THE orang-outang in the big iron cage lashed to the sheep-pen began the discussion. The night was stiflingly hot, and as Hans Breitmann and I passed him, dragging our bedding to the fore-peak of the steamer, he roused himself and chattered obscenely. He had been caught somewhere in the Malayan Archipelago, and was going to England to be exhibited at a shilling a head. For four days he had struggled, yelled, and wrenched at the heavy iron bars of his prison without ceasing, and had nearly slain a Lascar incautious enough to come within reach of the great hairy paw.

“It would he well for you, mine friend, if you was a liddle seasick,” said Hans Breitmann, pausing by the cage. “You haf too much Ego in your Cosmos.”

The orang-outang’s arm slid out negligently from between the bars. No one would have believed that it would make a sudden snake-like rush at the German’s breast. The thin silk of the sleeping-suit tore out: Hans stepped back unconcernedly, to pluck a banana from a bunch hanging close to one of the boats.

“Too much Ego,” said be, peeling the fruit and offering it to the caged devil, who was rending the silk to tatters.

Then we laid out our bedding in the bows, among the sleeping Lascars, to catch any breeze that the pace of the ship might give us. The sea was like smoky oil., except where it turned to fire under our forefoot and whirled back into the dark in smears of dull flame. There was a thunderstorm some miles away: we could see the glimmer of the lightning. The ship’s cow, distressed by the heat and the smell of the ape-beast in the cage, lowed unhappily from time to time in exactly the same key as the lookout man at the bows answered the hourly call from the bridge. The trampling tune of the engines was very distinct, and the jarring of the ash-lift, as it was tipped into the sea, hurt the procession of hushed noise. Hans lay down by my side and lighted a good-night cigar. This was naturally the beginning of conversation. He owned a voice as soothing as the wash of the sea, and stores of experiences as vast as the sea itself; for his business in life was to wander up and down the world, collecting orchids and wild beasts and ethnological specimens for German and American dealers. I watched the glowing end of his cigar wax and wane in the gloom, as the sentences rose and fell, till I was nearly asleep. The orang-outang, troubled by some dream of the forests of his freedom, began to yell like a soul in purgatory, and to wrench madly at the bars of the cage.

“If he was out now dere would not be much of us left hereabouts,” said Hans, lazily. “He screams good. See, now, how I shall tame him when he stops himself.”

There was a pause in the outcry, and from Hans’ mouth came an imitation of a snake’s hiss, so perfect that I almost sprung to my feet. The sustained murderous sound ran along the deck, and the wrenching at the bars ceased. The orang-outang was quaking in an ecstasy of pure terror.

“Dot stop him,” said Hans. “I learned dot trick in Mogoung Tanjong when I was collecting liddle monkeys for some peoples in Berlin. Efery one in der world is afraid of der monkeys except der snake. So I blay snake against monkey, and he keep quite still. Dere was too much Ego in his Cosmos. Dot is der soul-custom of monkeys. Are you asleep, or will you listen, and I will tell a dale dot you shall not pelief?”

“There’s no tale in the wide world that I can’t believe,” I said.

“If you have learned pelief you haf learned somedings. Now I shall try your pelief. Good! When I was collecting dose liddle monkeys-it was in ’79 or ’80, und I was in der islands of der Archipelago—over dere in der dark”—he pointed southward to New Guinea generally—“Mein Gott! I would sooner collect life red devils than liddle monkeys. When dey do not bite off your thumbs dey are always dying from nostalgia—homesick—for dey haf der imperfect soul, which is midway arrested in defelopment—und too much Ego. I was dere for nearly a year, und dere I found a man dot was called Bertran. He was a Frenchman, und he was a goot man—naturalist to the bone. Dey said he was an escaped convict, but he was a naturalist, und dot was enough for me. He would call all her life beasts from der forests, und dey would come. I said he was St. Francis of Assisi in a new dransmigration produced, und he laughed und said he hal never preach to der fishes. He sold dem for tripang-beche-de-mer.

“Und dot man, who was king of beasts-tamer men, he had in der house shush such anoder as dot devil-animal in der cage—a great orang-outang dot thought he was a man. He haf found him when he was a child—der orang-outang—und he was child and brother and opera comique all round to Bertran. He had his room in dot house—not a cage, but a room—mit a bed and sheets, and he would go to bed and get up in der morning and smoke his cigar und eat his dinner mit Bertran, und walk mit him hand-in-hand, which was most horrible. Herr Gott! I haf seen dot beast throw himself back in his chair and laugh when Bertran haf made fun of me. He was not a beast; he was a man, and he talked to Bertran, und Bertran comprehended, for I bave seen dem. Und he was always politeful to me except when I talk too long to Bertran und say nodings at all to him. Den he would pull me away—dis great, dark devil, mit his enormous paws—hush as if I was a child. He was not a beast, he was a man. Dis I saw pefore I know him three months, und Bertran he haf saw the same; and Bimi, der orang-outang, baf understood us both, mit his cigar between his big-dog teeth und der blue gum.

“I was dere a year, dere und at dere oder islands—somedimes for monkeys and somedimes for butterflies und orchits. One time Bertran says to me dot he will be married, because he haf found a girl dot was goot, and he inquire if this marrying idea was right. I would not say, pecause it was not me dot was going to be married. Den he go off courting der girl—she was a half-caste French girl- very pretty. Haf you got a new light for my cigar? Oof! Very pretty. Only I say ‘Haf you thought of Bimi? If he pulls me away when I talk to you, what will he do to your wife? He will pull her in pieces. If I was you, Bertran, I would gif my wife for wedding present der stuff figure of Bimi.’ By dot time I bad learned somedings about der monkey peoples. ‘Shoot him?’ says Bertran. ‘He is your beast,’ I said; ‘if he was mine he would be shot now.’

“Den I felt at der back of my neck der fingers of Bimi. Mein Gott! I tell you dot he talked through dose fingers. It was der deaf-and-dumb alphabet all gomplete. He slide his hairy arm round my neck, and he tilt up my chin and look into my face, shust to see if I understood his talk so well as he understood mine.

“’See now dere!’ says Bertran, ‘und you would shoot him while he is cuddling you? Dot is der Teuton ingrate!’

“But I knew dot I had made Bimi a life’s enemy, pecause his fingers haf talk murder through the back of my neck. Next dime I see Bimi dere was a pistol in my belt, und he touch it once, and I open de breech to show him it was loaded. He haf seen der liddle monkeys killed in der woods, and he understood.

“So Bertran he was married, and he forgot clean about Bimi dot was skippin’ alone on the beach mit der haf of a human soul in his belly. I was see him skip, und he took a big bough und thrash der sand till he haf made a great hole like a grave. So I says to Bertran ‘For any sakes, kill Bimi. He is mad mit der jealousy.’

“Bertran haf said: ‘He is not mad at all. He haf obey and love my wife, und if she speaks he wall get her slippers,’ und he looked at his wife across der room. She was a very pretty girl.

“Den I said to him: ‘Dost thou pretend to know monkeys und dis beast dot is lashing himself mad upon der sands, pecause you do not talk to him? Shoot him when he comes to der house, for he haf der light in his eyes dot means killing—und killing.’ Bimi come to der house, but dere was no light in his eyes. It was all put away, cunning—so cunning—und he fetch der girl her slippers, and Bertran turn to me und say: ‘Dost thou know him in nine months more dan I haf known him in twelve years? Shall a child stab his fader? I have fed him, und he was my child. Do not speak this nonsense to my wife or to me any more.’

“Dot next day Bertran came to my house to help me make some wood cases for der specimens, und he tell me dot he haf left his wife a liddle while mit Bimi in der garden. Den I finish my cases quick, und I say: ‘Let us go to your house und get a trink.’ He laugh und say: ‘Come along, dry mans.’

“His wife was not in der garden, und Bimi did not come when Bertran called. Und his wife did not come when he called, und he knocked at her bedroom door und dot was shut tight-locked. Den he looked at me, und his face was white. I broke down der door mit my shoulder, und der thatch of der roof was torn into a great hole, und der sun came in upon der floor. Haf you ever seen paper in der waste-basket, or cards at whist on der table scattered? Dere was no wife dot could be seen. I tell you dere was noddings in dot room dot might be a woman. Dere was stuff on der floor, und dot was all. I looked at dese things und I was very sick; but Bertran looked a little longer at what was upon the floor und der walls, und der hole in der thatch. Den he pegan to laugh, soft and low, und I know und thank God dot he was mad. He nefer cried, he nefer prayed. He stood still in der doorway und laugh to him-self. Den he said: ‘She haf locked herself in dis room, and he haf torn up der thatch. Fi donc. Dot is so. We will mend der thatch und wait for Bimi. He will surely come.’

“I tell you we waited ten days in dot house, after der room was made into a room again, and once or twice we saw Bimi comm’ a liddle way from der woods. He was afraid pecause he haf done wrong. Bertran called him when he was come to look on the tenth day, und Bimi come skipping along der beach und making noises, mit a long piece of black hair in his hands. Den Bertran laugh and say, ‘Fi donc!’ shust as if it was a glass broken upon der table; und Bimi come nearer, und Bertran was honey-sweet in his voice and laughed to himself. For three days he made love to Bimi, pecause Bimi would not let himself be touched. Den Bimi come to dinner at der same table mit us, und der hair on his hands was all black und thick mit—mit what had dried on his hands. Bertran gave him sangaree till Bimi was drunk and stupid, und den—”

Hans paused to puff at his cigar.

“And then?” said I.

“Und den Bertran kill him with his hands, und I go for a walk upon der beach. It was Bertran’s own piziness. When I come back der ape he was dead, und Bertran he was dying abofe him; but still he laughed a liddle und low, and he was quite content. Now you know der formula uf der strength of der orang-outang—it is more as seven to one in relation to man. But Bertran, he haf killed Bimi mit sooch dings as Gott gif him. Dot was der mericle.”

The infernal clamor in the cage recommenced. “Aba! Dot friend of ours haf still too much Ego in his Cosmos, Be quiet, thou!”

Hans hissed long and venomously. We could hear the great beast quaking in his cage.

“But why in the world didn’t you help Bertran instead of letting him be killed?” I asked.

“My friend,” said Hans, composedly stretching himself to slumber, “it was not nice even to mineself dot I should lif after I had seen dot room wit der hole in der thatch. Und Bertran, he was her husband. Good-night, und sleep well,”

His spots are the joy of the Leopard: his horns are the Buffalo’s pride.
Be clean, for the strength of the hunter is known by the gloss of his hide.
If ye find that the bullock can toss you, or the heavy-browed Sambhur can gore;
Ye need not stop work to inform us: we knew it ten seasons before.
Oppress not the cubs of the stranger, but hail them as Sister and Brother,
For though they are little and fubsy, it may be the Bear is their mother.
‘There is none like to me !’ says the Cub in the pride of his earliest kill;
But the jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let him think and be still.
(Maxims of Baloo)

page 1 of 7

ALL that is told here happened some time before Mowgli was turned out of the Seeonee Wolf-Pack, or revenged himself on Shere Khan the tiger. It was in the days when Baloo was teaching him the Law of the Jungle. The big, serious, old brown bear was delighted to have so quick a pupil, for the young wolves will only learn as much of the Law of the Jungle as applies to their own pack and tribe, and run away as soon as they can repeat the Hunting Verse:—‘Feet that make no noise; eyes that can see in the dark; ears that can hear the winds in their lairs, and sharp white teeth, all these things are the marks of our brothers except Tabaqui the Jackal and the Hyaena whom we hate.’ But Mowgli, as a man-cub, had to learn a great deal more than this. Sometimes Bagheera, the Black Panther, would come lounging through the Jungle to see how his pet was getting on, and would purr with his head against a tree while Mowgli recited the day’s lesson to Baloo. The boy could climb almost as well as he could swim, and swim almost as well as he could run; so Baloo, the Teacher of the Law, taught him the Wood and Water Laws; how to tell a rotten branch from a sound one; how to speak politely to the wild bees when he came upon a hive of them fifty feet above ground; what to say to Mang the Bat when he disturbed him in the branches at midday; and how to warn the water-snakes in the pools before he splashed down among them. None of the Jungle-People like being disturbed, and all are very ready to fly at an intruder. Then, too, Mowgli was taught the Stranger’s Hunting Call, which must be repeated aloud till it is answered, whenever one of the Jungle-People hunts outside his own grounds. It means, translated: ‘Give me leave to hunt here because I am hungry’; and the answer is: ‘Hunt then for food, but not for pleasure.’

All this will show you how much Mowgli had to learn by heart, and he grew very tired of saying the same thing over a hundred times; but, as Baloo said to Bagheera, one day when Mowgli had been cuffed and run off in a temper: ‘A Mancub is a Man-cub, and he must learn all the Law of the Jungle.’

‘But think how small he is,’ said the Black Panther, who would have spoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. ‘How can his little head carry all thy long talk?’

‘Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly, when he forgets.’

‘Softly! What dost thou know of softness, old Iron-feet?’ Bagheera grunted. ‘His face is all bruised to-day by thy—softness. Ugh!’

‘Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him than that he should come to harm through ignorance,’ Baloo answered very earnestly. ‘I am now teaching him the Master-Words of the jungle that shall protect him with the birds and the Snake-People, and all that hunt on four feet, except his own pack. He can now claim protection, if he will only remember the words, from all in the Jungle. Is not that worth a little beating?’

‘Well, look to it then that thou dost not kill the Man-cub. He is no tree-trunk to sharpen thy blunt claws upon. But what are those MasterWords? I am more likely to give help than to ask it’—Bagheera stretched out one paw and admired the steel-blue, ripping-chisel talons at the end of it—‘still I should like to know.’

‘I will call Mowgli and he shall say them—if he will. Come, Little Brother!’

‘My head is ringing like a bee-tree,’ said a sullen little voice over their heads, and Mowgli slid down a tree-trunk very angry and indignant, adding as he reached the ground: ‘I come for Bagheera and not for thee, fat old Baloo!’

‘That is all one to me,’ said Baloo, though he was hurt and grieved. ‘Tell Bagheera, then, the Master-Words of the Jungle that I have taught thee this day.’

‘Master-Words for which people?’ said Mowgli, delighted to show off. ‘The Jungle has many tongues. I know them all.’

‘A little thou knowest, but not much. See, O Bagheera, they never thank their teacher. Not one small wolfling has ever come back to thank old Baloo for his teachings. Say the word for the Hunting-People, then—great scholar.’

‘We be of one blood, ye and I,’ said Mowgli, giving the words the Bear accent which all the Hunting-People use.

‘Good. Now for the birds.’

Mowgli repeated, with the Kite’s whistle at the end of the sentence.

‘Now for the Snake-People,’ said Bagheera.

The answer was a perfectly indescribable hiss, and Mowgli kicked up his feet behind, clapped his hands together to applaud himself, and jumped on to Bagheera’s back, where he sat sideways, drumming with his heels on the glossy skin and making the worst faces he could think of at Baloo.

‘There—there! That was worth a little bruise,’ said the brown bear tenderly. ‘Some day thou wilt remember me.’ Then he turned aside to tell Bagheera how he had begged the Master-Words from Hathi the Wild Elephant, who knows all about these things, and how Hathi had taken Mowgli down to a pool to get the Snake Word from a water-snake, because Baloo could not pronounce it, and how Mowgli was now reasonably safe against all accidents in the Jungle, because neither snake, bird, nor beast would hurt him.

‘No one, then, is to be feared,’ Baloo wound up, patting his big furry stomach with pride.

‘Except his own tribe,’ said Bagheera, under his breath; and then aloud to Mowgli: ‘Have a care for my ribs, Little Brother! What is all this dancing up and down?’

Mowgli had been trying to make himself heard by pulling at Bagheera’s shoulder-fur and kicking hard. When the two listened to him he was shouting at the top of his voice: ‘And so I shall have a tribe of my own, and lead them through the branches all day long.’

‘What is this new folly, little dreamer of dreams?’ said Bagheera.

‘Yes, and throw branches and dirt at old Baloo,’ Mowgli went on. ‘They have promised me this. Ah!’

‘Whoof!’ Baloo’s big paw scooped Mowgli off Bagheera’s back, and as the boy lay between the big fore-paws he could see the Bear was angry.

‘Mowgli,’ said Baloo, ‘thou hast been talking with the Bandar-log—the Monkey-People.’

Mowgli looked at Bagheera to see if the Panther was angry too, and Bagheera’s eyes were as hard as jade-stones.

page 2

‘Thou hast been with the Monkey-People—the grey apes—the people without a Law—the eaters of everything. That is great shame.’

‘When Baloo hurt my head,’ said Mowgli (he was still on his back), ‘I went away, and the grey apes came down from the trees and had pity on me. No one else cared.’ He snuffled a little.

