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THEY were playing hide-and-seek with bicycle lamps after tea. Dan had hung his lamp on the apple tree at the end of the hellebore bed in the walled garden, and was crouched by the gooseberry bushes ready to dash off when Una should spy him. He saw her lamp come into the garden and disappear as she hid it under her cloak. While he listened for her footsteps, somebody (they both thought it was Phillips the gardener) coughed in the corner of the herb-beds. ‘All right,’ Una shouted across the asparagus; ‘we aren’t hurting your old beds, Phippsey!’

She flashed her lantern towards the spot, and in its circle of light they saw a Guy Fawkes-looking man in a black cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, walking down the path beside Puck. They ran to meet him, and the man said something to them about rooms in their head. After a time they understood he was warning them not to catch colds.

‘You’ve a bit of a cold yourself, haven’t you?’ said Una, for he ended all his sentences with a consequential cough. Puck laughed.

‘Child,’ the man answered, ‘if it hath pleased Heaven to afflict me with an infirmity—’

‘Nay, nay,’ Puck struck In, ‘the maid spoke out of kindness. I know that half your cough is but a catch to trick the vulgar; and that’s a pity. There’s honesty enough in you, Nick, without rasping and hawking.’

‘Good people’—the man shrugged his lean shoulders—‘the vulgar crowd love not truth unadorned. Wherefore we philosophers must needs dress her to catch their eye or—ahem! —their ear.’

‘And what d’you think of that?’ said Puck solemnly to Dan.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘It sounds like lessons.’

‘Ah—well! There have been worse men than Nick Culpeper to take lessons from. Now, where can we sit that’s not indoors?’

‘In the hay-mow, next to old Middenboro,’ Dan suggested. ‘He doesn’t mind.’

‘Eh?’ Mr Culpeper was stooping over the pale hellebore blooms by the light of Una’s lamp. ‘Does Master Middenboro need my poor services, then?’

‘Save him, no!’ said Puck. ‘He is but a horse—next door to an ass, as you’ll see presently. Come!’

Their shadows jumped and slid on the fruit-tree walls. They filed out of the garden by the snoring pig-pound and the crooning hen-house, to the shed where Middenboro the old lawn-mower pony lives. His friendly eyes showed green in the light as they set their lamps down on the chickens’ drinking-trough outside, and pushed past to the hay-mow. Mr Culpeper stooped at the door.

‘Mind where you lie,’ said Dan. ‘This hay’s full of hedge-brishings.

‘In! in!’ said Puck. ‘You’ve lain in fouler places than this, Nick. Ah! Let us keep touch with the stars!’ He kicked open the top of the half-door, and pointed to the clear sky. ‘There be the planets you conjure with! What does your wisdom make of that wandering and variable star behind those apple boughs?’

The children smiled. A bicycle that they knew well was being walked down the steep lane. ‘Where?’ Mr Culpeper leaned forward quickly. ‘That? Some countryman’s lantern.’

‘Wrong, Nick,’ said Puck. ‘’Tis a singular bright star in Virgo, declining towards the house of Aquarius the water-carrier, who hath lately been afflicted by Gemini. Aren’t I right, Una?’ Mr Culpeper snorted contemptuously.

‘No. It’s the village nurse going down to the Mill about some fresh twins that came there last week. Nurse,’ Una called, as the light stopped on the flat, ‘when can I see the Morris twins? And how are they?’

‘Next Sunday, perhaps. Doing beautifully,’ the Nurse called back, and with a ping-ping-ping of the bell brushed round the corner.

‘Her uncle’s a vetinary surgeon near Banbury,’ Una explained, and if you ring her bell at night, it rings right beside her bed—not downstairs at all. Then she ’umps up—she always keeps a pair of dry boots in the fender, you know—and goes anywhere she’s wanted. We help her bicycle through gaps sometimes. Most of her babies do beautifully. She told us so herself.’

‘I doubt not, then, that she reads in my books,’ said Mr Culpeper quietly. ‘Twins at the Mill!’ he muttered half aloud. “And again He sayeth, Return, ye children of men.” ‘

‘Are you a doctor or a rector?’ Una asked, and Puck with a shout turned head over heels in the hay. But Mr Culpeper was quite serious. He told them that he was a physician-astrologer—a doctor who knew all about the stars as well as all about herbs for medicine. He said that the sun, the moon, and five Planets, called Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, and Venus, governed everybody and everything in the world. They all lived in Houses—he mapped out some of them against the dark with a busy forefinger—and they moved from House to House like pieces at draughts; and they went loving and hating each other all over the skies. If you knew their likes and dislikes, he said, you could make them cure your patient and hurt your enemy, and find out the secret causes of things. He talked of these five Planets as though they belonged to him, or as though he were playing long games against them. The children burrowed in the hay up to their chins, and looked out over the half-door at the solemn, star-powdered sky till they seemed to be falling upside down into it, while Mr Culpeper talked about ‘trines’ and ‘oppositions’ and ‘conjunctions’ and ‘sympathies’ and ‘antipathies’ in a tone that just matched things.

A rat ran between Middenboro’s feet, and the old pony stamped.

‘Mid hates rats,’ said Dan, and passed him over a lock of hay. ‘I wonder why.’

‘Divine Astrology tells us,’ said Mr Culpeper. ‘The horse, being a martial beast that beareth man to battle, belongs naturally to the red planet Mars—the Lord of War. I would show you him, but he’s too near his setting. Rats and mice, doing their businesses by night, come under the dominion of our Lady the Moon. Now between Mars and Luna, the one red, t’other white, the one hot t’other cold and so forth, stands, as I have told you, a natural antipathy, or, as you say, hatred. Which antipathy their creatures do inherit. Whence, good people, you may both see and hear your cattle stamp in their stalls for the self-same causes as decree the passages of the stars across the unalterable face of Heaven! Ahem!’ Puck lay along chewing a leaf. They felt him shake with laughter, and Mr Culpeper sat up stiffly.

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‘I myself” said he, ‘have saved men’s lives, and not a few neither, by observing at the proper time—there is a time, mark you, for all things under the sun—by observing, I say, so small a beast as a rat in conjunction with so great a matter as this dread arch above us.’ He swept his hand across the sky. ‘Yet there are those,’ he went on sourly, ‘who have years without knowledge.’

‘Right,’ said Puck. ‘No fool like an old fool.’

Mr Culpeper wrapped his cloak round him and sat still while the children stared at the Great Bear on the hilltop.

‘Give him time,’ Puck whispered behind his hand. ‘He turns like a timber-tug—all of a piece.’

‘Ahem!’ Mr Culpeper said suddenly. ‘I’ll prove it to you. When I was physician to Saye’s Horse, and fought the King—or rather the man Charles Stuart—in Oxfordshire (I had my learning at Cambridge), the plague was very hot all around us. I saw it at close hands. He who says I am ignorant of the plague, for example, is altogether beside the bridge.’

‘We grant it,’ said Puck solemnly. ‘But why talk of the plague this rare night?’

‘To prove my argument. This Oxfordshire plague, good people, being generated among rivers and ditches, was of a werish, watery nature. Therefore it was curable by drenching the patient in cold water, and laying him in wet cloths; or at least, so I cured some of them. Mark this. It bears on what shall come after.’

‘Mark also, Nick,’ said Puck, ‘that we are not your College of Physicians, but only a lad and a lass and a poor lubberkin. Therefore be plain, old Hyssop on the Wall!’

‘To be plain and in order with you, I was shot in the chest while gathering of betony from a brookside near Thame, and was took by the King’s men before their Colonel, one Blagg or Bragge, whom I warned honestly that I had spent the week past among our plague-stricken. He flung me off into a cowshed, much like this here, to die, as I supposed; but one of their priests crept in by night and dressed my wound. He was a Sussex man like myself.’

‘Who was that?’ said Puck suddenly. ‘Zack Tutshom?’

‘No, Jack Marget,’ said Mr Culpeper.

‘Jack Marget of New College? The little merry man that stammered so? Why a plague was stuttering Jack at Oxford then?’ said Puck.

‘He had come out of Sussex in hope of being made a Bishop when the King should have conquered the rebels, as he styled us Parliament men. His College had lent the King some monies too, which they never got again, no more than simple Jack got his bishopric. When we met he had had a bitter bellyful of King’s promises, and wished to return to his wife and babes. This came about beyond expectation, for, so soon as I could stand of my wound, the man Blagge made excuse that I had been among the plague, and Jack had been tending me, to thrust us both out from their camp. The King had done with Jack now that Jack’s College had lent the money, and Blagge’s physician could not abide me because I would not sit silent and see him butcher the sick. (He was a College of Physicians man!) So Blagge, I say, thrust us both out, with many vile words, for a pair of pestilent, prating, pragmatical rascals.’

‘Ha! Called you pragmatical, Nick?’ Puck started up. ‘High time Oliver came to purge the land! How did you and honest Jack fare next?’

‘We were in some sort constrained to each other’s company. I was for going to my house in Spitalfields, he would go to his parish in Sussex; but the plague was broke out and spreading through Wiltshire, Berkshire, and Hampshire, and he was so mad distracted to think that it might even then be among his folk at home that I bore him company. He had comforted me in my distress. I could not have done less; and I remembered that I had a cousin at Great Wigsell, near by Jack’s parish. Thus we footed it from Oxford, cassock and buff coat together, resolute to leave wars on the left side henceforth; and either through our mean appearances, or the plague making men less cruel, we were not hindered. To be sure, they put us in the stocks one half-day for rogues and vagabonds at a village under St Leonard’s forest, where, as I have heard, nightingales never sing; but the constable very honestly gave me back my Astrological Almanac, which I carry with me.’ Mr Culpeper tapped his thin chest. ‘I dressed a whitlow on his thumb. So we went forward.

‘Not to trouble you with impertinences, we fetched over against Jack Marget’s parish in a storm of rain about the day’s end. Here our roads divided, for I would have gone on to my cousin at Great Wigsell, but while Jack was pointing me out his steeple, we saw a man lying drunk, as he conceived, athwart the road. He said it would be one Hebden, a parishioner, and till then a man of good life; and he accused himself bitterly for an unfaithful shepherd, that had left his flock to follow princes. But I saw it was the plague, and not the beginnings of it neither. They had set out the plague-stone, and the man’s head lay on it.’

‘What’s a plague-stone?’ Dan whispered.

‘When the plague is so hot in a village that the neighbours shut the roads against ’em, people set a hollowed stone, pot, or pan, where such as would purchase victual from outside may lay money and the paper of their wants, and depart. Those that would sell come later—what will a man not do for gain? —snatch the money forth, and leave in exchange such goods as their conscience reckons fair value. I saw a silver groat in the water, and the man’s list of what he would buy was rain-pulped in his wet hand.

‘“My wife! Oh, my wife and babes!” says Jack of a sudden, and makes uphill—I with him.

‘A woman peers out from behind a barn, crying out that the village is stricken with the plague, and that for our lives’ sake we must avoid it.

‘“Sweetheart!” says Jack. “Must I avoid thee?” and she leaps at him and says the babes are safe. She was his wife.

‘When he had thanked God, even to tears, he tells me this was not the welcome he had intended, and presses me to flee the place while I was clean.

‘“Nay! The Lord do so to me and more also if I desert thee now,” I said. “These affairs are, under God’s leave, in some fashion my strength.”

‘“Oh, sir,” she says, “are you a physician? We have none.”

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‘“Then, good people,” said I, “I must e’en justify myself to you by my works.”

‘“Look—look ye,” stammers Jack, “I took you all this time for a crazy Roundhead preacher.” He laughs, and she, and then I—all three together in the rain are overtook by an unreasonable gust or clap of laughter, which none the less eased us. We call it in medicine the Hysterical Passion. So I went home with ’em.’

‘Why did you not go on to your cousin at Great Wigsell, Nick?’ Puck suggested. ‘’tis barely seven mile up the road.’

‘But the plague was here,’ Mr Culpeper answered, and pointed up the hill. ‘What else could I have done?’

‘What were the parson’s children called?’ said Una.

‘Elizabeth, Alison, Stephen, and Charles—a babe. I scarce saw them at first, for I separated to live with their father in a cart-lodge. The mother we put—forced—into the house with her babes. She had done enough.

‘And now, good people, give me leave to be particular in this case. The plague was worst on the north side of the street, for lack, as I showed ’em, of sunshine; which, proceeding from the Prime Mobile, or source of life (I speak astrologically), is cleansing and purifying in the highest degree. The plague was hot too by the corn-chandler’s, where they sell forage to the carters, extreme hot in both Mills, along the river, and scatteringly in other places, except, mark you, at the smithy. Mark here, that all forges and smith shops belong to Mars, even as corn and meat and wine shops acknowledge Venus for their mistress. There was no plague in the smithy at Munday’s Lane—’

‘Munday’s Lane? You mean our village? I thought so when you talked about the two Mills,’ cried Dan. ‘Where did we put the plague-stone? I’d like to have seen it.’

‘Then look at it now,’ said Puck, and pointed to the chickens’ drinking-trough where they had set their bicycle lamps. It was a rough, oblong stone pan, rather like a small kitchen sink, which Phillips, who never wastes anything, had found in a ditch and had used for his precious hens.

‘That?’ said Dan and Una, and stared, and stared, and stared. Mr Culpeper made impatient noises in his throat and went on.

‘I am at these pains to be particular, good people, because I would have you follow, so far as you may, the operations of my mind. That plague which I told you I had handled outside Wallingford in Oxfordshire was of a watery nature, conformable to the brookish riverine country it bred in, and curable, as I have said, by drenching in water. This plague of ours here, for all that it flourished along watercourses—every soul at both Mills died of it,—could not be so handled. Which brought me to a stand. Ahem!’

‘And your sick people in the meantime?’ Puck demanded.

‘We persuaded them on the north side of the street to lie out in Hitheram’s field. Where the plague had taken one, or at most two, in a house, folk would not shift for fear of thieves in their absence. They cast away their lives to die among their goods.’

‘Human nature,’ said Puck. ‘I’ve seen it time and again. How did your sick do in the fields?’

‘They died not near so thick as those that kept within doors, and even then they died more out of distraction and melancholy than plague. But I confess, good people, I could not in any sort master the sickness, or come at a glimmer of its nature or governance. To be brief, I was flat bewildered at the brute malignity of the disease, and so—did what I should have done before—dismissed all conjectures and apprehensions that had grown up within me, chose a good hour by my Almanac, clapped my vinegar-cloth to my face, and entered some empty houses, resigned to wait upon the stars for guidance.’

‘At night? Were you not horribly frightened?’ said Puck.

‘I dared to hope that the God who hath made man so nobly curious to search out His mysteries might not destroy a devout seeker. In due time—there’s a time, as I have said, for everything under the sun—I spied a whitish rat, very puffed and scabby, which sat beneath the dormer of an attic through which shined our Lady the Moon. Whilst I looked on him—and her—she was moving towards old cold Saturn, her ancient ally—the rat creeped languishingly into her light, and there, before my eyes, died. Presently his mate or companion came out, laid him down beside there, and in like fashion died too. Later—an hour or less to midnight—a third rat did e’en the same; always choosing the moonlight to die in. This threw me into an amaze, since, as we know, the moonlight is favourable, not hurtful, to the creatures of the Moon; and Saturn, being friends with her, as you would say, was hourly strengthening her evil influence. Yet these three rats had been stricken dead in very moonlight. I leaned out of the window to see which of Heaven’s host might be on our side, and there beheld I good trusty Mars, very red and heated, bustling about his setting. I straddled the roof to see better.

‘Jack Marget came up street going to comfort our sick in Hitheram’s field. A tile slipped under my foot.

Says he, heavily enough, “Watchman, what of the night?”

‘“Heart up, Jack,” says I. “Methinks there’s one fighting for us that, like a fool, I’ve forgot all this summer.” My meaning was naturally the planet Mars.

‘“Pray to Him then,” says he. “I forgot Him too this summer.”

‘He meant God, whom he always bitterly accused himself of having forgotten up in Oxfordshire, among the King’s men. I called down that he had made amends enough for his sin by his work among the sick, but he said he would not believe so till the plague was lifted from ’em. He was at his strength’s end—more from melancholy than any just cause. I have seen this before among priests and overcheerful men. I drenched him then and there with a half-cup of waters, which I do not say cure the plague, but are excellent against heaviness of the spirits.’

‘What were they?’ said Dan.

‘White brandy rectified, camphor, cardamoms, ginger, two sorts of pepper, and aniseed.’

‘Whew!’ said Puck. ‘Waters you call ’em!’

‘Jack coughed on it valiantly, and went downhill with me. I was for the Lower Mill in the valley, to note the aspect of the Heavens. My mind had already shadowed forth the reason, if not the remedy, for our troubles, but I would not impart it to the vulgar till I was satisfied. That practice may be perfect, judgment ought to be sound, and to make judgment sound is required an exquisite knowledge. Ahem! I left Jack and his lantern among the sick in Hitheram’s field. He still maintained the prayers of the so-called Church, which were rightly forbidden by Cromwell.’

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‘You should have told your cousin at Wigsell,’ said Puck, ’and Jack would have been fined for it, and you’d have had half the money. How did you come so to fail in your duty, Nick?’

Mr Culpeper laughed—his only laugh that evening—and the children jumped at the loud neigh of it.

‘We were not fearful of men’s judgment in those days,’ he answered. ‘Now mark me closely, good people, for what follows will be to you, though not to me, remarkable. When I reached the empty Mill, old Saturn, low down in the House of the Fishes, threatened the Sun’s rising-place. Our Lady the Moon was moving towards the help of him (understand, I speak astrologically). I looked abroad upon the high Heavens, and I prayed the Maker of ’em for guidance. Now Mars sparkingly withdrew himself below the sky. On the instant of his departure, which I noted, a bright star or vapour leaped forth above his head (as though he had heaved up his sword), and broke all about in fire. The cocks crowed midnight through the valley, and I sat me down by the mill-wheel, chewing spearmint (though that’s an herb of Venus), and calling myself all the asses’ heads in the world! ’Twas plain enough now!’

‘What was plain?’ said Una.

‘The true cause and cure of the plague. Mars, good fellow, had fought for us to the uttermost. Faint though he had been in the Heavens, and this had made me overlook him in my computations, he more than any of the other planets had kept the Heavens—which is to say, had been visible some part of each night wellnigh throughout the year. Therefore his fierce and cleansing influence, warring against the Moon, had stretched out to kill those three rats under my nose, and under the nose of their natural mistress, the Moon. I had known Mars lean half across Heaven to deal our Lady the Moon some shrewd blow from under his shield, but I had never before seen his strength displayed so effectual.’

‘I don’t understand a bit. Do you mean Mars killed the rats because he hated the Moon?’ said Una.

‘That is as plain as the pikestaff with which Blagge’s men pushed me forth,’ Mr Culpeper answered. ‘I’ll prove it. Why had the plague not broken out at the blacksmith’s shop in Munday’s Lane? Because, as I’ve shown you, forges and smithies belong naturally to Mars, and, for his honour’s sake, Mars ’ud keep ’em clean from the creatures of the Moon. But was it like, think you, that he’d come down and rat-catch in general for lazy, ungrateful mankind? That were working a willing horse to death. So, then, you can see that the meaning of the blazing star above him when he set was simply this: “Destroy and burn the creatures of the moon, for they are the root of your trouble. And thus, having shown you a taste of my power, good people, adieu.”’

‘Did Mars really say all that?’ Una whispered.

‘Yes, and twice so much as that to any one who had ears to hear. Briefly, he enlightened me that the plague was spread by the creatures of the Moon. The Moon, our Lady of ill-aspect, was the offender. My own poor wits showed me that I, Nick Culpeper, had the people in my charge, God’s good providence aiding me, and no time to lose neither.

‘I posted up the hill, and broke into Hitheram’s field amongst ’em all at prayers.

‘“Eureka, good people!” I cried, and cast down a dead mill-rat which I’d found. “Here’s your true enemy, revealed at last by the stars.”

‘“Nay, but I’m praying,” says Jack. His face was as white as washed silver.

‘“There’s a time for everything under the sun,” says I. “If you would stay the plague, take and kill your rats.”

‘“Oh, mad, stark mad!” says he, and wrings his hands.

‘A fellow lay in the ditch beside him, who bellows that he’d as soon die mad hunting rats as be preached to death on a cold fallow. They laughed round him at this, but Jack Marget falls on his knees, and very presumptuously petitions that he may be appointed to die to save the rest of his people. This was enough to thrust ’em back into their melancholy.

‘“You are an unfaithful shepherd, jack,” I says. “Take a bat” (which we call a stick in Sussex) “and kill a rat if you die before sunrise. ’Twill save your people.”

‘“Aye, aye. Take a bat and kill a rat,” he says ten times over, like a child, which moved ’em to ungovernable motions of that hysterical passion before mentioned, so that they laughed all, and at least warmed their chill bloods at that very hour—one o’clock or a little after—when the fires of life burn lowest. Truly there is a time for everything; and the physician must work with it—ahem!—or miss his cure. To be brief with you, I persuaded ’em, sick or sound, to have at the whole generation of rats throughout the village. And there’s a reason for all things too, though the wise physician need not blab ’em all. Imprimis, or firstly, the mere sport of it, which lasted ten days, drew ’em most markedly out of their melancholy. I’d defy sorrowful job himself to lament or scratch while he’s routing rats from a rick. Secundo, or secondly, the vehement act and operation of this chase or war opened their skins to generous transpiration—more vulgarly, sweated ’em handsomely; and this further drew off their black bile—the mother of sickness. Thirdly, when we came to burn the bodies of the rats, I sprinkled sulphur on the faggots, whereby the onlookers were as handsomely suffumigated. This I could not have compassed if I had made it a mere physician’s business; they’d have thought it some conjuration. Yet more, we cleansed, limed, and burned out a hundred foul poke-holes, sinks, slews, and corners of unvisited filth in and about the houses in the village, and by good fortune (mark here that Mars was in opposition to Venus) burned the corn-handler’s shop to the ground. Mars loves not Venus. Will Noakes the saddler dropped his lantern on a truss of straw while he was rat-hunting there.’

‘Had ye given Will any of that gentle cordial of yours, Nick, by any chance?’ said Puck.

‘A glass—or two glasses—not more. But as I would say, in fine, when we had killed the rats, I took ash, slag, and charcoal from the smithy, and burnt earth from the brickyard (I reason that a brickyard belongs to Mars), and rammed it with iron crowbars into the rat-runs and buries, and beneath all the house floors. The Creatures of the Moon hate all that Mars hath used for his own clean ends. For example—rats bite not iron.’

‘And how did poor stuttering Jack endure it?’ said Puck.

‘He sweated out his melancholy through his skin, and catched a loose cough, which I cured with electuaries, according to art. It is noteworthy, were I speaking among my equals, that the venom of the plague translated, or turned itself into, and evaporated, or went away as, a very heavy hoarseness and thickness of the head, throat, and chest. (Observe from my books which planets govern these portions of man’s body, and your darkness, good people, shall be illuminated—ahem!) None the less, the plague, qua plague, ceased and took off (for we only lost three more, and two of ’em had it already on ’em) from the morning of the day that Mars enlightened me by the Lower Mill.’ He coughed—almost trumpeted—triumphantly.

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‘It is proved,’ he jerked out. ‘I say I have proved my contention, which is, that by Divine Astrology and humble search into the veritable causes of things—at the proper time—the sons of wisdom may combat even the plague.’

‘H’m!’ Puck replied. ‘For my own part I hold that a simple soul —’

‘Mine? Simple, forsooth?’ said Mr Culpeper.

‘A very simple soul, a high courage tempered with sound and stubborn conceit, is stronger than all the stars in their courses. So I confess truly that you saved the village, Nick.’

‘I stubborn? I stiff-necked? I ascribed all my poor success, under God’s good providence, to Divine Astrology. Not to me the glory! You talk as that dear weeping ass Jack Marget preached before I went back to my work in Red Lion House, Spitalfields.’

‘Oh! Stammering Jack preached, did he? They say he loses his stammer in the pulpit.’

‘And his wits with it. He delivered a most idolatrous discourse when the plague was stayed. He took for his text: “The wise man that delivered the city.” I could have given him a better, such as: “There is a time for—” ‘

‘But what made you go to church to hear him?’ Puck interrupted. ‘Wail Attersole was your lawfully appointed preacher, and a dull dog he was!’

Mr Culpeper wriggled uneasily.

‘The vulgar,’ said he, ‘the old crones and—ahem! —the children, Alison and the others, they dragged me to the House of Rimmon by the hand. I was in two minds to inform on Jack for maintaining the mummeries of the falsely-called Church, which, I’ll prove to you, are founded merely on ancient fables—’

‘Stick to your herbs and planets,’ said Puck, laughing. ‘You should have told the magistrates, Nick, and had Jack fined. Again, why did you neglect your plain duty?’

‘Because—because I was kneeling, and praying, and weeping with the rest of ’em at the Altar-rails. In medicine this is called the Hysterical Passion. It may be—it may be.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said Puck. They heard him turn the hay. ‘Why, your hay is half hedge-brishings,’ he said. ‘You don’t expect a horse to thrive on oak and ash and thorn leaves, do you?’

Ping-ping-ping went the bicycle bell round the corner. Nurse was coming back from the mill.

‘Is it all right?’ Una called.

‘All quite right,’ Nurse called back. ‘They’re to be christened next Sunday.’

‘What? What?’ They both leaned forward across the half-door. it could not have been properly fastened, for it opened, and tilted them out with hay and leaves sticking all over them.

‘Come on! We must get those two twins’ names,’ said Una, and they charged uphill shouting over the hedge, till Nurse slowed up and told them. When they returned, old Middenboro had got out of his stall, and they spent a lively ten minutes chasing him in again by starlight.

[a short tale]

WILL the public be good enough to look into this business? It has sent Crewe to bed, and Mottleby is applying for home leave, and I’ve lost my faith in man altogether, and the Club gives it up. Trivey is the only man who is unaffected by the catastrophe, and he says “I told you so.” We were all proud of Trivey at the Club, and would have crowned him with wreaths of Bougainvillea had he permitted the liberty. But Trivey was an austere man. The utmost that he permitted himself to say was: “I can stretch a little bit when I’m in the humour.” We called him the Monumental Liar. Nothing that the Club oflFered was too good for Trivey. He had the soft chair opposite the thermantidote in the hot weather, and he made up his own four at whist. When visitors came in—globe-trotters for choice—Trivey used to unmuzzle himself and tell tales that sent the globe-trotter out of the Club on tiptoe looking for snakes in his hat and tigers in the compound. Whenever a man from a strange Club came in Trivey used to call for a whisky and ginger-wine and rout that man on all points—from horses upward. There was a man whose nickname was “Ananias,” who came from the Prince’s Plungers to look at Trivey; and, though Trivey was only a civilian, the Plunger man resigned his title to the nickname before eleven o’clock. He made it over to Trivey on a card, and Trivey himg up the concession in his quarters. We loved Trivey—all of us; and now we don’t love him any more.

