signature. St. Peter glanced it over. ‘Private R. M. Buckland,’ he read, ‘on the charge of saying that there is no God. ’That all?’

‘He says he is prepared to prove it, sir, and—according to the Rules——’

‘If you will make yourself acquainted with the Rules, you’ll find they lay down that “the fool says in his heart, there is no God.” That decides it; probably shell-shock. Have you tested his reflexes?’

‘No, sir. He kept on saying that there——’

‘Pass him in at once! Tell off some one to argue with him and give him the best of the argument till St. Luke’s free. Anything else?’

‘A hospital-nurse’s record, sir. She has been nursing for two years.’

‘A long while.’ St. Peter spoke severely. ‘She may very well have grown careless.’

‘It’s her civilian record, sir. I judged best to refer it to you.’ The Seraph handed him a vivid scarlet docket.

‘The next time,’ said St. Peter, folding it down and writing on one corner, ‘that you get one of these—er—tinted forms, mark it Q.M.A. and pass bearer at once. Don’t worry over trifles.’ The Seraph flashed off and returned to the clamorous Gate.

‘Which Department is Q.M.A.?’ said Death. St. Peter chuckled .

‘It’s not a department. It’s a Ruling. “Quia multum amavit.” A most useful Ruling. I’ve stretched it to . . . Now, I wonder what that child actually did die of.’

‘I’ll ask,’ said Death, and moved to a public telephone near by. ‘Give me War Check and Audit: English side: non-combatant,’ he began. ‘Latest returns . . . Surely you’ve got them posted up to date by now! . . . Yes ! Hospital Nurse in France . . . No! Not “nature and aliases.” I said—what—was—nature—of—illness? . . . Thanks.’ He turned to St. Peter. ‘Quite normal,’ he said. ‘Heart-failure after neglected pleurisy following overwork.’

‘Good!’ St. Peter rubbed his hands. ‘That brings her under the higher allowanceC,.L.H. scale—“Greater love bath no man—” But my people ought to have known that from the first.’

‘Who is that clerk of yours?’ asked Death. ‘He seems rather a stickler for the proprieties.’

‘The usual type nowadays,’ St. Peter returned. ‘A young Power in charge of some half-baked Universe. Never having dealt with life yet, he’s somewhat nebulous.’

Death sighed. ‘It’s the same with my old Departmental Heads. Nothing on earth will make my fossils on the Normal Civil Side realise that we are dying in a new age. Come and look at them. They might interest you.’

‘Thanks, I will, but— Excuse me a minute! Here’s my zealous young assistant on the wing once more.’

The Seraph had returned to report the arrival of overwhelmingly heavy convoys at The Gate, and to ask what the Saint advised.

‘I’m just off on an inter-departmental inspection which will take me some time,’ said St. Peter. ‘You must learn to act on your own initiative. So I shall leave you to yourself for the next hour or two, merely suggesting (I don’t wish in any way to sway your judgment) that you invite St. Paul, St. Ignatius (Loyola, I mean) and—er—St. Christopher to assist as Supervising Assessors on the Board of Admission. Ignatius is one of the subtlest intellects we have, and an officer and a gentleman to boot. I assure you’—the Saint turned towards Death—‘he revels in dialectics. If he’s allowed to prove his case, he’s quite capable of letting off the offender. St. Christopher, of course, will pass anything that looks wet and muddy.’

‘They are nearly all that now, sir,’ said the Seraph.

‘So much the better; and—as I was going to say—St. Paul is an embarrass—a distinctly strong colleague. Still—we all have our weaknesses. Perhaps a well-timed reference to his seamanship in the Mediterranean—by the way, look up the name of his ship, will you? Alexandria register, I think—might be useful in some of those sudden maritime cases that crop up. I needn’t tell you to be firm, of course. That’s your besetting—er—I mean—reprimand ’em severely and publicly, but—’ the Saint’s voice broke—‘oh, my child, you don’t know what it is to need forgiveness. Be gentle with ’em—be very gentle with ’em!’

Swiftly as a falling shaft of light the Seraph kissed the sandalled feet and was away.

‘Aha!’ said St. Peter. ‘He can’t go far wrong with that Board of Admission as I’ve—er—arranged it.’

They walked towards the great central office of Normal Civil Death, which, buried to the knees in a flood of temporary structures, resembled a closed cribbage-board among spilt dominoes.

They entered an area of avenues and cross-avenues, flanked by long, low buildings, each packed with seraphs working wing to folded wing.

‘Our temporary buildings,’ Death explained. “Always being added to. This is the War-side. You’ll find nothing changed on the Normal Civil Side. They are more human than mankind.’

‘It doesn’t lie in my mouth to blame them,’ said St. Peter.

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‘No, I’ve yet to meet the soul you wouldn’t find excuse for,’ said Death tenderly; ‘but then I don’t—er—arrange my Boards of Admission.’

‘If one doesn’t help one’s Staff, one’s Staff will never help itself,’ St. Peter laughed, as the shadow of the main porch of the Normal Civil Death Offices darkened above them.

‘This facade rather recalls the Vatican, doesn’t it?’ said the Saint.

‘They’re quite as conservative. ’Notice how they still keep the old Holbein uniforms? ’Morning, Sergeant Fell. How goes it?’ said Death as he swung the dusty doors and nodded at a Commissionaire, clad in the grim livery of Death, even as Hans Holbein has designed it.

‘Sadly. Very sadly indeed, sir,’ the Commissionaire replied. ‘So many pore ladies and gentlemen, sir, ’oo might well ’ave lived another few years, goin’ off, as you might say, in every direction with no time for the proper obsequities.’

‘Too bad,’ said Death sympathetically. ‘Well, we’re none of us as young as we were, Sergeant.’

They climbed a carved staircase, behung with the whole millinery of undertaking at large. Death halted on a dark Aberdeen granite landing and beckoned a messenger.

‘We’re rather busy to-day, sir,’ the messenger whispered, ‘but I think His Majesty will see you.’

‘Who is the Head of this Department if it isn’t you?’ St. Peter whispered in turn.

‘You may well ask,’ his companion replied. ‘I’m only—’ he checked himself and went on. ‘The fact is, our Normal Civil Death side is controlled by a Being who considers himself all that I am and more. He’s Death as men have made him—in their own image.’ He pointed to a brazen plate, by the side of a black-curtained door, which read: ‘Normal Civil Death, K.G., K.T., K.P., P.C., etc.’ ‘He’s as human as mankind.’

‘I guessed as much from those letters. What do they mean?’

‘Titles conferred on him from time to time. King of Ghosts; King of Terrors; King of Phantoms; Pallid Conqueror, and so forth. There’s no denying he’s earned every one of them. A first-class mind, but just a leetle bit of a sn——’

‘His Majesty is at liberty,’ said the messenger.

Civil Death did not belie his name. No monarch on earth could have welcomed them more graciously; or, in St. Peter’s case, with more of that particularity of remembrance which is the gift of good kings. But when Death asked him how his office was working, he became at once the Departmental Head with a grievance.

‘Thanks to this abominable war,’ he began testily, ‘my N.C.D. has to spend all its time fighting for mere existence. Your new War-side seems to think that nothing matters except the war. I’ve been asked to give up two-thirds of my Archives Basement (E. 7—E. 64) to the Polish Civilian Casualty Check and Audit. Preposterous! Where am I to move my Archives? And they’ve just been cross-indexed, too!’

‘As I understood it,’ said Death, ’our War-side merely applied for desk-room in your basement. They were prepared to leave your Archives in situ.’

‘Impossible! We may need to refer to them at any moment. There’s a case now which is interesting Us all—a Mrs. Ollerby. Worcestershire by extraction—dying of an internal hereditary complaint. At any moment, We may wish to refer to her dossier, and how can We if Our basement is given up to people over whom We exercise no departmental control? This war has been made excuse for slackness in every direction.’

‘Indeed!’ said Death. ‘You surprise me. I thought nothing made any difference to the N.C.D.’

‘A few years ago I should have concurred,’ Civil Death replied. ‘But since this—this recent outbreak of unregulated mortality there has been a distinct lack of respect toward certain aspects of Our administration. The attitude is bound to reflect itself in the office. The official is, in a large measure, what the public makes him. Of course, it is only temporary reaction, but the merest outsider would notice what I mean. Perhaps you would like to see for yourself?’ Civil Death bowed towards St. Peter, who feared that he might be taking up his time.

‘Not in the least. If I am not the servant of the public, what am I?’ Civil Death said, and preceded them to the landing. ‘Now, this’—he ushered them into an immense but badly lighted office—‘is our International Mortuary Department—the I.M.D. as we call it. It works with the Check and Audit. I should be sorry to say offhand how many billion sterling it represents, invested in the funeral ceremonies of all the races of mankind.’ He stopped behind a very bald-headed clerk at a desk. ‘And yet We take cognizance of the minutest detail, do not We?’ he went on. ‘What have We here, for example?’

‘Funeral expenses of the late Mr. John Shenks Tanner.’ The clerk stepped aside from the redruled book. ‘Cut down by the executors on account of the War from £173:19:1 to £47:18:4. A sad falling off, if I may say so, Your Majesty.’

‘And what was the attitude of the survivors?’ Civil Death asked.

‘Very casual. It was a motor-hearse funeral.’

‘A pernicious example, spreading, I fear, even in the lowest classes,’ his superior muttered. ‘Haste, lack of respect for the Dread Summons, carelessness in the Subsequent Disposition of the Corpse and——’

‘But as regards people’s real feelings?’ St. Peter demanded of the clerk.

‘That isn’t within the terms of our reference, Sir,’ was the answer. ‘But we do know that, as often as not, they don’t even buy black-edged announcement-cards nowadays.’

‘Good Heavens!’ said Civil Death swellingly. ‘No cards! I must look into this myself. Forgive me, St. Peter, but we Servants of Humanity, as you know, are not our own masters. No cards, indeed!’ He waved them off with an official hand, and immersed himself in the ledger.

‘Oh, come along,’ Death whispered to St. Peter. ‘This is a blessed relief!’

They two walked on till they reached the far end of the vast dim office. The clerks at the desks here scarcely pretended to work. A messenger entered and slapped down a small autophonic reel.

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‘Here you are!’ he cried. ‘Mister Wilbraham Lattimer’s last dying speech and record. He made a shockin’ end of it.’

‘Good for Lattimer!’ a young voice called from a desk. ‘Chuck it over!’

‘Yes,’ the messenger went on.‘Lattimer said to his brother: “Bert, I haven’t time to worry about a little thing like dying these days, and what’s more important, you haven’t either. You go back to your Somme doin’s, and I’ll put it through with Aunt Maria. It’ll amuse her and it won’t hinder you.” That’s nice stuff for your boss!’ The messenger whistled and departed. A clerk groaned as he snatched up the reel.

‘How the deuce am I to knock this into official shape?’ he began. ‘Pass us the edifying Gantry Tubnell. I’ll have to crib from him again, I suppose.’

‘Be careful!’ a companion whispered, and shuffled a typewritten form along the desk. ‘I’ve used Tubby twice this morning already.’

The late Mr. Gantry Tubnell must have demised on approved departmental lines, for his record was much thumbed. Death and St. Peter watched the editing with interest.

‘I can’t bring in Aunt Maria any way,’ the clerk broke out at last. ‘Listen here, every one! She has heart-disease. She dies just as she’s lifted the dropsical Lattimer to change his sheets. She says: “Sorry, Willy! I’d make a dam’ pore ’ospital nurse!”; Then she sits down and croaks. Now I call that good! I’ve a great mind to take it round to the War-side as an indirect casualty and get a breath of fresh air.’

‘Then you’ll be hauled over the coals,’ a neighbour suggested.

‘I’m used to that, too,’ the clerk sniggered.

‘Are you?’ said Death, stepping forward suddenly from behind a high map-stand. ‘Who are you?’ The clerk cowered in his skeleton jacket.

‘I’m not on the Regular Establishment, Sir,’ he stammered. ‘I’m a—Volunteer. I—I wanted to see how people behaved when they were in trouble.’

‘Did you? Well, take the late Mr. Wilbraham Lattimer’s and Miss Maria Lattimer’s papers to the War-side General Reference Office. When they have been passed upon, tell the Attendance Clerk that you are to serve as probationer in—let’s see—in the Domestic Induced Casualty Side—7 G.S.’

The clerk collected himself a little and spoke through dry lips.

‘But—but I’m—I slipped in from the Lower Establishment, Sir,’ he breathed.

There was no need to explain. He shook from head to foot as with the palsy; and under all Heaven none tremble save those who come from that class which ‘also believe and tremble.’

‘Do you tell Me this officially, or as one created being to another?’ Death asked after a pause.

‘Oh, non-officially, Sir. Strictly non-officially, so long as you know all about it.’

His awe-stricken fellow-workers could not restrain a smile at Death having to be told about anything. Even Death bit his lips.

‘I don’t think you will find the War-side will raise any objection,’ said he. ‘By the way, they don’t wear that uniform over there.’

Almost before Death ceased speaking, it was ripped off and flung on the floor, and that which had been a sober clerk of Normal Civil Death stood up an unmistakable, curly-haired, bat-winged, faun-eared Imp of the Pit. But where his wings joined his shoulders there was a patch of delicate dove-coloured feathering that gave promise to spread all up the pinion. St. Peter saw it and smiled, for it was a known sign of grace.

‘Thank Goodness!’ the ex-clerk gasped as he snatched up the Lattimer records and sheered sideways through the skylight.

‘Amen!’ said Death and St. Peter together, and walked through the door.

‘Weren’t you hinting something to me a little while ago about my lax methods?’ St. Peter demanded, innocently.

‘Well, if one doesn’t help one’s Staff, one’s Staff will never help itself,’ Death retorted. ‘Now, I shall have to pitch in a stiff demi-official asking how that young fiend came to be taken on in the N.C.D. without examination. And I must do it before the N.C.D. complain that I’ve been interfering with their departmental transfers. Aren’t they human? If you want to go back to The Gate I think our shortest way will be through here and across the War-Sheds.’

They carne out of a side-door into Heaven’s full light. A phalanx of Shining Ones swung across a great square singing

‘To Him Who made the Heavens abide, yet cease not from their motion,
To Him Who drives the cleansing tide twice a day round Ocean—
Let His Name be magnified in all poor folks’ devotion!’

Death halted their leader, and asked a question.

‘We’re Volunteer Aid Serving Powers,’ the Seraph explained, ‘reporting for duty in the Domestic Induced Casualty Department—told off to help relatives, where we can.’

The shift trooped on—such an array of Powers, Honours, Glories, Toils, Patiences, Services, Faiths and Loves as no man may conceive even by favour of dreams. Death and St. Peter followed them into a D.I.C.D. Shed on the English side where, for the moment, work had slackened. Suddenly a name flashed on the telephone-indicator. ‘Mrs. Arthur Bedott, 317, Portsmouth Avenue, Brondesbury. Husband badly wounded. One child.’ Her special weakness was appended.

A Seraph on the raised dais that overlooked the Volunteer Aids waiting at the entrance, nodded and crooked a finger. One of the new shift—a temporary Acting Glory—hurled himself from his place and vanished earthward.

‘You may take it,’ Death whispered to St. Peter, ‘there will be a sustaining epic built up round Private Bedott’s wound for his wife and Baby Bedott to cling to. And here—’they heard wings that flapped wearily—‘here, I suspect, comes one of our failures.’

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A Seraph entered and dropped, panting, on a form. His plumage was ragged, his sword splintered to the hilt; and his face still worked with the passions of the world he had left, as his soiled vesture reeked of alcohol.

‘Defeat,’ he reported hoarsely, when he had given in a woman’s name. ‘Utter defeat! Look!’ He held up the stump of his sword. ‘I broke this on her gin-bottle.’

‘So? We try again,’ said the impassive Chief Seraph. Again he beckoned, and there stepped forward that very Imp whom Death had transferred from the N.C.D.

‘Go you!’ said the Seraph. ‘We must deal with a fool according to her folly. Have you pride enough?’

There was no need to ask. The messenger’s face glowed and his nostrils quivered with it. Scarcely pausing to salute, he poised and dived, and the papers on the desks spun beneath the draught of his furious vans.

St. Peter nodded high approval. ‘I see!’ he said. ‘He’ll work on her pride to steady her. By all means—“if by all means,” as my good Paul used to say. Only it ought to read “by any manner of possible means.” Excellent!’

‘It’s difficult, though,’ a soft-eyed Patience whispered. ‘I fail again and again. I’m only fit for an old-maid’s tea-party.’

Once more the record flashed—a multiple-urgent appeal on behalf of a few thousand men, worn-out body and soul. The Patience was detailed.

‘Oh, me!’ she sighed, with a comic little shrug of despair, and took the void softly as a summer breeze at dawning.

‘But how does this come under the head of Domestic Casualties? Those men were in the trenches. I heard the mud squelch,’ said St. Peter.

‘Something wrong with the installation—as usual. Waves are always jamming here,’ the Seraph replied.

‘So it seems,’ said St. Peter as a wireless cut in with the muffled note of some one singing (sorely out of tune), to an accompaniment of desultory poppings:

‘Unless you can love as the Angels love With the breadth of Heaven be——’

‘Twixt!’ It broke off. The record showed a name. The waiting Seraphs stiffened to attention with a click of tense quills.

‘As you were!’ said the Chief Seraph. ‘He’s met her.’

‘Who is she?’ said St. Peter.

‘His mother. You never get over your weakness for romance,’ Death answered, and a covert smile spread through the Office.

‘Thank Heaven, I don’t. But I really ought to be going——’

‘Wait one minute. Here’s trouble coming through, I think,’ Death interposed.

A recorder had sparked furiously in a broken run of S.O.S.’s that allowed no time for inquiry.

‘Name! Name!’ an impatient young Faith panted at last. ‘It can’t be blotted out.’ No name came up. Only the reiterated appeal.

‘False alarm!’ said a hard-featured Toil, well used to mankind. ‘Some fool has found out that he owns a soul. ‘Wants work. I’d cure him! . . .’

‘Hush!’ said a Love in Armour, stamping his mailed foot. The office listened.

‘’Bad case?’ Death demanded at last.

‘Rank bad, Sir. They are holding back the name,’ said the Chief Seraph. The S.O.S. signals grew more desperate, and then ceased with an emphatic thump. The Love in Armour winced.

‘Firing-party,’ he whispered to St. Peter. ‘’Can’t mistake that noise!’

‘What is it?’ St. Peter cried nervously.

‘Deserter; spy; murderer,’ was the Chief Seraph’s weighed answer. ‘It’s out of my department—now. No—hold the line! The name’s up at last.’

It showed for an instant, broken and faint as sparks on charred wadding, but in that instant a dozen pens had it written. St. Peter with never a word gathered his robes about him and bundled through the door, headlong for The Gate.

‘No hurry,’ said Death at his elbow. ‘With the present rush your man won’t come up for ever so long.’

‘’Never can be sure these days. Anyhow, the Lower Establishment will be after him like sharks. He’s the very type they’d want for propaganda. Deserter—traitor—murderer. Out of my way, please, babies!’

A group of children round a red-headed man who was telling them stories, scattered laughing. The man turned to St. Peter.

‘Deserter, traitor, murderer,’ he repeated. ‘Can I be of service?’

‘You can!’ St. Peter gasped. ‘Double on ahead to The Gate and tell them to hold up all expulsions till I come. Then,’ he shouted as the man sped off at a long hound-like trot, ‘go and picket the outskirts of the Convoys. Don’t let any one break away on any account. Quick!’

But Death was right. They need not have hurried. The crowd at The Gate was far beyond the capacities of the Examining Board even though, as St. Peter’s Deputy informed him, it had been enlarged twice in his absence.

‘We’re doing our best,’ the Seraph explained, ‘but delay is inevitable, Sir. The Lower Establishment are taking advantage of it, as usual, at the tail of the Convoys. I’ve doubled all pickets there, and I’m sending more. Here’s the extra list, Sir—Arc J., Bradlaugh C., Bunyan J., Calvin J. Iscariot J. reported to me just now, as under your orders, and took ’em with him. Also Shakespeare W. and——’

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‘Never mind the rest,’ said St. Peter. I I’m going there myself. Meantime, carry on with the passes—don’t fiddle over ’em—and give me a blank or two.’ He caught up a thick block of Free Passes, nodded to a group in khaki at a passport table, initialled their Commanding Officer’s personal pass as for ‘Officer and Party,’ and left the numbers to be filled in by a quite competent-looking Quarter-master-Sergeant. Then, Death beside him, he breasted his way out of The Gate against the incoming multitude of all races, tongues, and creeds that stretched far across the plain.

An old lady, firmly clutching a mottle-nosed, middle-aged Major by the belt, pushed across a procession of keen-faced poilus, and blocked his path, her captive held in that terrible mother-grip no Power has yet been able to unlock.

‘I found him! I’ve got him! Pass him !’ she ordered.

St. Peter’s jaw fell. Death politely looked elsewhere.

‘There are a few formalities,’ the Saint began.

‘With Jerry in this state? Nonsense! How like a man! My boy never gave me a moment’s anxiety in——’

‘Don’t, dear—don’t!’ The Major looked almost as uncomfortable as St. Peter.

‘Well, nothing compared with what he would give me if he weren’t passed.’

‘Didn’t I hear you singing just now?’ Death asked, seeing that his companion needed a breathing-space.

‘Of course you did,’ the Mother intervened. ‘He sings beautifully. And that’s another reason! You’re bass, aren’t you now, darling?’

St. Peter glanced at the agonised Major and hastily initialled him a pass. Without a word of thanks the Mother hauled him away.

‘Now, under what conceivable Ruling do you justify that ?’ said Death.

‘I.W.—the Importunate Widow. It’s scandalous!’ St. Peter groaned. Then his face darkened as he looked across the great plain beyond The Gate. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said. ‘The Lower Establishment is out in full force to-night. I hope our pickets are strong enough——’

The crowd here had thinned to a disorderly queue flanked on both sides by a multitude of busy, discreet emissaries from the Lower Establishment who continually edged in to do business with them, only to be edged off again by a line of watchful pickets. Thanks to the khaki everywhere, the scene was not unlike that which one might have seen on earth any evening of the old days outside the refreshment-room by the Arch at Victoria Station, when the Army trains started. St. Peter’s appearance was greeted by the usual outburst of cock-crowing from the Lower Establishment.

‘Dirty work at the cross-roads,’ said Death dryly.

‘I deserve it!’ St. Peter grunted, ‘but think what it must mean for Judas.’

He shouldered into the thick of the confusion where the pickets coaxed, threatened, implored, and in extreme cases bodily shoved the wearied men and women past the voluble and insinuating spirits who strove to draw them aside.

A Shropshire Yeoman had just accepted, together with a forged pass, the assurance of a genial runner of the Lower Establishment that Heaven lay round the corner, and was being stealthily steered thither, when a large hand jerked him back, another took the runner in the chest, and some one thundered: ‘Get out, you crimp!’ The situation was then vividly explained to the soldier in the language of the barrack-room.

‘Don’t blame me, Guv’nor,’ the man expostulated. ‘I ’aven’t seen a woman, let alone angels, for umpteen months. I’m from Joppa. Where ’you from?’

‘Northampton,’ was the answer. ‘Rein back and keep by me.’

‘What? You ain’t ever Charley B. that my dad used to tell about? I thought you always said——’

‘I shall say a deal more soon. Your Sergeant’s talking to that woman in red. Fetch him in—quick!’

Meantime, a sunken-eyed Scots officer, utterly lost to the riot around, was being button-holed by a person of reverend aspect who explained to him that, by the logic of his own ancestral creed, not only was the Highlander irrevocably damned, but that his damnation had been predetermined before Earth was made.

‘It’s unanswerable—just unanswerable,’ said the young man sorrowfully. ‘I’ll be with ye.’ He was moving off, when a smallish figure interposed, not without dignity.

‘Monsieur,’ it said, ‘would it be of any comfort to you to know that I am—I was—John Calvin?’ At this the reverend one cursed and swore like the lost Soul he was, while the Highlander turned to discuss with Calvin, pacing towards The Gate, some alterations in the fabric of a work of fiction called the Institutio.

Others were not so easily held. A certain Woman, with loosened hair, bare arms, flashing eyes and dancing feet, shepherded her knot of waverers, hoarse and exhausted. When the taunt broke out against her from the opposing line: ‘Tell ’em what you were! Tell ’em if you dare!’ she answered unflinchingly, as did Judas, who, worming through the crowd like an Armenian carpet-vendor, peddled his shame aloud that it might give strength to others.

‘Yes,’ he would cry, ‘I am everything they say, but if I’m here it must be a moral cert for you gents. This way, please. Many mansions, gentlemen! Go-ood billets! Don’t you notice these low people, Sar. Plees keep hope, gentlemen i’

When there were cases that cried to him from the ground—poor souls who could not stick it but had found their way out with a rifle and a boot-lace, he would tell them of his own end, till he made them contemptuous enough to rise up and curse him. Here St. Luke’s imperturbable bedside manner backed and strengthened the other’s almost too oriental flux of words.

In this fashion and step by step, all the day’s Convoy were piloted past that danger-point where the Lower Establishment are, for reasons not given us, allowed to ply their trade. The pickets dropped to the rear, relaxed, and compared notes.

‘What always impresses me most,’ said Death to St. Peter, ‘is the sheeplike simplicity of the intellectual mind.’ He had been watching one of the pickets apparently overwhelmed by the arguments of an advanced atheist who—so hot in his argument that he was deaf to the offers of the Lower Establishment to make him a god—had stalked, talking hard—while the picket always gave ground before him—straight past the Broad Road.

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‘He was plaiting of long-tagged epigrams,’ the sober-faced picket smiled. ‘Give that sort only an ear and they’ll follow ye gobbling like turkeys.’

‘And John held his peace through it all,’ a full fresh voice broke in. ‘“It may be so,” says John. “Doubtless, in your belief, it is so,” says John. “Your words move me mightily,” says John, and gorges his own beliefs like a pike going backwards. And that young fool, so busy spinning words—words—words—that he trips past Hell Mouth without seeing it! . . . Who’s yonder, Joan?’

‘One of your English. ’Always late. Look!’ A young girl with short-cropped hair pointed with her sword across the plain towards a single faltering figure which made at first as though to overtake the Convoy, but then turned left towards the Lower Establishment, who were enthusiastically cheering him as a leader of enterprise.

‘That’s my traitor,’ said St. Peter. ‘He has no business to report to the Lower Establishment before reporting to Convoy.’

The figure’s pace slackened as he neared the applauding line. He looked over his shoulder once or twice, and then fairly turned tail and fled again towards the still Convoy.

‘Nobody ever gave me credit for anything I did,’ he began, sobbing and gesticulating. ‘They were all against me from the first. I only wanted a little encouragement. It was a regular conspiracy, but I showed ’em what I could do! I showed ’em! And—and—’ he halted again. ‘Oh, God! What are you going to do with me?’

No one offered any suggestion. He ranged sideways like a doubtful dog, while across the plain the Lower Establishment murmured seductively. All eyes turned to St. Peter.

‘At this moment,’ the Saint said half to himself, ‘I can’t recall any precise ruling under which——’

‘My own case?’ the ever-ready Judas suggested.

‘No-o ! That’s making too much of it. And yet——’

‘Oh, hurry up and get it over,’ the man wailed, and told them all that he had done, ending with the cry that none had ever recognised his merits; neither his own narrow-minded people, his inefficient employers, nor the snobbish jumped-up officers of his battalion.

‘You see,’ said St. Peter at the end. ‘It’s sheer vanity. It isn’t even as if we had a woman to fall back upon.’

‘Yet there was a woman or I’m mistaken,’ said the picket with the pleasing voice who had praised John.

‘Eh—what? When?’ St. Peter turned swiftly on the speaker. ‘Who was the woman?’

‘The wise woman of Tekoah,’ came the smooth answer. ‘I remember, because that verse was the private heart of my plays—some of ’em.’

But the Saint was not listening. ‘You have it!’ he cried. ‘Samuel Two, Double Fourteen. To think that I should have forgotten! “For we must needs die and are as water spilled on the ground which cannot be gathered up again. Neither Both God respect any person, yet—” Here, you! Listen to this!’

The man stepped forward and stood to attention. Some one took his cap as Judas and the picket John closed up beside him.

‘“Yet doth He devise means (d’you understand that?) devise means that His banished be not expelled from Him!” This covers your case. I don’t know what the means will be. That’s for you to find out. They’ll tell you yonder.’ He nodded towards the now silent Lower Establishment as he scribbled on a pass. ‘Take this paper over to them and report for duty there. You’ll have a thin time of it; but they won’t keep you a day longer than I’ve put down. Escort!’

‘Does—does that mean there’s any hope?’ the man stammered.

‘Yes—I’ll show you the way,’ Judas whispered. ‘I’ve lived there—a very long time.’

‘I’ll bear you company a piece,’ said John, on his left flank. ‘There’ll be Despair to deal with. Heart up, Mr. Littlesoul!’

The three wheeled off, and the Convoy watched them grow smaller and smaller across the plain.

St. Peter smiled benignantly and rubbed his hands.

‘And now we’re rested,’ said he, ‘I think we might make a push for billets this evening, gentlemen, eh?’