‘The pity of the Monkey-People!’ Baloo snorted. ‘The stillness of the mountain stream! The cool of the summer sun! And then, Man-cub?’

‘And then, and then, they gave me nuts and pleasant things to eat, and they—they carried me in their arms up to the top of the trees and said I was their blood-brother except that I had no tail, and should be their leader some day.’

‘They have no leader,’ said Bagheera. ‘They lie. They have always lied.’

‘They were very kind and bade me come again. Why have I never been taken among the Monkey-People? They stand on their feet as I do. They do not hit me with hard paws. They play all day. Let me get up! Bad Baloo, let me up! I will play with them again.’

‘Listen, Man-cub,’ said the Bear, and his voice rumbled like thunder on a hot night. ‘I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the Jungle—except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no Law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the Jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We of the Jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die. Hast thou ever heard me speak of the Bandar-log, till to-day?’

‘No,’ said Mowgli in a whisper, for the forest was very still now Baloo had finished.

‘The Jungle-People put them out of their mouths and out of their minds. They are very many, evil, dirty, shameless, and they desire, if they have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle-People. But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads.’

He had hardly spoken when a shower of nuts and twigs spattered down through the branches; and they could hear coughings and howlings and angry jumpings high up in the air among the thin branches.

‘The Monkey-People are forbidden,’ said Baloo, ‘forbidden to the Jungle-People. Remember.’

‘Forbidden,’ said Bagheera; ‘but I still think Baloo should have warned thee against them.’

‘I—I? How was I to guess he would play with such dirt? The Monkey-People! Faugh!’

A fresh shower came down on their heads and the two trotted away, taking Mowgli with them. What Baloo had said about the monkeys was perfectly true. They belonged to the tree-tops, and as beasts very seldom look up, there was no occasion for the monkeys and the Jungle-People to cross each other’s path. But whenever they found a sick wolf, or a wounded tiger, or bear, the monkeys would torment him, and would throw sticks and nuts at any beast for fun and in the hope of being noticed. Then they would howl and shriek senseless songs, and invite the Jungle-People to climb up their trees and fight them, or would start furious battles over nothing among themselves, and leave the dead monkeys where the Jungle-People could see them. They were always just going to have a leader, and laws and customs of their own, but they never did, because their memories would not hold over from day to day, and so they compromised things by making up a saying: ‘What the Bandar-log think now the Jungle will think later,’ and that comforted them a great deal. None of the beasts could reach them, but on the other hand none of the beasts would notice them, and that was why they were so pleased when Mowgli came to play with them, and they heard how angry Baloo was.

They never meant to do any more—the Bandar-log never mean anything at all; but one of them invented what seemed to him a brilliant idea, and he told all the others that Mowgli would be a useful person to keep in the tribe, because he could weave sticks together for protection from the wind; so, if they caught him, they could make him teach them. Of course, Mowgli, as a woodcutter’s child, inherited all sorts of instincts, and used to make little huts of fallen branches without thinking how he came to do it, and the Monkey-People, watching in the trees, considered his play most wonderful. This time, they said, they were really going to have a leader and become the wisest people in the Jungle—so wise that every one else would notice and envy them. Therefore they followed Baloo and Bagheera and Mowgli through the Jungle very quietly till it was time for the midday nap, and Mowgli, who was very much ashamed of himself, slept between the Panther and the Bear, resolving to have no more to do with the Monkey-People.

The next thing he remembered was feeling hands on his legs and arms—hard, strong, little hands—and then a swash of branches in his face, and then he was staring down through the swaying boughs as Baloo woke the Jungle with his deep cries and Bagheera bounded up the trunk with every tooth bared. The Bandar-log howled with triumph and scuffled away to the upper branches where Bagheera dared not follow, shouting: ‘He has noticed us! Bagheera has noticed us. All the Jungle People admire us for our skill and our cunning.’ Then they began their flight; and the flight of the Monkey-People through tree-land is one of the things nobody can describe. They have their regular roads and cross-roads, up hills and down hills, all laid out from fifty to seventy or a hundred feet above ground, and by these they can travel even at night if necessary. Two of the strongest monkeys caught Mowgli under the arms and swung off with him through the tree-tops, twenty feet at a bound. Had they been alone they could have gone twice as fast, but the boy’s weight held them back. Sick and giddy as Mowgli was he could not help enjoying the wild rush, though the glimpses of earth far down below frightened him, and the terrible check and jerk at the end of the swing over nothing but empty air brought his heart between his teeth. His escort would rush him up a tree till he felt the thinnest topmost branches crackle and bend under them, and then with a cough and a whoop would fling themselves into the air outward and downward, and bring up, hanging by their hands or their feet to the lower limbs of the next tree. Sometimes he could see for miles and miles across the still green Jungle, as a man on the top of a mast can see for miles across the sea, and then the branches and leaves would lash him across the face, and he and his two guards would be almost down to earth again. So, bounding and crashing and whooping and yelling, the whole tribe of Bandar-log swept along the tree-roads with Mowgli their prisoner.

page 3

For a time he was afraid of being dropped: then he grew angry but knew better than to struggle, and then he began to think. The first thing was to send back word to Baloo and Bagheera, for, at the pace the monkeys were going, he knew his friends would be left far behind. It was useless to look down, for he could only see the top-sides of the branches, so he stared upward and saw, far away in the blue, Chil the Kite balancing and wheeling as he kept watch over the Jungle waiting for things to die. Chil saw that the monkeys were carrying something, and dropped a few hundred yards to find out whether their load was good to eat. He whistled with surprise when he saw Mowgli being dragged up to a tree-top and heard him give the Kite call for —‘We be of one blood, thou and I’ The waves of the branches closed over the boy, but Chil balanced away to the next tree in time to see the little brown face come up again. ‘Mark my trail,’ Mowgli shouted. ‘Tell Baloo of the Seeonee Pack and Bagheera of the Council Rock.’

‘In whose name, Brother?’ Chil had never seen Mowgli before, though of course he had heard of him.

‘Mowgli, the Frog. Man-cub they call me! Mark my tra-il!’

The last words were shrieked as he was being swung through the air, but Chil nodded and rose up till he looked no bigger than a speck of dust, and there he hung, watching with his telescope eyes the swaying of the tree-tops as Mowgli’s escort whirled along.

‘They never go far,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘They never do what they set out to do. Always pecking at new things are the Bandar-log. This time, if I have any eyesight, they have pecked down trouble for themselves, for Baloo is no fledgling and Bagheera can, as I, know, kill more than goats.’

So he rocked on his wings, his feet gathered up under him, and waited.

Meantime, Baloo and Bagheera were furious with rage and grief. Bagheera climbed as he had never climbed before, but the thin branches broke beneath his weight, and he slipped down, his claws full of bark.

‘Why didst thou not warn the Man-cub?’ he roared to poor Baloo, who had set off at a clumsy trot in the hope of overtaking the monkeys. ‘What was the use of half slaying him with blows if thou didst not warn him?’

‘Haste! Oh, haste! We—we may catch them yet!’ Baloo panted.

‘At that speed! It would not tire a wounded cow. Teacher of the Law—cub-beater—a mile of that rolling to and fro would burst thee open. Sit still and think! Make a plan. This is no time for chasing. They may drop him if we follow too close.’

‘Arrula! Whoo! They may have dropped him already, being tired of carrying him. Who can trust the Bandar-log? Put dead bats on my head! Give me black bones to eat! Roll me into the hives of the wild bees that I may be stung to death, and bury me with the Hyaena, for I am the most miserable of bears! Arrulala! Wahooa! Oh, Mowgli, Mowgli! why did I not warn thee against the Monkey-Folk instead of breaking thy head? Now perhaps I may have knocked the day’s lesson out of his mind, and he will be alone in the Jungle without the Master-Words.’

Baloo clasped his paws over his ears and rolled to and fro moaning.

‘At least he gave me all the Words correctly a little time ago,’ said Bagheera impatiently. ‘Baloo, thou hast neither memory nor respect. What would the Jungle think if I, the Black Panther, curled myself up like Ikki the Porcupine, and howled?’

‘What do I care what the Jungle thinks? He may be dead by now.’

‘Unless and until they drop him from the branches in sport, or kill him out of idleness, I have no fear for the Man-cub. He is wise and well taught, and above all he has the eyes that make the Jungle-People afraid. But (and it is a great evil) he is in the power of the Bandar-log, and they, because they live in trees, have no fear of any of our people.’ Bagheera licked one forepaw thoughtfully.

‘Fool that I am! Oh, fat, brown, root-digging fool that I am,’ said Baloo, uncurling himself with a jerk, ‘it is true what Hathi the Wild Elephant says: “To each his own fear”; and they, the Bandar-log, fear Kaa the Rock Snake. He can climb as well as they can. He steals the young monkeys in the night. The whisper of his name makes their wicked tails cold. Let us go to Kaa.’

‘What will he do for us? He is not of our tribe, being footless—and with most evil eyes,’ said Bagheera.

‘He is very old and very cunning. Above all, he is always hungry,’ said Baloo hopefully. ‘Promise him many goats.’

‘He sleeps for a full month after he has once eaten. He may be asleep now, and even were he awake what if he would rather kill his own goats?’ Bagheera, who did not know much about Kaa, was naturally suspicious.

‘Then in that case, thou and I together, old hunter, might make him see reason.’ Here Baloo rubbed his faded brown shoulder against the Panther, and they went off to look for Kaa the Rock Python.

They found him stretched out on a warm ledge in the afternoon sun, admiring his beautiful new coat, for he had been in retirement for the last ten days, changing his skin, and now he was very splendid—darting his big blunt-nosed head along the ground, and twisting the thirty feet of his body into fantastic knots and curves, and licking his lips as he thought of his dinner to come.

‘He has not eaten,’ said Baloo, with a grunt of relief, as soon as he saw the beautifully mottled brown-and-yellow jacket. ‘Be careful, Bagheera! He is always a little blind after he has changed his skin, and very quick to strike.’

Kaa was not a poison-snake-in fact he rather despised the poison-snakes as cowards—but his strength lay in his hug, and when he had once lapped his huge coils round anybody there was no more to be said. ‘Good hunting!’ cried Baloo, sitting up on his haunches. Like all snakes of his breed, Kaa was rather deaf, and did not hear the call at first. Then he curled up ready for any accident, his head lowered.

‘Good hunting for us all!’ he answered. ‘Oho, Baloo, what dost thou do here? Good hunting, Bagheera! One of us at least needs food. Is there any news of game afoot? A doe now, or even a young buck? I am as empty as a dried well.’

‘We are hunting,’ said Baloo carelessly. He knew that you must not hurry Kaa. He is too big.

‘Give me permission to come with you,’ said Kaa. ‘A blow more or less is nothing to thee, Bagheera or Baloo, but I—I have to wait and wait for days in a wood-path and climb half a night on the mere chance of a young ape. Pss-haw! The branches are not what they were when I was young. Rotten twigs and dry boughs are they all.’

‘Maybe thy great weight has something to do with the matter,’ said Baloo.

page 4

‘I am a fair length—a fair length,’ said Kaa, with a little pride. ‘But for all that, it is the fault of this new-grown timber. I came very near to falling on my last hunt—very near indeed—and the noise of my slipping, for my tail was not tight wrapped round the tree, waked the Bandar-log, and they called me most evil names.’

‘Footless, yellow earth-worm,’ said Bagheera under his whiskers, as though he were trying to remember something.

‘Sssss! Have they ever called me that?’ said Kaa.

‘Something of that kind it was that they shouted to us last moon, but we never noticed them. They will say anything—even that thou hast lost all thy teeth, and wilt not face anything bigger than a kid, because (they are indeed shameless, these Bandar-log)—because thou art afraid of the he-goat’s horns,’ Bagheera went on sweetly.

Now a snake, especially a wary old python like Kaa, very seldom shows that he is angry, but Baloo and Bagheera could see the big swallowing-muscles on either side of Kaa’s throat ripple and bulge.

‘The Bandar-log have shifted their grounds,’ he said quietly. ‘When I came up into the sun to-day I heard them whooping among the tree-tops.’

‘It—it is the Bandar-log that we follow now,’ said Baloo; but the words stuck in his throat, for that was the first time in his memory that one of the Jungle-People had owned to being interested in the doings of the monkeys.

‘Beyond doubt then it is no small thing that takes two such hunters—leaders in their own Jungle I am certain—on the trail of the Bandar-log,’ Kaa replied courteously, as he swelled with curiosity.

‘Indeed,’ Baloo began, ‘I am no more than the old and sometimes very foolish Teacher of the Law to the Seeonee wolf-cubs, and Bagheera here——’

‘Is Bagheera,’ said the Black Panther, and his jaws shut with a snap, for he did not believe in being humble. ‘The trouble is this, Kaa. Those nut-stealers and pickers of palm-leaves have stolen away our Man-cub, of whom thou hast perhaps heard.’

‘I heard some news from Ikki (his quills make him presumptuous) of a man-thing that was entered into a wolf-pack, but I did not believe. Ikki is full of stories half heard and very badly told.’

‘But it is true. He is such a Man-cub as never was,’ said Baloo. ‘The best and wisest and boldest of Man-cubs—my own pupil, who shall make the name of Baloo famous through all the jungles; and besides, I—we—love him, Kaa.’

‘Tss! Tss!’ said Kaa, shaking his head to and fro. ‘I also have known what love is. There are tales I could tell that——’

‘That need a clear night when we are all well fed to praise properly,’ said Bagheera quickly. ‘Our Man-cub is in the hands of the Bandar-log now, and we know that of all the Jungle-People they fear Kaa alone.’

‘They fear me alone. They have good reason,’ said Kaa. ‘Chattering, foolish, vain—vain, foolish, and chattering, are the monkeys. But a man-thing in their hands is in no good luck. They grow tired of the nuts they pick, and throw them down. They carry a branch half a day, meaning to do great things with it, and then they snap it in two. That man-thing is not to be envied. They called me also—“yellow fish,” was it not?’

‘Worm—worm—earth-worm,’ said Bagheera, ‘as well as other things which I cannot now say for shame.’

‘We must remind them to speak well of their master. Aaa-ssh! We must help their wandering memories. Now, whither went they with the cub?’

‘The Jungle alone knows. Toward the sunset, I believe,’ said Baloo. ‘We had thought that thou wouldst know, Kaa.’

‘I? How? I take them when they come in my way, but I do not hunt the Bandar-log, or frogs—or green scum on a water-hole for that matter.’

‘Up, Up! Up, Up! Hillo! Illo! Illo! Look up, Baloo of the Seeonee Wolf-Pack!’

Baloo looked up to see where the voice came from, and there was Chil the Kite, sweeping down with the sun shining on the upturned flanges of his wings. It was near Chil’s bed-time, but he had ranged all over the Jungle looking for the Bear and had missed him in the thick foliage.

‘What is it?’ said Baloo.

‘I have seen Mowgli among the Bandar-log. He bade me tell you. I watched. The Bandar-log have taken him beyond the river to the monkey city—to the Cold Lairs. They may stay there for a night, or ten nights, or an hour. I have told the bats to watch through the dark time. That is my message. Good hunting, all you below!’

‘Full gorge and a deep sleep to you, Chil,’ cried Bagheera. ‘I will remember thee in my next kill, and put aside the head for thee alone, O best of kites!’

‘It is nothing. It is nothing. The boy held the Master-Word. I could have done no less,’ and Chil circled up again to his roost.

‘He has not forgotten to use his tongue,’ said Baloo, with a chuckle of pride. ‘To think of one so young remembering the Master-Word for the birds too while he was being pulled across-trees!’

‘It was most firmly driven into him,’ said Bagheera. ‘But I am proud of him, and now we must go to the Cold Lairs.’

They all knew where that place was, but few of the Jungle-People ever went there, because what they called the Cold Lairs was an old deserted city, lost and buried in the Jungle, and beasts seldom use a place that men have once used. The wild boar will, but the hunting-tribes do not. Besides, the monkeys lived there as much as they could be said to live anywhere, and no self-respecting animal would come within eyeshot of it except in times of drouth, when the half ruined tanks and reservoirs held a little water.

‘It is half a night’s journey-at full speed,’ said Bagheera, and Baloo looked very serious. ‘I will go as fast as I can,’ he said anxiously.

‘We dare not wait for thee. Follow, Baloo. We must go on the quick-foot—Kaa and I.’

page 5

‘Feet or no feet, I can keep abreast of all thy four,’ said Kaa shortly. Baloo made one effort to hurry, but had to sit down panting, and so they left him to come on later, while Bagheera hurried forward, at the quick panther-canter. Kaa said nothing, but, strive as Bagheera might, the huge Rock Python held level with him. When they came to a hill-stream, Bagheera gained, because he bounded across while Kaa swam, his head and two feet of his neck clearing the water, but on level ground Kaa made up the distance.

