SIR: Your article on ‘Landscape and Literature’ in the Spectator of June 18th has the following, among other suggestive passages: “But whence came the vision of the enchanted island in the ‘Tempest’? It had no existence in Shakspere’s world, but was woven out of such stuff as dreams are made of.”

May I cite Malone’s suggestion connecting the play with the casting away of Sir George Somers on the island of Bermuda in 1609; and further may I be allowed to say how it seems to me possible that the vision was woven from the most prosaic material from nothing more promising in fact, than the chatter of a half-tipsy sailor at a theatre? Thus:

A stage-manager, who writes and vamps plays, moving among his audience, overhears a mariner discoursing to his neighbour of a grievous wreck, and of the behaviour of the passengers, for whom all sailors have ever entertained a natural contempt. He describes, with the wealth of detail peculiar to sailors, measures taken to claw the ship off a lee-shore, how helm and sails were workt, what the passengers did and what he said. One pungent phrase to be rendered later into:

‘What care these brawlers for the name of King?’

strikes the manager’s ear, and he stands behind the talkers. Perhaps only one-tenth of the earnestly delivered, hand-on-shoulder sea talk was actually used of all that was automatically and unconsciously stored by the inland man who knew all inland arts and crafts. Nor is it too fanciful to imagine a half-turn to the second listener as the mariner, banning his luck as mariners will, says there are those who would not give a doit to a poor man while they will lay out ten to see a raree-show, a dead Indian. Were he in foreign parts, as he now is in England, he could show people something in the way of strange fish. Is it to consider too curiously to see a drink ensue on this hint (the manager dealt but little in his plays with the sea at first hand, and his instinct for new words would have been waked by what he had already caught), and with the drink a sailor’s minute description of how he went across the reefs to the island of his calamity, or islands rather, for there were many? Some you could almost carry away in your pocket. They were sown broadcast like like the nutshells on the stage there.

“Many islands, in truth,” says the manager patiently, and afterwards his Sebastian says to Antonio:

I think he will carry the island home in his pocket and give it to his son for an apple.

To which Antonio answers:

And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands.

“But what was the island like?” says the manager. The sailor tries to explain. “It was green, with yellow in it; a tawny-coloured country” the colour, that is to say, of the coral-beached, cedar-covered Bermuda of today “and the air made one sleepy, and the place was full of noises “the muttering and roaring of the sea among the islands and between the reefs and there was a sou’-west wind that blistered one all over.” The Elizabethan mariner would not discriminate finely between blisters and prickly heat; but the Bermudian of today will tell you that the sou’-west or Lighthouse wind in summer brings that plague and general discomfort. That the coral rock, battered by the sea, rings hollow with strange sounds, answered by the winds in the little cramped valleys, is a matter of common knowledge.

The man, refreshed with more drink, then describes the geography of his landing place, the spot where Trinculo makes his first appearance. He insists and reinsists on details which to him at one time meant life or death, and the manager follows attentively. He can give his audience no more than a few hangings and a placard for scenery, but that his lines shall lift them beyond that bare show to the place he would have them, the manager needs for himself the clearest possible understanding, the most ample detail. He must see the scene in the round solid ere he peoples it. Much, doubtless, he discarded, but so closely did he keep to his original informations that those who go today to a certain beach some two miles from Hamilton will find the stage set for Act II, Scene 2 of the ‘Tempest,’a bare beach, with the wind singing through the scrub at the land’s edge, a gap in the reefs wide enough for the passage of Stephano’s butt of sack, and (these eyes have seen it) a cave in the coral within easy reach of the tide, whereto such a butt might be conveniently rolled.

(My cellar is in a rock by the seaside where my wine is hid).

There is no other cave for some two miles.

Here’s neither bush nor shrub; one is exposed to the wrath of “yond same black cloud,” and here the currents strand wreckage. It was so well done that, after three hundred years, a stray tripper and no Shakspere scholar, recognized in a flash that old first set of all.

