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For our white and our excellent nights—for the nights of swift running,
Fair ranging, far seeing, good hunting, sure cunning!
For the smells of the dawning, untainted, ere dew has departed!
For the rush through the mist, and the quarry blind-started!
For the cry of our mates when the sambhur has wheeled and is standing at bay,
For the risk and the riot of night!
For the sleep at the lair-mouth by day,
It is met, and we go to the fight.
Bay! O Bay!

IT was after the letting in of the jungle that the pleasantest part of Mowgli’s life began. He had the good conscience that comes from paying debts; all the Jungle was his friend, and just a little afraid of him. The things that he did and saw and heard when he was wandering from one people to another, with or without his four companions, would make many many stories, each as long as this one. So you will never be told how he met the Mad Elephant of Mandla, who killed two-and-twenty bullocks drawing eleven carts of coined silver to the Government Treasury, and scattered the shiny rupees in the dust; how he fought Jacala, the Crocodile, all one long night in the Marshes of the North, and broke his skinning-knife on the brute’s backplates; how he found a new and longer knife round the neck of a man who had been killed by a wild boar, and how he tracked that boar and killed him as a fair price for the knife; how he was caught up once in the Great Famine, by the moving of the deer, and nearly crushed to death in the swaying hot herds; how he saved Hathi the Silent from being once more trapped in a pit with a stake at the bottom, and how, next day, he himself fell into a very cunning leopard-trap, and how Hathi broke the thick wooden bars to pieces above him; how he milked the wild buffaloes in the swamp, and how——

But we must tell one tale at a time. Father and Mother Wolf died, and Mowgli rolled a big boulder against the mouth of their cave, and cried the Death Song over them; Baloo grew very old and stiff, and even Bagheera, whose nerves were steel and whose muscles were iron, was a shade slower on the kill than he had been. Akela turned from gray to milky white with pure age; his ribs stuck out, and he walked as though he had been made of wood, and Mowgli killed for him. But the young wolves, the children of the disbanded Seeonee Pack, throve and increased, and when there were about forty of them, masterless, full-voiced, clean-footed five-year-olds, Akela told them that they ought to gather themselves together and follow the Law, and run under one head, as befitted the Free People.

This was not a question in which Mowgli concerned himself, for, as he said, he had eaten sour fruit, and he knew the tree it hung from; but when Phao, son of Phaona (his father was the Gray Tracker in the days of Akela’s headship), fought his way to the leadership of the Pack, according to the Jungle Law, and the old calls and songs began to ring under the stars once more, Mowgli came to the Council Rock for memory’s sake. When he chose to speak the Pack waited till he had finished, and he sat at Akela’s side on the rock above Phao. Those were days of good hunting and good sleeping. No stranger cared to break into the jungles that belonged to Mowgli’s people, as they called the Pack, and the young wolves grew fat and strong, and there were many cubs to bring to the Looking-over. Mowgli always attended a Looking-over, remembering the night when a black panther bought a naked brown baby into the pack, and the long call, ‘Look, look well, O Wolves,’ made his heart flutter. Otherwise, he would be far away in the Jungle with his four brothers, tasting, touching, seeing, and feeling new things.

One twilight when he was trotting leisurely across the ranges to give Akela the half of a buck that he had killed, while the Four jogged behind him, sparring a little, and tumbling one another over for joy of being alive, he heard a cry that had never been heard since the bad days of Shere Khan. It was what they call in the Jungle the pheeal, a hideous kind of shriek that the jackal gives when he is hunting behind a tiger, or when there is a big killing afoot. If you can imagine a mixture of hate, triumph, fear, and despair, with a kind of leer running through it, you will get some notion. of the pheeal that rose and sank and wavered and quavered far away across the Waingunga. The Four stopped at once, bristling and growling. Mowgli’s hand went to his knife, and he checked, the blood in his face, his eyebrows knotted.

‘There is no Striped One dare kill here,’ he said.

‘That is not the cry of the Forerunner,’ answered Gray Brother. ‘It is some great killing. Listen!’

It broke out again, half sobbing and half chuckling, just as though the jackal had soft human lips. Then Mowgli drew deep breath, and ran to the Council Rock, overtaking on his way hurrying wolves of the Pack. Phao and Akela were on the Rock together, and below them, every nerve strained, sat the others. The mothers and the cubs were cantering off to their lairs; for when the pheeal cries it is no time for weak things to be abroad.

They could hear nothing except the Waingunga rushing and gurgling in the dark, and the light evening winds among the tree-tops, till suddenly across the river a wolf called. It was no wolf of the Pack, for they were all at the Rock. The note changed to a long, despairing bay; and ‘Dhole!’ it said, ‘Dhole! dhole! dhole!’ They heard tired feet on the rocks, and a gaunt wolf, streaked with red on his flanks, his right fore-paw useless, and his jaws white with foam, flung himself into the circle and lay gasping at Mowgli’s feet.

‘Good hunting! Under whose Headship?’ said Phao gravely.

‘Good hunting! Won-tolla am I,’ was the answer. He meant that he was a solitary wolf, fending for himself, his mate, and his cubs in some lonely lair, as do many wolves in the south. Wontolla means an Outlier—one who lies out from any Pack. Then he panted, and they could see his heart-beats shake him backward and forward.

‘What moves?’ said Phao, for that is the question all the Jungle asks after the pheeal cries.

‘The dhole, the dhole of the Dekkan—Red Dog, the Killer! They came north from the south saying the Dekkan was empty and killing out by the way. When this moon was new there were four to me—my mate and three cubs. She would teach them to kill on the grass plains, hiding to drive the buck, as we do who are of the open. At midnight I heard them together, full tongue on the trail. At the dawn-wind I found them stiff in the grass-four, Free People, four when this moon was new. Then sought I my Blood-Right and found the dhole.’

‘How many?’ said Mowgli quickly; the Pack growled deep in their throats.

‘I do not know. Three of them will kill no more, but at the last they drove me like the buck; on my three legs they drove me. Look, Free People!’

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He thrust, out his mangled fore-foot, all dark with dried blood. There were cruel bites low down on his side, and his throat was torn and worried.

‘Eat,’ said Akela, rising up from the meat Mowgli had brought him, and the Outlier flung himself on it.

‘This shall be no loss,’ he said humbly, when he had taken off the first edge of his hunger. ‘Give me a little strength, Free People, and I also will kill. My lair is empty that was full when this moon was new, and the Blood Debt is not all paid.’

Phao heard his teeth crack on a haunch-bone and grunted approvingly.

‘We shall need those jaws,’ said he. ‘Were there cubs with the dhole?’

‘Nay, nay. Red Hunters all: grown dogs of their Pack, heavy and strong for all that they eat lizards in the Dekkan.’

What Won-tolla had said meant that the dhole, the red hunting-dog of the Dekkan, was moving to kill, and the Pack knew well that even the tiger will surrender a new kill to the dhole. They drive straight through the Jungle, and what they meet they pull down and tear to pieces. Though they are not as big nor half as cunning as the wolf, they are very strong and very numerous. The dhole, for instance, do not begin to call themselves a pack till they are a hundred strong; whereas forty wolves make a very fair pack indeed. Mowgli’s wanderings had taken him to the edge of the high grassy downs of the Dekkan, and he had seen the fearless dholes sleeping and playing and scratching themselves in the little hollows and tussocks that they use for lairs. He despised and hated them because they did not smell like the Free People, because they did not live in caves, and, above all, because they had hair between their toes while he and his friends were clean-footed. But he knew, for Hathi had told him, what a terrible thing a dhole hunting-pack was. Even Hathi moves aside from their line, and until they are killed, or till game is scarce, they will go forward.

Akela knew something of the dholes, too, for he said to Mowgli quietly, ‘It is better to die in a Full Pack than leaderless and alone. This is good hunting, and—my last. But, as men live, thou hast very many more nights and days, Little Brother. Go north and lie down, and if any live after the dhole has gone by he shall bring thee word of the fight.’

‘Ah,’ said Mowgli, quite gravely, ‘must I go to the marshes and catch little fish and sleep in a tree, or must I ask help of the Bandar-log and crack nuts, while the Pack fight below?’

‘It is to the death,’ said Akela. ‘Thou hast never met the dhole—the Red Killer. Even the Striped One——’

‘Aowa! Aowa!’ said Mowgli pettingly. ‘I have killed one striped ape, and sure am I in my stomach that Shere Khan would have left his own mate for meat to the dhole if he had winded a pack across three ranges. Listen now: There was a wolf, my father, and there was a wolf, my mother, and there was an old gray wolf (not too wise he is white now) was my father and my mother. Therefore I—’ he raised his voice, ‘I say that when the dhole come, and if the dhole come, Mowgli and the Free People are of one skin for that hunting; and I say, by the Bull that bought me—by the Bull Bagheera paid for me in the old days which ye of the Pack do not remember—I say, that the Trees and the River may hear and hold fast if I forget; I say that this my knife shall be as a tooth to the Pack—and I do not think it is so blunt. This is my Word which has gone from me.’