‘By the Broken Lock that freed me,’ said Bagheera, when twilight had fallen, ‘thou art no slow goer!’

‘I am hungry,’ said Kaa. ‘Besides, they called me speckled frog.’

‘Worm—earth-worm, and yellow to boot.’

‘All one. Let us go on,’ and Kaa seemed to pour himself along the ground, finding the shortest road with his steady eyes, and keeping to it.

In the Cold Lairs the Monkey-People were not thinking of Mowgli’s friends at all. They had brought the boy to the Lost City, and were very pleased with themselves for the time. Mowgli had never seen an Indian city before, and though this was almost a heap of ruins it seemed very wonderful and splendid. Some king had built it long ago on a little hill. You could still trace the stone causeways that led up to the ruined gates where the last splinters of wood hung to the worn, rusted hinges. Trees had grown into and out of the walls; the battlements were tumbled down and decayed, and wild creepers hung out of the windows of the towers on the walls in bushy hanging clumps.

A great roofless palace crowned the hill, and the marble of the courtyards and the fountains was split, and stained with red and green, and the very cobble-stones in the courtyard where the king’s elephants used to live had been thrust up and apart by grasses and young trees. From the palace you could see the rows and rows of roofless houses that made up the city looking like empty honeycombs filled with blackness; the shapeless block of stone that had been an idol, in the square where four roads met; the pits and dimples at street-corners where the public wells once stood, and the shattered domes of temples with wild figs sprouting on their sides. The monkeys called the place their city, and pretended to despise the Jungle-People because they lived in the forest. And yet they never knew what the buildings were made for nor how to use them. They would sit in circles on the hall of the king’s council chamber, and scratch for fleas and pretend to be men; or they would run in and out of the roofless houses and collect pieces of plaster and old bricks in a corner, and forget where they had hidden them, and fight and cry in scuffling crowds, and then break off to play up and down the terraces of the king’s garden, where they would shake the rose-trees and the oranges in sport to see the fruit and flowers fall. They explored all the passages and dark tunnels in the palace and the hundreds of little dark rooms, but they never remembered what they had seen and what they had not; and so drifted about in ones and twos or crowds telling each other that they were doing as men did. They drank at the tanks and made the water all muddy, and then they fought over it, and then they would all rush together in mobs and shout: ‘There is no one in the jungle so wise and good and clever and strong and gentle as the Bandar-log.’ Then all would begin again till they grew tired of the city and went back to the tree-tops, hoping the Jungle-People would notice them.

Mowgli, who had been trained under the Law of the Jungle, did not like or understand this kind of life. The monkeys dragged him into the Cold Lairs late in the afternoon, and instead of going to sleep, as Mowgli would have done after a long journey, they joined hands and danced about and sang their foolish songs. One of the monkeys made a speech and told his companions that Mowgli’s capture marked a new thing in the history of the Bandar-log, for Mowgli was going to show them how to weave sticks and canes together as a protection against rain and cold. Mowgli picked up some creepers and began to work them in and out, and the monkeys tried to imitate; but in a very few minutes they lest interest and began to pull their friends’ tails or jump up and down on all fours, coughing.

‘I wish to eat,’ said Mowgli. ‘I am a stranger in this part of the jungle. Bring me food, or give me leave to hunt here.’

Twenty or thirty monkeys bounded away to bring him nuts and wild pawpaws; but they fell to fighting on the road, and it was too much trouble to go back with what was left of the fruit. Mowgli was sore and angry as well as hungry, and he roamed through the empty city giving the Stranger’s Hunting Call from time to time, but no one answered him, and Mowgli felt that he had reached a very bad place indeed. ‘All that Baloo has said about the Bandar-log is true,’ he thought to himself. ‘They have no Law, no Hunting Call, and no leaders—nothing but foolish words and little picking thievish hands. So if I am starved or killed here, it will be all my own fault. But I must try to return to my own jungle. Baloo will surely beat me, but that is better than chasing silly rose-leaves with the Bandar-log.’

No sooner had he walked to the city wall than the monkeys pulled him back, telling him that he did not know how happy he was, and pinching him to make him grateful. He set his teeth and said nothing, but went with the shouting monkeys to a terrace above the red sandstone reservoirs that were half-full of rain-water. There was a ruined summer-house of white marble in the centre of the terrace, built for queens dead a hundred years ago. The domed roof had half fallen in and blocked up the underground passage from the palace by which the queens used to enter; but the walls were made of screens of marble tracery—beautiful milk-white fretwork, set with agates and cornelians and jasper and lapis lazuli, and as the moon came up behind the hill it shone through the open-work, casting shadows on the ground like black velvet embroidery. Sore, sleepy, and hungry as he was, Mowgli could not help laughing when the Bandar-log began, twenty at a time, to tell him how great and wise and strong and gentle they were, and how foolish he was to wish to leave them. ‘We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true,’ they shouted. ‘Now, as you are a new listener and can carry our words back to the Jungle-People so that they may notice us in future, we will tell you all about our most excellent selves.’ Mowgli made no objection, and the monkeys gathered by hundreds and hundreds on the terrace to listen to their own speakers singing the praises of the Bandar-log, and whenever a speaker stopped for want of breath they would all shout together: ‘This is true; we all say so.’ Mowgli nodded and blinked, and said ‘Yes’ when they asked him a question, and his head spun with the noise. ‘Tabaqui the jackal must have bitten all these people,’ he said to himself, ‘and now they have the madness. Certainly this is dewanee, the madness. Do they never go to sleep? Now there is a cloud coming to cover that moon. If it were only a big enough cloud I might try to run away in the darkness. But I am tired.’

That same cloud was being watched by two good friends in the ruined ditch below the city wall, for Bagheera and Kaa, knowing well how dangerous the Monkey-People were in large numbers, did not wish to run any risks. The monkeys never fight unless they are a hundred to one, and few in the Jungle care for those odds.

‘I will go to the west wall,’ Kaa whispered, ‘and come down swiftly with the slope of the ground in my favour. They will not throw themselves upon my back in their hundreds, but—’

‘I know it,’ said Bagheera. ‘Would that Baloo were here; but we must do what we can. When that cloud covers the moon I shall go to the terrace. They hold some sort of council there over the boy.’

page 6

‘Good hunting!’ said Kaa grimly, and glided away to the west wall. That happened to be the least ruined of any, and the big snake was delayed a while before he could find a way up the stones. The cloud hid the moon, and as Mowgli wondered what would come next he heard Bagheera’s light feet on the terrace. The Black Panther had raced up the slope almost without a sound and was striking—he knew better than to waste time in biting—right and left among the monkeys, who were seated round Mowgli in circles fifty and sixty deep. There was a howl of fright and rage, and then as Bagheera tripped on the rolling kicking bodies beneath him, a monkey shouted: ‘There is only one here! Kill him! Kill!’ A scufing mass of monkeys, biting, scratching, tearing, and pulling, closed over Bagheera, while five or six laid hold of Mowgli, dragged him up the wall of the summer-house and pushed him through the hole of the broken dome. A man trained boy would have been badly bruised, for the fall was a good fifteen feet, but Mowgli fell as Baloo had taught him to fall, and landed on his feet.

‘Stay there,’ shouted the monkeys, ‘till we have killed thy friends, and later we will play with thee—if the Poison-People leave thee alive.’

‘We be of one blood, ye and I,’ said Mowgli, quickly giving the Snake’s Call. He could hear rustling and hissing in the rubbish all round him and gave the Call a second time, to make sure.

‘Even ssso! Down hoods all!’ said half-adozen low voices (every ruin in India becomes sooner or later a dwelling-place of snakes, and the old summer-house was alive with cobras). ‘Stand still, Little Brother, for thy feet may do us harm.’

Mowgli stood as quietly as he could, peering through the open-work and listening to the furious din of the fight round the Black Panther—the yells and chatterings and scufflings, and Bagheera’s deep, hoarse cough as he backed and bucked and twisted and plunged under the heaps, of his enemies. For the first time since he was born, Bagheera was fighting for his life.

‘Baloo must be at hand; Bagheera would not have come alone,’ Mowgli thought; and then he called aloud: ‘To the tank, Bagheera! Roll to the water-tank. Roll and plunge! Get to the water!’

Bagheera heard, and the cry that told him Mowgli was safe gave him new courage. He worked his way desperately, inch by inch, straight for the reservoirs, hitting in silence. Then from the ruined wall nearest the Jungle rose up the rumbling war-shout of Baloo. The old bear had done his best, but he could not come before. ‘Bagheera,’ he shouted, ‘I am here. I climb! I haste! Ahuwora! The stones slip under my feet! Wait my coming, O most infamous Bandar-log!’ He panted up the terrace only to disappear to the head in a wave of monkeys, but he threw himself squarely on his haunches, and, spreading out his fore-paws, hugged as many as he could hold, and then began to hit with a regular bat-bat-bat, like the flipping strokes of a paddle-wheel. A crash and a splash told Mowgli that Bagheera had fought his way to the tank where the monkeys could not follow. The panther lay gasping for breath, his head just out of water, while the monkeys stood three deep on the red steps, dancing up and down with rage, ready to spring upon him from all sides if he came out to help Baloo. It was then that Bagheera lifted up his dripping chin, and in despair gave the Snake’s Call for protection ‘We be of one blood, ye and I’—for he believed that Kaa had turned tail at the last minute. Even Baloo, half smothered under the monkeys on the edge of the terrace, could not help chuckling as he heard the Black Panther asking for help.

Kaa had only just worked his way over the west wall, landing with a wrench that dislodged a coping-stone into the ditch. He had no intention of losing any advantage of the ground, and coiled and uncoiled himself once or twice, to be sure that every foot of his long body was in working order. All that while the fight with Baloo went on, and the monkeys yelled in the tank around Bagheera, and Mang the Bat, flying to and fro, carried the news of the great battle over the Jungle, till even Hathi the Wild Elephant trumpeted, and, far away, scattered bands of the Monkey-Folk woke and came leaping along the tree-roads to help their comrades in the Cold Lairs, and the noise of the fight roused all the day-birds for miles round. Then Kaa came straight, quickly, and anxious to kill. The fighting-strength of a python is in the driving blow of his head backed by all the strength and weight of his body. If you can imagine a lance, or a battering-ram, or a hammer weighing nearly half a ton driven by a cool, quiet mind living in the handle of it, you can roughly imagine what Kaa was like when he fought. A python four or five feet long can knock a man down if he hits, him fairly in the chest, and Kaa was thirty feet long, as you know. His first stroke was delivered into the heart of the crowd round Baloo—was sent home with shut
mouth in silence, and there was no need of a second. The monkeys scattered with cries of —‘Kaa! It is Kaa! Run! Run!’

Generations of monkeys had been scared into good behaviour by the stories their elders told them of Kaa, the night-thief, who could slip along the branches as quietly as moss grows, and steal away the strongest monkey that ever lived; of old Kaa, who could make himself look so like a dead branch or a rotten stump that the wisest were deceived, till the branch caught them. Kaa was everything that the monkeys feared in the Jungle, for none of them knew the limits of his power, none of them could look him in the face, and none had ever come alive out of his hug. And so they ran, stammering with terror, to the walls and the roofs of the houses, and Baloo drew a deep breath of relief. His fur was much thicker than Bagheera’s, but he had suffered sorely in the fight. Then Kaa opened his mouth for the first time and spoke one long hissing word, and the far-away monkeys, hurrying to the defence of the Cold Lairs, stayed where they were, cowering, till the loaded branches bent and crackled under them. The monkeys on the walls and the empty houses stopped their cries, and in the stillness that fell upon the city Mowgli heard Bagheera shaking his wet sides as he came up from the tank. Then the clamour broke out again. The monkeys leaped higher up the walls; they clung round the necks of the big stone idols and shrieked as they skipped along the battlements, while Mowgli, dancing in the summer-house, put his eye to the screen-work and hooted owl-fashion between his front teeth, to show his derision and contempt.

‘Get the Man-cub out of that trap; I can do no more,’ Bagheera gasped. ‘Let us take the Man-cub and go. They may attack again.’

‘They will not move till I order them. Stay you sssso!’ Kaa hissed, and the city was silent once more. ‘I could not come before, Brother, but I think I heard thee call’—this was to Bagheera.

‘I—I may have cried out in the battle,’ Bagheera answered. ‘Baloo, art thou hurt?’

‘I am not sure that they have not pulled me into a hundred little bearlings,’ said Baloo gravely, shaking one leg after the other. ‘Wow! I am sore. Kaa, we owe thee, I think, our lives—Bagheera and I’

‘No matter. Where is the Manling?’

‘Here, in a trap. I cannot climb out,’ cried Mowgli. The curve of the broken dome was above his head.

‘Take him away. He dances like Mao the Peacock. He will crush our young,’ said the cobras inside.

‘Hah!’ said Kaa, with a chuckle, ‘he has friends everywhere, this Manling. Stand back, Manling; and hide you, O Poison-People. I break down the wall.’

page 7

Kaa looked carefully till he found a discoloured crack in the marble tracery showing a weak spot, made two or three light taps with his head to get the distance, and then, lifting up six feet of his body clear of the ground, sent home half-a-dozen full-power, smashing blows, nose-first. The screen-work broke and fell away in a cloud of dust and rubbish, and Mowgli leaped through the opening and flung himself between Baloo and Bagheera—an arm round each big neck.

‘Art thou hurt?’ said Baloo, hugging him softly.

‘I am sore, hungry, and not a little bruised; but, oh, they have handled ye grievously, my Brothers! Ye bleed.’

‘Others also,’ said Bagheera, licking his lips, and looking at the monkey-dead on the terrace and round the tank.

‘It is nothing, it is nothing, if thou art safe, O my pride of all little frogs!’ whimpered Baloo.

‘Of that we shall judge later,’ said Bagheera, in a dry voice that Mowgli did not at all like. ‘But here is Kaa, to whom we owe the battle and thou owest thy life. Thank him according to our customs, Mowgli.’

Mowgli turned and saw the great python’s head swaying a foot above his own.

‘So this is the Manling,’ said Kaa. ‘Very soft is his skin, and he is not so unlike the Bandar-log. Have a care, Manling, that I do not mistake, thee for a monkey some twilight when I have newly changed my coat.’

‘We be of one blood, thou and I,’ Mowgli answered. ‘I take my life from thee, to-night. My kill shall be thy kill if ever thou art hungry, O Kaa.’

‘All thanks, Little Brother,’ said Kaa, though his eyes twinkled. ‘And what may so bold a hunter kill? I ask that I may follow when next he goes abroad.’

‘I kill nothing,—I am too little,—but I drive goats toward such as can use them. When thou art empty come to me and see if I speak the truth. I have some skill in these’—he held out his hands—‘and if ever thou art in a trap, I may pay the debt which I owe to thee, to Bagheera, and to Baloo, here. Good hunting to ye all, my masters.’

‘Well said,’ growled Baloo, for Mowgli had returned thanks very prettily. The python dropped his head lightly for a minute on Mowgli’s shoulder. ‘A brave heart and a courteous tongue,’ said he. ‘They shall carry thee far through the Jungle, Manling. But now go hence quickly with thy friends. Go and sleep, for the moon sets, and what follows it is not well that thou shouldst see.’

The moon was sinking behind the hills, and the lines of trembling monkeys huddled together on the walls and battlements looked like ragged, shaky fringes of things. Baloo went down to the tank for a drink, and Bagheera began to put his fur in order, as Kaa glided out into the centre of the terrace and brought his jaws together with a ringing snap that drew all the monkeys’ eyes upon him.

‘The moon sets,’ he said. ‘Is there yet light to see?’

From the walls came a moan like the wind in the tree-tops: ‘We see, O Kaa.’

‘Good. Begins now the Dance—the Dance of the Hunger of Kaa. Sit still and watch.’

He turned twice or thrice in a big circle, weaving his head from right to left. Then he began making loops and figures of eight with his body, and soft, oozy triangles that melted into squares and five-sided figures, and coiled mounds, never resting, never hurrying, and never stopping his low, humming song. It grew darker and darker, till at last the dragging, shifting coils disappeared, but they could hear the rustle of the scales.

Baloo and Bagheera stood still as stone, growling in their throats, their neck-hair bristling, and Mowgli watched and wondered.

‘Bandar-log,’ said the voice of Kaa at last, ‘can ye stir foot or hand without my order? Speak!’

‘Without thy order we cannot stir foot or hand, O Kaa!’

‘Good! Come all one pace closer to me.’