So far good. Up to this point the manager has gained little except some suggestions for an opening scene, and some notion of an uncanny island. The mariner (one cannot believe that Shakspere was mean in these little things) is dipping to a deeper drunkenness. Suddenly he launches into a preposterous tale of himself and his fellows, flung ashore, separated from their officers, horribly afraid of the devil-haunted beach of noises, with their heads full of the fumes of broacht liquor. One castaway was found hiding under the ribs of a dead whale which smelt abominably. They hauled him out by the legs — he mistook them for imps — and gave him drink. And now, discipline being melted, they would strike out for themselves, defy their officers, and take possession of the island. The narrator’s mates in this enterprise were probably described as fools. He was the only sober man in the company.

So they went inland, faring badly as they staggered up and down this pestilent country. They were prickt with palmettoes, and the cedar branches raspt their faces. Then they found and stole some of their officers’ clothes which were hanging up to dry. But presently they fell into a swamp, and, what was worse, into the hands of their officers; and the great expedition ended in muck and mire. Truly an island bewicht. Else why their cramps and sickness? Sack never made a man more than reasonably drunk. He was prepared to answer for unlimited sack; but what befell his stomach and head was the purest magic that honest man ever met.

A drunken sailor of to-day wandering about Bermuda would probably sympathize with him; and to-day, as then, if one takes the easiest inland road from Trinculo’s beach, near Hamilton, the path that a drunken man would infallibly follow, it ends abruptly in swamp. The one point that our mariner did not dwell upon was that he and the others were suffering from acute alcoholism combined with the effects of nerve-shattering peril and exposure. Hence the magic. That a wizard should control such an island was demanded by the beliefs of all seafarers of that date.

Accept this theory, and you will concede that the ‘Tempest’ came to the manager sanely and normally in the course of his daily life. He may have been casting about for a new play; he may have purposed to vamp an old one say — Aurelio and Isabella; or he may have been merely waiting on his demon. But it is all Prospero’s wealth against Caliban’s pignuts that to him in a receptive hour, sent by heaven, entered the original Stephano fresh from the seas and half-seas over. To him Stephano told his tale all in one piece, a two hours’ discourse of most glorious absurdities. His profligate abundance of detail at the beginning, when he was more or less sober, supplied and surely establisht the earth-basis of the play in accordance with the great law that a story to be truly miraculous must be ballasted with facts. His maunderings of magic and incomprehensible ambushes, when he was without reservation drunk (and this is just the time when a lesser-minded man than Shakspere would have paid the reckoning and turned him out) suggested to the manager the peculiar note of its supernatural mechanism.

Truly it was a dream, but that there may be no doubt of its source or of his obligation, Shakspere has also made the dreamer immortal.

RUDYARD KIPLING.

AS there is only one man in charge of a steamer, so there is but one man in charge of a newspaper, and he is the Editor. My Chief taught me this on an Indian journal, and he further explained that an order was an order, to be obeyed at a run, not a walk, and that any notion or notions as to the fitness or unfitness of any particular kind of work for the young had better be held over till the last page was locked up to press. He was breaking me into harness, and I owe him a deep debt of gratitude, which I did not discharge at the time. The path of virtue was very steep, whereas the writing of verses allowed a certain play to the mind, and, unlike the filling-in of reading-matter, could be done as the spirit served. Now a sub-editor is not hired to write verses. He is paid to sub-edit. At the time, this discovery shocked me greatly; but, some years later, when, for a few weeks I came to be an editor- in-charge, Providence dealt me for my sub-ordinate one saturated with Elia. He wrote very pretty, Lamb-like essays, but he wrote them when he should have been sub-editing. Then I saw a little what my Chief must have suffered on my account. There is a moral here for the ambitious and aspiring who are oppressed by their superiors.

This is a digression, as all my verses were digressions from office work. They came without invitation, unmanneredly, in the nature of things; but they had to come, and the writing out of them kept me healthy and amused. To the best of my remembrance, no one then discovered their grievous cynicism, or their pessimistic tendency, and I was far too busy, and too happy, to take thought about these things.

So they arrived merrily, being born out of the life about me, and they were very bad indeed; but the joy of doing them was pay a thousand times their worth. Some, of course, came and ran away again, and the dear sorrow of going in search of these (out of office hours) and catching them, was almost better than writing them clear. Bad as they were, I burned twice as many as were published, and of the survivors at least two-thirds were cut down at the last moment. Nothing can be wholly beautiful that is not useful, and therefore my verses were made to ease off the perpetual strife between the manager extending his advertisements, and my Chief fighting for his reading-matter. They were born to be sacrificed. Rukn-Din, the foreman of our side, approved of them immensely, for he was a Muslim of culture. He would say: ‘Your potery very good, sir; just coming proper length today. You giving more soon? One-third column just proper. Always can take on third page.’