The pickets fell in, guardians no longer but friends and companions all down the line. There was a little burst of cheering and the whole Convoy strode away towards the not so distant Gate.

The Saint and Death stayed behind to rest awhile. It was a heavenly evening. They could hear the whistle of the low-flighting Cherubim, clear and sharp, under the diviner note of some released Seraph’s wings, where, his errand accomplished, he plunged three or four stars deep into the cool Baths of Hercules; the steady dynamo-like hum of the nearer planets on their axes; and, as the hush deepened, the surprised little sigh of some new-born sun a universe of universes away. But their minds were with the Convoy that their eyes followed.

Said St. Peter proudly at last: ‘If those people of mine had seen that fellow stripped of all hope in front of ’em, I doubt if they could have marched another yard to-night. Watch ’em stepping out now, though! Aren’t they human?’

‘To whom do you say it?’ Death answered, with something of a tired smile. ‘I’m more than human. I’ve got to die some time or other. But all other created Beings—afterwards . . .’

‘I know,’ said St. Peter softly. ‘And that is why I love you, O Azrael!’

For now they were alone Death had, of course, returned to his true majestic shape—that only One of all created beings who is doomed to perish utterly, and knows it.

‘Well, that’s that—for me!’ Death concluded as he rose. ‘And yet—’ he glanced towards the empty plain where the Lower Establishment had withdrawn with their prisoner. ‘“Yet doth He devise means.”’

Namgay Doola

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ONCE upon a time there was a King who lived on the road to Thibet, very many miles in the Himalayas. His Kingdom was eleven thousand feet above the sea and exactly four miles square; but most of the miles stood on end owing to the nature of the country. His revenues were rather less than four hundred pounds yearly, and they were expended in the maintenance of one elephant and a standing army of five men. He was tributary to the Indian Government, who allowed him certain sums for keeping a section of the Himalaya-Thibet road in repair. He further increased his revenues by selling timber to the Railway companies; for he would cut the great deodar trees in his one forest, and they fell thundering into the Sutlej river and were swept down to the plains three hundred miles away and became railway-ties.

Now and again this King, whose name does not matter, would mount a ringstraked horse and ride scores of miles to Simla-town to confer with the Lieutenant-Governor on matters of state, or to assure the Viceroy that his sword was at the service of the Queen-Empress. Then the Viceroy would cause a ruffle of drums to be sounded, and the ringstraked horse and the cavalry of the State—two men in tatters—and the herald who bore the silver stick before the King, would trot back to their own place, which lay between the tail of a heaven-climbing glacier and a dark birch-forest.

Now, from such a King, always remembering that he possessed one veritable elephant, and could count his descent for twelve hundred years, I expected, when it was my fate to wander through his dominions, no more than mere license to live.The night had closed in rain, and rolling clouds blotted out the lights of the villages in the valley.

Forty miles away, untouched by cloud or storm, the white shoulder of Donga Pa—the Mountain of the Council of the Gods—upheld the Evening Star. The monkeys sang sorrowfully to each other as they hunted for dry roosts in the fern-wreathed trees, and the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die. The clouds closed and the smell went away, and there remained nothing in all the world except chilling white mist and the boom of the Sutlej river racing through the valley below.

A fat-tailed sheep, who did not want to die, bleated piteously at my tent door. He was scuffling with the Prime Minister and the Director-General of Public Education, and he was a royal gift to me and my camp servants. I expressed my thanks suitably, and asked if I might have audience of the King. The Prime Minister readjusted his turban, which had fallen off in the struggle, and assured me that the King would be very pleased to see me. Therefore I despatched two bottles as a foretaste, and when the sheep had entered upon another incarnation went to the King’s Palace through the wet. He had sent his army to escort me, but the army stayed to talk with my cook. Soldiers are very much alike all the world over.

The Palace was a four-roomed, and white-washed mud and timber-house, the finest in all the hills for a day’s journey. The King was dressed in a purple velvet jacket, white muslin trousers, and a saffron—yellow turban of price. He gave me audience in a little carpeted room opening off the palace courtyard which was occupied by the Elephant of State. The great beast was sheeted and anchored from trunk to tail, and the curve of his back stood out grandly against the mist.

The Prime Minister and the Director-General of Public Education were present to introduce me, but all the court had been dismissed, lest the two bottles aforesaid should corrupt their morals. The King cast a wreath of heavy-scented flowers round my neck as I bowed, and inquired how my honoured presence had the felicity to be. I said that through seeing his auspicious countenance the mists of the night had turned into sunshine, and that by reason of his beneficent sheep his good deeds would be remembered by the Gods. He said that since I had set my magnificent foot in his Kingdom the crops would probably yield seventy per cent more than the average. I said that the fame of the King had reached to the four corners of the earth, and that the nations gnashed their teeth when they heard daily of the glories of his realm and the wisdom of his moon-like Prime Minister and lotus-like Director-General of Public Education.

Then we sat down on clean white cushions, and I was at the King’s right hand. Three minutes later he was telling me that the state of the maize crop was something disgraceful, and that the Railway companies would not pay him enough for his timber. The talk shifted to and fro with the bottles, and we discussed very many stately things, and the King became confidential on the subject of Government generally. Most of all he dwelt on the shortcomings of one of his subjects, who, from all I could gather, had been paralyzing the executive.

“In the old days,” said the King, “I could have ordered the Elephant yonder to trample him to death. Now I must e’en send him seventy miles across the hills to be tried, and his keep would be upon the State. The Elephant eats everything.”

“What be the man’s crimes, Rajah Sahib?” said I.

“Firstly, he is an outlander and no man of mine own people. Secondly, since of my favour I gave him land upon his first coming, he refuses to pay revenue. Am I not the lord of the earth, above and below, entitled by right and custom to one-eighth of the crop? Yet this devil, establishing himself, refuses to pay a single tax; and he brings a poisonous spawn of babes.”

“Cast him into jail,” I said.

“Sahib,” the King answered, shifting a little on the cushions, “once and only once in these forty years sickness came upon me so that I was not able to go abroad. In that hour I made a vow to my God that I would never again cut man or woman from the light of the sun and the air of God; for I perceived the nature of the punishment. How can I break my vow? Were it only the lopping of a hand or a foot I should not delay. But even that is impossible now that the English have rule. One or another of my people”—he looked obliquely at the Director-General of Public Education—“would at once write a letter to the Viceroy, and perhaps I should be deprived of my ruffle of drums.”

He unscrewed the mouthpiece of his silver water-pipe, fitted a plain amber mouthpiece, and passed his pipe to me. “Not content with refusing revenue,” he continued, “this outlander refuses also the begar” (this was the corvée or forced labour on the roads) “and stirs my people up to the like treason. Yet he is, when he wills, an expert log-snatcher. There is none better or bolder among my people to clear a block of the river when the logs stick fast.”

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“But he worships strange Gods,” said the Prime Minister deferentially.

“For that I have no concern,” said the King, who was as tolerant as Akbar in matters of belief. “To each man his own God and the fire or Mother Earth for us all at last. It is the rebellion that offends me.”

“The King has an army”, I suggested. “Has not the King burned the man’s house and left him naked to the night dews?”

“Nay, a hut is a hut, and it holds the life of a man. But once, I sent my army against him when his excuses became wearisome. of their heads he brake three across the top with a stick. The other two men ran away. Also the guns would not shoot.”

I had seen the equipment of the infantry. One-third of it was an old muzzle-loading fowling-piece, with a ragged rust-hole where the nipples should have been, one-third a wire-bound match-lock with a worm-eaten stock, and one-third a four-bore flint duck-gun without a flint.

“But it is to be remembered,” said the King, reaching out for the bottle, “that he is a very expert log-snatcher and a man of a merry face. What shall I do to him, Sahib?”

This was interesting. The timid hill-folk would as soon have refused taxes to their King as revenues to their Gods.

“If it be the King’s permission,” I said, “I will not strike my tents till the third day and I will see this man. The mercy of the King is God-like, and rebellion is like unto the sin of witchcraft. Moreover, both the bottles and another be empty.”

“You have my leave to go,” said the King.

Next morning a crier went through the State proclaiming that there was a log-jam on the river and that it behoved all loyal subjects to remove it. The people poured down from their villages to the moist, warm valley of poppy-fields; and the King and I went with them. Hundreds of dressed deodar-logs had caught on a snag of rock, and the river was bringing down more logs every minute to complete the blockade. The water snarled and wrenched and worried at the timber, and the population of the State began prodding the nearest logs with a pole in the hope of starting a general movement. Then there went up a shout of “Namgay Doola! Namgay Doola!” and a large red-haired villager hurried up, stripping off his clothes as he ran.

“That is he. That is the rebel,” said the King. “Now will the dam be cleared.”

“But why has he red hair?” I asked, since red hair among hill-folks is as common as blue or green.

“He is an outlander,” said the King. “Well done! Oh, well done!”

Namgay Doola had scrambled out on the jam and was clawing out the butt of a log with a rude sort of boat-hook. It slid forward slowly as an alligator moves, three or four others followed it, and the green water spouted through the gaps they had made. Then the villagers howled and shouted and scrambled across the logs, pulling and pushing the obstinate timber, and the red head of Namgay Doola was chief among them all. The logs swayed and chafed and groaned as fresh consignments from upstream battered the now weakening dam. All gave way at last in a smother of foam, racing logs, bobbing black heads and confusion indescribable. The river tossed everything before it. I saw the red head go down with the last remnants of the jam and disappear between the great grinding tree-trunks. It rose close to the bank and blowing like a grampus. Namgay Doola wrung the water out of his eyes and made obeisance to the King. I had time to observe him closely. The virulent redness of his shock head and beard was most startling; and in the thicket of hair wrinkled above high cheek bones shone two very merry blue eyes. He was indeed an outlander, but yet a Thibetan in language, habit, and attire. He spoke the Lepcha dialect with an indescribable softening of the gutturals. It was not so much a lisp as an accent.

“Whence comest thou?” I asked.

“From Thibet.” He pointed across the hills and grinned. That grin went straight to my heart. Mechanically I held out my hand and Namgay Doola shook it. No pure Thibetan would have understood the meaning of the gesture. He went away to look for his clothes, and as he climbed back to his village, I heard a joyous yell that seemed unaccountably familiar. It was the whooping of Namgay Doola.

“You see now,” said the King, “why I would not kill him. He is a bold man among my logs, but,” and he shook his head like a schoolmaster, “I know that before long there will be complaints of him in the court. Let us return to the Palace and do justice.” It was that King”s custom to judge his subjects every day between eleven and three o’clock. I saw him decide equitably in weighty matters of trespass, slander, and a little wife-stealing. Then his brow clouded and he summoned me.

“Again it is Namgay Doola,” he said despairingly. “Not content with refusing revenue on his own part, he has bound half his village by an oath to the like treason. Never before has such a thing befallen me! Nor are my taxes heavy.”

A rabbit-faced villager, with a blush-rose stuck behind his ear, advanced trembling. He had been in the conspiracy, but had told everything and hoped for the King’s favour.

“O King,” said I. “If it be the King’s will let this matter stand over till the morning. Only the Gods can do right swiftly, and it may be that yonder villager has lied.”

“Nay, for I know the nature of Namgay Doola; but since a guest asks let the matter remain. Wilt thou speak harshly to this red-headed outlander. He may listen to thee.”

I made an attempt that very evening, but for the life of me I could not keep my countenance. Namgay Doola grinned persuasively, and began to tell me about a big brown bear in a poppy-field by the river. Would I care to shoot it? I spoke austerely on the sin of conspiracy, and the certainty of punishment. Namgay Doola’s face clouded for a moment. Shortly afterwards he withdrew from my tent, and I heard him singing to himself softly among the pines. The words were unintelligible to me, but the tune, like his liquid insinuating speech, seemed the ghost of something strangely familiar.

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Dir hané mard-i-yemen dir
To weeree ala gee.

sang Namgay Doola again and again, and I racked my brain for that lost tune. It was not till after dinner that I discovered some-one had cut a square foot of velvet from the centre of my best camera-cloth. This made me so angry that I wandered down the valley in the hope of meeting the big brown bear. I could hear him grunting like a discontented pig in the poppy-field, and I waited shoulder deep in the dew-dripping Indian corn to catch him after his meal. The moon was at full and drew out the rich scent of the tasselled crop. Then I heard the anguished bellow of a Himalayan cow, one of the little black crummies no bigger than Newfoundland dogs. Two shadows that looked like a bear and her cub hurried past me. I was in act to fire when I saw that they had each a brilliant red head. The lesser animal was trailing some rope behind it that left a dark track on the path. They passed within six feet of me, and the shadow of the moonlight lay velvet-black on their faces. Velvet-black was exactly the word, for by all the powers of moonlight they were masked in the velvet of my camera-cloth! I marvelled and went to bed.

Next morning the Kingdom was in uproar. Namgay Doola, men said, had gone forth in the night and with a sharp knife had cut off the tail of a cow belonging to the rabbit-faced villager who had betrayed him. It was sacrilege unspeakable against the Holy Cow. The State desired his blood, but he had retreated into his hut, barricaded the doors and windows with big stones, and defied the world.

The King and I and the Populace approached the hut cautiously. There was no hope of capturing the man without loss of life, for from a hole in the wall projected the muzzle of an extremely well-cared-for gun—the only gun in the State that could shoot. Namgay Doola had narrowly missed a villager just before we came up. The Standing Army stood. It could do no more, for when it advanced pieces of sharp shale flew from the windows. To these were added from time to time showers of scalding water. We saw red heads bobbing up and down in the hut. The family of Namgay Doola were aiding their sire, and bloodcurdling yells of defiance were the only answers to our prayers.

“Never,” said the King, puffing, “has such a thing befallen my State. Next year I will certainly buy a little cannon.” He looked at me imploringly.

“Is there any priest in the Kingdom to whom he will listen?” said I, for a light was beginning to break upon me.

“He worships his own God,” said the Prime Minister. “We can starve him out.”

“Let the white man approach,” said Namgay Doola from within. “All others I will kill. Send me the white man.”

The door was thrown open and I entered the smoky interior of a Thibetan hut crammed with children. And every child had flaming red hair. A raw cow’s-tail lay on the floor, and by its side two pieces of black velvet—my black velvet—rudely hacked into the semblance of masks.

“And what is this shame, Namgay Doola?” said I.

He grinned more winningly than ever. “There is no shame,” said he. “I did but cut off the tail of that man”s cow. He betrayed me. I was minded to shoot him, Sahib. But not to death. Indeed not to death. Only in the legs.”

“And why at all, since it is the custom to pay revenue to the King? Why at all?”

“By the God of my father I cannot tell,” said Namgay Doola.

“And who was thy father?”

“The same that had this gun.” He showed me his weapon—a Tower musket bearing date 1832 and the stamp of the Honourable East India Company.

“And thy father”s name?” said I.

“Timlay Doola,” said he. “At the first, I being then a little child, it is in my mind that he wore a red coat.”

“Of that I have no doubt. But repeat the name of thy father thrice or four times.”

He obeyed, and I understood whence the puzzling accent in his speech came. “Thimla Dhula,” said he excitedly. “To this hour I worship his God.”

“May I see that God?”

“In a little while—at twilight time.”

“Rememberest thou aught of thy father’s speech?”

“It is long ago. But there is one word which he said often. Thus ‘Shun.’ Then I and my brethren stood upon our feet, our hands to our sides. Thus.”

“Even so. And what was thy mother?

“A woman of the hills. We be Lepchas of Darjeeling, but me they call an outlander because my hair is as thou seest.”

The Thibetan woman, his wife, touched him on the arm gently. The long parley outside the fort had lasted far into the day. It was now close upon twilight—the hour of the Angelus. Very solemnly, the red-headed brats rose from the floor and formed a semicircle. Namgay Doola laid his gun against the wall, lighted a little oil lamp, and set it before a recess in the wall. Pulling aside a curtain of dirty cloth he revealed a worn brass crucifix leaning against the helmet-badge of a long forgotten East India regiment.

“Thus did my father,” he said, crossing himself clumsily. The wife and children followed suit. Then all together they struck up the wailing chant that I heard on the hillside—

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Dir hané mard-i-yemen dir
To weeree ala gee.

I was puzzled no longer. Again and again they crooned as if their hearts would break, their version of the chorus of the Wearing of the Green—

They’re hanging men and women too,
For the wearing of the green.

A diabolical inspiration came to me. One of the brats, a boy about eight years old, was watching me as he sang. I pulled out a rupee, held the coin between finger and thumb, and looked—only looked—at the gun against the wall. A grin of brilliant and perfect comprehension overspread the face of the child. Never for an instant stopping the song he held out his hand for the money, and then slid the gun to my hand. I might have shot Namgay Doola as he chanted. But I was satisfied. The blood-instinct of the race held true. Namgay Doola drew the curtain across the recess. Angelus was over.

“Thus my father sang. There was much more, but I have forgotten, and I do not know the purport of these words, but it may be that the God will understand. I am not of this people, and I will not pay revenue.”

“And why?”

Again that soul-compelling grin. “What occupation would be to me between crop and crop? It is better than scaring bears. But these people do not understand.” He picked the masks from the floor, and looked in my face as simply as a child.

“By what road didst thou attain knowledge to make these devilries?” I said, pointing.

“I cannot tell. I am but a Lepcha of Darjeeling, and yet the stuff—”

“Which thou hast stolen.”

“Nay, surely. Did I steal? I desired it so. The stuff—the stuff—what else should I have done with the stuff?” He twisted the velvet between his fingers.

“But the sin of maiming the cow—consider that?”

“That is true; but oh, Sahib, that man betrayed me and I had no thought—but the heifer’s tail waved in the moonlight and I had my knife. What else should I have done? The tail came off ere I was aware. Sahib, thou knowest more than I.”

“That is true,” said I. “Stay within the door. I go to speak to the King.”

The population of the State were ranged on the hillsides. I went forth and spoke to the King.

“O King,” said I. “Touching this man there be two courses open to thy wisdom. Thou canst either hang him from a tree, he and his brood, till there remains no hair that is red within the land.”

“Nay,” said the King. “Why should I hurt the little children?”

They had poured out of the hut door and were making plump obeisance to everybody. Namgay Doola waited with his gun across his arm.

“Or thou canst, discarding the impiety of the cow-maiming, raise him to honour in thy Army. He comes of a race that will not pay revenue. A red flame is in his blood which comes out at the top of his head in that glowing hair. Make him chief of the Army. Give him honour as may befall, and full allowance of work, but look to it, O King, that neither he nor his hold a foot of earth from thee henceforward. Feed him with words and favour, and also liquor from certain bottles that thou knowest of, and he will be a bulwark of defence. But deny him even a tuft of grass for his own. This is the nature that God has given him. Moreover he has brethren—”

The State groaned unanimously.

“But if his brethren come, they will surely fight with each other till they die; or else the one will always give information concerning the other. Shall he be of thy Army, O King? Choose.”

The King bowed his head, and I said, “Come forth, Namgay Doola, and command the King’s Army. Thy name shall no more be Namgay in the mouths of men, but Patsay Doola, for as thou hast said, I know.”

Then Namgay Doola, new christened Patsay Doola, son of Timlay Doola, which is Tim Doolan gone very wrong indeed, clasped the King’s feet, cuffed the standing Army, and hurried in an agony of contrition from temple to temple, making offerings for the sin of cattle maiming.

And the King was so pleased with my perspicacity that he offered to sell me a village for twenty pounds sterling. But I buy no villages in the Himalayas so long as one red head flares between the tail of the heaven-climbing glacier and the dark birch-forest.

I know that breed.

Letters on Leave

(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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TO Lieutenant John McHail,
151st (Kumharsen) P.N.I.,
Hakaiti via Tharanda,
Assam.

DEAR OLD MAN: Your handwriting is worse than ever, but as far as I can see among the loops and fish-hooks, you are lonesome and want to be comforted with a letter. I knew you wouldn’t write to me unless you needed something. You don’t tell me that you have left your regiment, but from what you say about “my battalion,” “my men,” and so forth, it seems as if you were raising military police for the benefit of the Chins. If that’s the case, I congratulate you. The pay is good. Ouless writes to me from some new fort something or other, saying that he has struggled into a billet of Rs. 700 (Military Police), and instead of being chased by writters as he used to be, is ravaging the country round Shillong in search of a wife. I am very sorry for the Mrs. Ouless of the future.

That doesn’t matter. You probably know more about the boys yonder than I do. If you’ll only send me from time to time some record of their movements I’ll try to tell you of things on this side of the water. You say “You don’t know what it is to hear from town.” I say “You don’t know what it is to hear from the dehat,” Now and again men drift in with news, but I don’t like hot-weather khubber. It’s all of the domestic occurrence kind. Old “Hat” Constable came to see me the other day. You remember the click in his throat before he begins to speak. He sat still, clicking at quarter-hour intervals, and after each click he’d say: “D’ye remember Mistress So-an’-So? Well, she’s dead o’ typhoid at Naogong.” When it wasn’t “Mistress So-an’-So” it was a man. I stood four clicks and four deaths, and then I asked him to spare me the rest. You seem to have had a bad season, taking it all round, and the women seem to have suffered most. Is that so?

We don’t die in London. We go out of town, and we make as much fuss about it as if we were going to the Neva. Now I understand why the transport is the first thing to break down when our army takes the field. The Englishman is cumbrous in his movements and very particular about his baskets and hampers and trunks—not less than seven of each—for a fifty-mile journey. Leave season began some weeks ago, and there is a burra-choop along the streets that you could shovel with a spade. All the people that say they are everybody have gone—quite two hundred miles away. Some of ’em are even on the Continent—and the clubs are full of strange folk. I found a Reform man at the Savage a week ago. He didn’t say what his business was, but he was dusty and looked hungry. I suppose he had come in for food and shelter.

Like the rest I’m on leave too. I converted myself into a Government Secretary, awarded myself one month on full pay with the chance of an extension, and went off. Then it rained and hailed, and rained again, and I ran up and down this tiny country in trains trying to find a dry place. After ten days I came back to town, having been stopped by the sea four times. I was rather like a kitten at the bottom of a bucke chasing its own tail. So I’m sitting here under a grey, muggy sky wondering what sort of time they are having at Simla. It’s August now. The rains would be nearly over, all the theatricals would be in full swing, and Jakko Hill would be just Paradise. You’re probably pink with prickly heat. Sit down quietly under the punkah and think of Umballa station, hot as an oven at four in the morning. Think of the dak-gharry slobbering in the wet, and the first little cold wind that comes round the first comer after the tonga is clear of Kalka. There’s a wind you and I know well. It’s blowing over the grass at Dugshai this very moment, and there’s a smell of hot fir trees all along and along from Solon to Simla, and some happy man is flying up that road with fragments of a tonga-bar in his eye, his pet terrier mider his arm, his thick clothes on the back-seat and the certainty of a month’s pure joy in front of him. Instead of which you’re being stewed at Hakaiti and I’m sitting in a second-hand atmosphere above a sausage-shop, watching three sparrows playing in a dirty-green tree and pretending that it’s summer, I have a view of very many streets.and a river. Except the advertisements on the walls, there isn’t one speck of colour as far as my eye can reach. The very cat, who is an amiable beast, comes off black under my hand, and I daren’t open the window for fear of smuts. And this is better than a soaked and sobbled country, with the corn-shocks standing like plover’s eggs in green moss and the oats lying flat in moist limips. We haven’t had any summer, and yesterday I smelt the raw touch of the winter. Just one little whiff to show that the year had turned. “Oh, what a happy land is England!”

I cannot understand the white man at home. You remember when we went out together and landed at the Apollo Bunder with all our sorrows before us, and went to Watson’s Hotel and saw the snake-charmers? You said: “It’ll take me all my lifetime to distinguish one nigger from another.” That was eight years ago. Now you don’t call them niggers any more, and you’re supposed—quite wrongly—to have an insight into native character, or else you would never have been allowed to recruit for the Kumharsens. I feel as I felt at Watson’s. They are so deathlily alike, especially the more educated. They all seem to read the same books, and the same newspapers telling ’em what to admire in the same books, and they all quote the same passages from the same books, and they write books on books about somebody else’s books, and they are penetrated to their boot-heels with a sense of the awful seriousness of their own views of the moment. Above that they seem to be, most curiously and beyond the right of ordinary people, divorced from the knowledge or fear of death. Of course, every man conceives that every man except himself is bound to die (you remember how Hallatt spoke the night before he went out) , but these men appear to be like children in that respect.

I can’t explain exactly, but it gives an air of unreality to their most earnest earnestnesses; and when a young man of views and culture and aspirations is in earnest, the trumpets of Jericho are silent beside him. Because they have everything done for them they know how everything ought to be done; and they are perfectly certain that wood pavements, policemen, shops and gaslight come in the regular course of nature. You can guess with these convictions how thoroughly and cocksurely they handle little trifles like colonial administration, the wants of the army, municipal sewage, housing of the poor, and so forth. Every third common need of average men is, in their mouths, a tendency or a movement or a federation affecting the world. It never seems to occur to ’em that the human instinct of getting as much as possible for money paid, or, failing money, for threats and fawnings, is about as old as Cain; and the burden of their bat is: “Me an’ a few mates o’ mine are going to make a new world.”

As long as men only write and talk they must think that way, I suppose. It’s compensation for playing with little things. And that reminds me. Do you know the University smile? You don’t by that name, but sometimes young civilians wear it for a very short time when they first come out. Something—I wonder if it’s our brutal chaff, or a billiard-cue, or which?—takes it out of their faces, and when they next differ with you they do so without smiling. But that smile flourishes in London. I’ve met it again and again. It expresses tempered grief, sorrow at your complete inability to march with the march of progress at the Universities, and a chastened contempt. There is one man who wears it as a garment. He is frivolously young—not more than thirty-five or forty—and all these years no one has removed that smile. He knows everything about everything on this earth, and above all he knows all about men under any and every condition of life. He knows all about the aggressive militarism of you and your friends; he isn’t quite sure of the necessity of an army; he is certain that colonial expansion is nonsense; and he is more than certain that the whole step of all our Empire must be regulated by the knowledge and foresight of the workingman. Then he smiles—smiles like a seraph with an M.A. degree. What can you do with a man like that? He has never seen an unmade road in his life; I think he believes that wheat grows on a tree and that beef is dug from a mine. He has never been forty miles from a railway, and he has never been called upon to issue an order to anybody except his well-fed servants. Isn’t it wondrous? And there are battalions and brigades of these men in town removed from the fear of want, living until they are seventy or eighty, sheltered, fed, drained and administered, expending their vast leisure in talking and writing.

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But the real fun begins much lower down the line. I’ve been associating generally and very particularly with the men who say that they are the only men in the world who work—and they call themselves the workingman. Now the workingman in America is a nice person. He says he is a man and behaves accordingly. That is to say, he has some notion that he is part and parcel of a great country. At least, he talks that way. But in this town you can see thousands of men meeting publicly on Sundays to cry aloud that everybody may hear that they are poor, downtrodden helots—in fact, “the pore workin’man.” At their clubs and pubs the talk is the same. It’s the utter want of self-respect that revolts. My friend the tobacconist has a cousin, who is, apparently, sound in mind and limb, aged twenty-three, clear-eyed and upstanding. He is a “skibbo” by trade—a painter of sorts. He married at twenty, and he has two children. He can spend three-quarters of an hour talking about his downtrodden condition. He works under another Raj-mistri, who has saved money and started a little shop of his own. He hates that Raj-mistri; he loathes the police; and his views on the lives and customs of the aristocracy are strange. He approves of every form of lawlessness, and he knows that everybody who holds authority is sure to be making a good thing out of it. Of himself as a citizen he never thinks. Of himself as an Ishmael he thinks a good deal. He is entitled to eight hours’ work a day and some time off—said time to be paid for; he is entitled to free education for his children—and he doesn’t want no bloomin’ clergyman to teach ’em; he is entitled to houses especially built for himself because he pays the bulk of the taxes of the country. He is not going to emigrate, not he; he reserves to himself the right of multiplying as much as he pleases; the streets must be policed for him while he demonstrates, immediately under my window, by the way, for ten consecutive hours, and I am probably a thief because my dothes are better than his. The proposition is a very simple one. He has no duties to the State, no personal responsibility of any kind, and he’d sooner see his children dead than soldiers of the Queen. The Government owes him everything because he is a pore workin’man. When the Guards tried their Board-school mutiny at the Wellington Barracks my friend was jubilant. “What did I tell your he said. “You see the very soldiers won’t stand it.”

“What’s it?”

“Bein’ treated like machines instead of flesh and blood. ’Course they won’t.”

The popular evening paper wrote that the Guards, with perfect justice, had rebelled against being treated like machines instead of flesh and blood. Then I thought of a certain regiment that lay in Mian Mir for three years and dropped four hundred men out of a thousand. It died of fever and cholera. There were no pretty nursemaids to work with it in the streets, because there were no streets. I saw how the Guards amused themselves and how their sergeants smoked in uniform. I pitied the Guards with their cruel sentry-goes, their three nights out of bed, and their unlimited supply of love and liquor.