A man from the frontier came in and began to tell tales—some very good ones, and some better than good. He was an outsider, but he had a wonderful imagination—for the frontier. He told six stories before Trivey brought up his first line, and three more before Trivey hurled his reserves into the fray.

“When I was at Anungaracharlupillay in Madras,” said Trivey quietly, “there was a rogue elephant cutting about the district. And I came upon him asleep.” All the Club stopped talking here, until Trivey had finished the story. He told us that he, in the company of another man, had found the rogue asleep, but just as they got up to the brute’s head it woke up with a scream. Then Trivey, who was careful to explain that he was a “bit powerful about the arms,” caught hold of its ears as it rose, and hung there, kicking the animal in the eyes, which so bewildered it that it stayed screaming and frightened until Trivey’s ally shot it behind the shoulder, and the villagers ran in and hamstrung it. It evidently died from loss of blood. Trivey was hanging on the ears and kicking hard for nearly fifteen minutes. When the frontier man heard the story he put his hands in front of his face and sobbed audibly. We gave him all the drinks he wanted, and he recovered sufficiently to carry away eighty rupees at whist later on; but his nerve was irretrievably shattered. He will be no use on the frontier any more. The rest of the Club were very pleased with Trivey, because these frontier men, and especially the guides, want a great deal of keeping in order. Trivey was quite modest. He was a truly great soul, and popular applause never turned his head. As I have said, we loved Trivey, till that fatal day when Crewe announced that he had been transferred for a couple of months to Animgaracharlupillay. “Oh!” said Trivey, “I dare say they’ll remember about my rogue elephant down there. You ask ’em, Crewe.” Then we felt sorry for Trivey, because we were sure that he was arriving at that stage of mental decay when a man begins to believe in his own fictions. That spoils a man’s hand. Crewe wrote up once or twice to Mottleby, saying that he would bring back a story that would make our hair curl. Good stories are scarce in Madras, and we rather scoffed at the announcement. When Crewe returned it was easy to see that he was bursting with importance. He gave a big dinner at the Club and invited nearly everybody but Trivey, who went off after dinner to teach a young subaltern to play “snooker.” At coffee and cheroots, Crewe could not restrain himself any longer. “I say, you Johnnies, it’s all true—every single word of it—and you can throw the decanter at my head and I’ll apologise. The whole village was full of it. There was a rogue elephant, and it slept, and Trivey did catch hold of its ears and kick it in the eyes, and hang on for ten minutes, at least, and all the rest of it. I neglected my regular work to sift that story, and on my honour the tale’s an absolute fact. The headsman said so, all the shikaries said so, and all the villages corroborated it. Now would a whole village volunteer a lie that would do them no good?” You might have heard a cigar-ash fall after this statement. Then Mottleby said, with deep disgust: “What can you do with a man like that? His best and brightest lie, too!” “’Tisn’t!” shrieked Crewe. “It’s a fact—a nickel-plated, teak-wood, Tantalusaction, forty-five rupee fact.’’ “That only makes it worse,” said Mottleby; and we all felt that was true. We ran into the billiard-room to talk to Trivey, but he said we had put him off his stroke; and that was all the satisfaction we got out of him. Later on he repeated that he was a “bit powerful about the arms,” and went to bed. We sat up half the night devising vengeance on Trivey. We were very angry, and there was no hope of hushing up the tale. The man had taken us in completely, and now that we’ve lost our champion Ananias, all the frontier will laugh at us, and we shall never be able to trust a word that Trivey says.

I ask with Mottleby: “What can you do with a man like that?”

[a short tale]

“A LITTLE more beef, please!’ said the fat man with the grey whiskers and the spattered waistcoat. “You can’t eat too much o’ good beef—not even when the prices are going up hoof over hock.” And he settled himself down to load in a fresh cargo.

Now, this is how the fat man had come by his meal. One thousand miles away, a red Texan steer was preparing to go to bed for the night in the company of his fellows—myriads of his fellows. From dawn till late dusk he had loafed across the leagues of grass and grunted savagely as each mouthful proved to his mind that grass was not what he had known it in his youth. But the steer was wrong. That summer had brought great drought to Montana and Northern Dakota. The cattle feed was withering day by day, and the more prudent stock owners had written to the East for manufactured provender. Only the little cactus that grows with the grasses appeared to enjoy itself. The cattle certainly did not; and the cowboys from the very beginning of spring had used language considered profane even for the cowboy. What their ponies said has never been recorded. The ponies had the worst time of all, and at each nightly camp whispered to each other their longings for the winter, when they would be turned out on the freezing ranges—galled from wither to croup, but riderless—thank Heaven, riderless. On these various miseries the sun looked down impartial. His business was to cake the ground and ruin the grasses.

The cattle—the acres of huddled cattle—were restless. In the first place, they were forced to scatter for graze; and in the second, the heat told on their tempers and made them prod each other with their long horns. In the heart of the herd you would have thought men were fighting with single-sticks. On the outskirts, posted at quarter-mile intervals, sat the cowboys on their ponies, the brims of their hats tilted over their sun-skinned noses, their feet out of the big brown-leather hooded stirrups, and their hands gripping the horn of the heavy saddle to keep themselves from falling on to the ground—asleep. A cowboy can sleep at full gallop; on the other hand, he can keep awake also at full gallop for eight and forty hours and wear down six unamiable bronchos in the process.

Lafe Parmalee; Shwink, the German who could not ride but had a blind affection for cattle from the branding-yard to the butcher’s block; Michigan, so called because he said he came from California but spoke not the Califomian tongue; Jim from San Diego, to distinguish him from other Jims, and The Corpse, were the outposts of the herd. The Corpse had won his name from a statement, made in the fulness of much McBrayer whisky, that he had once been a graduate of Corpus Christi. He spoke truth, but to the wrong audience. The inhabitants of the Elite Saloon, after several attempts to get the hang of the name, dubbed the speaker The Corpse, and as long as he cinched a broncho or jingled a spur within four hundred miles of Livingston—yea, far in the south, even to the unexplored borders of the sheep-eater Indians—he was known by that unlovely name. How he had passed from college to cattle no man knew, and, according to the etiquette of the West, no man asked. He was not by any means a tenderfoot—had no unmanly weakness for washing, did not in the least object to appearing at the wild and wonderful reunions held nightly in “Miss Minnie’s parlour,’’ whose flaring advertisement did not in the least disturb the proprieties of Wachoma Junction, and, in common with his associates, was, when drunk, ready to shoot at anything or anybody. He was not proud. He had condescended to take in hand and educate a young and promising Chicago drummer, who by evil fate had wandered into that wilderness, where all his cunning was of no account; and from that youth’s quivering hand—outstretched by command—had shot away the top of a wineglass. The Corpse was recognised in the freemasonry of the craft as “one of the C.M.R.’s boys, and tough at that.”

The C.M.R. controlled much cattle, and their slaughter-houses in Chicago bubbled the blood of beeves all day long. Their salt-beef fed the sailor on the sea, and their iced, best firsts, the housekeeper in the London suburbs. Not even the firm knew how many cowboys they employed, but all the firm knew that on the fourteenth day of July their stockyards at Wachoma Junction were to be filled with two thousand head of cattle, ready for immediate shipment to Chicago while prices yet ruled high, and before the grass had withered utterly. Lafe, Michigan, Jim, The Corpse and the others knew this too, and were heartily glad of it, because they would be paid up in Chicago for their half-year’s work, and would then do their best towards painting that town in purest vermilion. They would get drunk; they would gamble, and would otherwise enjoy themselves till they were broke; and then they would hire out again.

The sun dropped behind the rolling hills; and the cattle halted for the night, cheered and cooled by a little wandering breeze. The red steer’s mother had been caught in a hailstorm five years ago. Till she went the way of all cow-flesh she missed no opportunity of telling her son to beware of the hot day and the cold wind that does not know its own mind. “When it blows five ways at once,” said she, “and makes your horns feel creepy, get away, my son. Follow the time-honoured instinct of our tribe, and run. I ran”—she looked ruefully at the scars on her side—“but that was in a barbwire country, and it hurt me. None the less, run.” The red steer chewed his cud, and the little wind out of the darkness played round his horns—all five ways at once. The cowboys lifted up their voices in unmelodious song, that the cattle might know where they were, and began slowly walking round the recumbent herd. “Do anybody’s horns feel creepy?” queried the red steer of his neighbours. “My mother told me”—and he repeated the tale, to the edification of the yearlings and the three-year olds breathing heavily at his side.

The song of the cowboys rose higher. The cattle bowed their heads. Their men were at hand. They were safe. Something had happened to the quiet stars. They were dying out one by one and the wind was freshening. “Bless my hoofs!” muttered a yearling, “my horns are beginning to feel creepy.” Softly the red steer lifted himself from the ground. “Come away,” quoth he to the yearling. “Come away to the outskirts, and we’ll move. My mother said . . . ” The innocent fool followed, and a white heifer saw them move. Being a woman she naturally bellowed “Timber wolves!” and ran forward blindly into a dun steer dreaming over clover. Followed the thunder of cattle rising to their feet, and the triple crack of a whip. The little wind had dropped for a moment, only to fall on the herd with a shriek and a few stinging drops of hail, that stung as keenly as the whips. The herd broke into a trot, a canter, and then a mad gallop. Black fear was behind them, black night in front. They headed into the night, bellowing with terror; and at their side rode the men with the whips. The ponies grunted as they felt the raking spurs. They knew that, an all-night gallop lay before them, and woe betide the luckless cayuse that stumbled in that ride. Then fell the hail—blinding and choking and flogging in one and the same stroke. The herd opened like a fan. The red steer headed a contingent he knew not whither. A man with a whip rode at his right flank. Behind him the lightning showed a field of glimmering horns, and of muzzles flecked with foam; a field of red terror-strained eyes and shaggy frontlets. The man looked back also, and his terror was greater than that of the beasts. The herd had surrounded him in the darkness. His salvation lay in the legs of Whisky Peat—and Whisky Peat knew it— knew it until an unseen gopher hole received his near forefoot as he strained every nerve—in the heart of the flying herd, with the red steer at his flanks. Then, being only an over-worked cayuse. Whisky Peat fell, and the red steer fancied that there was something soft on the ground.

It was Michigan, Jim and Lafe who at last brought the herd to a standstill as the dawn was breaking. “What’s come to The Corpse?” quoth Lafe. Jim loosened the girths of his quivering pony and made answer slowly: “Onless I’m a blamed fool, the gentleman is now livin’ up to his durned appellation ’bout fifteen miles back—what there is of him and the cayuse.” “Let’s go and look,” said Lafe, shuddering slightly, for the morning air, you must understand, was raw. “Let’s go to—a much hotter place than Texas,” responded Jim. “Get the steers to the Junction first. Guess what’s left of The Corpse will keep.”

And it did. And that was how the fat man in Chicago got his beef. It belonged to the red steer.

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ONCE a priest, always a priest; once a mason, always a mason; but once a journalist, always and for ever a journalist.There were three of us, all newspaper men, the only passengers on a little tramp steamer that ran where her owners told her to go. She had once been in the Bilbao iron ore business, had been lent to the Spanish Government for service at Manilla; and was ending her days in the Cape Town coolie-trade, with occasional trips to Madagascar and even as far as England. We found her going to Southampton in ballast, and shipped in her because the fares were nominal. There was Keller, of an American paper, on his way back to the States from palace executions in Madagascar; there was a burly half-Dutchman, called Zuyland, who owned and edited a paper up country near Johannesburg; and there was myself, who had solemnly put away all journalism, vowing to forget that I had ever known the difference between an imprint and a stereo advertisement.

Ten minutes after Keller spoke to me, as the Rathmines cleared Cape Town, I had forgotten the aloofness I desired to feign, and was in heated discussion on the immorality of expanding telegrams beyond a certain fixed point. Then Zuyland came out of his cabin, and we were all at home instantly, because we were men of the same profession needing no introduction. We annexed the boat formally, broke open the passengers’ bath-room door—on the Manilla lines the Dons do not wash—cleaned out the orange-peel and cigar-ends at the bottom of the bath, hired a Lascar to shave us throughout the voyage, and then asked each other’s names.

Three ordinary men would have quarrelled through sheer boredom before they reached Southampton. We, by virtue of our craft, were anything but ordinary men. A large percentage of the tales of the world, the thirty-nine that cannot be told to ladies and the one that can, are common property coming of a common stock. We told them all, as a matter of form, with all their local and specific variants which are surprising. Then came, in the intervals of steady card-play, more personal histories of adventure and things seen and suffered: panics among white folk, when the blind terror ran from man to man on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the people crushed each other to death they knew not why; fires, and faces that opened and shut their mouths horribly at red-hot window frames; wrecks in frost and snow, reported from the sleet-sheathed rescue-tug at the risk of frostbite; long rides after diamond thieves; skirmishes on the veldt and in municipal committees with the Boers; glimpses of lazy tangled Cape politics and the mule-rule in the Transvaal; card-tales, horse-tales, woman-tales, by the score and the half hundred; till the first mate, who had seen more than us all put together, but lacked words to clothe his tales with, sat open-mouthed far into the dawn.

When the tales were done we picked up cards till a curious hand or a chance remark made one or other of us say, ‘That reminds me of a man who—or a business which—’ and the anecdotes would continue while the Rathmines kicked her way northward through the warm water.

In the morning of one specially warm night we three were sitting immediately in front of the wheel-house, where an old Swedish boatswain whom we called ‘Frithiof the Dane’ was at the wheel, pretending that he could not hear our stories. Once or twice Frithiof spun the spokes curiously, and Keller lifted his head from a long chair to ask,
‘What is it? Can’t you get any steerage-way on her?’

‘There is a feel in the water,’ said Frithiof, ‘that I cannot understand. I think that we run downhills or somethings. She steers bad this morning.’

Nobody seems to know the laws that govern the pulse of the big waters. Sometimes even a lands-man can tell that the solid ocean is atilt, and that the ship is working herself up a long unseen slope; and sometimes the captain says, when neither full steam nor fair wind justifies the length of a day’s run, that the ship is sagging downhill; but how these ups and downs come about has not yet been settled authoritatively.

‘No, it is a following sea,’ said Frithiof; ‘and with a following sea you shall not get good steerage-way.’

The sea was as smooth as a duck-pond, except for a regular oily swell. As I looked over the side to see where it might be following us from, the sun rose in a perfectly clear sky and struck the water with its light so sharply that it seemed as though the sea should clang like a burnished gong. The wake of the screw and the little white streak cut by the log-line hanging over the stern were the only marks on the water as far as eye could reach.

Keller rolled out of his chair and went aft to get a pine-apple from the ripening stock that was hung inside the after awning.

‘Frithiof, the log-line has got tired of swimming. It’s coming home,’ he drawled.

‘What?’ said Frithiof, his voice jumping several octaves.

‘Coming home,’ Keller repeated, leaning over the stern. I ran to his side and saw the log-line, which till then had been drawn tense over the stern railing, slacken, loop, and come up off the port quarter. Frithiof called up the speaking-tube to the bridge, and the bridge answered, ‘Yes, nine knots.’ Then Frithiof spoke again, and the answer was, ‘What do you want of the skipper?’ and Frithiof bellowed, ‘Call him up.’

By this time Zuyland, Keller, and myself had caught something of Frithiof’s excitement, for any emotion on shipboard is most contagious. The captain ran out of his cabin, spoke to Frithiof, looked at the log-line, jumped on the bridge, and in a minute we felt the steamer swing round as Frithiof turned her.

‘’Going back to Cape Town?’ said Keller.

Frithiof did not answer, but tore away at the wheel. Then he beckoned us three to help, and we held the wheel down till the Rathmines answered it, and we found ourselves looking into the white of our own wake, with the still oily sea tearing past our bows, though we were not going more than half steam ahead.

The captain stretched out his arm from the bridge and shouted. A minute later I would have given a great deal to have shouted too, for one-half of the sea seemed to shoulder itself above the other half, and came on in the shape of a hill. There was neither crest, comb, nor curl-over to it; nothing but black water with little waves chasing each other about the flanks. I saw it stream past and on a level with the Rathmines’; bow-plates before the steamer hove up her bulk to rise, and I argued that this would be the last of all earthly voyages for me. Then we lifted for ever and ever and ever, till I heard Keller saying in my ear, ‘The bowels of the deep, good Lord!’ and the Rathmines stood poised, her screw racing and drumming on the slope of a hollow that stretched downwards for a good half-mile.

We went down that hollow, nose under for the most part, and the air smelt wet and muddy, like that of an emptied aquarium. There was a second hill to climb; I saw that much: but the water came aboard and carried me aft till it jammed me against the wheel-house door, and before I could catch breath or clear my eyes again we were rolling to and fro in torn water, with the scuppers pouring like eaves in a thunderstorm.

‘There were three waves,’ said Keller; ‘and the stokehold’s flooded.’

page 2

The firemen were on deck waiting, apparently, to be drowned. The engineer came and dragged them below, and the crew, gasping, began to work the clumsy Board of Trade pump. That showed nothing serious, and when I understood that the Rathmines was really on the water, and not beneath it, I asked what had happened.

‘The captain says it was a blow-up under the sea—a volcano,’ said Keller.

‘It hasn’t warmed anything,’ I said. I was feeling bitterly cold, and cold was almost unknown in those waters. I went below to change my clothes, and when I came up everything was wiped out in clinging white fog.

‘Are there going to be any more surprises?’ said Keller to the captain.

‘I don’t know. Be thankful you’re alive, gentlemen. That’s a tidal wave thrown up by a volcano. Probably the bottom of the sea has been lifted a few feet somewhere or other. I can’t quite understand this cold spell. Our sea-thermometer says the surface water is 44º, and it should be 68º at least.’

‘It’s abominable,’ said Keller, shivering. ‘But hadn’t you better attend to the fog-horn? It seems to me that I heard something.’

‘Heard! Good heavens!’ said the captain from the bridge, ‘ I should think you did.’ He pulled the string of our fog-horn, which was a weak one. It sputtered and choked, because the stokehold was full of water and the fires were halfdrowned, and at last gave out a moan. It was answered from the fog by one of the most appalling steam-sirens I have ever heard. Keller turned as white as I did, for the fog, the cold fog, was upon us, and any man may be forgiven for fearing a death he cannot see.

‘Give her steam there!’ said the captain to the engine-room. ‘Steam for the whistle, if we have to go dead slow.’

We bellowed again, and the damp dripped off the awnings on to the deck as we listened for the reply. It seemed to be astern this time, but much nearer than before.

‘The Pembroke Castle on us!’ said Keller; and then, viciously, ‘Well, thank God, we shall sink her too.’

‘It’s a side-wheel steamer,’ I whispered. ‘Can’t you hear the paddles?’

This time we whistled and roared till the steam gave out, and the answer nearly deafened us. There was a sound of frantic threshing in the water, apparently about fifty yards away, and something shot past in the whiteness that looked as though it were gray and red.

‘The Pembroke Castle bottom up,’ said Keller, who, being a journalist, always sought for explanations. ‘That’s the colours of a Castle liner. We’re in for a big thing.’

‘The sea is bewitched,’ said Frithiof from the wheel-house. ‘There are two steamers!’

Another siren sounded on our bow, and the little steamer rolled in the wash of something that had passed unseen.

‘We’re evidently in the middle of a fleet,’ said Keller quietly. ‘If one doesn’t run us down, the other will. Phew! What in creation is that?’

I sniffed, for there was a poisonous rank smell in the cold air—a smell that I had smelt before.

‘If I was on land I should say that it was an alligator. It smells like musk,’ I answered.

‘Not ten thousand alligators could make that smell,’ said Zuyland; ‘I have smelt them.’

‘Bewitched! Bewitched!’ said Frithiof. ‘The sea she is turned upside down, and we are walking along the bottom.’

Again the Rathmines rolled in the wash of some unseen ship, and a silver-gray wave broke over the bow, leaving on the deck a sheet of sediment-the gray broth that has its place in the fathomless deeps of the sea. A sprinkling of the wave fell on my face, and it was so cold that it stung as boiling water stings. The dead and most untouched deep water of the sea had been heaved to the top by the submarine volcano—the chill still water that kills all life and smells of desolation and emptiness. We did not need either the blinding fog or that indescribable smell of musk to make us unhappy—we were shivering with cold and wretchedness where we stood.

‘The hot air on the cold water makes this fog,’ said the captain; ‘it ought to clear in a little time.’

‘Whistle, oh! whistle, and let’s get out of it,’ said Keller.

The captain whistled again, and far and far astern the invisible twin steam-sirens answered us. Their blasting shriek grew louder, till at last it seemed to tear out of the fog just above our quarter, and I cowered while the Rathmines plunged bows under on a double swell that crossed.

‘No more,’ said Frithiof, ‘it is not good any more. Let us get away, in the name of God.’

‘Now if a torpedo-boat with a City of Paris siren went mad and broke her moorings and hired a friend to help her, it’s just conceivable that we might be carried as we are now. Otherwise this thing is——’

The last words died on Keller’s lips, his eyes began to start from his head, and his jaw fell. Some six or seven feet above the port bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon, hung a Face. It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for it did not belong to this earth as known to man. The mouth was open, revealing a ridiculously tiny tongue—as absurd as the tongue of an elephant; there were tense wrinkles of white skin at the angles of the drawn lips, white feelers like those of a barbel sprung from the lower jaw, and there was no sign of teeth within the mouth. But the horror of the face lay in the eyes, for those were sightless—white, in sockets as white as scraped bone, and blind. Yet for all this the face, wrinkled as the mask of a lion is drawn in Assyrian sculpture, was alive with rage and terror. One long white feeler touched our bulwarks. Then the face disappeared with the swiftness of a blindworm popping into its burrow, and the next thing that I remember is my own voice in my own ears, saying gravely to the mainmast, ‘But the air-bladder ought to have been forced out of its mouth, you know.’

Keller came up to me, ashy white. He put his hand into his pocket, took a cigar, bit it, dropped it, thrust his shaking thumb into his mouth and mumbled, ‘The giant gooseberry and the raining frogs! Gimme a light-gimme a light! Say, gimme a light.’ A little bead of blood dropped from his thumb joint.

I respected the motive, though the manifestation was absurd. ‘Stop, you’ll bite your thumb off,’ I said, and Keller laughed brokenly as he picked up his cigar. Only Zuyland, leaning over the port bulwarks, seemed self-possessed. He declared later that he was very sick.

page 3

‘We’ve seen it,’ he said, turning round. ‘That is it.’

‘What?’ said Keller, chewing the unlighted cigar.

As he spoke the fog was blown into shreds, and we saw the sea, gray with mud, rolling on every side of us and empty of all life. Then in one spot it bubbled and became like the pot of ointment that the Bible speaks of. From that wideringed trouble a Thing came up—a gray and red Thing with a neck—a Thing that bellowed and writhed in pain. Frithiof drew in his breath and held it till the red letters of the ship’s name, woven across his jersey, straggled and opened out as though they had been type badly set. Then he said with a little cluck in his throat, ‘Ah me! It is blind. Hur illa! That thing is blind,’ and a murmur of pity went through us all, for we could see that the thing on the water was blind and in pain. Something had gashed and cut the great sides cruelly and the blood was spurting out. The gray ooze of the undermost sea lay in the monstrous wrinkles of the back, and poured away in sluices. The blind white head flung back and battered the wounds, and the body in its torment rose clear of the red and gray waves till we saw a pair of quivering shoulders streaked with weed and rough with shells, but as white in the clear spaces as the hairless, maneless, blind, toothless head. Afterwards, came a dot on the horizon and the sound of a shrill scream, and it was as though a shuttle shot all across the sea in one breath, and a second head and neck tore through the levels, driving a whispering wall of water to right and left. The two Things met—the one untouched and the other in its death-throe—male and female, we said, the female coming to the male. She circled round him bellowing, and laid her neck across the curve of his great turtle-back, and he disappeared under water for an instant, but flung up again, grunting in agony while the blood ran. Once the entire head and neck shot clear of the water and stiffened, and I heard Keller saying, as though he was watching a street accident, ‘Give him air. For God’s sake, give him air.’ Then the death-struggle began, with crampings and twistings and jerkings of the white bulk to and fro, till our little steamer rolled again, and each gray wave coated her plates with the gray slime. The sun was clear, there was no wind, and we watched, the whole crew, stokers and all, in wonder and pity, but chiefly pity. The Thing was so helpless, and, save for his mate, so alone. No human eye should have beheld him; it was monstrous and indecent to exhibit him there in trade waters between atlas degrees of latitude. He had been spewed up, mangled and dying, from his rest on the sea-floor, where he might have lived till the Judgment Day, and we saw the tides of his life go from him as an angry tide goes out across rocks in the teeth of a landward gale. His mate lay rocking on the water a little distance off, bellowing continually, and the smell of musk came down upon the ship making us cough.

At last the battle for life ended in a batter of coloured seas. We saw the writhing neck fall like a flail, the carcase turn sideways, showing the glint of a white belly and the inset of a gigantic hind leg or flipper. Then all sank, and sea boiled over it, while the mate swam round and round, darting her head in every direction. Though we might have feared that she would attack the steamer, no power on earth could have drawn any one of us from our places that hour. We watched, holding our breaths. The mate paused in her search; we could hear the wash beating along her sides; reared her neck as high as she could reach, blind and lonely in all that loneliness of the sea, and sent one desperate bellow booming across the swells as an oyster-shell skips across a pond. Then she made off to the westward, the sun shining on the white head and the wake behind it, till nothing was left to see but a little pin point of silver on the horizon. We stood on our course again; and the Rathmines, coated with the sea-sediment from bow to stern, looked like a ship made gray with terror.

‘We must pool our notes,’ was the first coherent remark from Keller. ‘w’e’re three trained journalists—we hold absolutely the biggest scoop on record. Start fair.’

I objected to this. Nothing is gained by collaboration in journalism when all deal with the same facts, so we went to work each according to his own lights. Keller triple-headed his account, talked about our ‘gallant captain,’ and wound up with an allusion to American enterprise in that it was a citizen of Dayton, Ohio, that had seen the sea-serpent. This sort of thing would have discredited the Creation, much more a mere sea tale, but as a specimen of the picture-writing of a half civilised people it was very interesting. Zuyland took a heavy column and a half, giving approximate lengths and breadths, and the whole list of the crew whom he had sworn on oath to testify to his facts. There was nothing fantastic or flamboyant in Zuyland. I wrote three-quarters of a leaded bourgeois column, roughly speaking, and refrained from putting any journalese into it for reasons that had begun to appear to me.

Keller was insolent with joy. He was going to cable from Southampton to the New York World, mail his account to America on the same day, paralyse London with his three columns of loosely knitted headlines, and generally efface the earth. ‘You’ll see how I work a big scoop when I get it,’ he said.