The lines of the monkeys swayed forward helplessly, and Baloo and Bagheera took one stiff step forward with them.

‘Closer!’ hissed Kaa, and they all moved again.

Mowgli laid his lands on Baloo and Bagheera to get them away, and the two great beasts started as though they had been waked from a dream.

‘Keep thy hand on my shoulder,’ Bagheera whispered. ‘Keep it there, or I must go backmust go back to Kaa. Aah!’

‘It is only old Kaa making circles on the dust,’ said Mowgli; ‘let us go’; and the three slipped off through a gap in the walls to the Jungle.

‘Whoof!’ said Baloo, when he stood under the still trees again. ‘Never more will I make an ally of Kaa,’ and he shook himself all over.

‘He knows more than we,’ said Bagheera, trembling. ‘In a little time, had I stayed, I should have walked down his throat.’

‘Many will walk by that road before the moon rises again,’ said Baloo. ‘He will have good hunting—after his own fashion.’

‘But what was the meaning of it all?’ said Mowgli, who did not know anything of a python’s
powers of fascination. ‘I saw no more than a big snake making foolish circles till the dark came. And his nose was all sore. Ho! Ho!’

‘Mowgli,’ said Bagheera angrily, ‘his nose was sore on thy account; as my ears and sides and paws and Baloo’s neck and shoulders are bitten on thy account. Neither Baloo nor Bagheera will be able to hunt with pleasure for many days.’

‘It is nothing,’ said Baloo; ‘we have the Man-cub again.’

‘True; but he has cost us heavily in time which might have been spent in good hunting, in wounds, in hair—I am half plucked along my back,—and, last of all, in honour. For, remember, Mowgli, I, who am the Black Panther, was forced to call upon Kaa for protection, and Baloo and I were both made stupid as little birds by the Hunger-Dance. All this, Mancub, came of thy playing with the Bandar-log.’

‘True; it is true,’ said Mowgli sorrowfully. ‘I am an evil Man-cub, and my stomach is sad in me.’

‘Mf! What says the Law of the Jungle, Baloo?’

Baloo did not wish to bring Mowgli into any more trouble, but he could not tamper with the Law, so he mumbled: ‘Sorrow never stays punishment. But remember, Bagheera, he is very little.’

‘I will remember; but he has done mischief, and blows must be dealt now. Mowgli, hast thou anything to say?’

‘Nothing. I did wrong. Baloo and thou are wounded. It is just.’

Bagheera gave him half-a-dozen love-taps; from a panther’s point of view they would hardly have waked one of his own cubs, but for a seven year-old boy they amounted to as severe a beating as you could wish to avoid. When it was all over Mowgli sneezed, and picked himself up without a word.

‘Now,’ said Bagheera, ‘jump on my back, Little Brother, and we will go home.’

One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward.

Mowgli laid his head down on Bagheera’s back and slept so deeply that he never waked when he was put down by Mother Wolf’s side in the home-cave.

page 1 of 6

IT was too hot to run about in the open, so Dan asked their friend, old Hobden, to take their own dinghy from the pond and put her on the brook at the bottom of the garden. Her painted name was the Daisy, but for exploring expeditions she was the Golden Hind or the Long Serpent, or some such suitable name. Dan hiked and howked with a boat-hook (the brook was too narrow for sculls), and Una punted with a piece of hop-pole. When they came to a very shallow place (the Golden Hind drew quite three inches of water) they disembarked and scuffled her over the gravel by her tow-rope, and when they reached the overgrown banks beyond the garden they pulled themselves up stream by the low branches.That day they intended to discover the North Cape like ‘Othere, the old sea-captain,’ in the book of verses which Una had brought with her; but on account of the heat they changed it to a voyage up the Amazon and the sources of the Nile. Even on the shaded water the air was hot and heavy with drowsy scents, while outside, through breaks in the trees, the sunshine burned the pasture like fire. The kingfisher was asleep on his watching-branch, and the blackbirds scarcely took the trouble to dive into the next bush. Dragon-flies wheeling and clashing were the only things at work, except the moor-hens and a big Red Admiral, who flapped down out of the shine for a drink.

When they reached Otter Pool the Golden Hind grounded comfortably on a shallow, and they lay beneath a roof of close green, watching the water trickle over the flood-gates down the mossy brick chute from the mill-stream to the brook. A big trout—the children knew him well—rolled head and shoulders at some fly that sailed round the bend, while once in just so often the brook rose a fraction of an inch against all the wet pebbles, and they watched the slow draw and shiver of a breath of air through the tree-tops. Then the little voices of the slipping water began again.

‘It’s like the shadows talking, isn’t it?’ said Una. She had given up trying to read. Dan lay over the bows, trailing his hands in the current. They heard feet on the gravel-bar that runs half across the pool and saw Sir Richard Dalyngridge standing over them.

‘Was yours a dangerous voyage?’ he asked, smiling.

‘She bumped a lot, sir,’ said Dan. ‘There’s hardly any water this summer.’

‘Ah, the brook was deeper and wider when my children played at Danish pirates. Are you piratefolk?’

‘Oh, no. We gave up being pirates years ago,’ explained Una. ‘We’re nearly always explorers now. Sailing round the world, you know.’

‘Round?’ said Sir Richard. He sat him in the comfortable crotch of an old ash-root on the bank. ‘How can it be round?’

‘Wasn’t it in your books?’ Dan suggested. He had been doing geography at his last lesson.

‘I can neither write nor read,’ he replied. ‘Canst thou read, child?’

‘Yes,’ said Dan, ‘barring the very long words.’

‘Wonderful! Read to me, that I may hear for myself.’

Dan flushed, but opened the book and began—gabbling a little—at ‘The Discoverer of the North Cape.’

‘Othere, the old sea captain,
Who dwelt in Helgoland,
To King Alfred, the lover of truth,
Brought a snow-white walrus-tooth,
Which he held in his brown right hand.

‘But—but—this I know! This is an old song! This I have heard sung! This is a miracle,’ Sir Richard interrupted. ‘Nay, do not stop!’ He leaned forward, and the shadows of the leaves slipped and slid upon his chain-mail.

‘I ploughed the land with horses,
But my heart was ill at ease,
For the old sea-faring men
Came to me now and then
With their sagas of the seas.’

His hand fell on the hilt of the great sword. ‘This is truth,’ he cried, ‘for so did it happen to me,’ and he beat time delightedly to the tramp of verse after verse.

‘“And now the land,” said Othere,
“Bent southward suddenly,
And I followed the curving shore,
And ever southward bore
Into a nameless sea.”’

‘A nameless sea!’ he repeated. ‘So did I—so did Hugh and I’

‘Where did you go? Tell us,’ said Una.

‘Wait. Let me hear all first.’ So Dan read to the poem’s very end.

‘Good,’ said the knight. ‘That is Othere’s tale—even as I have heard the men in the Dane ships sing it. Not in those same valiant words, but something like to them.’

‘Have you ever explored North?’ Dan shut the book.

‘Nay. My venture was South. Farther South than any man has fared, Hugh and I went down with Witta and his heathen.’ He jerked the tall sword forward, and leaned on it with both hands; but his eyes looked long past them.

‘I thought you always lived here,’ said Una, timidly.

‘Yes; while my Lady Ælueva lived. But she died. She died. Then, my eldest son being a man, I asked De Aquila’s leave that he should hold the Manor while I went on some journey or pilgrimage—to forget. De Aquila, whom the Second William had made Warden of Pevensey in Earl Mortain’s place, was very old then, but still he rode his tall, roan horses, and in the saddle he looked like a little white falcon. When Hugh, at Dallington over yonder, heard what I did, he sent for my second son, whom being unmarried he had ever looked upon as his own child, and, by De Aquila’s leave, gave him the Manor of Dallington to hold till he should return. Then Hugh came with me.’

page 2

‘When did this happen?’ said Dan.

‘That I can answer to the very day, for as we rode with De Aquila by Pevensey—have I said that he was Lord of Pevensey and of the Honour of the Eagle?—to the Bordeaux ship that fetched him his wines yearly out of France, a Marsh man ran to us crying that he had seen a great black goat which bore on his back the body of the King, and that the goat had spoken to him. On that same day Red William our King, the Conqueror’s son, died of a secret arrow while he hunted in a forest. “This is a cross matter,” said De Aquila, “to meet on the threshold of a journey. If Red William be dead I may have to fight for my lands. Wait a little.”

‘My Lady being dead, I cared nothing for signs and omens, nor Hugh either. We took that wine-ship to go to Bordeaux; but the wind failed while we were yet in sight of Pevensey, a thick mist hid us, and we drifted with the tide along the cliffs to the west. Our company was, for the most part, merchants returning to France, and we were laden with wool and there were three couple of tall hunting-dogs chained to the rail. Their master was a knight of Artois. His name I never learned, but his shield bore gold pieces on a red ground, and he limped, much as I do, from a wound which he had got in his youth at Mantes siege. He served the Duke of Burgundy against the Moors in Spain, and was returning to that war with his dogs. He sang us strange Moorish songs that first night, and half persuaded us to go with him. I was on pilgrimage to forget—which is what no pilgrimage brings. I think I would have gone, but . . . .

‘Look you how the life and fortune of man changes! Towards morning a Dane ship, rowing silently, struck against us in the mist, and while we rolled hither and yon Hugh, leaning over the rail, fell outboard. I leaped after him, and we two tumbled aboard the Dane, and were caught and bound ere we could rise. Our own ship was swallowed up in the mist. I judge the Knight of the Gold Pieces muzzled his dogs with his cloak, lest they should give tongue and betray the merchants, for I heard their baying suddenly stop.

‘We lay bound among the benches till morning, when the Danes dragged us to the high deck by the steering-place, and their captain—Witta, he was called—turned us over with his foot. Bracelets of gold from elbow to armpit he wore, and his red hair was long as a woman’s, and came down in plaited locks on his shoulder. He was stout, with bowed legs and long arms. He spoiled us of all we had, but when he laid hand on Hugh’s sword and saw the runes on the blade hastily he thrust it back. Yet his covetousness overcame him and he tried again and again, and the third time the Sword sang loud and angrily, so that the rowers leaned on their oars to listen. Here they all spoke together, screaming like gulls, and a Yellow Man, such as I have never seen, came to the high deck and cut our bonds. He was yellow—not from sickness, but by nature—yellow as honey, and his eyes stood endwise in his head.’

‘How do you mean.?’ said Una, her chin on her hand.

‘Thus,’ said Sir Richard He put a finger to the corner of each eye, and pushed it up till his eyes narrowed to slits.

‘Why, you look just like a Chinaman!’ cried Dan. ‘Was the man a Chinaman?’

‘I know not what that may be. Witta had found him half dead among ice on the shores of Muscovy. We thought he was a devil. He crawled before us and brought food in a silver dish which these sea-wolves had robbed from some rich abbey, and Witta with his own hands gave us wine. He spoke a little in French, a little in South Saxon, and much in the Northman’s tongue. We asked him to set us ashore, promising to pay him better ransom than he would get price if he sold us to the Moors—as once befell a knight of my acquaintance sailing from Flushing.

‘“Not by my father Guthrum’s head,” said he. “The Gods sent ye into my ship for a luck-offering.”

‘At this I quaked, for I knew it was still the Danes’ custom to sacrifice captives to their gods for fair weather.

‘“A plague on thy four long bones!” said Hugh. “What profit canst thou make of poor old pilgrims that can neither work nor fight?”

‘“Gods forbid I should fight against thee, poor Pilgrim with the Singing Sword,” said he. “Come with us and be poor no more. Thy teeth are far apart, which is a sure sign thou wilt travel and grow rich.”

‘“What if we will not come?” said Hugh.

‘“Swim to England or France,” said Witta. “We are midway between the two. Unless ye choose to drown yourselves no hair of your head will be harmed here aboard. We think ye bring us luck, and I myself know the runes on that Sword are good.” He turned and bade them hoist sail.

‘Hereafter all made way for us as we walked about the ship, and the ship was full of wonders.’

‘What was she like?’ said Dan.

‘Long, low, and narrow, bearing one mast with a red sail, and rowed by fifteen oars a side,’ the knight answered. ‘At her bows was a deck under which men might lie, and at her stern another shut off by a painted door from the rowers’ benches. Here Hugh and I slept, with Witta and the Yellow Man, upon tapestries as soft as wool. I remember’—he laughed to himself—‘when first we entered there a loud voice cried, “Out swords! Out swords! Kill, kill!” Seeing us start Witta laughed, and showed us it was but a great-beaked grey bird with a red tail. He sat her on his shoulder, and she called for bread and wine hoarsely, and prayed him to kiss her. Yet she was no more than a silly bird. But—ye knew this?’ He looked at their smiling faces.

‘We weren’t laughing at you,’ said Una. ‘That must have been a parrot. It’s just what Pollies do.’

‘So we learned later. But here is another marvel. The Yellow Man, whose name was Kitai, had with him a brown box. In the box was a blue bowl with red marks upon the rim, and within the bowl, hanging from a fine thread, was a piece of iron no thicker than that grass stem, and as long, maybe, as my spur, but straight. In this iron, said Witta, abode an Evil Spirit which Kitai, the Yellow Man, had brought by Art Magic out of his own country that lay three years’ journey southward. The Evil Spirit strove day and night to return to his country, and therefore, look you, the iron needle pointed continually to the South.’

‘South?’ said Dan, suddenly, and put his hand into his pocket.

‘With my own eyes I saw it. Every day and all day long, though the ship rolled, though the sun and the moon and the stars were hid, this blind Spirit in the iron knew whither it would go, and strained to the South. Witta called it the Wise Iron, because it showed him his way across the unknowable seas.’ Again Sir Richard looked keenly at the children. ‘How think ye? Was it sorcery?’

page 3

‘Was it anything like this?’ Dan fished out his old brass pocket-compass, that generally lived with his knife and key-ring. ‘The glass has got cracked, but the needle waggles all right, sir.’

The knight drew a long breath of wonder. ‘Yes, yes. The Wise Iron shook and swung in just this fashion. Now it is still. Now it points to the South.’

‘North,’ said Dan.

‘Nay, South! There is the South,’ said Sir Richard. Then they both laughed, for naturally when one end of a straight compass-needle points to the North, the other must point to the South.

‘Té,’ said Sir Richard, clicking his tongue. ‘There can be no sorcery if a child carries it. Wherefore does it point South—or North?’

‘Father says that nobody knows,’ said Una.

Sir Richard looked relieved. ‘Then it may still be magic. It was magic to us. And so we voyaged. When the wind served we hoisted sail, and lay all up along the windward rail, our shields on our backs to break the spray. When it failed, they rowed with long oars; the Yellow Man sat by the Wise Iron, and Witta steered. At first I feared the great white-flowering waves, but as I saw how wisely Witta led his ship among them I grew bolder. Hugh liked it well from the first. My skill is not upon the water; and rocks, and whirlpools such as we saw by the West Isles of France, where an oar caught on a rock and broke, are much against my stomach. We sailed South across a stormy sea, where by moonlight, between clouds, we saw a Flanders ship roll clean over and sink. Again, though Hugh laboured with Witta all night, I lay under the deck with the Talking Bird, and cared not whether I lived or died. There is a sickness of the sea which for three days is pure death! When we next saw land Witta said it was Spain, and we stood out to sea. That coast was full of ships busy in the Duke’s war against the Moors, and we feared to be hanged by the Duke’s men or sold into slavery by the Moors. So we put into a small harbour which Witta knew. At night men came down with loaded mules, and Witta exchanged amber out of the North against little wedges of iron and packets of beads in earthen pots. The pots he put under the decks, and the wedges of iron he laid on the bottom of the ship after he had cast out the stones and shingle which till then had been our ballast. Wine, too, he bought for lumps of sweet-smelling grey amber—a little morsel no bigger than a thumbnail purchased a cask of wine. But I speak like a merchant.’

‘No, no. Tell us what you had to eat,’ cried Dan.

‘Meat dried in the sun, and dried fish and ground beans, Witta took in; and corded frails of a certain sweet, soft fruit, which the Moors use, which is like paste of figs, but with thin, long stones. Aha! Dates is the name.

‘“Now,” said Witta, when the ship was loaded, “I counsel you strangers to pray to your gods, for, from here on, our road is No Man’s road.” He and his men killed a black goat for sacrifice on the bows; and the Yellow Man brought out a small, smiling image of dull-green stone and burned incense before it. Hugh and I commended our-selves to God, and Saint Barnabas, and Our Lady of the Assumption, who was specially dear to my Lady. We were not young, but I think no shame to say whenas we drove out of that secret harbour at sunrise over a still sea, we two rejoiced and sang as did the knights of old when they followed our great Duke to England. Yet was our leader an heathen pirate; all our proud fleet but one galley perilously overloaded; for guidance we leaned on a pagan sorcerer; and our port was beyond the world’s end. Witta told us that his father Guthrum had once in his life rowed along the shores of Africa to a land where naked men sold gold for iron and beads. There had he bought much gold, and no few elephants’ teeth, and thither by help of the Wise Iron would Witta go. Witta feared nothing—except to be poor.

