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THERE had been rather a long sitting at Lodge ‘Faith and Works,’ 5837 E.C., that warm April night. Three initiations and two raisings, each conducted with the spaciousness and particularity that our Lodge prides itself upon, made the Brethren a little silent, and the strains of certain music had not yet lifted from them.‘There are two pieces that ought to be barred for ever,’ said a Brother as we were sitting down to the ‘banquet.’ ‘“Last Post” is the other.’‘I can just stand “Last Post.” It’s “Tipperary” breaks me,’ another replied. ‘But I expect every one carries his own firing-irons inside him.’

I turned to look. It was a sponsor for one of our newly raised Brethren—a fat man with a fish-like and vacant face, but evidently prosperous. We introduced ourselves as we took our places. His name was Bevin, and he had a chicken farm near Chalfont St. Giles, whence he supplied, on yearly contract, two or three high-class London hotels. He was also, he said, on the edge of launching out into herb-growing.

‘There’s a demand for herbs,’ said he; ‘but it all depends upon your connections with the wholesale dealers. We ain’t systematic enough. The French do it much better, especially in those mountains on the Swiss an’ Italian sides. They use more herbal remedies than we do. Our patent-medicine business has killed that with us. But there’s a demand still, if your connections are sound. I’m going in for it.’

A large, well-groomed Brother across the table (his name was Pole, and he seemed some sort of professional man) struck in with a detailed account of a hollow behind a destroyed village near Thiepval, where, for no ascertainable reason, a certain rather scarce herb had sprung up by the acre, he said, out of the overturned earth.

‘Only you’ve got to poke among the weeds to find it, and there’s any quantity of bombs an’ stuff knockin’ about there still. They haven’t cleaned it up yet.’

‘Last time I saw the place,’ said Bevin, ‘I thought it ’ud be that way till Judgment Day. You know how it lay in that dip under that beet-factory. I saw it bombed up level in two days—into brick-dust mainly. They were huntin’ for St. Firmin Dump.’ He took a sandwich and munched slowly, wiping his face, for the night was close.

‘Ye-es,’ said Pole. ‘The trouble is there hasn’t been any judgment taken or executed. That’s why the world is where it is now. We didn’t need anything but justice—afterwards. Not gettin’ that, the bottom fell out of things, naturally.’

‘That’s how I look at it too,’ Bevin replied. ‘We didn’t want all that talk afterwards—we only wanted justice. What I say is, there must be a right and a wrong to things. It can’t all be kiss-an’-make-friends, no matter what you do.’

A thin, dark brother on my left, who had been attending to a cold pork pie (there are no pork pies to equal ours, which are home-made), suddenly lifted his long head, in which a pale blue glass eye swivelled insanely.

‘Well,’ he said slowly. ‘My motto is “Never again.” Ne-ver again for me.’

‘Same here—till next time,’ said Pole, across the table. ‘You’re from Sydney, ain’t you?’

‘How d’you know?’ was the short answer

‘You spoke.’ The other smiled. So did Bevin, who added: ‘I know how your push talk, well enough. Have you started that Republic of yours down under yet?’

‘No. But we’re goin’ to. Then you’ll see.’

‘Carry on. No one’s hindering,’ Bevin pursued.

The Australian scowled. ‘No. We know they ain’t. And—and—that’s what makes us all so crazy angry with you.’ He threw back his head and laughed the spleen out of him. ‘What can you do with an Empire that—that don’t care what you do?’

‘I’ve heard that before,’ Bevin laughed, and his fat sides shook. ‘Oh, I know your push inside-out.’ .

‘When did you come across us? My name’s Orton—no relation to the Tichborne one.’

‘Gallip’li—dead mostly. My battalion began there. We only lost half.’

‘Lucky! They gambled us away in two days. ’Member the hospital on the beach?’ asked asked Orton.

‘Yes. An’ the man without the face—preaching,’ said Bevin, sitting up a little.

‘Till he died,’ said the Australian, his voice lowered.

‘And afterwards,’ Bevin added, lower still.

‘Christ! Were you there that night?’

Bevin nodded. The Australian choked off something he was going to say, as a Brother on his left claimed him. I heard them talk horses, while Bevin developed his herb-growing projects with the well-groomed Brother opposite.

At the end of the banquet, when pipes were drawn, the Australian addressed himself to Bevin, across me, and as the company re-arranged itself, we three came to anchor in the big anteroom where the best prints are hung. Here our Brother across the table joined us, and moored alongside.

The Australian was full of racial grievances, as must be in a young country; alternating between complaints that his people had not been appreciated enough in England, or too fulsomely complimented by an hysterical Press.

‘No-o,’ Pole drawled, after a while. ‘You’re altogether wrong. We hadn’t time to notice anything—we were all too busy fightin’ for our lives. What your crowd down under are suffering from is growing-pains. You’ll get over ’em in three hundred years or so—if you’re allowed to last so long.’

‘Who’s going to stoush us?’ Orton asked fiercely.

This turned the talk again to larger issues and possibilities—delivered on both sides straight from the shoulder without malice or heat, between bursts of song from round the piano at the far end. Bevin and I sat out, watching.

‘Well, I don’t understand these matters,’ said Bevin at last. ‘But I’d hate to have one of your crowd have it in for me for anything.’

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‘Would you? Why?’ Orton pierced him with his pale, artificial eye.

‘Well, you’re a trifle—what’s the word?—vindictive?—spiteful? At least, that’s what I’ve found. I expect it comes from drinking stewed tea with your meat four times a day,’ said Bevin. ‘No! I’d hate to have an Australian after me for anything in particular.’

Out of this came his tale—somewhat in this shape:

It opened with an Australian of the name of Hickmot or Hickmer—Bevin called him both—who, finding his battalion completely expended at Gallipoli, had joined up with what stood of Bevin’s battalion, and had there remained, unrebuked and unnoticed. The point that Bevin laboured was that his man had never seen a table-cloth, a china plate, or a dozen white people together till, in his thirtieth year, he had walked for two months to Brisbane to join up. Pole found this hard to believe.

‘But it’s true,’ Bevin insisted. ‘This chap was born an’ bred among the black fellers, as they call ’em, two hundred miles from the nearest town, four hundred miles from a railway, an’ ten thousand from the grace o’ God—out in Queensland near some desert.’

‘Why, of course. We come out of everywhere,’ said Orton. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Yes—but—— Look here! From the time that this man Hickmot was twelve years old he’d ridden, driven—what’s the word?—conducted sheep for his father for thousands of miles on end, an’ months at a time, alone with these black fellers that you daren’t show the back of your neck to—else they knock your head in. That was all that he’d ever done till he joined up. He—he—didn’t belong to anything m the world, you understand. And he didn’t strike other men as being a—a human being.’

‘Why? He was a Queensland drover. They’re all right,’ Orton explained.

‘I dare say; but—well, a man notices another man, don’t he? You’d notice if there was a man standing or sitting or lyin’ near you, wouldn’t you? So’d any one. But you’d never notice Hickmot. His bein’ anywhere about wouldn’t stay in your mind. He just didn’t draw attention any more than anything else that happened to be about. Have you got it?’

‘Wasn’t he any use at his job?’ Pole inquired.

‘I’ve nothing against him that way, an’ I’m—I was his platoon sergeant. He wouldn’t volunteer specially for any doings, but he’d slip out with the party and he’d slip back with what was left of ’em. No one noticed him, and he never opened his mouth about any doings. You’d think a man who had lived the way he’d lived among black fellers an’ sheep would be noticeable enough in an English battalion, wouldn’t you?’

‘It teaches ’em to lie close; but you seem to have noticed him,’ Orton interposed, with a little suspicion.

‘Not at the time—but afterwards. If he was noticeable it was on account of his unnoticeability—same way you’d notice there not being an extra step at the bottom of the staircase when you thought there was.’

‘Ye-es,’ Pole said suddenly. ‘It’s the eternal mystery of personality. “God before Whom ever lie bare——” Some people can occlude their personality like turning off a tap. I beg your pardon. Carry on!’

‘Granted,’ said Bevin. ‘I think I catch your drift. I used to think I was a student of human nature before I joined up.’

‘What was your job—before?’ Orton asked.

‘Oh, I was the young blood of the village. Goal-keeper in our soccer team, secretary of the local cricket and rifle—oh, lor’!—clubs. Yes, an’ village theatricals. My father was the chemist in the village. How I did talk! What I did know!’ He beamed upon us all.

‘I don’t mind hearing you talk,’ said Orton, lying back in his chair. ‘You’re a little different from some of ’em. What happened to this dam’ drover of yours?’

‘He was with our push for the rest of the war—an’ I don’t think he ever sprung a dozen words at one time. With his upbringing, you see, there wasn’t any subject that any man knew about he could open up on. He kept quiet, and mixed with his backgrounds. If there was a lump of dirt, or a hole in the ground, or what was—was left after anythin’ had happened, it would be Hickmot. That was all he wanted to be.’

‘A camouflager?’ Orton suggested.

‘You have it! He was the complete camouflager all through. That’s him to a dot. Look here! He hadn’t even a nickname in his platoon! And then a friend of mine from our village, of the name of Vigors, came out with a draft. Bert Vigors. As a matter of fact, I was engaged to his sister. And Bert hadn’t been with us a week before they called him “The Grief.” His father was an oldish man, a market-gardener—high-class vegetables, bit o’ glass, an’—an’ all the rest of it. Do you know anything about that particular business?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ said Pole, ‘except that glass is expensive, and one’s man always sells the cut flowers.’

‘Then you do know something about it. It is. Bert was the old man’s only son, an’—I don’t blame him—he’d done his damnedest to get exempted—for the sake of the business, you understand. But he caught it all right. The tribunal wasn’t takin’ any the day he went up. Bert was for it, with a few remarks from the patriotic old was-sers on the bench. Our county paper had ’em all.’

‘That’s the thing that made one really want the Hun in England for a week or two,’ said Pole.

‘Mwor osee! The same tribunal, havin’ copped Bert, gave unconditional exemption to the opposition shop—a man called Margetts, in the market-garden business, which he’d established since the war, with his two sons who, every one in the village knew, had been pushed into the business to save their damned hides. But Margetts had a good lawyer to advise him. The whole case was frank and above-board to a degree—our county paper had it all in, too. Agricultural producevital necessity; the plough mightier than the sword; an’ those ducks on the bench, who had turned down Bert, noddin’ and smilin’ at Margetts, all full of his cabbage and green peas. What happened? The usual. Vigors’ business—he’s sixty-eight, with asthma—goes smash, and Margetts and Co. double theirs. So, then, that was Bert’s grievance, an’ he joined us full of it. That’s why they called him “The Grief.” Knowing the facts, I was with him; but being his sergeant, I had to check him, because grievances are catchin’, and three or four men with ’em make Companies—er—sticky. Luckily Bert wasn’t handy with his pen. He had to cork up his grievance mostly till he came across Hickmot, an’ Gord in Heaven knows what brought those two together. No! As y’were. I’m wrong about God! I always am. It was Sheep. Bert knew’s much about sheep as I do—an’ that’s Canterbury lamb—but he’d let

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Hickmot talk about ’em for hours, in return for Hickmot listenin’ to his grievance. Hickmot ’ud talk sheep—the one created thing he’d ever open up on—an’ Bert ’ud talk his grievance while they was waiting to go over the top. I’ve heard ’em again an’ again, and, of course, I encouraged ’em. Now, look here! Hickmot hadn’t seen an English house or a field or a road or—or anything any civ’lised man is used to in all his life! Sheep an’ blacks! Market-gardens an’ glass an’ exemption-tribunals! An’ the men’s teeth chatterin’ behind their masks between rum-issue an’ zero. Oh, there was fun in Hell those days, wasn’t there, boys?’

‘Sure! Oh, sure!’ Orton chuckled, and Pole echoed him.

‘Look here! When we were lying up somewhere among those forsaken chicken-camps back o’ Doullens, I found Hickmot making mud-pies in a farmyard an’ Bert lookin’ on. He’d made a model of our village according to Bert’s description of it. He’d preserved it in his head through all those weeks an’ weeks o’ Bert’s yap; an’ he’d coughed it all up—Margetts’ house and gardens, old Mr. Vigors’ ditto; both pubs; my father’s shop, everything that he’d been told by Bert done out to scale in mud, with bits o’ brick and stick. Haig ought to have seen it; but as his sergeant I had to check him for misusin’ his winkle-pin on dirt. ‘Come to think of it, a man who runs about uninhabited countries, with sheep, for a livin’ must have gifts for mappin’ and scalin’ things somehow or other, or he’d be dead. I never saw anything like it—all out o’ what Bert had told him by word of mouth. An’ the next time we went up the line Hickmot copped it in the leg just in front of me.’

‘Finish?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no. Only beginnin’. That was in December, somethin’ or other, ’16. In Jan’ry Vigors copped it for keeps. I buried him—snowin’ blind it was—an’ before we’d got him under the whole show was crumped. I wanted to bury him again just to spite ’em (I’m a spiteful man by nature), but the party wasn’t takin’ any more—even if they could have found it. But, you see, we had buried him all right, which is what they want at home, and I wrote the usual trimmin’s about the chaplain an’ the full service, an’ what his captain had said about Bert bein’ recommended for a pip, an’ the irreparable loss an’ so on. That was in Jan’ry ’17. In Feb’ry some time or other I got saved. My speciality had come to be bombin’s and night-doings. Very pleasant for a young free man, but—there’s a limit to what you can stand. It takes all men differently. Noise was what started me, at last. I’d got just up to the edge—wonderin’ when I’d crack an’ how many of our men I’d do in if it came on me while we were busy. I had that nice taste in the mouth and the nice temperature they call trench-fever, an’—I had to feel inside my head for the meanin’ of every order I gave or was responsible for executin’. You know!’

‘We do. Go on!’ said Pole in a tone that made Orton look at him.

‘So, you see, the bettin’ was even on my drawin’ a V.C. or getting Number Umpty rest-camp or—a firing party before breakfast. But Gord saved me. (I made friends with Him the last two years of the war. The others went off too quick.) They wanted a bomb in’-instructor for the training-battalion at home, an’ He put it into their silly hearts to indent for me. It took ’em five minutes to make me understand I was saved. Then I vomited, an’ then I cried. You know!’ The fat face of Bevin had changed and grown drawn, even as he spoke; and his hands tugged as though to tighten an imaginary belt.

‘I was never keen on bombin’ myself,’ said Pole. ‘But bomb in’-instruction’s murder!’

‘I don’t deny it’s a shade risky, specially when they take the pin out an’ start shakin’ it, same as the Chinks used to do in the woods at Beauty, when they were cuttin’ ’em down. But you live like a home defence Brigadier, besides week-end leaf. As a matter o’ fact, I married Bert’s sister soon’s I could after I got the billet, an’ I used to lie in our bed thinkin’ of the old crowd on the Somme an’—feelin’ what a swine I was. Of course, I earned two V.C.’s a week behind the traverse in the exercise of my ord’nary duties, but that isn’t the same thing. An’ yet I’d only joined up because—because I couldn’t dam’ well help it.’

‘An’ what about your Queenslander?’ the Australian asked.

‘Too de sweet! Pronto! We got a letter in May from a Brighton hospital matron, sayin’ that one of the name of Hickmer was anxious for news o’ me, previous to proceedin’ to Roehampton for initiation into his new leg. Of course, we applied for him by return. Bert had written about him to his sister—my missus—every time he wrote at all; an’ any pal o’ Bert’s—well, you know what the ladies are like. I warned her about his peculiarities. She wouldn’t believe till she saw him. He was just the same. You’d ha’ thought he’d show up in England like a fresh stiff on snow—but you never noticed him. You never heard him; and if he didn’t want to be seen he wasn’t there. He just joined up with his background. I knew he could do that with men; but how in Hell, seein’ how curious women are, he could camouflage with the ladies—my wife an’ my mother to wit—beats me! He’d feed the chickens for us; he’d stand on his one leg—it was off above the knee—and saw wood for us. He’d run—I mean he’d hop—errands for Mrs. B, or mother; our dog worshipped him from the start, though I never saw him throw a word to him; and—yet he didn’t take any place anywhere. You’ve seen a rabbit—you’ve seen a pheasant—hidin’ in a ditch? ’Put your hand on it sometimes before it moved, haven’t you? Well, that was Hickmot—with two women in the house crazy to find out—find out—anything about him that made him human. You know what women are! He stayed with us a fortnight. He left us on a Sat’day to go to Roehampton to try his leg. On Friday he came over to the bombin’ ground—not saym’ anything, as usual—to watch me instruct my Suicide Club, which was only half an hour’s run by rail from our village. He had his overcoat on, an’ as soon as he reached the place it was mafeesh with him, as usual. Rabbit-trick again! You never noticed him. He sat in the bomb-proof behind the pit where the duds accumulate till it’s time to explode ’em. Naturally, that’s strictly forbidden to the public. So he went there, an’ no one noticed him. When he’d had enough of watchin’, he hopped off home to feed our chickens for the last time.’

‘Then how did you know all about it?’ Orton said.

‘Because I saw him come into the place just as I was goin’ down into the trench. Then he slipped my memory till my train went back. But it would have made no difference what our arrangements were. If Hickmer didn’t choose to be noticed, he wasn’t noticed. Just for curiosity’s sake I asked some o’ the Staff Sergeants whether they’d seen him on the ground. Not one—not one single one had—or could tell me what he was like. An’, Sat’day noon, he went off to Roehampton. We saw him into the train ourselves, with the lunch Mrs. B. had put up for him—a one-legged man an’ his crutch, in regulation blue, khaki warm an’ kit-bag. Takin’ everything together, per’aps he’d spoken as many as twenty times in the thirteen days he’d been with us. I’m givin’ it you straight as it happened. An’ now—look here!—this is what did happen.

‘Between two and three that Sunday morning—dark an’ blowin’ from the north—I was woke up by an explosion an’ people shoutin’ “Raid!” The first bang fetched ’em out like worms after rain. There was another some minutes afterwards, an’ me an’ a Sergeant in the Shropshires on leaf told ’em all to take cover. They did. There was a devil of a long wait an’ there was a third pop. Everybody, includin’ me, heard aeroplanes. I didn’t notice till afterwards that——’

Bevin paused.

‘What?’ said Orton.

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‘Oh, I noticed a heap of things afterwards. What we noticed first—the Shropshire Sergeant an’ me—was a rick well alight back o’ Margetts’ house, an’, with that north wind, blowin’ straight on to another rick o’ Margetts’. It went up all of a whoosh. The next thing we saw by the light of it was Margetts’ house with a bomb-hole in the roof and the rafters leanin’ sideways like—like they always lean on such occasions. So we ran there, and the first thing we met was Margetts in his split-tailed nightie callin’ on his mother an’ damnin’ his wife. A man always does that when he’s cross. Have you noticed? Mrs. Margetts was in her nightie too, remindin’ Margetts that he hadn’t completed his rick insurance. An’ that’s a woman’s lovin’ care all over. Behind them was their eldest son, in trousers an’ slippers, nursin’ his arm an’ callin’ for the doctor. They went through us howlin’ like flammemwerfer casualties—right up the street to the surgery.

‘Well, there wasn’t anything to do except let the show burn out. We hadn’t any means of extinguishing conflagrations. Some of ’em fiddled with buckets, an’ some of ’em tried to get out some o’ Margetts’ sticks, but his younger son kept shoutin’, “Don’t! Don’t! It’ll be stole! It’ll be stole!” So it burned instead, till the roof came down, top of all—a little, cheap, dirty villa, In reel life one whizz-bang would have shifted it; but in our civil village it looked that damned important and particular you wouldn’t believe. We couldn’t get round to Margetts’ stable because of the two ricks alight, but we found some one had opened the door early an’ the horses was in Margetts’ new vegetable piece down the hill which he’d hired off old Vigors to extend his business with. I love the way a horse always looks after his own belly—same as a Gunner. They went to grazin’ down the carrots and onions till young Margetts ran to turn ’em out, an’ then they got in among the glass frames an’ cut themselves. Oh, we had a regular Russian night of it, everybody givin’ advice an’ fallin’ over each other. When it got light we saw the damage. House, two ricks an’ stable mafeesh; the big glasshouse with every pane smashed and the furnace-end of it blown clean out. All the horses an’ about fifteen head o’ cattle—butcher’s stores from the next field—feeding in the new vegetable piece. It was a fair clean-up from end to end—house, furniture, fittin’s, plant, an’ all the early crops.’

‘Was there any other damage in the village?’ I asked.

‘I’m coming to it—the curious part—but I wouldn’t call it damage. I was renting a field then for my chickens off the Merecroft Estate. It’s accommodation-land, an’ there was a wet ditch at the bottom that I had wanted for ever so long to dam up to make a swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks.’

‘Ah!’ said Orton, half turning in his chair, all in one piece.

‘S’pose I was allowed? Not me. Their Agent came down on me for tamperin’ with the Estate’s drainage arrangements. An’ all I wanted was to bring the bank down where the ditch narrows—a couple of cartloads of dirt would have held the water back for half-a-dozen yards—not more than that, an’ I could have made a little spill-way over the top with three boards-same as in trenches. Well, the first bomb—the one that woke me up—had done my work for me better than I could. It had dropped just under the hollow of the bank an’ brought it all down in a fair landslide. I’d got my swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks, an’ I didn’t see how the Estate could kick at the Act o’ God, d’you?’

‘And Hickmot?’ said Orton, grinning.

‘Hold on! There was a Parish Council meetin’ to demand reprisals, of course, an’ there was the policeman an’ me pokin’ about among the ruins till the Explosives Expert came down in his motor car at three p.m. Monday, an’ he meets all the Margetts off their rockers, howlin’ in the surgery, an’ he sees my swim-hole fillin’ up to the brim.’

‘What did he say?’ Pole inquired.

‘He sized it up at once. (He had to get back to dine in town that evening.) He said all the evidence proved that it was a lucky shot on the part of one isolated Hun ’plane gom’ home, an’ we weren’t to take it to heart. I don’t know that anybody but the Margetts did. He said they must have used incendiary bombs of a new type—which he’d suspected for a long time. I don’t think the man was any worse than God intended him to be. I don’t reelly. But the Shropshire Sergeant said——’

‘And what did you think?’ I interrupted.

‘I didn’t think. I knew by then. I’m not a Sherlock Holmes; but havin’ chucked ’em an’ chucked ’em back and kicked ’em out of the light an’ slept with ’em for two years, an’ makin’ my livin’ out of them at that time, I could recognise the fuse of a Mills bomb when I found it. I found all three of ’em. ’Curious about that second in Margetts’ glasshouse. Hickmot mus’ have raked the ashes out of the furnace, popped it in, an’ shut the furnace door. It operated all right. Not one livin’ pane left in the putty, and all the brickwork spread round the yard in streaks. Just like that St. Firmin village we were talking about.’

‘But how d’you account for young what’s—hisname gettin’ his arm broken?’ said Pole.

‘Crutch!’ said Bevin. ‘If you or me had taken on that night’s doin’s, with one leg, we’d have hopped and sweated from one flank to another an’ been caught half-way between. Hickmot didn’t. I’m as sure as I’m sittin’ here that he did his doings quiet and comfortable at his full height—he was over six feet—and no one noticed him. This is the way I see it. He fixed the swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks first. We used to talk over our own affairs in front of him, of course, and he knew just what she wanted in the way of a pond. So he went and made it at his leisure. Then he prob’ly went over to Margetts’ and lit the first rack, knowin’ that the wind ’ud do the rest. When young Margetts saw the light of it an’ came out to look, Hickmot would have taken post at the back-door an’ dropped the young swine with his crutch, same as we used to drop Huns comin’ out of a dug-out. You know how they blink at the light? Then he must have walked off an’ opened Margetts’ stable door to save the horses. They’d be more to him than any man’s life. Then he prob’ly chucked one bomb on top o’ Margetts’ roof, havin’ seen that the first rick had caught the second and that the whole house was bound to go. D’you get me?’