Another man, not a workman, told me that the Guards’ riot—it’s impossible, as you know, to call this kick-up of the fatted flunkies of the army a mutiny—was only “a schoolboy’s prank”; and he could not see that if it was what he said it was, the Guards were no regiment and should have been wiped out decently and quietly. There again the futility of a sheltered people cropped up. You mustn’t treat a man like a machine in this country, but you can’t get any work out of a man till he has learned to work like a machine. D—— has just come home for a few months from the charge of a mountain battery on the frontier. He used to begin work at eight, and he was thankful if he got off at six; most of the time on his feet. When he went to the Black Mountain he was extensively engaged for nearly sixteen hours a day; and that on food at which the “pore workin’man” would have turned up his state-lifted nose. D—— on the subject of labour as understood by the white man in his own home is worth hearing. Though coarse—considerably coarse! But D—— doesn’t know all the hopeless misery of the business. When the small pig, oyster, furniture, carpet, builder or general shopman works his way out of the ruck he turns round and makes his old friends and employes sweat. He knows how near he can go to flaying ’em alive before they kick; and in this matter he is neither better nor worse than a bunnia or a havildar of our own blessed country. It’s the small employer of labour that skins his servant, exactly as the forty-pound householder works her one white servant to the bone and goes to drop pennies into the plate to convert the heathen in the East.

Just at present, as you have read, the person who calls himself the pore workin’man—the man I saw kicking fallen men in the mud by the docks last winter—has discovered a real, fine, new original notion; and he is workhlg it for all he is worth. He calls it the solidarity of labour bundobast; but it’s caste—four thousand years old, caste of Menu—with old shetts, mahajuns, guildtolls, excommunication and all the rest of it. All things considered, there isn’t anything much older than caste—it began with the second generation of man on earth—but to read the “advance” papers on the subject you’d imagine it was a revelation from Heaven. The real fun will begin—as it has begun and ended many times before—when the caste of skilled labour—that’s the pore workin’man—are pushed up and knocked about by the lower and unrecognised castes, who will form castes of their own and outcaste on the decision of their own punchayats. How these castes will scuffle and fight among themselves, and how astonished the Englishman will be!

He is naturally lawless because he is a fighting animal; and his amazingly sheltered condition has made him inconsequent. I don’t like inconsequent lawlessness. I’ve seen it down at Bow Street, at the docks, by the G.P.O., and elsewhere. Its chief home, of course, is in that queer place called the House of Commons, but no one goes there who isn’t forced by business. It’s shut up at present, and the persons who belong to it are loose all over the face of the country, I don’t think—but I won’t swear—that any of them are spitting at policemen. One man appears to have been poaching, others are advocating various forms of murder and outrage—and nobody seems to care. The residue talk—just heavens, how they talk, and what wonderful fictions they tell! And they firmly believe, being ignorant of the mechanism of Government, that they administer the country. In addition, certain of their newspapers have elaborately worked up a famine in Ireland that could be engineered by two Deputy Commissioners and four average Stunts into a “woe” and a “calamity” that is going to overshadow the peace of the nation—even the Empire. I suppose they have their own sense of proportion, but they manage to keep it to themselves very successfully. What do you, who have seen half a countryside in deadly fear of its life, suppose that this people would do if they were chukkered and gabraowed? If they really knew what the fear of death and the dread of injury implied? If they died very swiftly, indeed, and could not count their futile lives enduring beyond next sundown? Some of the men from your—I mean our—part of the world say that they would be afraid and break and scatter and run. But there is no room in the island to run. The sea catches you, midwaist, at the third step. I am curious to see if the cholera, of which these people stand in most lively dread, gets a firm foothold in London. In that case I have a notion that there will be scenes and panics. They live too well here, and have too much to make life worth clinging to—clubs, and shop fronts, and gas, and theatres, and so forth—things that they affect to despise, and whereon and whereby they live like leeches. But I have written enough. It doesn’t exhaust the subject; but you won’t be grateful for other epistles. De Vitre of the Poona Irregular Moguls will have it that they are a tiddy-iddy people. He says that all their visible use is to produce loans for the colonies and men to be used up in developing India. I honestly believe that the average Englishman would faint if you told him it was lawful to use up human life for any purpose whatever. He believes that it has to be developed and made beautiful for the possessor, and in that belief talkatively perpetrates cruelties that would make Torquemada jump in his grave. Go to Alipur if you want to see. I am off to foreign parts—forty miles away—to catch fish for my friend the char-cat; also to shoot a little bird if I have luck.

Yours, RUDYARD KIPLING

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TO Lieutenant John McHail,
151st (Kumharsen) N.I.,
Hakaiti via Tharanda.

Captain Sahib Bahadur! The last Pi gives me news of your step, and I’m more pleased about it than many. You’ve been “cavalry quick” in your promotion. Eight years and your company! Allahu! But it must have been that long, lean horse-head of yours that looks so wise and says so little that has imposed upon the authorities. My best congratulations. Let out your belt two holes, and be happy, as I am not.

Did I tell you in my last about going to Woking in search of a grave? The dust and the grime and the grey and the sausage-shop told on my spirits to such an extent that I solemnly took a train and went grave-hunting through the Necropolis—locally called the Necrapolis. I wanted an eligible, entirely detached site in a commanding position—six by three and bricked throughout. I found it, but the only drawback was that I must go back to town to the head office to buy it. One doesn’t go to town to haggle for tomb-space, so I deferred the matter and went fishing. All the same, there are very nice graves at Woking, and I shall keep my eye on one of ’em.

Since that date I seem to have been in four or five places, because there are labels on the bag. One of the places was Plymouth, where I found half a regiment at field exercises on the Hoe. They were practising the attack in three lines with the mixed rush at the end, even as it is laid down in the drill-book, and they charged subduedly across the Hoe. The people laughed. I was much more inclined to cry. Except the Major, there didn’t seem to be anything more than twenty years old in the regiment; and oh! but it was pink and white and chubby and undersized—just made to die succulently of disease. I fancied that some of our battalions out with you were more or less young and exposed, but a home battalion is a crêche, and it scares one to watch it. Eminent and distinguished Generals get up after dinner—I’ve listened to two of ’em—and explain that though the home battalion can only be regarded as a feeder to the foreign, yet all our battalions can be regarded as efficient; and if they aren’t efficient we shall find in our military reserve the nucleus—how I loath that lying word!—of the Lord knows what, but the speeches always end with allusions to the spirit of the English, their glorious past, and the certainty that when the hour of need comes the nation will “emerge victorious.” If (sic) the Engineer of the Hungerford Bridge told the Southeastern Railway that because a main girder had stood for thirty years without need of renewal it was therefore sure to stand for another fifty, he would probably get the sack. Our military authorities don’t get the sack. They are allowed to make speeches in public. Some day, if we live long enough, we shall see the glories of the past and the “sublime instinct of an ancient people” without one complete army corps, pitted against a few unsentimental long-range guns and some efficiently organised troops. Then the band will begin to play, and it will not play Rule Britannia until it has played some funny tunes first.

Do you remember Tighe? He was in the Deccan Lancers and retired because he got married. He is in Ireland now, and I met him the other day, idle, unhappy and dying for some work to do. Mrs. Tighe is equally miserable. She wants to go back to Poona instead of administering a big barrack of a house somewhere at the back of a bog. I quote Tighe here. He has, you may remember, a pretty tongue about him, and he was describing to me at length how a home regiment behaves when it is solemnly turned out for a week or a month training under canvas:

“About four in the mornin’, me dear boy, they begin pitchin’ their tents for the next day—four hours to pitch it, and the tent ropes a howlin’ tangle when all’s said and sworn. Then they tie their horses with strings to their big toes and go to bed in hollows and caves in the earth till the rain falls and the tents are flooded, and then, me dear boy, the men and the horses and the ropes and the vegetation of the country cuddle each other till the morning for the company’s sake. And next day it all begins again. Just when they are beginning to understand how to camp they are all put back into their boxes, and half of ’em have lung disease.”

But what is the use of snarling and grumbling? The matter will adjust itself later on, and the one nation on earth that talks and thinks most of the sanctity of human life will be a little astonished at the waste of life for which it will be responsible. In those days, my captain, the man who can command seasoned troops and have made the best use of those troops will be sought after and petted and will rise to honour. Remember the Hakaiti when next you measure the naked recruit.

Let us revisit calmer scenes. I’ve been down for three perfect days to the seaside. Don’t you remember what a really fine day means? A milk-white sea, as smooth as glass, with blue-white heat haze hanging over it, one little wave talking to itself on the sand, warm shingle, four bathing machines, cliff in the background, and half the babies in Christendom paddling and yelling. It was a queer little place, just near enough to the main line of traffic to be overlooked from morning till night. There was a baby—an Ollendorfian baby—with whom I fell madly in love. She lived down at the bottom of a great white sunbonnet; talked French and English in a clear, bell-like voice, and of such I fervently hope will the Kingdom of Heaven be. When she found that my French wasn’t equal to hers she condescendingly talked English and bade me build her houses of stones and draw cats for her through half the day. After I had done everything that she ordered she went off to talk to some one else. The beach belonged to that baby, and every soul on it was her servant, for I know that we rose with shouts when she paddled into three inches of water and sat down, gasping: “Mon Dieu! Je suis mort!” I know you like the little ones, so I don’t apologise for yarning about them. She had a sister aged seven and one-half—a lovely child, without a scrap of self-consciousness, and enormous eyes. Here comes a real tragedy. The girl—and her name was Violet—had fallen wildly in love with a little fellow of nine. They used to walk up the single street of the village with their arms round each other’s necks. Naturally, she did all the little wooings, and Hugh submitted quietly. Then devotion began to pall, and he didn’t care to paddle with Violet. Hereupon, as far as I can gather, she smote him on the head and threw him against a wall. Anyhow, it was very sweet and natural, and Hugh told me about it when I came down. “She’s so unrulable,” he said. “I didn’t hit her back, but I was very angry.” Of course, Violet repented, but Hugh grew suspicious, and at the psychological moment there came down from town a destroyer of delights and a separator of companions in the shape of a tricycle. Also there were many little boys on the beach—rude, shouting, romping little chaps—who said: “Come along!” “Hullo!” and used the wicked word “beastly!” Among these Hugh became a person of importance and began to realise that he was a man who could say “beastly,” and “Come on!” with the best of ’em. He preferred to run about with the little boys on wars and expeditions, and he wriggled away when Violet put her arm round his waist. Violet was hurt and angry, and I think she slapped Hugh. Relations were strained when I arrived because one morning Violet, after asking permission, invited Hugh to come to lunch. And that bad, Spanish-eyed boy deliberately filled his bucket with the cold seawater and dashed it over Violet’s pink ankles. (Joking apart, this seems to be about the best way of refusing an invitation that civilisation can invent. Try it on your Colonel.) She was madly angry for a moment, and then she said: “Let me carry you up the beach, ’cause of the shingles in your toes.” This was divine, but it didn’t move Hugh, and Violet went off to her mother. She sat down with her chin in her hand, looking out at the sea for a long time very sorrowfully. Then she said, and it was her first experience: “I know that Hugh cares more for his horrid bicycle than he does for me, and if he said he didn’t I wouldn’t believe him.”

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Up to date Hugh has said nothing. He is running about playing with the bold, bad little boys, and Violet is sitting on a breakwater, trying to find out why things are as they are. It’s a nice tale, and tales are scarce these days. Have you noticed how small and elemental is the stock of them at the world’s disposal? Men foregathered at that little seaside place, and, manlike, exchanged stories. They were all the same stories. One had heard ’em in the East with Eastern variations, and in the West with Western extravagances tacked on. Only one thing seemed new, and it was merely a phrase used by a groom in speaking of an ill-conditioned horse: “No, sir; he’s not ill in a manner o’ speaking, but he’s so to speak generally unfriendly with his innards as a usual thing.”

I entrust this to you as a sacred gift. See that it takes root in the land. “Unfriendly with his innards as a usual thing.” Remember. It’s better than laboured explanations in the rains. And I fancy it’s raw.

And now. But I had nearly forgotten. We’re a nation of grumblers, and that’s why other people call Anglo-Indians bores. I write feelingly because M——, just home on long leave, has for the second time sat on my devoted head for two hours simply and solely for the purpose of swearing at the Accountant-General. He has given me the whole history of his pay, prospects and promotion twice over, and in case I should misunderstand wants me to dine with him and hear it all for the third time. If M—— would leave the A.-G. alone he is a delightful man, as we all know; but he’s loose in London now, button-holing English friends and quoting leave and paycodes to them. He wants to see a Member of Parliament about something or other, and I believe he spends his nights rolled up in a rezai on the stairs of the India Office waiting to catch a secretary. I like the India Office. They are so beautifully casual and lazy, and their rooms look out over the Green Park, and they are never tired of admiring the view. Now and then a man comes in to report himself, and the secretaries and the under-secretaries and the chaprassies play battledore and shuttlecock with him until they are tired.

Some time since, when I was better, more serious and earnest than I am now, I preached a jehad up and down those echoing corridors, and suggested the abolition of the India Office and the purchase of a four-pound-ten American revolving bookcase to hold all the documents on India that were of public value or could be comprehended by the public. Now I am more frivolous because I am dropping gently into that grave at Woking; and yet I believe in the bookcase. India is bowed down with too much duftar as it is, and the House of Correction, Revision, Division and Supervision cannot do her much good. I saw a committee or a council file in the other day. Only one desirable tale came to me out of that office. If you’ve heard it before stop me. It began with a cutting from an obscure Welsh paper, I think, A man—a gardener—went mad, announced that Lord Cross was the Messiah and burned himself alive on a pile of garden refuse. That’s the first part. I never could get at the second, but I am credibly informed that the work of the India Office stood still for three weeks, while the entire staff took council how to break the news to the Secretary of State. I believe it still remains unbroken.

. . . . .

Decidedly, leave in England is a disappointing thing. I’ve wandered into two stations since I wrote the last. Nothing but the labels on the bag remain—oh, and a memory of a weighing-in at an East End fishing club. That was an experience. I foregathered with a man on the top of a ’bus, and we became great friends because we both agreed that gorgetackle for pike was only permissible in very weedy streams. He repeated his views, which were my views, nearly ten times, and in the evening invited me to this weighing-in, at, we’ll say, rooms of the Lea and Chertsey Piscatorial Anglers’ Benevolent Brotherhood. We assembled in a room at the top of a publichouse, the walls ornamented with stuffed fish and water-birds, and the anglers came in by twos and threes, and I was introduced to all of ’em as “the gen’elman I met just now.” This seemed to be good enough for all practical purposes. There were ten and five shilling prizes, and the affable and energetic clerk of the scales behaved as though he were weighing-in for the Lucknow races. The take of the day was one pound fifteen ounces of dace and roach, about twenty fingerlings, and the winner, who is in charge of a railway bookstall, described minutely how he had caught each fish. As a matter of fact, roach-fishing in the Lea and Thames is a fine art. Then there were drinks—modest little drinks—and they called upon me for a sentiment. You know how things go at the sergeants’ messes and some of the lodges. In a moment of brilliant inspiration I gave “free fishing in the parks” and brought down the whole house. Sah! free fishing for coarse fish in the Serpentine and the Green Park water would hurt nobody and do a great deal of good to many. The stocking of the water—but what does this interest you? The Englishman moves slowly. He is just beginning to understand that it is not sufiicient to set apart a certain amount of land for a lung of London and to turn people into it with “There, get along and play,” unless he gives ’em something to play with. Thirty years hence he will almost allow cafés and hired bands in Hyde Park.

To return for a moment to the fish club. I got away at eleven, and in darkness and despair had to make my way west for leagues and leagues across London. I was on the Mile End Road at midnight and there lost myself, and learned something more about the policeman. He is haughty in the East and always afraid that he is being chaffed. I honestly only wanted sailing directions to get homeward. One policeman said: “Get along. You know your way as well as I do.” And yet another: “You go back to the country where you comed from. You ain’t doin’ no good ’ere!” It was so deadly true that I couldn’t answer back, and there wasn’t an expensive cab handy to prove my virtue and respectability. Next time I visit the Lea and Chertsey Affabilities I’ll find out something about trains. Meantime I keep holiday dolefully. There is not anybody to play with me. They have all gone away to their own places. Even the Infant, who is generally the idlest man in the world, writes me that he is helping to steer a ten-ton yacht in Scottish seas. When she heels over too much the Infant is driven to the O.P. side and she rights herself. The Infant’s host says: “Isn’t this bracing? Isn’t this delightful?” And the Infant, who lives in dread of a chill bringing back his Indian fever, has to say “Ye-es,” and pretend to despise overcoats. Wallah! This is a cheerful worid.

RUDYARD KIPLING

Scylla and Charybdis

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SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. – SECOND DRAFT

They strolled across the wind, shoulders touching, hands in pockets,
caps driven down on their noses and coat-collars turned up against
the fine rain that was sweeping over the Burrows. Underfoot, the salty,
sheep-bitten turf squelched at every step. Overhead smoking vapours
of the Atlantic drove low in pearly-grey wreaths. Out of the mist to
windward, beyond the grey loom of the pebble-ridge came an unceas-
ing roar of the sea rising and falling in rollers two miles long. To
leeward a few stray cattle and donkeys showed through the haze.
Beyond—blotted out—lay Appledore and the mudflats and sandbanks
of the Pool where the Taw and the Torridge join.

In front of them, veiled with the rest, lay the sea of bent-crowned
bunkers—hillock on hillock of sand, miniature ravines, wadys and
nullahs that fill the far corner of the great triangle of the Burrows. A
spliced and rickety driver, an ancient cleek and a putter that had lost
half its face showed why the boys had sought that bleak waste. One
played golf in the Easter term, when one was not being fagged as a
‘caddy’ by a senior; and whether one liked golf or loathed it the
bunkers were always a city of refuge for small boys.

‘Come on!’ said the tallest of the three, producing a new and almost
speckless gutty. The boys lived very largely on lost balls retrieved
among the bents by sharp eyes. ‘We’ll play from Four to Seven and
see if we can get over Charybdis this time.’

He was a child of remarkably cheerful countenance with light hazel
eyes and a singularly elastic step. Trouser hem and coat sleeve showed
he was growing fast.

‘Beetle’s lost his again. Oh come on, Beetle!’ This was a bony and
sallow youth, with a prominent nose and a mouth seldom shut;
black-haired, black-lashed, with a distinct Irish accent.

The third boy, fat and unhandy, rubbed the wet from his spectacles
with a grimy handkerchief, dropped his putter, recovered it, felt
through his pockets and raised his hand suddenly to his head.

‘I put it in my cap, I remember now. But it isn’t there!’

‘Serves you right. You’re so beastly careless. Well now you’ll have
to caddy for Turkey and me,’ said the hazel-eyed one.

‘That’s not fair Corkran.’

‘Shut up. It’s two to one,’ said the sallow boy. ‘Come on!’

Beetle replaced his hands in his pockets, putter under armpit, grunted,
and set out for No.4 green. He had consorted with these two since
his first term—a year ago when they were almost as wretched and
forlorn as himself. Corkran of the dancing eyes had decreed it, with
McTurk seated upon a play-box, down in the lavatory, after they had
been bullied all one solid afternoon by Fairburn and Cobby Adams.
They had invented that famous law of two to one, which settled all
questions. So far, Beetle had been the victim but if he could ever win
over Corkran or McTurk to his views then it would be two to one
against McTurk or Corkran. That day had not yet come but Beetle lived
in hope. A year in a boy’s life is almost all eternity and Beetle never
contemplated independent action of any kind. Together they had griz-
zled, homesick and miserable; together they had written letters to their
people praying to be taken away from ‘this beastly place’; together they
had been flung into the deep end of the baths to teach them how to
swim; together they had cooked sparrows over the gas on a nib; togeth-
er they had made sloe-jam, kept silk-worms, skinned small vermin and
bullied boys smaller than themselves. Together they discussed life: its
difficulties—as ut with the subjunctive and the protean genders of
Gaul; its ambushes: as Fairburn and Cobby; its defeats: gatings,
black-marks and imposition; its delights: as tuck and a casual post-
office order from a relative; and its successes: a warm place at the
formroom fire and little comforts and shortcuts thought out by their
united minds. Small boys of twelve, in the later seventies, at a school
designed to pass boys into the Army had to make their own life much
as the Red Indian makes his.

Ordinary warfare with their fellows they recognised as fair; but a
recent invasion of the broad links by men—grown men in red-coats,
troubled them greatly. Golf had not then become fashionable and the
school which had learned the game viva voce at the haft of a broken
club, believed, with all the wrongheadedness of young animals, that the
links were theirs. Men whom they knew by sight—old[?] men in work-
manlike tweeds could play on them of course; but this steady
immigration of red-coated strangers they considered an outrage. The
matter had been very fully discussed in the formrooms.

‘There’s another—by gum!’ said Corkran when they reached No.
Four green. ‘You know they brought a whole waggonnette full of ’em
to “Rowena” last week, all red coats too.’

‘Well, they can’t interfere with us.’ McTurk turned his back
on the red blob in the mist and addressed the ball. Some one most
impolitely cried ‘Hi!’ which is no form of salutation on the links.

‘Go on, Turkey,’ said Corkran ‘It’s only a fresh cad of some kind.’

An elderly gentleman encased in a fearful combination of heather-
mixture stockings, white spats, orange boots, and elephants’-end
knickerbockers (they could have forgiven everything except the red
coat) strode towards them crying ‘What are you doing on the links. We
can’t have little boys here.’

A caddy of their acquaintance panted behind with an enormous can-
vas and leather club-bag, as vilely new as the yellow boots. Now it was
their faith—hammered into them by their elders—that a man who
needed more than driver, cleek and putter under any circumstances was
an ass.

McTurk drove off with a clear clean smack, putting all the wriggle
of him into the drive.

‘Them’s Collegers,’ the caddy explained grinning.

‘I don’t care who they are. I didn’t come down here all the way
from London—all the way from London—to find the links used by little
boys. I shall complain to the Secretary. I shall certainly complain to
the Secretary! Puts me off my stroke. Puts me off my stroke entirely.’

page 2

Corkran followed McTurk’s lead, in silence and they drew off
together.

‘Hi! Hi! Hi! You boy with the spectacles. Can’t you answer me?’

‘What a howlin’ bargee!’ said Beetle hunching one shoulder.
‘That’s what comes of lettin’ all these London cads on to the links.’

They heard the unmistakeable snarl of a digging driver shot behind
them and the ball came trundling by at a rate of four miles an hour.

‘Put back your turf,’ McTurk called over his shoulder.

‘Put that clod back, Dicky,’ Stalky cried.

‘Don’t cut up the green!’ Beetle shouted and they went on into the
mist.

‘They’m Collegers, Sir,’ was Dicky Yeo’s explanation as the old
gentleman looked ruefully at the scarred turf.

‘Don’t know how I came to do it. ‘Pon my word I don’t. They put
me off my stroke the young devils. Links given up to a parcel of boys—
larking all over the place—taking no notice when they’re spoken to.
Outrageous, I think.’

His second drive, and it was a good lie too, repeated the first; and
was followed by a commination service so rich, so full, so varied that
the delighted boys to whom it carried down wind decided at once to
abandon their own game and wait developments.

‘If he curses like that on the turf, what will he say when he gets into
Charybdis. He’s bound to be bunkered there. He can’t play one little
bit’ said Corkran.

‘I vote we go over to Charybdis and lie up in our cave and listen,’
said McTurk.

‘Oh, it will be so beastly wet any how,’ said Beetle. ‘Much better
go back to Coll.’

‘And have Fairburn bully us till tea? Not much. It’s two to one
Beetle. Come on.’

Now that terrible bunker Charybdis was in those days—but sands
shift almost as quickly as the years—a deep and ragged crater midway
between the sixth and seventh holes about the distance of an average
drive. With luck and direction you may land on some twenty feet of
sweet short turf that separate its right flank from the low, broken
hillocks of pimply Scylla but in five cases out of seven you, trusting
to drive over it, drop neatly into the crater the walls of which are sand
and the bottom of which is high, rank bents. The boys had scraped out
a sort of shallow cave under an overhanging lip of bent-bound sand—
such a shelter as sheep stamp out against the wind. Here, for there was
a fringe of bents at the mouth of it, they could just squeeze in and
entirely unseen, command a full view of the crater from south to north.
Here they had heard some very curious and interesting language—such
words as little boys are not supposed to know the meaning of—had
watched the war-dances of their elders when virtuous heads of families
broke niblicks across their knees and called Heaven and Earth and the
caddy to witness how they had kept their tempers. Beetle called
Charybdis ‘Hell’ for these reasons.

Here then they repaired, scuttling low like young partridges through
the mist and were hardly in position ere a ball came booming and
whirring over the lip and buried itself in the bents of the bottom.
As a drive it was a success that carried its own penalty.

‘By gum!’ said Beetle, squirming joyously; for words came after
the ball: words and the sound of heavy feet.

‘I drove over it. I saw it go over.’

‘Yes Sir. I’ll go look forward for her. She’ll be t’other side bunker;
but may be yeou’d better take a look in the bunker too,’ said Dicky Yeo.

They heard the old gentleman climbing the steep side behind them.
He passed within a few feet of the shelter, and slid heavily into the gulf.

‘He’ll never find it,’ whispered Corkran.

‘Looks like a bear at the Zoo—doesn’t he!’ Beetle giggled. ‘By
Jove! He’s cursin’ us still. What a shockin’ bad temper.’

‘Found un?’ This from Dicky Yeo without.

‘ No. Yes. And a good lie too,’ was the answer.

‘Go-olly. Did you see that?’ said Corkran. ‘He took a new ball out
of his pocket.’

‘And shoved it on down on a bit of hard,’ said McTurk.

Beetle wiped his spectacles furiously. The old gentleman had cho-
sen a very good lie; but it cost him two chops with a niblick and one
with a lofting iron ere he was free.

Swiftly Corkran hurried to the bottom of the crater and recov-
ered the original ball. ‘Look at it,’ said he. ‘That isn’t one of our
gutties. Pascall, St Andrews stamped in black. Besides it’s cut differ-
ently. I knew that by the hum it made. Bags 1!’

‘What a beastly old cheat,’ said McTurk.

‘Oh it was only practice—not a game,’ said Beetle.

‘Well if he’d do that at practice what wouldn’t he do in a match,’
said Corkran.

‘Dunno. You can crib in a qualifying exam. You mustn’t in a com-
petitive,’ said Beetle whose morals so far were simple and
uncontaminated.

‘Yes; but this isn’t an exam. This is serious,’ said Corkran.

‘Oh no. It only shows he’s a cad. All chaps in red coats are,’ said
McTurk. ‘Listen! Didn’t you hear a sally? Over by the Frying-pan?’

page 3

It was the fashion of that [senior (sic)] among seniors to go
rabbit-shooting with saloon pistols and when game failed what more
natural than that they should devise wars and ambushes, using dust shot
instead of bulleted breech caps and, more or less, keeping a crooked
left arm before their eyes.

‘It’s Wigram and that lot,’ said Beetle. ‘They’ll plug at us—for
fun. Dust shot hurts too.’

‘ ‘Tisn’t as bad as salt,’ said McTurk absently rubbing his calf.
Keepers misunderstand boys so cruelly sometimes.

‘Huh!’ Stalky slapped his pocket. ‘I’d back a tweaker against a
sally any day.’

Indeed a well constructed catapult—low in the nick, long in the
grip and supple-pouched, is in the hands of an expert five times more
deadly than any ironmongery that ever came out of Belgium. The
Frying-pan was another crater bunker far to the left of the links—the
recognised stamping ground of the bold and the bad. A continuous
ripple of pops came to their ears, as they wormed through the bents.
Seniors do not like to be spied upon by juniors: least of all when their
diversions are such that they think it best to turn their caps inside out.
The mist, thicker than ever, saved the three from discovery. They
crawled to the edge of the Frying-pan and looked down upon a wholly
satisfactory war—five seniors a side: each one laid at length behind
such cover as he could find. The least movement drew fire from an
unseen enemy. It was the end of a hotly contested campaign on bush
models in which caps and trouser legs had suffered.

‘Plaistow. I’m running out of ammunition,’ a voice whispered.

‘Come over to me, then,’ said Plaistow.

‘Don’t you move Gobby.’ This was Ingram across the bunker.
‘I’ll plug you if you do!’

‘Look out! It’s a ruse—to put us off. Behind you Ingram! Behind
you!’

‘Ouch!’ Ingram outflanked had been peppered on the calf at five
yards and leaped to his feet.

Plaistow and Gobby, their coats over their heads for protection,
wheeled into the open and fired left and right driving Ingram’s forces
(the boys had just sense enough not to rush in on dust shot) up the sides
of the bunker, when these descended clad in heather-mixture stockings,
white spats and the accursed blood red coat. Apropos of nothing save
the smell of gunpowder for he had not been hit, he called them a par-
cel of young blackguards. That is to say he addressed the fore part of
the sentence to the hind part of Ingram fleeing over the ridge. The rest
spent itself on the empty bunker all littered with empty cartridges. One
does not lead ‘sally fights’ without knowing something of cover.

‘Young devils firing guns at each other. Where the deuce did my
ball go to?’ He blew his nose wrathfully. ‘And they call this golf in
southern England!’

‘Are you deluding yourself into the notion that you are playing golf
Sir?’ The bland carefully articulated English voice out of the mist
belonged to Plaistow. ‘You’re miles out of your line, Sir.’
‘Am I! Heh? Am I? What’s that got to do with you Sir?’
‘Oh nothing. Only we hate a foozler. Don’t we?’
‘I say you must have pulled atrociously, your last drive.’ That was
Ingram, the school’s golf-champion. The old gentleman literally pawed
the sand in his wrath; but he was less lucky than the bull of the arena
in that he could not see his enemies.