‘Is this your first visit to England?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said he. ‘You don’t seem to appreciate the beauty of our scoop. It’s pyramidal—the death of the sea-serpent! Good heavens alive, man, it’s the biggest thing ever vouchsafed to a paper!’

‘Curious to think that it will never appear in any paper, isn’t it?’ I said.

Zuyland was near me, and he nodded quickly.

‘What do you mean?’ said Keller. ‘If you’re enough of a Britisher to throw this thing away, I shan’t. I thought you were a newspaperman.’

‘I am. That’s why I know. Don’t be an ass, Keller. Remember, I’m seven hundred years your senior, and what your grandchildren may learn five hundred years hence, I learned from my grandfathers about five hundred years ago. You won’t do it, because you can’t.’

This conversation was held in open sea, where everything seems possible, some hundred miles from Southampton. We passed the Needles Light at dawn, and the lifting day showed the stucco villas on the green and the awful orderliness of England—line upon line, wall upon wall, solid stone dock and monolithic pier. We waited an hour in the Customs shed, and there was ample time for the effect to soak in.

‘Now, Keller, you face the music. The Havel goes out to-day. Mail by her, and I’ll take you to the telegraph-office,’ I said.

I heard Keller gasp as the influence of the land closed about him, cowing him as they say Newmarket Heath cows a young horse unused to open courses.

‘I want to retouch my stuff. Suppose we wait till we get to London?’ he said.

Zuyland, by the way, had torn up his account and thrown it overboard that morning early. His reasons were my reasons.

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In the train Keller began to revise his copy, and every time that he looked at the trim little fields, the red villas, and the embankments of the line, the blue pencil plunged remorselessly through the slips. He appeared to have dredged the dictionary for adjectives. I could think of none that he had not used. Yet he was a perfectly sound poker-player and never showed more cards than were sufficient to take the pool.

‘Aren’t you going to leave him a single bellow?’ I asked sympathetically. ‘Remember, everything goes in the States, from a trouser-button to a double-eagle.’

‘That’s just the curse of it,’ said Keller below his breath. ‘We’ve played ’em for suckers so often that when it comes to the golden truth—I’d like to try this on a London paper. You have first call there, though.’

‘Not in the least. I’m not touching the thing in our papers. I shall be happy to leave ’em all to you; but surely you’ll cable it home?’

‘No. Not if I can make the scoop here and see the Britishers sit up.’

‘You won’t do it with three columns of slushy headline, believe me. They don’t sit up as quickly as some people.’

‘I’m beginning to think that too. Does nothing make any difference in this country?’ he said, looking out of the window. ‘How old is that farmhouse?’

‘New. It can’t be more than two hundred years at the most.’

‘Um. Fields, too?’

‘That hedge there must have been clipped for about eighty years.’

‘Labour cheap—eh?’

‘Pretty much. Well, I suppose you’d like to try the Times, wouldn’t you?’

‘No,’ said Keller, looking at Winchester Cathedral. ‘’Might as well try to electrify a haystack. And to think that the World would take three columns and ask for more—with illustrations too! It’s sickening.’

‘But the Times might,’ I began.

Keller flung his paper across the carriage, and it opened in its austere majesty of solid type—opened with the crackle of an encyclopædia.

‘Might! You might work your way through the bow-plates of a cruiser. Look at that first page!’

‘It strikes you that way, does it?’ I said. ‘Then I’d recommend you to try a light and frivolous journal.’

‘With a thing like this of mine—of ours? It’s sacred history!’

I showed him a paper which I conceived would be after his own heart, in that it was modelled on American lines.

‘That’s homey,’ he said, ‘but it’s not the real thing. Now, I should like one of these fat old Times columns. Probably there’d be a bishop in the office, though.’

When we reached London Keller disappeared in the direction of the Strand. What his experiences may have been I cannot tell, but it seems that he invaded the office of an evening paper. at 11.45 a.m. (I told him English editors were most idle at that hour), and mentioned my name as that of a witness to the truth of his story.

‘I was nearly fired out,’ he said furiously at lunch. ‘As soon as I mentioned you, the old man said that I was to tell you that they didn’t want any more of your practical jokes, and that you knew the hours to call if you had anything to sell, and that they’d see you condemned before they helped to puff one of your infernal yarns in advance. Say, what record do you hold for truth in this country, anyway?’

‘A beauty. You ran up against it, that’s all. Why don’t you leave the English papers alone and cable to New York? Everything goes over there.’

‘Can’t you see that’s just why?’ he repeated.

‘I saw it a long time ago. You don’t intend to cable, then?’

‘Yes, I do,’ he answered, in the over-emphatic voice of one who does not know his own mind.

That afternoon I walked him abroad and about, over the streets that run between the pavements like channels of grooved and tongued lava, over the bridges that are made of enduring stone, through subways floored and sided with yard-thick concrete, between houses that are never rebuilt, and by river-steps hewn, to the eye, from the living rock. A black fog chased us into Westminster Abbey, and, standing there in the darkness, I could hear the wings of the dead centuries circling round the head of Litchfield A. Keller, journalist, of Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A., whose mission it was to make the Britishers sit up.

He stumbled gasping into the thick gloom, and the roar of the traffic came to his bewildered ears.

‘Let’s go to the telegraph-office and cable,’ I said. ‘Can’t you hear the New York World crying for news of the great sea-serpent, blind, white, and smelling of musk, stricken to death by a submarine volcano, and assisted by his loving wife to die in mid-ocean, as visualised by an American citizen, the breezy, newsy, brainy news paper man of Dayton, Ohio? ’Rah for the Buckeye State. Step lively! Both gates! Szz! Boom! Aah!’ Keller was a Princeton man, and he seemed to need encouragement.

‘You’ve got me on your own ground,’ said he, tugging at his overcoat pocket. He pulled out his copy, with the cable forms—for he had written out his telegram—and put them all into my hand, groaning, ‘I pass. If I hadn’t come to your cursed country—1f I’d sent it off at Southampton—If I ever get you west of the Alleghannies, if——’

‘Never mind, Keller. It isn’t your fault. It’s the fault of your country. If you had been seven hundred years older you’d have done what I am going to do.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Tell it as a lie.’

‘Fiction?’ This with the full-blooded disgust of a journalist for the illegitimate branch of the profession.

‘You can call it that if you like. I shall call it a lie.’

And a lie it has become; for Truth is a naked lady, and if by accident she is drawn up from the bottom of the sea, it behoves a gentleman either to give her a print petticoat or to turn his face to the wall and vow that he did not see.

[a short tale]

IT was pyjama time on the Madura in the Bay of Bengal, and the incense of the very early morning cigar went up to the stainless skies. Every one knows pyjama time—the long hour that follows the removal of the beds from the saloon skylight and the consumption of chota hazri. Most men know, too, that the choicest stories of many seas may be picked up then—from the long-winded histories of the Colonial sheep-master to the crisp anecdotes of the Californian; from tales of battle, murder and sudden death told by the Burmah-retumed subaltern, to the bland drivel of the globe-trotter. The Captain, taste-fully attired in pale pink, sat up on the signal-gun and tossed the husk of a banana overboard.

“It looked in through my cabin-window,” said he, “and scared me nearly into a fit.” We had just been talking about a monkey who appeared to a man in an omnibus, and haunted him till he cut his own throat. The apparition, amid howls of incredulity, was said to have been the result of excessive tea-drinking. The Captain’s apparition promised to be better.

“It was a menagerie—a whole turnout, lock, stock, and barrel, from the big bear to the little hippopotamus; and you can guess the size of it from the fact that they paid us a thousand pounds in freight only. We got them all accommodated somewhere forward among the deck passengers, and they whooped up terribly all along the ship for two or three days. Among other things, such as panthers and leopards, there were sixteen giraffes, and we moored ’em fore and aft as securely as might be; but you can’t get a purchase on a giraffe somehow. He slopes back too much from the bows to the stem. We were running up the Red Sea, I think, and the menagerie fairly quiet. One night I went to my cabin not feeling well. About midnight I was waked by something breathing on my face. I was quite cahn and collected, for I had got it into my head that it was one of the panthers, or at least the bear; and I reached back to the rack behind me for a revolver. Then the head began to slide against my cabin—all across it—and I said to myself: ‘It’s the big python.’ But I looked into its eyes—they were beautiful eyes—and saw it was one of the giraffes. Tell you, though, a giraffe has the eyes of a sorrowful nun, and this creature was just brimming over with liquid tenderness. The seven-foot neck rather spoilt the effect, but I’ll always recollect those eyes.”

“Say, did you kiss the critter?” demanded the orchid-hunter en route to Siam.

“No; I remembered that it was dam valuable, and I didn’t want to lose freight on it. I was afraid it would break its neck drawing its head out of my window—I had a big deck cabin, of course—so I shoved it out softly like a hen, and the head slid out, with those Mary Magdalene eyes following me to the last. Then I heard the quartermaster calling on heaven and earth for his lost giraffe, and then the row began all up and down the decks. The giraffe had sense enough to duck its head to avoid the awnings—we were awned from bow to stem—but it clattered about like a sick cow, the quartermaster jumping after it, and it swinging its long neck like a flail. ‘Catch it, and hold it!’ said the quartermaster. ‘Catch a typhoon,’ said I. ‘She’s going overboard.’ The spotted fool had heaved one foot over the stem railings and was trying to get the other to follow. It was so happy at getting its head into the open I thought it would have crowed—I don’t know whether giraffes crow, but it heaved up its neck for all the world like a crowing cock. ‘Come back to your stable,’ yelled the quartermaster, grabbing hold of the brute’s tail.

“I was nearly helpless with laughing, though I knew if the concern went over it would be no laughing matter for me. Well, by good luck she came round—the quartermaster was a strong man at a rope’s end. First of all she slewed her neck round, and I could see those tender, loving eyes under the stars sort of saying: ‘Cruel man! What are you doing to my tail?’ Then the foot came on board, and she humped herself up under the awning, looking ready to cry with disappointment. The funniest thing was she didn’t make any noise—a pig would ha’ roused the ship in no time—only every time she dropped her foot on the deck it was like firing a revolver, the hoofs clicked so. We headed her towards the bows, back to her moorings—just like a policeman showing a short-sighted old woman over a crossing. The quartermaster sweated and panted and swore, but she never said anything—only whacked her old head despsiringly against the awning and the funnel case. Her feet woke up the whole ship, and by the time we had her fairly moored fore and aft the population in their night-gear were giving us advice. Then we took up a yard or two in all the moorings and turned in. No other animal got loose that voyage, though the old lady looked at me most repmachfully every time I came that way, and ‘You’ve blasted my young and tender innocence’ was the expression of her eyes. It was all the quartermaster’s fault for hauling her tail. I wonder she didn’t kick him open. Well, of course, that isn’t much of a yarn, but I remember once, in the city of Venice, we had a Malayan tapir loose on Hm deck, and we had to lasso him. It was this way”:

“Guzl thyar hai,” said the steward, and I fled down the companion and missed the tale of be tapir.

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WHEN that sloop known to have been in the West Indies trade for a century had been repaired by Mr. Randolph of Stephano’s Island, there arose between him and her owner, Mr. Gladstone Gallop, a deep-draught pilot, Admiral (retired) Lord Heatleigh, and Mr. Winter Vergil, R.N. (also retired), the question how she would best sail. This could only be settled on trial trips of the above Committee, ably assisted by Lil, Mr. Randolph’s mongrel fox-terrier, and, sometimes, the Commander of the H.M.S. Bulleana, who was the Admiral’s nephew.

Lil had been slid into a locker to keep dry till they reached easier water. The others lay aft watching the breadths of the all-coloured seas. Mr. Gallop at the tiller, which had replaced the wheel, said as little as possible, but condescended, before that company, to make his boat show off among the reefs and passages of coral where his business and delight lay.

Mr. Vergil, not for the first time, justified himself to the Commander for his handling of the great Parrot Problem, which has been told elsewhere. The Commander tactfully agreed with the main principle that—man, beast, or bird—discipline must be preserved in the Service; and that, so far, Mr. Vergil had done right in disrating, by cutting off her tail-feathers, Josephine, alias Jemmy Reader, the West African parrot . . . .

He himself had known a dog—his own dog, in fact—almost born, and altogether brought up, in a destroyer, who had not only been rated and disrated, but also re-rated and promoted, completely understanding the while what had happened, and why.

‘Come out and listen,’ said Mr. Randolph, reaching into the locker. ‘This’ll do you good.’ Lil came out, limp over his hand, and braced herself against the snap and jerk of a sudden rip which Mr. Gallop was cutting across. He had stood in to show the Admiral Gallop’s Island whose original grantees had freed their Carib slaves more than a hundred years ago. These had naturally taken their owners’ family name; so that now there were many Gallops—gentle, straight-haired men of substance and ancestry, with manners to match, and instinct, beyond all knowledge, of their home waters—from Panama, that is, to Pernambuco.

The Commander told a tale of an ancient destroyer on the China station which, with three others of equal seniority, had been hurried over to the East Coast of England when the Navy called up her veterans for the War. How Malachi—Michael, Mike, or Mickey—throve aboard the old Makee-do, on whose books he was rated as ‘Pup,’ and learned to climb oily steel ladders by hooking his fore-feet over the rungs. How he was used as a tippet round his master’s neck on the bridge of cold nights. How he had his own special area, on deck by the raft, sacred to his private concerns, and never did anything one hair’s-breadth outside it. How he possessed an officers’ steward of the name of Furze, his devoted champion and trumpeter through the little flotilla which worked together on convoy and escort duties in the North Sea. Then the wastage of war began to tell and . . . The Commander turned to the Admiral.

‘They dished me out a new Volunteer sub for First Lieutenant—a youngster of nineteen—with a hand on him like a ham and a voice like a pneumatic riveter, though he couldn’t pronounce “r” to save himself. I found him sitting on the wardroom table with his cap on, scratching his leg. He said to me, “Well, old top, and what’s the big idea for to-mowwow’s agony?” I told him—and a bit more. He wasn’t upset. He was really grateful for a hint how things were run on “big ships” as he called ’em. (Makee-do was three hundred ton, I think.) He’d served in Coastal Motor Boats retrieving corpses off the Cornish coast. He told me his skipper was a vet who called the swells “fuwwows” and thought he ought to keep between ’em. His name was Eustace Cyril Chidden; and his papa was a sugar-refiner . . . .’

Surprise was here expressed in various quarters; Mr. Winter Vergil adding a few remarks on the decadence of the New Navy.

‘No,’ said the Commander. ‘The “old top” business had nothing to do with it. He just didn’t know—that was all. But Mike took to him at once.

‘Well, we were booted out, one night later, on special duty. No marks or lights of course—raining, and confused seas. As soon as I’d made an offing, I ordered him to take the bridge. Cyril trots up, his boots greased, the complete N.O. Mike and I stood by in the chart-room. Pretty soon, he told off old Shide, our Torpedo Coxswain, for being a quarter-point off his course. (He was, too; but he wasn’t pleased.) A bit later, Cyril ships his steam-riveter voice and tells him he’s all over the card, and if he does it again he’ll be “welieved.” It went on like this the whole trick; Michael and me waiting for Shide to mutiny. When Shide came off, I asked him what he thought we’d drawn. “Either a dud or a diamond,” says Shide. “There’s no middle way with that muster.” That gave me the notion that Cyril might be worth kicking. So we all had a hack at him. He liked it. He did, indeed! He said it was so “intewesting” because Makee-do “steered like a witch,” and no one ever dreamed of trying to steer C.M.B.’s. They must have been bloody pirates in that trade, too. He was used to knocking men about to make ’em attend. He threatened a stay-maker’s apprentice (they were pushing all sorts of shore-muckings at us) for imitating his lisp. It was smoothed over, but the man made the most of it. He was a Bolshie before we knew what to call ’em. He kicked Michael once when he thought no one was looking, but Furze saw, and the blighter got his head cut on a hatch-coaming. That didn’t make him any sweeter.’

A twenty-thousand-ton liner, full of thirsty passengers, passed them on the horizon. Mr. Gallop gave her name and that of the pilot in charge, with some scandal as to her weakness at certain speeds and turns.

‘Not so good a sea-boat as her!’ He pointed at a square-faced tug—or but little larger—punching dazzle-white wedges out of indigo-blue. The Admiral stood up and pronounced her a North Sea mine-sweeper.

‘’Was. ’Ferry-boat now,’ said Mr. Gallop. ‘’Never been stopped by weather since ten years.’

The Commander shuddered aloud, as the old thing shovelled her way along. ‘But she sleeps dry,’ he said. ‘We lived in a foot of water. Our decks leaked like anything. We had to shore our bulkheads with broomsticks practically every other trip. Most of our people weren’t broke to the life, and it made ’em sticky. I had to tighten things up.’

The Admiral and Mr. Vergil nodded.

‘Then, one day, Chidden came to me and said there was some feeling on the lower deck because Mike was still rated as “Pup” after all his sea-time. He thought our people would like him being promoted to Dog. I asked who’d given ’em the notion. “Me,” says Cyril. “I think it’ll help de-louse ’em mowally.” Of course I instructed him to go to Hell and mind his own job. Then I notified that Mike was to be borne on the ship’s books as Able Dog Malachi. I was on the bridge when the watches were told of it. They cheered. Fo’c’sle afloat; galley-fire missing as usual; but they cheered. That’s the Lower Deck.’

Mr. Vergil rubbed hands in assent.

page 2

‘Did Mike know, Mr. Randolph? He did. He used to sniff forrard to see what the men’s dinners were going to be. If he approved, he went and patronised ’em. If he didn’t, he came to the wardroom for sharks and Worcester sauce. He was a great free-fooder. But—the day he was promoted Dog—he trotted round all messes and threw his little weight about like an Admiral’s inspection—Uncle. (He wasn’t larger than Lil, there.) Next time we were in for boiler-clean, I got him a brass collar engraved with his name and rating. I swear it was the only bit of bright work in the North Sea all the War. They fought to polish it. Oh, Malachi was a great Able Dog, those days, but he never forgot his decencies . . . .’

Mr. Randolph here drew Lil’s attention to this.

‘Well, and then our Bolshie-bird oozed about saying that a ship where men were treated like dogs and vice versa was no catch. Quite true, if correct; but it spreads despondency and attracts the baser elements. You see?’

‘Anything’s an excuse when they are hanging in the wind,’ said Mr. Vergil. ‘And what might you have had for the standing-part of your tackle?’

‘You know as well as I do, Vergil. The old crowd—Gunner, Chief Engineer, Cook, Chief Stoker, and Torpedo Cox. But, no denyin’, we were hellish uncomfy. Those old thirty-knotters had no bows or freeboard to speak of, and no officers’ quarters. (Sleep with your Gunner’s socks in your mouth, and so on.) You remember ’em, sir?’ The Admiral did—when the century was young—and some pirate-hunting behind muddy islands. Mr. Gallop drank it in. His war experiences had ranged no further than the Falklands, which he had visited as one of the prize-crew of a German sailing-ship picked up Patagonia-way and sent south under charge of a modern sub-lieutenant who had not the haziest notion how to get the canvas off a barque in full career for vertical cliffs. He told the tale. Mr. Randolph, who had heard it before, brought out a meal sent by Mrs. Vergil. Mr. Gallop laid the sloop on a slant where she could look after herself while they ate. Lil earned her share by showing off her few small tricks.

‘Mongrels are always smartest,’ said Mr. Randolph half defiantly.

‘Don’t call ’em mongrels.’ The Commander tweaked Lil’s impudent little ear. ‘Mike was a bit that way. Call ’em “mixed.” There’s a difference.’

The tiger-lily flush inherited from his ancestors on the mainland flared a little through the brown of Mr. Gallop’s cheek. ‘Right,’ said he. ‘There’s a heap differ ’twixt mongrel and mixed.’

And in due time, so far as Time was on those beryl floors, they came back to the Commander’s tale.

It covered increasing discomforts and disgusts, varied by escapes from being blown out of water by their own side in fog; affairs with submarines; arguments with pig-headed convoy-captains, and endless toil to maintain Makee-do abreast of her work which the growing ignorance and lowering morale of the new drafts made harder.

‘The only one of us who kept his tail up was Able Dog Malachi. He was an asset, let alone being my tippet on watch. I used to button his front and hind legs into my coat, with two turns of my comforter over all. Did he like it? He had to. It was his station in action. But he had his enemies. I’ve told you what a refined person he was. Well, one day, a buzz went round that he had defiled His Majesty’s quarterdeck. Furze reported it to me, and, as he said, “Beggin’ your pardon, it might as well have been any of us, sir, as him.” I asked the little fellow what he had to say for himself; confronting him with the circumstantial evidence of course. He was very offended. I knew it by the way he stiffened next time I took him for tippet. Chidden was sure there had been some dirty work somewhere; but he thought a Court of Inquiry might do good and settle one or two other things that were loose in the ship. One party wanted Mike disrated on the evidence. They were the——’

‘I know ’em,’ sighed Mr. Vergil; his eyes piercing the years behind him. ‘The other lot wanted to find out the man who had tampered with the—the circumstantial evidence and pitch him into the ditch. At that particular time, we were escorting mine-sweepers—every one a bit jumpy. I saw what Chidden was driving at, but I wasn’t sure our crowd here were mariners enough to take the inquiry seriously. Chidden swore they were. He’d been through the Crystal Palace training himself. Then I said, “Make it so. I waive my rights as the dog’s owner. Discipline’s discipline, tell ’em; and it may be a counter-irritant.”

‘The trouble was there had been a fog, on the morning of the crime, that you couldn’t spit through; so no one had seen anything. Naturally, Mike sculled about as he pleased; but his regular routine—he slept with me and Chidden in the wardroom—was to take off from our stomachs about three bells in the morning watch (half-past five) and trot up topside to attend to himself in his own place. But the evidence, you see, was found near the bandstand—the after six-pounder; and accused was incapable of testifying on his own behalf . . . . Well, that Court of Inquiry had it up and down and thort-ships all the time we were covering the minesweepers. It was a foul area; rather too close to Fritz’s coast. We only drew seven feet, so we were more or less safe. Our supporting cruisers lay on the edge of the area. Fritz had messed that up months before, and lots of his warts—mines—had broke loose and were bobbing about; and then our specialists had swept it, and laid down areas of their own, and so on. Any other time all hands would have been looking out for loose mines. (They have horns that nod at you in a sickly-friendly-frisky way when they roll.) But, while Mike’s inquiry was on, all hands were too worked-up over it to spare an eye outboard . . . . Oh, Mike knew, Mr. Randolph. Make no mistake. He knew he was in for trouble. The Prosecution were too crafty for him. They stuck to the evidence—the locus in quo and so on . . . . Sentence? Disrating to Pup again, which carried loss of badge-of-rank—his collar. Furze took it off, and Mickey licked his hand and Furze wept like Peter . . . . Then Mickey hoicked himself up to the bridge to tell me about it, and I made much of him. He was a distressed little dog. You know how they snuffle and snuggle up when they feel hurt.’

Though the question was to Mr. Randolph, all hands answered it.

‘Then our people went to dinner with this crime on their consciences. Those who felt that way had got in on me through Michael.’

‘Why did you make ’em the chance?’ the Admiral demanded keenly.

‘To divide the sheep from the goats, sir. It was time. . . . Well, we were second in the line—How-come and Fan-kwai next astern and Hop-hell, our flagship, leading. Withers was our Senior Officer. We called him “Joss” because he was always so infernally lucky. It was flat calm with patches of fog, and our sweepers finished on time. While we were escorting ’em back to our cruisers, Joss picked up some wireless buzz about a submarine spotted from the air, surfacing over to the north-east-probably recharging. He detached How-come and Fan-kwai to go on with our sweepers, while him and me went-look-see. We dodged in and out of fog-patches—two-mile visibility one minute and blind as a bandage the next-then a bit of zincy sun like a photograph—and so on. Well, breaking out of one of these patches we saw a submarine recharging-hatches open, and a man on deck—not a mile off our port quarter. We swung to ram and, as he came broadside on to us, I saw Hop-hell slip a mouldie—fire a torpedo—at him, and my Gunner naturally followed suit. By the mercy o’ God, they both streaked ahead and astern him,

page 3

because the chap on deck began waving an open brolly at us like an old maid hailing a bus. That fetched us up sliding on our tails, as you might say. Then he said, “What do you silly bastards think you’re doin’?” (He was Conolly, and some of his crowd had told us, ashore, that the brolly was his private code. That’s why we didn’t fire on sight, sir.—“Red” Conolly, not “Black.”) He told us he’d gone pretty close inshore on spec the night before and had been hunted a bit and had to lie doggo, and he’d heard three or four big ships go over him. He told us where that was, and we stood by till he’d finished recharging and we gave him his position and he sculled off. He said it was hellish thick over towards the coast, but there seemed to be something doing there. So we proceeded, on the tip Conolly gave us . . . . Oh, wait a minute! Joss’s Gunner prided himself on carrying all the silhouettes of Fritz’s navy in his fat head, and he had sworn that Conolly’s craft was the duplicate of some dam U-boat. Hence his shot. I believe Joss pretty well skinned him for it, but that didn’t alter the fact we’d only one mouldie apiece left to carry on with . . . .

‘Presently Joss fetched a sharp sheer to port, and I saw his bow-wave throw off something that looked like the horns of a mine; but they were only three or four hock bottles. We don’t drink hock much at sea.’

Mr. Randolph and Mr. Gallop smiled. There are few liquors that the inhabitants of Stephano’s Island do not know—bottled, barrelled, or quite loose.

The Commander continued.

‘Then Joss told me to come alongside and hold his hand, because he felt nervous.’

The Commander here explained how, with a proper arrangement of fenders, a trusty Torpedo Cox at the wheel, and not too much roll on, destroyers of certain types can run side by side close enough for their captains to talk even confidentially to each other. He ended, ‘We used to slam those old dowagers about like sampans.’

‘You youngsters always think you discovered navigation,’ said the Admiral. ‘Where did you steal your fenders from?’

‘That was Chidden’s pigeon in port, sir. He was the biggest thief bar three in the Service. C.M.B.’s are a bad school . . . . So, then, we proceeded—bridge to bridge—chinning all comfy. Joss said those hock bottles and the big ships walking over Conolly interested him strangely. It was shoaling and we more or less made out the set of the tide. We didn’t chuck anything overboard, though; and just about sunset in a clear patch we passed another covey of hock bottles. Mike spotted them first. He used to poke his little nose up under my chin if he thought I was missing anything. Then it got blind-thick, as Conolly said it would, and there was an ungodly amount of gibber on the wireless. Joss said it sounded like a Fritz tip-and-run raid somewhere and we might come in handy if the fog held. (You couldn’t see the deck from the bridge.) He said I’d better hand him over my surviving mouldie because he was going to slip ’em himself hence-forward, and back his own luck. My tubes were nothing to write home about, anyhow. So we passed the thing over, and proceeded. We cut down to bare steerage-way at last (you couldn’t see your hand before your face by then) and we listened. You listen better in fog.’