‘Then why did he waste his bomb on the house?’ said Orton. His glass eye seemed as triumphant as his real one.

‘For camouflage, of course. He was camouflagin’ an air-raid. When the Margetts piled out of their place into the street, he prob’ly attended to the glasshouse, because that would be Margetts’ chief means o’ business. After that—I think so, because otherwise I don’t see where all those extra cattle came from that we found in the vegetable piece—he must have walked off an’ rounded up all the butcher’s beasts in the next medder, an’ driven ’em there to help the horses. And when he’d finished everything he’d set out to do, I’ll lay my life an’ kit he curled up like a bloomin’ wombat not fifty yards away from the whole flamin’ show—an’ let us run round him. An’ when he’d had his sleep out, he went up to Roehampton Monday mornin’ by some tram that he’d decided upon in his own mind weeks an’ weeks before.’

‘Did he know all the trains then?’ said Pole.

‘Ask me another. I only know that if he wanted to get from any place to another without bein’ noticed, he did it.’

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‘And the bombs? He got ’em from you, of course,’ Pole went on.

‘What do you think? He was an hour in the park watchin’ me instruct, sittin’, as I remember, in the bomb-proof by the dud-hole, in his overcoat. He got ’em all right. He took neither more nor less than he wanted; an’ I’ve told you what he did with ’em—one—two—an’ three.’

‘’Ever see him afterwards?’ said Orton.

‘Yes. ’Saw him at Brighton when I went down there with the missus, not a month after he’d been broken in to his Roehampton leg. You know how the boys used to sit all along Brighton front in their blues, an’ jump every time the coal was bein’ delivered to the hotels behind them? I barged into him opposite the Old Ship, an’ I told him about our air-raid. I told him how Margetts had gone off his rocker an’ walked about starin’ at the sky an’ holdin’ reprisal-meetin’s all by himself; an’ how old Mr. Vigors had bought in what he’d left—tho’ of course I said what was left—o’ Margetts’ business; an’ how well my swim-hole for the ducks was doin’. It didn’t interest him. He didn’t want to come over to stay with us any more, either. We were a long, long way back in his past. You could see that. He wanted to get back with his new leg, to his own God-forsaken sheep-walk an’ his black fellers in Queensland. I expect he’s done it now, an’ no one has noticed him. But, by Gord! He did leak a little at the end. He did that much! When we was waitin’ for the tram to the station, I said how grateful I was to Fritz for moppin’ up Margetts an’ makin’ our swim-hole all in one night. Mrs. B. seconded the motion. We couldn’t have done less. Well, then Hickmot said, speakin’ in his queer way, as if English words were all new to him: “Ah, go on an’ bail up in Hell,” he says. “Bert was my friend.” That was all. I’ve given it you just as it happened, word for word. I’d hate to have an Australian have it in for me for anything I’d done to his friend. Mark you, I don’t say there’s anything wrong with you Australians, Brother Orton. I only say they ain’t like us or any one else that I know.’

‘Well, do you want us to be?’ said Orton.

‘No, no. It takes all sorts to make a world, as the sayin’ is. And now’—Bevin pulled out his gold watch—‘if I don’t make a move of it I’ll miss my last train.’

‘Let her go,’ said Orton serenely. ‘You’ve done some lorry-hoppin’ in your time, haven’t you—Sergeant?’

‘When I was two an’ a half stone lighter, Digger,’ Bevin smiled in reply.

‘Well, I’ll run you out home before sun-up. I’m a haulage-contractor now—London and Oxford. There’s an empty of mine ordered to Oxford. We can go round by your place as easy as not. She’s lyin’ out Vauxhall-way.’

‘My Gord ! An’ see the sun rise again! ’Haven’t seen him since I can’t remember when,’ said Bevin, chuckling. ‘Oh, there was fun sometimes in Hell, wasn’t there, Australia?’; and again his hands went down to tighten the belt that was missing.

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THE only important society in existence to-day is the E.C.F.—the Eclectic but Comprehensive Fraternity for the Perpetuation of Gratitude towards Lesser Lights. Its founders were William Lemming, of Lemming and Orton, print-sellers; Alexander Hay McKnight, of Ellis and McKnight, provision-merchants; Robert Keede, M.R.C.P., physician, surgeon, and accoucheur; Lewis Holroyd Burges, tobacconist and cigar importer—all of the South Eastern postal districts—and its zealous, hard-working, but unappreciated Secretary. The meetings are usually at Mr. Lemming’s little place in Berkshire, where he raises pigs.I had been out of England for awhile, missing several dinners, but was able to attend a summer one with none present but ourselves; several red mullets in paper; a few green peas and ducklings; an arrangement of cockscombs with olives, and capers as large as cherries; strawberries and cream; some 1903 Chateau la Tour; and that locked cabinet of cigars to which only Burges has the key.

It was at the hour when men most gracefully curvet abroad on their hobbies, and after McKnight had been complaining of systematic pilfering in his three big shops, that Burges told us how an illustrious English astrologer called Lily had once erected a horoscope to discover the whereabouts of a parcel of stolen fish. The stars led him straight to it and the thief and, incidentally, into a breeze with a lady over ‘seven Portugal onions’ also gone adrift, but not included in the periscope. Then we wondered why detective-story writers so seldom use astrology to help out the local Sherlock Holmes; how many illegitimate children that great original had begotten in magazine form; and so drifted on to murder at large. Keede, whose profession gives him advantages, illustrated the subject.

‘I wish I could do a decent detective story,’ I said at last. ‘I never get further than the corpse.’

‘Corpses are foul things,’ Lemming mused aloud. ‘I wonder what sort of a corpse I shall make.’

‘You’ll never know,’ the gentle, silver-haired Burges replied. ‘You won’t even know you’re dead till you look in the glass and see no reflection. An old woman told me that once at Barnet Horse Fair—and I couldn’t have been more than seven at the time.’

We were quiet for a few minutes, while the Altar of the Lesser Lights, which is also our cigar-lighter, came into use. The single burner atop, representing gratitude towards Lesser Lights in general, was of course lit. Whenever gratitude towards a named Lesser Light is put forward and proven, one or more of the nine burners round the base can be thrown into action by pulling its pretty silver draw-chain.

‘What will you do for me,’ said Keede, puffing, ‘if I give you an absolutely true detective yarn?’

‘If I can make anything of it,’ I replied, ‘I’ll finish the Millar Gift.’

This meant the cataloguing of a mass of Masonic pamphlets (1832-59), bequeathed by a Brother to Lodge Faith and Works 5836 E.C.—a job which Keede and I, being on the Library Committee, had together shirked for months.

‘Promise you won’t doctor it if you use it?’ said Keede.

‘And for goodness’ sake don’t bring me in any more than you can help,’ said Lemming.

No practitioner ever comprehends another practitioner’s methods; but a promise was given, a bargain struck; and the tale runs here substantially as it was told.

That past autumn, Lemming’s pig-man (who had been sitting up with a delicate lady-Berkshire) discovered, on a wet Sunday dawn in October, the body of a village girl called Ellen Marsh lying on the bank of a deep cutting where the road from the village runs into the London Road. Ellen, it seemed, had many friends with whom she used to make evening appointments, and Channet’s Ash, as the cross-roads were called, from the big ash that overhung them, was one of her well-known trysting-places. The body lay face down at the highest point of a sloping footpath which the village children had trodden out up the bank, and just where that path turned the corner under Channet’s Ash and dropped into the London Road. The pig-man roused the village constable, an ex-soldier called Nicol, who picked up, close to the corpse, a narrow-bladed fern-trowel, its handle wrapped with twine. There were no signs of a struggle, but it had been raining all night. The pig-man then went off to wake up Keede, who was spending the week-end with Lemming. Keede did not disturb his host, Mrs. Lemming being ill at the time, but he and the policeman commandeered a builder’s handcart from some half-built shops down the London Road; wheeled the body to the nearest inn—the Cup o’ Grapes—pushed a car out of a lock-up; took the shove-halfpenny board from the Oddfellows’ Room, and laid the body on it till the regular doctor should arrive.

‘He was out,’ Keede said, ‘so I made an examination on my own. There was no question of assault. She had been dropped by one scientific little jab, just at the base of the skull, by someone who knew his anatomy. That was all. Then Nicol, the Bobby, asked me if I’d care to walk over with him to Jimmy Tigner’s house.’

‘Who was Jimmy Tigner?’ I asked.

‘Ellen’s latest young man—a believing soul. He was assistant at the local tinsmith’s, living with his mother in a cottage down the street. It was seven o’clock then, and not a soul about. Jimmy had to be waked up. He stuck his head out of the window, and Nicol stood in the garden among the cabbages—friendly as all sin—and asked him what he’d been doing the night before, because someone had been knocking Ellen about. Well, there wasn’t much doubt what Jimmy had been up to. He was altogether “the morning after.” He began dressing and talking out of the window at the same time, and said he’d kill any man who touched Ellen.’

‘Hadn’t the policeman cautioned him?’ McKnight demanded.

‘What for? They’re all friends in this village. Then Jimmy said that, on general principles, Ellen deserved anything she might have got. He’d done with her. He told us a few details (some girl must have given her away), but the point he kept coming back to was that they had parted in “high dungeon.” He repeated that a dozen times. Nicol let him run on, and when the boy was quite dressed, he said “Well, you may as well come on up-street an’ look at her. She don’t bear you any malice now.” (Oh, I tell you the War has put an edge on things all round!) Jimmy came down, jumpy as a cat, and, when we were going through the Cup o’ Grapes yard, Nicol unlocked the garage and pushed him in. The face hadn’t been covered either.’

‘Drastic,’ said Burges, shivering.

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‘It was. Jimmy went off the handle at once; and Nicol kept patting him on the back and saying: “That’s all right! I’ll go bail you didn’t do it.” Then Jimmy wanted to know why the deuce he’d been dragged into it. Nicol said “Oh, that’s what the French call a confrontation. But you’re all right.” Then Jimmy went for Nicol. So we got him out of the garage, and gave him a drink, and took him back to his mother. But at the inquest he accounted for every minute of his time. He’d left Ellen under Channet’s Ash, telling her what he thought of her over his shoulder for a quarter of a mile down the lane (that’s what “high dungeon” meant in their language). Luckily two or three of the girls and the bloods of the village had heard ’em. After that, he’d gone to the Cup o’ Grapes, filled himself up, and told everybody his grievances against Ellen till closing-time. The interestin’ thing was that he seemed to be about the only decent boy of the lot.’

‘Then,’ Lemming interrupted, ‘the reporters began looking for clues. They—they behaved like nothing I’ve ever imagined! I was afraid we’d be dragged into it. You see, that wretched Ellen had been our scullery-maid a few months before, and—my wife—as ill as she was. . . . But mercifully that didn’t come out at the inquest.’

‘No’ Keede went on. ‘Nicol steered the thing. He’s related to Ellen. And by the time Jimmy had broken down and wept, and the reporters had got their sensation, it was brought in “person or persons unknown.”’

‘What about the trowel?’ said McKnight, who is a notable gardener.

‘It was a most valuable clue, of course, because it explained the modus operandi. The punch—with the handle, the local doctor said—had been delivered through her back hair, with just enough strength to do the job and no more. I couldn’t have operated more neatly myself. The Police took the trowel, but they couldn’t trace it to anyone, somehow. The main point in the village was that no one who knew her wanted to go into Ellen’s character. She was rather popular, you see. Of course the village was a bit disappointed about Jimmy’s getting off; and when he broke down again at her funeral, it revived suspicion. Then the Huish poisoning case happened up in the North; and the reporters had to run off and take charge of it. What did your pig-man say about ’em, Will?’

‘Oh, Griffiths said: “’Twas Gawd’s own Mercy those young gen’elmen didn’t ’ave ’alf of us ’ung before they left. They were that energetic!”’

‘They were,’ said Keede. ‘That’s why I kept back my evidence.’

‘There was the wife to be considered too,’ said Lemming. ‘She’d never have stood being connected with the thing, even remotely.’

‘I took it upon myself to act upon that belief,’ Keede replied gravely. ‘Well—now for my little bit. I’d come down that Saturday night to spend the week-end with Will here; and I couldn’t get here till late. It was raining hard, and the car skidded badly. Just as I turned off the London Road into the lane under Channet’s Ash, my lights picked up a motor-bike lying against the bank where they found Ellen; and I saw a man bending over a woman up the bank. Naturally one don’t interfere with these little things as a rule; but it occurred to me there might have been a smash. So I called out: “Anything wrong? Can I help?” The man said: “No, thanks. We’re all right,” or words to that effect, and I went on. But the bike’s letters happened to be my own initials, and its number was the year I was born in. I wasn’t likely to forget ’em, you see.’

‘You told the Police?’ said McKnight severely.

‘’Took ’em into my confidence at once, Sandy,’ Keede replied. ‘There was a Sergeant, Sydenham way, that I’d been treating for Salonika fever. I told him I was afraid I’d brushed a motor-bike at night coming up into West Wickham, on one of those blind bends—up the hill, and I’d be glad to know I hadn’t hurt him. He gave me what I wanted in twenty-four hours. The bike belonged to one Henry Wollin—of independent means—livin’ near Mitcham.’

‘But West Wickham isn’t in Berkshire—nor is Mitcham,’ McKnight began.

‘Here’s a funny thing,’ Keede went on, without noticing. ‘Most men and nearly all women commit murder single-handed; but no man likes to go man-hunting alone. Primitive instinct, I suppose. That’s why I lugged Will into the Sherlock Holmes business. You hated too.’

‘I hadn’t recovered from those reporters,’ said Lemming.

‘They were rather energetic. But I persuaded Will that we’d call upon Master Wollin and apologise—as penitent motorists—and we went off to Mitcham in my two-seater. Wollin had a very nice little detached villa down there. The old woman—his housekeeper—who let us in, was West Country, talkin’ as broad as a pat o’ butter. She took us through the hall to Wollin, planting things in his back-garden.’

‘A wonderful little garden for that soil,’ said Lemming, who considers himself an even greater gardener than McKnight, although he keeps two men less.

‘He was a big, strong, darkish chap—middle-aged—wide as a bull between the eyes—no beauty, and evidently had been a very sick man. Will and I apologised to him, and he began to lie at once. He said he’d been at West Wickham at the time (on the night of the murder, you know), and he remembered dodging out of the way of a car. He didn’t seem pleased that we should have picked up his number so promptly. Seeing we were helping him to establish an alibi, he ought to have been, oughtn’t he?’

‘Ye mean,’ said McKnight, suddenly enlightened, ‘that he was committing the murder here in Berkshire on the night that he told you he was in West Wickham, which is in Kent.’

‘Which is in Kent. Thank you. It is. And we went on talking about that West Wickham hill till he mentioned he’d been in the War, and that gave me my chance to talk. And he was an enthusiastic gardener, he said, and that let Will in. It struck us both that he was nervous in a carneying way that didn’t match his build and voice at all. Then we had a drink in his study. Then the fun began. There were four pictures on the wall.’

‘Prints—prints,’ Lemming corrected professionally.

‘’Same thing, aren’t they, Will? Anyhow, you got excited enough over them. At first I thought Will was only playing up. But he was genuine.’

‘So were they,’ Lemming said. ‘Sandy, you remember those four “Apostles” I sold you last Christmas?’

‘I have my counterfoil yet,’ was the dry answer.

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‘What sort of prints were they?’ Burges demanded.

The moonlike face of Alexander McKnight, who collects prints along certain lines, lit with devout rapture. He began checking off on his fingers.

‘The firrst,’ said he, ‘was the draped one of Ray—the greatest o’ them all. Next, yon French print o’ Morrison, when he was with the Duke of Orleans at Blois; third, the Leyden print of Grew in his youth; and, fourth, that wreathed Oxford print of Hales. The whole aapostolic succession of them.’

‘I never knew Morrison laid out links in France,’ I said.

‘Morrison? Links? Links? Did you think those four were gowfers then?’

‘Wasn’t old Tom Morrison a great golfer?’ I ventured.

McKnight turned on me with utter scorn. ‘Those prints—’ he began. ‘But ye’d not understand. They were—we’ll say they were just pictures of some garrdeners I happened to be interested in.’

This was rude of McKnight, but I forgave him because of the excellence of his imported groceries. Keede went on.

‘After Will had talked the usual buyer’s talk, Wollin seemed willin’ to part with ’em, and we arranged we’d call again and complete the deal. Will ’ud do business with a criminal on the drop o’ course. He gave Wollin his card, and we left; Wollin carneying and suckin’ up to us right to the front door. We hadn’t gone a couple of miles when Will found he’d given Wollin his personal card—not his business one—with his private address in Berkshire! The murder about ten days old, and the papers still stinkin’ with it! I think I told you at the time you were a fool, Will?’

‘You did. I never saw how I came to make the mistake. These cards are different sizes too,’ poor Lemming said.

‘No, we were not a success as man-hunters,’ Keede laughed. ‘But Will and I had to call again, of course, to settle the sale. That was a week after. And this time, of course, Wollin—not being as big a fool as Will—had hopped it and left no address. The old lady said he was given to going off for weeks at a time. That hung us up; but to do Will justice, which I don’t often, he saved the situation by his damned commercial instincts. He said he wanted to look at the prints again. The old lady was agreeable—rather forth-comin’ in fact. She let us into the study, had the prints down, and asked if we’d like some tea. While she was getting it, and Will was hanging over the prints, I looked round the room. There was a cupboard, half opened, full of tools, and on top of ’em a new—what did you say it was, Will?—fern-trowel. ’Same pattern as the one Nicol found by Ellen’s head. That gave me a bit of a turn. I’d never done any Sherlockin’ outside my own profession. Then the old lady came back and I made up to her. When I was a sixpenny doctor at Lambeth, half my great success——’

‘Ye can hold that over,’ McKnight observed. ‘The murrder’s what’s interestin’ me.’

‘Wait till your next go of gout. I’ll interest you, Sandy. Well, she expanded (they all do with me), and, like patients, she wanted advice gratis. So I gave it. Then she began talking about Wollin. She’d been his nurse, I fancy. Anyhow, she’d known him all his life, and she said he was full of virtue and sickness She said he’d been wounded and gassed and gangrened in the War, and after that—oh, she worked up to it beautifully—he’d been practically off his head. She called it “fairy-kist.”’

‘That’s pretty—very pretty,’ said Burges.

‘Meanin’ he’d been kissed by the fairies?’ McKnight inquired.

‘It would appear so, Sandy. I’d never heard the word before. ’West Country, I suppose. And she had one of those slow, hypnotic voices, like cream from a jug. Everything she said squared with my own theories up to date. Wollin was on the break of life, and, given wounds, gas, and gangrene just at that crisis, why anything—Jack the Ripperism or religious mania—might come uppermost. I knew that, and the old lady was as good as telling it me over again, and putting up a defence for him in advance. ’Wonderful bit of work. Patients’ relatives are like that sometimes—specially wives.’

‘Yes, but what about Wollin?’ I said.

‘Wait a bit. Will and I went away, and we talked over the fern-trowel and so forth, and we both agreed we ought to release our evidence. There, somehow, we stuck. Man-hunting’s a dirty job. So we compromised. I knew a fellow in the C.I.D., who thought he had a floating kidney, and we decided to put the matter before him and let him take charge. He had to go North, however, and he wrote he could not see us before the Tuesday of next week. This would be four or five weeks after the murder. I came down here again that week-end to stay with Will, and on Saturday night Will and I went to his study to put the finishing touches to our evidence. I was trying to keep my own theory out of it as much as I could. Yes, if you want to know, Jack the Ripper was my notion, and my theory was that my car had frightened the brute off before he could do anything in that line. And then, Will’s housemaid shot into the study with Nicol after her, and Jimmy Tigner after him!’

‘Luckily my wife was up in town at the time,’ said Lemming. ‘They all shouted at once too.’

‘They did! ‘ said Keede. ‘Nicol shouted loudest, though. He was plastered with mud, waving what was left of his helmet, and Jimmy was in hysterics. Nicol yelled:—“Look at me Look at this! It’s all right! Look at me! I’ve got it!” He had got it too! It came out, when they quieted down, that he had been walking with Jimmy in the lane by Channet’s Ash. Hearing a lorry behind ’em—you know what a narrow lane it is—they stepped up on to that path on the bank (I told you about it) that the school-children had made. It was a contractor’s lorry—Higbee and Norton, a local firm—with two girders for some new shops on the London Road. They were deliverin’ late on Saturday evening, so’s the men could start on Monday. Well, these girders had been chucked in anyhow on to a brick lorry with a tail-board. Instead of slopin’ forward they cocked up backwards like a pheasant’s tail, sticking up high and overhanging. They were tied together with a few turns of rope at the far ends. Do you see.’

So far we could see nothing. Keede made it plainer.

‘Nicol said he went up the bank first Jimmy behind him—and after a few steps he found his helmet knocked off. If he’d been a foot higher up the bank his head ’ud have gone. The lorry had skidded on the tar of the London Road, as it turned into it left-handed—her tail swung to the right, and the girders swung with it, just missing braining Nicol up on the bank. The lorry was well in the left-hand gutter when he got his breath again. He went for the driver at once. The man said all the lorries always skidded under Channet’s Ash, when it was wet, because of the camber of the road, and they allowed for it as a regular stunt. And he damned the road authorities, and Nicol for being in the light. Then Jimmy Tigner, Nicol told us, caught on to what it meant, and he climbed into the lorry shouting: “You killed Ellen!” It was all Nicol could do to prevent him choking the fellow there and then; but Nicol didn’t pull him off till Jimmy got it out of the driver that he had been delivering girders the night Ellen was killed. Of course, he hadn’t noticed anything.

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‘Then Nicol came over to Lemming and me to talk it over. I gave Jimmy a bromide and sent him off to his mother. He wasn’t any particular use, except as a witness—and no good after. Then Nicol went over the whole thing again several times, to fix it in our minds. Next morning he and I and Will called on old Higbee before he could get to church. We made him take out the particular lorry implicated, with the same driver, and a duplicate load packed the same way, and demonstrate for us. We kept her stunting half Sunday morning in the rain, and the skid delivered her into the left-hand gutter of the London Road every time she took that corner; and every time her tail with the girders swiped along the bank of that lane like a man topping a golf-ball. And when she did that, there were half-a-dozen paces—not more—along that schoolchildren’s path, that meant sure death to anyone on it at the time. Nicol was just climbing into the danger-zone when he stepped up, but he was a foot too low. The girders only brushed through his hair. We got some laths and stuck ’em in along the path (Jimmy Tigner told us Ellen was five foot three) to test our theory. The last lath was as near as could be to where the pig-man had found the body; and that happened to be the extreme end of the lorry’s skid. ’See what happened? We did. At the end of her skid the lorry’s rear wheels ’ud fetch up every time with a bit of a jar against the bank, and the girders ’ud quiver and lash out a few inches—like a golf-club wigglin’. Ellen must have caught just enough of that little sideway flick, at the base of her skull, to drop her like a pithed ox. We worked it all out on the last lath. The rope wrappings on the end of the damned things saved the skin being broken. Hellish, isn’t it? And then Jimmy Tigner realised that if she had only gone two paces further she’d have been round the corner of the bank and safe. Then it came back to him that she’d stopped talkin’ “in dungeon” rather suddenly, and he hadn’t gone back to see! I spent most of the afternoon sitting with him. He’d been tried too high—too high. I had to sign his certificate a few weeks later. No! He won’t get better.’

We commented according to our natures, and then McKnight said:—‘But—if so—why did Wollin disappear?’

‘That comes next on the agenda, Worshipful Sir. Brother Lemming has not the instincts of the real man-hunter. He felt shy. I had to remind him of the prints before he’d call on Wollin again. We’d allowed our prey ten days to get the news, while the papers were busy explainin’ Ellen’s death, and people were writin’ to ’em and saying they’d nearly been killed by lorries in the same way in other places. Then old Higbee gave Ellen’s people a couple of hundred without prejudice (he wanted to get a higher seat in the Synagogue—the Squire’s pew, I think), and everyone felt that her character had been cleared.’