‘Well! Hurry up. Find your ball. Don’t stay here all night.’
‘Go back to the pavilion and get a plan of the links from the
Secretary. It’s threepence.’

‘I don’t know who you are. But let me tell you you’re no gentle-
man.’ He was trying to face all ways at once as voice after voice stung
him.

‘Bluggins—Bluggins—keep your hair on,’ warningly and [regret-
fully?]. The unholy christening was received with joy.

‘Why Bluggins is that you, old man? I swear we didn’t know you
in that coat.’

‘Don’t go Bluggins. You’re just gettin’ amusin’!’
‘Goodbye, Bluggins. Sorry we can’t help you to find your ball.’
The boys drew off in silence but to the almost unbearable delight of
the three watchers, the old gentleman explained to the mist that he was
a major and several other things: that he had golfed on all the links of
the North but never in his life had been treated after this fashion. Then
he climbed out in their direction.

‘We’d better go I think,’ said Beetle. ‘He’s pretty average wrathy.’
‘Sit tight. We haven’t done anything,’ said Stalky. This made no
particular difference for the old gentleman found the whipping boys his
soul needed.

‘Oh you’re the young devils,’ he began and, with no more explana-
tion, soundly boxed Beetle’s ears. ‘I’ll teach you to insult people on the
links. What—what d’you mean?’ He had reason to ask because he
found himself covered by two catapults, each drawn to the hand. Beetle
wriggled free and hastened to bring up his artillery.

The ms of the revised version finishes here at the end of the third page
of foolscap without any formal indication of being abandoned at this
point. We continue with the first draft.

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. – FIRST DRAFT (or scroll to * * * * * to continue tale)

They strolled down wind, shoulders touching, hands in pockets,
caps driven down over noses and coat collars turned up against the fine
rain that was sweeping across the burrows. Underfoot the salty sheep-
bitten turf squelched at each step; and overhead the smoking vapours
from the Atlantic drove low in pearly grey wreaths. Out of the mist to
windward, beyond the grey line of the pebble-ridge, came the unceas-
ing roar of the sea, rising and falling in mile long rollers. To leeward a
few stray cattle and donkeys showed through the haze of the flats.
Beyond the [grey?] blotted out surf lay Appledore and the mud flats
and sand banks of the Pool where the Taw and the Torridge meet.

page 4

In front of them, mist veiled with the rest, lay a sea of bent-crowned
bunkers—hillock on hillock, miniature ravines, wadys and nullahs that
fill the far corner of the great triangle of the burrows. A spliced and
ricketty [sic] cleek, a putter and a cut down driver lacking half its face
showed why the boys [had] sought that bleak waste. One played Golf
in the Easter term. That was the custom—unless one were fagging for
a senior as caddy; and whether one liked golf or loathed it, the bunkers
were ever a city of refuge from persecution.

The tallest of the three began to search through many pockets,
removing at last an almost black gutta-percha. He was a boy of remark-
ably cheery countenance, with twinkling hazel eyes and a singularly
light step. Trouser hem and coat sleeve showed he was growing rapid-
ly. The owner of the cleek followed his example but clumsily. This was
a sallow and bony child, black-eyebrowed, black-lashed, with a promi-
nent nose; a mouth generally half open and a fairly developed Irish
accent.

‘Come on Beetle! Where’s yours?’

The boy with the putter dropped it—he was fat and unhandy—
rubbed the wet off his spectacles with a grimy handkerchief and began
his search.

‘Come on! We can’t wait all night. You had it when we left
College,’ said the driver.

‘You put it in your cap, you fool,’ drawled the Irishman.

‘So I did’ said Beetle raising his hat. ‘But—but it isn’t here now.
I must have dropped it.’

‘Serves you right. You’re so beastly careless. Well, you’ll have to
caddy for Turkey and me.’

‘Catch hold!’ said McTurk flinging the cleek at him; Beetle tucked
it under his arm with the putter in silence. ‘Come on Corkey.’

He had consorted with these two since his first term—a year ago
when they were almost as wretched as himself. Corkran of the light eyes
had decided with McTurk, in a boxroom, sitting upon a play-box after
they had been bullied all one solid hour by Fairburn; and Beetle had
taken his orders with meekness and joy. If Corkran and McTurk agreed
upon a matter who was he to object. Was it not two to one; and perfect-
ly fair. If he could ever win McTurk or Stalky to his views it would be
two to one against Stalky or McTurk. That joyful day had not yet come
but Beetle lived in hope. Together they had cooked sparrows over the
gas on rusty nibs; together they had made sloe jam; together they had
been flung into the deep end of the baths to teach them how to swim;
together they had dared to insult a senior and together they had waged
war against him when he came to slay them. Together they had grizzled,
sore and homesick, down in the lavatories, cheering one another with
the thought that they would write home to their parents and be taken
away from this beastly place; together they had striven to assist each
other with the mysteries of ut with the subjunctive and the genders of
Gaul. A year in a boy’s life is very long. Looking back mistily as
children do, they could not remember when they were unallied.

Corkran drove off with a clean full smack, putting all the wriggle of
him into the unhandy driver. They would play from the fourth to the
seventh hole and see if this time they could clear Charybdis—that big
bunker whose other name was Hell. The links have been altered since
many times and golf is a game for men, with a literature of its own; but
in those far days men were few on the links; red coats practically
unknown; and the School, who learned golf at the haft of a broken
cleek, regarded them as interlopers.

McTurk was addressing himself to the ball when some one most
impolitely called ‘Hi!’ which is no form of address on the links.

An elderly gentleman, evidently a stranger, clad in a blood-red coat
and encased in a fearful combination of ribbed heather-mixture, white
spats, and elephant’s behind-end knickerbockers, strode towards them
angrily: ‘What are you doing on the links? We don’t want little boys
here.’ A caddy of their acquaintance panted up behind him, with a
huge—and to the boys new—tanned canvas and leather bag.

‘Go on Turkey,’ said Corkran. It was not etiquette to notice a
player. McTurk drove off as cleanly as Stalky but with a more cramped
hand.

‘They’m Collegers,’ the caddy explained with a grin.

‘I don’t care who they are. I didn’t come down here all the way
from London to—all the way from London to find the links covered by
little boys. I shall complain to the Secretary. I shall certainly complain
to the Secretary. Put me off my stroke—put me off my stroke entirely.’

‘Hi! You caddy!’ This was to Beetle who was following the
others. He did not answer. ‘You boy, with the spectacles. Can’t you
answer me!’

‘Oh play golf and don’t jaw,’ snapped McTurk.

‘Go back to London,’ said Stalky. ‘The links don’t belong to you.’

‘We’ve been golfin’ here for years,’ said Beetle; and turned on his
heel, the gentleman pursuing them with language.

‘Too beastly,’ said McTurk. ‘Why they bring down a [sic] whole
wagonnette-fuls of men from the hotel to play [usually?]. I counted one
of ’em.’

‘Oh he’s a cad o’ some kind. Never mind. Where did my ball land,
Beetle? Oh it’s no good asking you.’

‘We’re right in the middle of the double-drive hole,’ said McTurk.
‘We ought to be able to find another pretty soon.’ The boys lived very
largely on lost balls. He hunted in a patch of bents. ‘Here’s one. Brand
new—lost first drive. Look where the ass topped it.’ The white paint
was scarred with the telltale crescent on the top. Otherwise it was virgin.

‘Phwit!’ A ball dropped with a whirr into a thick bed of bents.

‘That’s old gaiters,’ said Corkran. ‘He must have pulled about a
mile to the left. He’ll never find it.’

page 5

‘Let him sweat then’ said Beetle, a few yards further on. ‘Here’s
your ball, Turkey, and a good lie too. Driver?’

‘Not much. I don’t want to fetch up in the Kafoozalum (a small
bunker about fifty yards away). I’m goin’ to loft her over. Topped it.
Blow!’

The ball, hugging the turf, danced up to the top side of the bunker
and skipped over the edge. Kafoozalum like Charybdis was a crater.

‘Have you seen my ball? I say, have you seen my ball!’ This to [sic:
from?] the mist behind them.

‘Let him hunt. We ain’t his caddies,’ said McTurk. ‘Look here. It’s
rather rot havin’ this cad yellin’ at us. Let’s stop and go to Charybdis
and see him come along. You can hear him cursin’ his caddie.’

‘Oh that’s Dicky Yeo. Dicky is an awful little brute. He can’t
mark a ball a little bit.’

‘Come on to Charybdis. We can get under the lip of it there—where
we made the cave. It’ll be drier,’ said Beetle.

They turned through the dunes by short cuts known to themselves
and the sheep; scaled the forty-foot slope of mighty Charybdis; and
curled up under an overhanging lip of bent-bound sand. It was one of
their retreats on a hot day, and they had scraped away a very cosy, if
cramped, little lair. Bents fringed the front of it so that, once laid down,
they could command a full view of the crater, themselves practically
invisible.

‘How he swears!’ said Stalky after a pause, turning on his stomach,
his chin between his hands.

‘Wonder if he’spracticin’ orplayin’,’ said McTurk. ‘He’s whackin’
away like—like a woodpecker. Bet you he gets badly bunkered here.’

‘Here he comes!’

A ball curled over the edge of the crater; dropped on the only patch
[of?] ground that was not hardened by the rain, and buried itself.

‘He’ll have to chop it up with a niblick—ten whacks, at least—for
him.’

‘Oh I cleared that. I saw it go over,’ they heard him say.

‘Golly, what a liar!’

‘I’ll go forward then. You’d better take a look inside. He’m a bad
bunker Sir.’

The old gentleman stumbled up. It was a mere accident that he did
not step on the lip of sand and bury all three boys—slid down into the
bowl of Charybdis and, unspeakable joy to the watchers, brought down
enough sand to thoroughly bury the ball.

‘Mark!’ whispered Corkran to McTurk. Beetle wiped his spectacles
[excitedly?] and stared with all his eyes.

The old gentleman looked, and looked again, using language that
ought to have brought a blush to the cheek of youth. But at twelve one
does not blush much.

‘Found it Sir?’ cried Dicky without.

‘No—not yet. Oh yes! Here it is. And a good lie too.’

‘Whew!’ said Corkran. ‘Did he drop it down his trouser leg?’

‘No. Took it [bang] out of his pocket, new ball. Filthy cheat! Golly.
What would he do in a match if he did this while he was practising?’

‘I didn’t see—I didn’t see’ said Beetle.

‘Well we did. Wait till he gets out an’ we’ll collar the ball.’

Ten chops and a swipe carried the old gentleman past his hazard[?].
They crept out, unearthed the lost ball, sorely hacked and cut, and were
ready to go, when another ball tumbled between them!

‘They’re all dropping into Charybdis today,’ said Corkran. ‘Wind
shifted I suppose.’

Bury it,’ said Beetle ‘and see what this chap’ll do.’
Promptly Corkran drove it under with his heel, scooped the sand
over it, and they returned to their lair.

Solitude and secrecy are terrible solvents of morality. It was another old
gentleman; with his caddy who acted as Dicky Yeo had done. But this play-
er searched longer than the first it is true; but at the end—he found the ball.

‘Two to us,’ said Corkran, digging up the second cache. ‘Well!’

‘My winkie,’ said Beetle. ‘It’s too jolly awful. We mustn’t play on
their beastly links either.’

‘Well, you know, the caddies don’t like us. Lost balls are their
perk. ‘That’s what they think. We find ’em though. Three today.’

‘Hark! Didn’t you hear a sally?’

It was the fashion of that term among the seniors to go rabbit shoot-
ing with saloon pistols. When game was scarce what more natural than
that they should arrange war-parties among themselves using dust caps
instead of bulleted breech caps.

‘It’s out over by the Frying-pan,’ said McTurk. ‘Let’s go and watch
’em.’

‘Then they’ll plug at us for fun. Dust shot hurts, too.’

‘Huh!’ Stalky slapped his pocket. ‘I’d back a tweaker against a sally
any day.’

In truth, a well constructed catapult, long in the grip, low in the
nick, with thin elastic and a supple pouch is more deadly than any iron-
mongery that came out of Belgium. They moved cautiously in the
direction of firing. Seniors did not like being spied upon especially
when their play was such as to demand turning their caps.

page 6

Plaistow of the Lower Fifth was at war with Wigram [sic], four
boys a side and the battle, a series of Indian surprises, raged merrily in
the mist. The boys were careful to keep their elbows before their eyes
and fire over a ducking arm. If they caught an enemy in the rear the
rules allowed them to fire point blank at his legs. The three small boys
nestled in a hollow at the top of the Frying-pan and looked down into
the long, low bunker squeaking with delight. Ingram had caught
Plaistow on a tightly stretched trouser and the hollow sand walls rang
to his outcries.

But Adams—Cobby Adams who afterwards became a naturalist of
renown, crawled upon his belly and outflanked Ingram who was gloat-
ing over the victory, and peppered him on the calf at ten yards—a
beautiful shot. The engagement became general—boy after boy stalk-
ing and being stalked in his turn. And the deepening mist lent itself well
to the concealed game.

Into the riot of a sudden dropped an elderly gentleman with heather-
mixture stockings, white spats and the blood red coat which to a rightly
constructed Colleger of those days was rather worse than a red rag to a bull.

Apropos of nothing in particular except the smell of gunpowder, for
he had not been hit, he called them ‘Young scoundrels.’ That is to say
he addressed the words to as much of Ingram as had not wriggled into
cover. The last of the sentence spent itself on the empty bunker littered
with cartridge cases. One does not practice sally-wars without knowing
how to utilize cover.

‘A parcel of scamps firing guns at each other. I shall complain to the
Secretary. I shall certainly complain to the Secretary,’ and he blew his
nose angrily. ‘They call this golf in Southern England.’

‘Are you deluding yourself with the notion you’ve been playing
golf, Sir?’ That was from Plaistow, [from the mist?] at the far end of
the Frying-pan. ‘You’re miles out of your line, Sir.’

‘Am I Heh? Am I? Don’t shout at me from cover, Sir, in that way.’

‘I say, you must have pulled shockin’ that last drive of yours.’
Ingram [Wigram?] was the School’s golf champion and what his
[youthful] eye and head did not know of the links was not worth know-
ing. ‘You pulled Sir. Don’t tell me. You pulled atrociously.’

‘Mi—iles out of your line. Pon my soul. You ought to have a dog
and a lantern, Sir.’

‘Golly, what a lark,’ said Corkran squirming in his shelter.

The old gentleman literally pawed the sand as a bull in the arena but
he was less lucky than the animal in that he could not see his
tormentors.

‘Go back to the pavilion and get a plan of the links from the
Secretary. It’s 3d.’

‘I—I don’t know who you are—but let me tell you this. You’re no
gentlemen.’

‘Bluggins! Bluggins! Keep your hair on.’

‘He’m quite raight. Us belongs to Bidevoor grammar schule, us do.
Aie!’

‘Bluggins, you’ve sold us enough cheese—yes [?] an’ sassingers
to know that.’

‘Why Bluggins! Is that you? How’s the shop getting on Bluggins?’

‘Shut up. His name’s Smith. Go home, Smith. You’re drunk.’ With
this last shot, Ingram and Plaistow [withheld?] their fire and withdrew
in silence. To the almost unbearable delight of the three small boys, the
old gentleman explained to the mist, that he was a Colonel and several
other things; that he had golfed on every links in the North; but he had
never in all his experience met with such treatment.

At this point, but not before, Dick Yeo, bursting with vulgar
joy wandered up. No, Dicky Yeo did not know for the life of him who
those rude persons might be. Did they say they belonged to Bideford
Grammar School? Then very possibly they might so belong. Meantime
would Colonel Martin continue the game.

‘Not today. Not today. Put me off my stroke altogether. Little boys
on the green—very ill mannered little boys—and a parcel of howling
barbarians with guns, afterwards. Why they as [much?] as told me I
couldn’t play the game.’

The Colonel began to climb out of the bunker heading directly for
the boys lair. Beetle made a quick motion.

‘We’re all right,’ said Corkran. ‘He can’t do anything to us.’

Herein lay the mistake, for the Colonel found in them the whipping
boys that his soul needed.

‘You here! You here! Didn’t I tell you to leave the links at once?
What on earth d’you mean by disobeying orders in this way? Heh?’ He
drew his thick eyebrows together and breathed heavily through his
nose.

‘Who are you?’ said McTurk in a note of deep and cold disgust.
‘You’ve bothered us once this afternoon already. Go away!’

‘Who am I! Bothered you once, have I. I’m to go away, am I?

What’s the world coming to. Be off at once; or I shall be angry. I shall
be seriously angry.’

‘What are we doing, please? This is Appledore burroughs [sic].
Even if you were a pot-walloper—’

‘Heh! What?’ The word was new to the Colonel.

‘Pot-walloper—a man who is allowed to graze cattle on the bur-
roughs [sic]. Those cattle.’ McTurk pointed into the mist.

‘—But confound you, I don’t graze cattle, Sir.’

page 7

‘Well I say even if you did, you couldn’t order us about in this way.
You ought to know that?’

‘Oh come on. No good having a row,’ said Beetle.

‘No I’m not coming,’ said McTurk who as the son of an Irish
Baronet held strong views even in his youth on landed property.
‘We’ve done nothing to you.’

‘He’ll report us to the Head or some rot,’ whispered Beetle. ‘Leave
him alone.’

‘Well he can if he wants to. We belong to the College here. You can
see our house caps. If you want our names we’ll give ’em to you. Then
you can report us for anything you like.’

‘ Oh that’s what boys are like these days, is it. When I was your age
I obeyed my elders.’

‘Well, what d’you want us to do. You say “Be off. Where to? Are
you going to hunt us all round the burrows or what?’

The tone was a little too much for the Colonel and he struck at
McTurk with the handle of his driver, more in a [petulant?] and admon-
ishing manner than with any intent to hurt. The boy leaped back
to avoid the blow. Next instant, the Colonel was, so to say, looking
down the muzzles of three loaded catapults—tense drawn; and care-
fully aimed at his legs.

* * * * *

‘You mustn’t do that,’ said Stalky clearly and shrilly. ‘If you go
about hitting boys you’ll get hurt. We’ll give you twenty yards law
and then we’ll plug at you.’

‘We thought you were a gentleman from your stockings,’ said
McTurk. ‘But you’re only a cad and it doesn’t matter. Are you going
to start?’

‘If you don’t you’ll get it now and it’ll hurt.’

‘Come away, Sir. Come away’ said Dick Yeo. ‘They’m Collegers.
Them tweakers’ll nigh kill ‘ee.’ He hauled at the speechless man’s coat
tails and the Colonel gave ground, swearing like a trooper but he would
not turn his back to the foe.

‘Now!’ said Corkran. ‘Fire low.’

There was a yell of pain and buckshot had sunk into a well filled
calf and the Colonel danced.

‘Load! Independent firing from the right.’ A military school has its
enthusiasts. The Colonel fled into the mist.

‘What a cad!’ was their only comment and after a little talk they dis-
missed the matter from their minds, and went up to College.

But the Colonel that evening in the Club told a tale that made the
Club Secretary look grave. He had been insulted and assaulted by
boys—mobs of them—some from Bideford Grammar School, which
institution he desired razed to the ground; others—three small devils he
called them—with red and black caps who said they belonged to the
College on the hill. These last had … he pulled down the heather-mix-
ture stocking.

‘You’ve been tweaked,’ said the Secretary who was also father of a
day boy.

The Major did not know the word but he was convinced that he
had not deserted St Andrews for the South Country to be treated in this
shape. Three small devils with lethal weapons, etc. When and where
should they be caught and punished? To this day men remember the
wrath of Major Martin in the old Golf Club that was destroyed by the
sea. He would pursue the matter to the bitter end.

By a most merciful dispensation of Providence, the
Secretary’s son was a confirmed “tweaker” as dayboys are apt to be. At
fifteen one has many things on one’s mind unfitting for a father to
know, and when the Secretary asked him questions about catapults and
recent adventures his sensitive conscience took alarm so that his father
was all misled and said to himself:- ‘If it wasn’t Dickie, he knows
something about it; and as Dickie has already been twice licked this
term for “tweaking”, he will probably get into immense trouble.’

And that was why the Secretary diverted Major Martin with sweet
words from carrying his complaint direct to the Head of the College
but promised him many and horrible private revenges.

‘We’ll catch them sooner or later my dear Sir. We’ll show them that
we mean business. We can make it much warmer for them than their
master can. One doesn’t want to make a thing like that public. After all,
there’s an element of the ridiculous in it.’

‘I utterly fail to see it,’ said the Major. ‘They—they “tweaked” me
as you call it—damnably.’

The Secretary—for these things do secretaries earn their wage—
approached the Head privily. His son had not yet dared the iniquity of
saloon-pistols, and it was the tale of the duels in the Frying-pan that
annoyed the Head most.

‘Yes I promise you I’ll attend to that. I believe there’s a regular
corps of young warriors of that kidney. I shall presently have a parent
writing that her lamb has lost his eyes—through my negligence. I must
lick for that. Otherwise,’—his eye twinkled—’it is strictly in accord
with the traditions of the School!’

‘He says he could tell their—dusty yellow caps anywhere.’ The
Secretary laughed.

‘Caps inside out, too. I wonder how often I have detected that little
ruse de guerre. I will make enquiries and put a stop to it. Or to any minor
annoyances, of course you can deal with the offenders yourself or send
’em to me as you think fit. We must teach the boys that they have not
[got] a vested interest in the links.’ That was the Head’s second term at
golf and though not a hardened maniac he was advancedly insane.

page 8

‘I should know them anywhere,’ said the Major at the Club. ‘One
of them is a little shock-headed beast with spectacles.’

But the heather-mixture stockings and the white spats were rather
more conspicuous than Beetle’s giglamps and the boys behaved
accordingly. Beyond doubt ‘gaiters’, ‘Bluggins’ or Smith was a cad;
but he was still a grown-up person; and the laws that regulated a man’s
conduct were barbarous and incomprehensible. They avoided him once
or twice, sheering off into the bunkers at half a mile. Occasionally they
took refuge in their lair at Charybdis and stimulated by past experience
promptly buried or confiscated any ball that dropped in. Three times
did Bluggins, and Bluggins was playing a match too, put down a new
ball, saying he had found the old one; twice did the other old gentleman
who played with Bluggins—they christened him “Pot” because he
was somewhat round—do the same thing.

And there were others—four in all. So their stock of golf-balls
increased as their estimate of human nature sank.

‘For we all have our funny little ways,’ Corkran lilted brushing the
sand off his knee.

‘Which we don’t show when anybody’s nigh—

My Goodness gracious me

What funny things you see

What funny things are done upon the sly.’

It was an inauspicious carol. The shrill tones carried far across the
bunkers; and Bluggins heard them. But he was a tactician too; or it may
be that, remembering the tweakers, he shunned a direct attack; for he
topped a bunker and disappeared with Dicky Yeo.

For a wonder, it was a fine day and the corrugated iron side of the
pavilion glimmered white against the dull blue of the pebble ridge—a
mile away, all [shining?] [wet?] in the soft air; and the links were
dotted with the accursed red coats.

‘It’s Fore! Fore! Fore! Every beastly minute,’ said Corkran,
ducking to the whirr of a golf-ball. ‘I like these men’s cheek.
Half of ’em can’t play a little bit; and they jaw at us!’

‘Fore! Get out of our light there!’ A couple were just driving off
from the third hole. They heard the distinct explosive ‘dam[n]’ as a
topped ball sliddered [(sic) slithered?] along the turf: and laughed.

‘I s’pose we’ve put ’em off their stroke’ said McTurk.

‘Rummy thing’ said Beetle, reflectively. ‘If you look at a man you
put him off his stroke, and we don’t mind any one cloddin’ us even.
I’ve driven off with Hewlett buzzin’ gutties at me. Jolly good gutties
old Bluggins keeps, don’t he!’ He looked at a Charybdis ball with
affection.

‘You ass! That isn’t a gutty. I asked Dicky Yeo and he told me
Bluggins said it was a St Andrews [tranter]. A gutty goes b-r-r-r but
a [tranter] goes wheir! wheir! like a bullet. They’re scored different.
Besides our gutties have the maker’s name in pink. This chap’—he
lugged out his share of the spoil—’is black: Pascall—St Andrews.’

‘Let’s go over to the Pavilion’ said McTurk. ‘Bluggins’ll be
halfway on his round.’

But this was just [where] Bluggins was not. He had turned back hot
foot; and even as they reached the [most?] first putting green, where
half a dozen men were gathered discussing [comparable? competi-
tion?] strokes, his hand fell on Corkran’s shoulder.

‘I want you my young friends,’ he said grimly. ‘I don’t think
you’ll use your catapult here. Hi! Raikes! I’ve got ’em. These are the
young imps I spoke about.’

The Secretary was buying a new driver and stood waggling it in the
doorway. A knot of men within were talking apparatus—which is the
one form of golf any one appreciates. A caddy or two waiting to go out
lounged under the shelter of the eaves; and there were drinks on a table.

‘Hullo! What’s up!’ a small lazy crowd gathered with great swiftness;
and the prisoners were moved into the anteroom.

To do him justice, the Major had decided to forgive the assault,
after a severe talking to. This the boys did not know; and he forfeited
all chance of mercy when he shook McTurk by the collar.

‘Look here—you mustn’t do that. We’re coming,’ the Irishman
snapped. ‘Tell him to let go of my collar, Mr Parkes.’

Corkran[‘s] eye swept the amused assembly. Three of them were
fathers of day boys; “Pot” was there wiping his moustache after his
whiskey and soda; two young men whom he did not know leaned
against the wall smiling; Captain Raikes (why had he “tweaked”
Captain Raikes’ fat spaniel last week!); Mr Parkes the Secretary;
Bluggins and three strangers made up the tale.

‘We’re from the College,’ gasped Beetle.

‘I think we know that,’ said the Secretary. ‘You’ve been guilty of
very serious rudeness.’

‘Hold on a minute. Give ’em a fair trial. What’s the charge?’ said
one of the young men. ‘We don’t know anything about it.’

McTurk had stiffened to attention and Corkran and Beetle followed
his example.

Major Martin gave the company his version of the affair.

‘Well, what was he doing in the Frying-pan at all?’ said Beetle.
There was a roar of laughter for the Frying-pan was the limbo of the
more unlucky. ‘It’s miles out of his course. We weren’t doing anything
to him. He came and told us to be off.

‘You know he couldn’t do that if he was a potwalloper,’ said
McTurk enraged by another peal of laughter. ‘We know it’s your golf-
club—’

page 9

‘Thanks awflly,’ from the young man.

‘Well, it is. But you can’t take up the whole of the burrows. If a man
can’t keep out of the Frying-pan—between the sixth and seventh—’

‘Excuse me a minute but can you keep out of the Frying-pan?
You talk as if you knew the game.’

‘Of course I can,’ said McTurk. ‘You must foozle badly to get into
it at all. It’s a clear drive from six to the mid-way marker; and a good
lie too, if you don’t get into the cart-ruts. Then it’s another drive—at
least it is for me—and your [sic] bang on to the green.’ Turning to the
Secretary ‘You know that Sir.’

Corkran was thinking—as he had never thought before.

‘Yes, we all know that. But you seem to forget the fact that even if
a man is off his course you needn’t tweak at him.’

‘We didn’t till he hit at us with his club. First he ordered us about
and then he hit at us. Why any cad in Northam would have rocked
him. They’d have rocked him every time they saw him and we only
tweaked him once.’

Then the Major grew very angry. Of course he had hit at them. They
were exceedingly insolent. They refused to obey his orders. For aught
he knew they might been concerned with the pistol-firing party he had
stumbled on.

‘What? D’you fire at people with pistols too!’

‘No Sir,’ from Beetle. ‘It’s—it’s only a little private duelling. We
haven’t anything to do with that. We’re not big enough.’

‘Well, Major, I must say you’ve unearthed a fine surprising sample
of younger generation.’

The Major did not care what he had unearthed. Thrice had he been
shot—’shot Sir—’

‘But only in the leg. I’ll swear it was only in the legs. Why—
Why—suppose you’d hit a man. He’d have hit you in the eye, Sir. You
hadn’t any right to go hitting players.’

‘You called after us like—like cads, Sir. You began shouting at us
first—’

‘All because he couldn’t play a little bit,’ Beetle explained to the
now [thickening?] crowd—

‘You followed us up. We weren’t doing anything to you. Then you
hit at us. Why fifty years ago—’

The Major interrupted.

‘Go on, young man. What would have happened fifty years ago?
We want to know?’ It was the fair-headed young man again—

‘My father would have called you out!’

The courtmartial rocked to and fro at the [polite haughtiness?] of
McTurk and the Major became uncomfortable. He was not going to be
made a public laughing-stock of by a parcel of young vagabonds. He
had not come South from St Andrews, etc.

Suddenly Stalky: his head a little on one side, [elected to throw?] in
a dart.

‘No. I don’t think your father would have called him out, Turkey:
Remember? Charybdis.’

‘Yes. No. Of course he couldn’t. I was wrong Sir. My father
couldn’t have called you out.’