‘Thou dost not know the dhole, man with a wolf’s tongue,’ said Won-tolla. ‘I look only to clear the Blood Debt against them ere they have me in many pieces. They move slowly, killing out as they go, but in two days a little strength will come back to me and I turn again for the Blood Debt. But for ye, Free People, my word is that ye go north and eat but little for a while till the dhole are gone. There is no meat in this hunting.’

‘Hear the Outlier!’ said Mowgli with a laugh. ‘ree People, we must go north and dig lizards and rats from the bank, lest by any chance we meet the dhole. He must kill out our hunting-grounds, while we lie hid in the north till it please him to give us our own again. He is a dog—and the pup of a dog—red, yellow-bellied, lairless, and haired between every toe! He counts his cubs six and eight at the litter, as though he were Chikai, the little leaping rat. Surely we must run away, Free People, and beg leave of the peoples of the north for the offal of dead cattle! Ye know the saying “North are the vermin; south are the lice. We are the Jungle.” Choose ye, O choose. It is good hunting! For the Pack—for the Full Pack—for the lair and the litter; for the in-kill and the out-kill; for the mate that drives the doe and the little, little cub within the cave; it is met!—it is met!—it is met!’

The Pack answered with one deep, crashing bark that sounded in the night like a big tree falling. ‘It is met!’ they cried.

‘Stay with these,’ said Mowgli to the Four. ‘We shall need every tooth. Phao and Akela must make ready the battle. I go to count the dogs.’

‘It is death!’ Won-tolla cried, half rising. ‘What can such a hairless one do against the Red Dog? Even the Striped One, remember——’

‘Thou art indeed an Outlier,’ Mowgli called back; ‘but we will speak when the dholes are dead. Good hunting all!’

He hurried off into the darkness, wild with excitement, hardly looking where he set foot, and the natural consequence was that he tripped full length over Kaa’s great coils where the python lay watching a deer-path near the river.

‘Kssha!’ said Kaa angrily. ‘Is this jungle-work, to stamp and tramp and undo a night’s hunting—when the game are moving so well, too?’

‘The fault was mine,’ said Mowgli, picking himself up. ‘Indeed I was seeking thee, Flathead, but each time we meet thou art longer and broader by the length of my arm. There is none like thee in the Jungle, wise, old, strong, and most beautiful Kaa.’

‘Now whither does this trail lead?’ Kaa’s voice was gentler. ‘Not a moon since there was a Manling with a knife threw stones at my head and called me bad little tree-cat names, because I lay asleep in the open.’

‘Ay, and turned every driven deer to all the winds, and Mowgli was hunting, and this same Flathead was too deaf to hear his whistle, and leave the deer-roads free,’ Mowgli answered composedly, sitting down among the painted coils.

‘Now this same Manling comes with soft, tickling words to this same Flathead, telling him that he is wise and strong and beautiful, and this same old Flathead believes and makes a place, thus, for this same stone-throwing Manling, and——Art thou at ease now? Could Bagheera give thee so good a resting-place?’

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Kaa had, as usual, made a sort of soft half-hammock of himself under Mowgli’s weight. The boy reached out in the darkness, and gathered in the supple cable-like neck till Kaa’s head rested on his shoulder, and then he told him all that had happened in the Jungle that night.

‘Wise I may be,’ said Kaa at the end; ‘but deaf I surely am. Else I should have heard the pheeal. Small wonder the Eaters of Grass are uneasy. How many be the dhole?’

‘I have not yet seen. I came hot-foot to thee. Thou art older than Hathi. But oh, Kaa,’—here Mowgli wriggled with sheer joy,—‘it will be good hunting. Few of us will see another moon.’

‘Dost thou strike in this? Remember thou art a Man; and remember what Pack cast thee out. Let the Wolf look to the Dog. Thou art a Man.’

‘Last year’s nuts are this year’s black earth,’ said Mowgli. ‘It is true that I am a Man, but it is in my stomach that this night I have said that I am a Wolf. I called the River and the Trees to remember. I am of the Free People, Kaa, till the dhole has gone by.’

‘Free People,’ Kaa grunted. ‘Free thieves! And thou hast tied thyself into the death-knot for the sake of the memory of the dead wolves? This is no good hunting.’

‘It is my Word which I have spoken. The Trees know, the River knows. Till the dhole have gone by my Word comes not back to me.’

‘Ngssh! This changes all trails: I had thought to take thee away with me to the northern marshes, but the Word—even the Word of a little, naked, hairless Manling—is the Word. Now I, Kaa, say——’

‘Think well, Flathead, lest thou tie thyself into the death-knot also. I need no Word from thee, for well I know——’

‘Be it so, then,’ said Kaa. ‘I will give no Word; but what is in thy stomach to do when the dhole come?’

‘They must swim the Waingunga. I thought to meet them with my knife in the shallows, the Pack behind me; and so stabbing and thrusting, we a little might turn them down-stream, or cool their throats.’

‘The dhole do not turn and their throats are hot,’ said Kaa. ‘There will be neither Manling nor Wolf-cub when that hunting is done, but only dry bones.’

‘Alala! If we die, we die. It will be most good hunting. But my stomach is young, and I have not seen many Rains. I am not wise nor strong. Hast thou a better plan, Kaa?’

‘I have seen a hundred and a hundred Rains. Ere Hathi cast his milk-tushes my trail was big in the dust. By the First Egg, I am older than many trees, and I have seen all that the Jungle has done.’

‘But this is new hunting,’ said Mowgli. ‘Never before have the dhole crossed our trail.’

‘What is has been. What will be is no more than a forgotten year striking backward. Be still while I count those my years.’

For a long hour Mowgli lay back among the coils, while Kaa, his head motionless on the ground, thought of all that he had seen and known since the day he came from the egg. The light seemed to go out of his eyes and leave them like stale opals, and now and again he made little stiff passes with his head, right and left, as though he were hunting in his sleep. Mowgli dozed quietly, for he knew that there is nothing like sleep before hunting, and he was trained to take it at any hour of the day or night.

Then he felt Kaa’s back grow bigger and broader below him as the huge python puffed himself out, hissing with the noise of a sword drawn from a steel scabbard.

‘I have seen all the dead seasons,’ Kaa said at last, ‘and the great trees and the old elephants, and the rocks that were bare and sharp-pointed ere the moss grew. Art thou still alive, Manling?’

‘It is only a little after moonset,’ said Mowgli. ‘I do not understand——’

‘Hssh! I am again Kaa. I knew it was but a little time: Now we will go to the river, and I will show thee what is to be done against the dhole.’

He turned, straight as an arrow, for the main stream of the Waingunga, plunging in a little above the pool that hid the Peace Rock, Mowgli at his side.

‘Nay, do not swim. I go swiftly. My back, Little Brother.’

Mowgli tucked his left arm round Kaa’s neck, dropped his right close to his body, and straightened his feet. Then Kaa breasted the current as he alone could, and the ripple of the checked water stood up in a frill round Mowgli’s neck, and his feet were waved to and fro in the eddy under the python’s lashing sides. A mile or two above the Peace Rock the Waingunga narrows between a gorge of marble rocks from eighty to a hundred feet high, and the current runs like a mill-race between and over all manner of ugly stones. But Mowgli did not trouble his head about the water; little water in the world could have given him a moment’s fear. He was looking at the gorge on either side and sniffing uneasily, for there was a sweetish-sourish smell in the air, very like the smell of a big ant-hill on a hot day. Instinctively he lowered himself in the water, only raising his head to breathe from time to time, and Kaa came to anchor with a double twist of his tail round a sunken rock, holding Mowgli in the hollow of a coil, while the water raced on.

‘This is the Place of Death,’ said the boy. ‘Why do we come here?’

‘They sleep,’ said Kaa. ‘Hathi will not turn aside for the Striped One. Yet Hathi and the Striped One together turn aside for the dhole, and the dhole they say turn aside for nothing. And yet for whom do the Little People of the Rocks turn aside? Tell me, Master of the Jungle, who is the Master of the Jungle?’

‘These,’ Mowgli whispered. ‘It is the Place of Death. Let us go.’

‘Nay, look well, for they are asleep. It is as it was when I was not the length of thy arm.’