‘“My father told me,” said Witta, “that a great Shoal runs three days’ sail out from that land, and south of the shoal lies a Forest which grows in the sea. South and east of the Forest my father came to a place where the men hid gold in their hair; but all that country, he said, was full of Devils who lived in trees, and tore folk limb from limb. How think ye?”

‘“Gold or no gold,” said Hugh, fingering his sword, “it is a joyous venture. Have at these devils of thine, Witta!”

‘“Venture!” said Witta, sourly. “I am only a poor sea-thief. I do not set my life adrift on a plank for joy, or the venture. Once I beach ship again at Stavanger, and feel the wife’s arms round my neck, I’ll seek no more ventures. A ship is heavier care than a wife or cattle.”

‘He leaped down among the rowers, chiding them for their little strength and their great stomachs. Yet Witta was a wolf in fight, and a very fox in cunning.

‘We were driven South by a storm, and for three days and three nights he took the stern-oar, and threddled the longship through the sea. When it rose beyond measure he brake a pot of whale’s oil upon the water, which wonderfully smoothed it, and in that anointed patch he turned her head to the wind and threw out oars at the end of a rope, to make, he said, an anchor at which we lay rolling sorely, but dry. This craft his father Guthrum had shown him. He knew, too, all the Leech-Book of Bald, who was a wise doctor, and he knew the Ship-Book of Hlaf the Woman, who robbed Egypt. He knew all the care of a ship.

‘After the storm we saw a mountain whose top was covered with snow and pierced the clouds. The grasses under this mountain, boiled and eaten, are a good cure for soreness of the gums and swelled ankles. We lay there eight days, till men in skins threw stones at us. When the heat increased Witta spread a cloth on bent sticks above the rowers, for the wind failed between the Island of the Mountain and the shore of Africa, which is east of it. That shore is sandy, and we rowed along it within three bowshots. Here we saw whales, and fish in the shape of shields, but longer than our ship. Some slept, some opened their mouths at us, and some danced on the hot waters. The water was hot to the hand, and the sky was hidden by hot, grey mists, out of which blew a fine dust that whitened our hair and beards of a morning. Here, too, were fish that flew in the air like birds. They would fall on the laps of the rowers, and when we went ashore we would roast and eat them.’

The knight paused to see if the children doubted him, but they only nodded and said, ‘Go on.’

The yellow land lay on our left, the grey sea on our right. Knight though I was, I pulled my oar amongst the rowers. I caught seaweed and dried it, and stuffed it between the pots of beads lest they should break. Knighthood is for the land. At sea, look you, a man is but a spurless rider on a bridleless horse. I learned to make strong knots in ropes—yes, and to join two ropes end to end, so that even Witta could scarcely see where they had been married. But Hugh had tenfold more sea-cunning than I. Witta gave him charge of the rowers of the left side. Thorkild of Borkum, a man with a broken nose, that wore a Norman steel cap, had the rowers of the right, and each side rowed and sang against the other. They saw that no man was idle. Truly, as Hugh said, and Witta would laugh at him, a ship is all more care than a Manor.

page 4

‘How? Thus. There was water to fetch from the shore when we could find it, as well as wild fruit and grasses, and sand for scrubbing of the decks and benches to keep them sweet. Also we hauled the ship out on low islands and emptied all her gear, even to the iron wedges, and burned off the weed, that had grown on her, with torches of rush, and smoked below the decks with rushes dampened in salt water, as Hlaf the Woman orders in her Ship-Book. Once when we were thus stripped, and the ship lay propped on her keel, the bird cried, “Out swords!” as though she saw an enemy. Witta vowed he would wring her neck.’

‘Poor Polly! Did he?’ said Una.

‘Nay. She was the ship’s bird. She could call all the rowers by name . . . . Those were good days—for a wifeless man—with Witta and his heathen—beyond the world’s end . . . . After many weeks we came on the Great Shoal which stretched, as Witta’s father had said, far out to sea. We skirted it till we were giddy with the sight and dizzy with the sound of bars and breakers, and when we reached land again we found a naked black people dwelling among woods, who for one wedge of iron loaded us with fruits and grasses and eggs. Witta scratched his head at them in sign he would buy gold. They had no gold, but they understood the sign (all the goldtraders hide their gold in their thick hair), for they pointed along the coast. They beat, too, on their chests with their clenched hands, and that, if we had known it, was an evil sign.’

‘What did it mean?’ said Dan.

‘Patience. Ye shall hear. We followed the coast eastward sixteen days (counting time by sword-cuts on the helm-rail) till we came to the Forest in the Sea. Trees grew there out of mud, arched upon lean and high roots, and many muddy
waterways ran allwhither into darkness under the trees. Here we lost the sun. We followed the winding channels between the trees, and where we could not row we laid hold of the crusted roots and hauled ourselves along. The water was foul, and great glittering flies tormented us. Morning and evening a blue mist covered the mud, which bred fevers. Four of our rowers sickened, and were bound to their benches, lest they should leap overboard and be eaten by the monsters of the mud. The Yellow Man lay sick beside the Wise Iron, rolling his head and talking in his own tongue. Only the Bird throve. She sat on Witta’s shoulder and screamed in that noisome, silent darkness. Yes; I think it was the silence we most feared.’

He paused to listen to the comfortable home noises of the brook.

‘When we had lost count of time among those black gullies and swashes we heard, as it were, a drum beat far off, and following it we broke into a broad, brown river by a hut in a clearing among fields of pumpkins. We thanked God to see the sun again. The people of the village gave the good welcome, and Witta scratched his head at them (for gold), and showed them our iron and beads. They ran to the bank—we were still in the ship—and pointed to our swords and bows, for always when near shore we lay armed. Soon they fetched store of gold in bars and in dust from their huts, and some great blackened elephant teeth. These they piled on the bank, as though to tempt us, and made signs of dealing blows in
battle, and pointed up to the tree tops, and to the forest behind. Their captain or chief sorcerer then beat on his chest with his fists, and gnashed his teeth.

‘Said Thorkild of Borkum: “Do they mean we must fight for all this gear?” and he half drew sword.

‘“Nay,” said Hugh. “I think they ask us to league against some enemy.”

‘“I like this not,” said Witta, of a sudden. “Back into midstream.”

‘So we did, and sat still all, watching the black folk and the gold they piled on the bank. Again we heard drums beat in the forest, and the people fled to their huts, leaving the gold unguarded.

‘Then Hugh, at the bows, pointed without speech, and we saw a great Devil come out of the forest. He shaded his brows with his hand, and moistened his pink tongue between his lips—thus.’

‘A Devil!’ said Dan, delightfully horrified.

‘Yea. Taller than a man; covered with reddish hair. When he had well regarded our ship, he beat on his chest with his fists till it sounded like rolling drums, and came to the bank swinging all his body between his long arms, and gnashed his teeth at us. Hugh loosed arrow, and pierced him through the throat. He fell roaring, and three other Devils ran out of the forest and hauled him into a tall tree out of sight. Anon they cast down the blood-stained arrow, and lamented together among the leaves. Witta saw the gold on the bank; he was loath to leave it. “Sirs,” said he (no man had spoken till then), “yonder is what we have come so far and so painfully to find, laid out to our very hand. Let us row in while these Devils bewail themselves, and at least bear off what we may.”

‘Bold as a wolf, cunning as a fox was Witta! He set four archers on the foredeck to shoot the Devils if they should leap from the tree, which was close to the bank. He manned ten oars a-side, and bade them watch his hand to row in or back out, and so coaxed he them toward the bank. But none would set foot ashore, though the gold was within ten paces. No man is hasty to his hanging! They whimpered at their oars like beaten hounds, and Witta bit his fingers for rage.

‘Said Hugh of a sudden, “Hark!” At first we thought it was the buzzing of the glittering flies on the water; but it grew loud and fierce, so that all men heard.’

‘What?’ said Dan and Una.

‘It was the Sword.’ Sir Richard patted the smooth hilt. ‘It sang as a Dane sings before battle. “I go,” said Hugh, and he leaped from the bows and fell among the gold. I was afraid to my four bones’ marrow, but for shame’s sake I followed, and Thorkild of Borkum leaped after me. None other came. “Blame me not,” cried Witta behind us, “I must abide by my ship.” We three had no time to blame or praise. We stooped to the gold and threw it back over our shoulders, one hand on our swords and one eye on the tree, which nigh overhung us.

‘I know not how the Devils leaped down, or how the fight began. I heard Hugh cry: “Out! out!” as though he were at Santlache again; I saw Thorkild’s steel cap smitten off his head by a great hairy hand, and I felt an arrow from the ship whistle past my ear. They say that till Witta took his sword to the rowers he could not bring his ship inshore; and each one of the four archers said afterwards that he alone had pierced the Devil that fought me. I do not know. I went to it in my mail-shirt, which saved my skin. With long-sword and belt-dagger I fought for the life against a Devil whose very feet were hands, and who whirled me back and forth like a dead branch. He had me by the waist, my arms to my side, when an arrow from the ship pierced him between the shoulders, and he loosened grip. I passed my sword twice through him, and he crutched himself away between his long arms, coughing and moaning. Next, as I remember, I saw Thorkild of Borkum bare-headed and smiling, leaping up and down before a Devil that leaped and gnashed his teeth. Then Hugh passed, his sword shifted to his left hand, and I wondered why I had not known that Hugh was a left-handed man; and thereafter I remembered nothing till I felt spray on my face, and we were in sunshine on the open sea. That was twenty days after.’

page 5

‘What had happened? Did Hugh die?’ the children asked.

‘Never was such a fight fought by christened man,’ said Sir Richard. ‘An arrow from the ship had saved me from my Devil, and Thorkild of Borkum had given back before his Devil, till the bowmen on the ship could shoot it all full of arrows from near by; but Hugh’s Devil was cunning, and had kept behind trees, where no arrow could reach. Body to body there, by stark strength of sword and hand, had Hugh slain him, and, dying, the Thing had clenched his teeth on the sword. Judge what teeth they were!’

Sir Richard turned the sword again that the children might see the two great chiselled gouges on either side of the blade.

‘Those same teeth met in Hugh’s right arm and side,’ Sir Richard went on. ‘I? Oh, I had no more than a broken foot and a fever. Thorkild’s ear was bitten, but Hugh’s arm and side clean withered away. I saw him where he lay along, sucking a fruit in his left hand. His flesh was wasted off his bones, his hair was patched with white, and his hand was blue-veined like a woman’s. He put his left arm round my neck and whispered, “Take my sword. It has been thine since Hastings, O my brother, but I can never hold hilt again.” We lay there on the high deck talking of Santlache, and, I think, of every day since Santlache, and it came so that we both wept. I was weak, and he little more than a shadow.

‘“Nay-nay,” said Witta, at the helm-rail. “Gold is a good right arm to any man. Looklook at the gold!” He bade Thorkild show us the gold and the elephants’ teeth, as though we had been children. He had brought away all the gold on the bank, and twice as much more, that the people of the village gave him for slaying the Devils. They worshipped us as gods, Thorkild
told me: it was one of their old women healed up Hugh’s poor arm.’

‘How much gold did you get?’ asked Dan.

‘How can I say? Where we came out with wedges of iron under the rowers’ feet we returned with wedges of gold hidden beneath planks. There was dust of gold in packages where we slept and along the side, and crosswise under the benches we lashed the blackened elephants’ teeth.

‘“I had sooner have my right arm,” said Hugh, when he had seen all.

‘“Ahai! That was my fault,” said Witta. “I should have taken ransom and landed you in France when first you came aboard, ten months ago.”

‘“It is over-late now,” said Hugh, laughing.

‘Witta plucked at his long shoulder-lock. “But think!” said he. “If I had let ye go—which I swear I would never have done, for I love ye more than brothers—if I had let ye go, by now ye might have been horribly slain by some mere Moor in the Duke of Burgundy’s war, or ye might have been murdered by land-thieves, or ye might have died of the plague at an inn. Think of this and do not blame me overmuch, Hugh. See! I will only take a half of the gold.’

‘“I blame thee not at all, Witta,” said Hugh. “It was a joyous venture, and we thirty-five here have done what never men have done. If I live till England, I will build me a stout keep over Dallington out of my share.”

‘“I will buy cattle and amber and warm red cloth for the wife,” said Witta, “and I will hold all the land at the head of Stavanger Fiord. Many will fight for me now. But first we must turn North, and with this honest treasure aboard I pray we meet no pirate ships.”

‘We did not laugh. We were careful. We were afraid lest we should lose one grain of our gold, for which we had fought Devils.

‘“Where is the Sorcerer?” said I, for Witta was looking at the Wise Iron in the box, and I could not see the Yellow Man.

‘“He has gone to his own country,” said he. “He rose up in the night while we were beating out of that forest in the mud, and said that he could see it behind the trees. He leaped out on to the mud, and did not answer when we called; so we called no more. He left the Wise Iron, which is all that I care for—and see, the Spirit still points to the South.’

‘We were troubled for fear that the Wise Iron should fail us now that its Yellow Man had gone, and when we saw the Spirit still served us we grew afraid of too strong winds, and of shoals, and of careless leaping fish, and of all the people on all the shores where we landed.’

‘Why?’ said Dan.

‘Because of the gold—because of our gold. Gold changes men altogether. Thorkild of Borkum did not change. He laughed at Witta for his fears, and at us for our counselling Witta to furl sail when the ship pitched at all.

‘“Better be drowned out of hand,” said Thorkild of Borkum, “than go tied to a deck-load of yellow dust.”

‘He was a landless man, and had been slave to some King in the East. He would have beaten out the gold into deep bands to put round the oars, and round the prow.

‘Yet, though he vexed himself for the gold, Witta waited upon Hugh like a woman, lending him his shoulder when the ship rolled, and tying of ropes from side to side that Hugh might hold by them. But for Hugh, he said—and so did all his men—they would never have won the gold. I remember Witta made a little, thin gold ring for our Bird to swing in.

‘Three months we rowed and sailed and went ashore for fruits or to clean the ship. When we saw wild horsemen, riding among sand-dunes, flourishing spears, we knew we were on the Moors’ coast, and stood over north to Spain; and a strong south-west wind bore us in ten days to a coast of high red rocks where we heard a hunting-horn blow among the yellow gorse and knew it was England.

‘“Now find ye Pevensey yourselves,” said Witta. “I love not these narrow ship-filled seas.’

‘He set the dried, salted head of the Devil, which Hugh had killed, high on our prow, and all boats fled from us. Yet, for our gold’s sake, we were more afraid than they. We crept along the coast by night till we came to the chalk cliffs, and so east to Pevensey. Witta would not come ashore with us, though Hugh promised him wine at Dallington enough to swim in. He was on fire to see his wife, and ran into the Marsh after sunset, and there he left us and our share of gold, and backed out on the same tide. He made no promise; he swore no oath; he looked for no thanks; but to Hugh, an armless man, and to me, an old cripple whom he could have flung into the sea, he passed over wedge upon wedge, packet upon packet of gold and dust of gold, and only ceased when we would take no more. As he stooped from the rail to bid us farewell he stripped off his right-arm bracelets and put them all on Hugh’s left, and he kissed Hugh on the cheek. I think when Thorkild of Borkum bade the rowers give way we were near weeping. It is true that Witta was an heathen and a pirate; true it is he held us by force many months in his ship, but I loved that bow-legged, blue-eyed man for his great boldness, his cunningl his skill, and, beyond all, for his simplicity.’

page 6

‘Did he get home all right?’ said Dan.

‘I never knew. We saw him hoist sail under the moon-track and stand away. I have prayed that he found his wife and the children.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘We waited on the Marsh till the day. Then I sat by the gold, all tied in an old sail, while Hugh went to Pevensey, and De Aquila sent us horses.’

Sir Richard crossed hands on his sword-hilt, and stared down stream through the soft warm shadows.

‘A whole shipload of gold!’ said Una, looking at the little Golden Hind. ‘But I’m glad I didn’t see the Devils.’

‘I don’t believe they were Devils,’ Dan whispered back.

‘Eh?’ said Sir Richard. ‘Witta’s father warned him they were unquestionable Devils. One must believe one’s father, and not one’s children. What were my Devils, then?’

Dan flushed all over. ‘I—I only thought,’ he stammered; ‘I’ve got a book called The Gorilla Hunters—it’s a continuation of Coral Island, sir—and it says there that the gorillas (they’re big monkeys, you know) were always chewing iron up.’