‘But Wollin?’ McKnight insisted.

‘When Will and I went to call on him he’d come home again. I hadn’t seen him for—let’s see, it must have been going on for a month—but I hardly recognised him. He was burned out—all his wrinkles gashes, and his eyes readjustin’ ’emselves after looking into Hell. One gets to know that kind of glare nowadays. But he was immensely relieved to see us. So was the old lady. If he’d been a dog, he’d have been wagging his tall from the nose down. That was rather embarrassing too, because it wasn’t our fault we hadn’t had him tried for his life. And while we were talking over the prints, he said, quite suddenly: “I don’t blame you! I’d have believed it against myself on the evidence!” That broke the ice with a brick. He told us he’d almost stepped on Ellen’s body that night—dead and stiffening. Then I’d come round the corner and hailed him, and that panicked him. He jumped on his bike and fled, forgetting the trowel. So he’d bought another with some crazy notion of putting the Law off the track. That’s what hangs murderers.

‘When Will and I first called on him, with our fairy-tales about West Wickham, he had fancied he might be under observation, and Will’s mixing up the cards clinched it. . . . So he disappeared. He went down into his own cellar, he said, and waited there, with his revolver, ready to blow his brains out when the warrant came. What a month! Think of it! A cellar and a candle, a file of gardening papers, and a loaded revolver for company! Then I asked why. He said no jury on earth would have believed his explanation of his movements. “Look at it from the prosecution’s point of view,” he said. “Here’s a middle-aged man with a medical record that ’ud account for any loss of controls—and that would mean Broadmoor—fifty or sixty miles from his home in a rainstorm, on the top of a fifteen foot cutting, at night. He leaves behind him, with the girl’s body, the very sort of weapon that might have caused her death. I read about the trowel in the papers. Can’t you see how the thing ’ud be handled?” he said.

‘I asked him then what in the world he really was doing that had to be covered up by suicide. He said he was planting things. I asked if he meant stolen goods. After the trouble we’d given him, Will and I wouldn’t have peached on him for that, would we, Will?’

‘No,’ said Lemming. ‘His face was enough. It was like——’ and he named a picture by an artist called Goya.

‘“Stolen goods be damned,” Wollin said to me. “If you must have it, I was planting out plants from my garden.” What did you say to him then, Will?’

‘I asked him what the plants were, of course,’ said Lemming, and turned to McKnight. ‘They were daffodils, and a sort of red honeysuckle, and a special loosestrife—a hybrid.’ McKnight nodded judicially while Lemming talked incomprehensible horticulture for a minute or two.

‘Gardening isn’t my line,’ Keede broke in, ‘but Will’s questions acted on Master Wollin like a charm. He dropped his suicide talk, and began on gardening. After that it was Will’s operation. I hadn’t a look-in for ten minutes. Then I said: “What’s there to make a fuss about in all this?” Then he turned away from Will and spoke to me, carneying again—like patients do. He began with his medical record—one shrapnel peppering, and one gassing, with gangrene. He had put in about fourteen months in various hospitals, and he was full of medical talkee-talkee. Just like you, Sandy, when you’ve been seeing your damned specialists. And he’d been doped for pain and pinched nerves, till the wonder was he’d ever pulled straight again. He told us that the only thing that had helped him through the War was his love of gardening. He’d been mad keen on it all his life—and even in the worst of the Somme he used to get comfort out of plants and bot’ny, and that sort of stuff. I never did. Well, I saw he was speaking the truth; but next minute he began to hedge. I noticed it, and said something, and then he sweated in rivers. He hadn’t turned a hair over his proposed suicide, but now he sweated till he had to wipe it off his forehead.

‘Then I told him I was something else besides a G.P., and Will was too, if that ’ud make things easier for him. And it did. From then on he told the tale on the Square, in grave distress, you know. At his last hospital he’d been particularly doped, and he fancied that that was where his mind had gone. He told me that he was insane, and had been for more than a year. I asked him not to start on his theories till he’d finished with his symptoms. (You patients are all the same.) He said there were Gotha raids round his hospital, which used to upset the wards. And there was a V.A.D.—she must have been something of a woman, too—who used to read to him and tell him stories to keep him quiet. He liked. ’em because, as far as he remembered, they were all about gardening. But, when he grew better, he began to hear Voices—little whispers at first, growing louder and ending in regular uproars—ordering him to do certain things. He used to lie there shaking with horror, because he funked going mad. He wanted to live and be happy again, in his garden—like the rest of us.

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‘When he was discharged, he said, he left hospital with a whole Army Corps shouting into his ears. The sum and substance of their orders was that he must go out and plant roots and things at large up and down the country-side. Naturally, he suffered a bit, but, after a while, he went back to his house at Mitcham and obeyed orders, because, he said, as long as he was carrying ’em out the Voices stopped. If he knocked off even for a week, he said, they helled him on again. Being a methodical bird, he’d bought a motor-bike and a basket lined with oil-cloth, and he used to skirmish out planting his silly stuff by the wayside, and in coppices and on commons. He’d spy out likely spots by day and attend to ’em after dark. He was working round Channet’s Ash that night, and he’d come out of the meadow, and down the school-children’s path, right on to Ellen’s body. That upset him. I wasn’t worryin’ about Ellen for the moment. I headed him back to his own symptoms. The devil of it was that, left to himself, there was nothing he’d have liked better than this planting job; but the Voices ordering him to do it, scared the soul out of him. Then I asked him if the Voices had worried him much when he was in the cellar with his revolver. He said, comin’ to think of it, that they had not; and I reminded him that there was very little seasickness in the boats when submarines were around.’

‘You’ve forgotten,’ said Lemming, ‘that he stopped fawning as soon as he found out we were on the Square.’

‘He did so,’ Keede assented. ‘And he insisted on our staying to supper, so’s he could tell his symptoms properly. (’Might have been you again, Sandy.) The old lady backed him up. She was clinging to us too, as though we’d done her a favour. And Wollin told us that if he’d been in the dock, he knew he’d have come out with his tale of his Voices and night-plantings, just like the Ancient Mariner; and that would have sent him to Broadmoor. It was Broadmoor, not hanging, that he funked. And so he went on and on about his Voices, and I cross-examined. He said they used to begin with noises in his head like rotten walnuts being smashed; but he fancied that must have been due to the bombs in the raid. I reminded him again that I didn’t want his theories. The Voices were sometimes like his V.A.D.’s, but louder, and they were all mixed up with horrible dope-dreams. For instance, he said, there was a smiling dog that ran after him and licked his face, and the dog had something to do with being able to read gardening books, and that gave him the notion, as he lay abed in hospital, that he had water on the brain, and that that ’ud prevent him from root-gatherin’ an’ obeying his orders.’

‘He used the words “root-gathering.” It’s an unusual combination nowadays,’ said Lemming suddenly. ‘That made me take notice, Sandy.’

Keede held up his hand. ‘No, you don’t, Will! I tell this tale much better than you. Well, then Will cut in, and asked Wollin if he could remember exactly what sort of stuff his V.A.D. had read to him during the raids. He couldn’t; except that it was all about gardening, and it made him feel as if he were in Paradise. Yes, Sandy, he used the word “Paradise.” Then Will asked him if he could give us the precise wording of his orders to plant things. He couldn’t do that either. Then Will said, like a barrister: “I put it to you, that the Voices ordered you to plant things by the wayside for such as have no gardens.” And Will went over it slowly twice. “My God!” said Wollin. “That’s the ipsissima verba.” “Good,” said Will. “Now for your dog. I put it to you that the smiling dog was really a secret friend of yours. What was his colour?” “Dunno,” said Wollin. “It was yellow,” says Will. “A big yellow bullterrier.” Wollin thought a bit and agreed. “When he ran after you,” says Will, “did you ever hear anyone trying to call him off, in a very loud voice?” “Sometimes,” said Wollin. “Better still,” says Will. “Now, I put it to you that that yellow bull-terrier came into a library with a Scotch gardener who said it was a great privilege to be able to consult botanical books.” Wollin thought a bit, and said that those were some of the exact words that were mixed up with his Voices, and his trouble about not being able to read. I shan’t forget his face when he said it, either. My word, he sweated.’

Here Sandy McKnight smiled and nodded across to Lemming, who nodded back as mysteriously as a Freemason or a gardener.

‘All this time,’ Keede continued, ‘Will looked more important than ever I’ve seen him outside of his shop; and he said to Wollin: “Now I’ll tell you the story, Mr. Wollin, that your V.A.D. read or told you. Check me where your memory fails, and I’ll refresh it.” That’s what you said, wasn’t it, Will? And Will began to spin him a long nursery-yarn about some children who planted flowers out in a meadow that wasn’t theirs, so that such as had no gardens might enjoy them; and one of the children called himself an Honest Rootgatherer, and one of ’em had something like water on the brain; and there was an old Squire who owned a smiling yellow bull-terrier that was fond of the children, and he kept his walnuts till they were rotten, and then he smashed ’em all. You ought to have heard Will! He can talk—even when there isn’t money in it.’

‘Mary’s Meadow!’ Sandy’s hand banged the table.

‘Hsh!’ said Burges, enthralled. ‘Go on, Robin.’

‘And Wollin checked it all, with the sweat drying on him—remember, Will?—and he put in his own reminiscences—one about a lilac sun-bonnet, I remember.’

‘Not lilac-marigold. One string of it was canary-colour and one was white.’ McKnight corrected as though this were a matter of life and death.

‘Maybe. And there was a nightingale singing to the Man in the Moon, and an old Herbal—not Gerard’s, or I’d have known it—“Paradise” something. Wollin contributed that sort of stuff all the time, with ten years knocked off his shoulders and a voice like the Town Crier’s. Yes, Sandy, the story was called Mary’s Meadow. It all came back to him—via Will.’

‘And that helped?’ I asked.

‘Well, Keede said slowly, ‘a General Practitioner can’t much believe in the remission of sins, can he? But if that’s possible, I know how a redeemed soul looks. The old lady had pretended to get supper, but she stopped when Will began his yarn, and listened all through. Then Wollin put up his hand, as though he were hearing his dam’ Voices. Then he brushed ’em away, and he dropped his head on the table and wept. My God, how he wept! And then she kissed him, and me. Did she kiss you, Will?’

‘She certainly did not,’ said the scandalised Lemming, who has been completely married for a long while.

‘You missed something. She has a seductive old mouth still. And Wollin wouldn’t let us go—hung on to us like a child. So, after supper, we went over the affair in detail, till all hours. The pain and the dope had made that nursery story stick in one corner of his mind till it took charge—it does sometimes—but all mixed up with bombings and nightmares. As soon as he got the explanation it evaporated like ether and didn’t leave a stink. I sent him to bed full of his own beer, and growing a shade dictatorial. He was a not uncommon cross between a brave bully and an old maid; but a man, right enough, when the pressures were off. The old lady let us out—she didn’t kiss me again, worse luck! She was primitive Stone Age—bless her! She looked on us as a couple of magicians who’s broken the spell on him, she said.’

‘Well, you had,’ said Burges. ‘What did he do afterwards?’

‘’Bought a side-car to his bike, to hold more vegetables—he’ll be had up for poaching or trespassing, some day—and he cuts about the Home Counties planting his stuff as happy as—Oh my soul! What wouldn’t I give to be even one fraction as happy as he is! But, mind you, he’d have committed suicide on the nod if Will and I had had him arrested. We aren’t exactly first-class Sherlocks.’

McKnight was grumbling to himself. ‘Juliaana Horratia Ewing,’ said he. ‘The best, the kindest, the sweetest, the most eenocent tale ever the soul of a woman gied birth to. I may sell tapioca for a living in the suburbs, but I know that. An’ as for those prints o’ mine,’ he turned to me, ‘they were not garrdeners. They were the Four Great British Botanists, an’—an’—I ask your pardon.’

He pulled the draw-chains of all the nine burners round the Altar of the Lesser Lights before we had time to put it to the vote.

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I WAS BUYING a canary in a birdshop when he first spoke to me and suggested that I should take a less highly coloured bird. ‘The colour is in the feeding,’ said he. ‘Unless you know how to feed ’em, it goes. Canaries are one of our hobbies.’ He passed out before I could thank him. He was a middle-aged man with grey hair and a short, dark beard, rather like a Sealyham terrier in silver spectacles. For some reason his face and his voice stayed in my mind so distinctly that, months later, when I jostled against him on a platform crowded with an Angling Club going to the Thames, I recognised, turned, and nodded.

‘I took your advice about the canary,’ I said.

‘Did you? Good!’ he replied heartily over the rod-case on his shoulder, and was parted from me by the crowd.

A few years ago I turned into a tobacconist’s to have a badly stopped pipe cleaned out.

‘Well! Well! And how did the canary do?’ said the man behind the counter. We shook hands, and ‘What’s your name?’ we both asked together.

His name was Lewis Holroyd Burges, of ‘Burges and Son,’ as I might have seen above the door—but Son had been killed in Egypt. His hair was whiter than it had been, and the eyes were sunk a little.

‘Well! Well! To think,’ said he, ‘of one man in all these millions turning up in this curious way, when there’s so many who don’t turn up at all—eh?’ (It was then that he told me of Son Lewis’s death and why the boy had been christened Lewis.) ‘Yes. There’s not much left for middle-aged people just at present. Even one’s hobbies—— We used to fish together. And the same with canaries! We used to breed ’em for colour—deep orange was our speciality. That’s why I spoke to you, if you remember; but I’ve sold all my birds. Well! Well! And now we must locate your trouble.’

He bent over my erring pipe and dealt with it skilfully as a surgeon. A soldier came in, spoke in an undertone, received a reply, and went out.

‘Many of my clients are soldiers nowadays, and a number of ’em belong to the Craft,’ said Mr. Burges. ‘It breaks my heart to give them the tobaccos they ask for. On the other hand, not one man in five thousand has a tobacco-palate. Preference, yes. Palate, no. Here’s your pipe, again. It deserves better treatment than it’s had. There’s a procedure, a ritual, in all things. Any time you’re passing by again, I assure you, you will be welcome. I’ve one or two odds and ends that may interest you.’

I left the shop with the rarest of all feelings on me—the sensation which is only youth’s right—that I might have made a friend. A little distance from the door I was accosted by a wounded man who asked for ‘Burges’s.’ The place seemed to be known in the neighbourhood.

I found my way to it again, and often after that, but it was not till my third visit that I discovered Mr. Burges held a half interest in Ackerman and Pernit’s, the great cigar-importers, which had come to him through an uncle whose children now lived almost in the Cromwell Road, and said that the uncle had been on the Stock Exchange.

‘I’m a shopkeeper by instinct,’ said Mr. Burges. ‘I like the ritual of handling things. The shop has done me well. I like to do well by the shop.’

It had been established by his grandfather in 1827, but the fittings and appointments must have been at least half a century older. The brown and red tobacco- and snuff-jars, with Crowns, Garters, and names of forgotten mixtures in gold leaf; the polished ‘Oronoque’ tobacco-barrels on which favoured customers sat ; the cherry-black mahogany counter, the delicately moulded shelves, the reeded cigar-cabinets, the German-silver-mounted scales, and the Dutch brass roll- and cake-cutter, were things to covet.

‘They aren’t so bad,’ he admitted. ‘That large Bristol jar hasn’t any duplicate to my knowledge. Those eight snuff-jars on the third shelf—they’re Dollin’s ware; he used to work for Wimble in Seventeen-Forty—are absolutely unique. Is there any one in the trade now could tell you what “Romano’s Hollande” was? Or “Scholten’s”? Here’s a snuff-mull of George the First’s time; and here’s a Louis Quinze—what am I talking of? Treize, Treize, of course—grater for making bran-snuff. They were regular tools of the shop in my grandfather’s day. And who on earth to leave ’em to outside the British Museum now, I can’t think! ‘

His pipes—I would this were a tale for virtuosi—his amazing collection of pipes was kept in the parlour, and this gave me the privilege of making his wife’s acquaintance. One morning, as I was looking covetously at a jacaranda-wood ‘cigarro’—not cigar-cabinet with silver lock-plates and drawer-knobs of Spanish work, a wounded Canadian came into the shop and disturbed our happy little committee.

‘Say,’ he began loudly, ‘are you the right place?’

‘Who sent you?’ Mr. Burges demanded.

‘A man from Messines. But that ain’t the point! I’ve got no certificates, nor papers nothin’, you understand. I left my Lodge owin’ ’em seventeen dollars back-dues. But this man at Messines told me it wouldn’t make any odds with you.’

‘It doesn’t,’ said Mr. Burges. ‘We meet to-night at 7 p.m.’

The man’s face fell a yard. ‘Hell!’ said he. ‘But I’m in hospital—I can’t get leaf.’

‘And Tuesdays and Fridays at 3 p.m.,’ Mr. Burges added promptly. ‘You’ll have to be proved, of course.’

‘Guess I can get by that all right,’ was the cheery reply. ‘Toosday, then.’ He limped off, beaming.

‘Who might that be?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know any more than you do—except he must be a Brother. London’s full of Masons now. Well! Well! We must do what we can these days. If you’ll come to tea this evening, I’ll take you on to Lodge afterwards. It’s a Lodge of Instruction.’

‘Delighted. Which is your Lodge?’ I said, for up till then he had not given me its name.

‘“Faith and Works 5837”—the third Saturday of every month. Our Lodge of Instruction meets nominally every Thursday, but we sit oftener than that now because there are so many Visiting Brothers in town. ‘Here another customer entered, and I went away much interested in the range of Brother Burgess hobbies.

At tea-time he was dressed as for Church, and wore gold pince-nez in lieu of the silver spectacles. I blessed my stars that I had thought to change into decent clothes.

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Yes, we owe that much to the Craft,’ he assented. ‘All Ritual is fortifying. Ritual’s a natural necessity for mankind. The more things are upset, the more they fly to it. I abhor slovenly Ritual anywhere. By the way, would you mind assisting at the examinations, if there are many Visiting Brothers to-night? You’ll find some of ’em very rusty, but—it’s the Spirit, not the Letter, that giveth life. The question of Visiting Brethren is an important one. There are so many of them in London now, you see; and so few places where they can meet.’

‘You dear thing!’ said Mrs. Burges, and handed him his locked and initialed apron-case.

‘Our Lodge is only just round the corner,’ he went on. ‘You mustn’t be too critical of our appurtenances. The place was a garage once.’

As far as I could make out in the humiliating darkness, we wandered up a mews and into a courtyard. Mr. Burges piloted me, murmuring apologies for everything in advance.

‘You mustn’t expect——’ he was still saying when we stumbled up a porch and entered a carefully decorated ante-room hung round with Masonic prints. I noticed Peter Gilkes and Barton Wilson, fathers of ‘Emulation’ working, in the place of honour; Kneller’s Christopher Wren; Dunkerley, with his own Fitz-George book-plate below and the bend sinister on the Royal Arms; Hogarth’s caricature of Wilkes, also his disreputable ‘Night’; and a beautifully framed set of Grand Masters, from Anthony Sayer down.

‘Are these another hobby of yours?’ I asked.

‘Not this time,’ Mr. Burges smiled. ‘We have to thank Brother Lemming for them.’ He introduced me to the senior partner of Lemming and Orton, whose little shop is hard to find, but whose words and cheques in the matter of prints are widely circulated.

‘The frames are the best part of ’em,’ said Brother Lemming after my compliments. ‘There are some more in the Lodge Room. Come and look. We’ve got the big Desaguliers there that nearly went to Iowa.’

I had never seen a Lodge Room better fitted. From mosaicked floor to appropriate ceiling, from curtain to pillar, implements to seats, seats to lights, and little carved music-loft at one end, every detail was perfect in particular kind and general design. I said what I thought of them all, many times over.

‘I told you I was a Ritualist,’ said Mr. Burges. ‘Look at those carved corn-sheaves and grapes on the back of these Wardens’ chairs. That’s the old tradition—before Masonic furnishers spoilt it. I picked up that pair in Stepney ten years ago—the same time I got the gavel.’ It was of ancient, yellowed ivory, cut all in one piece out of some tremendous tusk. ‘That came from the Gold Coast,’ he said. ‘It belonged to a Military Lodge there in 1794. You can see the inscription.’

‘If it’s a fair question,’ I began, ‘how much——’

‘It stood us,’ said Brother Lemming, his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, ‘an appreciable sum of money when we built it in 1906, even with what Brother Anstruther—he was our contractor—cheated himself out of. By the way, that ashlar there is pure Carrara, he tells me. I don’t understand marbles myself. Since then I expect we’ve put in—oh, quite another little sum. Now we’ll go to the examination-room and take on the Brethren.’

He led me back, not to the ante-room, but a convenient chamber flanked with what looked like confessional-boxes (I found out later that that was what they had been, when first picked up for a song near Oswestry). A few men in uniform were waiting at the far end. ‘That’s only the head of the procession. The rest are in the ante-room,’ said an officer of the Lodge.

Brother Burges assigned me my discreet box, saying: ‘Don’t be surprised. They come all shapes.’

‘Shapes’ was not a bad description, for my first penitent was all head-bandages—escaped from an Officers’ Hospital, Pentonville way. He asked me in profane Scots how I expected a man with only six teeth and half a lower lip to speak to any purpose, so we compromised on the signs. The next—a New Zealander from Taranaki—reversed the process, for he was one-armed, and that in a sling. I mistrusted an enormous Sergeant-Major of Heavy Artillery, who struck me as much too glib, so I sent him on to Brother Lemming in the next box, who discovered he was a Past District Grand Officer. My last man nearly broke me down altogether. Everything seemed to have gone from him.

‘I don’t blame yer,’ he gulped at last. ‘I wouldn’t pass my own self on my answers, but I give yer my word that so far as I’ve had any religion, it’s been all the religion I’ve had. For God’s sake, let me sit in Lodge again, Brother!’

When the examinations were ended, a Lodge Officer came round with our aprons—no tinsel or silver-gilt confections, but heavily-corded silk with tassels and—where a man could prove he was entitled to them-levels, of decent plate. Some one in front of me tightened a belt on a stiffly silent person in civil clothes with dischargebadge. ‘’Strewth! This is comfort again,’ I heard him say. The companion nodded. The man went on suddenly: ‘Here! What’re you doing? Leave off! You promised not to Chuck it!’ and dabbed at his companion’s streaming eyes.

‘Let him leak,’ said an Australian signaller. ‘Can’t you see how happy the beggar is? ‘

It appeared that the silent Brother was a ‘shell-shocker’ whom Brother Lemming had passed, on the guarantee of his friend and—what moved Lemming more—the threat that, were he refused, he would have fits from pure disappointment. So the ‘shocker’ went happily and silently among Brethren evidently accustomed to these displays.

We fell in, two by two, according to tradition, fifty of us at least, and were played into Lodge by what I thought was an harmonium, but which I discovered to be an organ of repute. It took time to settle us down, for ten or twelve were cripples and had to be helped into long or easy chairs. I sat between a one-footed R.A.M.C. Corporal and a Captain of Territorials, who, he told me, had ‘had a brawl’ with a bomb, which had bent him in two directions. ‘But that’s first-class Bach the organist is giving us now,’ he said delightedly. ‘I’d like to know him. I used to be a piano-thumper of sorts.’

‘I’ll introduce you after Lodge,’ said one of the regular Brethren behind us—a plump, torpedo-bearded man, who turned out to be a doctor. ‘After all, there’s nobody to touch Bach, is there?’ Those two plunged at once into musical talk, which to outsiders is as fascinating as trigonometry.

Now a Lodge of Instruction is mainly a parade-ground for Ritual. It cannot initiate or confer degrees, but is limited to rehearsals and lectures. Worshipful Brother Burges, resplendent in Solomon’s Chair (I found out later where that, too, had been picked up), briefly told the Visiting Brethren how welcome they were and always would be, and asked them to vote what ceremony should be rendered for their instruction.

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When the decision was announced he wanted to know whether any Visiting Brothers would take the duties of Lodge Officers. They protested bashfully that they were too rusty. ‘The very reason why,’ said Brother Surges, while the organ Bached softly. My musical Captain wriggled in his chair.