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The split and weatherworn rocks of the gorge of the Waingunga had been used since the beginning of the Jungle by the Little People of the Rocks—the busy, furious, black wild bees of India; and, as Mowgli knew well, all trails turned off half a mile before they reached the gorge. For centuries the Little People had hived and swarmed from cleft to cleft, and swarmed again, staining the white marble with stale honey, and made their combs tall and deep in the dark of the inner caves, where neither man nor beast nor fire nor water had ever touched them. The length of the gorge on both sues was hung as it were with black shimmery velvet curtains, and Mowgli sank as he looked, for those were the clotted millions of the sleeping bees. There were other lumps and festoons and things like decayed tree-trunks studded on the face of the rock, the old combs of past years, or new cities built in the shadow of the windless gorge, and huge masses of spongy, rotten trash had rolled down and stuck among the trees and creepers that clung to the rockface. As he listened he heard more than once the rustle and slide of a honey-loaded comb turning over or falling away somewhere in the dark galleries; then a booming of angry wings, and the sullen drip, drip, drip, of the wasted honey, guttering along till it lipped over some ledge in the open air and sluggishly trickled down on the twigs. There was a tiny little beach, not five feet broad, on one side of the river, and that was piled high with the rubbish of uncounted years. There were dead bees, drones, sweepings, and stale combs, and wings of marauding moths that had strayed in after honey, all tumbled in smooth piles of the finest black dust. The mere sharp smell of it was enough to frighten anything that had no wings, and knew what the Little People were.

Kaa moved up-stream again till he came to a sandy bar at the head of the gorge.

‘Here is this season’s kill,’ said he. ‘Look!’

On the bank lay the skeletons of a couple of young deer and a buffalo. Mowgli could see that neither wolf nor jackal had touched the bones, which were laid out naturally.

‘They came beyond the line; they did not know the Law,’ murmured Mowgli, ‘and the Little People killed them. Let us go ere they wake.’

‘They do not wake till the dawn,’ said Kaa ‘Now I will tell thee. A hunted buck from the south, many, many Rains ago, came hither from the south, not knowing the Jungle, a Pack on his trail. Being made blind by fear, he leaped from above, the Pack running by sight, for they were hot and blind on the trail. The sun was high, and the Little People were many and very angry. Many, too, were those of the Pack who leaped into the Waingunga, but they were dead ere they took water. Those who did not leap died also in the rocks above. But the buck lived.’

‘How?’

‘Because he came first, running for his life, leaping ere the Little People were aware, and was in the river when they gathered to kill. The Pack, following, was altogether lost under the weight of the Little People.’

‘The buck lived?’ Mowgli repeated slowly.

‘At least he did not die then, though none waited his coming down with a strong body to hold him safe against the water, as a certain old fat, deaf, yellow Flathead would wait for a Manling—yea, though there were all the dholes of the Dekkan on his trail. What is in thy stomach?’ Kaa’s head was close to Mowgli’s ear; and it was a little time before the boy answered.

‘It is to pull the very whiskers of Death, but—Kaa, thou art, indeed, the wisest of all the Jungle.’

‘So many have said. Look now, if the dhole follow thee——’

‘As surely they will follow. Ho! ho! I have many little thorns under my tongue to prick into their hides.’

‘If they follow thee hot and blind, looking only at thy shoulders, those who do not die up above will take water either here or lower down, for the Little People will rise up and cover them. Now the Waingunga is hungry water, and they will have no Kaa to hold them, but will go down, such as live, to the shallows by the Seeonee Lairs, and there thy Pack may meet them by the throat.’

‘Ahai! Eowawa! Better could not be till the Rains fall in the dry season. There is now only the little matter of the run and the leap. I will make me known to the dholes, so that they shall follow me very closely.’

‘Hast thou seen the rocks above thee? From the landward side?’

‘Indeed, no. That I had forgotten.’

‘Go look. It is all rotten ground, cut and full of holes. One of thy clumsy feet set down without seeing would end the hunt. See, I leave thee here, and for thy sake only I will carry word to the Pack that they may know where to look for the dhole. For myself, I am not of one skin with any wolf.’

When Kaa disliked an acquaintance he could be more unpleasant than any of the Jungle People, except perhaps Bagheera. He swam down-stream, and opposite the Rock he came on Phao and Akela, listening to the night noises.

‘Hssh! Dogs,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The dholes will come down-stream. If ye be not afraid ye can kill them in the shallows.’

‘When come they?’ said Phao. ‘And where is my Man-cub?’ said Akela.

‘They come when they come,’ said Kaa. ‘Wait and see. As for thy Man-cub, from whom thou hast taken a Word and so laid him open to Death, thy Man-cub is with me, and if he be not already dead the fault is none of thine, bleached dog! Wait here for the dhole, and be glad that the Man-cub and I strike on thy side.’

Kaa flashed up-stream again, and moored himself in the middle of the gorge, looking upward at the line of the cliff. Presently he saw Mowgli’s head move against the stars, and then there was a whizz in the air, the keen, clean schloop of a body falling feet first, and next minute the boy was at rest again in the loop of Kaa’s body.

‘It is no leap by night,’ said Mowgli quietly. ‘I have jumped twice as far for sport; but that is an evil place above—low bushes and gullies that go down very deep, all full of the Little People. I have put big stones one above the other by the side of three gullies. These I shall throw down with my feet in running, and the Little People will rise up behind me, very angry.’

‘That is Man’s talk and Man’s cunning,’ said Kaa. ‘Thou art wise, but the Little People are always angry.’

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‘Nay, at twilight all wings near and far rest for a while. I will play with the dhole at twilight, for the dhole hunts best by day. He follows now Won-tolla’s blood-trail.’

‘Chil does not leave a dead ox, nor the dhole the blood-trail,’ said Kaa.

‘Then I will make him a new blood-trail, of his own blood, if I can, and give him dirt to eat. Thou wilt stay here, Kaa, till I come again with my dholes?’

‘Ay, but what if they kill thee in the Jungle, or the Little People kill thee before thou canst leap down to the river?’

‘When to-morrow comes we will kill for tomorrow,’ said Mowgli, quoting a Jungle saying; and again, ‘When I am dead it is time to sing the Death Song. Good hunting, Kaa!’

He loosed his arm from the python’s neck and went down the gorge like a log in a freshet, paddling toward the far bank, where he found slack-water, and laughing aloud from sheer happiness. There was nothing Mowgli liked better than, as he himself said, ‘to pull the whiskers of Death,’ and make the Jungle know that he was their overlord. He had often, with Baloo’s help, robbed bees’ nests in single trees, and he knew that the Little People hated the smell of wild garlic. So he gathered a small bundle of it, tied it up with a bark string, and then followed Won-tolla’s blood-trail, as it ran southerly from the Lairs, for some five miles, looking at the trees with his head on one side, and chuckling as he looked.

‘Mowgli the Frog have I been,’ said he to himself; ‘Mowgli the Wolf have I said that I am. Now Mowgli the Ape must I be before I am Mowgli the Buck. At the end I shall be Mowgli the Man. Ho!’ and he slid his thumb along the eighteen-inch blade of his knife.

Won-tolla’s trail, all rank with dark bloodspots, ran under a forest of thick trees that grew close together and stretched away north-eastward, gradually growing thinner and thinner to within two miles of the Bee Rocks. From the last tree to the low scrub of the Bee Rocks was open country, where there was hardly cover enough to hide a wolf. Mowgli trotted along under the trees, judging distances between branch and branch, occasionally climbing up a trunk and taking a trial leap from one tree to another till he came to the open ground, which he studied very carefully for an hour. Then he turned, picked up Won-tolla’s trail where he had left it, settled himself in a tree with an outrunning branch some eight feet from the ground, and sat still, sharpening his knife on the sole of his foot and singing to himself.

A little before mid-day, when the sun was very warm, he heard the patter of feet and smelt the abominable smell of the dhole-pack as they trotted pitilessly along Won-tolla’s trail. Seen from above, the red dhole does not look half the size of a wolf, but Mowgli knew how strong his feet and jaws were. He watched the sharp bay head of the leader snuffing along the trail, and gave him ‘Good hunting!’

The brute looked up, and his companions halted behind him, scores and scores of red dogs with low-hung tails, heavy shoulders, weak quarters, and bloody mouths. The dholes are a very silent people as a rule, and they have no manners even in their own Jungle. Fully two hundred must have gathered below him, but he could see that the leaders sniffed hungrily on Won-tolla’s trail, and tried to drag the Pack forward. That would never do, or they would be at the Lairs in broad daylight, and Mowgli meant to hold them under his tree till dusk.

‘By whose leave do ye come here?’ said Mowgli.

‘All Jungles are our Jungle,’ was the reply, and the dhole that gave it bared his white teeth. Mowgli looked down with a smile, and imitated perfectly the sharp chitter-chatter of Chikai, the leaping rat of the Dekkan, meaning the dholes to understand that he considered them no better than Chikai. The Pack closed up round the tree-trunk and the leader bayed savagely, calling Mowgli a tree-ape. For an answer Mowgli stretched down one naked leg and wriggled his bare toes just above the leader’s head. That was enough, and more than enough, to wake the Pack to stupid rage. Those who have hair between their toes do not care to be reminded of it. Mowgli caught his foot away as the leader leaped up, and said sweetly: ‘Dog, red dog! Go back to the Dekkan and eat lizards. Go to Chikai thy brother—dog, dog—red, red dog! There is hair between every toe!’ He twiddled his toes a second time.