Mahmoud, who set them up, had an unpleasant way of referring to a new lyric as ‘Ek aur chiz ‘— ‘one more thing ‘—which I never liked. The job side, too, were unsympathetic, because I used to raid into their type for private proofs with Old English and Gothic headlines. Even a Hindu does not like to find the serifs of his f’s cut away to make long s’s.

And in this manner, week by week, my verses came to be printed in the paper. I was in very good company, for there is always an undercurrent of song, a little bitter for the most part, running through the Indian papers. The bulk of it is much better than mine, being more graceful, and is done by those less than Sir Alfred Lyall — to whom I would apologise for mentioning his name in this gallery — ‘Pekin’, ‘Latakia’, ‘Cigarette,’ ‘ O,’ ‘ T.W.,’ ‘ Foresight,’ and others, whose names came up with the stars out of the Indian Ocean going eastward.

Sometimes a man in Bangalore would be moved to song, and a man on the Bombay side would answer him, and a man in Bengal would echo back, till at last we would all be crowing together, like cocks before daybreak, when it is too dark to see your fellow. And, occasionally, some unhappy Chaaszee, away in the China Ports, would lift up his voice among the tea-chests, and the queer-smelling yellow papers of the Far East brought us his sorrows. The newspaper files showed that, forty years ago, the men sang of just the same subjects as we did — of heat, loneliness, love, lack of promotion, poverty, sport, and war. Further back still, at the end of the eighteenth century, Hickey’s Bengal Gazette, a very wicked little sheet in Calcutta, published the songs of the young factors, ensigns, and writers to the East India Company. They, too, wrote of the same things, but in those days men were strong enough to buy a bullock’s heart for dinner, cook it with their own hands because they could not afford a servant, and make a rhymed jest of all the squalor and poverty. Lives were not worth two monsoons’ purchase, and perhaps a knowledge of this a little coloured the rhymes when they sang:

‘In a very short time you’re released from all cares —
If the Padre’s asleep, Mr. Oldham reads prayers!’

The note of physical discomfort that runs through so much Anglo- Indian poetry had been struck then. You will find it most fully suggested in ‘ The Long, Long Indian Day’, a comparatively modern affair; but there is a set of verses called ‘Scanty Ninety-five’, dated about Warren Hastings’s time, which gives a lively idea of what our seniors in the service had to put up with. One of the most interesting poems I ever found was written at Meerut, three or four days before the Mutiny broke out there. The author complained that he could not get his clothes washed nicely that week, and was very facetious over his worries!

My verses had the good fortune to last a little longer than some others, which were more true to facts, and certainly better workmanship. Men in the Army and the Civil Service and the Railway wrote to me saying that the rhymes might be made into a book. Some of them had been sung to the banjoes round the camp-fires, and some had run as far down coast as Rangoon and Moulmein, and up to Mandalay. A real book was out of the question, but I knew that Rukn-Din and the office plant were at my disposal at a price, if I did not use the office time. Also, I had handled in the previous year a couple of small books, of which I was part owner, and had lost nothing. So there was built a sort of book, a lean oblong docket, wire-stitched, to imitate a D.O. Government envelope, printed on one side only, bound in brown paper, and secured with red tape. It was addressed to all Heads of Departments, and all Government Officials, and among a pile of papers would have deceived a clerk of twenty years’ service. Of these ‘books’ we made some hundreds, and as there was no necessity for advertising, my public being to my hand, I took reply – postcards, printed the news of the birth of the book on one side, the blank order-form on the other, and posted them up and down the Empire from Aden to Singapore and from Quetta to Colombo. There was no trade discount, no reckoning twelves as thirteens, no commission, and no credit of any kind whatever. The money came back in poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher, my left-hand pocket, direct to the author, my right-hand pocket. Every copy sold in a few weeks, and the ratio of expenses to profits, as I remember it, has since prevented my injuring my health by sympathising with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements. The down-country papers complained of the form of the thing. The wire-binding cut the pages, and the red tape tore the covers. This was not intentional, but Heaven helps those who help themselves. Consequently, there arose a demand for a new edition, and this time I exchanged the pleasure of taking in money over the counter for that of seeing a real publisher’s imprint on the title-page. More verses were taken out and put in, and some of that edition travelled as far as Hong Kong on the map, and each edition grew a little fatter, and, at last, the book came to London with a gilt top and a stiff back, and was advertised in a publisher’s poetry department.