‘Not always,’ said Una ‘Only twice.’ They had been reading The Gorilla Hunters in the orchard.

‘Well, anyhow, they always drummed on their chests, like Sir Richard’s did, before they went for people. And they built houses in trees, too.’

‘Ha!’ Sir Richard opened his eyes. ‘Houses like flat nests did our Devils make, where their imps lay and looked at us. I did not see them (I was sick after the fight), but Witta told me, and, lo, ye know it also? Wonderful! Were our Devils only nest-building apes? Is there no sorcery left in the world?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered Dan, uncomfortably. ‘I’ve seen a man take rabbits out of a hat, and he told us we could see how he did it, if we watched hard. And we did.’

‘But we didn’t,’ said Una, sighing. ‘Oh! there’s Puck!’

The little fellow, brown and smiling, peered between two stems of an ash, nodded, and slid down the bank into the cool beside them.

‘No sorcery, Sir Richard?’ he laughed, and blew on a full dandelion head he bad picked.

‘They tell me that Witta’s Wise Iron was a toy. The boy carries such an iron with him. They tell me our Devils were apes, called gorillas!’ said Sir Richard, indignantly.

‘That is the sorcery of books,’ said Puck. ‘I warned thee they were wise children. All people can be wise by reading of books.’

‘But are the books true?’ Sir Richard frowned. ‘I like not all this reading and writing.’

‘Ye-es,’ said Puck, holding the naked dandelion head at arm’s length. ‘But if we hang all fellows who write falsely, why did De Aquila not begin with Gilbert the Clerk? He was false enough.’

‘Poor false Gilbert. Yet, in his fashion, he was bold,’ said Sir Richard.

‘What did he do?’ said Dan.

‘He wrote,’ said Sir Richard. ‘Is the tale meet for children, think you?’ He looked at Puck; but ‘Tell us! Tell us!’ cried Dan and Una together.

page 1 of 4

The night we felt the earth would move
We stole and plucked him by the hand,
Because we loved him with the love
That knows but cannot understand.

And when the roaring hillside broke,
And all our world fell down in rain,
We saved him, we the Little Folk;
But lo! he does not come again!

Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
Of such poor love as wild ones may.
Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
And his own kind drive us away!

Dirge of the Langurs

THERE was once a man in India who was Prime Minister of one of the semi-independent native States in the north-western part of the country. He was a Brahmin, so high-caste that caste ceased to have any particular meaning for him; and his father had been an important official in the gay-coloured tag-rag and bobtail of an old-fashioned Hindu Court. But as Purun Dass grew up he felt that the old order of things was changing, and that if any one wished to get on in the world he must stand well with the English, and imitate all that the English believed to be good. At the same time a native official must keep his own master’s favour. This was a difficult game, but the quiet, close-mouthed young Brahmin, helped by a good English education at a Bombay University, played it coolly, and rose, step by step, to be Prime Minister of the kingdom. That is to say, he held more real power than his master the Maharajah.

When the old king—who was suspicious of the English, their railways and telegraphs—died, Purun Dass stood high with his young successor, who had been tutored by an Englishman; and between them, though he always took care that his master should have the credit, they established schools for little girls, made roads, and started State dispensaries and shows of agricultural implements, and published a yearly blue-book on the ‘Moral and Material Progress of the State,’ and the Foreign Office and the Government of India were delighted. Very few, native States take up English progress altogether, for they will not believe, as Purun Dass showed he did, that what was good for the Englishman must be twice as good for the Asiatic. The Prime Minister became the honoured friend
of Viceroys, and Governors, and Lieutenant-Governors, and medical missionaries, and common missionaries, and hard-riding English officers who came to shoot in the State preserves, as well as of whole hosts of tourists who travelled up and down India in the cold weather, showing how things ought to be managed. In his spare time he would endow scholarships for the study of medicine and manufactures on strictly English lines, and write letters to the Pioneer, the greatest Indian daily paper, explaining his master’s aims and objects.

At last he went to England on a visit, and had to pay enormous sums to the priests when he came back; for even so high-caste a Brahmin as Purun Dass lost caste by crossing the black sea. In London he met and talked with every one worth knowing—men whose names go all over the world—and saw a great deal more than he said. He was given honorary degrees by learned universities, and he made speeches and talked of Hindu social reform to English ladies in evening dress, till all London cried, ‘This is the most fascinating man we have ever met at dinner since cloths were first laid.’

When he returned to India there was a blaze of glory, for the Viceroy himself made a special visit to confer upon the Maharajah the Grand Cross of the Star of India—all diamonds and ribbons and enamel; and at the same ceremony, while the cannon boomed, Purun Dass was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire; so that his name stood Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E.

That evening, at dinner, in the big Viceregal tent, he stood up with the badge and the collar of the Order on his breast, and replying to the toast of his master’s health, made a speech few Englishmen could have bettered.

Next month, when the city had returned to its sun-baked quiet, he did a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing; for, so far as the world’s affairs went, he died. The jewelled order of his knighthood went back to the Indian Government, and a new Prime Minister was appointed to the charge of affairs, and a great game of General Post began in all the subordinate appointments. The priests knew what had happened, and the people guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Sunnyasi, or holy man, was considered nothing extraordinary. He had been, as the Old Law recommends, twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter,—though he had never carried a weapon in his life,—and twenty years head of a household. He had used his wealth and his power for what he knew both to be worth; he had taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and cities far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him. Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no longer needs.

Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope skin and brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl of polished brown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with eyes cast on the ground—behind him they were firing salutes from the bastions in honour of his happy successor. Purun Dass nodded. All that life was ended; and he bore it no more ill-will or good-will than a man bears to a colourless dream of the night. He was a Sunnyasi—a houseless, wandering mendicant, depending on his neighbours for his daily bread; and so long as there is a morsel to divide in India, neither priest nor beggar starves. He had never in his life tasted meat, and very seldom eaten even fish. A five-pound note would have covered his personal expenses for food through any one of the many years in which he had been absolute master of millions of money. Even when he was being lionised in London he had held before him his dream of peace and quiet—the long, white, dusty Indian road, printed all over with bare feet, the incessant, slow-moving traffic, and the sharp-smelling wood smoke curling up under the fig-trees in the twilight, where the wayfarers sit at their evening meal.

When the time came to make that dream true the Prime Minister took the proper steps, and in three days you might more easily have found a bubble in the trough of the long Atlantic seas than Purun Dass among the roving, gathering, separating millions of India.

page 2

At night his antelope skin was spread where the darkness overtook him—sometimes in a Sunnyasi monastery by the roadside; sometimes by a mud-pillar shrine of Kala Pir, where the Jogis, who are another misty division of holy men, would receive him as they do those who know what castes and divisions are worth; sometimes on the outskirts of a little Hindu village, where the children would steal up with the food their parents had prepared; and sometimes on the pitch of the bare grazing-grounds, where the flame of his stick fire waked the drowsy camels. It was all one to Purun Dass—or Purun Bhagat, as he called himself now. Earth, people, and food were all one. But unconsciously his feet drew him away northward and eastward; from the south to Rohtak; from Rohtak to Kurnool; from Kurnool to ruined Samanah, and then up-stream along the dried bed of the Gugger river that fills only when the rain falls in the hills, till one day he saw the far line of the great Himalayas.

Then Purun Bhagat smiled, for he remembered that his mother was of Rajput Brahmin birth, from Kulu way—a Hill-woman, always home-sick for the snows—and that the least touch of Hill blood draws a man in the end back to where he belongs.

‘Yonder,’ said Purun Bhagat, breasting the lower slopes of the Sewaliks, where the cacti stand up like seven-branched candlesticks—‘yonder I shall sit down and get knowledge’; and the cool wind of the Himalayas whistled about his ears as he trod the road that led to Simla.

The last time he had come that way it had been in state, with a clattering cavalry escort, to visit the gentlest and most affable of Viceroys; and the two had talked for an hour together about mutual friends in London, and what the Indian common folk really thought of things. This time Purun Bhagat paid no calls, but leaned on the rail of the Mall, watching that glorious view of the Plains spread out forty miles below, till a native Mohammedan policeman told him he was obstructing traffic; and Purun Bhagat salaamed reverently to the Law, because he knew the value of it, and was seeking for a Law of his own. Then he moved on, and slept that night in an empty hut at Chota Simla, which looks like the very last end of the earth, but it was only the beginning of his journey.

He followed the Himalaya-Thibet road, the little ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid rock, or strutted out on timbers over gulfs a thousand feet deep; that dips into warm, wet, shut-in valleys, and climbs out across bare, grassy hill-shoulders where the sun strikes like a burning-glass; or turns through dripping, dark forests where the tree-ferns dress the trunks from head to heel, and the pheasant calls to his mate. And he met Thibetan herdsmen with their dogs and flocks of sheep, each sheep with a little bag of borax on his back, and wandering wood-cutters, and cloaked and blanketed Lamas from Thibet, coming into India on pilgrimage, and envoys of little solitary Hill-states, posting furiously on ring-streaked and piebald ponies, or the cavalcade of a Rajah paying a visit; or else for a long, clear day he would see nothing more than a black bear grunting and rooting below in the valley. When he first started, the roar of the world he had left still rang in his ears, as the roar of a tunnel rings long after the train has passed through; but when he had put the Mutteeanee Pass behind him that was all done, and Purun Bhagat was alone with himself, walking, wondering, and thinking, his eyes on the ground, and his thoughts with the clouds.

One evening he crossed the highest pass he had met till then—it had been a two-day’s climb—and came out on a line of snow-peaks that banded all the horizon—mountains from fifteen to twenty thousand feet high, looking almost near enough to hit with a stone, though they were fifty or sixty miles away. The pass was crowned with dense, dark forest—deodar, walnut, wild cherry, wild olive, and wild pear, but mostly deodar, which is the Himalayan cedar; and under the shadow of the deodars stood a deserted shrine to Kali—who is Durga, who is Sitala, who is sometimes worshipped against the smallpox.

Purun Dass swept the stone floor clean, smiled at the grinning statue, made himself a little mud fireplace at the back of the shrine, spread his antelope skin on a bed of fresh pine-needles, tucked his bairagi—his brass-handled crutch—under his armpit, and sat down to rest.

Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All round it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the threshing-floors. Looking across the valley, the eye was deceived by the size of things, and could not at first realise that what seemed to be low scrub, on the opposite mountain-flank, was in truth a forest of hundred-foot pines. Purun Bhagat saw an eagle swoop across the gigantic hollow, but the great bird dwindled to a dot ere it was half-way over. A few bands of scattered clouds strung up and down the valley, catching on a shoulder of the hills, or rising up and dying out when they were level with the head of the pass. And ‘Here shall I find peace,’ said Purun Bhagat.

Now, a Hill-man makes nothing of a few hundred feet up or down, and as soon as the villagers saw the smoke in the deserted shrine, the village priest climbed up the terraced hillside to welcome the stranger.

When he met Purun Bhagat’s eyes—the eyes of a man used to control thousands—he bowed to the earth, took the begging-bowl without a word, and returned to the village, saying, ‘We have at last a holy man. Never have I seen such a man. He is of the Plains—but pale-coloured—a Brahmin of the Brahmins.’ Then all the housewives of the village said, ‘Think you he will stay with us?’ and each did her best to cook the most savoury meal for the Bhagat. Hill-food is very simple, but with buckwheat and Indian corn, and rice and red pepper, and little fish out of the stream in the valley, and honey from the flue-like hives built in the stone walls, and dried apricots, and turmeric, and wild ginger, and bannocks of flour, a devout woman can make good things, and it was a full bowl that the priest carried to the Bhagat. Was he going to stay? asked the priest. Would he need a chela—a disciple—to beg for him? Had he a blanket against the cold weather? Was the food good?

Purun Bhagat ate, and thanked the giver. It was in his mind to stay. That was sufficient, said the priest. Let the begging-bowl be placed outside the shrine, in the hollow made by those two twisted roots, and daily should the Bhagat be fed; for the village felt honoured that such a man—he looked timidly into the Bhagat’s face—should tarry among them.

That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat’s wanderings. He had come to the place appointed for him—the silence and the space. After this, time stopped, and he, sitting at the mouth of the shrine, could not tell whether he were alive or dead; a man with control of his limbs, or a part of the hills, and the clouds, and the shifting rain and sunlight. He would repeat a Name softly to himself a hundred hundred times, till, at each repetition, he seemed to move more and more out of his body, sweeping up to the doors of some tremendous discovery; but, just as the door was opening, his body would drag him back, and, with grief, he felt he was locked up again in the flesh and bones of Purun Bhagat.

Every morning the filled begging-bowl was laid silently in the crutch of the roots outside the shrine. Sometimes the priest brought it; sometimes a Ladakhi trader, lodging in the village, and anxious to get merit, trudged up the path; but, more often, it was the woman who had cooked the meal overnight; and she would murmur, hardly above her breath: ‘Speak for me before the gods, Bhagat. Speak for such a one, the wife of so-and-so!’ Now and then some bold child would be allowed the honour, and Purun Bhagat would hear him drop the bowl and, run as fast as his little legs could carry him, but the Bhagat never came down to the village. It was laid out like a map at his feet. He could see the evening gatherings, held on the circle of the threshing-floors, because that was the only level ground; could see the wonderful unnamed green of the young rice, the indigo blues of the Indian corn, the dock-like patches of buckwheat, and, in its season, the red bloom of the amaranth, whose tiny seeds, being neither grain nor pulse, make a food that can be lawfully eaten by Hindus in time of fasts.

page 3

When the year turned, the roofs of the huts were all little squares of purest gold, for it was on the roofs that they laid out their cobs of the corn to dry. Hiving and harvest, rice-sowing and husking, passed before his eyes, all embroidered down there on the many-sided plots of fields, and he thought of them all, and wondered what they all led to at the long last.

Even in populated India a man cannot a day sit still before the wild things run over him as though he were a rock; and in that wilderness very soon the wild things, who knew Kali’s Shrine well, came back to look at the intruder. The langurs, the big gray-whiskered monkeys of the Himalayas, were, naturally, the first, for they are alive with curiosity; and when they had upset the beggingbowl, and rolled it round the floor, and tried their teeth on the brass-handled crutch, and made faces at the antelope skin, they decided that the human being who sat so still was harmless. At evening, they would leap down from the pines, and beg with their hands for things to eat, and then swing off in graceful curves. They liked the warmth of the fire, too, and huddled round it till Purun Bhagat had to push them aside to throw on more fuel; and in the morning, as often as not, he would find a furry ape sharing his blanket. All day long, one or other of the tribe would sit by his side, staring out at the snows, crooning and looking unspeakably wise and sorrowful.

After the monkeys came the barasingh, that big deer which is like our red deer, but stronger. He wished to rub off the velvet of his horns against the cold stones of Kali’s statue, and stamped his feet when he saw the man at the shrine. But Purun Bhagat never moved, and, little by little, the royal stag edged up and nuzzled his shoulder. Purun Bhagat slid one cool hand along the hot antlers, and the touch soothed the fretted beast, who bowed his head, and Purun Bhagat very softly rubbed and ravelled off the velvet. Afterward, the barasingh brought his doe and fawn—gentle things that mumbled on the holy man’s blanket—or would come alone at night, his eyes green in the fire-flicker, to take his share of fresh walnuts. At last, the musk-deer, the shyest and almost the smallest of the deerlets, came, too, her big rabbity ears erect; even brindled, silent mushick-nabha must needs find out what the light in the shrine meant, and drop out her moose-like nose into Purun Bhagat’s lap, coming and going with the shadows of the fire. Purun Bhagat called them all ‘my brothers,’ and his low call of ‘Bhai! Bhai!’ would draw them from the forest at noon if they were within earshot. The Himalayan black bear, moody and suspicious—Sona, who has the V-shaped white mark under his chin—passed that way more than once; and since the Bhagat showed no fear, Sona showed no anger, but watched him, and came closer, and begged a share of the caresses, and a dole of bread or wild berries. Often, in the still dawns, when the Bhagat would climb to the very crest of the pass to watch the red day walking along the peaks of the snows, he would find Sona shuffling and grunting at his heels, thrusting a curious fore-paw under fallen trunks, and bringing it away with a whoof of impatience; or his early steps would wake Sona where he lay curled up, and the great brute, rising erect, would think to fight, till he heard the Bhagat’s voice and knew his best friend.