‘Come down ere we starve thee out, hairless ape!’ yelled the Pack, and this was exactly what Mowgli wanted. He laid himself down along the branch, his cheek to the bark, his right arm free, and there he told the Pack what he thought and knew about them, their manners, their customs, their mates, and their puppies. There is no speech in the world so rancorous and so stinging as the language the Jungle People use to show scorn and contempt. When you come to think of it you will see how this must be so. As Mowgli told Kaa, he had many little thorns under his tongue, and slowly and deliberately he drove the dholes from silence to growls, from growls to yells, and from yells to hoarse slavery ravings. They tried to answer his taunts, but a cub might as well have tried to answer Kaa in a rage; and all the while Mowgli’s right hand lay crooked at his side, ready for action, his feet locked round the branch. The big bay leader had leaped many times in the air, but Mowgli dared not risk a false blow. At last, made furious beyond his natural strength, he bounded up seven or eight feet clear of the ground. Then Mowgli’s hand shot out like the head of a tree-snake, and gripped him by the scruff of his neck, and the branch shook with the jar as his weight fell back, almost wrenching Mowgli to the ground. But he never loosed his grip, and inch by inch he hauled the beast, hanging like a drowned jackal, up on the branch. With his left hand he reached for his knife and cut off the red, bushy tail, flinging the dhole back to earth again. That was all he needed. The Pack would not go forward on Won-tolla’s trail now till they had killed Mowgli or Mowgli had killed them. He saw them settle down in circles with a quiver of the haunches that meant they were going to stay, and so he climbed to a higher crotch, settled his back comfortably, and went to sleep.

After three or four hours he waked and counted the Pack. They were all there, silent, husky, and dry, with eyes of steel. The sun was beginning to sink. In half an hour the Little People of the Rocks would be ending their labours, and, as you know, the dhole does not fight best in the twilight.

‘I did not need such faithful watchers,’ he said politely, standing up on a branch, ‘but I will remember this. Ye be true dholes, but to my thinking over much of one kind. For that reason I do not give the big lizard-eater his tail again. Art thou not pleased, Red Dog?’

‘I myself will tear out thy stomach!’yelled the leader, scratching at the foot of the tree.

‘Nay, but consider, wise rat of the Dekkan. There will now be many litters of little tailless red dogs, yea, with raw red stumps that sting when the sand is hot. Go home, Red Dog, and cry that an ape has done this. Ye will not go? Come, then, with me, and I will make you very wise!’

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He moved, Bandar-log fashion, into the next tree, and so on into the next and the next, the Pack following with lifted hungry heads. Now and then he would pretend to fall, and the Pack would tumble one over the other in their haste to be at the death. It was a curious sight—the boy with the knife that shone in the low sunlight as it sifted through the upper branches, and the silent Pack with their red coats all aflame, huddling and following below. When he came to the last tree he took the garlic and rubbed himself all over carefully, and the dholes yelled with scorn. ‘Ape with a wolf’s tongue, dost thou think to cover thy scent?’ they said. ‘We follow to the death.’

‘Take thy tail,’ said Mowgli, flinging it back along the course he had taken. The Pack instinctively rushed after it. ‘And follow now—to the death.’

He had slipped down the tree-trunk, and headed like the wind in bare feet for the Bee Rocks, before the dholes saw what he would do.

They gave one deep howl, and settled down to the long, lobbing canter that can at the last run down anything that runs. Mowgli knew their pack-pace to be much slower than that of the wolves, or he would never have risked a two-mile run in full sight. They were sure that the boy was theirs at last, and he was sure that he held them to play with as he pleased. All his trouble was to keep them sufficiently hot behind him to prevent their turning off too soon. He ran cleanly, evenly, and springily; the tailless leader not five yards behind him; and the Pack tailing out over perhaps a quarter of a mile of ground, crazy and blind with the rage of slaughter. So he kept his distance by ear, reserving his last effort for the rush across the Bee Rocks.

The Little People had gone to sleep in the early twilight, for it was not the season of late blossoming flowers; but as Mowgli’s first footfalls rang hollow on the hollow ground he heard a sound as though all the earth were humming. Then he ran as he had never run in his life before, spurned aside one’two’three of the piles of stones into the dark, sweet-smelling gullies; heard a roar like the roar of the sea in a cave; saw with the tail of his eye the air grow dark behind him; saw the current of the Waingunga far below, and a flat, diamond-shaped head in the water; leaped outward with all his strength, the tailless dhole snapping at his shoulder in mid-air, and dropped feet first to the safety of the river, breathless and triumphant. There was not a sting upon him, for the smell of the garlic had checked the Little People for just the few seconds that he was among them. When he rose Kaa’s coils were steadying him and things were bounding over the edge of the cliff-great lumps, it seemed, of clustered bees falling like plummets; but before any lump touched water the bees flew upward and the body of a dhole whirled down-stream. Overhead they could hear furious short yells that were drowned in a roar like breakers—the roar of the wings of the Little People of the Rocks. Some of the dholes, too, had fallen into the gullies that communicated with the underground caves, and there choked and fought and snapped among the tumbled honeycombs, and at last, borne up, even when they were dead, on the heaving waves of bees beneath them, shot out of some hole in the river-face, to roll over on the black rubbish-heaps. There were dholes who had leaped short into the trees on the cliffs, and the bees blotted out their shapes; but the greater number of them, maddened by the stings, had flung themselves into the river; and, as Kaa said, the Waingunga was hungry water.

Kaa held Mowgli fast till the boy had recovered his breath.

‘We may not stay here,’ he said. ‘The Little People are roused indeed. Come!’

Swimming low and diving as often as he could, Mowgli went down the river, knife in hand.

‘Slowly, slowly,’ said Kaa. ‘One tooth does not kill a hundred unless it be a cobra’s, and many of the dholes took water swiftly when they saw the Little People rise.’

‘The more work for my knife, then. Phai! How the Little People follow!’ Mowgli sank again. The face of the water was blanketed with wild bees, buzzing sullenly and stinging all they found.

‘Nothing was ever yet lost by silence,’ said Kaa—no sting could penetrate his scales—‘and thou hast all the long night for the hunting. Hear them howl!’

Nearly half the pack had seen the trap their fellows rushed into, and turning sharp aside had flung themselves into the water where the gorge broke down in steep banks. Their cries of rage and their threats against the ‘tree-ape’ who had brought them to their shame mixed with the yells and growls of those who had been punished by the Little People. To remain ashore was death, and every dhole knew it. Their pack was swept along the current, down to the deep eddies of the Peace Pool, but even there the angry Little People followed and forced them to the water again. Mowgli could hear the voice of the tailless leader bidding his people hold on and kill out every wolf in Seeonee. But he did not waste his time in listening.

‘One kills in the dark behind us!’ snapped a dhole. ‘Here is tainted water!’

Mowgli had dived forward like an otter, twitched a struggling dhole under water before he could open his mouth, and dark rings rose as the body plopped up, turning on its side. The dholes tried to turn, but the current prevented them, and the Little People darted at the heads and ears, and they could hear the challenge of the Seeonee Pack growing louder and deeper in the gathering darkness. Again Mowgli dived, and again a dhole went under, and rose dead, and again the clamour broke out at the rear of the pack; some howling that it was best to go ashore, others calling on their leader to lead them back to the Dekkan, and others bidding Mowgli show himself and be killed.

‘They come to the fight with two stomachs and several voices,’ said Kaa. ‘The rest is with thy brethren below yonder, The Little People go back to sleep. They have chased us far. Now I, too, turn back, for I am not of one skin with any wolf. Good hunting, Little Brother, and remember the dhole bites low.’

A wolf came running along the bank on three legs, leaping up and down, laying his head sideways close to the ground, hunching his back, and breaking high into the air, as though he were playing with his cubs. It was Won-tolla, the Outlier, and he said never a word, but continued his horrible sport beside the dholes. They had been long in the water now, and were swimming wearily, their coats drenched and heavy, their bushy tails dragging like sponges, so tired and shaken that they, too, were silent, watching the pair of blazing eyes that moved abreast.

‘This is no good hunting,’ said one, panting.

‘Good hunting!’ said Mowgli, as he rose boldly at the brute’s side, and sent the long knife home behind the shoulder, pushing hard to avoid his dying snap.

‘Art thou there, Man-cub?’ said Won-tolla across the water.

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‘Ask of the dead, Outlier,’ Mowgli replied. ‘Have none come down-stream? I have filled these dogs’ mouths with dirt; I have tricked them in the broad daylight, and their leader lacks his tail, but here be some few for thee still. Whither shall I drive them?’

‘I will wait,’ said Won-tolla. ‘The night is before me.’

Nearer and nearer came the bay of the Seeonee wolves. ‘For the Pack, for the Full Pack it is met!’ and a bend in the river drove the dholes forward among the sands and shoals opposite the Lairs.