But I loved it best when it was a little brown baby, with a pink string round its stomach; a child’s child ignorant that it was afflicted with all the most modern ailments; and before people had learned beyond doubt how its author lay awake of nights in India, plotting and scheming to write something that should take with the English public.

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‘BOOK—Book—Domesday Book!’ They were letting in the water for the evening stint at Robert’s Mill, and the wooden Wheel, where lived the Spirit of the Mill, settled to its nine-hundred-year-old song: ‘Here Azor, a freeman, held one rod, but it never paid geld. Nun-nun-nunquam geldavit. Here Reinbert has one villein and four cottars with one plough—and wood for six hogs and two fisheries of sixpence and a mill of ten shillings—unum molinum—one mill. Reinbert’s mill—Robert’s Mill. Then and afterwards and now—tune et post et modo—Robert’s Mill. Book—Book—Domesday Book!’  ‘I confess,’ said the Black Rat on the crossbeam, luxuriously trimming his whiskers—‘I confess I am not above appreciating my position and all it means.’ He was a genuine old English black rat, a breed which, report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.

‘Appreciation is the surest sign of inadequacy,’ said the Grey Cat, coiled up on a piece of sacking.

‘But I know what you mean,’ she added. ‘To sit by right at the heart of things—eh?’

‘Yes,’ said the Black Rat, as the old mill shook and the heavy stones thuttered on the grist. ‘To possess—er—all this environment as an integral part of one’s daily life must insensibly of course . . . You see?’

‘I feel,’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Indeed, if we are not saturated with the spirit of the Mill, who should be?’

‘Book—Book—Domesday Book!’ The Wheel, set to his work, was running off the tenure of the whole rape, for he knew Domesday Book backwards and forwards: ‘In Ferle tenuit Abbatia de Wiltuna unam hidam et unam virgam et dimidiam. Nunquam geldavit. And Agemond, a freeman, has half a hide and one rod. I remember Agemond well. Charmin’ fellow—friend of mine. He married a Norman girl in the days when we rather looked down on the Normans as upstarts. An’ Agemond’s dead? So he is. Eh, dearie me! dearie me! I remember the wolves howling outside his door in the big frost of Ten Fifty-Nine . . . . Essewelde hundredum nunquam geldum reddidit. Book! Book! Domesday Book!’

‘After all,’ the Grey Cat continued, ‘atmosphere is life. It is the influences under which we live that count in the long run. Now, outside’ she cocked one ear towards the half-opened door—‘there is an absurd convention that rats and cats are, I won’t go so far as to say natural enemies, but opposed forces. Some such ruling may be crudely effective—I don’t for a minute presume to set up my standards as final—among the ditches; but from the larger point of view that one gains by living at the heart of things, it seems for a rule of life a little overstrained. Why, because some of your associates have, shall I say, liberal views on the ultimate destination of a sack of—er—middlings, don’t they call them——’

‘Something of that sort,’ said the Black Rat, a most sharp and sweet-toothed judge of everything ground in the mill for the last three years.

‘Thanks—middlings be it. Why, as I was saying, must I disarrange my fur and my digestion to chase you round the dusty arena whenever we happen to meet?’

‘As little reason,’ said the Black Rat, ‘as there is for me, who, I trust, am a person of ordinarily decent instincts, to wait till you have gone on a round of calls, and then to assassinate your very charming children.’

‘Exactly! It has its humorous side though.’ The Grey Cat yawned. ‘The miller seems afflicted by it. He shouted large and vague threats to my address, last night at tea, that he wasn’t going to keep cats who “caught no mice.” Those were his words. I remember the grammar sticking in my throat like a herring-bone.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘What does one do when a barbarian utters? One ceases to utter and removes. I removed—towards his pantry. It was a riposte he might appreciate.’