This seemed to make the Major rather more furious than anything
that had gone before.

‘Why! Oh Why?’ Tears were running down the young man’s
cheeks.

‘You tell, Corkran.’

‘Fish ’em out,’ was the oracular response, and the men watched
while the boys went through their pockets bringing out golf-balls.

‘We have a place of our own, just inside Charybdis, where we can
lie down and see everything from a little cave place we’ve made.
Once when we were there he came in, and it was sanded up.’

‘The ball? The ball?’

‘Yes. Then he came in and stepped on it so he couldn’t find it. Then
we heard Dicky Yeo asking whether he had found the ball; he said he
had and he played out—with a new ball. This is the one he left in the
bunker. Well, after that we used to go to Charybdis and watch. We’ve
got—’

The silence was painful as Corkran fumbled for a Pascall ball. ‘He
uses St Andrews tranters [? Saltires ?]. We’ve got three of ’em:
Pascall St Andrews. And we’ve seen—’

‘Nonsense,’ said the Club Secretary genially. ‘That’s quite enough.
If you’re going to talk nonsense like this—’

‘Go on! Go on. We want to know’ said the fair-headed youth.

‘Oh we can’t have boys straying all round the bunkers,’ said a voice
‘and drawing a lot of [false?] conclusions from their ignorance of the
game.’

‘Why one of them has spectacles. He couldn’t have seen.’

The atmosphere seemed to have suddenly chilled around them.

Beetle was about to insist when a warning kick from Corkran
silenced him.

‘You’d better run away and get some little knowledge of the game
you pretend to know so much about.’ said the Secretary.

‘But—but—’ this was McTurk. Corkran in the [background?]
administered another kick.

page 10

‘You have evidently a very fair knowledge of golf for your age.
Haven’t they!’

‘Never want to see any one drive better for his years than that [(sic)
the?] tallest,’ said Pot hurriedly. ‘Wonder if they aren’t hungry? Boys
generally are. Do you think you could eat some biscuit—and lemon-
ade?’

They thought so; and they did; and the men overwhelmed them
with attentions; all except the young man who lay back and laughed.
The Major went out with Pot; he seemed to have forgotten his
vengeance and the boys ate in silence.

‘I think we must be going back to Coll,’ said Corkran at last wiping
his mouth. ‘It’s nearly call over.’

‘Well, goodbye,’ said the Secretary. ‘We won’t say anything more
about the affair and I think the Major will overlook it too.’

‘Do you suppose,’ said the young man. ‘That you’ve hoodwinked
the boys for a minute?’

‘Don’t know—Don’t care,’ said the Secretary simply. ‘We must—
but we couldn’t have that sort of thing could we.’

‘Certainly not,’ said two members indignantly. ‘The little devils
ought to have been well licked.’ And they too went out leaving only the
two young men and the Secretary.

‘Responsible post yours,’ said one.

‘Very,’ said the Secretary.

‘Much of it, d’you think?’ said the other.

‘How does a man feel when he’s alone in a bunker with a lost ball!’
said the Secretary. ‘You ought to know.’

‘Oh we’ve felt the temptation ourselves. That youth will go far.
You did uncommonly well. It destroys all your fellowship in a club at
once.’

The ms stops here one-third down p.8 to be followed by a typically
Kipling doodle of a ‘Chinese Chippendale fret. There are five doodles
altogether in the first draft.

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. – FIRST PAGE 5

They did all in their power to dissuade him. No Club cares to
appear in print, and the Major hinted at Law. Meantime he would keep
his eyes open on the links and woe betide the criminals if he came
across them.

Mercifully, heather-mixture stockings and white spats, not to men-
tion auburn whiskers and a slight limp, are fairly conspicuous objects
on the green, and moreover the boys were careful never to cross the
links openly. They preferred to go down to the sands, trot along the sea-
ward face of the pebble ridge, strike into the bunkers direct and work
their way into Charybdis among the sandhills. It was half-an-hour’s
hard running but Corkran decreed it—at least until time and circum-
stance had delivered to them their enemy. Afternoon upon afternoon
they spent on their stomachs in the cave of Charybdis. Sometimes the
Major, a zealous player, would escape the trap; sometimes he was too
close upon the ball to allow them to steal forth and hide it but, and this
happened three times, whenever a long drive landed him in the bents
and Corkran swiftly crouching had taken charge of the ball, the Major
after diligent search, would put down a new one and serenely drive out.

It was not only the black stamped ‘Pascall St Andrews’ that they
hid but an occasional southern ‘guttie’, the clean-whistling closely-
scored kind, and—solitude and secrecy are terrible solvents of morality
—the boys’ stock of golf-balls rose as their estimate of human nature fell.

‘That makes Bluggins—three times in matches too—Pot’; he was
a somewhat tubby person whose name they did not know; ‘and the
Snorter.’ said Corkran, counting out three St Andrews and four
‘gutties’. ‘If we stayed here long enough we’d collar the whole lot I
suppose. It’s only taken us a week to nobble these.’

‘We shall all be gated next week’ said McTurk. “Member the Head
swears he’ll gate the whole Coll. [sic] if he don’t get the names of the
chaps who fired pistols at Bluggins.’

‘But no one fired pistols at Bluggins,’ said Beetle, with a chuckle.

‘Gobby and Ingram shouldn’t tell if they had. It’ll be rather hard
lines on the Coll. I expect they’ve hid their sallies long ago—in case
the play-boxes are searched. Ingram’s a stalky chap.’

‘But the Head’s stalky too,’ said McTurk. ‘He’ll ask for the names
of the chaps who were out that day with sallies. Then he’ll collar ’em.’

‘And then he’ll lick ’em extra on suspicion of havin’ shot at
Bluggins,’ said Corkran joyfully. ‘Well it don’t do Gobby any harm.
He’s licked me often enough.’

‘What are we goin’ to do about Bluggins’ cheating? We haven’t
told a soul yet.’

‘Dunno quite. It don’t matter what Bluggins has done—to the Head
you know. He’ll lick us for tweakin’ him just the same. We mustn’t for-
get that,’ said McTurk.

‘No-o. I’m thinkin’ of it,’ Corkran replied. ‘What we ought to do, I
think, is to go straight to old Raikes and ask him to have Bluggins
expelled.’

‘Who’s goin’ to do it? You have got cheek’ said McTurk.

‘It’s rather risky. There’s no knowin’ how Raikes ‘ud take it. I
thought we might two-to-one Beetle for the job.’

Beetle howled despairfully. Even McTurk had not heart to send him
to this doom, and they debated the matter in the cave till their only
watch told them that it was within twenty minutes of call-over.

page 11

They had missed enough musters that week to make them a little
anxious. Juniors were liable to be caned for systematic unpunctuality—
as their housemaster had hinted to them the day before. By running
straight across the burrows they might just save their names. So they
ran. It was two miles and the latter part uphill. Their line took them
across the red-dotted links not a hundred yards from the corrugated iron
pavilion.

‘Ca—can’t you crack on a little?’ panted Stalky, his eyes on their
goal, the far-away College against the hillside. The others shook their
heads. ‘If we can hold our [pace?] but—we can only—just get in,’ said Mcturk.

A red-coat detached itself from the little crowd by the pavilion
doors and—it is astonishing how fast a really angry man can run—
barred their path.

‘I’ve got you—at last! You young devils. Got you at last have I. Ha!
Raikes! I’ve caught them—the young imps who fired at me. Running
away—Eh!’

‘Le—le—let me get my wind,’ sobbed Turkey. ‘We weren’t run-
ning away from you. Ta—take your hand off my collar. I’ll go up to the
pavilion.’

Flushed and breathing heavily they were hauled to the ante-room by
the delighted Major. Two or three men were sitting at the table over
whiskies and sodas, another was splicing a driver. The Secretary,
beaked like a bird of prey, was deep in accounts and two freckled
young men with enormous bony wrists leaned against the lockers talk-
ing together. The Major introduced them to the assembly with no
regard whatever for their feelings, repeated his charges three times and
demanded an instant execution.

‘Wait a minute,’ said the most freckled of the young men. ‘Give
’em a fair trial. What’s it all about? Stealing golf-balls?’

The Major repeated the charges yet again; the boys stood to atten-
tion, thinking swiftly. It was a hostile court with but one kindly face.

‘Let them get their breath,’ the young man persisted. ‘Now you give
us your version of things.’

It annoyed the Major that there should be any version except his
own; and he said so.

* * * * * *

The Finances of the Gods

[a short tale]

THE evening meal was ended in Dhunni Bhagat’s Chubara, and the old priests were smoking or counting their beads. A little naked child pattered in, with its mouth wide open, a handful of marigold flowers in one hand, and a lump of conserved tobacco in the other. It tried to kneel and make obeisance to Gobind, but it was so fat that it fell forward on its shaven head, and rolled on its side, kicking and gasping, while the marigolds tumbled one way and the tobacco the other. Gobind laughed, set it up again, and blessed the marigold flowers as he received the tobacco.‘From my father,’ said the child. ‘He has the fever, and cannot come. Wilt thou pray for him, father?’

‘Surely, littlest; but the smoke is on the ground, and the night-chill is in the air, and it is not good to go abroad naked in the autumn.’

‘I have no clothes,’ said the child, ‘and all today I have been carrying cow-dung cakes to the bazar. It was very hot, and I am very tired.’ It shivered a little, for the twilight was cool.

Gobind lifted an arm under his vast tattered quilt of many colours, and made an inviting little nest by his side. The child crept in, and Gobind filled his brass-studded leather waterpipe with the new tobacco. When I came to the Chubara the shaven head with the tuft atop, and the beady black eyes looked out of the folds of the quilt as a squirrel looks out from his nest, and Gobind was smiling while the child played with his beard.

I would have said something friendly, but remembered in time that if the child fell ill afterwards I should be credited with the Evil Eye, and that is a horrible possession.

‘Sit thou still, Thumbling,’ I said, as it made to get up and run away. ‘Where is thy slate, and why has the teacher let such an evil character loose on the streets when there are no police to protect us weaklings? In which ward dost thou try to break thy neck with flying kites from the house-tops?’

‘Nay, Sahib, nay,’ said the child, burrowing its face into Gobind’s beard, and twisting uneasily. ‘There was a holiday to-day among the schools, and I do not always fly kites. I play ker-li-kit like the rest.’

Cricket is the national game among the schoolboys of the Punjab, from the naked hedge-school children, who use an old kerosine-tin for wicket, to the B.A.’s of the University, who compete for the Championship belt.

‘Thou play kerlikit! Thou art half the height of the bat!’ I said.

The child nodded resolutely. ‘Yea, I do play. Perlay-ball. Ow-at! Ran, ran, ran! I know it all.’

‘But thou must not forget with all this to pray to the Gods according to custom,’ said Gobind, who did not altogether approve of cricket and Western innovations.

‘I do not forget,’ said the child in a hushed voice.

‘Also to give reverence to thy teacher, and’—Gobind’s voice softened—’to abstain from pulling holy men by the beard, little badling. Eh, eh, eh?’

The child’s face was altogether hidden in the great white beard, and it began to whimper till Gobind soothed it as children are soothed all the world over, with the promise of a story.

‘I did not think to frighten thee, senseless little one. Look up! Am I angry? Aré, are, are! Shall I weep too, and of our tears make a great pond and drown us both, and then thy father will never get well, lacking thee to pull his beard? Peace, peace, and I will tell thee of the Gods. Thou hast heard many tales?’

‘Very many, father.’

‘Now, this is a new one which thou hast not heard. Long and long ago when the Gods walked with men as they do to-day, but that we have not faith to see, Shiv, the greatest of Gods, and Parbati his wife, were walking in the garden of a temple.’

‘Which temple? That in the Nandgaon ward?’ said the child.

‘Nay, very far away. Maybe at Trimbak or Hurdwar, whither thou must make pilgrimage when thou art a man. Now, there was sitting in the garden under the jujube trees, a mendicant that had worshipped Shiv for forty years, and he lived on the offerings of the pious, and meditated holiness night and day.’

‘Oh father, was it thou?’ said the child, looking up with large eyes.

‘Nay, I have said it was long ago, and, moreover, this mendicant was married.’

‘Did they put him on a horse with flowers on his head, and forbid him to go to sleep all night long? Thus they did to me when they made my wedding,’ said the child, who had been married a few months before.

‘And what didst thou do?’ said I.

‘I wept, and they called me evil names, and then I smote her, and we wept together.’

‘Thus did not the mendicant,’ said Gobind; ‘for he was a holy man, and very poor. Parbati perceived him sitting naked by the temple steps where all went up and down, and she said to Shiv, “What shall men think of the Gods when the Gods thus scorn their worshippers? For forty years yonder man has prayed to us, and yet there be only a few grains of rice and some broken cowries before him after all. Men’s hearts will be hardened by this thing.” And Shiv said, “It shall be looked to,” and so he called to the temple which was the temple of his son, Ganesh of the elephant head, saying, “Son, there is a mendicant without who is very poor. What wilt thou do for him?” Then that great elephant-headed One awoke in the dark and answered, “In three days, if it be thy will, he shall have one lakh of rupees.” Then Shiv and Parbati went away.

‘But there was a money-lender in the garden hidden among the marigolds’—the child looked at the ball of crumpled blossoms in its hands—‘ay, among the yellow marigolds, and he heard the Gods talking. He was a covetous man, and of a black heart, and he desired that lakh of rupees for himself. So he went to the mendicant and said, “Oh brother, how much do the pious give thee daily?” The mendicant said, “I cannot tell. Sometimes a little rice, sometimes a little pulse, and a few cowries and, it has been, pickled mangoes, and dried fish.”

‘That is good,’ said the child, smacking its lips.

‘Then said the money-lender, “Because I have long watched thee, and learned to love thee and thy patience, I will give thee now five rupees for all thy earnings of the three days to come. There is only a bond to sign on the matter.” But the mendicant said, “Thou art mad. In two months I do not receive the worth of five rupees,” and he told the thing to his wife that evening. She, being a woman, said, “When did money-lender ever make a bad bargain? The wolf runs through the corn for the sake of the fat deer. Our fate is in the hands of the Gods. Pledge it not even for three days.”

‘So the mendicant returned to the money-lender, and would not sell. Then that wicked man sat all day before him offering more and more for those three days’ earnings. First, ten, fifty, and a hundred rupees; and then, for he did not know when the Gods would pour down their gifts, rupees by the thousand, till he had offered half a lakh of rupees. Upon this sum the mendicant’s wife shifted her counsel, and the mendicant signed the bond, and the money was paid in silver; great white bullocks bringing it by the cartload. But saving only all that money, the mendicant received nothing from the Gods at all, and the heart of the money-lender was uneasy on account of expectation. Therefore at noon of the third day the money-lender went into the temple to spy upon the councils of the Gods, and to learn in what manner that gift might arrive. Even as he was making his prayers, a crack between the stones of the floor gaped, and, closing, caught him by the heel. Then he heard the Gods walking in the temple in the darkness of the columns, and Shiv called to his son Ganesh, saying “Son, what hast thou done in regard to the lakh of rupees for the mendicant?” And Ganesh woke, for the money-lender heard the dry rustle of his trunk uncoiling, and he answered, “Father, one-half of the money has been paid, and the debtor for the other half I hold here fast by the heel.” ’

The child bubbled with laughter. ‘And the money-lender paid the mendicant?’ it said.

‘Surely, for he whom the Gods hold by the heel must pay to the uttermost. The money was paid at evening,
all silver, in great carts, and thus Ganesh did his work.’

‘Nathu! Ohé Nathu!’

A woman was calling in the dusk by the door of the courtyard.

The child began to wriggle. ‘That is my mother,’ it said.

‘Go then, littlest,’ answered Gobind; ‘but stay a moment.’

He ripped a generous yard from his patchwork-quilt, put it over the child’s shoulders, and the child ran
away.

The Satisfaction of a Gentleman

page 1 of 6

Long before the days of Cyrano de Bergerac, the Coll. knew that you might discuss his red nose with Dickson Quartus in all amity and safety, so long as it did not turn blue, and he did not gnash his teeth and speak with tongues. If that happened— why, anything might happen; and the worst generally happened after long stretches of lean living. For example, ‘Pussy’ Abanazar and Tertius, his study mates, being the junior sub-prefects of that winter term, were in the field, taking Lower School footer – which, of course, took both of their fags— and Dick coming up from place-kicking found the study fire out, too.

Naturally, he went up to Number Five, immediately overhead, and borrowed from Beetle, in riposo on the domestic hearth, a shovelful of burning coals. Coming down with it, he almost ran into Mr. King, his own House-master, at the bottom of the stairs, and from sheer nervous shock tilted out the whole affair at, if not over, his feet. There was some energetic dancing and denouncing, as Beetle noted through the banisters, and when it had ceased Dick had five hundred lines, which did not prevent him from being very happy with Beetle over the spirited action of King’s hindlegs among the cinders.

Last lesson that day was English Literature— Paradise Lost— and when Harrison major, whose voice is as a lost sheep’s, bleated about Satan treading on ‘burning marl,’ Beetle sputtered aloud. King might or might not have guessed the connection. But he said nothing beyond, ‘Two hundred Latin lines.’ Dick condoled with Beetle after tea; but also developed his own grievance, which was that Beede had heaped too many coals of fire on him.

‘I like that!’ was the retort. ‘I kept on tellin’ you your shovel wouldn’t hold ’em, you blue-snouted Mandrill.’ Beetle knew much about the coloration of Mandrills, and would often describe it to Dick.

But this time Dick’s nose blue-fired where it stood; he gnashed his teeth, and emitted the war-cry of the Royal Line of Ashantee. (His naval uncle had fought in those parts and, Dick swore, had taught him all the languages.) What followed, though painful for Beetle, who was alone (and Pussy was with Dick), was merely an affair of outposts. The Temple of Janus was opened ceremonially later. After prayers, Number Five, who were sitting up from nine to ten for ‘extra work,’ caught a fag of their House about to undress, hustled it into a nightgown over all for tabard, and sent it to Dick’s study with a stolen gym boxing-glove, which Turkey called ‘the Cartel.’ Dick spared the quavering herald, and pranced up to Number Five, robed in a tablecloth, at the very top of his rarely shown form. As Head of the Gaboon and the Dahomey Customs, he talked Fantee, which includes — with whistlings and quackings— Rabelaisian accounts of the manners of the West Coast, and the etiquette of native courts thereabouts; for his uncle had been an observant officer. It altogether destroyed Number Five. They clung to the table, beseeching Dick to stop and let them get breath; and they topped off the ribald hour with pickled onions and raspberry vinegar for a pledge of naked war.

When they went up to their study next morning, after second lesson, they found, when they could see, everything in it furred with a ghastly, greasy deposit; and a smell fouler than the sight. Dick had shut down their chimney damper, set an old ‘gutty’ golf-ball in a sardine-tin on the new-made fire, jammed their window, plugged up with paper beneath their door, and let nature do the rest. Their pictures left white squares on the walls when they took them down. Turkey felt it most, for Art was his province. Beetle wanted to bore holes in the floor, and pour melted lead through; but, as Stalky pointed out, Pussy and Tertius were sub-prefects, and could not include their study in the field of unrestricted warfare.

‘Dick’s flank is covered all right,’ he said. ‘Beetle ought to have thought of that. Yes, you ass, I have thought of snuff; but don’t you try to think, or you’ll hash it. Leave him alone!’

So when the King of Ashantee quacked his triumph at next call-over, they all looked straitly to their own front, and lifted neither hand nor hoof. Only Pussy, on an exquisite note between apology and authority, reminded Stalky that the day following would be a House-match (Macrea’s v. King’s), which would claim him, Tertius and Dick from three to five. As sub-prefect he could have commanded a truce, but as ally of Dick he had sanctioned the war and had taken part in the execution of Beede— Death by the Hundred Slices between two forms.

‘That’s all right,’ Stalky answered him. ‘We wouldn’t, when they’re empty.’

‘Dick didn’t think,’ Pussy went on. It was the extreme limit of concession.

‘Don’t you worry, Kitten. He’s goin’ to.’ After which. Stalky removed from Beetle six penny stamps reserved for correspondence.

‘Want ’em all?’ said Beetle.

‘I didn’t. But I will now, you selfish hound. I do all the work an’. . . ’

‘All right. ’Tisn’t my fault if I can’t write home,’ said the robbed one in a relieved voice, and went on plaintively; ‘Who’s bagged my new socks, curse you?’

‘Those Mandrill ones? Wouldn’t be found dead in ’em. Turkey most likely. He’s aesthetic.’

Beetle sighed. They were a church-going pair of a provocative peacock-blue, which, when coquettishly exhibited across an aisle, would make Dick’s nose glow through half the sermon.

On Saturday afternoon, with everybody down at the House-match, Stalky brought out the communal frying-pan, and laid in it large slabs of the fattest bacon.

‘Old Mother Hunt gave me all that for fourpence. She thinks it’s a bit off. Fry it. Beetle.’

The slice rendered as generously as blubber. When the pan was about half full of fat, Stalky fished out three slices and tied each slice to a string from a new penny string-ball. Then he and the others leaned out of their window, and bobbed them against the window of the study below. In that crisp October air, each bob left a white blob of coagulated fat on the pane. When a slice ceased to register, it was hauled up and reconditioned: at intervals, some-one would go down to report on the effect from the ground-level, or to direct the more delicate stipplings. They put on a second coat to make sure, and judged that it would do.

The returning enemy were too full of their game to notice anything till they had washed, and were well at home again. Then, peering from above. Number Five saw Pussy’s huge paw put forth, and an experimenting finger drawn through the creamy deposit on the panes. ‘Go an’ jape with them, Turkey. Get Dick’s head well out. Keep that fat just off the bubble, Beetle,’ said Stalky.

page 2

Turkey presented himself on the area-railings outside the lower study and, as usual, let others make conversation. He had gifts that way. Things had not gone much beyond ‘Filthy swine!’ when the King of Ashantee, ousting his slower-minded mates, leaned forth, and addressed himself directly to Turkey, with two golf-balls, one after the other. Here Stalky took the pan from Beetle, and decanted, say, one pint of pure bacon fat on to Dick’s scalp, where it set at once into a frosty wig. The bag of flour, dashed down after it, was sheer waste of the sixth of Beetle’s penny stamps. Without a glance at the result, Turkey sauntered back, and pushed the study table against the door.

‘All right. To-morrow’s Sunday,’ said Stalky. ‘Good for Dick’s topper. But don’t you notice him. He’s the Lord’s Anointed.’

Saturday prayers were worth attending; but next day’s divine service was—just that! Dick’s locks had clotted into irregular overlapping scales which, when flattened by a desperate hand, sprang up again unrelatedly. Even his study-mates mocked him, but, for Number Five, it was as though he had never been upon earth or in memory. They merely put it about that his was a disease which comes from not brushing the hair, and that presently it would bleed.

That same Sabbath eve — disregarding advice and scorning reinforcements — the Head of the Gaboon tore upstairs alone to call upon them, when, seeing that he appeared to be armed, they fell on him — ankle, waist and neck — without a word. At last he was understood to say something about ‘slugs in a saw-pit.’ They let him up.

‘It’s your gloat,’ he gasped. ‘Let’s top off with a duel in the Bunkers. I challenge the lot of you. Death before dishonour! An’ give me some of that raspberry vinegar.’

‘Your sally any good?’ M‘Turk asked. He had Number Five’s armoury in his own care.

‘Hellish stiff. I was bringing it for you to clean a bit. I’ve got cartridges but no oil.’ He picked up from the floor a lock-jawed twenty-two rim-fire Belgian saloon-pistol, which Turkey took over at once.

‘Get expelled for duellin’,’ Beetle observed sourly.

‘You abject cur! You’re the only one with gig-lamps, too,’ Stalky rebuked.

‘You called me The Mandrill,’ said the Head of the Gaboon. ‘An’ what was that beastliness of yours about my hair bleedin’, — thou— thou varlet?’ (That was Dick’s word of the week, so to say.)

‘Oh, Plica Polemica said Beetle, and brightly summarised as much as he could recall of Polish Plat out of a Heaven-sent old encyclopedia.

‘Two shots at Beetle for that,’ said Dick icily.

‘You shall have ’em!’ cried generous Stalky. ‘But look here, you can’t take us all on. What about a quadrilateral duel?’ Stalky saw himself excelling Marryat.

‘What for? You each get plugged at three times, same as me. I don’t mind.’

‘What distance?’ said Turkey, with his head in his playbox among the oiled rags.

‘Dunno, quite. Ten paces too much?’ Stalky suggested.

‘Rot!’ Beede protested. ‘You can make a Burrows donkey bray his head off at a hundred yards with dust-shot. I’ve done it.’

‘You unfeelin’ brute! Now you can do a little brayin’ on your own, an’ see how you like it. I vote we make it twelve paces for the duels, an’ after that we’ll pick sides and have a general stalk in the Bunkers.’

‘Who’s to give the range then?’ Beetle asked.

‘Guess it, you old burbler. Besides, dust-shot don’t hardly sting even at point-blank.’

Beetle explained what his spiritual adventures must be ere he lent himself to such speculations. His piety wearied them.

‘If you say much more we’ll decree you a rabbit — same as Maunsell did young Vivian. He made him cock-up at point-blank.’ Stalky was referring to an episode of their early and oppressed past.

‘Yes, an’ Gartside major got hold of it an’ half cut Maunsell’s fat soul out of him in the dormitory. That shows what prefects think of duellin’! An’ s’pose King spots us in the Bunkers with his filthy telescope? I’ve looked through it. I swear you can see the crabs runnin’ about on Braunton Sands.’ Beetle delivered this all in one passionate breath.

‘You’re sickenin’,’ said Turkey. ‘Maunsell was bullyin’ young Vivian. D’you mean to say you’re bein’ bullied? An’, tell me now, has King or Prout or Foxy — has anyone — ever told ye that duellin’ is forbidden at Coll.? Don’t prevaricate. Have you ever seen it posted in the corridor?’

‘Then get Pussy and Tertius for seconds,’ Beetle howled.

‘I’d not dream of runnin’ in on them for a little thing like this,’ Turkey concluded, and Dick added:

‘Besides, this is a private affair. It’s the satisfaction of a gentleman, thou scurvy varlet.’

‘Oh, shut up an’ listen to your Uncle. The Bunkers to-morrow after call-over. Shots all round — an’ one extra for Beetle. First blood satisfies Honour. Then we’ll pick sides an’ have a general stalk till we’re out of ammunition.’

‘Good business,’ said the foe. ‘And a brew for the survivors after tea! My uncle hath remembered me. Selah! We’d better have it up here and ask Pussy and Tertius. It’s safer.’

At that epoch, the young of the English, alone of their kind, understood the exact difference between official and unofficial. Pussy and Tertius said they would be happy to attend the brew and, being men of substance, sent, as it were, milk and honey in advance. They had not been officially informed what the banquet would celebrate, but prying suspicion is beneath true authority.

‘Anyhow,’ said Pussy to his colleague, ‘I’ve been through Dick’s cartridges to make sure. All dust-shot.’

page 3

At three, then, next day, after Beetle, the housekeeper, had set out the table for a brew of six, four boys in prudent overcoats (‘sallies’ pack clumsily beneath short jackets) pushed into the wind for the rushy sand-dunes at the far end of the Pebble Ridge. It is true that certain old men who, though not in the Army, impiously wore red coats, used a fringe of the landscape for a senile diversion known as Golf— Turkey had played it for some weeks and pronounced it ‘sickenin’’ — but once off the line of their activities — the ‘fairway,’ they called it — a boy might have been in the Sahara.

The Equinox drove the sand into their faces or round their legs, as they dived among the sheep-haunted hollows. The upstanding winter tide roared and trampled along the Pebble Ridge outside till they had to shout to each other, and racing slashes of low sunlight from seaward lit the sands and the bents with fierce coppery glares. In a secluded dell, out of the worst of the wind, Turkey posted Stalky and Dick Four — each edge-on. House-cap pulled down to the eyebrows, left elbow crooked, covering mouth and nose, and pistol ready to level over the crook at the Caution and to fire at the Word. For such had been the tradition of the Giants of the Prime — great names —now even greater Captains who, of course, stood fire daily.

‘Squad!’ croaked Turkey in Foxy’s best manner.

‘Fire!’ Both pistols popped together. It was a clean miss.

‘Didn’t you even hear mine?’ Stalky called.

The King of Coomassie shook his head gingerly. It was difficult for him to keep his cap on his matted hair.

‘Never mind. I’ll get you at the stalk.’ Then Stalky in turn placed Turkey and Dick. They fired.

‘Heard something that time,’ said Dick appreciatively. Turkey had raised his left elbow, knowing that his pistol threw low.

Beetle took the field of honour without parade. His first shot was well to the left.

‘Your man is in front of ye,’ said M‘Turk grimly. ‘Reload as ye stand.’

‘Now you pay for Mandrill !’ Dick shouted. But on the ‘Fire’ Beetle blazed skyward, which, with that uncertain sort of ammunition and by the help of a passing gust, was just enough to sling the charge well forward. The King of Ashantee rubbed his cheek and swore in purest English.

‘Blood!’ Turkey paced in. ‘Tip of Dick’s ear bleedin’.’

‘Pimple! Pimple!’ roared the King. ‘I’ve been scratchin’ it for weeks.’