‘One moment, Worshipful Sir.’ The plump Doctor rose. ‘We have here a musician for whom place and opportunity are needed. Only,’ he went on colloquially, ‘those organ-loft steps are a bit steep.’

‘How much,’ said Brother Burges with the solemnity of an initiation, ‘does our Brother weigh? ‘

‘Very little over eight stone,’ said the Brother. ‘Weighed this morning, Worshipful Sir.’

The Past District Grand Officer, who was also a Battery-Sergeant-Major, waddled across, lifted the slight weight in his arms and bore it to the loft, where, the regular organist pumping, it played joyously as a soul caught up to Heaven by surprise.

When the visitors had been coaxed to supply the necessary officers, a ceremony was rehearsed. Brother Burges forbade the regular members to prompt. The visitors had to work entirely by themselves, but, on the Battery-Sergeant-Major taking a hand, he was ruled out as of too exalted rank. They floundered badly after that support was withdrawn.

The one—footed R.A.M.C. on my right chuckled.

‘D’you like it?’ said the Doctor to him.

‘Do I? It’s Heaven to me, sittin’ in Lodge again. It’s all comin’ back now, watching their mistakes. I haven’t much religion, but all I had I learnt in Lodge.’ Recognising me, he flushed a little as one does when one says a thing twice over in another’s hearing. ‘Yes, “ veiled in all’gory and illustrated in symbols”—the Fatherhood of God, an’ the Brotherhood of Man; an’ what more in Hell do you want? . . . Look at ’em!’ He broke off giggling. ‘See! See! They’ve tied the whole thing into knots. I could ha’ done it better myself—my one foot in France. Yes, I should think they ought to do it again! ‘

The new organist covered the little confusion that had arisen with what sounded like the wings of angels.

When the amateurs, rather red and hot, had finished, they demanded an exhibition-working of their bungled ceremony by Regular Brethren of the Lodge. Then I realised for the first time what word-and-gesture-perfect Ritual can be brought to mean. We all applauded, the one-footed Corporal most of all.

‘We are rather proud of our working, and this is an audience worth playing up to,’ the Doctor said.

Next the Master delivered a little lecture on the meanings of some pictured symbols and diagrams. His theme was a well-worn one, but his deep holding voice made it fresh.

‘Marvellous how these old copybook-headings persist,’ the Doctor said.

‘That’s all right!’ the one-footed man spoke cautiously out of the side of his mouth like a boy in form. ‘But they’re the kind o’ copybook-headin’s we shall find burnin’ round our bunks in Hell. Believe me-ee! I’ve broke enough of ’em to know. Now, hsh!’ He leaned forward, drinking it all in.

Presently Brother Burges touched on a point which had given rise to some diversity of Ritual. He asked for information. ‘Well, in Jamaica, Worshipful Sir,’ a Visiting Brother began, and explained how they worked that detail in his parts. Another and another joined in from different quarters of the Lodge (and the world), and when they were well warmed the Doctor sidled softly round the walls and, over our shoulders, passed us cigarettes.

‘A shocking innovation,’ he said, as he returned to the Captain-musician’s vacant seat on my left. ‘But men can’t really talk without tobacco, and we’re only a Lodge of Instruction.’

‘An’ I’ve learned more in one evenin’ here than ten years.’ The one-footed man turned round for an instant from a dark, sour-looking Yeoman in spurs who was laying down the law on Dutch Ritual. The blue haze and the talk increased, while the organ from the loft blessed us all.

‘But this is delightful,’ said I to the Doctor. ‘How did it all happen?’

‘Brother Burges started it. He used to talk to the men who dropped into his shop when the war began. He told us sleepy old chaps in Lodge that what men wanted more than anything else was Lodges where they could sit—just sit and be happy like we are now. He was right too. We’re learning things in the war. A man’s Lodge means more to him than people imagine. As our friend on your right said just now, very often Masonry’s the only practical creed we’ve ever listened to since we were children. Platitudes or no platitudes, it squares with what everybody knows ought to be done.’ He sighed. ‘And if this war hasn’t brought home the Brotherhood of Man to us all, I’m—a Hun! ‘

‘How did you get your visitors?’ I went on.

‘Oh, I told a few fellows in hospital near here, at Burgess suggestion, that we had a Lodge of Instruction and they’d be welcome. And they came. And they told their friends. And they came! That was two years ago—and now we’ve Lodge of Instruction two nights a week, and a matinee nearly every Tuesday and Friday for the men who can’t get evening leave. Yes, it’s all very curious. I’d no notion what the Craft meant—and means—till this war.’

‘Nor I, till this evening,’ I replied.

‘Yet it’s quite natural if you think. Here’s London—all England—packed with the Craft from all over the world, and nowhere for them to go. Why, our weekly visiting attendance for the last four months averaged just under a hundred and forty. Divide by four—call it thirty-five Visiting Brethren a time. Our record’s seventy-one, but we have packed in as many as eighty-four at Banquets. You can see for yourself what a potty little hole we are!’

‘Banquets too!’ I cried. ‘It must cost like anything. May the Visiting Brethren——’

The Doctor—his name was Keede—laughed. ‘No, a Visiting Brother may not.’

‘But when a man has had an evening like this, he wants to——’

‘That’s what they all say. That makes our difficulty. They do exactly what you were going to suggest, and they’re offended if we don’t take it.’

‘Don’t you?’ I asked.

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‘My dear man—what does it come to? They can’t all stay to Banquet. Say one hundred suppers a week—fifteen quid—sixty a month—seven hundred and twenty a year. How much are Lemming and Orton worth? And Ellis and McKnight—that long big man over yonder—the provision dealers? How much d’you suppose could Burges write a cheque for and not feel? ’Tisn’t as if he had to save for any one now. I assure you we have no scruple in calling on the Visiting Brethren when we want anything. We couldn’t do the work otherwise. Have you noticed how the Lodge is kept—brass-work, jewels, furniture, and so on? ‘

‘I have indeed,’ I said. ‘It’s like a ship. You could eat your dinner off the floor.’

‘Well, come here on a bye-day and you’ll often find half-a-dozen Brethren, with eight legs between ’em, polishing and ronuking and sweeping everything they can get at. I cured a shell-shocker this spring by giving him our jewels to look after. He pretty well polished the numbers off ’em, but—it kept him from fighting Huns in his sleep. And when we need Masters to take our duties—two matinees a week is rather a tax—we’ve the choice of P.M.’s from all over the world. The Dominions are much keener on Ritual than an average English Lodge. Besides that—— Oh, we’re going to adjourn. Listen to the greetings. They’ll be interesting.’

The crack of the great gavel brought us to our feet, after some surging and plunging among the cripples. Then the Battery-Sergeant-Major, in a trained voice, delivered hearty and fraternal greetings to ‘Faith and Works’ from his tropical District and Lodge. The others followed, with out order, in every tone between a grunt and a squeak. I heard ‘Hauraki,’ ‘Inyanga-Umbezi,’ ‘Aloha,’ ‘Southern Lights’ (from somewhere Punta Arenas way), ‘Lodge of Rough Ashlars’ (and that Newfoundland Naval Brother looked it), two or three Stars of something or other, half-a-dozen cardinal virtues, variously arranged, hailing from Klondyke to Kalgoorlie, one Military Lodge on one of the fronts, thrown in with a severe Scots burr by my friend of the head-bandages, and the rest as mixed as the Empire itself. Just at the end there was a little stir. The silent Brother had begun to make noises; his companion tried to soothe him.

‘Let him be! Let him be!’ the Doctor called professionally. The man jerked and mouthed, and at last mumbled something unintelligible even to his friend, but a small dark P.M. pushed forward importantly.

‘It iss all right,’ he said. ‘He wants to say——’ he spat out some yard-long Welsh name, adding, ‘That means Pembroke Docks, Worshipful Sir. We haf good Masons in Wales, too.’ The silent man nodded approval.

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, quite unmoved. ‘It happens that way sometimes. Hespere panta fereis, isn’t it? The Star brings ’em all home. I must get a note of that fellow’s case after Lodge. I saw you didn’t care for music,’ he went on, ‘but I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with a little more. It’s a paraphrase from Micah. Our organist arranged it. We sing it antiphonally, as a sort of dismissal.’

Even I could appreciate what followed. The singing seemed confined to half-a-dozen trained voices answering each other till the last line, when the full Lodge came in. I give it as I heard it

‘We have showèd thee, O Man,
What is good.
What doth the Lord require of us?
Or Conscience’ self desire of us?
But to do justly—
But to love mercy,
And to walk humbly with our God,
As every Mason should.’

Then we were played and sung out to the quaint tune of the ‘Entered Apprentices’ Song.’ I noticed that the regular Brethren of the Lodge did not begin to take off their regalia till the lines

‘Great Kings, Dukes, and Lords
Have laid down their swords.’

They moved into the ante-room, now set for the Banquet, on the verse

‘Antiquity’s pride
We have on our side,
Which maketh men just in their station.’

The Brother (a big-boned clergyman) that I found myself next to at table told me the custom was ‘a fond thing vainly invented’ on the strength of some old legend. He laid down that Masonry should be regarded as an ‘intellectual abstraction.’ An Officer of Engineers disagreed with him, and told us how in Flanders, a year before, some ten or twelve Brethren held Lodge in what was left of a Church. Save for the Emblems of Mortality and plenty of rough ashlars, there was no furniture.

‘I warrant you weren’t a bit the worse for that,’ said the Clergyman. ‘The idea should be enough without trappings.’

‘But it wasn’t,’ said the other. ‘We took a lot of trouble to make our regalia out of camouflage-stuff that we’d pinched, and we manufactured our jewels from old metal. I’ve got the set now. It kept us happy for weeks.’

‘Ye were absolutely irregular an’ unauthorised. Whaur was your Warrant?’ said the Brother from the Military Lodge. ‘Grand Lodge ought to take steps against——‘

‘If Grand Lodge had any sense,’ a private three places up our table broke in, ‘it ’ud warrant travelling Lodges at the front and attach first-class lecturers to ’em.’

‘Wad ye confer degrees promiscuously?’ said the scandalised Scot.

‘Every time a man asked, of course. You’d have half the Army in.’

The speaker played with the idea for a little while, and proved that, on the lowest scale of fees, Grand Lodge would get huge revenues.

‘I believe,’ said the Engineer Officer thoughtfully, ‘I could design a complete travelling Lodge outfit under forty pounds weight.’

‘Ye’re wrong. I’ll prove it. We’ve tried ourselves,’ said the Military Lodge man; and they went at it together across the table, each with his own note-book.

The ‘Banquet’ was simplicity itself. Many of us ate in haste so as to get back to barracks or hospitals, but now and again a Brother came in from the outer darkness to fill a chair and empty a plate. These were Brethren who had been there before and needed no examination.

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One man lurched in—helmet, Flanders mud, accoutrements and all—fresh from the leave-train.

‘’Got two hours to wait for my train,’ he explained. ‘I remembered your night, though. My God, this is good! ‘

‘What is your train and from what station?’ said the Clergyman precisely. ‘Very well. What will you have to eat? ‘

‘Anything. Everything. I’ve thrown up a month’s rations in the Channel.’

He stoked himself for ten minutes without a word. Then, without a word, his face fell forward. The Clergyman had him by one already limp arm and steered him to a couch, where ho dropped and snored. No one took the trouble to turn round.

‘Is that usual too?’ I asked.

‘Why not?’ said the Clergyman. ‘I’m on duty to-night to wake them for their trains. They do not respect the Cloth on those occasions.’ He turned his broad back on me and continued his discussion with a Brother from Aberdeen by way of Mitylene where, in the intervals of mine-sweeping, he had evolved a complete theory of the Revelation of St. John the Divine in the Island of Patmos.

I fell into the hands of a Sergeant-Instructor of Machine Guns—by profession a designer of ladies’ dresses. He told me that Englishwomen as a class ‘lose on their corsets what they make on their clothes,’ and that ‘Satan himself can’t save a woman who wears thirty-shilling corsets under a thirty-guinea costume.’ Here, to my grief, he was buttonholed by a zealous Lieutenant of his own branch, and became a Sergeant again all in one click.

I drifted back and forth, studying the prints on the walls and the Masonic collection in the cases, while I listened to the inconceivable talk all round me. Little by little the company thinned, till at last there were only a dozen or so of us left. We gathered at the end of a table near the fire, the night-bird from Flanders trumpeting lustily into the hollow of his helmet, which some one had tipped over his face.

‘And how did it go with you?’ said the Doctor.

‘It was like a new world,’ I answered.

‘That’s what it is really.’ Brother Burges returned the gold pince-nez to their case and reshipped his silver spectacles. ‘Or that’s what it might be made with a little trouble. When I think of the possibilities of the Craft at this juncture I wonder——’ He stared into the fire.

‘I wonder, too,’ said the Sergeant-Major slowly, ‘but—on the whole—I’m inclined to agree with you. We could do much with Masonry.’

‘As an aid—as an aid—not as a substitute for Religion,’ the Clergyman snapped.

‘Oh, Lord! Can’t we give Religion a rest for a bit?’ the Doctor muttered. ‘It hasn’t done so—I beg your pardon all round.’

The Clergyman was bristling. ‘Kamerad!’ the wise Sergeant-Major went on, both hands up. ‘Certainly not as a substitute for a creed, but as an average plan of life. What I’ve seen at the front makes me sure of it.’

Brother Burges came out of his muse. ‘There ought to be a dozen—twenty—other Lodges in London every night; conferring degrees too, as well as instruction. Why shouldn’t the young men join? They practise what we’re always preaching. Well! Well! We must all do what we can. What’s the use of old Masons if they can’t give a little help along their own lines? ‘

‘Exactly,’ said the Sergeant-Major, turning on the Doctor. ‘And what’s the darn use of a Brother if he isn’t allowed to help? ‘

‘Have it your own way then,’ said the Doctor testily. He had evidently been approached before. He took something the Sergeant-Major handed to him and pocketed it with a nod. ‘I was wrong,’ he said to me, ‘when I boasted of our independence. They get round us sometimes. This,’ he slapped his pocket, ‘will give a banquet on Tuesday. We don’t usually feed at matinees. It will be a surprise. By the way, try another sandwich. The ham are best.’ He pushed me a plate.

‘They are,’ I said. ‘I’ve only had five or six. I’ve been looking for them.’

‘’Glad you like them,’ said Brother Lemming. ‘Fed him myself, cured him myself—at my little place in Berkshire. His name was Charlemagne. By the way, Doc, am I to keep another one for next month?’

‘Of course,’ said the Doctor with his mouth full. ‘A little fatter than this chap, please. And don’t forget your promise about the pickled nasturtiums. They’re appreciated.’ Brother Lemming nodded above the pipe he had lit as we began a second supper. Suddenly the Clergyman, after a glance at the clock, scooped up half-a-dozen sandwiches from under my nose, put them into an oiled paper bag, and advanced cautiously towards the sleeper on the couch.

‘They wake rough sometimes,’ said the Doctor. ‘Nerves, y’know.’ The Clergyman tip-toed directly behind the man’s head, and at arm’s length rapped on the dome of the helmet. The man woke in one vivid streak, as the Clergyman stepped back, and grabbed for a rifle that was not there.

‘You’ve barely half an hour to catch your train.’ The Clergyman passed him the sandwiches. ‘Come along.’

‘You’re uncommonly kind and I’m very grateful,’ said the man, wriggling into his stiff straps. He followed his guide into the darkness after saluting.

‘Who’s that?’ said Lemming.

‘Can’t say,’ the Doctor returned indifferently. ‘He’s been here before. He’s evidently a P.M. of sorts.’

‘Well! Well!’ said Brother Burges, whose eyelids were drooping. ‘We must all do what we can. Isn’t it almost time to lock up? ‘

‘I wonder,’ said I, as we helped each other into our coats, ‘what would happen if Grand Lodge knew about all this.’

‘About what?’ Lemming turned on me quickly.

‘A Lodge of Instruction open three nights and two afternoons a week—and running a lodging-house as well. It’s all very nice, but it doesn’t strike me somehow as regulation.’

‘The point hasn’t been raised yet,’ said Lemming. ‘We’ll settle it after the war. Meantime we shall go on.’

‘There ought to be scores of them,’ Brother Burges repeated as we went out of the door. ‘All London’s full of the Craft, and no places for them to meet in. Think of the possibilities of it! Think what could have been done by Masonry through Masonry for all the world. I hope I’m not censorious, but it sometimes crosses my mind that Grand Lodge may have thrown away its chance in the war almost as much as the Church has.’

‘Lucky for you the Padre is taking that chap to King’s Cross,’ said Brother Lemming, ‘or he’d be down your throat. What really troubles him is our legal position under Masonic Law. I think he’ll inform on us one of these days. Well, good night, all.’ The Doctor and Lemming turned off together.

‘Yes,’ said Brother Burges, slipping his arm into mine. ‘Almost as much as the Church has. But perhaps I’m too much of a Ritualist.’

I said nothing. I was speculating how soon I could steal a march on the Clergyman and inform against ‘Faith and Works No. 5837 E.C.’

pages 1 of 6

IN THE LODGE of Instruction attached to ‘Faith and Works No. 5837 E.C.,’ which has already been described, Saturday afternoon was appointed for the weekly clean-up, when all visiting Brethren were welcome to help under the direction of the Lodge Officer of the day: their reward was light refreshment and the meeting of companions.This particular afternoon—in the autumn of ’20—Brother Burges, P.M., was on duty and, finding a strong shift present, took advantage of it to strip and dust all hangings and curtains, to go over every inch of the Pavement—which was stone, not floorcloth—by hand; and to polish the Columns, Jewels, Working outfit and organ. I was given to clean some Officers’ Jewels—beautiful bits of old Georgian silver-work humanised by generations of elbow-grease—and retired to the organ-loft; for the floor was like the quarterdeck of a battleship on the eve of a ball. Half-a-dozen brethren had already made the Pavement as glassy as the aisle of Greenwich Chapel; the brazen chapiters winked like pure gold at the flashing Marks on the Chairs; and a morose one-legged brother was attending to the Emblems of Mortality with, I think, rouge.

‘They ought,’ he volunteered to Brother Burges as we passed, ‘to be betwixt the colour of ripe apricots an’ a half-smoked meerschaum. That’s how we kept ’em in my Mother-Lodge—a treat to look at.’

‘I’ve never seen spit-and-polish to touch this,’ I said.

‘Wait till you see the organ,’ Brother Burges replied. ‘You could shave in it when they’ve done. Brother Anthony’s in charge up there—the taxi-owner you met here last month. I don’t think you’ve come across Brother Humberstall, have you?’

‘I don’t remember—’ I began.

‘You wouldn’t have forgotten him if you had. He’s a hairdresser now, somewhere at the back of Ebury Street. ’Was Garrison Artillery. ’Blown up twice.’

‘Does he show it?’ I asked at the foot of the organ-loft stairs.

‘No-o. Not much more than Lazarus did, I expect.’ Brother Burges fled off to set some one else to a job.

Brother Anthony, small, dark, and humpbacked, was hissing groom-fashion while he treated the rich acacia-wood panels of the Lodge organ with some sacred, secret composition of his own. Under his guidance Humberstall, an enormous, flat-faced man, carrying the shoulders, ribs, and loins of the old Mark ’14 Royal Garrison Artillery, and the eyes of a bewildered retriever, rubbed the stuff in. I sat down to my task on the organ-bench, whose purple velvet cushion was being vacuum-cleaned on the floor below.

‘Now,’ said Anthony, after five minutes’ vigorous work on the part of Humberstall. ‘Now we’re gettin’ somethin’ worth lookin’ at! Take it easy, an’ go on with what you was tellin’ me about that Macklin man.’

‘I—I ’adn’t anything against ’im,’ said Humberstall, ’excep’ he’d been a toff by birth; but that never showed till he was bosko absoluto. Mere bein’ drunk on’y made a common ’ound of ’im. But when bosko, it all came out. Otherwise, he showed me my duties as mess-waiter very well on the ’ole.’

‘Yes, yes. But what in ’ell made you go back to your Circus? The Board gave you down-an’-out fair enough, you said, after the dump went up at Eatables? ‘

‘Board or no Board, I ’adn’t the nerve to stay at ’ome—not with Mother chuckin’ ’erself round all three rooms like a rabbit every time the Gothas tried to get Victoria; an’ sister writin’ me aunts four pages about it next day. Not for me, thank you! till the war was over. So I slid out with a draft—they wasn’t particular in ’17, so long as the tally was correct—and I joined up again with our Circus somewhere at the back of Lar Pug Noy, I think it was.’ Humberstall paused for some seconds and his brow wrinkled. ‘Then I—I went sick, or somethin’ or other, they told me; but I know when I reported for duty, our Battery Sergeant-Major says that I wasn’t expected back, an’—an’, one thing leadin’ to another—to cut a long story short—I went up before our Major—Major—I shall forget my own name next-Major——’

‘Never mind,’ Anthony interrupted. ‘Go on! It’ll come back in talk!’

‘’Alf a mo’. ’Twas on the tip o’ my tongue then.’

Humberstall dropped the polishing-cloth and knitted his brows again in most profound thought. Anthony turned to me and suddenly launched into a sprightly tale of his taxi’s collision with a Marble Arch refuge on a greasy day after a three-yard skid.

‘’Much damage?’ I asked.

‘Oh no! Ev’ry bolt an’ screw an’ nut on the chassis strained; but nothing carried away, you understand me, an’ not a scratch on the body. You’d never ’ave guessed a thing wrong till you took ’er in hand. It was a wop too: ’ead-on—like this!’ And he slapped his tactful little forehead to show what a knock it had been.

‘Did your Major dish you up much?’ he went on over his shoulder to Humberstall, who came out of his abstraction with a slow heave.

‘We-ell! He told me I wasn’t expected back either; an’ he said ’e couldn’t ’ang up the ’ole Circus till I’d rejoined; an’ he said that my ten-inch Skoda which I’d been Number Three of, before the dump went up at Eatables, had ’er full crowd. But, ’e said, as soon as a casualty occurred he’d remember me. “Meantime,” says he, “I particularly want you for actin’ mess-waiter.”

‘“Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” I says perfectly respectful; “but I didn’t exactly come back for that, sir.”

‘“Beggin’ your pardon, ’Umberstall,” says ’e, “but I ’appen to command the Circus! Now, you’re a sharp-witted man,” he says; “an’ what we’ve suffered from fool-waiters in Mess ’as been somethin’ cruel. You’ll take on, from now—under instruction to Macklin ’ere.” So this man, Macklin, that I was tellin’ you about, showed me my duties . . . . ’Ammick! I’ve got it! ’Ammick was our Major, an’ Mosse was Captain!’ Humberstall celebrated his recapture of the name by labouring at the organ-panel on his knee.

‘Look out! You’ll smash it,’ Anthony protested.

‘Sorry! Mother’s often told me I didn’t know my strength. Now, here’s a curious thing. This Major of ours—it’s ail comin’ back to me—was a high-up divorce-court lawyer; an’ Mosse, our Captain, was Number One o’ Mosses Private Detective Agency. You’ve heard of it? ’Wives watched while you wait, an’ so on. Well, these two ’ad been registerin’ together, so to speak, in the Civil line for years on end, but hadn’t ever met till the War. Consequently, at Mess their talk was mostly about famous cases they’d been mixed up in. ’Ammick told the Law-courts’ end o’ the business, an’ all what had been left out of the pleadin’s; an’ Mosse ’ad the actual facts concernin’ the errin’ parties—in hotels an’ so on. I’ve heard better talk in our Mess than ever before or since. It comes o’ the Gunners bein’ a scientific corps.’

page 2

‘That be damned!’ said Anthony. ‘If anythin’ ’appens to ’em they’ve got it all down in a book. There’s no book when your lorry dies on you in the ’Oly Land. That’s brains.’