‘But it doesn’t give you your bearings,’ said Mr. Gallop earnestly.

‘True. Then you fancy you hear things—like we did. Then Mike began poking up under my chin again. He didn’t imagine things. I passed the word to Joss, and a minute or two after, we heard voices—they sounded miles away. Joss said, “That’s the hock-bottler. He’s hunting his home channel. I hope he’s too bothered to worry about us; but if this stuff lifts we’ll wish we were Conolly.” I buttoned Mike well in to me bosom and took an extra turn of my comforter round him, and those ghastly voices started again—up in the air this time, and all down my neck. Then something big went astern, both screws—then ahead dead slow—then shut off. Joss whispered, “He’s atop of us!” I said, “Not yet. Mike’s winding .. him to starboard!” The little chap had his head out of my comforter again, sniffin’ and poking my chin . . . . And then, by God! the blighter slid up behind us to starboard. We couldn’t see him. We felt him take what wind there was, and we smelt him—hot and sour. He was passing soundings to the bridge, by voice. I suppose he thought he was practically at home. Joss whispered, “Go ahead and cuddle him till you hear me yap. Then amuse him. I shall slip my second by the flare of his batteries while he’s trying to strafe you.” So he faded off to port and I went ahead slow—oh, perishing slow! Shide swore afterwards that he made out the loom of the brute’s stern just in time to save his starboard propeller. That was when my heart stopped working. Then I heard my port fenders squeak like wet cork along his side, and there we were cuddling the hock-bottler! If you lie close enough to anything big he can’t theoretically depress his guns enough to get you.’

Mr. Gallop smiled again. He had known that game played in miniature by a motor-launch off the Bahamas under the flaring bows of a foreign preventive boat.

‘. . . ’Funny to lie up against a big ship eaves-dropping that way. We could hear her fans and engine-room bells going, and some poor devil with a deuce of a cough. I don’t know how long it lasted, but, all that awful while, Fritz went on with his housekeeping overhead. I’d sent Shide aft to the relieving tackles—I had an idea the wheel might go—and put Chidden on the twelve-pounder on the bridge. My Gunner had the forward six-pounders, and I kept Makee-do cuddling our friend. Then I heard Joss yap once, and then the devil of a clang. He’d got his first shot home. We got in three rounds of the twelve, and the sixes cut into her naked skin at-oh, fifteen feet it must have been. Then we all dived aft. (My ewe-torpedo wouldn’t have been any use anyhow. The head would have hit her side before the tail was out of the tube.) She woke up and blazed off all starboard batteries, but she couldn’t depress to hit us. The blast of ’em was enough, though. It knocked us deaf and sick and silly. It pushed my bridge and the twelve-pounder over to starboard in a heap, like a set of fire-irons, and it opened up the top of the forward funnel and flared it out like a tulip. She put another salvo over us that winded us again. Mind you, we couldn’t hear that! We felt it. Then we were jarred sideways—a sort of cow-kick, and I thought it was finish. Then there was a sort of ripping woolly feel—not a noise—in the air, and I saw the haze of a big gun’s flash streaking up overhead at abou’ thirty degrees. It occurred to me that she was rolling away from us and it was time to stand clear. So we went astern a bit. And that haze was the only sight I got of her from first to last! . . . After a while, we felt about to take stock of the trouble. Our bridge-wreckage was listing us a good deal to starboard: the funnel spewed smoke all over the shop and some of the stays were cut; wireless smashed; compasses crazy of course; raft and all loose fittings lifted overboard; hatches and such-like strained or jammed and the deck leaking a shade more than usual. But no casualties. A few ratings cut and bruised by being chucked against things, and, of course, general bleeding from the nose and ears. But—funny thing—we all shook like palsy. That lasted longest. We all went about shouting and shaking. Shock, I suppose.’

‘And Mike?’ Mr. Randolph asked.

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‘Oh, he was all right. He had his teeth well into my comforter throughout. ’First thing after action, he hopped down to the wardroom and lapped up pints. Then he tried to dig the gas taste out of his mouth with his paws. Then he wanted to attend to himself, but he found all his private area gone west with the other unsecured gadgets. He was very indignant and told Furze about it. Furze bellows into my ear, “That’s proof it couldn’t have been him on the quarterdeck, sir, because, if ever any one was justified in being promiscuous, now would be the time. But ’e’s as dainty as a duchess.” . . . Laugh away!—It wasn’t any laughing matter for Don Miguel.’

‘—I beg his pardon! How did you settle his daintiness?’ said the Admiral.

‘I gave him special leave to be promiscuous, and just because I laughed he growled like a young tiger . . . . You mayn’t believe what comes next, but it’s fact. Five minutes later, the whole ship was going over Mike’s court-martial once again. They were digging out like beavers to repair damage, and chinning at the top of their voices. And a year—no—six months before, half of ’em were Crystal Palace naval exhibits!’

‘Same with shanghaied hands,’ said Mr. Gallop, putting her about with a nudge of his shoulder on the tiller and some almost imperceptible touch on a sheet. The wind was rising.

‘. . . I ran out of that fog at last like running out of a tunnel. I worked my way off shore, more or less by soundings, till I picked up a star to go home by. Arguin’ that Joss ’ud do about the same, I waited for him while we went on cutting away what was left of the bridge and restaying the funnel. It was flat calm still; the coast-fog lying all along like cliffs as far as you could see. ’Dramatic, too, because, when the light came, Joss shot out of the fog three or four miles away and hared down to us clearing his hawsers for a tow. We did look rather a dung-barge. I signalled we were all right and good for thirteen knots, which was one dam lie . . . . Well . . . so then we proceeded line-ahead, and Joss sat on his depth-charge-rack aft, semaphoring all about it to me on my fo’c’sle-head. He had landed the hock-bottler to port with his first shot. His second—it touched off her forward magazine—was my borrowed one; but he reported it as “a torpedo from the deck of my Second in Command!” She was showing a blaze through the fog then, so it was a sitting shot—at about a hundred yards, he thought. He never saw any more of her than I did, but he smelt a lot of burnt cork. She might have been some old craft packed with cork like a life-boat for a tip-and-run raid. We never knew.’

Even in that short time the wind and the purpose of the waves had strengthened.

‘All right,’ said Mr. Gallop. ‘Nothin’ due ’fore to-morrow.’ But Mr. Randolph, under sailing-orders from Mrs. Vergil, had the oilskins out ere the sloop lay down to it in earnest. ‘Then—after that?’ said he.

‘Well, then we proceeded; Joss flag-wagging me his news, and all hands busy on our funnel and minor running-repairs, but all arguin’ Mike’s case hotter than ever. And all of us shaking.’

‘Where was Mike?’ Mr. Randolph asked as a cut wave-top slashed across the deck.

‘Doing tippet for me on the fo’c’sle, and telling me about his great deeds. He never barked, but he could chin like a Peke. Then Joss changed course. I thought it might be mines, but having no bridge I had no command of sight. Then we passed a torpedo-bearded man lolling in a life-belt, with his head on his arms, squinting at us—like a drunk at a pub . . . . Dead? Quite. . . . You never can tell how the lower deck’ll take anything. They stared at it and our Cook said it looked saucy. That was all. Then Furze screeched: “But for the grace o’ God that might be bloody-all of us!” And he carried on with that bit of the Marriage Service—“I ree-quire an’ charge you as ye shall answer at the Day of Judgment, which blinkin’ hound of you tampered with the evidence re Malachi. Remember that beggar out in the wet is listenin’.” ’Sounds silly, but it gave me the creeps at the time. I heard the Bolshie say that a joke was a joke if took in the right spirit. Then there was a bit of a mix-up round the funnel, but of course I was busy swapping yarns with Joss. When I went aft—I didn’t hurry—our Chief Stoker was standing over Furze, while Chidden and Shide were fending off a small crowd who were lusting for the Bolshie’s blood. (He had a punch, too, Cywil.) It looked to me—but I couldn’t have sworn to it—that the Chief Stoker scraped up a knife with his foot and hoofed it overboard.’

‘Knife!’ the shocked Admiral interrupted.

‘A wardroom knife, sir, with a ground edge on it. Furze had been a Leicester Square waiter or pimp or something, for ten years, and he’d contracted foreign habits. By the time I took care to reach the working-party, they were carrying on like marionettes, because they hadn’t got over their shakes, you see . . . . I didn’t do anything. I didn’t expect the two men Chidden had biffed ’ud complain of him as long as the Bolshie was alive; and our Chief Stoker had mopped up any awkward evidence against Furze. All things considered, I felt rather sorry for the Bolshie . . . . Chidden came to me in the wardroom afterwards, and said the man had asked to be “segwegated” for his own safety. Oh yes!—he’d owned up to tampering with the evidence. I said I couldn’t well crime the swine for blackening a dog’s character; but I’d reinstate and promote Michael, and the lower deck might draw their own conclusions. “Then they’ll kill the Bolshie,” says the young ’un. “No,” I said, “C.M.B.’s don’t know everything, Cywil. They’ll put the fear of death on him, but they won’t scupper him. What’s he doing now?” “Weconstwucting Mike’s pwivate awea, with Shide and Furze standing over him gwinding their teeth.” “Then he’s safe,” I said. “I’ll send Mike up to see if it suits him. But what about Dawkins and Pratt?” Those were the two men Cyril had laid out while the Chief Stoker was quenching the engine-room ratings. They didn’t love the Bolshie either. “Full of beans and blackmail!” he says. “I told ’em I’d saved ’em fwom being hung, but they want a sardine-supper for all hands when we get in.”’

‘But what’s a Chief Stoker doin’ on the upper deck?’ said Mr. Vergil peevishly, as he humped his back against a solid douche.

‘Preserving discipline. Ours could mend anything from the wardroom clock to the stove, and he’d make a sailor of anything on legs—same as you used to, Mr. Vergil. . . . Well, and so we proceeded, and when Chidden reported the “awea” fit for use I sent Mike up to test it.’

‘Did Mike know?’ said Mr. Randolph.

‘Don’t ask me what he did or didn’t, or you might call me a liar. The Bolshie apologised to Malachi publicly, after Chidden gave out that I’d promoted him to Warrant Dog “for conspicuous gallantwy in action and giving valuable information as to enemy’s whaiwabouts in course of same.” So Furze put his collar on again, and gave the Bolshie his name and rating.’

The Commander quoted it—self-explanatory indeed, but not such as the meanest in His Majesty’s Service would care to answer to even for one day.

‘It went through the whole flotilla.’ The Commander repeated it, while the others laughed those gross laughs women find so incomprehensible.

‘Did he stay on?’ said Mr. Vergil. ‘Because I knew a stoker in the old Minotaur who cut his throat for half as much as that. It takes ’em funny sometimes.’

‘He stayed with us all right; but he experienced a change of heart, Mr. Vergil.’

‘I’ve seen such in my time,’ said the Ancient.

The Admiral nodded to himself. Mr. Gallop at the tiller half rose as he peered under the foresail, preparatory to taking a short-cut where the coral gives no more second chance than a tiger’s paw. In half an hour they were through that channel. In an hour, they had passed the huge liner tied up and discharging her thirsty passengers opposite the liquor-shops that face the quay. Some, who could not suffer the four and a half minutes’ walk to the nearest hotel, had already run in and come out tearing the wrappings off the whisky bottles they had bought. Mr. Gallop held on to the bottom of the harbour and fetched up with a sliding curtsey beneath the mangroves by the boat-shed . . . .

‘I don’t know whether I’ve given you quite the right idea about my people,’ said the Commander at the end. ‘I used to tell ’em they were the foulest collection of sweeps ever forked up on the beach. In some ways they were. But I don’t want you to make any mistake. When it came to a pinch they were the salt of the earth—the very salt of God’s earth—blast ’em and bless ’em. Not that it matters much now. We’ve got no Navy.’

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ACCORDING to the custom of Vermont, Sunday afternoon is salting-time on the farm, and, unless something very important happens, we attend to the salting ourselves. Dave and Pete, the red oxen, are treated first; they stay in the home meadow ready for work on Monday. Then come the cows, with Pan, the calf, who should have been turned into veal long ago, but survived on account of his manners; and lastly the horses, scattered through the seventy acres of the Back Pasture. You must go down by the brook that feeds the clicking, bubbling water-ram; up through the sugar-bush, where the young maple undergrowth closes round you like a shallow sea; next follow the faint line of an old county-road running past two green hollows fringed with wild rose that mark the cellars of two ruined houses; then by Lost Orchard, where nobody ever comes except in cider-time; then across another brook, and so into the Back Pasture. Half of it is pine and hemlock and Spruce, with sumach and little juniper bushes, and the other half is grey rock and boulder and moss, with green streaks of brake and swamp; but the horses like it well enough—our own, and the others that are turned down there to feed at fifty cents a week. Most people walk to the Back Pasture, and find it very rough work; but one can get there in a buggy, if the horse knows what is expected of him. The safest conveyance is our coupé. This began life as a buckboard, and we bought it for five dollars from a sorrowful man who had no other sort of possessions; and the seat came off one night when we were turning a corner in a hurry. After that alteration it made a beautiful salting-machine, if you held tight, because there was nothing to catch your feet when you fell out, and the slats rattled tunes.

One Sunday afternoon we went out with the salt as usual. It was a broiling hot day, and we could not find the horses anywhere till we let Tedda Gabler, the bobtailed mare who throws up the dirt with her big hooves exactly as a tedder throws hay, have her head. Clever as she is, she tipped the coupé over in a hidden brook before she came out on a ledge of rock where all the horses had gathered, and were switching flies. The Deacon was the first to call to her. He is a very dark iron-grey four-year-old, son of Grandee. He has been handled since he was two, was driven in a light cart before he was three, and now ranks as an absolutely steady lady’s horse—proof against steam-rollers, grade-crossings, and street processions.

“Salt!” said the Deacon, joyfully. “You’re dreffle late, Tedda.”

“Any—any place to cramp the coupé?” Tedda panted. “It weighs turr’ble this weather. I’d ’a’ come sooner, but they didn’t know what they wanted—ner haow. Fell out twice, both of ’em. I don’t understand sech foolishness.”

“You look consider’ble het up. ’Guess you’d better cramp her under them pines, an’ cool off a piece.”

Tedda scrambled on the ledge, and cramped the coupé in the shade of a tiny little wood of pines, while my companion and I lay down among the brown, silky needles, and gasped. All the home horses were gathered round us, enjoying their Sunday leisure.

There were Rod and Rick, the seniors on the farm. They were the regular road-pair, bay with black points, full brothers, aged, sons of a Hambletonian sire and a Morgan dam. There were Nip and Tuck, seal-browns, rising six, brother and sister, Black Hawks by birth, perfectly matched, just finishing their education, and as handsome a pair as man could wish to find in a forty-mile drive. There was Muldoon, our ex-car-horse, bought at a venture, and any colour you choose that is not white; and Tweezy, who comes from Kentucky, with an affliction of his left hip, which makes him a little uncertain how his hind legs are moving. He and Muldoon had been hauling gravel all the week for our new road. The Deacon you know already. Last of all, and eating something, was our faithful Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the black buggy-horse, who had seen us through every state of weather and road, the horse who was always standing in harness before some door or other—a philosopher with the appetite of a shark and the manners of an archbishop. Tedda Gabler was a new “trade,” with a reputation for vice which was really the result of bad driving. She had one working gait, which she could hold till further notice; a Roman nose; a large, prominent eye; a shaving-brush of a tail; and an irritable temper. She took her salt through her bridle; but the others trotted up nuzzling and wickering for theirs, till we emptied it on the clean rocks. They were all standing at ease, on three legs for the most part, talking the ordinary gossip of the Back Pasture—about the scarcity of water, and gaps in the fence, and how the early windfalls tasted that season—when little Rick blew the last few grains of his allowance into a crevice, and said:

“Hurry, boys! Might ha’ knowed that livery plug would be around.”

We heard a clatter of hooves, and there climbed up from the ravine below a fifty-center transient—a wall-eyed, yellow frame-house of a horse, sent up to board from a livery-stable in town, where they called him “The Lamb,” and never let him out except at night and to strangers. My companion, who knew and had broken most of the horses, looked at the ragged hammer-head as it rose, and said quietly:

“Ni-ice beast. Man-eater, if he gets the chance—see his eye. Kicker, too—see his hocks. Western horse.”

The animal lumbered up, snuffling and grunting. His feet showed that he had not worked for weeks and weeks, and our creatures drew together significantly.

“As usual,” he said, with an underhung sneer—“bowin’ your heads before the Oppressor that comes to spend his leisure gloatin’ over you.”

“Mine’s done,” said the Deacon; he licked up the remnant of his salt, dropped his nose in his master’s hand, and sang a little grace all to himself. The Deacon has the most enchanting manners of any one I know.

“An’ fawnin’ on them for what is your inalienable right. It’s humiliatin’,” said the yellow horse, sniffing to see if he could find a few spare grains.

“Go daown hill, then, Boney,” the Deacon replied. “Guess you’ll find somethin’ to eat still, if yer hain’t hogged it all. You’ve ett more’n any three of us today—an’ day ’fore that—an’ the last two months—sence you’ve been here.”

“I am not addressin’ myself to the young an’ immature. I am speakin’ to those whose opinion an’ experience commands respect.”

I saw Rod raise his head as though he were about to make a remark; then he dropped it again, and stood three-cornered, like a plough-horse. Rod can cover his mile in a shade under three minutes on an ordinary road to an ordinary buggy. He is tremendously powerful behind, but, like most Hambletonians, he grows a trifle sullen as he gets older. No one can love Rod very much; but no one can help respecting him.

“I wish to wake those,” the yellow horse went on, “to an abidin’ sense o’ their wrongs an’ their injuries an’ their outrages.”

“Haow’s that?” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, dreamily. He thought Boney was talking of some kind of feed.

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“An’ when I say outrages and injuries”—Boney waved his tail furiously “I mean ’em, too. Great Oats! That’s just what I do mean, plain an’ straight.”

“The gentleman talks quite earnest,” said Tuck, the mare, to Nip, her brother, “There’s no doubt thinkin’ broadens the horizons o’ the mind. His language is quite lofty.”

“Hesh, sis,” Nip answered. “He hain’t widened nothin’ ’cep’ the circle he’s ett in pasture. They feed words fer beddin’ where he comes from.”

“It’s elegant talkin’, though,” Tuck returned, with an unconvinced toss of her pretty, lean little head.

The yellow horse heard her, and struck an attitude which he meant to be extremely impressive. It made him look as though he had been badly stuffed.

“Now I ask you, I ask you without prejudice an’ without favour,—what has Man the Oppressor ever done for you?—Are you not inalienably entitled to the free air O’ heaven, blowin’ acrost this boundless prairie?”

“Hev ye ever wintered here?” said the Deacon, merrily, while the others snickered. “It’s kinder cool.”

“Not yet,” said Boney. “I come from the boundless confines o’ Kansas, where the noblest of our kind have their abidin’-place among the sunflowers on the threshold o’ the settin’ sun in his glory.”

“An’ they sent you ahead as a sample—” said Rick, with an amused quiver of his long, beautifully groomed tail, as thick and as fine and as wavy as a quadroon’s back hair.

“Kansas, sir, needs no advertisement. Her native sons rely on themselves an’ their native sires. Yes, sir.”

Then Tweezy lifted up his wise and polite old head. His affliction makes him bashful as a rule, but he is ever the most courteous of horses.

“Excuse me, suh,” he said slowly, “but, unless I have been misinfohmed, most of your prominent siahs, suh, are impo’ted from Kentucky; an’ I’m from Paduky.”

There was the least little touch of pride in the last words.

“Any horse dat knows beans,” said Muldoon, suddenly (he had been standing with his hairy chin on Tweezy’s broad quarters), “gits outer Kansas ’fore dey crip his shoes. I blew in dere from Ioway in de days o’ me youth an’ innocence, an’ I wuz grateful when dey boxed me fer N’ York. You can’t tell me anything about Kansas I don’t wanter fergit. De Belt Line stables ain’t no Hoffman House, but dey’re Vanderbilts ’longside Kansas.”

“What the horses o’ Kansas think today, the horses of America will think tomorrow; an’ I tell you that when the horses of America rise in their might, the day o’ the Oppressor is ended.”

There was a pause, till Rick said, with a little grunt:

“Ef you put it that way, every one of us has riz in his might, ’cep’ Marcus, mebbe. Marky, ’j ever rise in yer might?”

“Nope,” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, thoughtfully quidding over a mouthful of grass. “I seen a heap o’ fools try, though.”

“You admit that you riz—” said the Kansas horse, excitedly. “Then why—why in Kansas did you ever go under again?”

“’Horse can’t walk on his hind legs all the time,” said the Deacon.

“Not when he’s jerked over on his back ’fore he knows what fetched him. We’ve all done it, Boney,” said Rick. “Nip an’ Tuck they tried it, spite o’ what the Deacon told ’em; an’ the Deacon he tried it, spite o’ what me an’ Rod told him; an’ me an’ Rod tried it, spite o’ what Grandee told us; an’ I guess Grandee he tried it, spite o’ what his dam told him. It’s the same old circus from generation to generation. ’Colt can’t see why he’s called on to back. Same old rearn’ on end—straight up. Same old feelin’ that you’ve bested ’em this time. Same old little yank at your mouth when you’re up good an’ tall. Same old Pegasus-act, wonderin’ where you’ll ’light. Same old wop when you hit the dirt with your head where your tail should be, and your in’ards shook up like a bran-mash. Same old voice in your ear: ‘Waal, ye little fool, an’ what did you reckon to make by that?’ We’re through with risin in our might on this farm. We go to pole er single, accordin’ ez we’re hitched.”

“An’ Man the Oppressor sets an’ gloats over you, same as he’s settin’ now. Hain’t that been your experience, madam?”

This last remark was addressed to Tedda; and any one could see with half an eye that poor, old anxious, fidgety Tedda, stamping at the flies, must have left a wild and tumultuous youth behind her.

“’Pends on the man,” she answered, shifting from one foot to the other, and addressing herself to the home horses. “They abused me dreffle when I was young. I guess I was sperrity an’ nervous some, but they didn’t allow for that.’Twas in Monroe County, Noo York, an’ sence then till I come here, I’ve run away with more men than ’u’d fill a boardin’-house. Why, the man that sold me here he says to the boss, s’ he: ‘Mind, now, I’ve warned you. ’Twon’t be none of my fault if she sheds you daown the road. Don’t you drive her in a top-buggy, ner ’thout winkers,’ s’ he, ’ner ’thought this bit ef you look to come home behind her.’ ’N’ the fust thing the boss did was to git the top-buggy.”

“Can’t say as I like top-buggies,” said Rick; “they don’t balance good.”

“Suit me to a ha’ar,” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. “Top-buggy means the baby’s in behind, an’ I kin stop while she gathers the pretty flowers—yes, an’ pick a maouthful, too. The women-folk all say I hev to be humoured, an’—I don’t kerry things to the sweatin’-point.”

“’Course I’ve no prejudice against a top-buggy s’ long ’s I can see it,” Tedda went on quickly. “It’s ha’f-seein’ the pesky thing bobbin’ an’ balancn’ behind the winkers gits on my nerves. Then the boss looked at the bit they’d sold with me, an’ s’ he: ‘Jiminy Christmas! This ’u’d make a clothes-horse Stan’ ’n end!’ Then he gave me a plain bar bit, an’ fitted it’s if there was some feelin’ to my maouth.”

“Hain’t ye got any, Miss Tedda?” said Tuck, who has a mouth like velvet, and knows it.

“Might ’a’ had, Miss Tuck, but I’ve forgot. Then he give me an open bridle,—my style’s an open bridle—an’—I dunno as I ought to tell this by rights—he—give—me—a kiss.”

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“My!” said Tuck, “I can’t tell fer the shoes o’ me what makes some men so fresh.”

“Pshaw, sis,” said Nip, “what’s the sense in actin’ so? You git a kiss reg’lar‘s hitchin’-up time.”

“Well, you needn’t tell, smarty,” said Tuck, with a squeal and a kick.

“I’d heard o’ kisses, o’ course,” Tedda went on, “but they hadn’t come my way specially. I don’t mind tellin’ I was that took aback at that man’s doin’s he might ha’ lit fire-crackers on my saddle. Then we went out jest’s if a kiss was nothin’, an’ I wasn’t three strides into my gait ’fore I felt the boss knoo his business, an’ was trustin’ me. So I studied to please him, an’ he never took the whip from the dash—a whip drives me plumb distracted—an’ the upshot was that—waal, I’ve come up the Back Pasture today, an’ the coupé’s tipped clear over twice, an’ I’ve waited till ’twuz fixed each time. You kin judge for yourselves. I don’t set up to be no better than my neighbours,—specially with my tail snipped off the way ’tis,—but I want you all to know Tedda’s quit fightin’ in harness or out of it, ’cep’ when there’s a born fool in the pasture, stuffin’ his stummick with board that ain’t rightly hisn, ’cause he hain’t earned it.”

“Meanin’ me, madam?” said the yellow horse.

“Ef the shoe fits, clinch it,” said Tedda, snorting. “I named no names, though, to be sure, some folks are mean enough an’ greedy enough to do ’thout ’em.”

“There’s a deal to be forgiven to ignorance,” said the yellow horse, with an ugly look in his blue eye.

“Seemin’ly, yes; or some folks ’u’d ha’ been kicked raound the pasture ’bout onct a minute sence they came—board er no board.”

“But what you do not understand, if you will excuse me, madam, is that the whole principle o’ servitood, which includes keep an’ feed, starts from a radically false basis; an’ I am proud to say that me an’ the majority o’ the horses o’ Kansas think the entire concern should be relegated to the limbo of exploded superstitions. I say we’re too progressive for that. I say we’re too enlightened for that. ’Twas good enough ‘s long ‘s we didn’t think, but naow—but naow—a new loominary has arisen on the horizon!”

“Meanin’ you?” said the Deacon.

“The horses o’ Kansas are behind me with their multitoodinous thunderin’ hooves, an’ we say, simply but grandly, that we take our stand with all four feet on the inalienable rights of the horse, pure and simple,—the high-toned child o’ nature, fed by the same wavin’ grass, cooled by the same ripplin’ brook— yes, an’ warmed by the same gen’rous sun as falls impartially on the outside an’ the inside of the pampered machine o’ the trottin’-track, or the bloated coupé-horses o’ these yere Eastern cities. Are we not the same flesh an’ blood?”

“Not by a bushel an’ a half,” said the Deacon, under his breath. “Grandee never was in Kansas.”

“My! Ain’t that elegant, though, abaout the wavin’ grass an’ the ripplin’ brooks?” Tuck whispered in Nip’s ear. “The gentleman’s real convincin’ I think.”