Then they saw their mistake. They should have landed half a mile higher up, and rushed the wolves on dry ground. Now it was too late. The bank was lined with burning eyes, and except for the horrible pheeal that had never stopped since sundown, there was no sound in the Jungle. It seemed as though Won-tolla were fawning on them to come ashore; and ‘Turn and take hold!’ said the leader of the dholes. The entire Pack flung themselves at the shore, threshing and squattering through the shoal water, till the face of the Waingunga was all white and torn, and the great ripples went from side to side, like bow-waves from a boat. Mowgli followed the rush, stabbing and slicing as the dholes, huddled together, rushed up the river-beach in one wave.

Then the long fight began, heaving and straining and splitting and scattering and narrowing and broadening along the red, wet sands, and over and between the tangled tree-roots, and through and among the bushes, and in and out of the grass clumps; for even now the dholes were two to one. But they met wolves fighting for all that made the Pack, and not only the short, high, deep-chested, white-tusked hunters of the Pack, but the anxious-eyed lahinis—the she-wolves of the lair, as the saying is—fighting for their litters, with here and there a yearling wolf, his first coat still half woolly, tugging and grappling by their sides. A wolf, you must know, flies at the throat or snaps at the flank, while a dhole, by preference, bites at the belly; so when the dholes were struggling out of the water and had to raise their heads, the odds were with the wolves. On dry land the wolves suffered; but in the water or ashore, Mowgli’s knife came and went without ceasing. The Four had worried their way to his side. Gray Brother, crouched between the boy’s knees, was protecting his stomach, while the others guarded his back and either side, or stood over him when the shock of a leaping, yelling dhole who had thrown himself full on the steady blade bore him down. For the rest, it was one tangled confusion—a locked and swaying mob that moved from right to left and from left to right along the bank; and also ground round and round slowly on its own centre. Here would be a heaving mound, like a water-blister in a whirlpool, which would break like a water-blister, and throw up four or five mangled dogs, each striving to get back to the centre; here would be a single wolf borne down by two or three dholes, laboriously dragging them forward, and sinking the while; here a yearling cub would be held up by the pressure round him, though he had been killed early, while his mother, crazed with dumb rage, rolled over and over, snapping, and passing on; and in the middle of the thickest press, perhaps, one wolf and one dhole, forgetting everything else, would be manoeuvring for first hold till they were whirled away by a rush of furious fighters. Once Mowgli passed Akela, a dhole on either flank, and his all but toothless jaws closed over the loins of a third; and once he saw Phao, his teeth set in the throat of a dhole, tugging the unwilling beast forward till the yearlings could finish him. But the bulk of the fight was blind flurry and smother in the dark; hit, trip, and tumble, yelp, groan, and worry-worry-worry, round him and behind him and above him. As the night wore on, the quick, giddy-go-round motion increased. The dholes were cowed and afraid to attack the stronger wolves, but did not yet dare to run away. Mowgli felt that the end was coming soon, and contented himself with striking merely to cripple. The yearlings were growing bolder; there was time now and again to breathe, and pass a word to a friend, and the mere flicker of the knife would sometimes turn a dog aside.

‘The meat is very near the bone,’ Gray Brother yelled. He was bleeding from a score of flesh-wounds.

‘But the bone is yet to be cracked,’ said Mowgli. ‘Eowawa! Thus do we do in the Jungle!’ The red blade ran like a flame along the side of a dhole whose hind-quarters were hidden by the weight of a clinging wolf.

‘My kill!’ snorted the wolf through his wrinkled nostrils. ‘Leave him to me.’

‘Is thy stomach still empty, Outlier?’ said Mowgli. Won-tolla was fearfully punished, but his grip had paralysed the dhole, who could not turn round and reach him.

‘By the Bull that bought me,’ said Mowgli, with a bitter laugh, ‘it is the tailless one!’ And indeed it was the big bay-coloured leader.

‘It is not wise to kill cubs and lahinis,’ Mowgli went on philosophically, wiping the blood out of his eyes, ‘unless one has also killed the Outlier; and it is in my stomach that this Won-tolla kills thee.’

A dhole leaped to his leader’s aid; but before his teeth had found Won-tolla’s flank, Mowgli’s knife was in his throat, and Gray Brother took what was left.

‘And thus do we do in the Jungle,’ said Mowgli.

Won-tolla said not a word, only his jaws were closing and closing on the backbone as his life ebbed. The dhole shuddered, his head dropped, and he lay still, and Won-tolla dropped above him.

‘Huh! The Blood Debt is paid,’ said Mowgli. ‘Sing the song, Won-tolla.’

‘He hunts no more,’ said Gray Brother; ‘and Akela, too, is silent this long time.’

‘The bone is cracked!’ thundered Phao, son of Phaona. ‘They go! Kill, kill out, O hunters of the Free People!’

Dhole after dhole was slinking away from those dark and bloody sands to the river, to the thick Jungle, up-stream or down-stream as he saw the road clear.

‘The debt! The debt!’ shouted Mowgli ‘Pay the debt! They have slain the Lone Wolf! Let not a dog go!’

He was flying to the river, knife in hand, to check any dhole who, dared to take water, when, from under a mound of nine dead, rose Akela’s head and fore-quarters, and Mowgli dropped on his knees beside the Lone Wolf.

‘Said I not it would be my last fight?’ Akela gasped. ‘It is good hunting. And thou, Little Brother?’

‘I live, having killed many.’

‘Even so. I die, and I would—I would die by thee, Little Brother.’

Mowgli took the terrible scarred head on his knees, and put his arms round the torn neck.

‘It is long since the old days of Shere Khan, and a Man-cub that rolled naked in the dust.’

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‘Nay, nay, I am a wolf. I am of one skin with the Free People,’ Mowgli cried. ‘It is no will of mine that I am a man.’

‘Thou art a man, Little Brother, wolfling of my watching. Thou art a man, or else the Pack had fled before the dhole. My life I owe to thee, and to-day thou hast saved the Pack even as once I saved thee. Hast thou forgotten? All debts are paid now. Go to thine own people. I tell thee again, eye of my eye, this hunting is ended. Go to thine own people.’

‘I will never go. I will hunt alone in the Jungle. I have said it.’

‘After the summer come the Rains, and after the Rains comes the spring. Go back before thou art driven.’

‘Who will drive me?’

‘Mowgli will drive Mowgli. Go back to thy people. Go to Man.’

‘When Mowgli drives Mowgli I will go,’ Mowgli answered.

‘There is no more to say,’ said Akela. ‘Little Brother, canst thou raise me to my feet? I also was a leader of the Free People.’

Very carefully and gently Mowgli lifted the bodies aside, and raised Akela to his feet, both arms round him, and the Lone Wolf drew a long breath, and began the Death Song that a leader of the Pack should sing when he dies. It gathered strength as he went on, lifting and lifting, and ringing far across the river, till it came to the last ‘Good hunting!’ and Akela shook himself clear of Mowgli for an instant, and, leaping into the air, fell backward dead upon his last and most terrible kill.

Mowgli sat with his head on his knees, careless of anything else, while the remnant of the flying dholes were being overtaken and run down by the merciless lahinis. Little by little the cries died away, and the wolves returned limping, as their wounds stiffened, to take stock of the losses. Fifteen of the Pack, as well as half a dozen lahinis, lay dead by the river, and of the others not one was unmarked. And Mowgli sat through it all till the cold daybreak, when Phao’s wet, red muzzle was dropped in his hand, and Mowgli drew back to show the gaunt body of Akela.

‘Good hunting!’ said Phao, as though Akela were still alive, and then over his bitten shoulder to the others: ‘Howl, dogs! A Wolf has died to-night!’

But of all the Pack of two hundred fighting dholes, whose boast was that all jungles were their Jungle, and that no living thing could stand before them, not one returned to the Dekkan to carry that word.

page 1 of 5

‘Thy Lord spoke by inspiration to the Bee.’
AL KORAN.

I HAVE, to my grief and loss, suppressed several notable stories of my friend, the Hon. A. M. Penfentenyou, once Minister of Woods and Waysides in De Thouar’s first administration; later, Premier in all but name of one of Our great and growing Dominions; and now, as always, the idol of his own Province, which is two and one-half the size of England.

For this reason I hold myself at liberty to deal with some portion of the truth concerning Penfentenyou’s latest visit to Our shores. He arrived at my house by car, on a hot summer day, in a white waistcoat and spats, sweeping black frock-coat and glistening top-hat—a little rounded, perhaps, at the edges, but agile as ever in mind and body.

‘What is the trouble now?’ I asked, for the last time we had met, Penfentenyou was floating a three-million pound loan for his beloved but unscrupulous Province, and I did not wish to entertain any more of his financial friends.

‘We,’ Penfentenyou replied ambassadorially, ‘have come to have a Voice in Your Councils. By the way, the Voice is coming down on the evening train with my Agent-General. I thought you wouldn’t mind if I invited ’em. You know We’re going to share Your burdens henceforward. You’d better get into training.’