Nearly all hermits and holy men who live apart from the big cities have the reputation of being able to work miracles with the wild things, but all the miracle lies in keeping still, in never making a hasty movement, and, for a long time, at least, in never looking directly at a visitor. The villagers saw the outline of the barasingh stalking like a shadow through the dark forest behind the shrine; saw the minaul, the Himalayan pheasant, blazing in her best colours before Kali’s statue; and the langurs on their haunches, inside, playing with the walnut shells. Some of the children, too, had heard Sona singing to himself, bear-fashion, behind the fallen rocks, and the Bhagat’s reputation as miracle-worker stood firm.

Yet nothing was farther from his mind than miracles. He believed that all things were one big Miracle, and when a man knows that much he knows something to go upon. He knew for a certainty that there was nothing great and nothing little in this world: and day and night he strove to think out his way into the heart of things, back to the place whence his soul had come.

So thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders, the stone slab at the side of the antelope skin was dented into a little hole by the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the place between the tree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day after day, sunk and wore into a hollow almost as smooth as the brown shell itself; and each beast knew his exact place at the fire. The fields changed their colours with the seasons; the threshing-floors filled and emptied, and filled again and again; and again and again, when winter came, the langurs frisked among the branches feathered with light snow, till the mother-monkeys brought their sad-eyed little babies up from the warmer valleys with the spring. There were few changes in the village. The priest was older, and many of the little children who used to come with the begging-dish sent their own children now; and when you asked of the villagers how long their holy man had lived in Kali’s Shrine at the head of the pass, they answered, ‘Always.’

Then came such summer rains as had not been known in the Hills for many seasons. Through three good months the valley was wrapped in cloud and soaking mist—steady, unrelenting downfall, breaking off into thunder-shower after thunder-shower. Kali’s Shrine stood above the clouds, for the most part, and there was a whole month in which the Bhagat never caught a glimpse of his village. It was packed away under a white floor of cloud that swayed and shifted and rolled on itself and bulged upward, but never broke from its piers —the streaming flanks of the valley.

All that time he heard nothing but the sound of a million little waters, overhead from the trees, and underfoot along the ground, soaking through the pine-needles, dripping from the tongues of draggled fern, and spouting in newly-torn muddy channels down the slopes. Then the sun came out, and drew forth the good incense of the deodars and the rhododendrons, and that far-off, clean smell which the Hill people call ‘the smell of the snows.’ The hot sunshine lasted for a week, and then the rains gathered together for their last downpour, and the water fell in sheets that flayed off the skin of the ground and leaped back in mud. Purun Bhagat heaped his fire high that night, for he was sure his brothers would need warmth; but never a beast came to the shrine, though he called and called till he dropped asleep, wondering what had happened in the woods.

It was in the black heart of the night, the rain drumming like a thousand drums, that he was roused by a plucking at his blanket, and, stretching out, felt the little hand of a langur. ‘It is better here than in the trees,’ he said sleepily, loosening a fold of blanket; ‘take it and be warm.’ The monkey caught his hand and pulled hard. ‘Is it food, then?’ said Purun Bhagat. ‘Wait awhile, and I will prepare some.’ As he kneeled to throw fuel on the fire the langur ran to the door of the shrine, crooned and ran back again, plucking at the man’s knee.

‘What is it? What is thy trouble, Brother?’ said Purun Bhagat, for the langur’s eyes were full of things that he could not tell. ‘Unless one of thy caste be in a trap—and none set traps here—I will not go into that weather. Look, Brother, even the barasingh comes for shelter!’

The deer’s antlers clashed as he strode into the shrine, clashed against the grinning statue of Kali. He lowered them in Purun Bhagat’s direction and stamped uneasily, hissing through his half-shut nostrils.

‘Hai! Hai! Hai!’ said the Bhagat, snapping his fingers, ‘Is this payment for a night’s lodging?’ But the deer pushed him toward the door, and as he did so Purun Bhagat heard the sound of something opening with a sigh, and saw two slabs of the floor draw away from each other, while the sticky earth below smacked its lips.

‘Now I see,’ said Purun Bhagat. ‘No blame to my brothers that they did not sit by the fire to-night. The mountain is falling. And yet—why should I go?’ His eye fell on the empty begging-bowl, and his face changed. ‘They have given me good food daily since—since I came, and, if I am not swift, to-morrow there will not be one mouth in the valley. Indeed, I must go and warn them below. Back there, Brother! Let me get to the fire.’

page 4

The barasingh backed unwillingly as Purun Bhagat drove a pine torch deep into the flame, twirling it till it was well lit. ‘Ah! ye came to warn me,’ he said, rising, ‘Better than that we shall do; better than that. Out, now, and lend me thy neck, Brother, for I have but two feet.’

He clutched the bristling withers of the barasingh with his right hand; held the torch away with his left, and stepped out of the shrine into the desperate night. There was no breath of wind, but the rain nearly drowned the flare as the great deer hurried down the slope, sliding on his haunches. As soon as they were clear of the forest more of the Bhagat’s brothers joined them. He heard, though he could not see, the langurs pressing about him, and behind them the uhh! uhh! of Sona. The rain matted his long white hair into ropes; the water splashed beneath his bare feet, and his yellow robe clung to his frail old body, but he stepped down steadily, leaning against the barasingh. He was no longer a holy man, but Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., Prime Minister of no small State, a man accustomed to command, going out to save life. Down the steep, plashy path they poured all together, the Bhagat and his brothers, down and down till the deer’s feet clicked and stumbled on the wall of a threshing-floor, and he snorted because he smelt Man. Now they were at the head of the one crooked village street, and the Bhagat beat with his crutch on the barred windows of the blacksmith’s house, as his torch blazed up in the shelter of the eaves. ‘Up and out!’ cried Purun Bhagat; and he did not know his own voice, for it was years since he had spoken aloud to a man. ‘The hill falls! The hill is falling! Up and out, oh, you within!’

‘It is our Bhagat,’ said the blacksmith’s wife. ‘He stands among his beasts. Gather the little ones and give the call.’

It ran from house to house, while the beasts, cramped in the narrow way, surged and huddled round the Bhagat, and Sona puffed impatiently.

The people hurried into the street—they were no more than seventy souls all told—and in the glare of the torches they saw their Bhagat holding back the terrified barasingh, while the monkeys plucked piteously at his skirts, and Sona sat on his haunches and roared.

‘Across the valley and up the next hill!’ shouted Purun Bhagat. ‘Leave none behind! We follow!’

Then the people ran as only Hill folk can run, for they knew that in a landslip you must climb for the highest ground across the valley. They fled, splashing through the little river at the bottom, and panted up the terraced fields on the far side, while the Bhagat and his brethren followed. Up and up the opposite mountain they climbed, calling to each other by name—the roll-call of the village—and at their heels toiled the big barasingh, weighted by the failing strength of Purun Bhagat. At last the deer stopped in the shadow of a deep pinewood, five hundred feet up the hillside. His instinct, that had warned him of the coming slide, told him he would be safe here.

Purun Bhagat dropped fainting by his side, for the chill of the rain and that fierce climb were killing him; but first he called to the scattered torches ahead, ‘Stay and count your numbers’; then, whispering to the deer as he saw the lights gather in a cluster,: ‘Stay with me, Brother. Stay—till—I—go!’

There was a sigh in the air that grew to a mutter, and a mutter that grew to a roar, and a roar that passed all sense of hearing, and the hillside on which the villagers stood was hit in the darkness, and rocked to the blow. Then a note as steady, deep, and true as the deep C of the organ drowned everything for perhaps five minutes, while the very roots of the pines quivered to it. It died away, and the sound of the rain falling on miles of hard ground and grass changed to the muffled drum of water on soft earth. That told its own tale.

Never a villager—not even the priest—was bold enough to speak to the Bhagat who had saved their lives. They crouched under the pines and waited till the day. When it came they looked across the valley and saw that what had been forest, and terraced field, and track-threaded grazing-ground was one raw, red, fan-shaped smear, with a few trees flung head-down on the scarp. That red ran high up the hill of their refuge, damming back the little river, which had begun to spread into a brick-coloured lake. Of the village, of the road to the shrine, of the shrine itself, and the forest behind, there was no trace. For one mile in width and two thousand feet in sheer depth the mountain-side had come away bodily, planed clean from head to heel.

And the villagers, one by one, crept through the wood to pray before their Bhagat. They saw the barasingh standing over him, who fled when they came near, and they heard the langurs wailing in the branches, and Sona moaning up the hill; but their Bhagat was dead, sitting cross-legged, his back against a tree, his crutch under his armpit, and his face turned to the north-east.

The priest said: ‘Behold a miracle after a miracle, for in this very attitude must all Sunnyasis be buried! Therefore where he now is we will build the temple to our holy man.’

They built the temple before a year was ended—a little stone-and-earth shrine—and they called the hill the Bhagat’s hill, and they worship there with lights and flowers and offerings to this day. But they do not know that the saint of their worship is the late Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., D.C.L., Ph.D., etc., once Prime Minister of the progressive and enlightened State of Mohiniwala, and honorary or corresponding member of more learned and scientific societies than will ever do any good in this world or the next.

page 1 of 6

I HAD not seen Penfentenyou since the Middle Nineties, when he was Minister of Ways and Woodsides in De Thouar’s first Administration. Last summer, though he nominally held the same portfolio, he was his Colony’s Premier in all but name, and the idol of his own province, which is two and a half times the size of England. Politically, his creed was his growing country; and he came over to England to develop a Great Idea in her behalf.Believing that he had put it in train, I made haste to welcome him to my house for a week.

That he was chased to my door by his own Agent-General in a motor; that they turned my study into a Cabinet Meeting which I was not invited to attend; that the local telegraph all but broke down beneath the strain of hundred word coded cables; and that I practically broke into the house of a stranger to get him telephonic facilities on a Sunday, are things I overlook. What I objected to was his ingratitude, while I thus tore up England to help him. So I said: “Why on earth didn’t you see your Opposite Number in Town instead of bringing your office work here?”

“Eh? Who?” said he, looking up from his fourth cable since lunch.

“See the English Minister for Ways and Woodsides.”

“I saw him,” said Penfentenyou, without enthusiasm.

It seemed that he had called twice on the gentleman, but without an appointment—(“I thought if I wasn’t big enough, my business was”)—and each time had found him engaged. A third party intervening, suggested that a meeting might be arranged if due notice were given.

“Then,” said Penfentenyou, “I called at the office at ten o’clock.”

“But they’d be in bed,” I cried.

“One of the babies was awake. He told me that—that ‘my sort of questions’”—he slapped the pile of cables—“were only taken between 11 and 2 p.m. So I waited.”

“And when you got to business?” I asked.

He made a gesture of despair. “It was like talking to children. They’d never heard of it.”

“And your Opposite Number?”

Penfentenyou described him.

“Hush! You mustn’t talk like that!” I shuddered. “He’s one of the best of good fellows. You should meet him socially.”

“I’ve done that too,” he said. “Have you?”

“Heaven forbid!” I cried; “but that’s the proper thing to say.”

“Oh, he said all the proper things. Only I thought as this was England that they’d more or less have the hang of all the—general hang-together of my Idea. But I had to explain it from the beginning.”

“Ah! They’d probably mislaid the papers,” I said, and I told him the story of a three-million pound insurrection caused by a deputy Under-Secretary sitting upon a mass of green-labelled correspondence instead of reading it.

“I wonder it doesn’t happen every week,” the answered. “D’you mind my having the Agent-General to dinner again tonight? I’ll wire, and he can motor down.”

The Agent-General arrived two hours later, a patient and expostulating person, visibly torn between the pulling Devil of a rampant Colony, and the placid Baker of a largely uninterested England. But with Penfentenyou behind him he had worked; for he told us that Lord Lundie—the Law Lord was the final authority on the legal and constitutional aspects of the Great Idea, and to him it must be referred.

“Good Heavens alive!” thundered Penfentenyou. “I told you to get that settled last Christmas.”

“It was the middle of the house-party season,” said the Agent-General mildly. “Lord Lundie’s at Credence Green now—he spends his holidays there. It’s only forty miles off.”

“Shan’t I disturb his Holiness?” said Penfentenyou heavily. “Perhaps ‘my sort of questions,’” he snorted, “mayn’t be discussed except at midnight.”

“Oh, don’t be a child,” I said.

“What this country needs,” said Penfentenyou, “is—” and for ten minutes he trumpeted rebellion.

“What you need is to pay for your own protection,” I cut in when he drew breath, and I showed him a yellowish paper, supplied gratis by Government, which is called Schedule D. To my merciless delight he had never seen the thing before, and I completed my victory over him and all the Colonies with a Brassey’s “Naval Annual” and a “Statesman’s Year Book.”

The Agent-General interposed with agent-generalities (but they were merely provocateurs) about Ties of Sentiment.

“They be blowed!” said Penfentenyou. “What’s the good of sentiment towards a Kindergarten?”

“Quite so. Ties of common funk are the things that bind us together; and the sooner you new nations realize it the better. What you need is an annual invasion. Then you’d grow up.”

“Thank you! Thank you!” said the Agent-General. “That’s what I am always trying to tell my people.”

page 2

“But, my dear fool,” Penfentenyou almost wept, “do you pretend that these banana-fingered amateurs at home are grown up?”

“You poor, serious, pagan man,” I retorted, “if you take ’em that way, you’ll wreck your Great Idea.”

“Will you take him to Lord Lundie’s to-morrow?” said the Agent-General promptly.

“I suppose I must,” I said, “if you won’t.”

“Not me! I’m going home,” said the Agent-General, and departed. I am glad that I am no colony’s Agent-General.

Penfentenyou continued to argue about naval contributions till 1.15 a.m., though I was victor from the first.

At ten o’clock I got him and his correspondence into the motor, and he had the decency to ask whether he had been unpolished over-night. I replied that I waited an apology. This he made excuse for renewed arguments, and used wayside shows as illustrations of the decadence of England.

For example we burst a tyre within a mile of Credence Green, and, to save time, walked into the beautifully kept little village. His eye was caught by a building of pale-blue tin, stencilled “Calvinist Chapel,” before whose shuttered windows an Italian organ-grinder .with a petticoated monkey was playing “Dolly Grey—”

“Yes. That’s it!” snapped the egoist. “That’s a parable of the general situation in England. And look at those brutes!” A huge household removals van was halted at a public-house. The men in charge were drinking beer from blue and white mugs. It seemed to me a pretty sight, but Penfentenyou said it represented Our National Attitude.

Lord Lundie’s summer resting-place we learned was a farm, a little out of the village, up a hill round which curled a high hedged road. Only an initiated few spend their holidays at Credence Green, and they have trained the householders to keep the place select. Penfentenyou made a grievance of this as we walked up the lane, followed at a distance by the organ-grinder.

“Suppose he is having a house-party,” he said: “Anything’s possible in this insane land.”

Just at that minute we found ourselves opposite an empty villa. Its roof was of black slate, with bright unweathered ridge-tiling; its walls were of blood-coloured brick, cornered and banded with vermiculated stucco work, and there was cobalt, magenta, and purest apple-green window-glass on either side of the front door. The whole was fenced from the road by a low, brick-pillared, flint wall, topped with a cast-iron Gothic rail, picked out in blue and gold.

Tight beds of geranium, calceolaria, and lobelia speckled the glass-plat, from whose centre rose one of the finest araucarias (its other name by the way is “monkey-puzzler”), that it has ever been my lot to see. It must have been full thirty feet high, and its foliage exquisitely answered the iron railings. Such bijou ne plus ultras, replete with all the amenities, do not, as I pointed out to Penfentenyou, transpire outside of England.

A hedge, swinging sharp right, flanked the garden, and above it on a slope of daisy-dotted meadows we could see Lord Lundie’s tiled and half-timbered summer farmhouse. Of a sudden we heard voices behind the tree—the fine full tones of the unembarrassed English, speaking to their equals—that tore through the hedge like sleet through rafters.

“That it is not called ‘monkey-puzzler’ for nothing, I willingly concede”—this was a rich and rolling note—“but on the other hand—”

“I submit, me lud, that the name implies that it might, could, would, or should be ascended by a monkey, and not that the ascent is a physical impossibility. I believe one of our South American spider monkeys wouldn’t hesitate . . . By Jove, it might be worth trying, if—”

This was a crisper voice than the first. A third, higher-pitched, and full of pleasant affectations, broke in.

“Oh, practical men, there is no ape here. Why do you waste one of God’s own days on unprofitable discussion? Give me a match!”

“I’ve a good mind to make you demonstrate in your own person. Come on, Bubbles! We’ll make Jimmy climb!”

There was a sound of scuffling, broken by squeaks from Jimmy of the high voice. I turned back and drew Penfentenyou into the side of the flanking hedge. I remembered to have read in a society paper that Lord Lundie’s lesser name was “Bubbles.”

“What are they doing?” Penfentenyou said sharply. “Drunk?”

“Just playing! Superabundant vitality of the Race, you know. We’ll watch ’em,” I answered. The noise ceased.