‘Really those people grow absolutely insufferable,’ said the Black Rat. ‘There is a local ruffian who answers to the name of Mangles—a builder—who has taken possession of the outhouses on the far side of the Wheel for the last fortnight. He has constructed cubical horrors in red brick where those deliciously picturesque pigstyes used to stand. Have you noticed?’

‘There has been much misdirected activity of late among the humans. They jabber inordinately. I haven’t yet been able to arrive at their reason for existence.’ The Cat yawned.

‘A couple of them came in here last week with wires, and fixed them all about the walls. Wires protected by some abominable composition, ending in iron brackets with glass bulbs. Utterly useless for any purpose and artistically absolutely hideous. What do they mean?’

‘Aaah! I have known four-and-twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza,’ said the Cat, who kept good company with the boarders spending a summer at the Mill Farm. ‘It means nothing except that humans occasionally bring their dogs with them. I object to dogs in all forms.’

‘Shouldn’t object to dogs,’ said the Wheel sleepily . . . . ‘The Abbot of Wilton kept the best pack in the county. He enclosed all the Harryngton Woods to Sturt Common. Aluric, a freeman, was dispossessed of his holding. They tried the case at Lewes, but he got no change out of William de Warrenne on the bench. William de Warrenne fined Aluric eight and fourpence for treason, and the Abbot of Wilton excommunicated him for blasphemy. Aluric was no sportsman. Then the Abbot’s brother married . . . . I’ve forgotten her name, but she was a charmin’ little woman. The Lady Philippa was her daughter. That was after the barony was conferred. She rode devilish straight to hounds. They were a bit throatier than we breed now, but a good pack one of the best. The Abbot kept ’em in splendid shape. Now, who was the woman the Abbot kept? Book—Book ! I shall have to go right back to Domesday and work up the centuries: Modo per omnia reddit burgum tunc—tunc—tunc! Was it burgum or hundredum? I shall remember in a minute. There’s no hurry.’ He paused as he turned over, silvered with showering drops.

‘This won’t do,’ said the Waters in the sluice. ‘Keep moving.’

The Wheel swung forward; the Waters roared on the buckets and dropped down to the darkness below.

‘Noisier than usual,’ said the Black Rat. ‘It must have been raining up the valley.’

‘Floods maybe,’ said the Wheel dreamily. ‘It isn’t the proper season, but they can come without warning. I shall never forget the big one—when the Miller went to sleep and forgot to open the hatches. More than two hundred years ago it was, but I recall it distinctly. Most unsettling.’

‘We lifted that wheel off his bearings,’ cried the Waters. ‘We said, “Take away that bauble!” And in the morning he was five miles down the valley—hung up in a tree.’

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‘Vulgar!’ said the Cat. ‘But I am sure he never lost his dignity.’

‘We don’t know. He looked like the Ace of Diamonds when we had finished with him . . . . Move on there! Keep on moving. Over! Get over!’

‘And why on this day more than any other?’ said the Wheel statelily. ‘I am not aware that my department requires the stimulus of external pressure to keep it up to its duties. I trust I have the elementary instincts of a gentleman.’

‘Maybe,’ the Waters answered together, leaping down on the buckets. ‘We only know that you are very stiff on your bearings. Over, get over!’

The Wheel creaked and groaned. There was certainly greater pressure upon him than he had ever felt, and his revolutions had increased from six and three-quarters to eight and a third per minute. But the uproar between the narrow, weed-hung walls annoyed the Grey Cat.

‘Isn’t it almost time,’ she said plaintively, ‘that the person who is paid to understand these things shuts off those vehement drippings with that screw-thing on the top of that box-thing?’

‘They’ll be shut off at eight o’clock as usual,’ said the Rat; ‘then we can go to dinner.’

‘But we shan’t be shut off till ever so late,’ said the Waters gaily. ‘We shall keep it up all night.’

‘The ineradicable offensiveness of youth is partially compensated for by its eternal hopefulness,’ said the Cat. ‘Our dam is not, I am glad to say, designed to furnish water for more than four hours at a time. Reserve is Life.’

‘Thank goodness!’ said the Black Rat. ‘Then they can return to their native ditches.’