‘Certainly,’ I replied. ‘What’s the Voice like?’

‘He’s in earnest,’ said Penfentenyou. ‘He’s got It, and he’s got It bad. He’ll give It to you,’ he said.

‘What’s his name?’

‘We call him all sorts of names, but I think you’d better call him Mr. Lingnam. You won’t have to do it more than once.’

‘What’s he suffering from?’

‘The Empire. He’s pretty nearly cured us all of Imperialism at home. P’raps he’ll cure you.’

‘Very good. What am I to do with him?’

‘Don’t you worry,’ said Penfentenyou. ‘He’ll do it.’

And when Mr. Lingnam appeared half-an-hour later with the Agent-General for Penfentenyou’s Dominion, he did just that.

He advanced across the lawn eloquent as all the tides. He said he had been observing to the Agent-General that it was both politically immoral and strategically unsound that forty-four million people should bear the entire weight of the defences of Our mighty Empire, but, as he had observed (here the Agent-General evaporated), we stood now upon the threshold of a new era in which the self-governing and self-respecting (bis) Dominions would rightly and righteously, as copartners in Empery, shoulder their share of any burden which the Pan-Imperial Council of the Future should allot. The Agent-General was already arranging for drinks with Penfentenyou at the other end of the garden. Mr. Lingnam swept me on to the most remote bench and settled to his theme.

We dined at eight. At nine Mr. Lingnam was only drawing abreast of things Imperial. At ten the Agent-General, who earns his salary, was shamelessly dozing on the sofa. At eleven he and Penfentenyou went to bed. At midnight Mr. Lingnam brought down his big-bellied despatch box with the newspaper clippings and set to federating the Empire in earnest. I remember that he had three alternative plans. As a dealer in words, I plumped for the resonant third—‘Reciprocally co-ordinated Senatorial Hegemony’—which he then elaborated in detail for three-quarters of an hour. At half-past one he urged me to have faith and to remember that nothing mattered except the Idea. Then he retired to his room, accompanied by one glass of cold water, and I went into the dawn-lit garden and prayed to any Power that might be off duty for the blood of Mr. Lingnam, Penfentenyou, and the Agent-General.

To me, as I have often observed elsewhere, the hour of earliest dawn is fortunate, and the wind that runs before it has ever been my most comfortable counsellor.

‘Wait!’ it said, all among the night’s expectant rosebuds. ‘To-morrow is also a day. Wait upon the Event!’

I went to bed so at peace with God and Man and Guest that when I waked I visited Mr. Lingnam in pyjamas, and he talked to me Pan-Imperially for half-an-hour before his bath. Later, the Agent-General said he had letters to write, and Penfentenyou invented a Cabinet crisis in his adored Dominion which would keep him busy with codes and cables all the forenoon. But I said firmly, ‘Mr. Lingnam wishes to see a little of the country round here. You are coming with us in your own car.’

‘It’s a hired one,’ Penfentenyou objected.

‘Yes. Paid for by me as a taxpayer,’ I replied.

‘And yours has a top, and the weather looks thundery,’ said the Agent-General. ‘Ours hasn’t a wind-screen. Even our goggles were hired.’

‘I’ll lend you goggles,’ I said. ‘My car is under repairs.’

The hireling who had looked to be returned to London spat and growled on the drive. She was an open car, capable of some eighteen miles on the flat, with tetanic gears and a perpetual palsy.

‘It won’t make the least difference,’ sighed the Agent-General. ‘He’ll only raise his voice. He did it all the way coming down.’

‘I say,’ said Penfentenyou suspiciously, ‘what are you doing all this for?’

‘Love of the Empire,’ I answered, as Mr. Lingnam tripped up in dust-coat and binoculars. ‘Now, Mr. Lingnam will tell us exactly what he wants to see. He probably knows more about England than the rest of us put together.’

‘I read it up yesterday,’ said Mr. Lingnam simply. While we stowed the lunch-basket (one can never make too sure with a hired car) he outlined a very pretty and instructive little day’s run.

‘You’ll drive, of course?’ said Penfentenyou to him. ‘It’s the only thing you know anything about.’

This astonished me, for your greater Federationists are rarely mechanicians, but Mr. Lingnam said he would prefer to be inside for the present and. enjoy our conversation.

page 2

Well settled on the back seat, he did not once lift his eyes to the mellow landscape around him, or throw a word at the life of the English road which to me is one renewed and unreasoned orgy of delight. The mustard-coloured scouts of the Automobile Association; their natural enemies, the unjust police; our natural enemies, the deliberate market-day cattle, broadside-on at all corners, the bicycling butcher-boy a furlong behind; road-engines that pulled giddy-go-rounds, rifle galleries, and swings, and sucked snortingly from wayside ponds in defiance of the noticeboard; traction-engines, their trailers piled high with road metal; uniformed village nurses, one per seven statute miles, flitting by on their wheels; governess-carts full of pink children jogging unconcernedly past roaring, brazen touring-cars; the wayside rector with virgins in attendance, their faces screwed up against our dust; motor-bicycles of every shape charging down at every angle; red flags of rifle-ranges; detachments of dusty-putteed Territorials; coveys of flagrant children playing in mid-street, and the wise, educated English dog safe and quite silent on the pavement if his fool-mistress would but cease from trying to save him, passed and repassed us in sunlit or shaded settings. But Mr. Lingnam only talked. He talked—we all sat together behind so that we could not escape him—and he talked above the worn gears and a certain maddening swish of one badly patched tire—and he talked of the Federation of the Empire against all conceivable dangers except himself. Yet I was neither brutally rude like Penfentenyou, nor swooningly bored like the Agent-General. I remembered a certain Joseph Finsbury who delighted the Tregonwell Arms on the borders of the New Forest with ‘nine’—it should have been ten—‘versions of a single income of two hundred pounds’ placing the imaginary person in—but I could not recall the list of towns further than ‘London, Paris, Bagdad, and Spitzbergen.’ This last I must have murmured aloud, for the Agent-General suddenly became human and went on: ‘Bussorah, Heligoland, and the Scilly Islands——’

‘What?’ growled Penfentenyou.

‘Nothing,’ said the Agent-General, squeezing my hand affectionately. ‘Only we have just found out that we are brothers.’

‘Exactly,’ said Mr. Lingnam. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to lead up to. We’re all brothers. D’you realise that fifteen years ago such a conversation as we’re having would have been unthinkable? The Empire wouldn’t have been ripe for it. To go back, even ten years——’

‘I’ve got it,’ cried the Agent-General. ‘“Brighton, Cincinnati, and Nijni-Novgorod!” God bless R.L.S.! Go on, Uncle Joseph. I can endure much now.’

Mr. Lingnam went on like our shandrydan, slowly and loudly. He admitted that a man obsessed with a Central Idea—and, after all, the only thing that mattered was the Idea—might become a bore, but the World’s Work, he pointed out, had been done by bores. So he laid his bones down to that work till we abandoned ourselves to the passage of time and the Mercy of Allah, Who Alone closes the Mouths of His Prophets. And we wasted more than fifty miles of summer’s vivid own England upon him the while.

About two o’clock we topped Sumtner Rising and looked down on the village of Sumtner Barton, which lies just across a single railway line, spanned by a red brick bridge. The thick, thunderous June airs brought us gusts of melody from a giddy-go-round steam-organ in full blast near the pond on the village green. Drums, too, thumped and banners waved and regalia flashed at the far end of the broad village street. Mr. Lingnam asked why.

‘Nothing Imperial, I’m afraid. It looks like a Foresters’ Fête—one of our big Mutual Benefit Societies,’ I explained.

‘The Idea only needs to be co-ordinated to Imperial scale——’ he began.

‘But it means that the pub. will be crowded,’ I went on.

‘What’s the matter with lunching by the roadside here?’ said Penfentenyou. ‘We’ve got the lunch-basket.’

‘Haven’t you ever heard of Sumtner Barton ales?’ I demanded, and he became the administrator at once, saying, ‘I see! Lingnam can drive us in and we’ll get some, while Holford’—this was the hireling chauffeur, whose views on beer we knew not—‘lays out lunch here. That’ll be better than eating at the pub. We can take in the Foresters’ Fête as well, and perhaps I can buy some newspapers at the station.’

‘True,’ I answered. ‘The railway station is just under that bridge, and we’ll come back and lunch here.’

I indicated a terrace of cool clean shade beneath kindly beeches at the head of Sumtner Rise. As Holford got out the lunch-basket, a detachment of Regular troops on manœuvres swung down the baking road.

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Lingnam, the monthlymagazine roll in his voice. ‘All Europe is an armed camp, groaning, as I remember I once wrote, under the weight of its accoutrements.’

‘Oh, hop in and drive,’ cried Penfentenyou. ‘We want that beer!’