Turkey dabbed with a handkerchief and held up the evidence.

‘Blood ! Honour satisfied. Let-off for you, Beetle !’

But Beetle was already treading his own conception of a reel to the chant of: ‘I’ve drilled the Mandrill — the Mandrill— the Mandrill !’

‘Bunk!’ Stalky warned him. ‘Run, you ass!’ The Head of the Gaboon was gnashing his teeth and reloading with intent. ‘We’ll start the stalk now. I’m on your side, Beetle.’

‘Are ye? Then I’m on Dick’s,’ said M‘Turk, wheeling, and fired into the skirts of the flying overcoat.

Beetle was out of that hollow and across several others before he found a ragged bunker— the old ‘Cockscomb’ —whose crest had been undercut by rabbits. Here he lay down and reloaded, resolved to sell his life dear, but not to go looking for many buyers. He knew what Stalky

could be as an ally, and it worried him; but, from broken words that rode the gale, it sounded as though Stalky must have stalked Dick Four, and so committed himself to a definite policy. Beede’s was to reach, as soon as might be, those very old red-coated men whom he had so often scorned. Deeply as they loathed his likes, they would not allow him to be peppered in their fairway. He crawled unfastidiously to the next bunker furthest from the sea, descended its face, and disturbed an old ewe. She bolted up wind, and brought down on him out of a side-ravine Dick Four, wrestling with a jammed pistol and roaring like a gorilla. Just when Beetle — as he ever afterwards explained — was about to blow his silly brains out, Dick scooped up tons of sand and tossed them into the blast. Beetle ate of it what he could not avoid, rubbed enough of the rest out of his spectacles and eyes to see a little, and ploughed on, the skirts of his unbuttoned overcoat ever being blown forward between his legs. Renewed poppings and yells from the rear indicated either that he had been ‘decreed a rabbit’ in absentia, or that civil war had broken out. But, like unthinking youth, he did not look back.

He arrived, well on all fours, at the lip of a big crater known in those pure days as The Pit. Directly beneath him stood an ancient in a red coat, scrabbling, like King David, with a niblick. While Beetle, on both elbows, removed his spectacles to get a little more damp sand off them, the unkind wind hove his coattails clean over his head, and plunged him into darkness, Almost at the same instant he felt a pain behind, which urged him to plunge out of it. . . . And thus it was that this innocent boy, with life’s golden promise before him, and that withered zealot, trifling blasphemously through his few remaining days, met all of a heap, on much the same selection of mots justes— cries of lost souls and defeated generals.

‘Blast you! Who are you?’ the elder began; but Beetle, his spectacles in his hand, disengaged and fled on — he felt at the moment that he could run for ever — to the protection of the fairway. Here, as he cleaned and reshipped his glasses, he realised that his personal grief was now more like the dying memory of an efficient ground-ash than any portent of fatal haemorrhage. Presently, life, as it tingled through his young system, seemed rather prosperous. At any rate, he had drilled the Mandrill; escaped further active service; the old goat in The Pit had not seen him with his spectacles on, which ought to be a perfect alibi; and a brew of brews awaited him. He returned towards Coll.

A sobbing voice hailed, and Stalky ranged or, rather, tottered alongside. Without turning his head, Beetle asked him what he had done that for.

‘Because you deserted! You left me to fight a rearguard action alone, you cad!’ Then, clinging to Beede’s cold shoulder: ‘I didn’t mean to. I swear I didn’t drill you; your coat blew up! Then I couldn’t help it. Wasn’t it a beauty? Did it sting much? Never mind! Turkey’s got it in the ankle— point-blank. He left his silly foot stickin’ out of some rushes an’ Dick thought it was you! Turkey’s a bit wrathy.’

Turkey limped up with Dick. They were obviously estranged. Dick was talking about ‘lousy Fenians,’ and Turkey’s nose was high in air.

page 4

‘Well?’ said Beetle, a thought comforted. Stalky continued;

‘Turkey got my cap. I stuck it up to draw his fire. Then he got me on the hand!’ A dirty rag round a limb was proof. ‘Oh, but before that, I got Dick where I got you, but much tighter. Turkey changed sides after Dick plugged him. That was really why I had to plug you — to make things fair. See, you old burbler?’

‘But,’ Dick was pleading with Turkey, ‘how the devil was I to know you were wearing Beetle’s ungodly socks? I couldn’t smell ’em in this wind, could I? It was your fault for baggin’ ’em!’

Beetle chortled. There seemed to be some justice in things after all.

‘I hope Turkey plugged you, you murderer,’ he rounded on Dick.

‘Only once.’ Dick rubbed his neck again. He might have lightly brushed a bough of gorse.

‘That’s nothing.’ Beetle looked pointedly at his own salient work on the rim of the ear.

‘Yours was an infernal fluke,’ said Dick hotly. ‘You were in a blue funk all the time, — thou — thou noisome varlet.’

‘Thou notch-eared knave,’ was the reply.

But the crisis had passed, and Dick beamed; he, too, had a sound taste in epithets.

They were going through pockets for overlooked cartridges (one has to explain so much if any are found), and throwing them into Goosey Pool, when, out of the autumn dusk, a robin-like old man hopped, and almost pecked, at Turkey. The others delicately walked on; Beetle for once leading.

‘You were the boy who swore at me just now,’ the stranger began.

Turkey took no notice, except that his nose went up a little more.

‘I was in a bunker, and you knocked into me. Using filthy language, sir!’

‘An’ what were ye doin’ in the bunker? An’ which bunker was it?’ Turkey spoke like all the wearied and disbelieving magistracy of the Ireland of those days.

‘The Pit,’ said the Ancient, being a golfer— which is to say a monomaniac.

Turkey came to life with a jerk.

‘Bunkered? In The Pit? With this wind blowin’? Comin’ or goin’ ye could nott.

‘But I tell you I did.’ The other seemed to have forgotten his original grievance.

‘Ah, then, ye’re not worth a curse — an’ never will be.’

Turkey rejoined his companions, to whom Beetle was giving a theory of cause and effect. The four linked arms and swept up the old sunken lane to Coll. Honour was satisfied; there remained but their own young appetites. When, just before last lesson, Beetle connected the rubber tube from the gas-bracket to their dear little stove — turning the jet down to that exact degree which will bring milk-cocoa to perfection in one hour and a half— and counted the potted ham-and-tongue jars, the chicken-and-ham sausage, the sardine-tins, the three jams, the condensed milk, the two pounds of Devonshire cream, and the whole pound of real butter, he would not have changed 1 is lot with kings. Nor, as he went to the form-room, did it strike him that a spare, accurately dressed person standing in the Head’s porch had anything to do with the old goat he had heard, rather than seen, cursing in The Pit.

Ten minutes before the close of last lesson (their mouths were watering already). Foxy knocked and laid a well-known slip on King’s desk.

‘The Head to see,’ King read, and paused to let suspense soak in. ‘Ah! Only our usual three— plus Dickson Quartus. This, I fear, portends tragedy. All four of you —at once— if you please!’

They agreed that, for the first time in their knowledge of him, the Head must have been drunk. Nothing else explained his performance.

‘The way he talked was enough,’ said Dick Four. ‘All the studies brew, and he knows it. But he went on as if he’d heard of it for the first time.’

‘At the top of his voice, too. When Bates is wrathy, he whispers. But he shouted like Rabbits-Eggs. That proves it’ said Stalky.

‘Then, all that putrid rot about “the criminality” of havin’ a tube. All the studies have ’em. He said it was theft— of gas! There you are!’ Dick continued.

‘An’ his rot about “gorgin’.” He knows we can’t live on the muck they give us. He— he said brewin’ was “an insult to the bountiful provision made for us by the authorities.” Mad! Ravin’ mad!’ This was Beetle’s kinder judgment.

Turkey scratched an ankle and spoke: —

‘Authority! He’s never said a word about any authority except himself since I’ve been here.’

‘Then you think he’s tight, too?’

‘I do not. If he’d drunk enough to make him talk like that, he’d have been lyin’ on the floor to say it.’

‘Anyhow, he licked like hell,’ Beetle went on.

‘He did nott, either. His arm was never shoulder-high once.’

‘But if he wasn’t tight, what made him count the cuts aloud? No one does that, except Justus Prout,’ said Stalky.

Dick Four pointed at the untouched table.

page 5

‘He hasn’t confiscated the grub. Better eat it and have Pussy and Tertius in for cover,’

‘Better make sure first,’ said Beetle. ‘J don’t want the Head japin’ with me again just now. I’ll ask Foxy.’

He found him in the gym as usual.

‘No orders about it at all,’ said the Sergeant, and there was an unfathomable twinkle in his little red eye.

But Turkey sat on the window-seat asking of nobody: —

‘For what would he be roarin’ like that? The man was out of his nature, I tell ye.’

* * *

Years— some years — later, Captain ‘Pussy’ Abanazar, R.E., seconded for duty in the Indian Political, at home on leave, was invited by the Head to spend a few days of the Easters at Coll., in a mild, early, Devon Spring. Half-a-dozen of the Army Class stayed up ‘to read for their exams.’, and perhaps as many juniors whose people were abroad. When the last shooting-brake-load had left, and emptiness filled the universe, the Head turned into a most delightful and comprehending uncle, so that that forlorn band remembered those Easters through the rest of their lives. And when Captain Abanazar rolled in, and was to each of them equally a demi-god and an elder brother of the right sort (he tipped like Croesus), their cups overflowed.

One soft evening in the Head’s private study, with the sea churning up old memories all along the Ridge, Pussy asked:

‘Bates Sahib, do you remember lickin’ Number Five and Dick Four for brewin’ in—’ He gave the year and added: ‘My first term as a sub, you know.’

The Head smiled and nodded.

‘And giving ’em a pi-jaw?’

‘Pi-jaws aren’t my line. There was a jaw, though. Why? What did they think about it?’

‘They didn’t understand it at all. I believe they thought you were tight.’

‘Would I had been! But it was worse. It was cowardice, Pussy— it was bowing down in the House of Rimmon. And they noticed what I said?’

‘I should say they did!’

‘No wonder! We had a Board of Directors in those days — retired Colonels — martial men with the habit of command. I’m glad I never had that.’

‘Yes, we all deplored your lack of it, sir.’

‘Don’t misunderstand me. They were excellent men. I’m sure we were all deeply indebted to them. One of the very best was a Colonel — Coll — Coll — wait a minute — Curthwen. But he’s in Abraham’s bosom now. (Awkward bed-fellow!) He knew about education and the prices of things. So useful at Board meetings. I always moved the vote of thanks to him. He was exceptionally nice to me. Advice — the soundest advice. You see, he knew about— er — everything except, yes, golf. He had to come down here to learn that. I only dared go round with him once. I enjoyed it too much. Little runny-nosed Northam caddies told him where to put his horrible feet. Ah! When he came down here, you see, his evenings were quite free, and he could drop in on me at any time, and — er — offer a few suggestions.’

Pussy shuddered all over; and he was not of the smaller makes.

‘Yes,’ the Head mused. ‘It’s a shameful story. That evening, he dropped in complaining that one of us — you — a boy— had nearly knocked him over in a bunker, and then used filthy language. No. I never found out who the boy was. I could only envy. But the shock and the language— he was, of course, a churchwarden— made him a little — excessive, perhaps. He gave me an hour’s sound advice — with a tang to it. Then I walked with him to the old Fives Court to see him off, but he sniffed like a hound opposite Number Five, and said he smelt gas escaping. (You can’t smell it any other way, can you?) Then he began all over again. Pussy — on economics in the abstract. An eye like a lizard’s. That type have the lust of detail. Yes! After one hour, he began again. Then I lied— as overworked children do.’

‘By Jove! I remember your warning me about that, when I worked Lower School too hard at footer. It’s true of men, too.’

‘It is. I lied like a scullion — like the hireling that I was! I told him the gas was always shut off from the studies when not required. I think I told him I kept the key of the meter in my— bath-room. I don’t want o think what I told him. He was good enough to say he took my word for it, but ’

‘Did he? Wish I’d been there. Well?’

‘He tracked the stink upstairs foot by foot — like Prout on a moral trail. It was I — I — who threw open the study door to show his suspicions were wrong. And there was that glorious brew laid out on the table, and the tube from the gas-jet to the stove! A tiny, little, bright, blue flame. Pussy. It went wheee-whee, like a toy balloon deflating. That was me, I deflated. He inflated for ten minutes. I am a wicked old man— as you know. I have terrorised infants and perjured myself to mothers, and intrigued with and against my Staff; but I paid for my sins then. Pussy. You’d have loved it.’

‘But I’d have dropped him out of the window first,’ said Pussy.

‘Why? He had the obvious right of it. There was the smell. There was the waste. (As a matter of fact, it was traced to the basement.) And, 1 suppose, there was a chance of burning down the Coll. Then he was shocked at the brew. He said it showed you didn’t appreciate your lawful food. Yes! He sawed at me with his voice. Pussy, till I fell. I connived— I confederated with him. I suggested that he should eaves drop in my private study — yes, here — and listen to ‘what I should say’ when I sacrificed those innocent children. Thank goodness, I have forgotten my discourse, but I know that I addressed them — him, next door, I mean — out of his own Philistine vocabulary. And you say they noticed the falling-off in my style? Aha! Non omnis moriar!‘ The Head purred.

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‘They couldn’t make any sense of it. And did you count the cuts aloud?’

‘Very like. Why should I have stopped at any crime? I was playing up to the Board — to appearances — to expediency — to fear of consequences — to all those little dirty things that I brought you children up to spit upon. Except that I didn’t kneel and pray with them — Heavens! he might have exacted that — there was only one redeeming feature. When it came to the execution, that little red cupboard-door stuck.’

‘The rope breaking on the gallows,’ Pussy amplified. ‘It never did with me!’

‘And I saw my face in the glass, like an ape’s — a frightened, revengeful ape’s. (And, so far as I have a gospel, it is never to carry things to the sweating point.) That saved a remnant of my integrity. Saved them something, as well. The licking was a noisy one —for his benefit — but artistically, my dear boy, you understand, a sketch— the merest outline.’ ‘That squares with the evidence, too. And you didn’t confiscate the grub. I know, because I helped eat it.’

‘There are limits to my brutality. Besides, he’d gone to gorge at his dreadful Golf Club; and I could have eaten a horse. But it was all abject— paltry— timeserving — unjust. Not that I believe in Justice, but 1 don’t like to think that I ever licked out of personal mortification and revenge.’

‘Don’t you worry, Bates dear. Those young devil had been out duellin’ in the Bunkers the whole afternoon. Every one of ’em was a casualty as he stood to you. What was our allowance for that?’

‘Threats of expulsion — followed by twelve of the best. The young scoundrels! But you’ve taken a load off my mind. Pussy. If I’d known that, I could have paid ’em honourably!’

‘Beetle was the chap who attended to your Colonel, too. Stalky plugged him — bending — on the edge of The Pit, and he fell into it, cursing Stalky for all he was worth. The Colonel was bunkered at the bottom. You see?’

‘I see. Never again will I hear a word against Beetle — unless I say it myself’ The Head spoke with genuine gratitude. ‘But how did they hound him into the fray? Was he — er — “decreed a rabbit”?’

‘Bates, dear, is there one single dam’ thing about us that you don’t know?’ Pussy spoke after an admiring pause.

‘We-ell! It’s a shameful confession, but, you see, I loved you all. The rest was only sending you all to bed dead-tired. You want a sheet of impot-paper? You know where it lives. What for?’

‘I’m going to restore your prestige an’ give Stalky pain. He needs a tonic where he is now, poor devil! . . . Please, sir, what are common nouns in io called?’

What Pussy sent out (as ‘code,’ at State expense) from the overwhelmed little Post Office ran:— ‘Capitem vidi. Stop. Constat flagellatio Studii Quinti Ricardique Quarti utsi oh caenam vere propter duellum vestrum inter arenas donata fuisse. Stop. Matutinissime si Capitem decipere vis surgendum. Stop. Amorem expedit. Stop. Felis Catus.’

What Stalky, doing station-master in a freezing internationalised lamp-room, received, after two or three telegraphists of the Nearer and Farther Easts had had their flying shots at it, was: —

‘Captain vids. Stop. Constance plageltio studdi quinti ricandk que qualte cuts obscene very prabst duel in vestry iter arimas donala puistse. Stop. Matushima so cahutem discipere via sargentson. Stop. Amend expent. Stop. Fehx Cotes.’

He had trouble enough on his own fork at the time, so, as Pussy foretold, it proved a tonic. The office of origin and ‘studdi quinti’ gave him a bearing, but he upset half the railway system of Cathay, as then working, to arrive at epigraphists with a College education. A Captain of Native infantry happened to remember the catchword, ‘You must get up pretty early to take in the Head. ’The rest was combined deductive scholarship. In due time a cable went back, not to F. Cotes, but to the Head:—

‘Have seen the Head. He says the licking of Number Five Study and Dick Four ostensibly for brewing was really for your duel in the Bunkers. You’ve got to get up very early to take in the Head. He sends love. The Cat. These from Sinim. Stop. Knew it all along. Delighted your character for downiness cleared. Stop. Ours nationally and personally more than indifferent here. Stop. Best loves for birthday.’

Four or five names out of an Army Class followed in school order.

Not till several years later did Pussy tell Stalky and the others how they had been deceived; and cruelly rubbed in that ‘Knew it all along.’ As they were, then, far too senior to go to war in the ancient formation, they passed the docket over to Beetle, with instructions to ‘report and revenge.’

Which had to be done.’

Bubbling Well Road

(a short tale)

LOOK out on a large scale map the place where the Chenab river falls into the Indus fifteen miles or so above the hamlet of Chachuran. Five miles west of Chachuran lies Bubbling Well Road, and the house of the gosain or priest of Arti-goth. It was the priest who showed me the road, but it is no thanks to him that I am able to tell this story.

Five miles west of Chachuran is a patch of the plumed jungle-grass, that turns over in silver when the wind blows, from ten to twenty feet high and from three to four miles square. In the heart of the patch hides the gosain of Bubbling Well Road. The villagers stone him when he peers into the daylight, although he is a priest, and he runs back again as a strayed wolf turns into tall crops. He is a one-eyed man and carries, burnt between his brows, the impress of two copper coins. Some say that he was tortured by a native prince in the old days; for he is so old that he must have been capable of mischief in the days of Runjit Singh. His most pressing need at present is a halter, and the care of the British Government.

These things happened when the jungle-grass was tall, and the villagers of Chachuran told me that a sounder of pig had gone into the Arti-goth patch. To enter jungle-grass is always an unwise proceeding, but I went, partly because I knew nothing of pig-hunting, and partly because the villagers said that the big boar of the sounder owned foot long tushes. Therefore I wished to shoot him, in order to produce the tushes in after years, and say that I had ridden him down in fair chase. I took a gun and went into the hot, close patch, believing that it would be an easy thing to unearth one pig in ten square miles of jungle. Mr. Wardle, the terrier, went with me because he believed that I was incapable of existing for an hour without his advice and countenance. He managed to slip in and out between the grass clumps, but I had to force my way, and in twenty minutes was as completely lost as though I had been in the heart of Central Africa. I did not notice this at first till I had grown wearied of stumbling and pushing through the grass, and Mr. Wardle was beginning to sit down very often and hang out his tongue very far. There was nothing but grass everywhere, and it was impossible to see two yards in any direction. The grass stems held the heat exactly as boiler-tubes do.

In half an hour, when I was devoutly wishing that I had left the big boar alone, I came to a narrow path which seemed to be a compromise between a native foot-path and a pig-run. It was barely six inches wide, but I could sidle along it in comfort. The grass was extremely thick here, and where the path was ill defined it was necessary to crush into the tussocks either with both hands before the face, or to back into it, leaving both hands free to manage the rifle. None the less it was a path, and valuable because it might lead to a place.

At the end of nearly fifty yards of fair way, just when I was preparing to back into an unusually stiff tussock, I missed Mr. Wardle, who for his girth is an unusually frivolous dog and never keeps to heel. I called him three times and said aloud, ‘Where has the little beast gone to?’ Then I stepped backwards several paces, for almost under my feet a deep voice repeated, ‘Where has the little beast gone?’ To appreciate an unseen voice thoroughly you should hear it when you are lost in stifling jungle grass. I called Mr. Wardle again and the underground echo assisted me. At that I ceased calling and listened very attentively, because I thought I heard a man laughing in a peculiarly offensive manner. The heat made me sweat, but the laughter made me shake. There is no earthly need for laughter in high grass. It is indecent, as well as impolite. The chuckling stopped, and I took courage and continued to call till I thought that I had located the echo somewhere behind and below the tussock into which I was preparing to back just before I lost Mr. Wardle. I drove my rifle up to the triggers between the grass-stems in a downward and forward direction. Then I waggled it to and fro, but it did not seem to touch ground on the far side of the tussock as it should have done. Every time that I grunted with the exertion of driving a heavy rifle through thick grass, the grunt was faithfully repeated from below, and when I stopped to wipe my face the sound of low laughter was distinct beyond doubting.

I went into the tussock, face first, an inch at a time, my mouth open and my eyes fine, full, and prominent. When I had overcome the resistance of the grass I found that I was looking straight across a black gap in the ground. That I was actually lying on my chest leaning over the mouth of a well so deep I could scarcely see the water in it.

There were things in the water,—black things,—and the water was as black as pitch with blue scum atop. The laughing sound came from the noise of a little spring, spouting half-way down one side of the well. Sometimes as the black things circled round, the trickle from the spring fell upon their tightly-stretched skins, and then the laughter changed into a sputter of mirth. One thing turned over on its back, as I watched, and drifted round and round the circle of the mossy brickwork with a hand and half an arm held clear of the water in a stiff and horrible flourish, as though it were a very wearied guide paid to exhibit the beauties of the place.

I did not spend more than half-an-hour in creeping round that well and finding the path on the other side. The remainder of the journey I accomplished by feeling every foot of ground in front of me, and crawling like a snail through every tussock. I carried Mr. Wardle in my arms and he licked my nose. He was not frightened in the least, nor was I, but we wished to reach open ground in order to enjoy the view. My knees were loose, and the apple in my throat refused to slide up and down. The path on the far side of the well was a very good one, though boxed in on all sides by grass, and it led me in time to a priest’s hut in the centre of a little clearing. When that priest saw my very white face coming through the grass he howled with terror and embraced my boots; but when I reached the bedstead set outside his door I sat down quickly and Mr. Wardle mounted guard over me. I was not in a condition to take care of myself.

When I awoke I told the priest to lead me into the open, out of the Arti-goth patch and to walk slowly in front of me. Mr. Wardle hates natives, and the priest was more afraid of Mr. Wardle than of me, though we were both angry. He walked very slowly down a narrow little path from his hut. That path crossed three paths, such as the one I had come by in the first instance, and every one of the three headed towards the Bubbling Well. Once when we stopped to draw breath, I heard the Well laughing to itself alone in the thick grass, and only my need for his services prevented my firing both barrels into the priest’s back.

When we came to the open the priest crashed back into cover, and I went to the village of Arti-goth for a drink. It was pleasant to be able to see the horizon all round, as well as the ground underfoot.

The villagers told me that the patch of grass was full of devils and ghosts, all in the service of the priest, and that men and women and children had entered it and had never returned. They said the priest used their livers for purposes of witchcraft. When I asked why they had not told me of this at the outset, they said that they were afraid they would lose their reward for bringing news of the pig.

Before I left I did my best to set the patch alight, but the grass was too green. Some fine summer day, however, if the wind is favourable, a file of old newspapers and a box of matches will make clear the mystery of Bubbling Well Road.

Aunt Ellen

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A PRUDENT man, working from the North to London, along the Eastern Counties, provides himself with friends from whom he can get food and lodging. Miss Gillon, whom all her world calls ‘Aunt Ellen,’ gave me lunch at her house near Grantham. She wished to send an eiderdown quilt to an old family servant at Hammersmith. Surely I remembered Prescott from past ages? To-morrow would be Prescott’s birthday. The quilt had been delayed for repairs. A man would not know, of course, how tender eiderdown quilts were. Should I be in London that evening? Then, in the morning, would I take the quilt round to Prescott’s address? Prescott would be so pleased! And surprised, too; for there were some little birthday remembrances from herself and from Saunders wrapped up in the quilt.

Saunders, Prescott’s successor, went upstairs and returned, her mouth full of knotted strings, clasping an outsized pasteboard coffin. The eiderdown, a loudly-patterned affair, was rolled into bolster form, bound in two places with broad puce ribbons, and coaxed into it. Saunders wove lashings over all and I carried it out and up-ended it beside my steering-wheel.

Going down the drive I could scarcely squint round the corner of the thing, and at the turn into the road, it lurched into my eye. So I declutched it, and tied it to the back of the two-seater. True, I made most of the knots with my gloves on, but, to compensate, I wove Saunders’ reef-points into the rear of the car as carefully as the pendulous oriole stays her nest.

Then I went on to dine at a seat of learning where I was due to pick up a friend—Henry Brankes Lettcombe, O.B.E.—once a Colonel of Territorials—whose mission, in peace, was the regeneration of our native cinema industry. He was a man of many hopes, which translated themselves into prospectuses that faded beneath the acid breath of finance. Sometimes I wrote the prospectuses, because he promised me that, when his ship came in, he would produce the supreme film of the world—the ‘Life of St. Paul.’ He said it would be easier than falling off a log, once he had launched his Pan-Imperial Life-Visions’ Association.

He had said I should find him at St. Martin’s College, which lies in a rather congested quarter of a University town. I always look on my mudguards as hostages to Fortune; yet even I was a little piqued at the waywardness of the traffic. It was composed of the hatless young, in flannel trousers and vivid blazers, who came and went and stopped without warning, in every manner of machine. They were as genial as those should be whose fathers pay all their bills. Only one, a thick-set youth in a canoe-ended natural wood sporting machine, rammed me on the starboard quarter and declared it was my fault.

His companion—slim, spotless, and urbane—smiled disarmingly. ‘I shouldn’t chide with him if I were you, sir,’ he said. ‘He’s been tuning-in.’

I disengaged, and passed on to St. Martin’s where I found Lettcombe also tuning-in. He was returned lately from a place called Hollywood, and he told us of energies unparalleled, and inventions beyond our imaginings, controlled by super-men who, having no racial prepossessions, could satisfy the ‘mass-appetence’ of all the races who attend ‘Sinnymus.’ He spoke, further, of ‘injuncted psychoses’ and ‘endyoclinics’—unsafe words to throw at the Learned who do not attend ‘Ki-ne-mas.’ They retaliated with abracadabras of their own, and demanded definitions of his. Lettcombe, always nebulous, except in action, drank a little College Madeira to help him define, and when we left, at last, for London, was quite definite.

While driving, I listened to the creation, on improved lines, of the Pan-Imperial Life-Visions’ Association. It was now, he said, to be run in conjunction with Hollywood. (He had abandoned my scheme of vast studios at the top of Helvellyn; with marine annexes on the Wash and Holy Island!) I led back tactfully to the St. Paul, pointing out that it would be silly to have the Apostle sunstruck among Californian cacti which, in the nature of things, could not have been discovered till fifteen hundred years after his martyrdom. Lettcombe retorted that the spirit, not the letter, gave life, and offered a semi-annually divorced Film Star for the part of the Elect Lady.

I was beginning to formulate some preliminary objections, when I heard behind us one single smart, drum-like tap. Lettcombe had just unpacked from his imported vocabulary the compelling word, ‘crypto-psychic-apperceptiveness.’ I braked, being cryptically aware that Saunders’ coffin had come adrift, and was lying in the fairway, at the same time as I psychically apperceived the scented loveliness of the early summer night, and the stillness that emphasises percipience when one’s car has stopped. Lettcombe was so full of the shortcomings of all the divorced husbands of the Lady to be elected, that he kept on taking her part to the abandoned steering-wheel long after I had descended and gone back afoot (the reverse not suiting my car’s temperament) to recover the lost packet.

The road behind us ran straight, a few hundred yards, to a small wood and there turned. It was wholly void when I started. First I found the coffin, void also; hacked it into the ditch that it had nearly reached, and held on, looking for a bed-quilt tied in two places. A large head-light illuminated the wood. A small car pelted round the curve. A horn squawked. There was a sound of ironmongery in revolt; the car bounded marsupially to its right, and, with its head-light, disappeared. But before it did this, I fancied I had seen my bundle lying in its path. I went to look.

Obviously no one had been hurt, for an even voice out of the dark pronounced that someone had done it now. A second voice, gruff and heated, asked if he had seen why he had done it. ‘For Women and Wine,’ said the first voice dreamily. ‘Unless that’s how you always change gears.’

They continued talking, like spirits who had encountered by chance in pure space.

The car, meanwhile, knelt on its forehead, presenting a canoe-shaped stern of elaborate carpenter’s work to the chill road. Beneath its hindwheels lay a longish lump, that stopped three of my heart-beats, so humanly dead did it show, till I saw that I should have to find Prescott another eiderdown; and I grew hot against those infants growling and cooing together by the bows of their meretricious craft. Let them enjoy my sensations unwarned, and all the better, if they should imagine they had done murder. Thus I argued in my lower soul; but, on the higher planes of it, where thought merges into Intuition and Prophecy, my Demon of Irresponsibility sang:—‘I am with you once more! Stand back and let Me take charge. This night shall be also One of the Nights.’ So I stood back and waited, as I have before, on Chance and Circumstance which, accepted humbly, betray not the True Believer.