‘Ditches!’ cried the Waters; ‘Raven’s Gill Brook is no ditch. It is almost navigable, and we come from there away.’ They slid over solid and compact till the Wheel thudded under their weight.

‘Raven’s Gill Brook,’ said the Rat. ‘I never heard of Raven’s Gill.’

‘We are the waters of Harpenden Brook—down from under Canton Rise. Phew! how the race stinks compared with the heather country.’ Another five foot of water flung itself against the Wheel, broke, roared, gurgled, and was gone.

‘Indeed?’ said the Grey Cat. ‘I am sorry to tell you that Raven’s Gill Brook is cut off from this valley by an absolutely impassable range of mountains, and Callton Rise is more than nine miles away. It belongs to another system entirely.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said the Rat, grinning, ‘but we forget that, for the young, water always runs uphill.’

‘Oh, hopeless! hopeless! hopeless!’ cried the Waters, descending open-palmed upon the Wheel. ‘There is nothing between here and Raven’s Gill Brook that a hundred yards of channelling and a few square feet of concrete could not remove; and hasn’t removed!’

‘And Harpenden Brook is north of Raven’s Gill and runs into Raven’s Gill at the foot of Callton Rise, where the big ilex trees are, and we come from there!’ These were the glassy, clear waters of the high chalk.

‘And Batten’s Ponds, that are fed by springs, have been led through Trott’s Wood, taking the spare water from the old Witches’ Spring under Churt Haw, and we—we—we are their combined waters!’ Those were the Waters from the upland bogs and moors—a porter-coloured, dusky, and foam-flecked flood.

‘It’s all very interesting,’ purred the Cat to the sliding waters, ‘and I have no doubt that Trott’s Woods and Bott’s Woods are tremendously important places; but if you could manage to do your work—whose value I don’t in the least dispute—a little more soberly, I, for one, should be grateful.’

‘Book—book—book—book—book—Domesday Book!’ The urged Wheel was fairly clattering now: ‘In Burgelstaltone a monk holds of Earl Godwin one hide and a half with eight villeins. There is a church—and a monk …. I remember that monk. Blessed if he could rattle his rosary off any quicker than I am doing now . . . and wood for seven hogs. I must be running twelve to the minute . . . almost as fast as Steam. Damnable invention, Steam! . . . Surely it’s time we went to dinner or prayers—or something. Can’t keep up this pressure, day in and day out, and not feel it. I don’t mind for myself, of course. Noblesse oblige, you know. I’m only thinking of the Upper and the Nether Millstones. They came out of the common rock. They can’t be expected to——’

‘Don’t worry on our account, please,’ said the Millstones huskily. ‘So long as you supply the power we’ll supply the weight and the bite.’

‘Isn’t it a trifle blasphemous, though, to work you in this way?’ grunted the Wheel. ‘I seem to remember something about the Mills of God grinding “ slowly.” Slowly was the word!’

‘But we are not the Mills of God. We’re only the Upper and the Nether Millstones. We have received no instructions to be anything else. We are actuated by power transmitted through you.’

‘Ah, but let us be merciful as we are strong. Think of all the beautiful little plants that grow on my woodwork. There are five varieties of rare moss within less than one square yard—and all these delicate jewels of nature are being grievously knocked about by this excessive rush of the water.’

‘Umph!’ growled the Millstones. ‘What with your religious scruples and your taste for botany we’d hardly know you for the Wheel that put the carter’s son under last autumn. You never worried about him!’

‘He ought to have known better.’

‘So ought your jewels of nature. Tell ’em to grow where it’s safe.’

‘How a purely mercantile life debases and brutalises!’ said the Cat to the Rat.

‘They were such beautiful little plants too,’ said the Rat tenderly. ‘Maiden’s-tongue and hart’s-hair fern trellising all over the wall just as they do on the sides of churches in the Downs. Think what a joy the sight of them must be to our sturdy peasants pulling hay!’

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‘Golly!’ said the Millstones. ‘There’s nothing like coming to the heart of things for information’; and they returned to the song that all English water-mills have sung from time beyond telling:

There was a jovial miller once
Lived on the River Dee,
And this the burden of his song
For ever used to be.

Then, as fresh grist poured in and dulled the note

I care for nobody—no, not I,
And nobody cares for me.