‘Well, then,’ Humberstall continued, ‘come on this secret society business that I started tellin’ you about. When those two—’Ammick an’ Mosse—’ad finished about their matrimonial relations—and, mind you, they weren’t radishes—they seldom or ever repeated—they’d begin, as often as not, on this Secret Society woman I was tellin’ you of—this Jane. She was the only woman I ever ’eard ’em say a good word for. ’Cordin’ to them Jane was a none-such. I didn’t know then she was a Society. ’Fact is, I only ’ung out ’arf an ear in their direction at first, on account of bein’ under instruction for mess-duty to this Macklin man. What drew my attention to her was a new Lieutenant joinin’ up. We called ’im “Gander” on account of his profeel, which was the identical bird. ’E’d been a nactuary—workin’ out ’ow long civilians ’ad to live. Neither ’Ammick nor Mosse wasted words on ’im at Mess. They went on talking as usual, an’ in due time, as usual, they got back to Jane. Gander cocks one of his big chilblainy ears an’ cracks his cold finger joints. “By God! Jane?” says ’e. “Yes, Jane,” says ’Ammick pretty short an’ senior. “Praise ’Eaven!” says Gander. “ It was ‘Bubbly’ where I’ve come from down the line.” (Some damn revue or other, I expect.) Well, neither ’Ammick nor Mosse was easy-mouthed, or for that matter mealy-mouthed; but no sooner ’ad Gander passed that remark than they both shook ’ands with the young squirt across the table an’ called for the port back again. It was a password, all right! Then they went at it about Jane—all three, regardless of rank. That made me listen. Presently, I ’eard ’Ammick say——’

‘’Arf a mo’,’ Anthony cut in. ‘But what was you doin’ in Mess?’

‘Me an’ Macklin was refixin’ the sand-bag screens to the dug-out passage in case o’ gas. We never knew when we’d cop it in the ’Eavies, don’t you see? But we knew we ’ad been looked for for some time, an’ it might come any minute. But, as I was sayin’, ’Ammick says what a pity ’twas Jane ’ad died barren. “I deny that,” says Mosse. “I maintain she was fruitful in the ’ighest sense o’ the word.” An’ Mosse knew about such things, too. “I’m inclined to agree with ’Ammick,” says young Gander. “Any’ow, she’s left no direct an’ lawful prog’ny.” I remember every word they said, on account o’ what ’appened subsequently. I ’adn’t noticed Macklin much, or I’d ha’ seen he was bosko absoluto. Then ’e cut in, leanin’ over a packin’-case with a face on ’im like a dead mackerel in the dark. “Pa-hardon me, gents,” Macklin says, “but this is a matter on which I do ’appen to be moderately well-informed. She did leave lawful issue in the shape o’ one son; an’ ’is name was ’Enery James.”

‘“By what sire? Prove it,” says Gander, before ’is senior officers could get in a word.

‘“I will,” says Macklin, surgin’ on ’is two thumbs. An’, mark you, none of ’em spoke! I forget whom he said was the sire of this ’Enery James-man; but ’e delivered ’em a lecture on this Jane-woman for more than a quarter of an hour. I know the exact time, because my old Skoda was on duty at ten-minute intervals reachin’ after some Jerry formin’-up area; and her blast always put out the dug-out candles. I relit ’em once, an’ again at the end. In conclusion, this Macklin fell flat forward on ’is face, which was how ’e generally wound up ’is notion of a perfect day. Bosko absoluto!

‘“Take ’im away,” says ’Ammick to me. “’E’s sufferin’ from shell-shock.”

‘To cut a long story short, that was what first put the notion into my ’ead. Wouldn’t it you? Even ’ad Macklin been a ’ighup Mason——’

‘Wasn’t ’e, then?’ said Anthony, a little puzzled.

‘’E’d never gone beyond the Blue Degrees, ’e told me. Any’ow, ’e’d lectured ’is superior officers up an’ down; ’e’d as good as called ’em fools most o’ the time, in ’is toff’s voice. I ’eard ’im an’ I saw ’im. An’ all he got was—me told off to put ’im to bed! And all on account o’ Jane! Would you have let a thing like that get past you? Nor me, either! Next mornin’, when his stummick was settled, I was at him full-cry to find out ’ow it was worked. Toff or no toff, ’e knew his end of a bargain. First, ’e wasn’t takin’ any. He said I wasn’t fit to be initiated into the Society of the Janeites. That only meant five bob more—fifteen up to date.

‘“Make it one Bradbury,” ’e says. “It’s dirt-cheap. You saw me ’old the Circus in the ’ollow of me ’and?”

‘No denyin’ it. I ’ad. So, for one pound, he communicated me the Password of the First Degree, which was Tilniz an’ trap-doors.

‘“I know what a trap-door is,” I says to ’im, “ but what in ’ell’s Tilniz? “

‘“You obey orders,” ’e says, “an’ next time I ask you what you’re thinkin’ about you’ll answer, ‘Tilniz an’ trap-doors,’ in a smart and soldierly manner. I’ll spring that question at me own time. All you’ve got to do is to be distinck.”

‘We settled all this while we was skinnin’ spuds for dinner at the back o’ the rear-truck under our camouflage-screens. Gawd, ’ow that glue-paint did stink! Otherwise, ’twasn’t so bad, with the sun comin’ through our pantomime-leaves, an’ the wind marcelling the grasses in the cutting. Well, one thing leading to another, nothin’ further ’appened in this direction till the afternoon. We ’ad a high standard o’ livin’ in Mess—an’ in the Group, for that matter. I was talon’ away Mosses lunch—dinner ’e would never call it—an’ Mosse was fillin’ ’is cigarette-case previous to the afternoon’s duty. Macklin, in the passage, comin’ in as if ’e didn’t know Mosse was there, slings ’is question at me, an’ I give the countersign in a low but quite distinck voice, makin’ as if I ’adn’t seen Mosse. Mosse looked at me through and through, with his cigarette-case in his ’and. Then ’e jerks out ’arf a dozen—best Turkish—on the table an’ exits. I pinched ’em an’ divvied with Macklin.

‘“You see ’ow it works,” says Macklin. “Could you ’ave invested a Bradbury to better advantage?”

‘“So far, no,” I says. “Otherwise, though, if they start provin’ an’ tryin’ me, I’m a dead bird. There must be a lot more to this Janeite game.”

‘“’Eaps an’ ’eaps,” he says. “But to show you the sort of ’eart I ’ave, I’ll communicate you all the ’Igher Degrees among the Janeites, includin’ the Charges, for another Bradbury; but you’ll ’ave to work, Dobbin.” ‘

‘’Pretty free with your Bradburys, wasn’t you?’ Anthony grunted disapprovingly.

‘What odds? Ac-tually, Gander told us, we couldn’t expect to av’rage more than six weeks longer apiece, an’, any’ow, I never regretted it. But make no mistake—the preparation was somethin’ cruel. In the first place, I come under Macklin for direct instruction re Jane.’

‘Oh! Jane was real, then?’ Anthony glanced for an instant at me as he put the question. ‘I couldn’t quite make that out.’

page 3

‘Real!’ Humberstall’s voice rose almost to a treble. ‘Jane? Why, she was a little old maid ’oo’d written ’alf a dozen books about a hundred years ago. ’Twasn’t as if there was anythin’ to ’em, either. I know. I had to read ’em. They weren’t adventurous, nor smutty, nor what you’d call even interestin’—all about girls o’ seventeen (they begun young then, I tell you), not certain ’oom they’d like to marry; an’ their dances an’ card-parties an’ picnics, and their young blokes goin’ off to London on ’orseback for ’air-cuts an’ shaves. It took a full day in those days, if you went to a proper barber. They wore wigs, too, when they was chemists or clergymen. All that interested me on account o’ me profession, an’ cuttin’ the men’s ’air every fortnight. Macklin used to chip me about bein’ an ’air-dresser. ’E could pass remarks, too!’

Humberstall recited with relish a fragment of what must have been a superb comminationservice, ending with, ‘You lazy-minded, lousyheaded, long-trousered, perfumed perookier.’

‘An’ you took it?’ Anthony’s quick eyes ran over the man.

‘Yes. I was after my money’s worth; an’ Macklin, havin’ put ’is ’and to the plough, wasn’t one to withdraw it. Otherwise, if I’d pushed ’im, I’d ha’ slew ’im. Our Battery Sergeant Major nearly did. For Macklin had a wonderful way o’ passing remarks on a man’s civil life; an’ he put it about that our B.S.M. had run a dope an’ dolly-shop with a Chinese woman, the wrong end o’ Southwark Bridge. Nothin’ you could lay ’old of, o’ course; but——’ Humberstall let us draw our own conclusions.

‘That reminds me,’ said Anthony, smacking his lips. ‘I ’ad a bit of a fracas with a fare in the Fulham Road last month. He called me a paras-tit-ic Forder. I informed ’im I was owner-driver, an’ ’e could see for ’imself the cab was quite clean. That didn’t suit ’im. ’E said it was crawlin’.’

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘One o’ them blue-bellied Bolshies of postwar Police (neglectin’ point-duty, as usual) asked us to flirt a little quieter. My joker chucked some Arabic at ’im. That was when we signed the Armistice. ’E’d been a Yeoman—a perishin’ Gloucestershire Yeoman—that I’d helped gather in the orange crop with at Jaffa, in the ’Oly Land ! ‘

‘And after that?’ I continued.

‘It ’ud be ’ard to say. I know ’e lived at Hendon or Cricklewood. I drove ’im there. We must ’ave talked Zionism or somethin’, because at seven next mornin’ him an’ me was tryin’ to get petrol out of a milkshop at St. Albans. They ’adn’t any. In lots o’ ways this war has been a public noosance, as one might say, but there’s no denyin’ it ’elps you slip through life easier. The dairyman’s son ’ad done time on Jordan with camels. So he stood us rum an’ milk.’

‘Just like ’avin’ the Password, eh?’ was Humberstall’s comment.

‘That’s right! Ours was Imshee kelb. Not so ’ard to remember as your Jane stuff.’

‘Jane wasn’t so very ’ard—not the way Macklin used to put ’er,’ Humberstall resumed. ‘I ’ad only six books to remember. I learned the names by ’eart as Macklin placed ’em. There was one called Persuasion, first; an’ the rest in a bunch, except another about some Abbey or other—last by three lengths. But, as I was sayin’, what beat me was there was nothin’ to ’em nor in ’em. Nothin’ at all, believe me.’

‘You seem good an’ full of ’em, any’ow,’ said Anthony.

‘I mean that ’er characters was no use! They was only just like people you run across any day. One of ’em was a curate—the Reverend Collins—always on the make an’ lookin’ to marry money. Well, when I was a Boy Scout, ’im or ’is twin brother was our troop-leader. An’ there was an upstandin’ ’ard-mouthed Duchess or a Baronet’s wife that didn’t give a curse for any one ’oo wouldn’t do what she told ’em to; the Lady—Lady Catherine (I’ll get it in a minute) De Bugg. Before Ma bought the ’airdressin’ business in London I used to know of an ’olesale grocer’s wife near Leicester (I’m Leicestershire myself) that might ’ave been ’er duplicate. And—oh yes—there was a Miss Bates; just an old maid runnin’ about like a hen with ’er ’ead cut off, an’ her tongue loose at both ends. I’ve got an aunt like ’er. Good as gold—but, you know.’

‘Lord, yes!’ said Anthony, with feeling. ‘An’ did you find out what Tilniz meant? I’m always huntin’ after the meanin’ of things mesel�’

‘Yes, ’e was a swine of a Major-General, retired, and on the make. They’re all on the make, in a quiet way, in Jane. ’E was so much of a gentleman by ’is own estimation that ’e was always be’avin’ like a hound. You know the sort. ‘Turned a girl out of ’is own ’ouse because she ’adn’t any money—after, mark you, encouragin’ ’er to set ’er cap at his son, because ’e thought she had.’

‘But that ’appens all the time,’ said Anthony. ‘Why, me own mother——’

‘That’s right. So would mine. But this Tilney was a man, an’ some’ow Jane put it down all so naked it made you ashamed. I told Macklin that, an’ he said I was shapin’ to be a good Janeite. ’Twasn’t his fault if I wasn’t. ’Nother thing, too; ’avin’ been at the Bath Mineral Waters ’Ospital in ’Sixteen, with trench-feet, was a great advantage to me, because I knew the names o’ the streets where Jane ’ad lived. There was one of ’em—Laura, I think, or some other girl’s name—which Macklin said was ’oly ground. “If you’d been initiated then,” he says, “you’d ha’ felt your flat feet tingle every time you walked over those sacred pavin’-stones.”

‘“My feet tingled right enough,” I said, “but not on account of Jane. Nothin’ remarkable about that,” I says.

‘“’Eaven lend me patience!” he says, combin’ ’is ’air with ’is little hands. “Every dam’ thing about Jane is remarkable to a pukka Janeite! It was there,” he says, “that Miss What’s—herName” (he had the name; I’ve forgotten it) “made up ’er engagement again, after nine years, with Captain T’other Bloke.” An’ he dished me out a page an’ a half of one of the books to learn by ’eart—Persuasion, I think it was.’

‘’You quick at gettin’ things off by ’eart?’ Anthony demanded.

‘Not as a rule. I was then, though, or else Macklin knew ’ow to deliver the Charges properly. ’E said ’e’d been some sort o’ schoolmaster once, and he’d make my mind resume work or break ’imself. That was just before the Battery Sergeant-Major ’ad it in for him on account o’ what he’d been sayin’ about the Chinese wife an’ the dollyshop.’

‘What did Macklin really say?’ Anthony and I asked together. Humberstall gave us a fragment. It was hardly the stuff to let loose on a pious post-war world without revision.

‘And what had your B.S.M. been in civil life?’ I asked at the end.

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‘’Ead-embalmer to an ’olesale undertaker in the Midlands,’ said Humberstall; ‘but, o’ course, when he thought ’e saw his chance he naturally took it. He came along one mornin’ lickin’ ’is lips. “You don’t get past me this time,” ’e says to Macklin. “You’re for it, Professor.”

‘“’Ow so, me gallant Major,” says Macklin; “an’ what for?”

‘“For writin’ obese words on the breech o’ the ten-inch,” says the B.S.M. She was our old Skoda that I’ve been tellin’ you about. We called ’er “Bloody Eliza.” She ’ad a badly wore obturator an’ blew through a fair treat. I knew by Macklin’s face the B.S.M. ’ad dropped it somewhere, but all he vow’saifed was, “Very good, Major. We will consider it in Common Room,” The B.S.M, couldn’t ever stand Macklin’s toff’s way o’ puttin’ things; so he goes off rumblin’ like ’ell’s bells in an ’urricane, as the Marines say. Macklin put it to me at once, what had I been doin’? Some’ow he could read me like a book.

‘Well, all I’d done—an’ I told ’im he was responsible for it—was to chalk the guns. ’Ammick never minded what the men wrote up on ’em. ’E said it gave ’em an interest in their job. You’d see all sorts of remarks chalked on the sideplates or the gear-casin’s.’

‘What sort of remarks?’ said Anthony keenly.

‘Oh! ’Ow Bloody Eliza, or Spittin’ Jim—that was our old Mark Five Nine-point-two—felt that morning, an’ such things. But it ’ad come over me—more to please Macklin than anythin’ else—that it was time we Janeites ’ad a look in. So, as I was tellin’ you, I’d taken an’ rechristened all three of ’em, on my own, early that mornin’. Spittin’ Jim I ’ad chalked “The Reverend Collins”—that Curate I was tellin’ you about; an’ our cut-down Navy Twelve, “General Tilney,” because it was worse wore in the groovin’ than anything I’d ever seen. The Skoda (an’ that was where I dropped it) I ’ad chalked up “The Lady Catherine De Bugg.” I made a clean breast of it all to Macklin. He reached up an’ patted me on the shoulder. “You done nobly,” he says. “You’re bringin’ forth abundant fruit, like a good Janeite. But I’m afraid your spellin’ has misled our worthy B.S.M. That’s what it is,” ’e says, slappin’ ’is little leg. “’Ow might you ’ave spelt De Bourgh for example?”

‘I told ’im. ’Twasn’t right; an’ ’e nips off to the Skoda to make it so. When ’e comes back, ’e says that the Gander ’ad been before ’im an’ corrected the error. But we two come up before the Major, just the same, that afternoon after lunch ; ’Ammick in the chair, so to speak, Mosse in another, an’ the B.S.M, chargin’ Macklin with writin’ obese words on His Majesty’s property, on active service. When it transpired that me an’ not Macklin was the offendin’ party, the B.S.M, turned ’is hand in and sulked like a baby. ’E as good as told ’Ammick ’e couldn’t hope to preserve discipline unless examples was made—meanin’, o’ course, Macklin.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard all that,’ said Anthony, with a contemptuous grunt. ‘The worst of it is, a lot of it’s true.’

‘’Ammick took ’im up sharp about Military Law, which he said was even more fair than the civilian article.’

‘My Gawd!’ This came from Anthony’s scornful midmost bosom.

‘“Accordin’ to the unwritten law of the ’Eavies,” says ’Ammick, “there’s no objection to the men chalkin’ the guns, if decency is preserved. On the other ’and,” says he, “we ’aven’t yet settled the precise status of individuals entitled so to do. I ’old that the privilege is confined to combatants only.”

‘“With the permission of the Court,” says Mosse, who was another born lawyer, “I’d like to be allowed to join issue on that point. Prisoner’s position is very delicate an’ doubtful, an’ he has no legal representative.”

‘“Very good,” says ‘Ammick. “Macklin bein’ acquitted——”

‘“With submission, me lud,” says Mosse. “I hope to prove ’e was accessory before the fact.”

‘“As you please,” says ’Ammick. “But in that case, ’oo the ’ell’s goin’ to get the port I’m tryin’ to stand the Court?”

‘“I submit,” says Mosse, “prisoner, bein’ under direct observation o’ the Court, could be temporarily enlarged for that duty.”

‘So Macklin went an’ got it, an’ the B.S.M. had ’is glass with the rest. Then they argued whether mess servants an’ non-combatants was entitled to chalk the guns (’Ammick versus Mosse). After a bit, ’Ammick as C.O. give ’imself best, an’ me an’ Macklin was severely admonished for trespassin’ on combatants’ rights, an’ the B.S.M. was warned that if we repeated the offence ’e could deal with us summ’rily. He ’ad some glasses o’ port an’ went out quite ’appy. Then my turn come, while Macklin was gettin’ them their tea; an’ one thing leadin’ to another, ’Ammick put me through all the Janeite Degrees, you might say. ’Never ’ad such a doin’ m my life.’

‘Yes, but what did you tell ’em?’ said Anthony. ‘I can’t ever think my lies quick enough when I’m for it.’

‘No need to lie. I told ’em that the backside view o’ the Skoda, when she was run up, put Lady De Bugg into my ’ead. They gave me right there, but they said I was wrong about General Tilney. ’Cordin’ to them, our Navy twelve-inch ought to ’ave been christened Miss Bates. I said the same idea ’ad crossed my mind, till I’d seen the General’s groovin’. Then I felt it had to be the General or nothin’. But they give me full marks for the Reverend Collins—our Nine-point-two.’

‘An’ you fed ’em that sort o’ talk?’ Anthony’s fox-coloured eyebrows climbed almost into his hair.

‘While I was assistin’ Macklin to get tea—yes. Seem’ it was an examination, I wanted to do ’im credit as a Janeite.’

‘An’—an’ what did they say?’

‘They said it was ’ighly creditable to us both. I don’t drink, so they give me about a hundred fags.’

‘Gawd! What a Circus you must ’ave been,’ was Anthony’s gasping comment.

‘It was a ’appy little Group. I wouldn’t ’a changed with any other.’

Humberstall sighed heavily as he helped Anthony slide back the organ-panel. We all admired it in silence, while Anthony repocketed his secret polishing mixture, which lived in a tin tobacco-box. I had neglected my work for listening to Humberstall. Anthony reached out quietly and took over a Secretary’s jewel and a rag. Humberstall studied his reflection in the glossy wood.

‘Almost,’ he said critically, holding his head to one side.

‘Not with an Army. You could with a Safety, though,’ said Anthony. And, indeed, as Brother Burges had foretold, one might have shaved in it with comfort.

page 5

‘Did you ever run across any of ’em afterwards, any time?’ Anthony asked presently.

‘Not so many of ’em left to run after, now. With the ’Eavies it’s mostly neck or nothin’. We copped it. In the neck. In due time.’

‘Well, you come out of it all right.’ Anthony spoke both stoutly and soothingly; but Humberstall would not be comforted.

‘That’s right; but I almost wish I ’adn’t,’ he sighed. ‘I was ’appier there than ever before or since. Jerry’s March push in ’Eighteen did us in; an’ yet, ’ow could we ’ave expected it? ’Ow could we ’ave expected it? We’d been sent back for rest an’ runnin’-repairs, back pretty near our base; an’ our old loco’ that used to shift us about o’ nights, she’d gone down the line for repairs. But for ’Ammick we wouldn’t even ’ave ’ad our camouflage-screens up. He told our Brigadier that, whatever ’e might be in the Gunnery line, as a leadin’ Divorce lawyer he never threw away a point in argument. So ’e ’ad us all screened in over in a cuttin’ on a little spur-line near a wood; an’ ’e saw to the screens ’imself. The leaves weren’t more than comin’ out then, an’ the sun used to make our glue-paint stink. Just like actin’ in a theatre, it was! But ’appy. But ’appy! I expect if we’d been caterpillars, like the new big six-inch hows, they’d ha’ remembered us. But we was the old La Bassée ’15 Mark o’ Heavies that ran on rails—not much more good than scrap-iron that late in the war. An’, believe me, gents—or Brethren, as I should say—we copped it cruel. Look ’ere! It was in the afternoon, an’ I was watchin’ Gander instructin’ a class in new sights at Lady Catherine. All of a sudden I ’eard our screens rip overhead, an’ a runner on a motor-bike come sailin’, sailin’ through the air—like that bloke that used to bicycle off Brighton Pier—and landed one awful wop almost atop o’ the class. “’Old ’ard,” says Gander. “That’s no way to report. What’s the fuss?” “Your screens ’ave broke my back, for one thing,” says the bloke on the ground; “an’ for another, the ’ole front’s gone.” “Nonsense,” says Gander. ’E ’adn’t more than passed the remark when the man was vi’lently sick an’ conked out. ’E ’ad plenty papers on ’im from Brigadiers and C.O.’s reporting ’emselves cut off an’ askin’ for orders. ’E was right both ways—his back an’ our front. The ’ole Somme front washed out as clean as kiss-me-’and!’ His huge hand smashed down open on his knee.

‘We ’eard about it at the time in the ’Oly Land. Was it reelly as quick as all that?’ said Anthony.

‘Quicker! Look ’ere! The motor—bike dropped in on us about four pip-emma. After that, we tried to get orders o’ some kind or other, but nothin’ came through excep’ that all available transport was in use and not likely to be released. That didn’t ’elp us any. About nine o’clock comes along a young Brass ’At in brown gloves. We was quite a surprise to ’im. ’E said they were evacuating the area and we’d better shift. “Where to?” says ’Ammick, rather short.

‘“Oh, somewhere Amiens way,” he says. “Not that I’d guarantee Amiens for any length o’ time; but Amiens might do to begin with.” I’m giving you the very words. Then ’e goes off swingin’ ’is brown gloves, and ’Ammick sends for Gander and orders ’im to march the men through Amiens to Dieppe; book thence to New’aven, take up positions be’ind Seaford, an’ carry on the war. Gander said ’e’d see ’im damned first. ’Ammick says ’e’d see ’im courtmartialled after. Gander says what ’e meant to say was that the men ’ud see all an’ sundry damned before they went into Arniens with their gunsights wrapped up in their puttees. ’Ammick says ’e ’adn’t said a word about puttees, an’ carryin’ off the gunsights was purely optional. “Well, anyhow,” says Gander, “puttees or drawers, they ain’t goin’ to shift a step unless you lead the procession.”