A shadow in a tight-waisted waterproof, with a dress-suit beneath it, came out of the ditch; saw what I had seen; drew its breath sharply, and, after a pause, laid hands slowly on the horror beneath the rear wheels. Suddenly it raised one of its own hands to its mouth and sucked it. I caught a hissing expulsion of relief and saw its outline relax. It then tugged, drew things free, and hauled and hauled at—shall we say Aunt Ellen?—till she was clear. The end of her that came out last was, so to speak, burst. The shadow coiled her up, embraced her with both arms, and partly decanted, partly stuffed, her into the dicky of the car, which it closed silently. I heard a very low chuckle, and I too laughed. The shadow tiptoed over to me. ‘Yours?’ it breathed. ‘Yes,’ I whispered. ‘Do you need it, sir?’ ‘I leave it to you, partner,’ I replied. It chuckled again and patted me on the shoulder with what seemed a mixture of appreciation and almost filial reverence, or even—but this might have been senile vanity—camaraderie. Then it turned and spoke towards the ditch: ‘Phil! She’s as dead as a classic.’

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The reply, delivered apparently through herbage, was that ‘Phil ‘ had ruined his shirt-front.

The shadow sighed, resignedly, ‘Never mind. We’ll break it to him later, sir,’ and patted my shoulder once more. In the silence that followed I heard Lettcombe who, by now, had come to miss me, in search along the road. He chanted his desire that the glow-worm should lend me her eyes, and that shooting-stars, which are as rare as glow-worms in early summer, should chaperone me through all the Eastern Counties.

A London-bound lorry came round the bend, and asked him how much of the road he needed. Lettcombe replied in the terms of the front-line of ’16; the lorry hurled them back with additions from the same gory lexicon, laughed pleasantly, and went on.

‘Well,’ said the voice called Phil, ‘are you going to stick here all night? I’ve got to get—’

‘Hush,’ replied the shadow. ‘I’ve disposed of her now, thank goodness. Back out, if you can.’

‘“Thus—thus to come unto thee!”’ carolled Lettcombe. ‘Did you see that lorry? ’Nearly ran me down! What’s the matter? Has there been an accident? I’m looking for a friend.’

‘Was she a woman?’ the shadow asked him.

The two had barely time to skip aside, when the car, with unnecessary power, belched its indecent little self back on to the tar. Phil, a thick-set youth, confused among levers, put pieces of questions to the shadow, which at a vast leisure answered to the name of ‘Bunny.’

‘What’s happened? What’s really happened? What were you saying about women?’ Phil repeated.

‘I seldom say anything about women. Not even when they are dead,’ Bunny replied.

‘Have you seen a dead woman, then?’ Phil turned on Lettcombe.

‘Nothing but that dam’ lorry. ’Nearly ran me down, too. Didn’t you see?’

‘Look here, Bunny,’ Phil went on. ‘I’ve got to be at Cadogan Gardens by midnight and—I—I’m here and—Haman’s head-light’s wonky. Something must have happened. What’s happened?’

‘And I haven’t seen my friend, either,’

Lettcombe struck in. ‘I wouldn’t worry about him, only I don’t drive much.’ He described me with the lewd facility which pavement and cinema artists are given in place of love of beauty or reverence for intellect.

‘Never mind him!’ said Bunny. ‘Here’s the Regius Professor of Medicine of——’ he named the opposition seat of learning, and by a certain exquisite expansion of bearing included me in the circle. Phil did not.

‘Then what the devil’s he doing up our street? Home! Go home, sir!’ he said to me. There was no reverence in this address, but Bunny apologised for him very prettily.

‘You see, he’s in love,’ he began. ‘He’s using this car to—er thus—thus—to come unto her. That makes him nervous and jealous. And he has run over an old lady, though he doesn’t realise it. When I get that into his head he’ll react quite differently. By the way, sir, did you observe any sign of life after we released her?’

‘I did not.’ The actual Regius Professor of Medicine could not have spoken more authoritatively.

‘Oh, Lord! Someone dead?’ Phil gasped. ‘Where?’

‘I slipped her into that lorry just now—to give her a chance. She looked rather bitten about the back, but she may be alive. We must catch up with her and find out,’ said Bunny.

‘You can’t mistake the lorry either,’ Lettcombe added. ‘It stinks of hens. ’Nearly ran me down. You saw it, didn’t you?’

‘In that case we had better get a move on,’ Bunny suggested.

The ditching had not improved the car, but she was still far from contemptible. Her left fore-wheel inclined, on its stub-axle, towards (technically speaking) the Plane of the Ecliptic; her radiator sweated like Samson at Gaza; her steering-gear played like all Wordsworth’s own daffodils; her swivelling head-light glared fixedly at the ground beneath it like a Trappist monk under penance; but her cranking-handle was beyond comparison, because it was not there. She answered, however, to the self-starter, with promising kicks. There may have been a few spare odds and ends left behind us, but, as Bunny said, that was Haman’s fault for not having provided a torch. I understood that Mr. Haman was seldom permitted to use his own car in term-time, because he had once volunteered that he was a ‘thorough-goin’ sport,’ and was now being educated; and as soon as Lettcombe understood why I had accepted a Regius Professorship of Medicine, and what and where the old lady was, he dropped a good deal of his morbid hate against his lorry, and, for a man of his unimaginative trade, did good work.

Our labours were rather interrupted by Phil’s officious attempts to find out whether his victim were dead or like to live. Bunny was as patient with him as any nurse, even when he began once more to hope to reach Cadogan Gardens by ‘a little after midnight’; it being then eleven forty-seven and a clear night.

We all, except Phil, felt we knew each other well when Mr. Haman’s car was assembled and controllable, and, like the travellers of old, ‘decided henceforth to journey in company.’ Mr. Haman’s car led, with mine in support to light it should any of its electric fittings fail.

Owing to her brutalised fore-wheel, which gave her the look and gait of a dachshund, she carried, as mariners say, a strong port helm; and if let off the wind for an instant, slid towards the ditch. This reduced her speed, but, on the other hand, there was not so much overtaking, at which manoeuvre her infirmities made her deadlier than Boadicea’s chariots.

Thus, then, we laboured London ward for a while, deep in the heart of the night and all its unpredictable allures. (The caption is Lettcombe’s.) Presently we smelt a smell out of the dear dead days when horses drew carts, and blacksmiths shod them—but not at midnight. Lettcombe was outlining ‘The Shaving of Shagpat’ for film purposes, when our squadron-leader stopped; and Bunny, sniffing, walked back to us. ‘Do you happen to remember,’ he asked, ‘if she wore a feather bonnet—or a boa?’

Lettcombe and I remembered both these articles distinctly.

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‘Then that’s all right.’ He called back: ‘She did, Phil. See if it’s anywhere on the dumb-iron.’

Phil got out and grovelled, as we walked towards the smell. He rose with a piece of loudly-patterned silk in his hand.

‘I’ve found this!’ said he hoarsely, ‘Low down on the radiator.’

‘Petticoat!’ said Bunny. ‘Torn off! Tck! Tck! I am sorry, old top.’

‘It don’t prove anything,’ said Lettcombe, ‘except that you may have grazed her. What we’ve got to do is to catch up with that lorry. Perhaps she’s only stunned.’

‘She’s pretty well red-hot,’ said Bunny, beside the crackling car.

He opened the bonnet, and the smell let itself out. It was complex, but with no trace of inferiority.

I remembered then that at least a quarter of ‘Aunt Ellen’s’ figure had been missing after the collision. We recovered a good deal of it, loose and blackening inside the bonnet yet I did not at first see why there should be greasy, fluffy deposits over the exhaust and the mechanism, any more than I could get abreast of the smell. There were motives in it of fats, butyric acid, alcohols, mineral oils, heated rubber, and singed leather, to a broadly-handled accompaniment of charred feathers, lightened by suggestions of crisped flesh.

I began to work out the birthday presents which Miss Gillon and the kindly Saunders must have packed inside ‘Aunt Ellen.’ Butter and hair-oil I could identify; gloves, perhaps; a horn or tortoise-shell comb certainly. The alcohol might have begun the journey as eau-de-Cologne; and there were traces of kidney. On digital exploration, it appeared to be the hair-oil that had really stopped so many of the radiator-holes with pledgets of oiled down. The fan must have sucked the mixture from the piece of quilt that had adhered to the radiator until the whole had impacted, whereby Mr. Haman’s machine had naturally choked and her works turned plum-colour.

‘Those holes ought to be cleared while she cools,’ I said.

‘Your tie-pin’s the thing.’ Bunny turned to Lettcombe, who, being of a decorative breed, detached a cameo head of Eros from his green made-up tie and handed it to Phil, who fell to work. A winkle-vendor could not have excelled him.

As Regius Professor of Medicine, my diagnosis of his condition was that the jolt into the ditch, combined with previous ‘tunings-in,’ had passed Phil into a waking trance, in which he reacted mechanically to stimuli, but felt no real pain.

‘Now, we’ve got to fill the radiator,’ said Bunny, while Phil blew at each hole after it was cleared.

In democratic England, if you make noise enough in public, someone, official or unofficial, will attend to your wants. While our twin Klaxons were developing this theme, a man came out of a gate in a hedge, and told us reproachfully that he had been sitting up solely in order to catch ‘W.E.A.F.’ on the midnight hush. Lettcombe said that at the present conjunction of the planets there was no chance of this till crack of dawn. Instantly all arguments dissolved into the babble of fellow-imbeciles. Bunny and I left them (the man tossed his head at us sideways, saying ‘Oh, that’s all right. Ask Ma.’) and went up a path to a new, dampish bungalow where there was a room with a water-tap and a jug. An old lady in a kimono came out of another room, and at once fell a victim to Bunny in his partially revealed dress-suit, who explained our position at the same time as he filled the jug, which I bore out to the car. On my first trip I passed the bungalow-man and Lettcombe still at the gate wrangling over the Alphabet. On my next, they had run into the bungalow to decide whether the amours of an ill-conducted cattery or the single note of a dismal flageolet represented all that the Western Hemisphere could give of uplift. But I continued to serve the radiator, and, before I had done, got to know something of Phil. He had, he told me, devoted himself to rowing, but that afternoon they had discarded him from his College boat on account of a slipped cartilage; since when, he had been ‘tuning in a little.’ He was, he said, the son of an Archdeacon, and would enter the Church if forced, but much preferred an unembarrassed life in one of our Dominions. He wanted to kill Mr. Haman, because Haman’s car had prevented him getting to Cadogan Gardens to keep an appointment on which a great deal depended. And throughout, he perspired inordinately. When the man and Lettcombe, followed by the old lady of the kimono and Bunny, came out, each bearing one large bottle of Bass, he accepted his with gratitude. The man told us he had been in the service of a Malayan Rubber Company at Kalang-Alang, which is eighty-three miles from the nearest white man, and that his mother had kept house for him there. His mother told Bunny that, as between leeches and tigers, she advised him to take tigers every time, because leeches got up your legs. Then, with appropriate farewells, we resumed our journey.

Barring the front wheel, which was an accident, the late Mr. Haman’s car behaved very well. We were going to compliment Phil on his work, but as soon as he got in beside Bunny, who took the wheel, he fell asleep.

Thanks to my iron nerve, and my refusal to be drawn from my orbit by the performances of the car ahead, I reached the outer suburbs of London, and steered among the heavy traffic that halts for refreshment at the wayside coffee-stalls which are so quiet by day.

Only the speed of my reactions saved me from bumping into Bunny when he pulled up without warning beside a lorry.

‘We’ve found her,’ he cried. ‘Wake up, Phil, and ask for what I told you.’

I heard Phil crash out of his sleep like a buffalo from a juicy wallow, and shout:—‘Have you got an old lady inside there?’

The reply, in a pleasant, though uncultivated, voice, was:—‘Show yourself, Maria. There’s a man after ye at last.’

And that which Phil had been told to ask for he got. Only the shadow of a profile, next the driver, showed in the lorry, so everything was as impersonal as Erebus. The allocution supposed Phil to be several things, and set them out in order and under heads. It imputed to him motives, as it proved that he had manners, of a revolting sort, and yet, by art beyond imitation, it implied all its profounder obscenities. The shallower ones, as Lettcombe said, were pelted in like maxim-belts between the descents of barrages. The pitch scarcely varied, and the temperature of the whole was that of liquefied air. When there was a pause, Bunny, who is ahead of his years in comprehension and pity, got out, went to the lorry and, uncovering, asked with reverence of the driver, ‘Are you married to her, sir?’

‘I am,’ said the pleasant voice proudly. ‘So it isn’t often I can ’ear it from the gallery, as you might say. Go on, Maria.’

Maria took breath between her teeth and went on. She defined Phil’s business as running up and down the world, murdering people better than himself. That was the grey canvas she embroidered idly, at first, as with flowers; then illuminated with ever-soaring fireworks; and lastly rent asunder from wing to wing with forked lightning-like yells of:—‘Murderer! Murderer!’

page 4

All England seemed to be relieved by the silence when it came. Phil, alone in the car, emitted (the caption, again, is Lettcombe’s) a low wolf-like howl, shifted into the driving-seat, and fled up the London road.

‘Better keep him in sight.’ Bunny had already established himself beside me. ‘Better let me drive, sir’; and he was at the wheel, hustling my astounded two-seater out of all her respectable past. Phil, however, took insane risks among the lorries that were bringing vegetables for London to boil, and kept in front.

‘I can’t make out what’s the matter with him.’ (Bunny seemed to find talking and driving at high speeds quite normal.) ‘He was all right till the woman came.’

‘They mostly are,’ said Lettcombe cheaply.

‘Perhaps he’s worrying about the accident,’ I suggested.

‘Oh, I had forgotten about that. I’ve told him about it, for ever so long, but he didn’t seem to take it in at the time. I expect it’s realised remorse.’

‘It ain’t hydrophobia, at any rate,’ said Lettcombe, who was keeping a look-out ahead.

We had reached the opening of one of our much-advertised but usually incomplete bypasses. It by-passed what had been a village where men used to water horses and wash carriages in a paved ‘flash’ or pond close to a public-house. Phil had turned into the pond and was churning it up a good deal.

‘What’s the matter, old thing?’ Bunny asked affectionately as we drew up on the edge. ‘Won’t she swim?’

‘I’m getting rid of the proofs,’ Phil cried. ‘You heard what that woman said? She’s right. This wheel’s stiff with blood. So are the cushions.’ He flung them overboard, and continued his circular tour.

‘I don’t suppose Haman will miss ’em much more than the rest,’ said Bunny to me. ‘I cut my hand on a bit of a bottle in your quilt, sir. It was port wine, I think. It must have splashed up through the floor. It splashed a lot.—Row ashore, Phil, and we’ll search her properly.’

But Phil went astern. He said he was washing the underbody clear of the head on the dumbiron, because no decent girl could be expected to put up with that sort of thing at a dance.

‘That is very strange,’ Bunny mused to himself. ‘I thought he’d forgotten about that too. I only said “bonnet.” He must have evolved “head” out of his subliminal mind.—She’s looking beautiful now, Phil.’

‘Do you really think so? Do you really think a girl ’ud like to see me in it?’ Phil roared above the waters he troubled.

We all said she would, and he swashed out of his pool, damp but prepared to do his duty. Bunny took the wheel at once and said they would show it to her before the dance ended.

‘But then,’ said Phil, ‘would that be fair on the woman I’ve killed? No decent girl could put up with that, you know. Doris least of all.’

‘Oh, you can always explain,’ Lettcombe suggested. ‘Just a simple explanation taken in the spirit in which it was offered.’

Phil thought upon it, while he crammed handfuls of wet dress-shirt-front back into position.

‘You’re right,’ he assented. ‘I’ll explain. . . . Bunny, drive like hell to Haman’s diggings. I’ve got to kill him.’

‘Quite right, old thing,’ said Bunny, and headed for London.

Once again we followed, and for some absurd reason Lettcombe was laid low by laughter. But I saw the zenith beginning to soften towards dawn, and the dim shoulders of the world taking shape against the first filtrations of light. It was the hour I knew of old—the one in which my Demon wrought his mightiest. Therefore, I never insult him by mirth till he has released the last foot of it.

(But what should a man who visits Hollywood for instruction know of any God?)

Dawn breathed upon that immense width of barren arterial tar, with its breadth of tintless stuff at either side. A red light marked a distant crossing. Bunny was letting the dachshund range rather generously all over the unoccupied area, and I suppose he hypnotised me. At any rate both cars seemed to be abreast at the moment that one lonely young Policeman stopped us and wanted to know what we were doing all that for.

I speculated, while he partially undressed himself to get at his notebook, what words my Demon would put into my mouth. They came—weighted—gigantesque—of themselves.

‘Robert William Peel,’ they ran, ‘it is necessary in the pursuit of Art that these things should be. Amen!’

He answered that quoting Scripture had nothing to do with driving to the common danger.

I pitied him—and that he might not go uncomforted to whatever doom awaited, I told him so; merely adding that the other car had been stolen from a Mr. Mordecai, Senior Acolyte of Old Bailey, and that I was observing it on behalf of the Midland Motors’ Recoveries Company. This last convincing cadenza prevented him from trying to smell my breath any longer. Then Phil said he had run over an old lady up the road, but wished to explain and to hang like a gentleman. He continued in this frame of mind and habit of speech for the rest of the conference; but—thanks to the sublime instincts of an ancient people broken to alcohol for a thousand years—the Bobby stuck to the civil charge. Why were we driving to the common danger?

I repeated my firm’s well-chosen name. To prevent theft, not murder, were my instructions; and what was the Policeman going to do about it? Bunny saved him trouble by owning that it was a fair cop, but, given half a chance, he would reform. The Policeman said he didn’t know, and he couldn’t say, but there was something wrong somewhere.

Then, of course, we all had to help him.

He pointed out that he had stopped us. We admitted it. Then would we kindly wait where we were till he went and fetched his Sergeant? He put it to us as gentlemen who wished to save trouble—would we? What else could we do? He went off. We wished to save him trouble, so we waited where we were. Phil sat down on the running-board of Mr. Haman’s car, whimpering ‘Doris!’ at intervals. Lettcombe, who does not markedly click with Aurora, rubbed his chin and said he could do with a shave. Bunny lit a cigarette and joined me. The night had left no trace on him—not even a feather’s weight on anything that he wore; and his young face, insolent as the morning that hurried towards it, had no fear of her revelations.

page 5

‘By she way,’ I asked, ‘have you a plan or a policy, or, anything of that sort?’

‘Plan?’ said he. ‘When one is alive? What for?’

‘’Sorry,’ said I. ‘But I should like to know who your father is.’

‘Speaking as an—er—Uncle, would you advise me to tell, sir, if you were in my position?’ the child replied.

‘Certainly not,’ I answered. ‘I never did.’

Whereupon he told me and went on: ‘If Police Sergeants have been up all night on duty they appreciate a run in the fresh air before turning in. If they’ve been hoicked out of bed, ad hoc, they’re apt to be anfractuous. It’s the Sergeant Complex.’

A lorry came along, and asked Lettcombe if any particular complaint caused him to wave his hands in that way. Lettcombe said that the Policeman had warned him and his friends not to go on till he came back with the Borough Surveyor to see if the road was safe. Mass-psychology being much the same in machines as in men, we presently accumulated three lorries, who debated together with the crispness of the coming morning’s self. A north-bound vehicle approached, was halted, and said that, so far as it knew, nothing was wrong with the road into London. This had to be discussed all over again, and then we saw, far off, the Policeman and his Sergeant advancing at the quickstep. Lettcombe, to encourage them, started a song with the refrain ‘Inky-pinky parlez-vous,’ which the first and third lorries took up in perfect time. The second hissed it conscientiously.

The Sergeant, however, did not attend to us all together. The lorries wanted their cases considered first. Lettcombe said that the Bobby had said that the road wasn’t safe. The Bobby said that he had said, that the way in which those two cars were driven on that road would make any road unsafe. His remarks were meant to be general—not particular. He would have explained further, but the lorries said that they were poor working-men. The Sergeant demurred at ‘poor,’ but, before any protest could be organised, a voice from the second lorry said: ‘A word with you, Master Sergeant Stinking Inspector General of Police, if you please.’

The Sergeant at once changed manner, and answered, like a shop-walker: ‘Oh, good morning, Mrs. Shemahen.’ ‘No good morning for you this morning, thank you,’ was the reply, and Mrs. Shemahen spoke, as she had spoken to Phil not so long ago. Her discourse this time had more of personal knowledge to relish it, and—which spurs every artist—all her points were taken by her audience. (They seemed to be a neighbourly lot along that stretch of road.) When she drew breath, the Bobby would cry hopefully: ‘Pass along! Pass along, there, please!’ but without the least effect on the enraptured lorries. When the Sergeant tried to interrupt (as to an alleged bigamous marriage) they all cried: ‘Hush up!’ and when Mrs. Shemahen said she had done with such as him, they demanded an encore.

They then drove on, and the Sergeant, morally more naked than at birth, turned to us as the loyal and zealous Policeman began: ‘At or about two-ten this morning, being on point duty——’

‘I wish to hell you hadn’t,’ said the Sergeant.

‘By the way,’ said Bunny, in a tone that will work woe in his world before long, ‘who was the woman who was speaking just now? She told us off a little while ago—much better than she did you. Her husband called her Maria, didn’t he?’

‘Oh yes. She’s quite a local character!’ (the seduced Sergeant returned to ease of manner, and natural bearing, as, some day, a girl or two will drop her guard with Bunny and—) ‘She runs a chicken-farm a bit along hereabouts. They give out she’s crazy. What do you think, sir?’

‘With a little training she’d be a revelation in our business,’ Lettcombe broke in. ‘Speaking as one who knows something about it, I can guarantee that.’

I started! Was my Demon going to lay the hot coal of inspiration on Lettcombe’s unshorn lips—not on mine? But I would allow him the count fairly, and I began, ‘One—Two—Three’—while the Bobby made a second shot at his catechism—(‘Six—Seven’)—After all, it was more in Lettcombe’s line than mine, yet—Lettcombe drew himself up, took breath, and—I saw the end, coming with the day.

‘Well, boys,’ he began on what I feel sure is the standardised Hollywood screech of a Producer. ‘The light’s about good enough now for a trial-shot. Jimmy,’ he pointed to Phil, ‘you’ve got to register guilt and remorse for the murder much stronger than you’ve done up to now.’

‘Here!’ I broke in, on the off chance that my Demon might relent, ‘let me help too.’

‘Not much,’ Lettcombe replied. ‘This is my St. Paul!’

‘Ah! I think I see . . .’ the Sergeant began.

‘You’re right, Sergeant.’ Lettcombe swept on. ‘It’s called “Love among the Leeches”—the English end of it. Doug!’ (This was blackguardly of Lettcombe. I do not resemble Mr. Fairbanks in the least.) You’re out of this. You’ve given up trying to blackmail Jimmy and you’ve doped him.’

‘You needn’t have given Jimmy all our whisky, though,’ said Bunny aggrievedly. ‘He’d have registered just as well on half of it.’

‘Exactly,’ Lettcombe resumed. ‘That’s what Mr. Fairbanks meant, Sergeant, when he told your man about doing things for Art’s sake. You’ll find it in his notebook. I saw him write it down. And, Jimmy, register that you’re quite convinced it was Clara you ran over in your car, and that she had committed suicide through grief after the tigers had killed her mother at Kalang-Alang. ’Got that? Say it, then.’

‘Kalang-alang-alang-alang,’ said Phil, like a level-crossing gong. ‘Look here! When do I kill Haman?’

‘In the second reel,’ Lettcombe commanded. ‘We must shoot the accident to the car all over again. Oh, we use up cars in our job as easy as lyin’, Sergeant. Now! ’Tention! Charlie!’—(Bunny took this serve)—‘You’re going to show poor Jimmy what he thought was Clara’s corpse. That comes after Jimmy’s arrest. Sergeant, do you mind telling your man to stand beside Jimmy? He has only got to look as if he didn’t know what’s coming next. Ready?’

And down the fully revealed road moved the wind that comes with morning-turn—a point or two south of sou-west, ever fortunate to me. Bunny moved to the dicky of Mr. Haman’s car and opened it.

page 6

‘Stand closer to the Bobby, Phil,’ he called, ‘and, Bobby darling, put your hand on his shoulder as though you were arresting him. Keep out of the picture, Sergeant, and you’ll be able to see exactly how it’s done.’

At the same time that Lettcombe levelled a light valise, in lieu of camera, Bunny took out from the dicky what he had put there less than two hours ago. And, as he had then hauled ‘Aunt Ellen’ out backwards, so now he shook her and he shook her and he kept on shaking her, forward from where her skirt was to where her head had been. Bits of paper, buttered; bits of bottle-glass; pieces of pomatum-pot (I must have been wrong about the hair-oil) and pieces of groceries came out; but what came out most and seemed as if it would never stop, was the down of the eider-duck (Somateria mollissima). Such is the ingenuity of man, who, from a few square feet of bed-gear, can evoke earth-enveloping smoke-screens of ‘change, alarm, surprise’—but, above all, surprise!

The Policeman disappeared. When we saw him again—Lo! he was older than Abraham, and whiter than Lot’s wife. He blew a good deal through his Father Christmas moustache, but no words came. Then he took off his Esquimaux gloves, and picked feebly at his Polar Bear belly.

Phil lurched towards us like a penguin through a blizzard. He was whiter than the Policeman, for he had been hatless, and his hair had been oiled, and he was damp all over. Bunny motioned him daintily to the open dicky.

The Sergeant, as advised, had kept out of the picture, and so had been able to see exactly how it was done. He sat at the base of the lamp-post at the crossing of the arterial by-pass, and hugged its standard with both arms. After repeated inquiries, none of which he was able to answer, because he could not speak, we left him there, while the Policeman persisted in trying to moult.

. . . . .

I do not laugh when I drive, which is why I was as nearly as possible dead when we followed the dachshund into Cadogan Gardens, where the numbers are ill-arranged, and drove round and round till some young people, who had been dancing, came out from beneath a striped awning into the first of the pure morning sunlight. One of them was called Doris. Phil called her, so that all Cadogan Gardens were aware. Yet it was an appreciable time before she connected the cry with the plumage of that mating bird.

The Shadow of His Hand

[a short tale]

“I COME from San José,” he said. “San José, Calaveras County, California: that’s my place.” I pricked up my ears at the mention of Calaveras County. Bret Harte has made that sacred ground.

“Yes?’’ said I politely. Always be polite to a gentleman from Calaveras County. For aught you know he may be a lineal descendant of the great Colonel Starbottle.

“Did you ever know Vermilyea of San Luis Obispo?” continued the stranger, chewing the plug of meditation.

“No,’’ said I. Heaven alone knows where lies San Luis Obispo, but I was not going to expose my ignorance. Besides, there might be a story at the back of it all. “What was the special weakness of Mister Vermilyea?”

“Vermilyea! He weak! Lot Vennilyea never had a weakness that you might call a weakness until subsequent events transpired. Then that weakness developed into White Rye. All Westerners drink White Rye. On the Eastern coast they drink Bourbon. Lot tried both when his heart was broken. Both—by the quart,”

“D’ you happen to remember what broke his heart?’’ I said.

“This must be your first trip to the States, sir, or you would know that Lot’s heart was broken by his father-in-law. Lot’s congregation—he took to Religion—always said that he had no business fooling with a father-inlaw. A good many other people said that too. But I always adhered to Lot. ‘Why don’t you kill the animal, Lot?’ I used to say. ‘I can’t. He’s the father of my wife,’ Lot used to say. ‘Loan him money then and settle him on the other side of the States,’ I used to say. ‘The old clam won’t move,’ Lot used to say.”

“Half a minute. What was the actual trouble between Vermilyea and his father-inlaw? Did he borrow money?”

“I’m coming to that,” said the stranger calmly. “It arrived this way. Lot had a notion to get married. Some men get that idea. He went to ’Frisco and pawned out his heart—Lot had a most feeling heart, and that was his ruin—to a girl who lived at back of Kearney Street. I’ve forgotten her given name, but the old man’s name was Dougherty. Guess he was a naturalised Irishman. The old man did not see the merits of Lot when he went sparking after the girl evenings. He fired Lot out off the stoop three or four times. Lot didn’t hit him because he was fond of the daughter. He just quit like a lamb; the old man welting into him with anything that came handy—sticks and besoms, and such. Lot endured that, being a tough man. Every time Lot was fired out he would wait till the old man was pretty well pumped out. Then he used to turn round and say, ‘When’s the wedding to be?’ Dougherty used to ramp round Lot while the girl hid herself till the breeze abated. He had a peculiar aversion to domiciliary visits from Lot, had Dougherty. I’ve my own theory on the subject. I’ll explain it later on. At last Dougherty got tired of Lot and his peacefulness. The girl stuck to him for all she was worth. Lot never budged. ‘If you want to marry her,’ said the old man, ‘just drop your long-suffering for half an hour. Stand up to me. Lot, and we’ll run this thing through with our hands.’ ‘If I must, I must,’ said Lot, and with that they began the argument up and down the parlour floor. Lot he was fighting for his wife. He set considerable value on the girl. The old man he was fighting for the fun of the affair. Lot whipped. He handled the old man tenderly out of regard for his connections. All the same he fixed him up pretty thoroughly. When he crawled off the old man he had received his permission to marry the girl. Old man Dougherty ran round ’Frisco advertising Lot for the tallest fighter in the town. Lot was a respectable sort of man and considerable absorbed in preparing for his wedding. It didn’t please him any to receive invitations from the boss fighting men of Trisco—professional invitations, you must understand. I guess he cussed the father-in-law to be.