“I say we are the same flesh an’ blood! Are we to be separated, horse from horse, by the artificial barriers of a trottin’-record, or are we to look down upon each other on the strength o’ the gifts o’ nature—an extry inch below the knee, or slightly more powerful quarters? What’s the use o’ them advantages to you? Man the Oppressor comes along, an’ sees you’re likely an’ good-lookin’, an’ grinds you to the face o’ the earth. What for? For his own pleasure: for his own convenience! Young an’ old, black an’ bay, white an’ grey, there’s no distinctions made between us. We’re ground up together under the remorseless teeth o’ the engines of oppression!”

“Guess his breechin’ must ha’ broke goin’ daown-hill,” said the Deacon. “Slippery road, maybe, an’ the buggy come onter him, an’ he didn’t know ’nough to hold back. That don’t feel like teeth, though. Maybe he busted a shaft, an’ it pricked him.”

“An’ I come to you from Kansas, wavin’ the tail o’ friendship to all an’ sundry, an’ in the name of the uncounted millions o’ pure-minded, high-toned horses now strugglin’ towards the light o’ freedom, I say to you, rub noses with us in our sacred an’ holy cause. The power is yourn. Without you, I say, Man the Oppressor cannot move himself from place to place. Without you he cannot reap, he cannot sow, he cannot plough.”

“Mighty odd place, Kansas!” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. “Seemin’ly they reap in the spring an’ plough in the fall. ’Guess it’s right fer them, but ’twould make me kinder giddy.”

“The produc’s of your untirin’ industry would rot on the ground if you did not weakly consent to help him. Let ’em rot, I say! Let him call you to the stables in vain an’ nevermore! Let him shake his ensnarin’ oats under your nose in vain! Let the Brahmas roost in the buggy, an’ the rats run riot round the reaper! Let him walk on his two hind feet till they blame well drop off! Win no more soul-destroyn’ races for his pleasure! Then, an’ not till then, will Man the Oppressor know where he’s at. Quit workin’, fellow-sufferers an’ slaves! Kick! Rear! Plunge! Lie down on the shafts, an’ woller! Smash an’ destroy! The conflict will be but short, an’ the victory is certain. After that we can press our inalienable rights to eight quarts o’ oats a day, two good blankets, an’ a fly-net an’ the best o’ stablin’.”

The yellow horse shut his yellow teeth with a triumphant snap; and Tuck said, With a sigh: “Seems’s if somethin’ ought to be done. Don’t seem right, somehow,—oppressin’ us an all,—to my way o’ thinkin’.”

Said Muldoon, in a far-away and sleepy voice: “Who in Vermont’s goin’ to haul de inalienable oats? Dey weigh like Sam Hill, an’ sixty bushel at dat allowance ain’t goin’ to last t’ree weeks here. An’ dere’s de winter hay for five mont’s!”

“We can settle those minor details when the great cause is won,” said the yellow horse. “Let us return simply but grandly to our inalienable rights—the right o’ freedom on these yere verdant hills, an’ no invijjus distinctions o’ track an’ pedigree:”

“What in stables “jer call an invijjus distinction?” said the Deacon, stiffly.

“Fer one thing, bein’ a bloated, pampered trotter jest because you happen to be raised that way, an’ couldn’t no more help trottin’ than eatin’.”

“Do ye know anythin’ about trotters?” said the Deacon.

“I’ve seen ’em trot. That was enough for me. I don’t want to know any more. Trottin’ ‘s immoral.”

page 4

“Waal, I’ll tell you this much. They don’t bloat, an’ they don’t pamp—much. I don’t hold out to be no trotter myself, though I am free to say I had hopes that way—onct. But I do say, fer I’ve seen ’em trained, that a trotter don’t trot with his feet: he trots with his head; an’ he does more work—ef you know what that is—in a week than you er your sire ever done in all your lives. He’s everlastingly at it, a trotter is; an’ when he isn’t, he’s studyin’ haow. You seen ’em trot? Much you hev! You was hitched to a rail, back o’ the stand, in a buckboard with a soap-box nailed on the slats, an’ a frowzy buff’lo atop, while your man peddled rum fer lemonade to little boys as thought they was actin’ manly, till you was both run off the track an’ jailed—you intoed, shufflin’, sway-backed, wind-suckin’ skate, you!”

“Don’t get het up, Deacon,” said Tweezy, quietly. “Now, suh, would you consider a fox-trot, an’ single-foot, an’ rack, an’ pace, an’ amble, distinctions not worth distinguishin’? I assuah you, gentlemen, there was a time befo’ I was afflicted in my hip, if you’ll pardon me, Miss Tuck, when I was quite celebrated in Paduky for all those gaits; an in my opinion the Deacon’s co’rect when he says that a ho’se of any position in society gets his gaits by his haid, an’ not by—his, ah, limbs, Miss Tuck. I reckon I’m very little good now, but I’m rememberin’ the things I used to do befo’ I took to transpo’tin’ real estate with the help an’ assistance of this gentleman here.” He looked at Muldoon.

“Invijjus arterficial hind legs !” said the ex-carhorse, with a grunt of contempt. “On de Belt Line we don’t reckon no horse wuth his keep ’less he kin switch de car off de track, run her round on de cobbles, an’ dump her in ag’in ahead o’ de truck what’s blockin’ him. Dere is a way o’ swingin’ yer quarters when de driver says, ‘Yank her out, boys!’ dat takes a year to learn. Onct yer git onter it, youse kin yank a cable-car outer a manhole. I don’t advertise myself for no circus-horse, but I knew dat trick better than most, an’ dey was good to me in de stables, fer I saved time on de Belt—an’ time’s what dey hunt in N’ York.”

“But the simple child o’ nature—” the yellow horse began.

“Oh, go an’ unscrew yer splints! You’re talkin’ through yer bandages,” said Muldoon, with a horse-laugh. “Dere ain’t no loose-box for de simple child o’ nature on de Belt Line, wid de Paris comin’ in an’ de Teutonic goin’ out, an’ de trucks an’ de coupé’s sayin’ things, an’ de heavy freight movin’ down fer de Boston boat ’bout t’ree o’clock of an August afternoon, in de middle of a hot wave when de fat Kanucks an’ Western horses drops dead on de block. De simple child o’ nature had better chase himself inter de water. Every man at de end of his lines is mad or loaded or silly, an’ de cop’s madder an’ loadeder an’ sillier than de rest. Dey all take it outer de horses. Dere’s no wavin’ brooks ner ripplin’ grass on de Belt Line. Run her out on de cobbles wid de sparks flyin’, an’ stop when de cop slugs you on de bone o’ yer nose. Dat’s N’York; see?

“I was always told s’ciety in Noo York was dreffle refined an’ high-toned,” said Tuck. “We’re lookin’ to go there one o’ these days, Nip an’ me.”

“Oh, you won’t see no Belt business where you’ll go, miss. De man dat wants you’ll want bad, an’ he’ll summer you on Long Island er at Newport, wid a winky-pinky silver harness an’ an English coachman. You’ll make a star-hitch, you an’ yer brother, miss. But I guess you won’t have no nice smooth bar bit. Dey checks ’em, an’ dey bangs deir tails, an’ dey bits ’em, de city folk, an’ dey says it’s English, ye know, an’ dey darsen’t cut a horse loose ’ca’se o’ de cops. N’ York’s no place fer a horse, ’less he’s on de Belt, an’ can go round wid de boys. Wisht I was in de Fire Department!”

“But did you never stop to consider the degradin’ servitood of it all?” said the yellow horse.

“You don’t stop on de Belt, cully. You’re stopped. An’ we was all in de servitood business, man an’ horse, an’ Jimmy dat sold de papers. Guess de passengers weren’t out to grass neither, by de way dey acted. I done my turn, an’ I’m none o’ Barnum’s crowd; but any horse dat’s worked on de Belt four years don’t train wid no simple child o’ nature—not by de whole length o’ N’ York.”

“But can it be possible that with your experience, and at your time of life, you do not believe that all horses are free and equal?” said the yellow horse.

“Not till they’re dead,” Muldoon answered quietly. “An’ den it depends on de gross total o’ buttons an’ mucilage dey gits outer youse at Barren Island.”

“They tell me you’re a prominent philosopher.” The yellow horse turned to Marcus. “Can you deny a basic and pivotal statement such as this?”

“I don’t deny anythin’,” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, cautiously; “but ef you ast me, I should say ’twuz more different sorts o’ clipped oats of a lie than anythin’ I’ve had my teeth into sence I wuz foaled.”

“Are you a horse?” said the yellow horse.

“Them that knows me best ’low I am.”

“Ain’t I a horse?”

“Yep; one kind of”

“Then ain’t you an’ me equal?”

“How fer kin you go in a day to a loaded buggy, drawin’ five hundred pounds?” Marcus asked carelessly.

“That has nothing to do with the case,” the yellow horse answered excitedly.

“There’s nothing I know hez more to do with the case,” Marcus replied.

“Kin ye yank a full car outer de tracks ten times in de mornin’?” said Muldoon.

“Kin ye go to Keene—forty-two mile in an afternoon—with a mate,” said Rick; “an’ turn out bright an’ early next mornin’?”

“Was there evah any time in your careah, suh—I am not referrin’ to the present circumstances, but our mutual glorious past—when you could carry a pretty girl to market hahnsome, an’ let her knit all the way on account o’ the smoothness o’ the motion?” said Tweezy.

“Kin you keep your feet through the West River Bridge, with the narrer-gage comin’ in on one side, an’ the Montreal flyer the other, an’ the old bridge teeterin’ between?” said the Deacon. “Kin you put your nose down on the cow-catcher of a locomotive when you’re waitin’ at the depot an’ let ’em play ‘Curfew shall not ring tonight’ with the big brass bell?”

page 5

“Kin you hold back when the brichin’ breaks? Kin you stop fer orders when your nigh hind leg’s over your trace an’ ye feel good of a frosty mornin’?” said Nip, who had only learned that trick last winter, and thought it was the crown of horsely knowledge.

“What’s the use o’ talk in’?” said Tedda Gabler, scornfully. “What kin ye do?”

“I rely on my simple rights—the inalienable rights o’ my unfettered horsehood. An’ I am proud to say I have never, since my first shoes, lowered myself to obeyin’ the will o’ man.”

“’Must ha’ had a heap o’ whips broke over yer yaller back,” said Tedda. “Hev ye found it paid any?”

“Sorrer has been my portion since the day I was foaled. Blows an’ boots an’ whips an’ insults—injury, outrage, an’ oppression. I would not endoor the degradin’ badges o’ servitood that connect us with the buggy an’ the farm-wagon.”

“It’s amazin’ difficult to draw a buggy ’thout traces er collar er breast-strap er somefin’,” said Marcus. “A Power-machine for sawin’ wood is most the only thing there’s no straps to. I’ve helped saw ‘s much as three cord in an afternoon in a Power-machine. Slep’, too, most o’ the time, I did; but ’tain’t half as interestin’ ez goin’ daown-taown in the Concord.”

“Concord don’t hender you goin’ to sleep any,” said Nip. “My throat-lash! D’you remember when you lay down in the sharves last week, waitin’ at the piazza?

“Pshaw! That didn’t hurt the sharves. They wuz good an’ wide, an’ I lay down keerful. The folks kep’ me hitched up nigh an hour ’fore they started; an’ larfed—why, they all but lay down themselves with larfin’. Say, Boney, if you’ve got to be hitched to anything that goes on wheels, you’ve got to be hitched with somefin’.”

“Go an’ jine a circus,” said Muldoon, “an’ walk on your hind legs. All de horses dat knows too much to work [he pronounced it “woik,” New York fashion] jine de circus.”

“I am not sayin’ anythin’ again’ work,” said the yellow horse; “work is the finest thing in the world.”

“’Seems too fine fer some of us,” Tedda snorted.

“I only ask that each horse should work for himself, an’ enjoy the profit of his labours. Let him work intelligently, an’ not as a machine.”

“There ain’t no horse that works like a machine,” Marcus began.

“There’s no way o’ workin’ that doesn’t mean goin’ to pole er single—they never put me in the Power-machine—er under saddle,” said Rick.

“Oh, shucks! We’re talkin’ same ez we graze,” said Nip, “raound an’ raound in circles Rod, we hain’t heard from you yet, an’ you’ve more know-how than any span here.”

Rod, the off-horse of the pair, had been standing with one hip lifted, like a tired cow; and you could only tell by the quick flutter of the haw across his eye, from time to time, that he was paying any attention to the argument. He thrust his jaw out sidewise, as his habit is when he pulls, and changed his leg. His voice was hard and heavy, and his ears were close to his big, plain Hambletonian head.

“How old are you?” he said to the yellow horse.

“Nigh thirteen, I guess.”

“Mean age; ugly age; I’m gettin’ that way myself. How long hev ye been pawin’ this firefanged stable-litter?”

“If you mean my principles, I’ve held ’em sence I was three.”

“Mean age; ugly age; teeth give heaps o’ trouble then. ’Set a colt to actin’ crazy fer a while. You’ve kep’ it up, seemin’ly. D’ye talk much to your neighbours fer a steady thing?”

“I uphold the principles o’ the Cause wherever I am pastured.”

“’Done a heap o’ good, I guess?”

“I am proud to say I have taught a few of my companions the principles o’ freedom an’ liberty.”

“Meanin’ they ran away er kicked when they got the chanst?”

“I was talkin’ in the abstrac’, an’ not in the concrete. My teachin’s educated them.”

“What a horse, specially a young horse, hears in the abstrac’, he’s liable to do in the Concord. You was handled late, I presoom.”

“Four, risin’ five.”

“That’s where the trouble began. Driv’ by a woman, like ez not—eh?”

“Not fer long,” said the yellow horse, with a snap of his teeth.

“Spilled her?”

“I heerd she never drove again.”

“Any childern?”

“Buckboards full of ’em.”

“Men too?”

“I have shed conside’ble men in my time.”

“By kickin’?”

“Any way that come along. Fallin’ back over the dash is as handy as most.”

page 6

“They must be turr’ble afraid o’ you daowntaown?”

“They’ve sent me here to get rid o’ me. I guess they spend their time talkin’ over my campaigns.”

“I wanter know!”

“Yes, sir. Now, all you gentlemen have asked me what I can do. I’ll just show you. See them two fellers lyin’ down by the buggy?”

“Yep; one of ’em owns me. T’other broke me,” said Rod.

“Get ’em out here in the open, an’ I’ll show you something. Lemme hide back o’ you peoples, so ‘s they won’t see what I’m at.”

“Meanin’ ter kill ’em?” Rod drawled. There was a shudder of horror through the others; but the yellow horse never noticed.

“I’ll catch ’em by the back o’ the neck, an’ pile-drive ’em a piece. They can suit ’emselves about livin’ when I’m through with ’em.”

“’Shouldn’t wonder ef they did,” said Rod. The yellow horse had hidden himself very cleverly behind the others as they stood in a group, and was swaying his head close to the ground with a curious scythe-like motion, looking side-wise out of his wicked eyes. You can never mistake a man-eater getting ready to knock a man down. We had had one to pasture the year before.

“See that?” said my companion, turning over on the pine-needles. “Nice for a woman walking ’cross lots, wouldn’t it be?”

“Bring ’em out!” said the yellow horse, hunching his sharp back. “There’s no chance among them tall trees. Bring out the—oh! Ouch!”

It was a right-and-left kick from Muldoon. I had no idea that the old car-horse could lift so quickly. Both blows caught the yellow horse full and fair in the ribs, and knocked the breath out of him.

“What’s that for?” he said angrily, when he recovered himself; but I noticed he did not draw any nearer to Muldoon than was necessary.

Muldoon never answered, but discoursed to himself in the whining grunt that he uses when he is going down-hill in front of a heavy load. We call it singing; but I think it’s something much worse, really. The yellow horse blustered and squealed a little, and at last said that, if it was a horse-fly that had stung Muldoon, he would accept an apology.

“You’ll get it,” said Muldoon, “in de sweet by-and-bye—all de apology you’ve any use for. Excuse me interruptin’ you, Mr. Rod, but I’m like Tweezy—I’ve a Southern drawback in me hind legs.”

“Naow, I want you all here to take notice, an’ you’ll learn something,” Rod went on. “This yaller-backed skate comes to our pastur’—”

“Not havin’ paid his board,” put in Tedda.

“Not havin’ earned his board, an’ talks smooth to us abaout ripplin’ brooks an’ wavin’ grass, an’ his high-toned, pure-souled horsehood, which don’t hender him sheddin’ women an’ childern, an’ fallin’ over the dash onter men. You heard his talk, an’ you thought it mighty fine, some o’ you.”

Tuck looked guilty here, but she did not say anything.

“Bit by bit he goes on ez you have heard.”

“I was talkin’ in the abstrac’,” said the yellow horse, in an altered voice.

“Abstrac’ be switched! Ez I’ve said, it’s this yer blamed abstrac’ business that makes the young uns cut up in the Concord; an’ abstrac’ or no abstrac’, he crep’ on an’ on till he come to killin’ plain an’ straight—killin’ them as never done him no harm, jest beca’se they owned horses.”

“An’ knowed how to manage ’em,” said Tedda. “That makes it worse.”

“Waal, he didn’t kill ’em, anyway,” said Marcus. “He’d ha’ been half killed ef he had tried.”

“’Makes no differ,” Rod answered. “He meant to; an’ ef he hadn’t—s’pose we want the Back Pasture turned into a biffin’-ground on our only day er rest? ’S’pose we want our men walkin’ round with bits er lead pipe an’ a twitch, an’ their hands full o’ stones to throw at us, same ’s if we wuz hogs er hooky keows? More’n that, leavin’ out Tedda here—an’ I guess it’s more her maouth than her manners stands in her light—there ain’t a horse on this farm that ain’t a woman’s horse, an’ proud of it. An’ this yer bogspavined Kansas sunflower goes up an’ daown the length o’ the country, traded off an’ traded on, boastin’ as he’s shed women —an’ childern. I don’t say as a woman in a buggy ain’t a fool. I don’t say as she ain’t the lastin’est kind er fool, ner I don’t say a child ain’t worse—spattin’ the lines an’ standin’ up an’ hollerin’—but I do say, ’tain’t none of our business to shed ’em daown the road.”

“We don’t,” said the Deacon. “The baby tried to git some o’ my tail for a sooveneer last fall when I was up to the haouse, an’ I didn’t kick. Boney’s talk ain’t goin’ to hurt us any. We ain’t colts.”

“Thet’s what you think by’n’by you git into a tight corner, ’Lection day er Valley Fair, like ’s not, daown-taown, when you’re all het an’ lathery, an’ pestered with flies, an’ thirsty, an’ sick o’ bein’ worked in an aout ’tween buggies. Then somethin’ whispers inside o’ your winkers, bringin’ up all that talk abaout servitood an’ inalienable truck an’ sech like, an’ jest then a Militia gun goes off; er your wheels hit, an’—waal, you’re only another horse ez can’t be trusted. I’ve been there time an’ again. Boys—fer I’ve seen you all bought er broke—on my solemn repitation fer a three-minute clip, I ain’t givin’ you no bran-mash o’ my own fixin’. I’m tellin’ you my experiences, an’ I’ve had ez heavy a load an’ ez high a check ’s any horse here. I wuz born with a splint on my near fore ez big ‘s a walnut, an’ the cussed, three-cornered Hambletonian temper that sours up an’ curdles daown ez you git older. I’ve favoured my splint; even little Rick he don’t know what it’s cost me to keep my end up sometimes; an’ I’ve fit my temper in stall an’ harness, hitched up an’ at pasture, till the sweat trickled off my hooves, an’ they thought I wuz off condition, an’ drenched me.”

page 7

“When my affliction came,” said Tweezy, gently, “I was very near to losin’ my manners. Allow me to extend to you my sympathy, suh.”

Rick said nothing, but he looked at Rod curiously. Rick is a sunny-tempered child who never bears malice, and I don’t think he quite understood. He gets his temper from his mother, as a horse should.

“I’ve been there too, Rod,” said Tedda. “Open confession’s good for the soul, an’ all Monroe County knows I’ve had my experiences.”

“But if you will excuse me, suh, that pusson”—Tweezy looked unspeakable things aat the yellow horse—“that pusson who has insulted our intelligences comes from Kansas. An’ what a ho’se of his position, an’ Kansas at that, says cannot, by any stretch of the halter, concern gentlemen of our position. There’s no shadow of equal’ty, suh, not even for one kick. He’s beneath our contempt.”

“Let him talk,” said Marcus. “It’s always interestin’ to know what another horse thinks. It don’t tech us.”

“An’ he talks so, too,” said Tuck. “I’ve never heard anythin’ so smart for a long time.”

Again Rod stuck out his jaws sidewise, and went on slowly, as though he were slugging on a plain bit at the end of a thirty-mile drive:

“I want all you here ter understand thet ther ain’t no Kansas, ner no Kentucky, ner yet no Vermont, in our business. There’s jest two kind o’ horse in the United States—them ez can an’ will do their work after bein’ properly broke an’ handled, an’ them as won’t. I’m sick an’ tired o’ this everlastin’ tail-switchin’ an’ wickerin’ abaout one State er another. A horse kin be proud o’ his State, an’ swap lies abaout it in stall or when he’s hitched to a block, ef he keers to put in fly-time that way; but he hain’t no right to let that pride o’ hisn interfere with his work, ner to make it an excuse fer claimin’ he’s different. That’s colts’ talk, an’ don’t you fergit it, Tweezy. An’, Marcus,you remember that hem’ a philosopher, an’ anxious to save trouble,—fer you are,—don’t excuse you from jumpin’ with all your feet on a slack-jawed, crazy clay-bank like Boney here. It’s leavin’ ’em alone that gives ’em their chance to ruin colts an’ kill folks. An’, Tuck, waal, you’re a mare anyways—but when a horse comes along an’ covers up all his talk o’ killin’ with ripplin’ brooks, an wavin grass, an’ eight quarts of oats a day free, after killn’ his man, don’t you be run away with by his yap. You’re too young an’ too nervous.”

“I’ll—I’ll have nervous prostration sure ef there’s a fight here,” said Tuck, who saw what was in Rod’s eye; “I’m—I’m that sympathetic I’d run away clear to next caounty.”

“Yep; I know that kind o’ sympathy. Jest lasts long enough to start a fuss, an’ then lights aout to make new trouble. I hain’t been ten years in harness fer nuthin’. Naow, we’re goin’ to keep school with Boney fer a spell.”

“Say, look a-here, you ain’t goin’ to hurt me, are you? Remember, I belong to a man in town,” cried the yellow horse, uneasily. Muldoon kept behind him so that he could not run away.

“I know it. There must be some pore delooded fool in this State hez a right to the loose end o’ your hitchin’-strap. I’m blame sorry fer him, but he shall hev his rights when we’re through with you,” said Rod.

“If it’s all the same, gentlemen, I’d ruther change pasture. ’Guess I’ll do it now.”

“’Can’t always have your ’druthers. ’Guess you won’t,” said Rod.

“But look a-here. All of you ain’t so blame unfriendly to a stranger. S’pose we count noses.”

“What in Vermont fer?” said Rod, putting up his eyebrows. The idea of settling a question by counting noses is the very last thing that ever enters the head of a well-broken horse.

“To see how many’s on my side. Here’s Miss Tuck, anyway; an’ Colonel Tweezy yonder’s neutral; an’ Judge Marcus, an’ I guess the Reverend [the yellow horse meant the Deacon] might see that I had my rights. He’s the likeliest-lookin’ Trotter I’ve ever set eyes on. Pshaw. Boys. You ain’t goin’ to pound me, be you? Why, we’ve gone round in pasture, all colts together, this month o’ Sundays, hain’t we, as friendly as could be. There ain’t a horse alive—I don’t care who he is—has a higher opinion o’ you, Mr. Rod, than I have. Let’s do it fair an’ true an’ above the exe. Let’s count noses same ‘s they do in Kansas.” Here he dropped his voice a little and turned to Marcus: “Say, Judge, there’s some green food I know, back o’ the brook, no one hain’t touched yet. After this little fracas is fixed up, you an’ me’ll make up a party an’ ’tend to it.”

Marcus did not answer for a long time, then he said: “There’s a pup up to the haouse ’bout eight weeks old. He’ll yap till he gits a lickin’, an’ when he sees it comin’ he lies on his back, an’ yowls. But he don’t go through no cirkituous nose-countin’ first. I’ve seen a noo light sence Rod spoke. You’ll better stand up to what’s served. I’m goin’ to philosophise all over your carcass.”

“I’m goin’ to do yer up in brown paper,” said Muldoon. “I can fit you on apologies.”

“Hold on. Ef we all biffed you now, these same men you’ve been so dead anxious to kill ’u’d call us off. ’Guess we’ll wait till they go back to the haouse, an’ you’ll have time to think cool an’ quiet,” said Rod.

“Have you no respec’ whatever fer the dignity o’ our common horsehood?” the yellow horse squealed.

“Nary respec’ onless the horse kin do something. America’s paved with the kind er horse you are—jist plain yaller-dog horse—waitin’ ter be whipped inter shape. We call ’em yearlings an’ colts when they’re young. When they’re aged we pound ’em—in this pastur’. Horse, sonny, is what you start from. We know all about horse here, an’ he ain’t any high-toned, pure souled child o’ nature. Horse, plain horse, same ez you, is chock-full o’ tricks, an’ meannesses, an’ cussednesses, an’ shirkin’s, an’ monkey-shines, which he’s took over from his sire an’ his dam, an’ thickened up with his own special fancy in the way o’ goin’ crooked. Thet’s horse, an’ thet’s about his dignity an’ the size of his soul ’fore he’s been broke an’ rawhided a piece. Now we ain’t goin’ to give ornery unswitched horse, that hain’t done nawthin’ wuth a quart of oats sence he wuz foaled, pet names that would be good enough fer Nancy Hanks, or Alix, or Directum, who hev. Don’t you try to back off acrost them rocks. Wait where you are! Ef I let my Hambletonian temper git the better o’ me I’d frazzle you out finer than rye-straw inside o’ three minutes, you woman-scarin’, kid-killin’, dash-breakin’, unbroke, unshod, ungaited, pastur’-hoggin’, saw-backed, shark-mouthed, hair-trunk-thrown-in-in-trade son of a bronco an’ a sewin’-machine!”

“I think we’d better get home,” I said to my companion, when Rod had finished; and we climbed into the coupé, Tedda whinnying, as we bumped over the ledges: “Well, I’m dreffle sorry I can’t stay fer the sociable; but I hope an’ trust my friends’ll take a ticket fer me.”

“Bet your natchul!” said Muldoon, cheerfully, and the horses scattered before us, trotting into the ravine.

Next morning we sent back to the livery-stable what was left of the yellow horse. It seemed tired, but anxious to go.