It made no difference. Mr. Lingnam could have federated the Empire from a tight rope. He continued his oration at the wheel as we trundled.

‘The danger to the Younger Nations is of being drawn into this vortex of Militarism,’ he went on, dodging the rear of the soldiery.

‘Slow past troops,’ I hinted. ‘It saves ’em dust. And we overtake on the right as a rule in England.’

‘Thanks!’ Mr. Lingnam slued over ‘That’s another detail which needs to be co-ordinated throughout the Empire. But to go back to what I was saying. My idea has always been that the component parts of the Empire should take counsel among themselves on the approach of war, so that, after we have decided on the merits of the casus belli, we can co-ordinate what part each Dominion shall play whenever war is, unfortunately, a possibility.’

We neared the hog-back railway bridge, and the hireling knocked piteously at the grade. Mr. Lingnam changed gears, and she hoisted herself up to a joyous Youp-i-addy-i-ay! from the steam-organ. As we topped the arch we saw a Foresters’ band with banners marching down the street.

‘That’s all very fine,’ said the Agent-General, ‘but in real life things have a knack of happening without approaching——’

(Some schools of Thought hold that Time is not; and that when we attain complete enlightenment we shall behold past, present, and future as One Awful Whole. I myself have nearly achieved this.)

We dipped over the bridge into the village. A boy on a bicycle, loaded with four paper bonnet-boxes, pedalled towards us, out of an alley on our right. He bowed his head the better to overcome the ascent, and naturally took his left. Mr. Lingnam swerved frantically to the right. Penfentenyou shouted. The boy looked up, saw the car was like to squeeze him against the bridge wall, flung himself off his machine and across the narrow pavement into the nearest house. He slammed the door at the precise moment when the car, all brakes set, bunted the abandoned bicycle, shattering three of the bonnet-boxes and jerking the fourth over the unscreened dashboard into Mr. Lingnam’s arms.

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There was a dead stillness, then a hiss like that of escaping steam, and a man who had been running towards us ran the other way.

‘Why! I think that those must be bees,’ said Mr. Lingnam.

They were—four full swarms—and the first living objects which he had remarked upon all day.

Some one said, ‘Oh, God!’ The Agent-General went out over the back of the car, crying resolutely: ‘Stop the traffic! Stop the traffic, there!’ Penfentenyou was already on the pavement ringing a door-bell, so I had both their rugs, which—for I am an apiarist—I threw over my head. While I was tucking my trousers into my socks—for I am an apiarist of experience—Mr. Lingnam picked up the unexploded bonnet-box and with a single magnificent gesture (he told us afterwards he thought there was a river beneath) hurled it over the parapet of the bridge, ere he ran across the road toward the village green. Now, the station platform immediately below was crowded with Foresters and their friends waiting to welcome a delegation from a sister Court. I saw the box burst on the flint edging of the station garden and the contents sweep forward cone-wise like shrapnel. But the result was stimulating rather than sedative. All those well-dressed people below shouted like Sodom and Gomorrah. Then they moved as a unit into the booking-office, the waiting-rooms, and other places, shut doors and windows and declaimed aloud, while the incoming train whistled far down the line.

I pivoted round cross-legged on the back seat, like a Circassian beauty beneath her veil, and saw Penfentenyou, his coat-collar over his ears, dancing before a shut door and holding up handfuls of currency to a silver-haired woman at an upper window, who only mouthed and shook her head. A little child, carrying a kitten, came smiling round a corner. Suddenly (but these things moved me no more than so many yards of threepenny cinematograph-film) the kitten leaped spitting from her arms, the child burst into tears, Penfentenyou, still dancing, snatched her up and tucked her under his coat, the woman’s countenance blanched, the front door opened, Penfentenyou and the child pressed through, and I was alone in an inhospitable world where every one was shutting windows and calling children home.

A voice cried: ‘You’ve frowtened ’em! You’ve frowtened ’em! Throw dust on ’em and they’ll settle!’

I did not desire to throw dust on any created thing. I needed both hands for my draperies and two more for my stockings. Besides, the bees were doing me no hurt. They recognised me as a member of the County Bee-keepers’ Association who had paid his annual subscription and was entitled to a free seat at all apicultural exhibitions. The quiver and the churn of the hireling car, or it might have been the lurching banners and the arrogant big drum, inclined many of them to go up street, and pay court to the advancing Foresters’ band. So they went, such as had not followed Mr. Lingnam in his flight toward the green, and I looked out of two goggled eyes instead of half a one at the approaching musicians, while I listened with both ears to the delayed train’s second whistle down the line beneath me.

The Foresters’ band no more knew what was coming than do troops under sudden fire. Indeed, there were the same extravagant gestures and contortions as attend wounds and deaths in war; the very same uncanny cessations of speech—for the trombone was cut off at midslide, even as a man drops with a syllable on his tongue. They clawed, they slapped, they fled, leaving behind them a trophy of banners and brasses crudely arranged round the big drum. Then that end of the street also shut its windows, and the village, stripped of life, lay round me like a reef at low tide. Though I am, as I have said, an apiarist in good standing, I never realised that there were so many bees in the world. When they had woven a flashing haze from one end of the desert street to the other, there remained reserves enough to form knops and pendules on all window-sills and gutter-ends, without diminishing the multitudes in the three oozing bonnet-boxes, or drawing on the Fourth (Railway) Battalion in charge of the station below. The prisoners in the waiting-rooms and other places there cried out a great deal (I argued that they were dying of the heat), and at regular intervals the stationmaster called and called to a signalman who was not on duty, and the train whistled as it drew nearer.

Then Penfentenyou, venal and adaptable politician of the type that survives at the price of all the higher emotions, appeared at the window of the house on my right, broken and congested with mirth, the woman beside him, and the child in his arms. I saw his mouth open and shut, he hollowed his hands round it, but the churr of the motor and the bees drowned his words. He pointed dramatically across the street many times and fell back, tears running down his face. I turned like a hooded barbette in a heavy seaway (not knowing when my trousers would come out of my socks again) through one hundred and eighty degrees, and in due time bore on the village green. There was a salmon in the pond, rising short at a cloud of midges to the tune of Yip-i-addy; but there was none to gaff him. The swing-boats were empty, cocoa-nuts sat still on their red sticks before white screens, and the gay-painted horses of the giddy-go-rounds revolved riderless, All was melody, green turf, bright water, and this greedy gambolling fish. When I had identified it by its grey gills and binoculars as Lingnam, I prostrated myself before Allah in that mirth which is more truly labour than any prayer. Then I turned to the purple Penfentenycu at the window, and wiped my eyes on the rug edge.

He raised the window half one cautious inch and bellowed through the crack: ‘Did you see him? Have they got you? I can see lots of things from here. It’s like a three-ring circus!’

‘Can you see the station?’ I replied, nodding toward the right rear mudguard.

He twisted and craned sideways, but could not command that beautiful view.

‘No! What’s it like?’ he cried.

‘Hell!’ I shouted. The silvery-haired woman frowned; so did Penfentenyou, and, I think, apologised to her for my language.

‘You’re always so extreme,’ he fluted reproachfully. ‘You forget that nothing matters except the Idea. Besides, they are this lady’s bees.’

He closed the window, and introduced us through it in dumb show; but he contrived to give the impression that I was the specimen under glass.

A spurt of damp steam saved me from apoplexy. The train had lost patience at last, and was coming into the station directly beneath me to see what was the matter. Happy voices sang and heads were thrust out all along the compartments, but none answered their songs or greetings. She halted, and the people began to get out. Then they began to get in again, as their friends in the waiting-rooms advised. All did not catch the warning, so there was congestion at the doors, but those whom the bees caught got in first.

Still the bees, more bent on their own business than wanton torture, kept to the south end of the platform by the bookstall, and that was why the completely exposed engine-driver at the north end of the train did not at first understand the hermetically sealed stationmaster when the latter shouted to him many times to ‘get on out o’ this.’

‘Where are you?’ was the reply. ‘And what for?’

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‘It don’t matter where I am, an’ you’ll get what-for in a minute if you don’t shift,’ said the stationmaster. ‘Drop ’em at Parson’s Meadow and they can walk up over the fields.’

That bare-armed, thin-shirted idiot, leaning out of the cab, took the stationmaster’s orders as an insult to his dignity, and roared at the shut offices: ‘You’ll give me what for, will you? Look ’ere, I’m not in the ’abit of——’ His outstretched hand flew to his neck . . . . Do you know that if you sting an engine-driver it is the same as stinging his train? She starts with a jerk that nearly smashes the couplings, and runs, barking like a dog, till she is out of sight. Nor does she think about spilled people and parted families on the platform behind her. I had to do all that. There was a man called Fred, and his wife Harriet—a cheery, full-blooded couple—who interested me immensely before they battered their way into a small detached building, already densely occupied. There was also a nameless bachelor who sat under a half-opened umbrella and twirled it dizzily, which was so new a game that I applauded aloud.