“When he was married, he concluded to locate in ’Frisco, and started business there. A married man don’t keep his muscle up any. Old man Dougherty he must have counted on that. By the time Lot’s first child was born he came around suffering for a fight. He painted Lot’s house crimson. Lot endured that. He got a hold of the baby and began yanking it around by the legs to see if it could squeal worth listening to. Lot stretched him. Old man howled with delight. Lot couldn’t well hand his father-in-law over to the police, so they had it, knuckle and tooth, all round the front floor, and the old man he quit by the window, considerably mashed up. Lot was fair spent, not having kept up his muscle. My notion is that old man Dougherty being a boss fighter couldn’t get his fighting regularly till Lot married into the family. Then he reckoned on a running discussion to warm up his bones. Lot was too fond of his wife to disoblige him. Any man in his senses would have brought the old man before the courts, or clubbed him, or laid him out stiff. But Lot was always tender-hearted.

“Soon as old man Dougherty got his senses together off the pavement, he argued that Lot was considerable less of a fighter than he had been. That pleased the old man. He was plastered and caulked up by the doctors, and as soon as he could move he interviewed Lot and made remarks. Lot didn’t much care what he said, but when he came to casting reflections on the parentage of the baby. Lot shut the office door and played round for half an hour till the walls glittered like the evening sun. Old man Dougherty crawled out, but he crowed as he crawled. ‘Praise the blessed saints,’ he said, ‘I kin get my fighting along o’ my meals. Lot, ye have prolonged my life a century.’

“Guess Lot would like to see him dead now. He is an old man, but most amazing tough. He has been fighting Lot for a matter of three years. If Lot made a lucky bit of trade, the old man would come along and fight him for luck. If Lot lost a little, the old man would fight him to teach him safe speculation. It took all Lot’s time to keep even with him. No man in business can ’tend his business and fight in streaks. Lot’s trade fell off every time he laid himself out to stretch the old man. Worst of it was that when Lot was made a Deacon of his church, the old man fought him most terrible for the honour of the Roman Catholic Church. Lot whipped, of course. He always whipped. Old man Dougherty went round among the other Deacons and lauded Lot for a boss pugilist, not meaning to hurt Lot’s prospects. Lot had to explain the situation to the church in general. They accepted it.

“Old man Dougherty he fought on. Age had no effect on him. Lot always whipped, but nothing would satisfy the old man. Lot shook all his teeth out till his gums were as bare as a sand-bar. Old man Dougherty came along lisping his invitation to the dance. They fought.

“When Lot shifted to San Luis Obispo, old man Dougherty he came along too—craving for his fight. It was cocktails and plug to him. It grew on him. Lot handled him too gently because of the wife. The old man could come to the scratch once a month, and always at the most inconvenient time. They fought.

“Last I heard of Lot he was sinking into the tomb. ‘It’s not the fighting,’ he said to me. ‘It’s the darned monotony of the circus. He knows I can whip him, but he won’t rest satisfied. ‘Lay him out. Lot,’ said I; ‘fracture his cranium or gouge him. This show is foolish all round.’ ‘I can’t lay him out,’ said Lot. ‘He’s my father-in-law. But don’t it strike you I’ve a deal to be thankful for? If he had been a Jew he’d have fought on Simdays when I was doing Deacon. I’ve been too gentle with him; the old man knows my spot place, but I’ve a deal to be thankful for.’

“Strikes me that thankfulness of Lot’s sort is nothing more nor less than cussed affectation. Say!”

I said nothing.

The Prophet and the Country

(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 5

NORTH of London stretches a country called ‘The Midlands,’ filled with brick cities, all absolutely alike, but populated by natives who, through heredity, have learned not only to distinguish between them but even between the different houses; so that at meals and at evening multitudes return, without confusion or scandal, each to the proper place.Last summer, desperate need forced me to cross that area, and I fell into a motor-licence ‘control’ which began in a market-town filled with unherded beeves carrying red numbered tickets on their rumps. An English-speaking policeman inspected my licence on a bridge, while the cattle blundered and blew round the car. A native in plain clothes lolled out an enormous mulberry-coloured tongue, with which he licked a numbered label, precisely like one of those on the behinds of the bullocks, and made to dab it on my wind-screen. I protested. ‘But it will save you trouble,’ he said. ‘You’re liable to be held up for your licence from now on. This is your protection. Everybody does it.’

‘Oh! If that’s the case——’ I began weakly.

He slapped it on the glass and I went forward —the man was right-all the cars I met were ‘protected’ as mine was—till I reached some county or other which marked the limit of the witch-doctoring, and entered, at twilight, a large-featured land where the Great North Road ran, bordered by wide way-wastes, between clumps of old timber.

Here the car, without warning, sobbed and stopped. One does not expect the make-and-break of the magneto—that tiny two-inch spring of finest steel—to fracture; and by the time we had found the trouble, night shut down on us. A rounded pile of woods ahead took one sudden star to its forehead and faded out; the way-waste melted into the darker velvet of the hedge; another star reflected itself in the glassy black of the bitumened road; and a weak moon struggled up out of a mist-patch from a valley. Our lights painted the grass unearthly greens, and the treeboles bone-white. A church clock struck eleven, as I curled up in the front seat and awaited the progress of Time and Things, with some notion of picking up a tow towards morning. It was long since I had spent a night in the open, and the hour worked on me. Time was when such nights, and the winds that heralded their dawns, had been fortunate and blessed; but those Gates, I thought, were for ever shut . . . .

I diagnosed it as a baker’s van on a Ford chassis, lit with unusual extravagance. It pulled up and asked what the trouble might be. The first sentence sufficed, even had my lights not revealed the full hairless face, the horn-rimmed spectacles, the hooded boots below, and the soft hat, fashioned on no block known to the Eastern trade, above, the yellow raincoat. I explained the situation. The resources of Mr. Henry Ford’s machines did not run to spare parts of my car’s type, but—it was a beautiful night for camping-out. He himself was independent of hotels. His outfit was a caravan hired these months past for tours of Great Britain. He had been alone since his wife died, of duodenal ulcer, five years ago. Comparative Ethnology was his present study. No, not a professor, nor, indeed, ever at any College, but a ‘realtor’—a dealer in real estate in a suburb of the great and cultured centre of Omaha, Nebraska. Had I ever heard of it? I had once visited the very place and there had met an unforgettable funeral-furnisher; but I found myself (under influence of the night and my Demon) denying all knowledge of the United States. I had, I said, never left my native land; but the passion of my life had ever been the study of the fortunes and future of the U.S.A.; and to this end I had joined three Societies, each of which regularly sent me all its publications.

He jerked her on to the grass beside my car, where our mingled lights slashed across the trunks of a little wood; and I was invited into his pitch-pine-lined caravan, with its overpowering electric installation, its flap-table, typewriter, drawers and lockers below the bunk. Then he spoke, every word well-relished between massy dentures; the inky-rimmed spectacles obscuring the eyes, and the face as expressionless as the unrelated voice.

He spoke in capital letters, a few of which I have preserved, on our National Spirit, which, he had sensed, was Homogeneous and in Ethical Contact throughout—Unconscious but Vitally Existent. That was his Estimate of our Racial Complex. It was an Asset, but a Democracy postulating genuine Ideals should be more multitudinously-minded and diverse in Outlook. I assented to everything in a voice that would have drawn confidences from pillar-boxes.

He next touched on the Collective Outlook of Democracy, and thence glanced at Herd Impulse, and the counter-balancing necessity for Individual Self-Expression. Here he began to search his pockets, sighing heavily from time to time.

‘Before my wife died, sir, I was rated a one-hundred-per-cent. American. I am now—but . . . Have you ever in Our Literature read a book called The Man Without a Country? I’m him!’ He still rummaged, but there was a sawing noise behind the face.

‘And you may say, first and last, drink did it!’ he added. The noise resumed. Evidently he was laughing, so I laughed too. After all, if a man must drink, what better lair than a caravan? At his next words I repented.

‘On my return back home after her burial, I first received my Primal Urge towards Self-Expression. Till then I had never realised myself . . . . Ah!’

He had found it at last in a breast pocket—a lank and knotty cigar.

‘And what, sir, is your genuine Opinion of Prohibition?’ he asked when the butt had been moistened to his liking.

‘Oh!—er! It’s a—a gallant adventure!’ I babbled, for somehow I had tuned myself to listen-in to tales of other things. He turned towards me slowly.

‘The Revelation qua Prohibition that came to me on my return back home from her funeral was not along those lines. This is the Platform I stood on.’ I became, thenceforward, one of vast crowds being addressed from that Platform.

‘There are Races, sir, which have been secluded since their origin from the microbes–the necessary and beneficent microbes—of Civ’lisation. Once those microbes are introdooced to ’em, those races re-act precisely in proportion to their previous immunity or Racial Virginity. Measles, which I’ve had twice and never laid by for, are as fatal to the Papuan as pneumonic plague to the White. Alcohol, for them, is disaster, degeneration, and death. Why? You can’t get ahead of Cause and Effect. Protect any race from its natural and God-given bacteria and you automatically create the culture for its decay, when that protection is removed. That, sir, is my Thesis.’

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The unlit cigar between his lips circled slowly, but I had no desire to laugh.

‘The virgin Red Indian fell for the Firewater of the Paleface as soon as it was presented to him. For Firewater, sir, he parted with his lands, his integrity, an’ his future. What is he now? An Ethnological Survival under State Protection. You get me? Immunise, or virg’nise, the Cit’zen of the United States to alcohol, an’ you as surely redooce him to the mental status an’ outlook of that Redskin. That is the Ne-mee-sis of Prohibition. And the Process has begun, sir. Haven’t you noticed it already’—he gulped—‘among Our People?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Men don’t always act as they preach, of course.’

‘You won’t abrade my National Complex. What’s the worst you’ve seen in connection with Our People—and Rum?’ The round lenses were full on me. I chanced it.

‘I’ve seen one of ’em on a cross-Channel boat, talking Prohibition in the bar—pretty full. He had three drinks while I listened.’

‘I thought you said you’d never quit England?’ he replied.

‘Oh, we don’t count France,’ I amended hastily.

‘Then was you ever at Monte Carlo? No? Well, I was—this spring. One of our tourist steamers unloaded three hundred of ’em at the port o’ Veel Franshe; and they went off to Monte Carlo to dine. I saw ’em, sir, come out of the dinner-hall of that vast Hotel opp’site the Cassino there, not drunk, but all—all havin’ drink taken. In that hotel lounge after that meal, I saw an elderly cit’zen up an’ kiss eight women, none of ’em specially young, sittin’ in a circle on the settees; the rest of his crowd applaudin’. Folk just shrugged their shoulders, and the French nigger on the door, I heard him say: “It’s only the Yanks tankin’ up.” It galled me. As a one-hundred-per-cent. American, it galled me unspeakably. And you’ve observed the same thing durin’ the last few years? ‘

I nodded. The face was working now in the yellow lights reflected from the close-buttoned raincoat. He dropped his hand on his knee and struck it again and again, before he steadied himself with the usual snap and grind of his superb dentist-work.

‘My Rev’lation qua the Peril of Prohibition was laid on me on my return back home in the hour of my affliction. I’d been discussin’ Prohibition with Mrs. Tarworth only the week before. Her best friend, sir, a neighbour of ours, had filled one of the vases in our parlour with chrysanthemums out of a bust wreath. I can’t ever smell to those flowers now ’thout it all comin’ back. Yes, sir, in my hour of woe it was laid on me to warn my land of the Ne-mee-sis of Presumption. There’s only one Sin in the world—and that is Presumption. Without strong Presumption, sir, we’d never have fixed Prohibition the way we did . . . . An’ when I retired that night I reasoned it out that there was but one weapon for me to work with to convey my message to my native land. That, sir, was the Movies. So I reasoned it. I reasoned it so-oo! Now the Movies wasn’t a business I’d ever been interested in, though a regular attendant . . . . Well, sir, within ten days after I had realised the Scope an’ Imperativeness of my Rev’lation, I’d sold out an’ re-invested so’s everything was available. I quit Omaha, sir, the freest—the happiest—man in the United States.’

A puff of air from the woods licked through the open door of the caravan, trailing a wreath of mist with it. He pushed home the door.

‘So you started in on Anti-Prohibition films?’ I suggested.

‘Sir?—More! It was laid on me to feature the Murder of Immunised America by the Microbe of Modern Civ’lisation which she had presumptuously defied. That text inspired all the titling. Before I arrived at the concept of the Appeal, I was months studyin’ the Movie business in every State of Our Union, in labour and trava-il. The Complete Concept, sir, with its Potential’ties, came to me of a Sunday afternoon in Rand Park, Keokuk, Iowa—the centre of our native pearl-button industry. As a boy, sir, I used to go shell-tongin’ after mussels, in a shanty-boat on the Cumberland River, Tennessee, always hopin’ to find a thousand dollar pearl. (The shell goes to Keokuk for manufacture.) I found my pearl in Keokuk—where my Concept came to me! Excuse me!’

He pulled out a drawer of card-indexed photographs beneath the bunk, ran his long fingers down the edges, and drew out three.

The first showed the head of an elderly Red Indian chief in full war-paint, the lined lips compressed to a thread, eyes wrinkled, nostrils aflare, and the whole face lit by so naked a passion of hate that I started.

‘That,’ said Mr. Tarworth, ‘is the Spirit of the Tragedy—both of the Red Indians who initially, and of our Whites who subsequently, sold ’emselves and their heritage for the Firewater of the Paleface. The Captions run in diapason with that note throughout. But for a Film Appeal, you must have a balanced leet-motif interwoven with the footage. Now this close-up of the Red Man I’m showin’ you, punctuates the action of the dramma. He recurs, sir, watchin’ the progressive degradation of his own people, from the advent of the Paleface with liquor, up to the extinction of his race. After that, you see him, again, more and more dominant, broodin’ over an’ rejoicin’ in the downfall of the White American artificially virg’nised against Alcohol—the identical cycle repeated. I got this shot of Him in Oklahoma, one of our Western States, where there’s a crowd of the richest Red Indians (drawin’ oil-royalties) on earth. But they’ve got a Historical Society that chases ’em into paint and feathers to keep up their race-pride, and for the Movies. He was an Episcopalian and owns a Cadillac, I was told. The sun in his eyes makes him look that way. He’s indexed as “Rum-in-the-Cup” (that’s the element of Popular Appeal), but, say ’—the voice softened with the pride of artistry—‘ain’t He just it for my purposes?’

He passed me the second photo. The cigar rolled again and he held on:

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‘Now in every Film Appeal, you must balance your leet-motif by balancin’ the Sexes. The American Women, sir, handed Prohibition to Us while our boys were away savin’ you. I know the type—’born an’ bred with it. She watches throughout the film what She’s brought about—watches an’ watches till the final Catastrophe. She’s Woman Triumphant, balanced against Rum-in-the-Cup—the Degraded Male. I hunted the whole of the Middle West for Her in vain, ’fore I remembered—not Jordan, but Abanna and Parphar—Mrs. Tarworth’s best friend at home. I was then in Texarkhana, Arkansas, fixin’ up a deal I’ll tell you about; but I broke for Omaha that evenin’ to get a shot of Her. When I arrived so sudden she—she—thought, I guess, I meant to make her Number Two. That’s Her. You wouldn’t realise the Type, but it’s it.’

I looked; saw the trained sweetness and unction in the otherwise hardish, ignorant eyes; the slightly open, slightly flaccid mouth; the immense unconscious arrogance, the immovable certitude of mind, and the other warning signs in the poise of the broad-cheeked head. He was fingering the third photo.

‘And when the American Woman realises the Scope an’ the Impact an’ the Irrevocability of the Catastrophe which she has created by Her Presumption, She—She registers Despair. That’s Her—at the finale.’

It was cruelty beyond justification to have pinned down any living creature in such agony of shame, anger, and impotence among life’s wreckage. And this was a well-favoured woman, her torment new-launched on her as she stood gripping the back of a stamped-velvet chair.

‘And so you went back to Texarkhana without proposing,’ I began.

‘Why, yes. There was only forty-seven minutes between trains. I told her so. But I got both shots.’

I must have caught my breath, for, as he took the photo back again, he explained: ‘In the Movie business we don’t employ the actool. This is only the Basis we build on to the nearest professional type. That secures controlled emphasis of expression. She’s only the Basis.’

‘I’m glad of that,’ I said. He lit his cigar, and relaxed beneath the folds of the loose coat.

‘Well, sir, having secured my leet-motifs and Sex-balances, the whole of the footage coverin’ the downfall of the Red Man was as good as given me by a bust Congregational Church that had been boosting Prohibition near Texarkhana. That was why I’d gone there. One of their ladies, who was crazy about Our National dealin’s with the Indian, had had the details documented in Washington; an’ the resultant film must have cost her any God’s dollars you can name. It was all there—the Red Man partin’ with his lands and furs an’ women to the early settlers for Rum; the liquor-fights round the tradin’-posts; the Government Agents swindlin’ ’em with liquor; an’ the Indians goin’ mad from it; the Black Hawk War; the winnin’ of the West—by Rum mainly—the whole jugful of Shame. But that film failed, sir, because folk in Arkansaw said it was an aspersion on the National Honour, and, anyway, buying land needful for Our inevitable development was more Christian than the bloody wars of Monarchical Europe. The Congregationalists wanted a new organ too; so I traded a big Estey organ for their film. My notion was to interweave it with parallel modern instances, from Monte Carlo and the European hotels, of White American Degradation; the Main Caption bein’: “The Firewater of the Paleface Works as Indifferently as Fate.” An’ old Rum-in-the-Cup’s close-up shows broodin’—broodin’—broodin’—through it all! You sense my Concept?’

He relighted his cigar.

‘I saw it like a vision. But, from there on; I had to rely on my own Complex for intuition. I cut out all modern side-issues—the fight against Prohibition; bootlegging; home-made Rum manufacture; wood-alcohol tragedies, an’ all that dope. ‘Dunno as I didn’t elim’nate to excess. The Revolt of the Red Blood Corpuscules should ha’ been stressed.’

‘What’s their share in it?’

‘Vital! They clean up waste and deleterious matter in the humane system. Under the microscope they rage like lions. Deprive ’em of their job by sterilisin’ an’ virginising the system, an’ the Red Blood Corpuscules turn on the humane system an’ destroy it bodily. Mentally, too, mebbe. Ain’t that a hell of a thought?’

‘Where did you get it from?’

‘It came to me—with the others,’ he replied as simply as Ezekiel might have told a fellow-captive beside Chebar. ‘But it’s too high for a Democracy. So I cut it right out. For Film purposes I assumed that, at an unspecified date, the United States had become virg’nised to liquor. The Taint was out of the Blood, and, apparently, the Instinct had aborted. “The Triumph of Presumption” is the Caption. But from there on, I fell down because, for the film Appeal, you cannot present such an Epoch without featurin’ confirmatory exhibits which, o’ course, haven’t as yet materialised. That meant that the whole Cultural Aspect o’ that Civ’lisation of the Future would have to be built up at Hollywood; an’ half a million dollars wouldn’t cover it. “The Vision of Virg’nised Civ’lisation.” A hell of a proposition! But it don’t matter now.’

He dropped his head and was still for a little.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘How does the idea work out—in your mind?’

‘In my mind? As inevitably, sir, as the Red Man’s Fall through Rum. My notion was a complete Cultural Exposay of a She—dom’nated Civ’hsation, built on a virginal basis qua alcohol, with immensely increased material Productivity (say, there’d be money in that from big Businesses demonstratin’ what they’ll prodooce a hundred years hence), and a side-wipe at the practically non-existent birth-rate.’

‘Why that, too?’ I asked.

He gave me the reason—a perfectly sound one—which has nothing to do with the tale, and went on:

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‘After that Vision is fully realised, the End comes—as remorselessly for the White as for the Red. How? The American Woman—you will recall the first close-up of that lady I showed you, interweavin’ throughout the narr’tive—havin’ accomplished all She set out to do, wishes to demonstrate to the world the Inteegral Significance of Her Life-work. Why not? She’s never been blamed in Her life. So delib’rately, out of High Presumption, the American Woman withdraws all inhibit’ry legislation, all barriers against Alcohol—to show what She has made of Her Men. The Captions here run—“The Zeenith of Presumption. America Stands by Herself—Guide and Saviour of Humanity.” “Let Evil do Its Damnedest! We are above It.” Say, ain’t that a hell of a thought?’

‘A bit extravagant, isn’t it?’

‘Extrav’gance? In the life of actool men an’ women? It don’t exist. Well, anyway, that’s my top-note before the day-bakkle. There’s an interval while the Great World-Wave is gatherin’ to sweep aside the Children of Presumption. Nothin’ eventuates for a while. The Machine of Virg’nised Civ’lisation functions by its own stored energy. And then, sir—then the World-Wave crashes down on the White as it crashed on the Red Skin! (All this while old Rum-in-the-Cup is growin’ more an’ more dom’nant, as I told you.) But now, owin’ to the artificialised mentality of the victims and the immune pop’lation, its effects are Cataclysmic. “The Alcohol Appeal, held back for five Generations, wakes like a Cyclone.” That’s the Horror I’m stressin’. And Europe, and Asia, and the Ghetto exploit America—cold. “A Virg’nised People let go all holts, and part with their All.” It is no longer a Dom’nationbut an Obsession. Then a Po-ssession! Then come the Levelled Bay’nets of Europe. Why so? Because the liquor’s peddled out, sir, under armed European guards to the elderly, pleadin’ American Whites who pass over their title-deeds—their businesses, fact’ries, canals, sky-scrapers, town-lots, farms, little happy-lookin’ homes—everything—for it. You can see ’em wadin’ into the ocean, from Oyster Bay to Palm Beach, under great flarin’ sunsets of National Decay, to get at the stuff sooner. And Europe’s got ’em by the gullet—peddlin’ out the cases, or a single bottle at a time, to each accordin’ to his need—under the Levelled Bay’nets of Europe.’

‘But why lay all the responsibility on Europe?’ I broke in. ‘Surely some progressive American Liquor Trust would have been m the game from the first?’

‘Sure! But the Appeal is National, and there are some things, sir, that the American People will not stand for. It was Europe or nothing. Otherwise, I could not have stressed the effect of the Levelled Bay’nets of Europe. You see those bay’nets keepin’ order in the vast cathedrals of the new religions—the broken whisky bottles round the altar—the Priest himself, old and virg’nised, pleadin’ and prayin’ with his flock till, in the zeenith of his agony an’ his denunciations, he too falls an’ wallows with the rest of ’em! Extrav’gant? No! Logic. An’ so it spreads, from West to East, from East to West up to the dividin’ line where the European and the Asiatic Liquor Trust have parcelled out the Land o’ Presumption. No paltry rum-peddlin’ at tradin’posts this time, but mile-long electric freight-trains, surgin’ and swoopin’ from San Francisco an’ Boston with their seven thousand ton of alcohol, till they meet head-on at the Liquor Line, an’ you see the little American People fawnin’ an’ pleadin’ round their big wheels an’ tryin’ to slip in under the Levelled Bay’nets of Europe to handle and touch the stuff, even if they can’t drink it. It’s horrible—horrible! “The Wages of Sin!” “The Death of the She-Dom’nated Sons of Presumption!”’

He stood up, his head high in the caravan’s resonant roof, and mopped his face.

‘Go on !’ I said.

‘There ain’t much more. You see the devirg’nised European an’ the immemorially sophisticated Asiatic, who can hold their liquor, spreadin’ out an’ occupyin’ the land (the signs in the streets register that) like—like a lavva-flow in Honolulu. There’s jest a hint, too, of the Return of the Great Scourge, an’ how it fed on all this fresh human meat. Jest a few feet of the flesh rottin’ off the bones—’same as when Syph’lis originated in the Re-nay-sanse Epoch. Last of all—date not specified—will be the herdin’ of the few survivin’ Americans into their reservation in the Yellowstone Park by a few slouchin’, crippled, remnants of the Redskins. ‘Get me? “Presumption’s Ultimate Reward.” “The Wheel Comes Full Circle.” An’ the final close-up of Rum-in-the-Cup with his Hate-Mission accomplished.’

He stooped again to the photos in the bunk-locker.

‘I shot that,’ he said, ‘when I was in the Yellowstone. It’s a document to build up my Last Note on. They’re jest a party of tourists watchin’ grizzly bears rakin’ in the hotel dumpheaps (they keep ’em to show). That wet light hits back well off their clothes, don’t it? ‘

I saw six or seven men and women, in pale-coloured raincoats, gathered, with no pretence at pose, in a little glade. One man was turning up his collar, another stooping to a bootlace, while a woman opened her umbrella over him. They faced towards a dimly defined heap of rubbish and tins; and they looked unutterably mean.

‘Yes.’ He took it back from me. ‘That would have been the final note—the dom’nant resolvin’ into a minor. But it don’t matter now.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ I said, stupidly enough.

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‘Not to me, sir. My Church—I’m a Fundamentalist, an’ I didn’t read ’em more than half the scenario—started out by disownin’ me for aspersin’ the National Honour. A bunch of our home papers got holt of it next. They said I was a ren’gade an’ done it for dollars. An’ then the ladies on the Social Betterment an’ Uplift Committees took a hand. In your country you don’t know the implications of that! I’m—I’m a one-hundred-per-cent. American, but—I didn’t know what men an’ women are. I guess none of us do at home, or we’d say so, instead o’ playin’ at being American Cit’zens. There’s no law with Us under which a man can be jailed for aspersin’ the National Honour. There’s no need. It got into the Legislature, an’ one Senator there he spoke for an hour, demandin’ to have me unanimously an’ internationally disavowed by—by my Maker, I presoom. No one else stood by me. I’d been to the big Jew combines that control the Movie business m our country. I’d been to Heuvelstein—he represents sixty-seven million dollars’ interests. They say he’s never read a scenario in his life. He read every last word of mine aloud. He laughed some, but he said he was doin’ well in a small way, and he didn’t propose to start up any pogroms against the Chosen in New York. He said I was ahead of my time. I know that. An’ then—my wife’s best friend was back of this—folk at home got talkin’ about callin’ for an inquiry into my state o’ mind, an’ whether I was fit to run my own affairs. I saw a lawyer or two over that, an’ I came to a realism’ sense of American Law an’ Justice. That was another of the things I didn’t know. It made me sick to my stummick, sir—sick with physical an’ mental terror an’ dread. So I quit. I changed my name an’ quit two years back. Those ancient prophets an’ martyrs haven’t got much on me in the things a Democracy hands you if you don’t see eye to eye with it. Therefore, I have no abidin’—place except this old caravan. Now, sir, we two are like ships that pass in the night, except, as I said, I’ll be very pleased to tow you into Doncaster this morning. Is there anythin’ about me strikes you in anyway as deviatin’ from sanity?’

‘Not m the least,’ I replied quickly. ‘But what have you done with your scenario?’

‘Deposited it in the Bank of England at London.’

‘Would you sell it?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Couldn’t it be produced here? ‘

‘I am a one-hundred-per-cent. American. The way I see it, I could not be a party to an indirect attack on my Native Land.’

Once again he ground his jaws. There did not seem to be much left to say. The heat in the shut caravan was more and more oppressive. Time had stood still with me listening. I was aware now that the owls had ceased hooting and that a night had gone out of the world. I rose from the bunk. Mr. Tarworth, carefully rebuttoning his raincoat, opened the door.

‘Good Lord Gord Almighty!’ he cried, with a child’s awed reverence. ‘It’s sun-up. Look! ‘

Daylight was just on the heels of dawn, with the sun following. The icy-blackness of the Great North Road banded itself with smoking mists that changed from solid pearl to writhing opal, as they lifted above hedge-row level. The dew-wet leaves of the upper branches turned suddenly into diamond facets, and that wind, which runs before the actual upheaval of the sun, swept out of the fragrant lands to the East, and touched my cheek—as many times it had touched it before, on the edge, or at the ends, of inconceivable experiences.

My companion breathed deeply, while the low glare searched the folds of his coat and the sags and wrinkles of his face. We heard the far-away pulse of a car through the infinite, clean-born, light-filled stillness. It neared and stole round the bend—a motor-hearse on its way to some early or distant funeral, one side of the bright oak coffin showing beneath the pall, which had slipped a little. Then it vanished in a blaze of wet glory from the sun-drenched road, amid the songs of a thousand birds.

Mr. Tarworth laid his hand on my shoulder.

‘Say, Neighbour,’ he said. ‘There’s somethin’ very soothin’ in the Concept of Death after all.’

Then he set himself, kindly and efficiently, to tow me towards Doncaster, where, when the day’s life should begin again, one might procure a new magneto make-and-break—that tiny two-inch spring of finest steel, failure of which immobilises any car.