‘“Mutinous ’ounds,” says ’Amrnick. “But we live in a democratic age. D’you suppose they’d object to kindly diggin’ ’emselves in a bit?” “Not at all,” says Gander. “The B.S.M.’s kept ’em at it like terriers for the last three hours.” “That bein’ so,” says ’Ammick, “Macklin’ll now fetch us small glasses o’ port.” Then Mosse comes in—he could smell port a mile off—an’ he submits we’d only add to the congestion in Amiens if we took our crowd there, whereas, if we lay doggo where we was, Jerry might miss us, though he didn’t seem to be missin’ much that evenin’.

‘The ’ole country was pretty noisy, an’ our dumps we’d lit ourselves flarin’ heavens-high as far as you could see. Lyin’ doggo was our best chance. I believe we might ha’ pulled it off, if we’d been left alone, but along towards midnight—there was some small stuff swishin’ about, but nothin’ particular—a nice little bald-headed old gentleman in uniform pushes into the dug-out wipin’ his glasses an’ sayin’ ’e was thinkin’ o’ formin’ a defensive flank on our left with ’is battalion which ’ad just come up. ’Ammick says ’e wouldn’t form much if ’e was ’im. “Oh, don’t say that,” says the old gentleman, very shocked. “One must support the Guns, mustn’t one?” “’Ammick says we was refittin’ an’ about as effective, just then, as a public lav’tory. “Go into Amiens,” he says, “an’ defend ’em there.” “Oh no,” says the old gentleman, “me an’ my laddies must make a defensive flank for you,” an’ he flips out of the dug-out like a performin’ bullfinch, chirruppin’ for his “laddies.” Gawd in ’Eaven knows what sort o’ push they was—little boys mostly—but they ’ung on to ’is coat-tails like a Sunday-school treat, an’ we ’eard ’em muckin’ about in the open for a bit. Then a pretty tight barrage was slapped down for ten minutes, an’ ’Ammick thought the laddies had copped it already. “It’ll be our turn next,” says Mosse. “There’s been a covey o’ Gothas messin’ about for the last ’alf-hour—lookin’ for the Railway Shops, I expect. They’re just as likely to take us.” “Arisin’ out o’ that,” says ’Ammick, “one of ’em sounds pretty low down now. We’re for it, me learned colleagues!” “Jesus!” says Gander, “I believe you’re right, sir.” And that was the last word I ’eard on the matter.’

‘Did they cop you then?’ said Anthony.

‘They did. I expect Mosse was right, an’ they took us for the Railway Shops. When I come to, I was lyin’ outside the cuttin’, which was pretty well filled up. The Reverend Collins was all right; but Lady Catherine and the General was past prayin’ for. I lay there, takin’ it in, till I felt cold an’ I looked at meself. Otherwise, I ’adn’t much on excep’ me boots. So I got up an’ walked about to keep warm. Then I saw somethin’ like a mushroom in the moonlight. It was the nice old gentleman’s bald ’ead. I patted it. ’im and ’is laddies ’ad copped it right enough. Some battalion run out in a ’urry from England, I suppose. They ’adn’t even begun to dig in—pore little perishers! I dressed myself off ’em there, an’ topped off with a British warm. Then I went back to the cuttin’ an’ some one says to me: “Dig, you ox, dig! Gander’s under.” So I ’elped shift things till I threw up blood an’ bile mixed. Then I dropped, an’ they brought Gander out—dead—an’ laid ’im next me. ’Ammick ’ad gone too—fair tore in ’alf, the B.S.M. said; but the funny thing was he talked quite a lot before ’e died, an’ nothin’ to ’im below ’is stummick, they told me. Mosse we never found. ’E’d been standing by Lady Catherine. She’d up-ended an’ gone back on ’em, with ’alf the cuttin’ atop of ’er, by the look of things.’

‘And what come to Macklin?’ said Anthony.

‘Dunno. . . . ’E was with ’Ammick. I expect I must ha’ been blown clear of all by the first bomb; for I was the on’y Janeite left. We lost about half our crowd, either under, or after we’d got ’em out. The B.S.M. went off ’is rocker when mornin’ came, an’ he ran about from one to another sayin’ : “That was a good push! That was a great crowd! Did ye ever know any push to touch ’em?” An’ then ’e’d cry. So what was left of us made off for ourselves, an’ I came across a lorry, pretty full, but they took me in.’

‘Ah!’ said Anthony with pride. ‘“They all take a taxi when it’s rainin’.” ’Ever ’eard that song?’

page 6

‘They went a long way back. Then I walked a bit, an’ there was a hospital-train fillin’ up, an’ one of the Sisters—a grey-headed one—ran at me wavin’ ’er red ’ands an’ sayin’ there wasn’t room for a louse in it. I was past carin’. But she went on talkin’ and talkin’ about the war, an’ her pa in Ladbroke Grove, an’ ’ow strange for ’er at ’er time of life to be doin’ this work with a lot o’ men, an’ next war, ’ow the nurses ’ud ’ave to wear khaki breeches on account o’ the mud, like the Land Girls; an’ that reminded ’er, she’d boil me an egg if she could lay ’ands on one, for she’d run a chicken-farm once. You never ’eard anythin’ like it—outside o’ Jane. It set me off laughin’ again. Then a woman with a nose an’ teeth on ’er, marched up. “What’s all this?” she says. “What do you want?” “Nothing,” I says, “only make Miss Bates, there, stop talkin’ or I’ll die.” “Miss Bates?” she says. “What in ’Eaven’s name makes you call ’er that?” “Because she is,” I says. “D’you know what you’re sayin’?” she says, an’ slings her bony arm round me to get me off the ground. “’Course I do,” I says, “an’ if you knew Jane you’d know too.” “That’s enough,” says she. “You’re comin’ on this train if I have to kill a Brigadier for you,” an’ she an’ an ord’ly fair hove me into the train, on to a stretcher close to the cookers. That beef-tea went down well! Then she shook ’ands with me an’ said I’d hit off Sister Molyneux in one, an’ then she pinched me an extra blanket. It was ’er own ’ospital pretty much. I expect she was the Lady Catherine de Bourgh of the area. Well, an’ so, to cut a long story short, nothing further transpired.’

‘’Adn’t you ’ad enough by then?’ asked Anthony.

‘I expect so. Otherwise, if the old Circus ’ad been carryin’ on, I might ’ave ’ad another turn with ’em before Armistice. Our B.S.M. was right. There never was a ’appier push. ’Ammick an’ Mosse an’ Gander an’ the B.S.M. an’ that pore little Macklin man makin’ an’ passin’ an’ raisin’ me an’ gettin’ me on to the ’ospital train after ’e was dead, all for a couple of Bradburys. I lie awake nights still, reviewing matters. There never was a push to touch ours—never! ‘

Anthony handed me back the Secretary’s Jewel resplendent.

‘Ah,’ said he. ‘No denyin’ that Jane business was more useful to you than the Roman Eagles or the Star an’ Garter. ’Pity there wasn’t any of you Janeites in the ’Oly Land. I never come across ’em.’

‘Well, as pore Macklin said, it’s a very select Society, an’ you’ve got to be a Janeite in your ’eart, or you won’t have any success. An’ yet he made me a Janeite! I read all her six books now for pleasure ’tween times in the shop; an’ it brings it all back—down to the smell of the glue-paint on the screens. You take it from me, Brethren, there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place. Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.’

Worshipful Brother Burges, from the floor of the Lodge, called us all from Labour to Refreshment. Humberstall hove himself up—so very a cart-horse of a man one almost expected to hear the harness creak on his back—and descended the steps.

He said he could not stay for tea because he had promised his mother to come home for it, and she would most probably be waiting for him now at the Lodge door.

‘One or other of ’em always comes for ’im. He’s apt to miss ’is gears sometimes,’ Anthony explained to me, as we followed.

‘Goes on a bust, d’you mean?’

‘’Im! He’s no more touched liquor than ’e ’as women since ’e was born. No, ’e’s liable to a sort o’ quiet fits, like. They came on after the dump blew up at Eatables. But for them, ’e’d ha’ been Battery Sergeant-Major.’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I couldn’t make out why he took on as mess-waiter when he got back to his guns. That explains things a bit.’

‘’Is sister told me the dump goin’ up knocked all ’is Gunnery instruction clean out of ’im. The only thing ’e stuck to was to get back to ’is old crowd. Gawd knows ’ow ’e worked it, but ’e did. He fair deserted out of England to ’em, she says; an’ when they saw the state ’e was in, they ’adn’t the ’eart to send ’im back or into ’ospital. They kep’ ’im for a mascot, as you might say. That’s all dead-true. ’Is sister told me so. But I can’t guarantee that Janeite business, excep’ ’e never told a lie since ’e was six. ’Is sister told me so. What do you think? ‘

‘He isn’t likely to have made it up out of his own head,’ I replied.

‘But people don’t get so crazy-fond o’ books as all that, do they? ’E’s made ’is sister try to read ’em. She’d do anythin’ to please him. But, as I keep tellin’ ’er, so’d ’is mother. D’you ’appen to know anything about Jane? ‘

‘I believe Jane was a bit of a match-maker in a quiet way when she was alive, and I know all her books are full of match-making,’ I said. ‘You’d better look out.’

‘Oh, that’s as good as settled,’ Anthony replied, blushing.

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

page 1 of 11

‘Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy’

THE LAW, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life, and one not easy to follow. I have been fellow to a beggar again and again under circumstances which prevented either of us finding out whether the other was worthy. I have still to be brother to a Prince, though I once came near to kinship with what might have been a veritable King, and was promised the reversion of a Kingdom—army, law-courts, revenue, and policy all complete. But, today, I greatly fear that my King is dead, and if I want a crown I must go hunt it for myself.

The beginning of everything was in a railway train upon the road to Mhow from Ajmir. There had been a Deficit in the Budget, which necessitated travelling, not Second-class, which is only half as dear as First-class, but by Intermediate, which is very awful indeed. There are no cushions in the Intermediate class, and the population are either Intermediate, which is Eurasian, or native, which for a long night journey is nasty, or Loafer, which is amusing though intoxicated. Intermediates do not buy from refreshment-rooms. They carry their food in bundles and pots, and buy sweets from the native sweetmeat-sellers, and drink the road-side water. That is why in the hot weather Intermediates are taken out of the carriages dead, and in all weathers are most properly looked down upon.

My particular Intermediate happened to be empty till I reached Nasirabad, when a big black-browed gentleman in shirt-sleeves entered, and, following the custom of Intermediates, passed the time of day. He was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself, but with an educated taste for whisky. He told tales of things he had seen and done, of out-of-the-way corners of the Empire into which he had penetrated, and of adventures in which he risked his life for a few days’ food.

‘If India was filled with men like you and me, not knowing more than the crows where they’d get their next day’s rations, it isn’t seventy millions of revenue the land would be paying—it’s seven hundred millions,’ said he; and as I looked at his mouth and chin I was disposed to agree with him.

We talked politics—the politics of Loaferdom, that see things from the underside where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off—and we talked postal arrangements because my friend wanted to send a telegram back from the next station to Ajmir, the turning-off place from the Bombay to the Mhow line as you travel westward. My friend had no money beyond eight annas, which he wanted for dinner, and I had no money at all, owing to the hitch in the Budget before mentioned. Further, I was going into a wilderness where, though I should resume touch with the Treasury, there were no telegraph offices. I was, therefore, unable to help him in any way.

‘We might threaten a Station-master, and make him send a wire on tick,’ said my friend, ‘but that’d mean inquiries for you and for me, and I’ve got my hands full these days. Did you say you are travelling back along this line within any days?’

‘Within ten,’ I said.

‘Can’t you make it eight?’ said he. ‘Mine is rather urgent business.’

‘I can send you telegram within ten days if that will serve you,’ I said.

‘I couldn’t trust the wire to fetch him now I think of it. It’s this way. He leaves Delhi on the 23rd for Bombay. That means he’ll be running through Ajmir about the night of the 23rd.’

‘But I’m going into the Indian Desert,’ I explained.

‘Well and good,’ said he. ‘You’ll be changing at Marwar Junction to get into Jodhpore territory—you must do that—and he’ll be coming through Marwar Junction in the early morning of the 24th by the Bombay Mail. Can you be at Marwar Junction on that time? ’Twon’t be inconveniencing you because I know that there’s precious few pickings to be got out of these Central Indian States—even though you pretend to be correspondent of the Backwoodsman.’

‘Have you ever tried that trick?’ I asked.

‘Again and again, but the Residents find you out, and then you get escorted to the Border before you’ve time to get your knife into them. But about my friend here. I must give him a word o’ mouth to tell him what’s come to me or else he won’t know where to go. I would take it more than kind of you if you was to come out of Central India in time to catch him at Marwar Junction, and say to him: “He has gone South for the week.” He’ll know what that means. He’s a big man with a red beard, and a great swell he is. You’ll find him sleeping like a gentleman with all his luggage round him in a Second-class compartment. But don’t you be afraid. Slip down the window, and say: “He has gone South for the week,” and he’ll tumble. It’s only cutting your time of stay in those parts by two days. I ask you as a stranger—going to the West.’ He said with emphasis.

‘Where have you come from?’ said I.

‘From the East,’ said he, ’and I am hoping that you will give him the message on the Square—for the sake of my Mother as well as your own.’

Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals to the memory of their mothers, but for certain reasons, which will be fully apparent, I saw fit to agree.

‘It’s more than a little matter,’ said he, ’and that’s why I asked you to do it—and now I know that I can depend on you doing it. A Second-class carriage at Marwar Junction, and a red-haired man asleep in it. You’ll be sure to remember. I get out at the next station, and I must hold on there till he comes or sends me what I want.’

‘I’ll give the message if I catch him,’ I said, ’and for the sake of your Mother as well as mine I’ll give you a word of advice. Don’t try to run the Central Indian States just now as the correspondent of the Backwoodsman. There’s a real one knocking about here, and it might lead to trouble.’

‘Thank you,’ said he simply, ’and when will the swine be gone? I can’t starve because he’s ruining my work. I wanted to get hold of the Degumber Rajah down here about his father’s widow, and give him a jump.’

‘What did you do to his father’s widow, then?’

‘Filled her up with red pepper and slippered her to death as she hung from a beam. I found that out myself, and I’m the only man that would dare going into the State to get hush-money for it. They’ll try to poison me, same as they did in Chortumna when I went on the loot there. But you’ll give the man at Marwar Junction my message?’

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He got out at a little roadside station, and I reflected. I had heard, more than once, of men personating correspondents of newspapers and bleeding small Native States with threats of exposure, but I had never met any of the caste before. They led a hard life, and generally die with great suddenness. The Native States have a wholesome horror of English newspapers which may throw light on their peculiar methods of government, and do their best to choke correspondents with champagne, or drive them out of their mind with four-in-hand barouches. They do not understand that nobody cares a straw for the internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or diseased from one end of the year to the other. They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I did business with divers Kings, and in eight days passed through many changes of life. Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and consorted with Princes and Politicals, drinking from crystal and eating from silver. Sometimes I lay out upon the ground and devoured what I could get, from a plate made of leaves, and drank the running water, and slept under the same rug as my servant. It was all in the day’s work.

Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert upon the proper date, as I had promised, and the night Mail set me down at Marwar Junction, where a funny, little, happy-go-lucky, native-managed railway runs to Jodhpore. The Bombay Mail from Delhi makes a short halt at Marwar. She arrived as I got in, and I had just time to hurry to her platform and go down the carriages. There was only one Second-class on the train. I slipped the window and looked down upon a flaming red beard, half covered by a railway rug. That was my man, fast asleep, and I dug him gently in the ribs. He woke with a grunt, and I saw his face in the light of the lamps. It was a great and shining face.

‘Tickets again?’ said he.

‘No,’ said I. ‘I am to tell you that he is gone South for the week. He has gone South for the week!’

The train had begun to move out. The red man rubbed his eyes. ‘He has gone South for the week,’ he repeated. ‘Now that’s just like his impidence. Did he say that I was to give you anything? ’Cause I won’t.’

‘He didn’t,’ I said, and dropped away, and watched the red lights die out in the dark. It was horribly cold because the wind was blowing off the sands. I climbed into my own train—not an Intermediate Carriage this time—and went to sleep.

If the man with the beard had given me a rupee I should have kept it as a memento of a rather curious affair. But the consciousness of having done my duty was my only reward.

Later on I reflected that two gentlemen like my friends could not do any good if they forgathered and personated correspondents of newspapers, and might, if they black-mailed one of the little rat-trap states of Central India or Southern Rajputana, get themselves into serious difficulties. I therefore took some trouble to describe them as accurately as I could remember to people who would be interested in deporting them; and succeeded, so I was later informed, in having them headed back from the Degumber borders.

Then I became respectable, and returned to an Office where there were no Kings and no incidents outside the daily manufacture of a newspaper. A newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back-slum of a perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed for command sit down and sketch the outline of a series of ten, twelve, or twenty-four leading articles on Seniority versus Selection; Missionaries wish to know why they have not been permitted to escape from their regular vehicles of abuse and swear at a brother-missionary under special patronage of the editorial We; stranded theatrical companies troop up to explain that they cannot pay for their advertisements, but on their return from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent punkah-pulling machines, carriage couplings, and unbreakable swords and axle-trees, call with specifications in their pockets and hours at their disposal; tea-companies enter and elaborate their prospectuses with the office pens; secretaries of ball-committees clamour to have the glories of their last dance more fully described; strange ladies rustle in and say, ‘I want a hundred lady’s cards printed at once, please,’ which is manifestly part of an Editor’s duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for employment as a proof-reader. And, all the time, the telephone-bell is ringing madly, and Kings are being killed on the Continent, and Empires are saying, ‘You’re another,’ and Mister Gladstone is calling down brimstone upon the British Dominions, and the little black copy-boys are whining, ‘kaa-pi chay-ha-yeh’ like tired bees, and most of the paper is as blank as Modred’s shield.

But that is the amusing part of the year. There are six other months when none ever comes to call, and the thermometer walks inch by inch up to the top of the glass, and the office is darkened to just above reading-light, and the press-machines are red-hot of touch, and nobody writes anything but accounts of amusements in the Hill-stations or obituary notices. Then the telephone becomes a tinkling terror, because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men and women that you knew intimately, and the prickly-heat covers you with a garment, and you sit down and write: ‘A slight increase of sickness is reported from the Khuda Janta Khan District. The outbreak is purely sporadic in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of the District authorities, is now almost at an end. It is, however, with deep regret we record the death, etc.’

Then the sickness really breaks out, and the less recording and reporting the better for the peace of the subscribers. But the Empires and the Kings continue to divert themselves as selfishly as before, and the Foreman thinks that a daily paper really ought to come out once in twenty-four hours, and all the people at the Hill-stations in the middle of their amusements say: ‘Good gracious! Why can’t the paper be sparkling? I’m sure there’s plenty going on up here.’

That is the dark half of the moon, and, as the advertisements say, ‘must be experienced to be appreciated’.

It was in that season, and a remarkably evil season, that the paper began running the last issue of the week on Saturday night, which is to say Sunday morning, after the custom of a London paper. This was a great convenience, for immediately after the paper was put to bed, the dawn would lower the thermometer from 96° to almost 84° for half an hour, and in that chill—you have no idea how cold is 84° on the grass until you begin to pray for it—a very tired man could get off to sleep ere the heat roused him.

One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty to put the paper to bed alone. A King or courtier or a courtesan or a Community was going to die or get a new Constitution, or do something that was important on the other side of the world, and the paper was to be held open till the latest possible minute in order to catch the telegram.

It was a pitchy black night, as stifling as a June night can be, and the loo, the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and pretending that the rain was on its heels. Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all our weary world knew that was only pretence. It was a shade cooler in the press-room than the office, so I sat there, while the type ticked and clicked, and the night-jars hooted at the windows, and the all but naked compositors wiped the sweat from their foreheads, and called for water. The thing that was keeping us back, whatever it was, would not come off, though the loo dropped and the last type was set, and the whole round earth stood still in the choking heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait the event. I drowsed, and wondered whether the telegraph was a blessing, and whether this dying man, or struggling people, might be aware of the inconvenience the delay was causing. There was no special reason beyond the heat and worry to make tension, but, as the clock-hands crept up to three o’clock, and the machines spun their fly-wheels two or three times to see that all was in order before I said the word that would set them off, I could have shrieked aloud.

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Then the roar and rattle of the wheels shivered the quiet into little bits. I rose to go away, but two men in white clothes stood in front of me. The first one said: ‘It’s him!’ The second said: ‘So it is!’ And they both laughed almost as loudly as the machinery roared, and mopped their foreheads. ‘We seed there was a light burning across the road, and we were sleeping in that ditch there for coolness, and I said to my friend here, The office is open. Let’s come along and speak to him as turned us back from the Degumber State,’ said the smaller of the two. He was the man I had met in the Mhow train, and his fellow was the red-bearded man of Marwar Junction. There was no mistaking the eyebrows of the one or the beard of the other.

I was not pleased, because I wished to go to sleep, not to squabble with loafers. ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

‘Half an hour’s talk with you, cool and comfortable, in the office,’ said the red-bearded man. ‘We’d like some drink—the Contrack doesn’t begin yet, Peachey, so you needn’t look—but what we really want is advice. We don’t want money. We ask you as a favour, because we found out you did us a bad turn about Degumber State.’

I led from the press-room to the stifling office with the maps on the walls, and the red-haired man rubbed his hands. ‘That’s something like,’ said he. ‘This was the proper shop to come to. Now, Sir, let me introduce to you Brother Peachey Carnehan, that’s him, and Brother Daniel Dravot, that is me, and the less said about our professions the better, for we have been most things in our time. Soldier, sailor, compositor, photographer, proof-reader, street-preacher, and correspondents of the Backwoodsman when we thought the paper wanted one. Carnehan is sober, and so am I. Look at us first, and see that’s sure. It will save you cutting into my talk. We’ll take one of your cigars apiece, and you shall see us light up.’

I watched the test. The men were absolutely sober, so I gave them each a tepid whisky and soda.

‘Well and good,’ said Carnehan of the eyebrows, wiping the froth from his moustache. ‘Let me talk now, Dan. We have been all over India, mostly on foot. We have been boiler-fitters, engine-drivers, petty contractors, and all that, and we have decided that Indian isn’t big enough for such as us.’

They certainly were too big for the office. Dravot’s beard seemed to fill half the room and Carnehan’s shoulders the other half, as they sat on the big table. Carnehan continued: ‘The country isn’t half worked out because they that governs it won’t let you touch it. They spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you can’t lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that, without all the Government saying, “Leave it alone, and let us govern.” Therefore, such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away to some other place where a man isn’t crowded and can come to his own. We are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except Drink, and we have signed a Contrack on that. Therefore, we are going away to be Kings.’

‘Kings in our own right,’ muttered Dravot.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘You’ve been tramping in the sun, and it’s a very warm night, and hadn’t you better sleep over the notion? Come tomorrow.’

‘Neither drunk nor sunstruck,’ said Dravot. ‘We have slept over the notion half a year, and require to see Books and Atlases, and we have decided that there is only one place now in the world that two strong men can Sar-a-whack. They call it Kafiristan. By my reckoning it’s the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three hundred miles from Peshawar. They have two-and-thirty heathen idols there, and we’ll be the thirty-third and thirty-fourth. It’s a mountainous country, and the women of those parts are very beautiful.’

‘But that is provided against in the Contrack,’ said Carnehan. ‘Neither Woman nor Liqu-or, Daniel.’

‘And that’s all we know, except that no one has gone there, and they fight, and in any place where they fight a man who knows how to drill men can always be a King. We shall go to those parts and say to any King we find—”D’you want to vanquish your foes?” and we will show him how to drill men; for that we know better than anything else. Then we will subvert that King and seize his Throne and establish a Dy-nasty.’

‘You’ll be cut to pieces before you’re fifty miles across the Border,’ I said. ‘You have to travel through Afghanistan to get to that country. It’s one mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers, and no Englishman has been through it. The people are utter brutes, and even if you reached them you couldn’t do anything.’