‘Even these stones have absorbed something of our atmosphere,’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Nine-tenths of the trouble in this world comes from lack of detachment.’

‘One of your people died from forgetting that, didn’t she?’ said the Rat.

‘One only. The example has sufficed us for generations.’

‘Ah! but what happened to Don’t Care?’ the Waters demanded.

‘Brutal riding to death of the casual analogy is another mark of provincialism!’ The Grey Cat raised her tufted chin. ‘I am going to sleep. With my social obligations I must snatch rest when I can; but, as our old friend here says, Noblesse oblige . . . . Pity me! Three functions to-night in the village, and a barn-dance across the valley!’

‘There’s no chance, I suppose, of your looking in on the loft about two. Some of our young people are going to amuse themselves with a new sacque-dance—best white flour only,’ said the Black Rat.

‘I believe I am officially supposed not to countenance that sort of thing, but youth is youth. . . By the way, the humans set my milk-bowl in the loft these days; I hope your youngsters respect it.’

‘My dear lady,’ said the Black Rat, bowing, ‘you grieve me. You hurt me inexpressibly. After all these years, too!’

‘A general crush is so mixed—highways and hedges—all that sort of thing—and no one can answer for one’s best friends. I never try. So long as mine are amusin’ and in full voice, and can hold their own at a tile-party, I’m as catholic as these mixed waters in the dam here!’

‘We aren’t mixed. We have mixed. We are one now,’ said the Waters sulkily.

‘Still uttering?’ said the Cat. ‘Never mind, here’s the Miller coming to shut you off. Ye-es, I have known—four—or five, is it?—and twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza . . . . A little more babble in the dam, a little more noise in the sluice, a little extra splashing on the wheel, and then——’

‘They will find that nothing has occurred,’ said the Black Rat. ‘The old things persist and survive and are recognised—our old friend here first of all. By the way,’ he turned toward the Wheel, ‘I believe we have to congratulate you on your latest honour.’

‘Profoundly well deserved—even if he had never—as he has—laboured strenuously through a long life for the amelioration of millkind,’ said the Cat, who belonged to many tile and oasthouse committees. ‘Doubly deserved, I may say, for the silent and dignified rebuke his existence offers to the clattering, fidgety-footed demands of—er—some people. What form did the honour take?’

‘It was,’ said the Wheel bashfully, ‘a machine-moulded pinion.’

‘Pinions! Oh, how heavenly!’ the Black Rat sighed. ‘I never see a bat without wishing for wings.’

‘Not exactly that sort of pinion,’ said the Wheel, ‘but a really ornate circle of toothed iron wheels. Absurd, of course, but gratifying. Mr. Mangles and an associate herald invested me with it personally—on my left rim—the side that you can’t see from the mill. I hadn’t meant to say anything about it—or the new steel straps round my axles—bright red, you know—to be worn on all occasions—but, without false modesty, I assure you that the recognition cheered me not a little.’

‘How intensely gratifying!’ said the Black Rat. ‘I must really steal an hour between lights some day and see what they are doing on your left side.’

‘By the way, have you any light on this recent activity of Mr. Mangles?’ the Grey Cat asked. ‘He seems to be building small houses on the far side of the tail-race. Believe me, I don’t ask from any vulgar curiosity.’

‘It affects our Order,’ said the Black Rat simply but firmly.

‘Thank you,’ said the Wheel. ‘Let me see if I can tabulate it properly. Nothing like system in accounts of all kinds. Book! Book! Book! On the side of the Wheel towards the hundred of Burgelstaltone, where till now was a stye of three hogs, Mangles, a freeman, with four villeins and two carts of two thousand bricks, has a new small house of five yards and a half, and one roof of iron and a floor of cement. Then, now, and afterwards beer in large tankards. And Felden, a stranger, with three villeins and one very great cart, deposits on it one engine of iron and brass and a small iron mill of four feet, and a broad strap of leather. And Mangles, the builder, with two villeins, constructs the floor for the same, and a floor of new brick with wires for the small mill. There are there also chalices filled with iron and water, in number fifty-seven. The whole is valued at one hundred and seventy-four pounds . . . . I’m sorry I can’t make myself clearer, but you can see for yourself.’