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IT was a maiden aunt of Stalky who sent him both books, with the inscription, ‘To dearest Artie, on his sixteenth birthday’; it was M‘Turk who ordered their hypothecation; and it was Beetle, returned from Bideford, who flung them on the window-sill of Number Five study with news that Bastable would advance but ninepence on the two; Eric; or, Little by Little, being almost as great a drug as St. Winifred’s. ‘An’ I don’t think much of your aunt. We’re nearly out of cartridges, too—Artie, dear.’  Whereupon Stalky rose up to grapple with him, but M‘Turk sat on Stalky’s head, calling him a ‘pure-minded boy’ till peace was declared. As they were grievously in arrears with a Latin prose, as it was a blazing July afternoon, and as they ought to have been at a house cricket-match, they began to renew their acquaintance, intimate and unholy, with the volumes.

‘Here we are!’ said M‘Turk. ‘“Corporal punishment produced on Eric the worst effects. He burned not with remorse or regret”—make a note o’ that, Beetle—”but with shame and violent indignation. He glared”—oh, naughty Eric! Let’s get to  where he goes in for drink.’

‘Hold on half a shake. Here’s another sample. “The Sixth,” he says, “is the palladium of all public schools.” But this lot’—Stalky rapped the gilded book—‘can’t prevent fellows drinkin’ and stealin’, an’ lettin’ fags out of window at night, an’—an’ doin’ what they please. Golly, what we’ve missed—not goin’ to St. Winifred’s! . . .’

‘I’m sorry to see any boys of my house taking so little interest in their matches.’

Mr. Prout could move very silently if he pleased, though that is no merit in a boy’s eyes. He had flung open the study-door without knocking—another sin—and looked at them suspiciously. ‘Very sorry, indeed, I am to see you frowsting in your studies.’

‘We’ve been out ever since dinner, sir,’ said M‘Turk wearily. One house-match is just like another, and their ‘ploy’ of that week happened to be rabbit-shooting with saloon-pistols.

‘I can’t see a ball when it’s coming, sir,’ said Beetle. ‘I’ve had my gig-lamps smashed at the Nets till I got excused. I wasn’t any good even as a fag, then, sir.’

‘Tuck is probably your form. Tuck and brewing. Why can’t you three take any interest in the honour of your house?’

They had heard that phrase till they were wearied. The ‘honour of the house’ was Prout’s weak point, and they knew well how to flick him on the raw.

‘If you order us to go down, sir, of course we’ll go,’ said Stalky, with maddening politeness. But Prout knew better than that. He had tried the experiment once at a big match, when the three, self-isolated, stood to attention for half an hour in full view of all the visitors, to whom fags, subsidised for that end, pointed them out as victims of Prout’s tyranny. And Prout was a sensitive man.

In the infinitely petty confederacies of the Common-room, King and Macrea, fellow house-masters, had borne it in upon him that by games, and games alone, was salvation wrought. Boys neglected were boys lost. They must be disciplined. Left to himself, Prout would have made a sympathetic house-master; but he was never so left, and, with the devilish insight of youth, the boys knew to whom they were indebted for his zeal.

‘Must we go down, sir?’ said M‘Turk.

‘I don’t want to order you to do what a right-thinking boy should do gladly. I’m sorry.’ And he lurched out with some hazy impression that he had sown good seed on poor ground.

‘Now what does he suppose is the use of that?’ said Beetle.

‘Oh, he’s cracked. King jaws him in Common-room about not keepin’ us up to the mark, and Macrea burbles about “dithcipline,” an’ old Heffy sits between ’em sweatin’ big drops. I heard Oke [the Common-room butler] talking to Richards [Prout’s house-servant] about it down in the basement the other day when I went down to bag some bread,’ said Stalky.

‘What did Oke say?’ demanded M‘Turk, throwing Eric into a corner.

‘“Oh,” he said, “they make more nise nor a nest full o’ jackdaws, an’ half of it like we’d no ears to our heads that waited on ’em. They talks over old Prout—what he’ve done an’ left undone about his boys. An’ how their boys be fine boys, an’ his’n be dom bad.” Well, Oke talked like that, you know, and Richards got awf’ly wrathy. He has a down on King for something or other. ‘Wonder why?’

‘Why, King talks about Prout in form-room—makes allusions, an’ all that—only half the chaps are such asses they can’t see what he’s drivin’ at. And d’you remember what he said about the “causal house” last Tuesday? He meant us. They say he says perfectly beastly things to his own house, making fun of Prout’s,’ said Beetle.

‘Well, we didn’t come here to mix up in their rows,’ M‘Turk said wrathfully. ‘Who’ll bathe after call-over? King’s takin’ it in the cricketfield. Come on.’ Turkey seized his straw and led the way.

They reached the sun-blistered pavilion over against the gray Pebbleridge just before roll-call, and, asking no questions, gathered from King’s voice and manner that his house was on the road to victory.

‘Ah, ha!’ said he, turning to show the light of his countenance. ‘Here we have the ornaments of the Casual House at last. You consider cricket beneath you, I believe’—the flannelled crowd sniggered—‘and from what I have seen this after-noon, I fancy many others of your house hold the same view. And may I ask what you purpose to do with your noble selves till tea-time?’

‘Going down to bathe, sir,’ said Stalky.

‘And whence this sudden zeal for cleanliness? There is nothing about you that particularly suggests it. Indeed, so far as I remember—I may be at fault—but a short time ago—’

‘Five years, sir,’ said Beetle hotly.

King scowled. ‘One of you was that thing called a water-funk. Yes, a water-funk. So now you wish to wash? It is well. Cleanliness never injured a boy or—a house. We will proceed to business,’ and he addressed himself to the call-over board.

‘What the deuce did you say anything to him for, Beetle?’ said M‘Turk angrily, as they strolled towards the big, open sea-baths.

‘’Twasn’t fair—remindin’ one of bein’ a water-funk. My first term, too. Heaps of chaps are—when they can’t swim.’

‘Yes, you ass; but he saw he’d fetched you. You ought never to answer King.’

‘But it wasn’t fair, Stalky.’

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‘My Hat! You’ve been here six years, and you expect fairness. Well, you are a dithering idiot.’

A knot of King’s boys, also bound for the baths, hailed them, beseeching them to wash—for the honour of their house.

‘That’s what comes of King’s jawin’ and messin’. Those young animals wouldn’t have thought of it unless he’d put it into their heads. Now they’ll be funny about it for weeks,’ said Stalky. ‘Don’t take any notice.’

The boys came nearer, shouting an opprobrious word. At last they moved to windward, ostentatiously holding their noses.

‘That’s pretty,’ said Beetle. ‘They’ll be sayin’ our house stinks next.’

When they returned from the baths, dampheaded, languid, at peace with the world, Beetle’s forecast came only too true. They were met in the corridor by a fag—a common, Lower-Second fag—who at arm’s length handed them a carefully wrapped piece of soap ‘with the compliments of King’s house.’

‘Hold on,’ said Stalky, checking immediate attack. ‘Who put you up to this, Nixon? Rattray and White? [Those were two leaders in King’s house.] Thank you. There’s no answer.’

‘Oh, it’s too sickening to have this kind o’ rot shoved on to a chap. What’s the sense of it? What’s the fun of it?’ said M‘Turk.

‘It will go on to the end of the term, though.’ Beetle wagged his head sorrowfully. He had worn many jests threadbare on his own account.

In a few days it became an established legend of the school that Prout’s house did not wash and were therefore noisome. Mr. King was pleased to smile succulently in form when one of his boys drew aside from Beetle with certain gestures.

‘There seems to be some disability attaching to you, my Beetle, or else why should Burton major withdraw, so to speak, the hem of his garments? I confess I am still in the dark. Will some one be good enough to enlighten me?’

Naturally, he was enlightened by half the form.

‘Extraordinary! Most extraordinary! However, each house has its traditions, with which I would not for the world interfere. We have a prejudice in favour of washing. Go on, Beetle—from ‘Fugurtha tamen’—and, if you can, avoid the more flagrant forms of guessing.’

Prout’s house was furious because Macrea’s and Hartopp’s houses joined King’s to insult them. They called a house-meeting after dinner—an excited and angry meeting of all save the prefects, whose dignity, though they sympathised, did not allow them to attend. They read ungrammatical resolutions, and made speeches beginning, ‘Gentlemen, we have met on this occasion,’ and ending with, ‘It’s a beastly shame,’ precisely as houses have done since time and schools began.

Number Five study attended, with its usual air of bland patronage. At last M‘Turk, of the lanthorn jaws, delivered himself:

‘You jabber and jaw and burble, and that’s about all you can do. What’s the good of it? King’s house’ll only gloat because they’ve drawn you, and King will gloat, too. Besides, that resolution of Orrin’s is chock-full of bad grammar, and King ‘ll gloat over that.’

‘I thought you an’ Beetle would put it right, an’—an’ we’d post it in the corridor,’ said the composer meekly.

‘Par si je le connai. I’m not goin’ to meddle with the biznai,’ said Beetle. ‘It’s a gloat for King’s house. Turkey’s quite right.’

‘Well, won’t Stalky, then?’

But Stalky puffed out his cheeks and squinted down his nose in the style of Panurge, and all he said was, ‘Oh, you abject burblers!’

‘You’re three beastly scabs!’ was the instant retort of the democracy, and they went out amid execrations.

‘This is piffling,’ said M‘Turk. ‘Let’s get our sallies, and go and shoot bunnies.’

Three saloon-pistols, with a supply of bulleted breech-caps, were stored in Stalky’s trunk, and this trunk was in their dormitory, and their dormitory was a three-bed attic one, opening out of a ten-bed establishment, which, in turn, communicated with the great range of dormitories that ran practically from one end of the College to the other. Macrea’s house lay next to Prout’s, King’s next to Macrea’s, and Hartopp’s beyond that again. Carefully locked doors divided house from house, but each house, in its internal arrangements—the College had originally been a terrace of twelve large houses—was a replica of the next; one straight roof covering all.

They found Stalky’s bed drawn out from the wall to the left of the dormer window, and the latter end of Richards protruding from a two-foot-square cupboard in the wall.

‘What’s all this? I’ve never noticed it before. What are you tryin’ to do, Fatty?’

‘Fillin’ basins, Muster Corkran.’ Richards’s voice was hollow and muffled. ‘They’ve been savin’ me trouble. Yiss.’

‘’Looks like it,’ said M‘Turk. ‘Hi! You’ll stick if you don’t take care.’

Richards backed puffing.

‘I can’t rache un. Yiss, ’tess a turncock, Muster M‘Turk. They’ve took an’ runned all the watter-pipes a storey higher in the houses—runned ’em all along under the ’ang of the heaves, like. Runned ’em in last holidays. I can’t rache the turncock.’

‘Let me try,’ said Stalky, diving into the aperture.

‘Slip ’ee to the left, then, Muster Corkran. Slip ’ee to the left, an’ feel in the dark.’

To the left Stalky wriggled, and saw a long line of lead-pipe disappearing up a triangular tunnel, whose roof was the rafters and boarding of the College roof, whose floor was sharp-edged joists, and whose side was the rough studding of the lath and plaster wall under the dormer.

‘Rummy show. How far does it go?’

‘Right along, Muster Corkran—right along from end to end. Her runs under the ’ang of the heaves. Have ’ee rached the stopcock yet? Mr. King got un put in to save us carryin’ watter from downstairs to fill the basins. No place for a lusty man like old Richards. I’m tu thickabout to go ferritin’. Thank ’ee, Muster Corkran.’

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The water squirted through the tap just inside the cupboard, and, having filled the basins, the grateful Richards waddled away.

The boys sat round-eyed on their beds considering the possibilities of this trove. Two floors below them they could hear the hum of the angry house; for nothing is so still as a dormitory in mid-afternoon of a midsummer term.

‘It has been papered over till now.’ M‘Turk examined the little door. ‘If we’d only known before!’

‘I vote we go down and explore. No one will come up this time o’ day. We needn’t keep cavé.’

They crawled in, Stalky leading, drew the door behind them, and on all fours embarked on a dark and dirty road full of plaster, odd shavings, and all the raffle that builders leave in the waste-room of a house. The passage was perhaps three feet wide, and, except for the straggling light round the edges of the cupboards (there was one to each dormer), almost pitchy dark.

‘Here’s Macrea’s house,’ said Stalky, his eye at the crack of the third cupboard. ‘I can see Barnes’s name on his trunk. Don’t make such a row, Beetle! We can get right to the end of the Coll. Come on! . . . We’re in King’s house now—I can see a bit of Rattray’s trunk. How these beastly boards hurt one’s knees!’ They heard his nails scraping on plaster.

‘That’s the ceiling below. Look out! If we smashed that the plaster ’ud fall down in the lower dormitory,’ said Beetle.

‘Let’s,’ whispered M‘Turk.

‘An’ be collared first thing? Not much. Why, I can shove my hand ever so far up between these boards.’

Stalky thrust an arm to the elbow between the joists.

‘No good stayin’ here. I vote we go back and talk it over. It’s a crummy place. ‘Must say I’m grateful to King for his waterworks.’

They crawled out, brushed one another clean, slid the saloon-pistols down a trouser-leg, and hurried forth to a deep and solitary Devonshire lane in whose flanks a boy might sometimes slay a young rabbit. They threw themselves down under the rank elder bushes, and began to think aloud.

‘You know,’ said Stalky at last, sighting at a distant sparrow, ‘we could hide our sallies in there like anything.’

‘Huh!’ Beetle snorted, choked, and gurgled. He had been silent since they left the dormitory.

‘Did you ever read a book called The History of a House or something? I got it out of the library the other day. A Frenchwoman wrote it—Violet somebody. But it’s translated, you know; and it’s very interestin’. Tells you how a house is built.’

‘Well, if you’re in a sweat to find out that, you can go down to the new cottages they’re building for the coastguard.’

‘My Hat! I will.’ He felt in his pockets. ‘Give me tuppence, some one.’

‘Rot! Stay here, and don’t mess about in the sun.’

‘Gi’ me tuppence.’

‘I say, Beetle, you aren’t stuffy about anything, are you?’ said M‘Turk, handing over the coppers. His tone was serious, for though Stalky often, and M‘Turk occasionally, manoeuvred on his own account, Beetle had never been known to do so in all the history of the confederacy.

‘No, I’m not. I’m thinking.’

‘Well, we’ll come, too,’ said Stalky, with a general’s suspicion of his aides.

‘’Don’t want you.’

‘Oh, leave him alone. He’s been taken worse with a poem,’ said M‘Turk. ‘He’ll go burbling down to the Pebbleridge and spit it all up in the study when he comes back.’

‘Then why did he want the tuppence, Turkey? He’s gettin’ too beastly independent. Hi! There’s a bunny. No, it ain’t. It’s a cat, by Jove! You plug first.’

Twenty minutes later a boy with a straw hat at the back of his head, and his hands in his pockets, was staring at workmen as they moved about a half-finished cottage. He produced some ferocious tobacco, and was passed from the forecourt into the interior, where he asked many questions.

‘Well, let’s have your beastly epic,’ said Turkey, as they burst into the study, to find Beetle deep in Viollet -le- Duc and some drawings. ‘We’ve had no end of a lark.’

‘Epic? What epic? I’ve been down to the coastguard.’

‘No epic? Then we will slay you, O Beadle,’ said Stalky, moving to the attack. ‘You’ve got something up your sleeve. I know, when you talk in that tone!’

‘Your Uncle Beetle’—with an attempt to imitate Stalky’s war-voice—‘is a Great Man.’

‘Oh no; he jolly well isn’t anything of the kind. You deceive yourself, Beetle. Scrag him, Turkey!’

‘A Great Man,’ Beetle gurgled from the floor. ‘You are futile—look out for my tie! —futile burblers. I am the Great Man. I gloat. Ouch! Hear me!’

‘Beetle, de-ah’ —Stalky dropped unreservedly on Beetle’s chest—‘we love you, an’ you’re a poet. If I ever said you were a doggaroo, I apologise; but you know as well as we do that you can’t do anything by yourself without mucking it.’

‘I’ve got a notion.’

‘And you’ll spoil the whole show if you don’t tell your Uncle Stalky. Cough it up, ducky, and we’ll see what we can do. Notion, you fat impostor—I knew you had a notion when you went away! Turkey said it was a poem.’

‘I’ve found out how houses are built. Le’ me get up. The floor-joists of one room are the ceiling-joists of the room below.’

‘Don’t be so filthy technical.’

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‘Well, the man told me. The floor is laid on top of those joists—those boards on edge that we crawled over—but the floor stops at a partition. Well, if you get behind a partition, same as you did in the attic, don’t you see that you can shove anything you please under the floor between the floorboards and the lath and plaster of the ceiling below? Look here. I’ve drawn it.’

He produced a rude sketch, sufficient to enlighten the allies. There is no part of the modern school curriculum that deals with architecture, and none of them had yet reflected whether floors and ceilings were hollow or solid. Outside his own immediate interests the boy is as ignorant as the savage he so admires; but he has also the savage’s resource.

‘I see,’ said Stalky. ‘I shoved my hand there. An’ then?’

‘An’ then . . . They’ve been calling us stinkers, you know. We might shove somethin’ under—sulphur, or something that stunk pretty bad—an’ stink ’em out. I know it can be done somehow.’ Beetle’s eyes turned to Stalky handling the diagrams.

‘Stinks?’ said Stalky interrogatively. Then his face grew luminous with delight. ‘By gum! I’ve got it. Horrid stinks! Turkey!’ He leaped at the Irishman. ‘This afternoon—just after Beetle went away! She’s the very thing!’

‘Come to my arms, my beamish boy,’ carolled M‘Turk, and they fell into each other’s arms dancing. ‘Oh, frabjous day! Calloo, callay! She will! She will!’

‘Hold on,’ said Beetle. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Dearr man! It shall, though. Oh, Artie, my pure-souled youth, let us tell our darling Reggie about Pestiferous Stinkadores.’

‘Not until after call-over. Come on!’

‘I say,’ said Orrin stiffly, as they fell into their places along the walls of the gymnasium. ‘The house are goin’ to hold another meeting.’

‘Hold away, then.’ Stalky’s mind was elsewhere.

‘It’s about you three this time.’

‘All right, give ’em my love. . . . Here, sir,’ and he tore down the corridor.

Gambolling like kids at play, with bounds and side-starts, with caperings and curvetings, they led the almost bursting Beetle to the rabbit-lane, and from under a pile of stones drew forth the newslain corpse of a cat. Then did Beetle see the inner meaning of what had gone before, and lifted up his voice in thanksgiving for that the world held warriors so wise as Stalky and M‘Turk.

‘Well-nourished old lady, ain’t she?’ said Stalky. ‘How long d’you suppose it’ll take her to get a bit whiff in a confined space?’

‘Bit whiff! What a coarse brute you are!’ said M‘Turk. ‘Can’t a poor pussy-cat get under King’s dormitory floor to die without your pursuin’ her with your foul innuendoes?’

‘What did she die under the floor for?’ said Beetle, looking to the future.

‘Oh, they won’t worry about that when they find her,’ said Stalky.

‘A cat may look at a king.’ M‘Turk rolled down the bank at his own jest. ‘Pussy, you don’t know how useful you’re goin’ to be to three pure-souled, high-minded boys.’

‘They’ll have to take up the floor for her, same as they did in Number Nine when the rat croaked. Big medicine—heap big medicine! Phew! Oh, Lord, I wish I could stop laughin’,’ said Beetle.

‘Stinks! Hi, stinks! Clammy ones!’ M‘Turk gasped as he regained his place. ‘And’ —the exquisite humour of it brought them sliding down together in a tangle—‘it’s all for the honour of the house, too!’

‘An’ they’re holdin’ another meetin’—on us,’ Stalky panted, his knees in the ditch and his face in the long grass. ‘Well, let’s get the bullet out of her and hurry up. The sooner she’s bedded out the better.’

Between them they did some grisly work with a penknife; between them (ask not who buttoned her to his bosom) they took up the corpse and hastened back, Stalky arranging their plan of action at the full trot.

The afternoon sun, lying in broad patches on the bed-rugs, saw three boys and an umbrella disappear into a dormitory wall. In five minutes they emerged, brushed themselves all over, washed their hands, combed their hair, and descended.

‘Are you sure you shoved her far enough under?’ said M‘Turk suddenly.

‘Hang it, man, I shoved her the full length of my arm and Beetle’s brolly. That must be about six feet. She’s bung in the middle of King’s big upper ten-bedder. Eligible central situation, I call it. She’ll stink out his chaps, and Hartopp’s and Macrea’s, when she really begins to fume. I swear your Uncle Stalky is a great man. Do you realise what a great man he is, Beetle?’

‘Well, I had the notion first, hadn’t I, only—’

‘You couldn’t do it without your Uncle Stalky, could you?’

‘They’ve been calling us stinkers for a week now,’ said M‘Turk. ‘Oh, won’t they catch it!’

‘Stinker! Yah! Stink-ah!’ rang down the corridor.

‘And she’s there,’ said Stalky, a hand on either boy’s shoulder. ‘She—is—there, gettin’ ready to surprise ’em. Presently she’ll begin to whisper to ’em in their dreams. Then she’ll whiff. Golly, how she’ll whiff! Oblige me by thinkin’ of it for two minutes.’

They went to their study in more or less of silence. There they began to laugh—laugh as only boys can. They laughed with their foreheads on the tables, or on the floor; laughed at length, curled over the backs of chairs or clinging to a book-shelf; laughed themselves limp.

And in the middle of it Orrin entered on behalf of the house.

‘Don’t mind us, Orrin; sit down. You don’t know how we respect and admire you. There’s something about your pure, high, young forehead, full of the dreams of innocent boyhood, that’s no end fetchin’. It is, indeed.’

‘The house sent me to give you this.’ He laid a folded sheet of paper on the table and retired with an awful front.

‘It’s the resolution! Oh, read it, some one. I’m too silly-sick with laughin’ to see,’ said Beetle.

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Stalky jerked it open with a precautionary sniff.

‘Phew! Phew! Listen. “The House notices with pain and contempt the attitude of indiference” —how many f’s in indifference, Beetle?’

‘Two for choice.’

‘Only one here— “adopted by the occupants of Number Five Study in relation to the insults offered to Mr. Prout’s House at the recent meeting in Number Twelve form-room, and the House hereby pass a vote of censure on the said study.” That’s all.’

‘And she bled all down my shirt, too!’ said Beetle.

‘An’ I’m catty all over,’ said M‘Turk, ‘though I washed twice.’

‘An’ I nearly broke Beetle’s brolly plantin’ her where she would blossom!’

The situation was beyond speech, but not laughter. There was some attempt that night to demonstrate against the three in their dormitory; so they came forth.

‘You see,’ Beetle began suavely as he loosened his braces, ‘the trouble with you is that you’re a set of unthinkin’ asses. You’ve no more brains than spidgers. We’ve told you that heaps of times, haven’t we?’

‘We’ll give all three of you a dormitory lickin’. You always jaw at us as if you were prefects,’ cried one.

‘Oh no, you won’t,’ said Stalky, ‘because you know that if you did you’d get the worst of it sooner or later. We aren’t in any hurry. We can afford to wait for our little revenges. You’ve made howlin’ asses of yourselves, and just as soon as King gets hold of your precious resolution to-morrow you’ll find that out. If you aren’t sick an’ sorry by to-morrow night, I’ll—I’ll eat my hat.’

But or ever the dinner-bell rang the next day Prout’s were sadly aware of their error. King received stray members of that house with an exaggerated attitude of fear. Did they purpose to cause him to be dismissed from the College by unanimous resolution? What were their views concerning the government of the school, that he might hasten to give effect to them? He would not offend them for worlds; but he feared—he sadly feared—that his own house, who did not pass resolutions (but washed), might somewhat deride.

King was a happy man, and his house, basking in the favour of his smile, made that afternoon a long penance to the misled Prout’s. And Prout himself, with a dull and lowering visage, tried to think out the rights and wrongs of it all, only plunging deeper into bewilderment. Why should his house be called ‘stinkers’? Truly, it was a small thing, but he had been trained to believe that straws show which way the wind blows, and that there is no smoke without fire. He approached King in Common-room with a sense of injustice, but King was pleased to be full of airy persiflage that tide, and brilliantly danced dialectical rings round Prout.

‘Now,’ said Stalky at bedtime, making pilgrimage through the dormitories before the prefects came up, ‘now what have you got to say for yourselves? Foster, Carton, Finch, Longbridge, Marlin, Brett! I heard you chaps catchin’ it from King—he made hay of you—an’ all you could do was to wriggle an’ grin an’ say, “Yes, sir,” an’ “No, sir,” an’ “Oh, sir,” an’ “Please, sir”! You an’ your resolution! Urh!’

‘Oh, shut up, Stalky.’

‘Not a bit of it. You’re a gaudy lot of resolutionists, you are! You’ve made a sweet mess of it. Perhaps you’ll have the decency to leave us alone next time.’

Here the house grew angry, and in many voices pointed out how this blunder would never have come to pass if Number Five study had helped them from the first.

‘But you chaps are so beastly conceited, an’— an’ you swaggered into the meetin’ as if we were a lot of idiots,’ growled Orrin of the resolution.

‘That’s precisely what you are! That’s what we’ve been tryin’ to hammer into your thick heads all this time,’ said Stalky. ‘Never mind, we’ll forgive you. Cheer up. You can’t help bein’ asses, you know,’ and, the enemy’s flank deftly turned, Stalky hopped into bed.

That night was the first of sorrow among the jubilant King’s. By some accident of under-floor drafts the cat did not vex the dormitory beneath which she lay, but the next one to the right; stealing on the air rather as a pale-blue sensation than as any poignant offense. But the mere adumbration of an odour is enough for the sensitive nose and clean tongue of youth. Decency demands that we draw several carbolised sheets over what the dormitory said to Mr. King and what Mr. King replied. He was genuinely proud of his house and fastidious in all that concerned their well-being. He came; he sniffed; he said things. Next morning a boy in that dormitory confided to his bosom friend, a fag of Macrea’s, that there was trouble in their midst which King would fain keep secret.

But Macrea’s boy had also a bosom friend in Prout’s, a shock-headed fag of malignant disposition, who, when he had wormed out the secret, told—told it in a high-pitched treble that rang along the corridor like a bat’s squeak.

‘An’— an’ they’ve been calling us “stinkers” all this week. Why, Harland minor says they simply can’t sleep in his dormitory for the stink. Come on!’

‘With one shout and with one cry’ Prout’s juniors hurled themselves into the war, and through the interval between first and second lesson some fifty twelve-year-olds were embroiled on the gravel outside King’s windows to a tune whose leit-motif was the word ‘stinker.’

‘Hark to the minute-gun at sea!’ said Stalky. They were in their study collecting books for second lesson—Latin, with King. ‘I thought his azure brow was a bit cloudy at prayers.