‘That’s more like,’ said Carnehan. ‘If you could think us a little more mad we would be more pleased. We have come to you to know about this country, to read a book about it, and to be shown maps. We want you to tell us that we are fools and to show us your books.’ He turned to the bookcases.

‘Are you at all in earnest?’ I said.

‘A little,’ said Dravot sweetly. ‘As big a map as you have got, even if it’s all blank where Kafiristan is, and any books you’ve got. We can read, though we aren’t very educated.’

I uncased the big thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch map of India, and two smaller Frontier maps, hauled down volume INF-KAN of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and the men consulted them.

‘See here!’ said Dravot, his thumb on the map. ‘Up to Jagdallak, Peachey and me know the road. We was there with Roberts’ Army. We’ll have to turn off to the right at Jagdallak through Laghmann territory. Then we get among the hills—fourteen thousand feet—fifteen thousand—it will be cold work there, but it don’t look very far on the map.’

I handed him wood on the Sources of the Oxus. Carnehan was deep in the Encyclopædia.

‘They’re a mixed lot,’ said Dravot reflectively; ’and it won’t help us to know the names of their tribes. The more tribes the more they’ll fight, and the better for us. From Jagdallak to Ashang H’mm!’

‘But all the information about the country is as sketchy and inaccurate as can be,’ I protested. ‘No one knows anything about it really. Here’s the file of United Services’ Institute. Read what Bellew says.’

‘Blow Bellew,!’ said Carnehan. ‘Dan, they’re a stinkin’ lot of heathens, but this book here says they think they’re related to us English.’

I smoked while the men poured over Raverty, Wood, the maps, and the Encyclopædia.

‘There is no use your waiting,’ said Dravot politely. ‘It’s about four o’clock now. We’ll go before six o’clock if you want to sleep, and we won’t steal any of the papers. Don’t you sit up. We’re two harmless lunatics, and if you come tomorrow evening down to the Serai, we’ll say good-bye to you.’

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‘You are two fools,’ I answered. ‘You’ll be turned back at the Frontier or cut up the minute you set foot in Afghanistan. Do you want any money or a recommendation down-country? I can help you to the chance of work next week.’

‘Next week we shall be hard at work ourselves, thank you,’ said Dravot. ‘It isn’t so easy being a King as it looks. When we’ve got our Kingdom in going order we’ll let you know, and you can come up and help us to govern it.’

“Would two lunatics make a contrack like that?” said Carnehan, with subdued pride, showing me a greasy half-sheet of notepaper on which was written the following. I copied it, then and there, as a curiosity—

This Contract between me and you persuing witnesseth in the name of God—Amen and so forth.

(One) That me and you will settle this matter together; i.e. to be Kings of Kafiristan.
(Two) That you and me will not, while this matter is being settled, look at any Liquor, nor any Woman black, white, or brown, so as to get mixed up with one or the other harmful.
(Three) That we conduct ourselves with Dignity and Discretion, and if one of us gets into trouble the other will stay by him.

Signed by you and me this day,
Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan
Daniel Dravot
(Both Gentlemen at Large)

‘There was no need for the last article,’ said Carnehan, blushing modestly; ‘but it looks regular. Now you know the sort of men that loafers are—we are loafers, Dan, until we get out of India—and do you think that we would sign a Contrack like that unless we was in earnest? We have kept away from the two things that make life worth having.’

‘You won’t enjoy your lives much longer if you are going to try this idiotic adventure. Don’t set the office on fire,’ I said, ’and go away before nine o’clock.

I left them still poring over the maps and making notes on the back of the ‘Contrack’. ‘Be sure to come down to the Serai tomorrow,’ were their parting words.

The Kumharsen Serai is the great four-square sink of humanity where the strings of camels and horses from the North load and unload. All the nationalities of Central Asia may be found there, and most of the folk of India proper. Balkh and Bokhara there meet Bengal and Bombay, and try to draw eye-teeth. You can buy ponies, turquoises, Persian pussy-cats, saddle-bags, fat-tailed sheep and musk in the Kumharsen Serai, and get many strange things for nothing. In the afternoon I went down to see whether my friends intended to keep their word or were lying there drunk.

A priest attired in fragments of ribbons and rags stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child’s paper whirligig. Behind him was his servant bending under a load of a crate of mud toys. The two were loading up two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai watched them with shrieks of laughter.

‘The priest is mad,’ said a horse-dealer to me. ‘He is going up to Kabul to sell toys to the Amir. He will either be raised to honor or have his head cut off. He came in here this morning and has been behaving madly ever since.’

‘The witless are under the protection of God,’ stammered a flat-cheeked Usbeg in broken Hindi. ‘They foretell future events.’

‘Would they could have foretold that my caravan would have been cut up by the Shinwaris almost within shadow of the Pass!’ grunted the Eusufzai agent of a Rajputana trading-house whose goods had been diverted into the hands of other robbers just across the Border, and whose misfortunes were the laughing-stock of the basar. ‘Ohé, priest, whence come you and whither do you go?’

‘From Roum have I come,’ shouted the priest, waving his whirligig; ‘from Roum, blown by the breath of a hundred devils across the sea! O thieves, robbers, liars, the blessing of Pir Khan on pigs, dogs, and perjurers! Who will take the Protected of God to the North to sell charms that are never still to the Amir? The camels shall not gall, the sons shall not fall sick, and the wives shall remain faithful while they are away, of the men who give me place in their caravan. Who will assist me to slipper the King of the Roos with a golden slipper with a silver heel? The protection of Pir Khan be upon his labours!’ He spread out the skirts of his gaberdine and pirouetted between the lines of tethered horses.

‘There starts a caravan from Peshawar to Kabul in twenty days, Huzrut,’ said the Eusufzai trader. ‘My camels go therewith. Do thou also go and bring us good luck.’

‘I will go even now!’ shouted the priest. ‘I will depart upon my winged camels, and be at Peshawar in a day! Ho! Hazar Mir Khan,’ he yelled to his servant, ‘drive out the camels, but let me first mount my own.’

He leaped on the back of his beast as it knelt, and, turning round to me, cried: ‘Come thou also, Sahib, a little along the road, and I will sell thee a charm—an amulet that shall make thee King of Kafiristan.’

Then the light broke upon me, and I followed the two camels out of the Serai till we reached open road and the priest halted.

‘What d’you think o’ that?’ said he in English. ‘Carnehan can’t talk their patter, so I’ve made him my servant. He makes a handsome servant. ’Tisn’t for nothing that I’ve been knocking about the country for fourteen years. Didn’t I do that talk neat? We’ll hitch on to a caravan at Peshawar till we get to Jagdallak, and then we’ll see if we can get donkeys for our camels, and strike into Kafiristan. Whirligigs for the Amir, O Lor! Put your hand under the camel-bags and tell me what you feel.’

I felt the butt of a Martini, and another and another.

‘Twenty of ’em,’ said Dravot placidly. ‘Twenty of ’em and ammunition to correspond, under the whirligigs and the mud dolls.’

‘Heaven help you if you are caught with those things!’ I said. ‘A Martini is worth her weight in silver among the Pathans.’

‘Fifteen hundred rupees of capital—every rupee we could beg, borrow, or steal—are invested on these two camels,’ said Dravot. ‘We won’t get caught. We’re going through the Khaiber with a regular caravan. Who’d touch a poor mad priest?’

‘Have you got everything you want?’ I asked, overcome with astonishment.

‘Not yet, but we shall soon. Give us a memento of your kindness, Brother. You did me a service, yesterday, and that time in Marwar. Half my Kingdom shall you have, as the saying is.’ I slipped a small charm compass from my watch-chain and handed it up to the priest.

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‘Good-bye,’ said Dravot, giving me hand cautiously. ‘It’s the last time we’ll shake hands with an Englishman these many days. Shake hands with him, Carnehan,’ he cried, as the second camel passed me.

Carnehan leaned down and shook hands. Then the camels passed away along the dusty road, and I was left alone to wonder. My eye could detect no failure in disguises. The scene in the Serai proved that they were complete to the native mind. There was just the chance, therefore, that Carnehan and Dravot would be able to wander through Afghanistan without detection. But, beyond, they would find death—certain and awful death.

Ten days later a native correspondent giving me the news of the day from Peshawar, wound up his letter with: ‘There has been much laughter here on account of a certain mad priest who is going in his estimation to sell petty gauds and insignificant trinkets which he ascribes as great charms to H.H. the Amir of Bukhara. He passed through Peshawar and associated himself to the Second Summer caravan that goes to Kabul. The merchants are pleased because through superstition they imagine that such mad fellows bring good fortune.’

The two, then, were beyond the Border. I would have prayed for them, but, that night, a real King died in Europe, and demanded an obituary notice.

The wheel of the world swings through the same phases again and again. Summer passed and winter thereafter, and came and passed again. The daily paper continued and I with it, and upon the third summer there fell a hot night, a night-issue, and a strained waiting for something to be telegraphed from the other side of the world, exactly as had happened before. A few great men had died in the past two years, the machines worked with more clatter, and some of the trees in the office garden were a few feet taller. But that was all the difference.

I passed over to the press-room, and went through just such a scene as I have already described. The nervous tension was stronger than it had been two years before, and I felt the heat more acutely. At three o’clock I cried, ‘Print off,’ and turned to go when there crept to my chair what was left of a man. He was bent into a circle, his head was sunk between his shoulders, and he moved his feet one over the other like a bar. I could hardly see whether he walked or crawled—this rag-wrapped, whining cripple who addressed me by name, crying that he was come back. ‘Can you give me a drink?’ he whimpered. ‘For the Lord’s sake give me a drink!’

I went back to the office, the man following with groans of pain, and I turned on the lamp.

‘Don’t you know me?’ he gasped, dropping into a chair, and he turned his drawn face, surmounted by a shock of grey hair, to the light.

I looked at him intently. Once before had I seen eyebrows that met over the nose in an inch-broad black band, but for the life of me I could not tell where.

‘I don’t know you,’ I said, handing him the whisky. ‘What can I do for you?’

He took a gulp of the spirit raw, and shivered in spite of the suffocating heat.

‘I’ve come back,’ he repeated; ’and I was the King of Kafiristan—me and Dravot—crowned Kings we was! In this office we settled it—you setting there and giving us the books. I am Peachey—Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan, and you’ve been setting here ever since—O Lord!’

I was more than a little astonished, and expressed my feelings accordingly.

‘It’s true,’ said Carnehan, with a dry cackle, nursing his feet, which were wrapped in rags. ‘True as gospel. Kings we were, with crowns upon our heads—me and Dravot—poor Dan—oh, poor, poor Dan, that would never take advice, not though I begged of him!’

‘Take the whisky,’ I said, ’and take your own time. Tell me all you can recollect of everything from beginning to end. You got across the Border on your camels, Dravot dressed as a mad priest and you his servant. Do you remember that?’

‘I ain’t mad—yet, but I shall be that way soon. Of course I remember. Keep looking at me, or maybe my words will go all to pieces. Keep looking at me in my eyes and don’t say anything.’

I leaned forward and looked into his face as steadily as I could. He dropped one hand upon the table and I grasped it by the wrist. It was twisted like a bird’s claw, and upon the back was a ragged red diamond-shaped scar.

‘No, don’t look there. Look at me,’ said Carnehan. ‘That comes afterwards, but for the Lord’s sake don’t distrack me. We left with that caravan, me and Dravot playing all sorts of antics to amuse the people we were with. Dravot used to make us laugh in the evenings when all the people was cooking their dinners—cooking their dinners, and . . . what did they do then? They lit little fires with sparks that went into Dravot’s beard, and we all laughed—fit to die. Little red fires they was, going into Dravot’s big red beard—so funny.’ His eyes left mine and he smiled foolishly.

‘You went as far as Jagdallak with that caravan,’ I said at a venture, ’after you had lit those fires. To Jagdallak, where you turned off to try to get into Kafiristan.’

‘No, we didn’t neither. What are you talking about? We turned off before Jagdallak, because we heard the roads was good. But they wasn’t good enough for our two camels—mine and Dravot’s. When we left the caravan, Dravot took off all his clothes and mine too, and said we would be heathen, because the Kafirs didn’t allow Mohammedans to talk to them. So we dressed betwixt and between, and such a sight as Daniel Dravot I never saw yet nor expect to see again. He burned half his beard, and slung a sheep-skin over his shoulder, and shaved his head into patters. He shaved mine, too, and made me wear outrageous things to look like a heathen. That was in a most mountaineous country, and our camels couldn’t go along any more because of the mountains. They were tall and black, and coming home I saw them fight like wild goats—there are lots of goats in Kafiristan. And these mountains, they never keep still, no more than the goats. Always fighting they are, and don’t let you sleep at night.’

‘Take some more whisky,’ I said very slowly. ‘What did you and Daniel Dravot do when the camels could go no farther because of the rough roads that led into Kafiristan?’

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‘What did which do? There was a party called Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan that was with Dravot. Shall I tell you about him? He died out there in the cold. Slap from the bridge fell old Peachy, turning and twisting in the air like a penny whirligig that you can sell to the Amir— No; they was two for three ha’pence, those whirligigs, or I am much mistaken and woful sore . . . And then these camels were no use, and Peachey said to Dravot— “For the Lord’s sake let’s get out of this before our heads are chopped off,” and with that they killed the camels all among the mountains, not having anything in particular to teat, but first they took off the boxes with the guns and the ammunition, till two men came along driving four mules. Dravot up and dances in front of them, singing— “Sell me four mules.” Says the first man— “If you are rich enough to buy, you are rich enough to rob”; but before ever he could put his hand to his knife, Dravot breaks his neck over his knee, and the other party runs away. So Carnehan loaded the mules with the rifles that was taken off the camels, and together we starts forward into those bitter cold mountaineous parts, and never a road broader than the back of your hand.’

He paused for a moment, while I asked him if he could remember the nature of the country through which he had journeyed.

‘I am telling you as straight as I can, but my head isn’t as good as it might be. They drove nails through it to make me hear better how Dravot died. The country was mountaineous and the mules were most contrary, and the inhabitants was dispersed and solitary. They went up and up, and down and down, and that other party, Carnehan, was imploring of Dravot not to sing and whistle so loud, for fear of bringing down the tremenjus avalanches. But Dravot says that if a King couldn’t sing it wasn’t worth being King, and whacked the mules over the rump, and never took no heed for ten cold days. We came to a big level valley all among the mountains, and the mules were near dead, so we killed them, not having anything in special for them or us to eat. We sat upon the boxes, and played odd and even with the cartridges that was jolted out.

‘Then ten men with bows and arrows ran down that valley, chasing twenty men with bows and arrows, and the row was tremenjus. They was fair men—fairer than you or me—with yellow hair and remarkable well built. Says Dravot, unpacking the guns— “This is the beginning of the business. We’ll fight for the ten men,” and with that he first two rifles at the twenty men, and drops one of them at two hundred yards from the rock where he was sitting. The other men began to run, but Carnehan and Dravot sits on the boxes picking them off at all ranges, up and down the valley. Then we goes up to the ten men that had run across the snow too, and they fires a footy little arrow at us. Dravot he shoots above their heads and they all falls down flat. Then he walks over them and kicks them, and then he lifts them up and shakes hands all round to make them friendly like. He calls them and gives them the boxes to carry, and waves his hand for all the world as though he was King already. They takes the boxes and him across the valley and up the hill into a pine wood on the top, where there was half-a-dozen big stone idols. Dravot he goes to the biggest—a fellow they call Imbra—and lays a rifle and a cartridge at his feet, rubbing his nose respectful with his own nose, patting him on the head, and saluting in front of it. He turns round to the men and nods his head, and says— “That’s all right. I’m in the know too, and all these old jim-jams are my friends.” Then he opens his mouth and points down it, and when the first man brings him food, he says— “No”; and when the second man brings him food, he says— “No”; but when one of the old priests and the boss of the village brings him food, he says— “Yes,” very haughty, and eats it slow. That was how we came to our first village, without any trouble, just as though we had tumbled from the skies. But we tumbled from one of those damned rope-bridges, you see, and—you couldn’t expect a man to laugh much after that?’

‘Take some more whisky and go on,’ I said. ‘That was the first village you came into. How did you get to be King?’

‘I wasn’t King,’ said Carnehan. ‘Dravot he was the King, and a handsome man he looked with the gold crown on his head and all. Him and the other party stayed in that village, and every morning Dravot sat by the side of old Imbra, and the people came and worshipped. That was Dravot’s order. Then a lot of men came into the valley, and Carnehan and Dravot picks them off with the rifles before they knew where they was, and runs down into the valley and up again the other side and finds another village, same as the first one, and the people all falls down flat on their faces, and Dravot says— “Now what is the trouble between you two villages?” and the people points to a woman, as fair as you or me, that was carried off, and Dravot takes her back to the first village and counts up the dead—eight there was. For each dead man Dravot pours a little milk on the ground and waves his arms like a whirligig, and “That’s all right,” says he. Then he and Carnehan takes the big boss of each village by the arm and walks them down into the valley, and shows them how to scratch a line with a spear right down the valley, and gives each a sod of turf form both sides of the line. Then all the people comes down and shouts like the devil and all, and Dravot says— “Go and dig the land, and be fruitful and multiply,” which they did, though they didn’t understand. Then we asks the names of things in their lingo—bread and water and fire and idols and such, and Dravot leads the priest of each village up to the idol, and says he must sit there and judge the people, and if anything goes wrong he is to be shot.

‘Next week they was all turning up the land in the village as quiet as bees and much prettier, and the priests heard all the complaints and told Dravot in dumb show what it was about. “That’s just the beginning,” says Dravot. “They think we’re Gods.” He and Carnehan picks out twenty good men and shows them how to click off a rifle, and form fours, and advance in line, and they was very pleased to do so, and clever to see the hang of it. Then he takes out his pipe and is baccy-pouch and leaves one at one village, and one at the other, and off we two goes to see what was to be done in the next valley. That was all rock, and there was a little village there, and Carnehan says— “Send ’em to the old valley to plant,” and takes ’em there, and gives ’em some land that wasn’t took before. They were a poor lot, and we blooded ’em with a kid before letting ’em into the new Kingdom. That was to impress the people, and then they settled down quiet, and Carnehan went back to Dravot who had got into another valley, all snow and ice and most mountaineous. There was no people there and the Army got afraid, so Dravot shoots one of them, and goes on till he finds some people in a village, and the Army explains that unless the people wants to be killed they had better not shoot their little matchlocks; for they had matchlocks. We makes friends with the priest, and I stays there alone with two of the Army, teaching the men how to drill, and a thundering big Chief comes across the snow with kettle-drums and horns twanging, because he heard there was a new God kicking about. Carnehan sights for the brown of the men half a mile across the snow and wings one of them. Then he sends a message to the Chief that, unless he wished to be killed, he must come and shake hands with me and leave his arms behind. The Chief comes alone first, and Carnehan shakes hands with him and whirls his arms about, same as Dravot used, and very much surprised that Chief was, and strokes my eyebrows. Then Carnehan goes alone to the Chief, and asks him in dumb show if he had an enemy he hated. “I have,” says the Chief. So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill, and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chief’s men rushes into a village and takes it, we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy. So we took that village too, and I gives the Chief a rag from my coat and says, “Occupy till I come”; which was scriptural. By way of a reminder, when me and the Army was eighteen hundred yards away, I drops a bullet near him standing on the snow, and all the people falls flat on their faces. Then I sends a letter to Dravot wherever he be by land or by sea.’

At the risk of throwing the creature out of train I interrupted— ‘How could you write a letter up yonder?’

‘The letter?—Oh!—The letter! Keep looking at me between the eyes, please. It was a string-talk letter, that we’d learned the way of it from a blind beggar in the Punjab.’

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I remember that there had once come to the office a blind man with a knotted twig and a piece of string which he wound round the twig according to some cipher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days or hours, repeat the sentence which he had reeled up. He had reduced the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds, and tried to teach me the method, but I could not understand.

‘I sent that letter to Dravot,’ said Carnehan; ’and told him to come back because this Kingdom was growing too big for me to handle, and then I struck for the first valley, to see how the priests were working. They called the village we took along with the Chief, Bashkai, and the first village we took, Er-Heb. The priests at Er-Heb was doing all right, but they had a lot of pending cases about land to show me, and some men from another village had been firing arrows at night. I went out and looked for that village, and fired four rounds at it from a thousand yards. That used all the cartridges I cared to spend, and I waited for Dravot, who had been away two or three months, and I kept my people quiet.

‘One morning I heard the devil’s own noise of drums and horns, and Dan Dravot marches down the hill with his Army and a tail of hundreds of men, and, which was the most amazing, a great gold crown on his head. “My Gord, Carnehan,” says Daniel, “this is a tremenjus business, and we’ve got the whole country as far as it’s worth having. I am the son of Alexander by Queen Semiramis, and you’re my younger brother and a God too! It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever seen. I’ve been marching and fighting for six weeks with the Army, and every footy little village for fifty miles has come in rejoiceful; and more than that, I’ve got the key of the whole show, as you’ll see, and I’ve got a crown for you! I told ’em to make two of ’em at a place called Shu, where the gold lies in the rock like suet in mutton. Gold I’ve seen, and turquoise I’ve kicked out of the cliffs, and there’s garnets in the sands of the river, and here’s a chunk of amber that a man brought me. Call up all he priests and, here, take your crown.”

‘One of the men opens a black hair bag, and I slips the crown on It was too small and too heavy, but I wore it for the glory. Hammered gold it was—five pound weight, like a hoop of a barrel.

‘“Peachey,” says Dravot, “we don’t want to fight no more. The Craft’s the trick, so help me!” and he brings forward that same Chief that I left at Bashkai—Billy Fish we called him afterwards, because he was so like Billy Fish that drove the big tank-engine at Mach on the Bolan in the old days. “Shake hands with him,” says Dravot, and I shook hands and nearly dropped, for Billy Fish gave me the Grip. I said nothing, but tried him with the Fellow Craft Grip. He answers all right, and I tried the Master’s Grip, but that was a slip. “A Fellow Craft he is!” I says to Dan, “Does he know the word? — “He does,” says Dan, “and all the priests know. It’s a miracle! The Chiefs and the priests can work a Fellow Craft Lodge in a way that’s very like ours, and they’ve cut the marks on the rocks, but they don’t know the Third Degree, and they’ve come to find out. It’s Gord’s Truth. I’ve known these long years that the Afghans knew up to the Fellow Craft Degree, but this is a miracle. A God and a Grand-Master of the Craft am I, and a Lodge in the Third Degree I will open, and we’ll raise the head priests and the Chiefs of the Village.”

‘“It’s against all the law,” says I, “holding a Lodge without warrant from any one; and you know we never held office in any Lodge.”

‘“It’s a master-stroke o’ policy,” says Dravot. “It means running the country as easy as a four-wheeled bogie on a down grade. We can’t stop to inquire now, or they’ll turn against us. I’ve forty Chiefs at my heel, and passed and raised according to their merit they shall be. Billet these men on the villages, and see that we run up a Lodge of some kind. The temple of Imbra will do for the Lodge-room. The women must make aprons as you show them. I’ll hold a levee of Chiefs tonight and Lodge tomorrow.”

‘I was fair run off my legs, but I wasn’t such a fool as not to see what a pull this Craft business gave us. I showed the priests’ families how to make aprons of the degrees, but for Dravot’s apron the blue border and marks was made of turquoise lumps on white hide, not cloth. We took a great square stone in the temple for the Master’s chair, and little stones for the officers’ chairs, and painted the black pavement with white squares, and did what we could to make things regular.

‘At the levee which was held that night on the hillside with big bonfires, Dravot gives out that him and me were Gods and sons of Alexander, and Past Grand-Masters in the Craft, and was come to make Kafiristan a country where every man should eat in peace and drink in quiet, and especially obey us. Then the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they were so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends. We gave them names according as they was like men we had known in India—Billy Fish, Holly Dilworth, Pikky Kergan, that was Bazar-master when I was at Mhow, and so on, and so on.