“My deliver,” Jimmy gasped. “The ram caught in the thicket, and—I’m the only one who can talk Neapolitan! Leggo my collar!” He cried aloud in a foreign tongue, and was answered from the gate.

“It’s the Calvinistic organ-grinder,” I whispered. I had already found a practicable break at the bottom of the hedge. “They’re going to try to make the monkey climb, I believe.”

“Here—let me look!” Penfentenyou flung himself down, and rooted till he too broke a peep-hole. We lay side by side commanding the entire garden at ten yards’ range.

“You know ’em?” said Penfentenyou, as I made some noise or other.

“By sight only. The big fellow in flannels is Lord Lundie; the light-built one with the yellow beard painted his picture at the last Academy: He’s a swell R.A., James Loman.”

“And the brown chap with the hands?”

“Tomling, Sir Christopher Tomling, the South American engineer who built the—”

page 3

“San Juan Viaduct. I know,” said Penfentenyou. “We ought to have had him with us . . . . Do you think a monkey would climb the tree?”

The organ-grinder at the gate fenced his beast with one arm as Jimmy-talked.

“Don’t show off your futile accomplishments,” said Lord Lundie. “Tell him it’s an experiment. Interest him!”

“Shut up, Bubbles. You aren’t in court,” Jimmy’,replied. “This needs delicacy. Giuseppe says—”

“Interest the monkey,” the brown engineer interrupted. “He won’t climb for love. Cut up to the house and get some biscuits, Bubbles—sugar ones and an orange or two. No need to tell our womenfolk.”

The huge white figure lobbed off at a trot which would not have disgraced a boy of seventeen. I gathered from something Jimmy let fall that the three had been at Harrow together.

“That Tomling has a head on his Shoulders,” muttered Penfentenyou. “Pity we didn’t get him for the Colony. But the question is, will the monkey climb?”

“Be quick, Jimmy. Tell the man we’ll give him five bob for the loan of the beast. Now run the organ under the tree, and we’ll dress it when Bubbles comes back,” Sir Christopher cried.

“I’ve often wondered,” said Penfentenyou, “whether it would puzzle a monkey?” He had forgotten the needs of his Growing Nation, and was earnestly parting the white-thorn stems with his fingers.

Giuseppe and Jimmy did as they were told, the monkey following them with a wary and malignant eye.

“Here’s a discovery,” said Jimmy. “The singing part of this organ comes off the wheels.” He spoke volubly to the proprietor. “Oh, it’s so as Giuseppe can take it to his room o’ nights. And play it. D’you hear that? The organ-grinder, after his day’s crime, plays his accursed machine for love. For love, Chris! And Michael Angelo was one of ’em!”

“Don’t jaw! Tell him to take the beast’s petticoat off,” said Sir Christopher Tomling.

Lord Lundie returned, very little winded, through a gap higher up the hedge.

“They’re all out, thank goodness!” he cried, “but I’ve raided what I could. Macrons glaces, candied fruit, and a bag of oranges.”

“Excellent!” said the world-renowned contractor.

“Jimmy, you’re the light-weight; jump up on the organ and impale these things on the leaves as I hand ’em!”

“I see,” said Jimmy, capering like a springbuck. “Upward and onward, eh? First, he’ll reach out for—how infernal prickly these leaves are!—this biscuit. Next we’ll lure him on—(that’s about the reach of his arm)—with the marron glare, and then he’ll open out this orange. How human! How like your ignoble career, Bubbles!”

With care and elaboration they ornamented that tree’s lower branches with sugar-topped biscuits, oranges, bits of banana, and marrons glares till it looked very ape’s path to Paradise.

“Unchain the Gyascutis!” said Sir Christopher commandingly. Giuseppe placed the monkey atop of the organ, where the beast, misunderstanding, stood on his head.

“He’s throwing himself on the mercy of the Court, me lud,” said Jimmy. “No—now he’s interested. Now he’s reaching after higher things. What wouldn’t I give to have here” (he mentioned a name not unhonoured in British Art). “Ambition plucking apples of Sodom!” (the monkey had pricked himself and was swearing). “Genius hampered by Convention? Oh, there’s a whole bushelful of allegories in it!”

“Give him time. He’s balancing the probabilities,” said Lord Lundie.

The three closed round the monkey,—hanging on his every motion with an earnestness almost equal to ours. The great judge’s head—seamed and vertical forehead, iron mouth, and pike-like under-jaw, all set on that thick neck rising out of the white flannelled collar—was thrown against the puckered green silk of the organ-front as it might have been a cameo of Titus. Jimmy, with raised eyes and parted lips, fingered his grizzled chestnut beard, and I was near enough to-note, the capable beauty of his hands. Sir Christopher stood a little apart, his arms folded behind his back, one heavy brown boot thrust forward, chin in as curbed, and black eyebrows lowered to shade the keen eyes.

Giuseppe’s dark face between flashing earrings, a twisted rag of red and yellow silk round his throat, turned from the reaching yearning monkey to the pink and white biscuits spiked on the bronzed leafage. And upon them all fell the serious and workmanlike sun of an English summer forenoon.

“Fils de Saint Louis, montez au ciel!” said Lord Lundie suddenly in a voice that made me think of Black Caps. I do not know what the monkey thought, because at that instant he leaped off the organ and disappeared.

There was a clash of broken glass behind the tree.

The monkey’s face, distorted with passion, appeared at an upper window of the house, and a starred hole in the stained-glass window to the left of the front door showed the first steps of his upward path.

“We’ve got to catch him,” cried Sir Christopher. “Come along!”

They pushed at the door, which was unlocked.

page 4

“Yes. But consider the ethics of the case,” said Jimmy. “Isn’t this burglary or something, Bubbles?”

“Settle that when he’s caught,” said Sir Christopher. “We’re responsible for the beast.”

A furious clanging of bells broke out of the empty house, followed by muffed gurglings and trumpetings.

“What the deuce is that?” I asked, half aloud.

“The plumbing, of course,” said Penfentenyou. “What a pity! I believe he’d have climbed if Lord Lundie hadn’t put him off!”

“Wait a moment, Chris,” said Jimmy the interpreter; “ Guiseppe says he may answer to the music of his infancy. Giuseppe, therefore, will go in with the organ. Orpheus with his lute, you know. Avante, Orpheus! There’s no Neapolitan for bathroom, but I fancy your friend is there.”

“I’m not going into another man’s house with a, hurdy-gurdy,” said Lord Lundie, recoiling, as Giuseppe unshipped the working mechanism of the organ (it developed a hang-down leg) from its wheels, slipped a strap round his shoulders, and gave the handle a twist.

“Don’t be a cad, Bubbles,” was Jimmy’s answer. “You couldn’t leave us now if you were on the Woolsack. Play, Orpheus! The Cadi accompanies.”

With a whoop, a buzz, and a crash, the organ sprang to life under the hand of Giuseppe, and the procession passed through the rained-to-imitate-walnut front door. A moment later we saw the monkey ramping on the roof.

“He’ll be all over the township in a minute if we don’t head him,” said Penfentenyou, leaping to his feet, and crashing into the garden. We headed him with pebbles till he retired through a window to the tuneful reminder that he had left a lot of little things behind him. As we passed the front door it swung open, and showed Jimmy the artist sitting at the bottom of a newly-cleaned staircase. He waggled his hands at us, and when we entered we saw that the man was stricken speechless. His eyes grew red—red like a ferret’s—and what little breath he had whistled shrilly. At first we thought it was a fit, and then we saw that it was mirth—the inopportune mirth of the Artistic Temperament.

The house palpitated to an infamous melody punctuated by the stump of the barrel-organ’s one leg, as Giuseppe, above, moved from room to room after his rebel slave. Now and again a floor shook a little under the combined rushes of Lord Lundie and Sir Christopher Tomling, who gave many and contradictory orders. But when they could they cursed Jimmy with splendid thoroughness.

“Have you anything to do with the house?” panted Jimmy at last. “Because we’re using it just now.” He gulped. “And I’m ah—keeping cave.”

“All right,” said Penfentenyou, and shut the hall door.

“Jimmy, you unspeakable blackguard, Jimmy, you cur! You coward!” (Lord Lundie’s voice overbore the flood of melody.) “Come up here! Giussieppe’s saying something we don’t understand.”

Jimmy listened and interpreted between hiccups.

“He says you’d better play the organ, Bubbles, and let him do the stalking. The monkey knows him.”

“By Jove, he’s quite right,” said Sir Christopher ,from the landing. “Take it, Bubbles, at once.”

“My God!” said Lord Lundie in horror.

The chase reverberated over our heads, from the attics to the first floor and back again. Bodies and Voices met in collision and argument, and once or twice the organ hit walls and doors. Then it broke forth in a new manner.

“He’s playing it,” said Jimmy. “I know his acute Justinian ear. Are you fond of music?”

“I think Lord Lundie plays very well for a beginner,” I ventured.

“Ah! That’s the trained legal intellect. Like mastering a brief. I haven’t got it.” He wiped his eyes and shook.

“Hi!” said Penfentenyou, looking through the stained glass window down the garden. “What’s that!”

A household removals van, in charge of four men, had halted at the gate. A husband and his wife householders beyond question—quavered irresolutely up the path. He looked tired. She was certainly cross. In all this haphazard world the last couple to understand a scientific experiment.

I laid hands on Jimmy—the clamour above drowning speech and with Penfentenyou’s aid, propped him against the window, that he should see.

He saw, nodded, fell as an umbrella can fall, and kneeling, beat his forehead on the shut door. Penfentenyou slid the bolt.

The furniture men reinforced the two figures on the path, and advanced, spreading generously.

“Hadn’t we better warn them up-stairs?” I suggested:

page 5

“No. I’ll die first!” said Jimmy. “I’m pretty near it now. Besides, they called me names.”

I turned from the Artist to the Administrator.

“Coeteris paribus, I think we’d better be going,” said Penfentenyou, dealer in crises.

“Ta—take me with you,” said Jimmy. “I’ve no reputation to lose, but I’d like to watch ’em from—er—outside the picture.”

“There’s always a modus viviendi,” Penfentenyou murmured, and tiptoed along the hall to a back door, which he opened quite silently. We passed into a tangle of gooseberry bushes where, at his statesmanlike example, we crawled on all fours, and regained the hedge.

Here we lay up, secure in our alibi.

“But your firm,”—the woman was wailing to the furniture removals men—”your firm promised me everything should be in yesterday. And it’s to-day! You should have been here yesterday!”

“The last tenants ain’t out yet, lydy,” said one of them.

Lord Lundie was rapidly improving in technique, though organ-grinding, unlike the Law, is more of a calling than a trade, and he hung occasionally on a dead centre. Giuseppe, I think, was singing, but I could not understand the drift of Sir Christopher’s remarks. They were Spanish.

The woman said something we did not catch.

“You might ’ave sub-let it,” the man insisted. “Or your gentleman ’ere might.”

“But I didn’t. Send for the Police at once.”

“I wouldn’t do that, lydy. They’re only fruit pickers on a beano. They aren’t particular where they sleep.”

“D’you mean they’ve been sleeping there? I only had it cleaned last week. Get them out.”

“Oh, if you say so, we’ll ’ave ’em out of it in two twos. Alf, fetch me the spare swingle-bar.”

“Don’t! You’ll knock the paint off the door. Get them out!”

“What the ’ell else am I trying to do for you, lydy?” the man answered with pathos; but the woman wheeled on her mate.

“Edward! They’re all drunk here, and they’re all mad there. Do something!” she said.

Edward took one short step forward, and sighed “Hullo!” in the direction of the turbulent house. The woman walked up and down, the very figure of Domestic Tragedy. The furniture men swayed a little on their heels, and—

“Got him!” The shout rang through all the windows at once. It was followed by a blood-hound-like bay from Sir Christopher, a maniacal prestissimo on the organ, and loud cries, for Jimmy. But Jimmy, at my side, rolled his congested eyeballs, owl-wise.

“I never knew them,” he said. “I’m an orphan.”

The front, door opened, and the three came forth to short-lived triumph. I had never before seen a Law Lord dressed as for tennis, with a stump-leg barrel-organ strapped to his shoulder. But it is a shy bird in this plumage. Lord Lundie strove to disembarrass himself of his accoutrements much as an ill-trained Punch and Judy dog tries to escape backwards through his frilled collar. Sir Christopher, covered with limewash, cherished a bleeding thumb, and the almost crazy monkey tore at Giuseppe’s hair.

The men on both sides reeled, but the woman stood her ground. “Idiots!” she said, and once more, “Idiots!”

I could have gladdened a few convicts of my acquaintance with a photograph of Lord Lundie at that instant.

“Madam,” he began, wonderfully preserving the roll in his voice, “it was a monkey.”

Sir Christopher sucked his thumb and nodded.

“Take it away and go,” she replied. “Go away!”

I would have gone, and gladly, on this permission, but these still strong men must ever be justifying themselves. Lord Lundie turned to the husband, who for the first time spoke.

“I have rented this house. I am moving in,” he said.

“We ought to have been in yesterday,” the woman interrupted.

“Yes. We ought to have been in yesterday. Have you slept there overnight?” said the man peevishly.

“No; I assure you we haven’t,” said Lord Lundie.

“Then go away. Go quite away,” cried the woman.

They went—in single file down the path. They went silently, restrapping the organ on its wheels, and rechaining the monkey to the organ.

page 6

“Damn it all!” said Penfentenyou. “They do face the music, and they do stick by each other in private life!”

“Ties of Common Funk,” I answered. Giuseppe ran to the gate and fled back to the possible world. Lord Lundie and Sir Christopher, constrained by tradition, paced slowly.

Then it came to pass that the woman, who walked behind them, lifted up her eyes, and beheld the tree which they had dressed.

“Stop!” she called; and they stopped. “Who did that?”

There was no answer. The Eternal Bad Boy in every man hung its head before the Eternal Mother in every woman.

“Who put these disgusting things there?” she repeated.

Suddenly Penfentenyou, Premier of his Colony in all but name, left Jimmy and me, and appeared at the gate. (If he is not turned out of office, that is how he will appear on the Day of Armageddon.)

“Well done you!” he cried zealously, and doffed his hat to the woman. “Have you any children, madam?” he demanded.

“Yes, two. They should have been here to-day. The firm promised—”

“Then we’re not a minute too soon. That monkey escaped. It was a very dangerous beast. ’Might have frightened your children into fits. All the organ-grinder’s fault! A most lucky thing these gentlemen caught it when they did. I hope you aren’t badly mauled, Sir Christopher?” Shaken as I was (I wanted to get away and laugh) I could not but admire the scoundrel’s consummate tact in leading his second highest trump. An ass would have introduced Lord Lundie and they would not have believed him.

It took the trick. The couple smiled, and gave respectful thanks for their deliverance by such hands from such perils.

“Not in the least,” said Lord Lundie. “Anybody—any father would have done as much, and pray don’t apologize your mistake was quite natural.” A furniture man sniggered here, and Lord Lundie rolled an Eye of Doom on their ranks. “By the way, if you have trouble with these persons—they seem to have taken as much as is good for them—please let me know. Er—Good morning!”

They turned into the lane.

“Heavens!” said Jimmy, brushing himself down. “Who’s that real man with the real head?” and we hurried after them, for they were running unsteadily, squeaking like rabbits as they ran. We overtook them in a little nut wood half a mile up the road, where they had turned aside, and were rolling. So we rolled with them, and ceased not till we had arrived at the extremity of exhaustion.

“You—you saw it all, then?” said Lord Lundie, rebuttoning his nineteen-inch collar.

“I saw it was a vital question from the first,” responded Penfentenyou, and blew his nose.

“It was. By the way, d’you mind telling me your name?”

Summa Penfentenyou’s Great Idea has gone through, a little chipped at the edges, but in fine and far-reaching shape. His Opposite Number worked at it like a mule—a bewildered mule, beaten from behind, coaxed from in front, and propped on either soft side by Lord Lundie of the compressed mouth and the searing tongue.

Sir Christopher Tomling has been ravished from the Argentine, where, after all, he was but preparing trade-routes for hostile peoples, and now adorns the forefront of Penfentenyou’s Advisory Board. This was an unforeseen extra, as was Jimmy’s gratis full-length—(it will be in this year’s Academy) of Penfentenyou, who has returned to his own place.

Now and again, from afar off, between the slam and bump of his shifting scenery, the glare of his manipulated limelight, and the controlled rolling of his thunder-drums, I catch his voice, lifted in encouragement and advice to his fellow-countrymen. He is quite sound on Ties of Sentiment, and—alone of Colonial Statesmen ventures to talk of the Ties of Common Funk.

Herein I have my reward.