She is comin’, sister Mary,
She is ——’

‘If they make such a row now, what will they do when she really begins to look up an’ take notice?’

‘Well, no vulgar repartee, Beetle. All we want is to keep out of this row like gentlemen.’

‘“’Tis but a little faded flower.” Where’s my Horace? Look here, I don’t understand what she means by stinkin’ out Rattray’s dormitory first. We holed in under White’s, didn’t we?’ asked M‘Turk, with a wrinkled brow.

page 6

‘Skittish little thing. She’s rompin’ about all over the place, I suppose.’

‘My Aunt! King’ll be a cheerful customer at second lesson. I haven’t prepared my Horace one little bit, either,’ said Beetle. ‘Come on!’

They were outside the form-room door now. It was within five minutes of the bell, and King might arrive at any moment.

Turkey elbowed into a cohort of scuffling fags, cut out Thornton tertius (he that had been Harland’s bosom friend), and bade him tell his tale.

It was a simple one, interrupted by tears. Many of King’s house had already battered him for libel.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ M‘Turk cried. ‘He says that King’s house stinks. That’s all.’

‘Stale!’ Stalky shouted. ‘We knew that years ago, only we didn’t choose to run about shoutin’ “Stinker!” We’ve got some manners, if they haven’t. Catch a fag, Turkey, and make sure of it.’

Turkey’s long arm closed on a hurried and anxious ornament of the Lower Second.

‘Oh, M‘Turk, please let me go. I don’t stink—I swear I don’t!’

‘Guilty conscience!’ cried Beetle. ‘Who said you did?’

‘What d’you make of it?’ Stalky punted the small boy into Beetle’s arms.

‘Snf! Snf! He does, though. I think it’s leprosy—or thrush. P’raps it’s both. Take it away.’

‘Indeed, Master Beetle’— King generally came to the house-door for a minute or two as the bell rang—‘we are vastly indebted to you for your diagnosis, which seems to reflect almost as much credit on the natural unwholesomeness of your mind as it does upon your pitiful ignorance of the diseases of which you discourse so glibly. We will, however, test your knowledge in other directions.’

That was a merry lesson, but, in his haste to scarify Beetle, King clean neglected to give him an imposition, and since at the same time he supplied him with many priceless adjectives for later use, Beetle was well content, and applied himself most seriously throughout third lesson (algebra with little Hartopp) to composing a poem entitled ‘The Lazar-house.’

After dinner King took his house to bathe in the sea off the Pebbleridge. It was an old promise; but he wished he could have evaded it, for all Prout’s lined up by the Fives Court and cheered with intention. In his absence not less than half the school invaded the infected dormitory to draw their own conclusions. The cat had gained in the last twelve hours, but a battlefield of the fifth day could not have been so flamboyant as the spies reported.

‘My word, she is doin’ herself proud,’ said Stalky. ‘Did you ever smell anything like it? Ah, an’ she isn’t under White’s dormitory at all yet.’

‘But she will be. Give her time,’ said Beetle. ‘She’ll twine like a giddy honeysuckle. What howlin’ Lazarites they are! No house is justified in makin’ itself a stench in the nostrils of decent —’

‘High-minded, pure-souled boys. Do you burn with remorse and regret?’ said M‘Turk, as they hastened to meet the house coming up from the sea. King had deserted it, so speech was unfettered. Round its front played a crowd of skirmishers—all houses mixed—flying, re forming, shrieking insults. On its tortured flanks marched the Hoplites, seniors hurling jests one after another—simple and primitive jests of the Stone Age. To these the three added themselves, dispassionately, with an air of aloofness, almost sadly.

‘And they look all right, too,’ said Stalky. ‘It can’t be Rattray, can it? Rattray?’

No answer.

‘Rattray, dear? He seems stuffy about something or other. Look here, old man, we don’t bear any malice about your sending that soap to us last week, do we? Be cheerful, Rat. You can live this down all right. I dare say it’s only a few fags. Your house is so beastly slack, though.’

‘You aren’t going back to the house, are you?’ said M‘Turk. The victims desired nothing better. ‘You’ve simply no conception of the reek up there. Of course, frowzin’ as you do, you wouldn’t notice it; but, after this nice wash and the clean, fresh air, even you’d be upset. ‘Much better camp on the Burrows. We’ll get you some straw. Shall we?’ The house hurried in to the tune of ‘John Brown’s body,’ sung by loving school-mates, and barricaded themselves in their form-room. Straightway Stalky chalked a large cross, with ‘Lord, have mercy upon us,’ on the door, and left King to find it.

The wind shifted that night and wafted a carrion-reek into Macrea’s dormitories; so that boys in nightgowns pounded on the locked door between the houses, entreating King’s to wash. Number Five study went to second lesson with not more than half a pound of camphor apiece in their clothing; and King, too wary to ask for explanations, gibbered awhile and hurled them forth. So Beetle finished yet another poem at peace in the study.

‘They’re usin’ carbolic now. Malpas told me, said Stalky. ‘King thinks it’s the drains.’

‘She’ll need a lot o’ carbolic,’ said M‘Turk. ‘No harm tryin’, I suppose. It keeps King out of mischief.’

‘I swear I thought he was goin’ to kill me when I sniffed just now. He didn’t mind Burton major sniffin’ at me the other day, though. He never stopped Alexander howlin’ “Stinker!” into our form-room before—before we doctored ’em. He just grinned,’ said Stalky. ‘What was he frothing over you for, Beetle?’

‘Aha! That was my subtle jape. I had him on toast. You know he always jaws about the learned Lipsius.’

‘“Who at the age of four”—that chap?’ said M‘Turk.

‘Yes. Whenever he hears I’ve written a poem. Well, just as I was sittin’ down, I whispered. “How is our learned Lipsius?” to Burton major. Old Butt grinned like an owl. He didn’t know what I was drivin’ at; but King jolly well did. That was really why he hove us out. Ain’t you grateful? Now shut up. I’m goin’ to write the “Ballad of the Learned Lipsius.”’

‘Keep clear of anything coarse, then,’ said Stalky. ‘I shouldn’t like to be coarse on this happy occasion.’

‘Not for wo-orlds. What rhymes to “stenches,” some one?’

page 7

In Common-room at lunch King discoursed acridly to Prout of boys with prurient minds, who perverted their few and baleful talents to sap discipline and corrupt their equals, to deal in foul imagery and destroy reverence.

‘But you didn’t seem to consider this when your house called us—ah—stinkers. If you hadn’t assured me that you never interfere with another man’s house, I should almost believe that it was a few casual remarks of yours that started all this nonsense.’

Prout had endured much, for King always took his temper to meals.

‘You spoke to Beetle yourself, didn’t you? Something about not bathing, and being a water-funk?’ the school chaplain put in. ‘I was scoring in the pavilion that day.’

‘I may have—jestingly. I really don’t pretend to remember every remark I let fall among small boys; and full well I know the Beetle has no feelings to be hurt.’

‘Maybe; but he, or they—it comes to the same thing—have the fiend’s own knack of discovering a man’s weak place. I confess I rather go out of my way to conciliate Number Five study. It may be soft, but so far, I believe, I am the only man here whom they haven’t maddened by their—well—attentions.’

‘That is all beside the point. I flatter myself I can deal with them alone as occasion arises. But if they feel themselves morally supported by those who should wield an absolute and open-handed justice, then I say that my lot is indeed a hard one. Of all things I detest, I admit that anything verging on disloyalty among ourselves is the first.’

The Common-room looked at one another out of the corners of their eyes, and Prout blushed.

‘I deny it absolutely,’ he said. ‘Er—in fact, I own that I personally object to all three of them. It is not fair, therefore, to —’

‘How long do you propose to allow it?’ said King.

‘But surely,’ said Macrea, deserting his usual ally, ‘the blame, if there be any, rests with you, King. You can’t hold them responsible for the—you prefer the good old Anglo-Saxon, I believe—stink in your house. My boys are complaining of it now.’

‘What can you expect? You know what boys are. Naturally they take advantage of what to them is a heaven-sent opportunity,’ said little Hartopp. ‘What is the trouble in your dormitories, King?’

Mr. King explained that as he had made it the one rule of his life never to interfere with another man’s house, so he expected not to be too patently interfered with. They might be interested to learn—here the chaplain heaved a weary sigh—that he had taken all steps that, in his poor judgment, would meet the needs of the case. Nay, further, he had himself expended, with no thought of reimbursement, sums, the amount of which he would not specify, on disinfectants. This he had done because he knew by bitter—by most bitter—experience that the management of the College was slack, dilatory, and inefficient. He might even add almost as slack as the administration of certain houses which now thought fit to sit in judgment on his actions. With a short summary of his scholastic career, and a précis of his qualifications, including his degrees, he withdrew, slamming the door.

‘Heigho!’ said the chaplain. ‘Ours is a dwarfing life—a belittling life, my brethren. God help all schoolmasters! They need it.’

‘I don’t like the boys, I own’— Prout dug viciously with his fork into the table-cloth—‘and I don’t pretend to be a strong man, as you know. But I confess I can’t see any reason why I should take steps against Stalky and the others because King happens to be annoyed by—by ——’

‘Falling into the pit he has digged,’ said little Hartopp. ‘Certainly not, Prout. No one accuses you of setting one house against another through sheer idleness.’

‘A belittling life—a belittling life.’ The chaplain rose. ‘I go to correct French exercises. By dinner King will have scored off some unlucky child of thirteen; he will repeat to us every word of his brilliant repartees, and all will be well.’

‘But about those three. Are they so prurient-minded?’

‘Nonsense,’ said little Hartopp. ‘If you thought for a minute, Prout, you would see that the “precocious flow of fetid imagery” that King complains of is borrowed wholesale from King. He “nursed the pinion that impelled the steel.” Naturally he does not approve. Come into the smoking-room for a minute. It isn’t fair to listen to boys; but they should be now rubbing it into King’s house outside. Little things please little minds.’

The dingy den off the Common-room was never used for anything except gowns. Its windows were ground glass; one could not see out of it, but one could hear almost every word on the gravel outside. A light and wary footstep came up from Number Five.

‘Rattray!’ in a subdued voice—Rattray’s study fronted that way. ‘D’you know if Mr. King’s anywhere about? I’ve got a ——’ M‘Turk discreetly left the end of his sentence open.

‘No. He’s gone out,’ said Rattray unguardedly.

‘Ah! The learned Lipsius is airing himself, is he? His Royal Highness has gone to fumigate.’ M‘Turk climbed on the railings, where he held forth like the never-wearied rook.

‘Now in all the Coll. there was no stink like the stink of King’s house, for it stank vehemently and none knew what to make of it. Save King. And he washed the fags privatim et seriatim. In the fishpools of Heshbon washed he them, with an apron about his loins.’

‘Shut up, you mad Irishman!’ There was the sound of a golf-ball spurting up gravel.

‘It’s no good getting wrathy, Rattray. We’ve come to jape with you. Come on, Beetle. They’re all at home. You can wind ’em.’

‘Where’s the Pomposo Stinkadore? ’Tisn’t safe for a pure-souled, high-minded boy to be seen round his house these days. Gone out, has he? Never mind. I’ll do the best I can, Rattray. I’m in loco parentis just now.’

(‘One for you, Prout,’ whispered Macrea, for this was Mr. Prout’s pet phrase.)

‘I have a few words to impart to you, my young friend. We will discourse together awhile.’

Here the listening Prout sputtered: Beetle, in a strained voice, had chosen a favourite gambit of King’s.

page 8

‘I repeat, Master Rattray, we will confer, and the matter of our discourse shall not be stinks, for that is a loathsome and obscene word. We will, with your good leave—granted, I trust, Master Rattray, granted, I trust—study this—this scabrous upheaval of latent demoralisation. What impresses me most is not so much the blatant indecency with which you swagger abroad under your load of putrescence’ (you must imagine this discourse punctuated with golf-balls, but old Rattray was ever a bad shot) ‘as the cynical immorality with which you revel in your abhorrent aromas. Far be it from me to interfere with another’s house ——’

(‘Good Lord!’ said Prout, ‘but this is King.’

‘Line for line, letter for letter. Listen,’ said little Hartopp.)

‘But to say that you stink, as certain lewd fellows of the baser sort aver, is to say nothing—less than nothing. In the absence of your beloved house-master, for whom no one has a higher regard than myself, I will, if you will allow me, explain the grossness—the unparalleled enormity—the appalling fetor of the stenches (I believe in the good old Anglo-Saxon word), stenches, sir, with which you have seen fit to infect your house. . . . Oh, bother! I’ve forgotten the rest, but it was very beautiful. Aren’t you grateful to us for labourin’ with you this way, Rattray? Lots of chaps ’ud never have taken the trouble, but we’re grateful, Rattray.’

‘Yes, we’re horrid grateful,’ grunted M‘Turk. ‘We don’t forget that soap. We’re polite. Why ain’t you polite, Rat?’

‘Hallo!’ Stalky cantered up, his cap over one eye. ‘Exhortin’ the Whiffers, eh? I’m afraid they’re too far gone to repent. Rattray! White! Perowne! Malpas! No answer. This is distressin’. This is truly distressin’. Bring out your dead, you glandered lepers!’

‘You think yourself funny, don’t you?’ said Rattray, stung from his dignity by this last. ‘It’s only a rat or something under the floor. We’re going to have it up to-morrow.’

‘Don’t try to shuffle it off on a poor dumb animal, and dead, too. I loathe prevarication. ‘Pon my soul, Rattray——’

‘Hold on. The Hartoffles never said “’Pon my soul” in all his little life,’ said Beetle critically.

(‘Ah!’ said Prout to little Hartopp.)

‘Upon my word, sir, upon my word, sir, I expected better things of you, Rattray. Why can you not own up to your misdeeds like a man? Have I ever shown any lack of confidence in you?’

(‘It’s not brutality,’ murmured little Hartopp, as though answering a question no one had asked. ‘It’s boy; only boy.’)

‘And this was the house.’ Stalky changed from a pecking, fluttering voice to tragic earnestness. ‘This was the—the—open cesspit that dared to call us “stinkers.” And now—and now, it tries to shelter itself behind a dead rat. You annoy me, Rattray. You disgust me! You irritate me unspeakably! Thank Heaven, I am a man of equable temper —’

(‘This is to your address, Macrea,’ said Prout.

‘I fear so, I fear so.’)

‘Or I should scarcely be able to contain myself before your mocking visage.’

‘Cavé!’ in an undertone. Beetle had spied King sailing down the corridor.

‘And what may you be doing here, my little friends?’ the house-master began. ‘I had a fleeting notion—correct me if I am wrong (the listeners with one accord choked)— that if I found you outside my house I should visit you with dire pains and penalties.’

‘We were just goin’ for a walk, sir,’ said Beetle.

‘And you stopped to speak to Rattray en route?’

‘Yes, sir. We’ve been throwing golf-balls,’ said Rattray, coming out of the study.

(‘Old Rat is more of a diplomat than I thought. So far he is strictly within the truth,’ said little Hartopp. ‘Observe the ethics of it, Prout.’)

‘Oh, you were sporting with them, were you? I must say I do not envy you your choice of associates. I fancy they might have been engaged in some of the prurient discourse with which they have been so disgustingly free of late. I should strongly advise you to direct your steps most carefully in the future. Pick up those golf-balls.’ He passed on.

Next day Richards, who had been a carpenter in the Navy, and to whom odd jobs were confided, was ordered to take up a dormitory floor; for Mr. King held that something must have died there.

‘We need not neglect all our work for a trumpery incident of this nature; though I am quite aware that little things please little minds. Yes, I have decreed the boards to be taken up after lunch under Richards’ auspices. I have no doubt it will be vastly interesting to a certain type of so-called intellect; but any boy of my house or another’s found on the dormitory stairs will ipso facto render himself liable to three hundred lines.’

The boys did not collect on the stairs, but most of them waited outside King’s. Richards had been bound to cry the news from the attic window, and, if possible, to exhibit the corpse.

‘’Tis a cat, a dead cat!’ Richards’ face showed purple at the window. He had been in the chamber of death and on his knees for some time.

‘Cat be blowed!’ cried M‘Turk. ‘It’s a dead fag left over from last term. Three cheers for King’s dead fag!’

They cheered lustily.

‘Show it, show it! Let’s have a squint at it!’ yelled the juniors. ‘Give her to the Bug-hunters. [This was the Natural History Society.] The cat looked at the King—and died of it! Hoosh! Yai! Yaow! Maiow! Ftzz!’ were some of the cries that followed.

Again Richards appeared.

‘She’ve been’— he checked himself suddenly—‘dead a long taime.’

The school roared.

page 9

‘Well, come on out for a walk,’ said Stalky in a well-chosen pause. ‘It’s all very disgustin’, and I do hope that the Lazar-house won’t do it again.’

‘Do what?’ a King’s boy cried furiously.

‘Kill a poor innocent cat every time you want to get off washing. It’s awfully hard to distinguish between you as it is. I prefer the cat, I must say. She isn’t quite so whiff. What are you goin’ to do, Beetle?’

‘Fe vais gloater. Fe vais gloater tout le blessed afternoon. Famais j’ai gloaté comme je gloaterai aujourd’hui. Nous bunkerons aux bunkers.’

And it seemed good to them so to do.

Down in the basement, where the gas flickers and the boots stand in racks, Richards, amid his blacking-brushes, held forth to Oke of the Common-room, Gumbly of the dining-halls, and fair Lena of the laundry.

‘Yiss. Her were in a shockin’ staate an’ condition. Her nigh made me sick, I tal ’ee. But I rowted un out, and I rowted un out, an’ I made all shipshape, though her smelt like to bilges.’

‘Her died mousin’, I reckon, poor thing,’ said Lena.

‘Then her moused different to any made cat o’ world, Lena. I up with the top-board, an’ she were lying on her back, an’ I turned un ovver with the brume-handle, an’ ’twas her back was all covered with the plaster from ’twixt the lathin’. Yiss, I tal ’ee. An’ under her head there lay, like, so’s to say, a little pillow o’ plaster druv up in front of her by raison of her slidin’ along on her back. No cat niver went mousin’ on her back, Lena. Some one had shoved her along right underneath, so far as they could shove un. Cats don’t make theyselves pillows for to die on. Shoved along, she were, when she was settin’ for to be cold, laike.’

‘Oh, yeou’m too clever to live, Fatty. Yeou go get wed an’ taught some sense,’ said Lena, the affianced of Gumbly.

‘Larned a little ’fore iver some maidens was born. Sarved in the Queen’s Navy, I have, where yeou’m taught to use your eyes. Yeou go ‘tend your own business, Lena.’

‘Do ’ee mean what you’m been tellin’ us?’ said Oke.

‘Ask me no questions, I’ll give ’ee no lies. Bullet-hole clane thru from side to side, an’ tu heart-ribs broke like withies. I seed un when I turned un ovver. They’m clever, oh, they’m clever, but they’m not too clever for old Richards! ’Twas on the born tip o’ my tongue to tell, tu, but . . . he said us niver washed, he did. Let his dom boys call us “stinkers,” he did. Sarved un dom well raight, I say!’

Richards spat on a fresh boot and fell to his work, chuckling.

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

page 1 of 6

MR. WALTER GRAVELL was, after forty years, a director of the Jannockshire and Chemical Manure Works. Chemicals and dyes were always needed, and certain gases, derived from them, had been specially in demand of late. Besides his money, which did not interest him greatly, he had his adored son, James, a long, saddish person with a dusky, mottled complexion and a pleuritic stitch which he had got during the War through a leaky gas-mask. Jemmy was in charge of the firm’s research-work, for he had taken to the scientific side of things even more keenly than his father had to the administrative. But Mr. Gravell, having made his fortune out of solid manures, now naturally wished to render them all unnecessary by breathing into the soil such gases as should wake its dormant powers. He believed that he had had successes with flowerpots on balconies, but he needed a larger field, and a nice country-house, where Jemmy could bring down friends for week-ends, and he could listen to them talking and watch how they deferred to his son.

On a spring day, then, Mr. Gravell drove sixty miles by appointment to a largish, comfortable house, with a hundred acres of land. These included a ravishing little dell, planted with azaleas, and screened from the tarred road by a belt of evergreens—a windless hollow, where gas could lie undisturbedly to benefit vegetation.

Thereupon he bought the place, told Jemmy what he had done, and, as usual, asked him to attend to the rest. Jemmy overhauled drains and roofs; imported the housekeeper and staff of their London house; reserved a couple of rooms for his own week-ends, and settled in beside his father. There had been some talk lately, behind the latter’s back, of increased blood-pressures, which would benefit by country life.

After a blissful honeymoon of months, Jemmy asked him whether he had met a Major Kniveat in the village, who expected his name to be pronounced ‘Kniveed,’ the t being soft in that very particular family.

‘Is there a village here? No-o, my dear. Who is he?’

‘One of the natives. You might have run across him.’

‘No. I didn’t come down here to run across people. I’m busy.’ Mr. Gravell went off to the dell as usual, to help the vegetation.

Jem had asked because Mrs. Saul, their housekeeper and a born gossip, had told him that a Major Kniveat, retired, of the Regular Army, had told everyone at the Golf Club that Mr. Gravell had bought the house for the purpose of thrusting himself into local society, and that the Major was eagerly awaiting any attempt in this direction, so that the village might show how outsiders should be treated. Jem had not dwelt on this till, at a tennis-party, he had been cross-examined by the Rector’s very direct wife as to whether his father meant to offer himself for the Bench of Justices of the Peace, or the County, District, or Parish Councils. She hinted that the Major was ambitious—in those directions. Putting two and two together, as scientific men should, Jem made the total four.

The house was burdened with a ‘home farm,’ which sent up milk, butter, and eggs, at more than London prices. That month they were making some hay. Jefferies, the working-foreman, was carrying the last field, and, though it was Saturday, when ‘work’ in England stops at noon, had cajoled his men to ‘work’ till five, promising he would pay them their wages and overtime in a field near a public-house, and remote from wives. While Mr. Gravell was busy in his dell, a woman came upon him, crying: ‘You ain’t paid your men!’

‘I don’t,’ said Mr. Gravell.

‘But I’ve got to get into town for my week-end shoppin’s. Why ain’t you paid ’em off at noon, same as always?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t ye? Then I lay you don’t know what I’m goin’ to do. I’m goin’ right up to the Street (village), an’ I’m goin’ to tell ’em there that this ’ouse don’t pay its people. That’s what I’m goin’ to say, and I’ll lay they’ll believe it.’

Mr. Gravell was so sure that this was one of the things Jemmy attended to that he forgot to mention her to him. But Mrs. Jefferies’s tale ran, by way of tradesmen, gardeners, and errand-boys, through the village. After Major Kniveat had had his turn, it was common knowledge that ‘them Gravellses’ (in the higher circles, ‘those manure-dealers’) were undischarged bankrupts, who had made a practice of cheating their ‘labour’ elsewhere, but who could not hope to work that trick here. Mrs. Saul told Jem, who asked Jefferies what it meant. Jefferies apologised for the temper of his wife, who had nerves above her station, and took tonic wines to steady them, and was sorry if there had been any ‘misunderstanding.’ Jemmy, survivor of an unfeudal generation which had had all the trouble it wanted, telephoned the county town auctioneer to offer all live and dead stock on the home farm at the first autumn sales. Next, he let the fields as accommodation-land to local butchers; arranged for dairy produce to be delivered at the house by a real farm at much lower rates, and—for the North pays its debts—brought down from the main Jannockshire Works a retired foreman, who had married Jem’s nurse, to sit rent-free in the farmhouse. But angry Mr. Jefferies joined the Public Services of his country, and worked on the roads for one-and-threepence an hour at Government stroke—till he became an overseer.

In six weeks nothing remained of the Gravells’ agricultural past save one Angelique, an enormous white sow, for whom none would bid at the sales; she being stricken in years and a notorious gatecrasher. What did not yield to the judicial end of her carried away before the executive, and then she would wander far afield, where, though well-meaning as a hound-pup (for she had been the weakling of her litter and brought up in a Christian kitchen) her face and figure were against her with strangers. That was why she was indicted by a local body—on Major Kniveat’s clamour—for obstructing a right-of-way by terrifying foot-passengers—three summer London Lady lodgers, to wit. They blocked her most-used gaps with barb-wire, which tickled her pleasantly, and she broke out again and again, till the local body, harried by the Major, indicted Mr. Gravell once more as proprietor of a public nuisance.

After this, she was kept in a solid brick sty at the home farm, where Mr. and Mrs. Enoch, the childless couple from the Jannockshire Works, made much of her. At intervals she would be let out to test stock-proof fencing or gates; when, often, Jemmy and his young friends would be judges, and her prize a cabbage.

Father and son passed a pleasant autumn together, varied by visits to town, and visits from young men who never showed up at church. But the imported staff, headed by Mrs. Saul, went there regularly for the honour of the establishment and to catch neighbourly comments after divine service. They heard, for a fact, that Mr. Gravell had ‘cohabitated’ with a person of colour, which explained his son’s Asiatic complexion.

‘All right,’ said Jemmy to Mrs. Saul, who was full of it. ‘Don’t let it get round to Dad, that’s all.’

‘And that Major Kniveat at their nasty little cat-parties he calls you “ The ’Alf-Caste,”’ Mrs. Saul insisted.

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‘Nigger, if you like. Dad isn’t here for that sort of thing. He doesn’t know there is a village. Tell your wenches to keep their mouths shut, or I’ll sack ’em.’

On Saturday of the next week-end, when Mr. Gravell had gone to bed, Jemmy told the tale to Kit Birtle—all but his own brother. Kit was the son of Jem’s godfather and brevet-uncle, Sir Harry Birtle, who was the Works’ leading lawyer—and he ranked therefore as brevet-nephew to Mr. Gravell, and kept changes of raiment at his house. He had done time as an Army doctor, and now specialised in post-war afflictions visible and invisible. Jem’s point was that his own dusky colour gave an interesting clue to the composition of some gas which he had inhaled near Arras a few years before. Said Kit: ‘You do look rather a half-caste. Get yourself overhauled again by that man in France.’

‘L’Espinasse, you mean? I will, but not just yet. It ’ud worry Dad. But talking about gas ’

Then they both talked, for they were interested in some new combinations which had produced interesting results.

‘And you might use Angelique as a control for some of it,’ Kit suggested. ‘She hasn’t any nerves.’

That brought out the tale of her doings, the footpaths that she was said to have blocked, and Major Kniveat’s public-spirited activities in general.

‘’Can’t make him out,’ said Jem. ‘We came down here to be quiet, but this sword-merchant seems to take it as a personal insult. What’s the complex, Kit?’

‘We’ve something like it in our hamlet—a retired officer bung-full of public-spirit and simian malignity. Idleness explains a lot, but I’ve a theory it’s glands at bottom. ’Rather noisome for you, though.’