‘The most amazing miracles was at Lodge next night. One of the old priests was watching us continuous, and I felt uneasy, for I knew we’d have to fudge the Ritual, and I didn’t know what the man knew. The old priest was a stranger come in from beyond the village of Bashkai. The minute Dravot puts on that Master’s apron that the girls had made for him, the priest fetches a whoop and a howl, and tries to overturn the stone that Dravot was sitting on. “It’s all up now,” I says. “That comes of meddling with the Craft without warrant!” Dravot never winked an eye, not when ten priests took and tilted over the Grand-Master’s chair—which was to say the stone of Imbra. The priests begins rubbing the bottom end of it to clear away the black dirt, and presently he shows all the other priests the Master’s Mark, same as was on Dravot’s apron, cut into the stone. Not even the priests of the temple of Imbra knew it was there. The old chap falls flat on his face at Dravot’s feet and kisses ’em. “Luck again,” says Dravot, across the Lodge to me; “they say it’s the Missing Mark that no one could understand the why of. We’re more than safe now.” Then he bangs the butt of his gun for a gavel and says: “By virtue of the authority vested in me by my own right hand and the help of Peachey, I declare myself Grand-Master of all Freemasonry in Kafiristan in this the Mother Lodge o’ the country, and King of Kafiristan equally with Peachey!” At that he puts on his crown and I puts on mine—I was doing Senior Warden—and we opens the Lodge in most ample form. It was an amazing miracle! The priests moved in Lodge through the first two degrees almost without telling, as if the memory was coming back to them. After than, Peachey and Dravot raised such as was worthy—high priests and Chiefs of far-off villages. Billy Fish was the first, and I can tell you we scared the soul out of him. It was not in any way according to Ritual, but it served our turn. We didn’t raise more than ten of the biggest men, because we didn’t want to make the Degree common. And they was clamouring to be raised.

‘“In another six months,” says Dravot, “we’ll hold another Communication, and see how you are working.” Then he asks them about their villages, and learns that they was fighting one against the other, and were sick and tired of it. And when they weren’t doing that they was fighting with the Mohammedans. “You can fight those when they come into our country,” says Dravot. “Tell off every tenth man of your tribes for a Frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time to this valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or speared any more so long as he does well, and I know that you won’t cheat me, because you’re white people—sons of Alexander—and not like common, black Mohammedans. You are my people, and by God,” says he, running off into English at the end— “I’ll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I’ll die in the making!”

‘I can’t tell all we did for the next six months, because Dravot did a lot I couldn’t see the hang of, and he learned their lingo in a way I never could. My work was to help the people plough, and now and again go out with some of the Army and see what the other villages were doing, and make ’em throw rope-bridges across the ravines which cut up the country horrid. Dravot was very kind to me, but when he walked up and down in the pine wood pulling that bloody red beard of his with both fists I knew he was thinking plans I would not advise about, and I just waited for orders.

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‘But Dravot never showed me disrespect before the people. They were afraid of me and the Army, but they loved Dan. He was the best of friends with the priests and the Chiefs; but anyone could come across the hills with a complaint, and Dravot would hear him out fair, and call four priests together and say what was to be done. He used to call in Billy Fish from Bashkai, and Pikky Kergan from Shu, and an old Chief we called Kafuzelum—it was like enough to his real name—and hold councils with ’em when there was any fighting to be done in small villages. That was his Council of War, and the four preists of Bashkai, Shu, Khawak, and Madora was his Privy Council. Between the lot of ’em they sent me, with forty men and twenty rifles and sixty men carrying turquoises, into the Ghorband country to buy those hand-made Martini rifles, that come out of the Amir’s workshops at Kabul, from one of the Amir’s Herati regiments that would have sold the very teeth out of their mouths for turquoises.

‘I stayed in Ghorband a month, and gave the Governor there the pick of my baskets for hush-money, and bribed the Colonel of the regiment some more, and, between the two and the tribespeople, we got more than a hundred hand-made Martinis, a hundred good Kohat Jezails that’ll throw to six hundred yards, and forty man-loads of very bad ammunition for the rifles. I came back with what I had, and distributed ’em among the men that the Chiefs sent in to me to drill. Dravot was too busy to attend to those things, but the old Army that we first made helped me, and we turned out five hundred men that could drill, and two hundred that knew how to hold arms pretty straight. Even those cork-screwed, hand-made guns was a miracle to them. Dravot talked big about powder-shops and factories, walking up and down in the pine wood when the winter was coming on.

‘I won’t make a Nation,” says he. “I’ll make an Empire! These men aren’t niggers; they’re English! Look at their eyes—look at their mouths. Look at the way they stand up. They sit on chairs in their own houses. They’re the Lost Tribes, or something like it, and they’ve grown to be English. I’ll take a census in the spring if the priests don’t get frightened. There must be a fair two million of ’em in these hills. The villages are full o’ little children. Two million people—two hundred and fifty thousand fighting men—and all English! They only want the rifles and a little drilling. Two hundred and fifty thousand men, ready to cut in on Russia’s right flank when she tries for India! Peachey, man,” he says, chewing his bard in great hunks, “we shall be Emperors—Emperors of the Earth! Rajah Brooke will be a suckling to us. I’ll treat with the Viceroy on equal terms. I’ll ask him to send me twelve picked English—to help us govern a bit. There’s Mackray, Sergeant-pensioner at Segowli—many’s the good dinner he’s given me, and his wife a pair of trousers. There’s Donkin, the Warder of Tounghoo Jail; there’s hundreds that I could lay my hands on if I was in India. The Viceroy shall do it for me. I’ll send a man through in the spring for those men, and I’ll write for a dispensation from the Grand Lodge for what I’ve done as Grand-Master. That—and all the Sniders that’ll be thrown out when the native troops in India take up the Martini. They’ll be worn smooth, but they’ll do for fighting in these hills. Twelve English, a hundred thousand Sniders run through the Amir’s country in driblets—I’d be content with twenty thousand in one year—and we’d be an Empire. When everything was shipshape I’d hand over the crown—this crown that I’m wearing now—to Queen Victoria on my knees, and she’d say: ‘Rise up, Sir Daniel Dravot.’ Oh, it’s big! It’s big, I tell you! But there’s so much to be done in every place—Bashkai, Khawak, Shu, and everywhere else.”

‘“What is it?” I says. “There are no more men coming in to be drilled this autumn. Look at those fat, black clouds. They’re bringing the snow.”

‘“It isn’t that,” says Daniel, putting his hand very hard on my shoulder; “and I don’t wish to say anything that’s against you, for no other living man would have followed me and made me what I am as you have done. You’re a first-class Commander-in-Chief, and the people know you, but—it’s a big country, and somehow you can’t help me, Peachey, in the way I want to be helped.”

‘“Go to your blasted priests, then!” I said, and I was sorry when I made that remark, but it did hurt me sore to find Daniel talking so superior when I’d drilled all the men, and done all he told me.

‘“Don’t let’s quarrel, Peachey,” says Daniel without cursing. “You’re a King too, and the half of this Kingdom is yours; but can’t you see, Peachey, we want cleverer men than us now—three or four of ’em, that we can scatter about for our Deputies. It’s a hugeous great State, and I can’t always tell the right thing to do, and I haven’t time for all I want to do, and here’s the winter coming on and all.” He put half his beard into his mouth, all red like the gold of his crown.

‘“I’m sorry, Daniel,” says I. “I’ve done all I could. I’ve drilled the men and shown the people how to stack their oats better; and I’ve brought in those tinware rifles from Ghorband—but I know what you’re driving at. I take it Kings always feel oppressed that way.”

‘“There’s another thing too,” says Dravot, walking up and down. “The winter’s coming and these people won’t be giving much trouble, and if they do we can’t move about. I want a wife.”

‘“For God’s sake leave the women alone!” I says. “We’ve both got all the work we can, though I am a fool. Remember the Contrack, and keep clear o’ women.”

‘“The Contrack only lasted till such time as we was Kings; and Kings we have been these months past,” says Dravot, weighting his crown in his hand. “You go get a wife too, Peachey—a nice, strappin’, plump girl that’ll keep you warm in the winter. They’re prettier than English girls, and we can take the pick of ’em. Boil ’em once or twice in hot water and they’ll come out like chicken and ham.”

‘“Don’t tempt me!” I says. “I will not have any dealings with a woman not till we are a dam’ side more settled than we are now. I’ve been doing the work o’ two men, and you’ve been doing the work o’ three. Let’s lie off a bit, and see if we can get some better tobacco from Afghan country and run in some good liquor; but no women.”

‘“Who’s talking o’ women?” says Dravot. “I said wife—a Queen to breed a King’s son for the King. A Queen out of the strongest tribe, that’ll make them your blood-brothers, and that’ll lie by your side and tell you all the people thinks about you and their own affairs. That’s what I mena.”

‘“Do you remember that Bengali woman I kept at Mogul Serai when I was a plate-layer?” says I. “A fat lot o’ good she was to me. She taught me the lingo and one or two other things; but what happened? She ran away with the Station-master’s servant and half my month’s pay. Then she turned up at Dadur Junction in tow of a half-caste, and had the impidence to say I was her husband—all among the drivers in the running-shed too!”

‘“We’ve done with that,” says Dravot; “these women are whiter than you or me, and a Queen I will have for the winter months.”

‘“For the last time o’ asking, Dan, do not,” I says. “It’ll only bring us harm. The Bible says that Kings ain’t to waste their strength on women, ‘specially when they’ve got a new raw Kingdom to work over.”

‘“For the last time of answering I will,” said Dravot, and he went away through the pine-trees looking like a big red devil, the sun being on his crown and beard and all.

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‘But getting a wife was not as easy as Dan thought. He put it before the Council, and there was no answer till Billy Fish said that he’d better ask the girls. Dravot damned them all around. “What’s wrong with me?” he shouts, standing by the idol Imbra. “Am I a dog or am I not enough of a man for your wenches? Haven’t I put the shadow of my hand over this country? Who stopped the last Afghan raid?” It was me really, but Dravot was too angry to remember. “Who bought your guns? Who repaired the bridges? Who’s the Grand-Master of the sign cut in the stone?” says he, and he thumped his hand on the block that he used to sit on in Lodge, and at Council, which opened like Lodge always. Billy Fish said nothing and no more did the others. “Keep your hair on, Dan,” said I; “and ask the girls. That’s how it’s done at Home, and these people are quite English.”

‘“The marriage of the King is a matter of State,” says Dan, in a white-hot rage, for he could feel, I hope, that he was going against his better mind. He walked out of the Council-room, and the others sat still, looking at the ground.

‘“Billy Fish,” says I to the Chief of Bashkai, “what’s the difficulty here? A straight answer to a true friend.”

‘“You know,” says Billy Fish. “How should a man tell you who knows everything? How can daughters of men marry Gods or Devils? It’s not proper.”

‘I remembered something like that in the Bible; but if, after seeing us as long as they had, they still believed we were Gods, it wasn’t for me to undeceive them.

‘“A God can do anything,” says I. “If the King is fond of a girl he’ll not let her die.” — “She’ll have to,” said Billy Fish. “There are all sorts of Gods and Devils in these mountains, and now and again a girl marries one of them and isn’t seen any more. Besides, you two know the Mark cut in the stone. Only the Gods know that. We thought you were men till you showed the sign of the Master.”

‘I wished then that we had explained about the loss of the genuine secrets of a Master-Mason at the first go-off; but I said nothing. All that night there was a blowing of horns in a little dark temple half-way down the hill, and I heard a girl crying fit to die. One of the priests told us that she was being prepared to marry the King.

‘“I’ll have no nonsense of that kind,” says Dan. “I don’t want to interfere with your customs, but I’ll take my own wife.” — “The girl’s a bit afraid,” says the priest. “She thinks she’s going to die, and they are a-heartening of her up down in the temple.”

‘“Hearten her very tender, then,” says Dravot, “or I’ll hearten you with the butt of a gun so you’ll never want to be heartened again.” He licked his lips, did Dan, and stayed up walking about more than half the night, thinking of the wife that he was going to get in the morning. I wasn’t any means comfortable, for I knew that dealings with a woman in foreign parts, though you was a crowned King twenty times over, could not but be risky. I got up very early in the morning while Dravot was asleep, and I saw the priests talking together in whispers, and the Chiefs talking together too, and they looked at me out of the corners of their eyes.

‘“What is up, Fish?” I say to the Bashkai man, who was wrapped up in his furs and looking splendid to behold.

‘“I can’t rightly say,” says he, “but if you can make the King drop all this nonsense about marriage, you’ll be doing him and me and yourself a great service.”

‘“That I do believe,” says I. “But sure, you know, Billy, as well as me, having fought against and for us, that the King and me are nothing more than two of the finest men that God Almighty ever made. Nothing more, I do assure you.”

‘“That may be,” says Billy Fish, “and yet I should be sorry if it was.” He sinks his head upon his great fur cloak for a minute and thinks. “King,” says he, “be you man or God or Devil, I’ll stick by you today. I have twenty of my men with me, and they will follow me. We’ll go to Bashkai until the storm blows over.”

‘A little snow had fallen in the night, and everything was white except the greasy fat clouds that blew down and down from the north. Dravot came out with his crown on his head, swinging his arms and stamping his feet, and looking more pleased than Punch.

‘“For the last time, drop it, Dan,” says I in a whisper, “Billy Fish here says that there will be a row.”

‘“A row amongst my people!” says Dravot. “Not much, Peachey, you’re a fool not to get a wife too. Where’s the girl?” says he with a voice as loud as the braying of a jackass. “Call up all the Chiefs and priests, and let the Emperor see if his wife suits him.”

‘There was no need to call anyone. They were all there leaning on their guns and spears round the clearing in the centre of the pine wood. A lot of priests went down to the little temple to bring up the girl, and the horns blew fit to wake the dead. Billy Fish saunters round and gets as close to Daniel as he could, and behind him stood his twenty men with matchlocks. Not a man of them under six feet. I was next to Dravot, and behind me was twenty men of the regular Army. Up comes the girl, and a strapping wench she was, covered with silver and turquoises, but white as death, and looking back every minute at the priests.

‘“She’ll do,” said Dan, looking her over. “What’s to be afraid of, lass? Come and kiss me.” He puts his arm round her. She shuts her eyes, gives a bit of a squeak, and down goes her face in the side of Dan’s flaming red beard.

‘“The slut’s bitten me!” says he, clapping his hand to his neck, and, sure enough, his hand was red with blood. Billy Fish and two of his matchlock-men catches hold of Dan by the shoulders and drags him into the Bashkai lot, while the priests howls in their lingo— “Neither God nor Devil but a man!” I was all taken aback, for a priest cut at me in front, and the Army behind began firing into the Bashkai men.

‘“God A’mighty!” says Dan. “What is the meaning o’ this?”

‘“Come back! Come away!” says Billy Fish. “Ruin and Mutiny is the matter. We’ll break for Bashkai if we can.”

‘I tried to give some sort of orders to my men—the men of the Regular Army—but it was no use, so I fired into the brown of ’em with an English Martini and drilled three beggars in a line. The valley was full of shouting, howling creatures, and every soul was shrieking, “Not a God or a Devil but only a man!” The Bashkai troops stuck to Billy Fish for all they were worth, but their matchlocks wasn’t half as good as the Kabul breech-loaders, and four of them dropped. Dan was bellowing like a bull, for he was very wrathy; and Billy Fish had a hard job to prevent him running out at the crowd.

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‘“We can’t stand,” says Billy Fish. “Make a run for it down the valley! The whole place is against us.” The matchlock-men ran, and we went down the valley in spite of Dravot. He was swearing horribly and crying out he was King. The priests rolled great stones on us, and the regular Army fired hard, and there wasn’t more than six men, not counting Dan, Billy Fish, and Me, that came down to the bottom of the valley alive.

‘Then they stopped firing and the horns in the temple blew again. “Come away—for God’s sake come away!” says Billy Fish. “They’ll send runners out to all the villages before ever we get to Bashkai. I can protect you there, but I can’t do anything now.”

‘My own notion is that Dan began to go mad in his head from that hour. He stared up and down like a stuck pig. Then he was all for walking back alone and killing the priests with his bare hands; which he could have done. “An Emperor am I,” says Daniel, “and next year I shall be a Knight of the Queen.”

‘“All right, Dan,” says I, “but come along now while there’s time.”

‘“It’s your fault,” says he, “for not looking after your Army better. There was mutiny in the midst, and you didn’t know—you damned engine-driving, plate-laying, missionary’s-pass-hunting hound!” He sat upon a rock and called me every foul name he could lay tongue to. I was too heart-sick to care, though it was all his foolishness that brought the smash.

‘“I’m sorry, Dan,” says I, “but there’s no accounting for natives. This business is our Fifty-Seven. Maybe we’ll make something out of it yet, when we’ve got to Bashkai.”

‘“Let’s get to Bashkai, then,” says Dan, “and, by God, when I come back here again I’ll sweep the valley so there isn’t a bug in a blanket left!”

‘We walked all that day, and all that night Dan was stumping up and down on the snow, chewing his beard and muttering to himself.

‘“There’s no hope o’ getting clear,” said Billy Fish. “The priests will have sent runners to the villages to say that you are only men. Why didn’t you stick on as Gods till things was more settled? I’m a dead man,” says Billy Fish, and he throws himself down on the snow and begins to pray to his Gods.

‘Next morning we was in a cruel bad country—all up and down, no level ground at all, and no food either. The six Bashkai men looked at Billy Fish hungry-way as if they wanted to ask something, but they said never a word. At noon we came to the top of a flat mountain all covered with snow, and when we climbed up into it, behold, there was an Army in position waiting in the middle!

‘“The runners have been very quick,” says Billy Fish, with a little bit of a laugh. “They are waiting for us.”

‘Three or four men began to fire from the enemy’s side, and a chance shot took Daniel in the calf of the leg. That brought him to his senses. He looks across the snow at the Army, and sees the rifles that we had brought into the country.

‘“We’re done for,” says he. “They are Englishmen, these people—and it’s by blasted nonsense that has brought you to this. Get back, Billy Fish, and take your men away; you’ve done what you could, and now cut for it. Carnehan,” says he, “shake hands with me and go along with Billy. Maybe they won’t kill you. I’ll go and meet ’em alone. It’s me that did it. Me, the King!”

“Go!” says I. “Go to Hell, Dan! I’m with you here. Billy Fish, you clear out, and we two will meet these folk.”

‘“I’m a Chief,” says Billy Fish, quite quiet. “I stay with you. My men can go.”

‘The Bashkai fellows didn’t wait for a second word, but ran off, and Dan and Me and Billy Fish walked across to where the drums were drumming and the horns were horning. It was cold—awful cold. I’ve got that cold in the back of my head now. There’s a lump of it there.’

The punkah-coolies had gone to sleep. Two kerosene lamps were blazing in the office, and the perspiration poured down my face and splashed on the blotter as I leaned forward. Carnehan was shivering, and I feared that his mind might go. I wiped my face, took a fresh grip of the piteously mangled hands, and said: ‘What happened after that?’

The momentary shift of my eyes had broken the clear current.

‘What was you pleased to say?’ whined Carnehan. ‘They took them without any sound. Not a little whisper all along the snow, not though the King knocked down the first man that set hand on him—not though old Peachey fired his last cartridge into the brown of ’em. Not a single solitary sound did those swines make. They just closed up tight, and I tell you their furs stunk. There was a man called Billy Fish, a good friend of us all, and they cut his throat, Sir, then and there, like a pig; and the King kicks up the bloody snow and says: “We’ve had a dashed fine run for our money. What’s coming next?” But Peachey, Peachey Taliaferro, I tell you, Sir, in confidence as betwixt two friends, he lost his head, Sir. No, he didn’t neither. The King lost his head, so he did, all along o’ one of those cunning rope-bridges. Kindly let me have the paper-cutter, Sir. It tilted this way. They marched him a mile across that snow to a rope-bridge over a ravine with a river at the bottom. You may have seen such. They prodded him behind like an ox. “Damn your eyes!” says the King. “D’you suppose I can’t die like a gentleman?” He turns to Peachey—Peachey that was crying like a child. “I’ve brought you to this, Peachey,” says he. “Brought you out of your happy life to be killed in Kafiristan, where you was late Commander-in-Chief of the Emperor’s forces. Say you forgive me, Peachey.” — “I do,” says Peachey. “Fully and freely do I forgive you, Dan.” — “Shake hands, Peachey,” says he. “I’m going now.” Out he goes, looking neither right nor left, and when he was plumb in the middle of those dizzy looking ropes— “Cut, you beggars,” he shouts; and they cut, and old Dan fell, turning round and round and round, twenty thousand miles, for he took half an hour to fall till he struck the water, and I could see his body caught on a rock with the gold crown close beside.

‘But do you know what they did to Peachey between two pine-trees? They crucified him, Sir, as Peachey’s hand will show. They used wooden pegs for his hands and his feet; and he didn’t die. He hung there and screamed, and they took him down next day, and said it was a miracle that he wasn’t dead. They took him down—poor old Peachey that hadn’t done them any harm—that hadn’t done them any—’

He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly, wiping his eyes with the back of his scarred hands and moaning like a child for some ten minutes.

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‘They was cruel enough to feed him up in the temple, because they said he was more of a God than old Daniel that was a man. Then they turned him out on the snow, and told him to go home, and Peachey came home in about a year, begging along the roads quite safe; for Daniel Dravot he walked before and said, “Come along, Peachey. It’s a big thing we’re doing.” The mountains they danced at night, and the mountains they tried to fall on Peachey’s head, but Dan he held up his hand, and Peachey came along bent double. He never let go of Dan’s hand, and he never let go of Dan’s head. They gave it to him as a present in the temple, to remind him not to come again, and though the crown was pure gold, and Peachey was starving, never would Peachey sell the same. You knew Dravot, Sir! You knew Right Worshipful Brother Dravot! Look at him now!’

He fumbled in the mass of rags round his bent waist; brought out a black horsehair bag embroidered with silver thread, and shook therefrom on to my table—the dried withered head of Daniel Dravot! The morning sun that had long been paling the lamps struck the red beard and blind sunken eyes; struck, too, a heavy circlet of gold studded with raw turquoises, that Carnehan placed tenderly on the battered temples.

‘You be’old now,’ said Carnehan, ‘the Emperor in his ’abit as he lived—the King of Kafiristan with his crown upon his head. Poor old Daniel that was a monarch once!’

I shuddered, for, in spite of defacements manifold, I recognized the head of the man of Marwar Junction. Carnehan rose to go. I attempted to stop him. He was not fit to walk abroad. ‘Let me take away the whisky, and give me a little money,’ he gasped. ‘I was a King once. I’ll go to the Deputy Commissioner and ask to be set in the Poorhouse till I get my health. No, thank you, I can’t wait till you get a carriage for me. I’ve urgent private affairs—in the south—at Marwar.’

He shambled out of the office and departed in the direction of the Deputy Commissioner’s house. That day at noon I had occasion to go down the blinding hot Mall, and I saw a crooked man crawling along the white dust of the roadside, his hat in his hand, quavering dolorously after the fashion of street-singers at Home. There was not a soul in sight, and he was out of all possible earshot of houses. And he sang through his nose, turning his head from right to left:

‘The Son of Man goes forth to war,
A golden crown to gain;
His blood-red banner streams afar—
Who follows in his train?’

 I waited to hear no more, but put the poor wretch into my carriage and drove him off to the nearest missionary for eventual transfer to the Asylum. He repeated the hymn twice while he was with me whom he did not in the least recognize, and I left him singing it to the missionary.

Two days later I inquired after his welfare of the Superintendent of the Asylum.

‘He was admitted suffering from sunstroke. He died early yesterday morning,’ said the Superintendent. ‘Is it true that he was half an hour bare-headed in the sun at mid-day?’

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but do you happen to know if he had anything upon him by any chance when he died?’

‘Not to my knowledge,’ said the Superintendent.

And there the matter rests.