When they had thoroughly cleared the ground, the bees set about making comb for publication at the bookstall counter. Presently some bold hearts tiptoed out of the waiting-rooms over the loud gravel with the consciously modest air of men leaving church, climbed the wooden staircase to the bridge, and so reached my level, where the inexhaustible bonnet-boxes were still vomiting squadrons and platoons. There was little need to bid them descend. They had wrapped their heads in handkerchiefs, so that they looked like the disappointed dead scuttling back to Purgatory. Only one old gentleman, pontifically draped in a banner embroidered ‘Temperance and Fortitude,’ ran the gauntlet up-street, shouting as he passed me, ‘It’s night or Blücher, Mister.’ They let him in at the White Hart, the pub, where I should have bought the beer.

After this the day sagged. I fell to reckoning how long a man in a Turkish bath, weakened by excessive laughter, could live without food, and specially drink; and how long a disenfranchised bee could hold out under the same conditions.

Obviously, since her one practical joke costs her her life, the bee can have but small sense of humour; but her fundamentally dismal and ungracious outlook on life impressed me beyond words. She had paralysed locomotion, wiped out trade, social intercourse, mutual trust, love, friendship, sport, music (the lonely steam-organ had run down at last), all that gives substance, colour or savour to life, and yet, in the barren desert she had created, was not one whit more near to the evolution of a saner order of things. The Heavens were darkened with the swarms’ divided counsels; the street shimmered with their purposeless sallies. They clotted on tiles and gutter-pipes, and began frenziedly to build a cell or two of comb ere they discovered that their queen was not with them; then flung off to seek her, or whirled, dishevelled and insane, into another hissing nebula on the false rumour that she was there. I scowled upon them with disfavour, and a massy, blue thunderhead rose majestically from behind the elm-trees of Sumtner Barton Rectory, arched over and scowled with me. Then I realised that it was not bees nor locusts that had darkened the skies, but the oncoming of the malignant English thunderstorm—the one thing before which even Deborah the bee cannot express her silly little self.

‘Aha! Now you’ll catch it,’ I said, as the herald gusts set the big drum rolling down the street like a box-kite. Up and up yearned the dark cloud, till the first lightning quivered and cut. Deborah cowered. Where she flew, there she fled; where she was, there she sat still; and the solid rain closed in on her as a book that is closed when the chapter is finished. By the time it had soaked to my second rug, Penfentenyou appeared at the window, wiping his false mouth on a napkin.

‘Are you all right?’ he inquired. ‘Then that’s all right! Mrs. Bellamy says that her bees don’t sting in the wet. You’d better fetch Lingnam over. He’s got to pay for them and the bicycle.’

I had no words which the silver-haired lady could listen to, but paddled across the flooded street between flashes to the pond on the green. Mr. Lingnam, scarcely visible through the sheeting downpour, trotted round the edge. He bore himself nobly, and lied at the mere sight of me.

‘Isn’t this wet?’ he cried. ‘It has drenched me to the skin. I shall need a change.’

‘Come along,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you’ll get, but you deserve more.’

Penfentenyou, dry, fed, and in command, let us in. ‘You,’ he whispered to me, ‘are to wait in the scullery. Mrs. Bellamy didn’t like the way you talked about her bees. Hsh! Hsh! She’s a kind-hearted lady. She’s a widow, Lingnam, but she’s kept his clothes, and as soon as you’ve paid for the damage she’ll rent you a suit. I’ve arranged it all!’

‘Then tell him he mustn’t undress in my hall,’ said a voice from the stair-head.

‘Tell her——’ Lingnam began.

‘Come and look at the pretty suit I’ve chosen,’ Penfentenyou cooed, as one cajoling a maniac.

I staggered out-of-doors again, and fell into the car, whose ever-running machinery masked my yelps and hiccups. When I raised my forehead from the wheel, I saw that traffic through the village had been resumed, after, as my watch showed, one and one-half hour’s suspension. There were two limousines, one landau, one doctor’s car, three touring-cars, one patent steam-laundry van, three tricars, one traction-engine, some motorcycles, one with a side-car, and one brewery lorry. It was the allegory of my own imperturbable country, delayed for a short time by unforeseen external events but now going about her business, and I blessed Her with tears in my eyes, even though I knew She looked upon me as drunk and incapable.

Then troops came over the bridge behind mea company of dripping wet Regulars without any expression. In their rear, carrying the lunchbasket, marched the Agent-General and Holford the hired chauffeur.

‘I say,’ said the Agent-General, nodding at the darkened khaki backs. ‘If that’s what we’ve got to depend on in event of war they’re a broken reed. They ran like hares—ran like hares, I tell you.

‘And you?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I just sauntered back over the bridge and stopped the traffic that end. Then I had lunch. ’Pity about the beer, though. I say—these cushions are sopping wet!’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had time to turn ’em.’

‘Nor there wasn’t any need to ’ave kept the engine runnin’ all this time,’ said Holford sternly. ‘I’ll ’ave to account for the expenditure of petrol. It exceeds the mileage indicated, you see.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated. After all, that is the way that taxpayers regard most crises.

The house-door opened and Penfentenyou and another came out into the now thinning rain.

‘Ah! There you both are! Here’s Lingnam,’ he cried. ‘He’s got a little wet. He’s had to change.’

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‘We saw that. I was too sore and weak to begin another laugh, but the Agent-General crumpled up where he stood. The late Mr. Bellamy must have been a man of tremendous personality, which he had impressed on every angle of his garments. I was told later that he had died in delirium tremens, which at once explained the pattern, and the reason why Mr. Lingnam, writhing inside it, swore so inspiredly. Of the deliberate and diffuse Federationist there remained no trace, save the binoculars and two damp whiskers. We stood on the pavement, before Elemental Man calling on Elemental Powers to condemn and incinerate Creation.

‘Well, hadn’t we better be getting back?” said the Agent-General.

‘Look out!’ I remarked casually. ‘Those bonnet-boxes are full of bees still!’

‘Are they?’ said the livid Mr. Lingnam, and tilted them over with the late Mr. Bellamy’s large boots. Deborah rolled out in drenched lumps into the swilling gutter. There was a muffled shriek at the window where Mrs. Bellamy gesticulated.

‘It’s all right. I’ve paid for them,’ said Mr. Lingnam. He dumped out the last dregs like mould from a pot-bound flower-pot.

‘What? Are you going to take ’em home with you?’said the Agent-General.

‘No!’ He passed a wet hand over his streaky forehead. ‘Wasn’t there a bicycle that was the beginning of this trouble?’ said he.

‘It’s under the fore-axle, sir,’ said Holford promptly. ‘I can fish it out from ’ere.’

‘Not till I’ve done with it, please.’ Before we could stop him, he had jumped into the car and taken charge. The hireling leaped into her collar, surged, shrieked (less loudly than Mrs. Bellamy at the window), and swept on. That which came out behind her was, as Holford truly observed, no joy-wheel. Mr. Lingnam swung round the big drum in the market-place and thundered back, shouting: ‘Leave it alone. It’s my meat!’

‘Mince-meat, ’e means,’ said Holford after this second trituration. ‘You couldn’t say now it ’ad ever been one, could you?’

Mrs. Bellamy opened the window and spoke. It appears she had only charged for damage to the bicycle, not for the entire machine which Mr. Lingnam was ruthlessly gleaning, spoke by spoke, from the highway and cramming into the slack of the hood. At last he answered, and I have never seen a man foam at the mouth before. ‘If you don’t stop, I shall come into your house—in this car—and drive upstairs and—kill you!’

She stopped; he stopped. Holford took the wheel, and we got away. It was time, for the sun shone after the storm, and Deborah beneath the tiles and the eaves already felt its reviving influence compel her to her interrupted labours of federation. We warned the village policeman at the far end of the street that he might have to suspend traffic again. The proprietor of the giddy-go-round, swings, and cocoanut-shies wanted to know from whom, in this world or another, he could recover damages. Mr. Lingnam referred him most directly to Mrs. Bellamy . . . . Then we went home.

After dinner that evening Mr. Lingnam rose stiffly in his place to make a few remarks on the Federation of the Empire on the lines of Coordinated, Offensive Operations, backed by the Entire Effective Forces, Moral, Military and Fiscal, of Permanently Mobilised Communities, the whole brought to bear, without any respect to the merits of any casus belli, instantaneously, automatically, and remorselessly at the first faint buzz of war.

‘The trouble with Us,’ said he, ‘is that We take such an infernally long time making sure that We are right that We don’t go ahead when things happen. For instance, I ought to have gone ahead instead of pulling up when I hit that bicycle.’

‘But you were in the wrong, Lingnam, when you turned to the right,’ I put in.

‘I don’t want to hear any more of your damned, detached, mugwumping excuses for the other fellow,’ he snapped.

‘Now you’re beginning to see things,’ said Penfentenyou. ‘I hope you won’t backslide when the swellings go down.’