‘Oh, Dad don’t notice anything. He hands it all over to me, and I haven’t time to fuss with the natives. What ’ud you care for to-morrow? The golf course ain’t fit yet, but I’ve got another patent stock-gate if you like——’

‘Angelique every time!’ said Kit, who knew her of old, and often compared her to one Harry Tate, an artist in the stage-handling of deckchairs and motor-cars.

Sunday forenoon, they loafed over to the farm, released the lady, and introduced her to the patent gate. Her preliminary search for weak points was side-splitting enough: but by the time she had tucked up, as it were, her skirts, had backed through the gate with the weight and amplitude of a docking liner, had reached her cabbage, and stood with the stalk of it, cigarette-wise, in her mouth, asking them what they thought of Auntie now, the two young men were beating on the grass with their hands. Getting her back to her sty was no small affair either, for she valued her Sunday outings, and they laughed too much to head her off quickly. As they rolled back across the fields, reviewing the show, Major Kniveat appeared on a footpath near by. It was, he had given out, part of his Sabbath works to see that public paths were not closed by newly-arrived parvenues. The two passed him, still guffawing over Angelique, and Monday morn brought by hand a letter, complaining that the Major had been publicly mocked and derided by his neighbours (there was some reference also to ‘gentlemen’) till he had been practically hooted off a right-of-way. The car was due for town in half an hour, and Jemmy spent that while in written disclaimer of any intent to offend, and apology if offence had been taken. He did not want the thing to bother his father in his absence. Major Kniveat accepted the apology, and ran about quoting it to all above the rank of road-mender, as a sample of the spirit of half-castes when frontally tackled.

Then spring bulb-catalogues began to arrive, but, in spite of them, Mr. Gravell was worried by Jemmy’s increasing duskiness; and he and Kit at last got him shipped off to L’Espinasse, the French specialist, who dealt in his kind of trouble. Mr. Gravell went with him to the South of France, where the specialist wintered, and saw him bedded down for the treatment. Thence he botanised along the heathy Italian foreshore, branched north to Nancy, where the best lilacs are bred, and so home by bulbous Holland. Altogether five weeks’ refreshing holiday. On return he found a good deal of accumulated correspondence for Jem to attend to; but, since the boy was away, he opened one letter all by himself. It was from the same local body as had written about Angelique and her misdeeds. It informed Mr. Gravell that certain trees on his property overhung the main road to an extent constituting a nuisance of which ratepayers had complained, and which he was called upon to abate within a given time. Failing this, the local body would themselves abate the said nuisance, charging him with the cost of the labour involved. It had been posted two days after he had left England.

Mr. Gravell went to look.

For twenty yards along the main road, the mangled and lopped timber laid the dell open to passing cars and charabancs. Nor was that all. Under the trees ran a low sandstone wall, which time had hidden beneath laurel and rhododendron. In dropping on to, hauling over, or stacking behind it, the limbs that were cut, the rhododendrons had been badly torn, and lengths of wall had collapsed. A raw track showed where people had already entered the dell to pick primroses. A gardener came up to him.

‘They never told me,’ the man said. ‘If they’d said a word, I could have tipped back they few branches they fussed about, and ’twould have been done. But they said naught to nobody. They done it all in one day like, and that Major Kniveat ’e came down the road and told ’em what was to be done, like. They didn’t know nothing. So they did it as ’e told ’em. They’ve fair savaged it—them and Jefferies.’

‘So I see,’ said Mr. Gravell. Then he wrote to the Company’s lawyer, Sir Harry Birtle, his lifelong friend.

The answer ran:

‘DEAR WALTER,—I also live in Arcadia. My advice to you is not to make trouble with local authorities. They will regret that their employees have exceeded their instructions, and that will be all. This Major Kniveat of yours, not being on any public body, has no locus standi. I know the type. We have one with us. If you insist, of course, my firm will give you a losing run for your money; but you had much better come up and dine with me, and I’ll tell you pretty stories of this kind. Love to your Jem, who writes my Kit that he is bleaching out properly in France.

This was, on the whole, a relief, for, after sending the letter, Mr. Gravell saw that the weight of the campaign would fall on his son when he came back and could attend to rebuilding the wall.

So he ordered his own meals, took his car when he wanted it, instead of waiting till Jemmy should be free, and went up to the London Office of the Works with the padded arm-rest down, which was never the case when his Jemmy came along.

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On his return he would visit the head of the dell before people were about, and discharge the contents of carefully stoppered phials into the traps of some two-inch land-drains, which had been laid down to carry off surplus water. These followed the contours of the slopes, and all met at the bottom of the hollow. By April he began to think that the grasses there were responding to the stimulus of the liquids that purred off softly into heavy gas, as he freed them down the traps. It cheered him, for it showed that, despite lack of early training, he was in the way to become such a scientist as his own wonderful Jemmy.

By early summer, when azaleas and such are worth picking, motor-traffic had increased on all roads, and the high, commanding charabancs were much interested by the sight of Mr. Gravell’s dell. Their drivers pulled up by the broken wall, which the publican at the White Hart, a little further up the road, recommended as a good pitch between drinks. So people used it more and more for picnics and pleasure, and after a Southern Counties Private Tour had removed as a trophy the pitiful little ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted,’ which was Mr. Gravell’s one protest, the gaps in the wall widened by feet in a week; the rhododendron clumps shrank like water drops on a hot iron, and the dell became dotted with coloured streamers, burst balloons, tins, corks, food-bags, old paper, tyre-wrappers, bottles—intact or broken—rags of the foulest, cigarette-cartons, and copious filth. But Mr. Gravell’s traps were on the upper levels, and, as has been said, he attended to them before rush hours. He very rarely went down into what had now become a rubbish-heap; for he was a fastidious man.

About that time, two children at the White Hart, who sold little bunches of flowers to trippers, developed an eruption which puzzled Dr. Frole, the local practitioner. He had never before seen orange and greenish-copper blotches on the healthy young. But, as these faded entirely in a week or so, he wrote it down ‘errors of diet,’ and said there was no need to close the schools.

It was different when a private party of thirty-two gentlemen and ladies, mostly in the retail jewellery business, and all near enough neighbours in Shoreditch to use the same panel-doctor, poured into that man’s consulting-room, comparing blotches as far as they dared, and wailing before an offended Deity. They were asked where they had been and what they had eaten. They had, it seemed, been in ever so many places, and by the way had eaten everything in Leviticus and out of it. Then a practitioner in Bermondsey, where they also make up select tours to the Beauty Spots of England, wrote to a local paper about an interesting variety of summer rash. This—so bound together is the English world—let loose a ‘Welsh Mother,’ who had trusted four of her brood to a local pastor on a Beauties-of-England tour. She complained in a popular journal of unprecedented circulation that they had returned looking ‘like the Heathen.’

Some weeks of perfect touring weather followed, and, as the roads filled and stank with charabancs, Carlisle, Morecambe Bay, Frinton, Tavistock, the Isle of Man, Newquay, and Alnwick, among others, reported strange cases of ‘blotching’ in all ages and sexes.

Entered, duly, in the journals of the democracy, ‘specialists,’ who, after blood-curdling forecasts, ‘deprecated panic’ and variously ascribed the origin of the epidemic to different causes, but, supremely, to the laissez-faire attitude of the Government.

At the height of the discussion, Jemmy wrote that he was coming home on the Sunday boat, ready for anything.

Mr. Gravell, anxious to avoid an explosion à deux, had invited Sir Harry and Kit to help welcome and divert the prodigal, whose stitch and complexion had vastly improved. But Mrs. Saul waylaid Jem on the stairs with a summary of Major Kniveat’s doings in the past three months, and his open exultation over Jefferies’s work in the dell, which sent Jem down there before dinner. The trippers had gone, but he found Angelique busy among the remains of picnics. When he tried to chase her out, she lay down and refused to be moved. So he threw stones at her, sent word to the Enochs that she was loose again, and changed for dinner, not in the best temper, although he tried not to show it.

‘It don’t really matter,’ his father said. ‘Wait till you hear what your Uncle Harry tells us. Oh, but I’m glad you’re back, Jemmy! I’ve wanted you desperate.’

‘Me, too, Dad.’ The hug was returned. ‘You’re quite right. We won’t have a shindy about the wall.. It ain’t worth it.’

‘Then, run along and get up the champagne. Your tie’s crooked, my dear.’ He put up his hand tenderly, as a widower may who has had to wash and dress a year-old baby.

‘Oh, Dad, I am sorry! You must have had a hellish time of it.’ Jem hugged his parent again.

‘Not a bit!’ said Mr. Gravell, glad that the boy was taking it so well. ‘It hasn’t interfered with my experiments. I always finish before the trippers come. I’m on the track of a mixture now that really gingers up the bacteria. I’ll tell you about it, dear. Didn’t you notice how rich the grass was?’

‘I didn’t notice anything much except Angelique. I landed her one or two for herself with a rock, though.’

Dinner went delightfully. Sir Harry Birtle was full of tales of ‘bad neighbours elsewhere, and the wisdom of leaving them alone, which, he said, annoyed them most. The present business was to rebuild the wall, and Jem was sketching it on a tablecloth for Kit, when the Sunday paper came in. Sir Harry picked it up.

‘One thousand and thirty-seven cases up to date,’ he read aloud.

‘What of? ’asked Mr. Gravell. ‘I don’t read the papers.’

‘They call it Bloody Measles, Uncle Wally,’ said Kit, the doctor. ‘It’s all over the place. It’s a sort of ten-days’ rash-greenish-copper blotches on the face and body. Not catching. No temperature; but no end of scratchin’. The papers have made rather a stunt of it.’

In time the young men went off to the billiard room, while the elders sat over the wine, each disparaging his own offspring that he might better draw the other’s rebuke and tribute.

Billiards ended with an inquiry into Jem’s treatment, and L’Espinasse’s views on gassing in general. ‘I was right about the gas that knocked me out,’ said Jem., ‘L’Espinasse admitted that, on my symptoms, it must have been Adler’s Mixture. That’s one up for me and the Works.’

‘But the Hun was only using straight mustard gas round Arras then,’ said Kit.

‘Not altogether. ’Remember that purple-and-white-band big stuff that used to crack and whiflie? I got a dose in the cutting behind Fampoux waiting for the train. That was Adler’s . . . But—never mind that. I’ve got to knock Hell’s Bells out of the Major. He might have upset Dad a good deal. But he took that outrage on the dell like a lamb.’

‘There’s a reason for that, too,’ said Kit, and explained how Mr. Gravell’s blood-pressures had dropped satisfactorily.

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‘’Glad to hear it,’ said Jem. ‘But it won’t excuse Mister Field Officer when I’m abreast of my arrears.’

They talked till bed-time, went up to town together next morning, pursued their several businesses till Saturday, came down again, and that evening wandered round the home-made nine-hole course, and fetched up by Angelique’s sty near the barn. It was empty.

‘She’s broken out again,’ said Kit. ‘Give her a shout.’

Jem hailed, and was answered by the lady, in a muffled key, from the house.

They went to look. Mr. and Mrs. Enoch received them, and complimented Jem on his improved appearance.

‘Ah’m gradely,’ Jem went back to the speech of the Works, in which he and Kit had almost been born. ‘But what’s to doin’ wi’ t’owd la-ady in t’house, Liz?’

‘She’ve gotten Bloody Measles—like what’s in arl t’pa-apers. We’ve had her oop to t’washhouse,’ Enoch explained.

He led along a back passage, and in the brickfloored wash-house, well strawed, lay Angelique, patterned all over with greenish orange-brown blotches, which she wore coquettishly.

‘Good Lord!’ said Kit. ‘I didn’t know Bloody Measles attacked animals! She looks like a turtle with dropsy.’

‘’Nowt to what she wor o’ Thursdaa. She wor like daffadillies an’ wall-flowers, Thursdaa.’ Enoch spoke with pride.

‘Ah, but she’s hearty—she’s rare an’ hearty. Tha’s none offen tha’ feed, is tha, ma luv?’ said Mrs. Enoch tenderly.

‘She’ll have to be killed,’ said Kit.

‘Kill nowt,’ said Mrs. Enoch. ‘She’ll lie oop here till t’spots gan off again. They showed oop a’ Tuesdaa neet, an’ to-morra’s Soondaa.’

‘What’s Sunday got to do with it?’ Kit cried.

‘T’ Major, blast him!’ said Enoch. Man and wife spoke together. Translated out of their dialect, which broadened as it flowed, the Major’s Sunday patrol of rights-of-way generally included the path round the barn beside Angelique’s sty. If he should notice her now—what his powers for making trouble might be they knew not, but feared the worst. But they did know that an Englishman’s house, even to his wash-house, is his castle. Thither, then, they had conveyed Angelique on Tuesday night, and there should she stay until her spots faded, as they had faded upon the publican’s brats at the White Hart.

‘She came out with ’em on Tuesday—did she?’ said Jem thoughtfully. ‘Well, we don’t want the Major poking his nose into this just now.’

That released Mrs. Enoch again. Mrs. Saul had said much about Major Kniveat, but the gleanings of Mrs. Enoch’s threshing-floor were richer than all the housekeeper’s harvests. She said he was consumed with desire to take some step which the ‘manure-makers’ should be compelled to notice. She reminded Jem of foremen and fore-women in the Works, who had given trouble on the same lines. Psychologically it was interesting, but Jem’s concern was that neither she nor her husband should talk to his father about it.

‘If this epidemic is going to attack livestock, there’ll be trouble,’ said Kit, on the way home.

‘I don’t think it will,’ said Jem, who had been silent for some while.

‘What’s the idea?’ his all-but-brother asked suspiciously.

‘My idea is that it’s Dad, if you want to know. Dad—and his dell!’

‘The Devil! Why?’

‘I asked our London Office (they were rather worried about it, too) what sort of stuff he’d been drawing from the Lab. while I was away, to ginger up his bacteria. Well, what he actually got was fairly hectic, but he tells me he’s taken to mixin’ ’em. So—Lord knows what they mayn’t throw up! Anyhow, the dell must be soaked with it. Wait a shake! Angelique was picnickin’ down there the Sunday night I got home. She came out with spots on Tuesday—call it forty-eight hours’ incubation.’

‘Stop! Let me take this in properly,’ said Kit. ‘You mean your dad—is responsible for—one thousand and thirty-seven cases of Bloody Picnickers—up to date?’

Jem nodded. ‘’Looks like it. He’s transmitted his scientific twist of mind to me, but outside that he’s a rank amateur, you know.’

Here Kit sat down. ‘Amateur! You aren’t fit to have my own Uncle Wally for a father. An’ he doesn’t read the papers! An’—an’ the British Medical Association recommends treating Bloody Measles with chawal-muggra oil. And Sir Herbert Buskitt says it’s due to atonic glands. The whole of my sacred profession’s involved! Don’t you realise what your dad’s done, you—you parricide?’

‘Dam-well I do. Here are the bases of the stuff he’s been working on.’ Jem passed over some chemical formula that sent Kit into fresh hysterics. ‘You see, he’s avoided lethal constituents so far, but he’s strong on the colour-fixation bases. ’Spose he wants it for the gorze-blooms.—Get up, you idiot!—Well! I’ve short-circuited that. He’ll have everything he writes for in future, as far as labels go. The muck don’t show or smell or taste. He’ll be just as happy.’

‘But I shan’t,’ said Kit, as soon as he could stand and talk straight. ‘I want more. Let’s lure the Major into the dell, and—er—Angelique him! He’d look rather pretty, ma luv!’

‘Not now. We’d be acting with guilty knowledge. The main thing is to get Angelique right before he spots her. She’ll come round, won’t she? ‘

‘’Question of temperament—and sex. After all, she’s a lady. Wait and see. Oh, my Uncle Wally! And my dad! How are we to keep our faces straight with ’em?’

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Since each of the Seven Ages of Man is separated from all the others by sound-and-X-ray-proof bulkheads, the parents only noticed that their young were in the spirits natural to their absurd thirty-odd years. Sunday passed, and the Major, too, on his rounds, in peace. They left Angelique in the wash-house Monday forenoon, visibly paling, but as interested and as interesting as ever. (Mrs. Enoch said she was company when one knitted.) On Saturday morning of that same week a wire from Enoch told Jem in town that she had cleared up. He showed it to Kit, who took him to lunch at a certain restaurant, before the drive down. There sat at the next table a globular female, with pendant mauve-washed cheeks, indigo eyelids, lips of orange vermilion, and locks of Titian red. She reminded Kit of Angelique in the height of her bloom, and . . . Here Jem and Kit together claimed the parentage of the Great Idea.

At any rate, in that hour, between them it was born. They went to a theatrical wigmaker and bought lavishly of grease-paints for Chinese, Red Indian, and Asiatic make-ups, as well as for clowns and corner-men.

They drove down, not a little to the public danger, and made a merry feast before their ancestors that summer evening. Next morning—Sunday at nine o’clock to be precise—Mrs. Enoch told them that her week in the wash-house had so filled Angelique with social aspirations, that ‘after setting with t’owd lady and readin’ t’pa-apers to her, ah hevn’t heart to give her t’ broomhead when she comes back again.’

‘Ask her oop,’ said Jem.

She came gratefully, and they told the Enochs what was in their minds.

‘He’ll say it’s t’Bloody Measles, an’ he’ll turn all his blasted committees on us,’ said Enoch. ‘He’s a tongue on ’im like a vi-iper, yon barstard.’

‘That’s what we’re gambling on. But she’s a bit too scurfy for the stuff to hold,’ said Jem, looking into the wash-house copper.

‘But tha winna mak’ a fool o’ t’poor dumb beast, will tha’, lads?’ Mrs. Enoch pleaded, as she dipped the broom in warm water and began on that enormous back.

Angelique lay down at command, sure that these things were but prelude to more admiration. They scrubbed her, till she was as white as a puff ball. Then, area by area, she was painted with dazzle-patterns of greenish-yellow and purple-brown, till it was hard to say whether she moved to or from the beholder. Jem took her head, jowl, and neck, where the space was limited. So he was forced to use spots which, by divine ordering, suggested the foullest evidences of decomposition. Remembering the lady in the restaurant, he paid special attention to her eyes and brows.

‘If t’Major niver had ’em before, she’ll give ’em to him proper,’ was Enoch’s verdict.

‘She lukes like nowt o’ God’s makin’ already,’ Mrs. Enoch agreed. ‘But she’s proud of hersen!—Sitha! She’s tryin’ to admire of her own belly! Wicked wumman! She’ll niver be t’saam to me again.’

‘It’ll wash off. Now we’ll go for a walk. Shove her into t’sty, Enoch, and pray the Major comes this morning.’

Their prayers were answered within the hour. They saw the Major, on his regular Sunday round, descend the slope to the home farm. Then they turned, on interior lines, which brought them face to face with him rounding the barn by Angelique’s sty. At the sound of their well-known voices, she reared up ponderously, and hitched her elbows over the low door, much as Jezebel, after her head was tyred, looked out of the window. It was not the loathly brown and yellow-green blotches on bosom and shoulder that appalled most, but the smaller ones on face, jowl, and neck, for she had been rubbing her cheeks a little, and the pattern had drawn into wedges and smears, perfectly simulating a mask of unspeakable agony coupled with desperate appeal. Moreover, so wholly is hearing dominated by sight, that her jovial grunt of welcome seemed the too-human plaint of a beast against realised death.

When, with haggard, purple-bordered eyes, she looked for applause and cabbage, the horror of that slow-turning head made even the artists forget their well-thought-out lines.

‘’Mornin’, old lady,’ said Jem at last, and Kit echoed him.

But the Major’s greeting was otherwise. He blenched. He held out one dramatic arm. He stammered: ‘How—how long has that creature been like that?’

‘Always, hasn’t she, Jem?’ said Kit sweetly. ‘We’re just taking her for a walk.’

‘I—I forbid you to touch her. Look at her spots! Look at her spots!’

‘Spots?’ Kit seemed puzzled for a moment.

‘Yes. Spots!’ The voice shook.

‘Spo-ots! Oh yes. Of course.’ This was in Kit’s best bedside-manner. ‘Certainly we won’t let her out if you feel that way.’

‘Feel! Can’t you see? She’s infected to the marrow. She’s rotting alive. Put her out of her misery at once!’

Here Enoch appeared with a broom, and the Major commanded him to kill and keep the body.

Enoch merely opened the sty door, and Angelique came out. The Major backed several yards, calling and threatening. But everyone except a few female summer-visitors had always been kind to her. This person—she argued—might be good for an apple, or—she was not bigoted—cigarette-ends. So she went towards him smiling, and her smile, for reasons given, was like the rolling back of the Gates of Golgotha.

Whether she would have rubbed herself against his Sunday trousers, or fled when she had seen his face, are “matters arguable to all eternity.” It is only agreed that the Major floated out of her orbit by about a bow-shot in the direction of the village, and thence onward earnestly.

‘Well, that proves it ain’t glands, at any rate,’ Kit pronounced. ‘He’ll stay away for a bit, but we won’t take chances. Come along, Angelique! Washee-washee, ma luv!’

Then and there they treated her in the washhouse with petrol, which removes grease-paints, and sacking soaked in warm water, which takes off the sting of it, till she was fit to turn out into the orchard and root a bit, lest she should be too clean at any later inspection. By then it was nearly lunch-time.

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‘Tha sees,’ said Jem, slipping on his coat. ‘Pe-wer as a lily! There’s nowt need come ’twix thee an’ t’owd lady now, Liz—is there, ma luv?’

Upon which Mrs. Enoch very properly kissed him, while Enoch sat helpless on a swill-bucket.

Mrs. Saul and the rest of the staff came back from evening service fully informed, for the Major had spent every minute since his meeting with Angelique in talking about her to everyone. He said, among other things, that she had been wilfully hidden, that she was being taken out for secret exercise when he discovered her condition, and that he was going to attend to the matter himself.

Thus Mrs. Saul on the landing as the two young men went up to change. ‘Very good,’ said Jem. ‘Don’t go to Dad about it, though.’

‘But we—but I’ve been down to Enoch’s to look at her. She’s as clean as me. Isn’t it shocking to be that way—on a Sunday morning? He took the bag round, too! You can never tell what these old bachelors are really like . . .’

They had finished dessert—the State-aided summer sunlight was still on the table—and the boys had gone to the billiard-room, when the Major was announced on an urgent matter.

‘Better have him in here, Wally,’ Sir Harry mildly suggested. ‘I believe he’s a bit of a bore.’

So he entered, and told his story, summarising the steps he would take, out of pure public spirit, to deal with this plague, and this menace, and these evasions.

‘I see! You’ve seen a spotted pig,’ said Mr. Gravell at last. ‘Well, that couldn’t have been our Angelique. She’s a Large White, you know, and—my son generally attends to this sort of thing.’ .

‘He saw her, too. As I’ve been telling you, your son saw her! He was perfectly cognisant of her condition. So was yours.’

The Major wheeled on Sir Harry, who was not a Company lawyer for nothing.

‘We won’t dispute that. Better call the boys in, Wally,’ said he.

They entered, without interest, as the young do when dragged from private conferences.

‘So far as I understand you, Major Kniveat,’ Sir Harry resumed, ‘you saw a pig—spotted yellow and green and purple, wasn’t it?—this morning?’

‘I did. I’m prepared to swear to it.’

‘I accept your word without question. There’s nothing to prevent anyone seeing spotted pigs on Sunday mornings, of course; but there are lots of things—on Saturday nights, for example—that may lead up to it. Can you recall any of them for us?’

The Major wished to know what Sir Harry might infer.

‘Oh, he saw them all right,’ Kit put in.

‘You did, too. You agreed with me at the time,’ the Major panted.

‘Naturally. Any medical man would—in the state you were then. Now, can you remember, sir, whether the spots were fixed or floating? Merely green and yellow, or iridescent with unstable black cores—oily and, perhaps, vermicular?’

The Major rose to his feet.

‘It’s all right—all right,’ Kit spoke soothingly. ‘It won’t come here! We won’t let the nasty pig come in here. And now, if you’ll put out your tongue, we’ll see if the tip trembles.’

‘Jem, what is it all about?’ Mr. Gravell wailed against the torrent of the Major’s speech.

‘Angelique,’ Jem answered, wearily. ‘He thinks she’s spotted green and purple and Lord knows what all.’

‘Then why doesn’t he go down to Enoch’s and look at her? There’s plenty of light still,’ the father answered. ‘Take him down and let him see her.’

‘I suppose we must. Come on, Kit, and help. . . . Oh, hush! Hush! Yes! Yes! You shall have your dam’ pig!’

The Major, among other things, said he wished for impartial witnesses and no evasions.

‘About half the village have been down there already,’ said Kit. ‘You’ll have witnesses enough. Come along!’

‘That’s right. That’s all right, then,’ said Mr. Gravell, and dropped further interest in the matter, for he was of a stock that attended to their own business and held their own liquor. But Sir Harry Birtle joined the house-party. He knew his Kit better than Mr. Gravell knew his Jemmy.

They went down through the long last lights of evening to the home farm. People were there already—a little group by Angelique’s sty that melted as they neared, leaving only the local solicitor; Dr. Frole, the general practitioner; and a retired Navy Captain—a J.P. who did not much affect the Major. As the other folk of lower degree moved off, they halted for a few words with the Enochs at the farmhouse door. Thence they joined friends who were waiting for them in the lane.

‘Do you want more witnesses?’ Jem asked. The Major shook his head.

‘Major Knivead—to see Angelique,’ Jem announced to the local solicitor. ‘The Major says he saw her this morning after divine service spotted green and yellow and purple. Look at her now, Major Knivead, please. She is the only pig we have. Would you like an affidavit? . . . We-ell, old lady.’

Angelique, once again hitched her elbows akimbo over her sty door, crossed her front feet, smiled, and—white almost as a puff-ball—said in effect to the company: ‘Bless you, my children!’

‘Wait a minute. You haven’t seen all of her yet,’ Kit opened the door. She came out and—it was a trick of infancy learned in the Christian kitchen—sat on her haunches like a dog, leering at the Major, Dr. Frole, the solicitor, and the Navy J.P. This latter sniffed dryly but very audibly. Sir Harry Birtle said, in the tone that had swayed many juries: ‘Yes. I think we all see.’

‘Now,’ said Jem. ‘About your spots?’

The Major would have looked over his left shoulder, but Kit was there softly patting it. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’ said Kit. ‘The ugly pig won’t run after you this time. I’ll attend to that. Look at her from here and tell me how many spots you count now.’

‘None,’ said Major Kniveat. ‘They’re all gone. My God! Everything’s gone!’

‘Quite right. Everything’s gone now, and here’s Dr. Frole, isn’t it yes, your own kind Dr. Frole—to see you safe home.’

The generation that tolerates but does not pity went away. They did not even turn round when they heard the first dry sob of one from whom all hope of office, influence, and authority was stripped for ever—drowned by the laughter in the lane.