‘Amazingly lucid,’ said the Cat. She was the more to be admired because the language of Domesday Book is not, perhaps, the clearest medium wherein to describe a small but complete electric-light installation, deriving its power from a water-wheel by means of cogs and gearing.

‘See for yourself—by all means, see for yourself,’ said the Waters, spluttering and choking with mirth.

‘Upon my word,’ said the Black Rat furiously, ‘I may be at fault, but I wholly fail to perceive where these offensive eavesdroppers—er—come in. We were discussing a matter that solely affected our Order.’

page 4

Suddenly they heard, as they had heard many times before, the Miller shutting off the water. To the rattle and rumble of the labouring stones succeeded thick silence, punctuated with little drops from the stayed wheel. Then some water-bird in the dam fluttered her wings as she slid to her nest, and the plop of a water-rat sounded like the fall of a log in the water.

‘It is all over—it always is all over at just this time. Listen, the Miller is going to bed—as usual. Nothing has occurred,’ said the Cat.

Something creaked in the house where the pigstyes had stood, as metal engaged on metal with a clink and a burr.

‘Shall I turn her on?’ cried the Miller.

‘Ay,’ said the voice from the dynamo-house.

‘A human in Mangles’ new house!’ the Rat squeaked.

‘What of it?’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Even supposing Mr. Mangles’ cat’s-meat-coloured hovel pullulated with humans, can’t you see for yourself—that——?’

There was a solid crash of released waters leaping upon the Wheel more furiously than ever, a grinding of cogs, a hum like the hum of a hornet, and then the unvisited darkness of the old mill was scattered by intolerable white light. It threw up every cobweb, every burl and knot in the beams and the floor; till the shadows behind the flakes of rough plaster on the wall lay clearcut as shadows of mountains on the photographed moon.

‘See! See! See!’ hissed the Waters in full flood. ‘Yes, see for yourselves. Nothing has occurred. Can’t you see?’

The Rat, amazed, had fallen from his foothold and lay half-stunned on the floor. The Cat, following her instinct, leaped nigh to the ceiling, and with flattened ears and bared teeth backed in a corner ready to fight whatever terror might be loosed on her. But nothing happened. Through the long aching minutes nothing whatever happened, and her wire-brush tail returned slowly to its proper shape.

‘Whatever it is,’ she said at last, ‘it’s overdone. They can never keep it up, you know.’

‘Much you know,’ said the Waters. ‘Over you go, old man. You can take the full head of us now. Those new steel axlestraps of yours can stand anything. Come along, Raven’s Gill, Harpenden, Callton Rise, Batten’s Ponds, Witches’ Spring, all together! Let’s show these gentlemen how to work!’

‘But—but—I thought it was a decoration. Why—why—why—it only means more work for me!’

‘Exactly. You’re to supply about sixty-eight candle lights when required. But they won’t be all in use at once’

‘Ah! I thought as much,’ said the Cat. ‘The reaction is bound to come.’

‘And,’ said the Waters, ‘you will do the ordinary work of the mill as well.’

‘Impossible!’ the old Wheel quivered as it drove. ‘Aluric never did it—nor Azor, nor Reinbert. Not even William de Warrenne or the Papal Legate. There’s no precedent for it. I tell you there’s no precedent for working a wheel like this.’

‘Wait a while! We’re making one as fast as we can. Aluric and Co. are dead. So’s the Papal Legate. You’ve no notion how dead they are, but we’re here—the Waters of Five Separate Systems. We’re just as interesting as Domesday Book. Would you like to hear about the land-tenure in Trott’s Wood? It’s squat-right, chiefly:’ The mocking Waters leaped one over the other, chuckling and chattering profanely.

‘In that hundred Jenkins, a tinker, with one dog—unus canis—holds, by the Grace of God and a habit he has of working hard, unam hidam—a large potato-patch. Charmin’ fellow, Jenkins. Friend of ours. Now, who the dooce did Jenkins keep? . . . In the hundred of Canton is one charcoal-burner irreligiosissimus homo—a bit of a rip—but a thorough sportsman. Ibi est ecclesia. Non multum. Not much of a church, quia because, episcopus the Vicar irritated the Non-conformists tunc et post et modo—then and afterwards and now—until they built a cut-stone Congregational chapel with red brick facings that did not return itself—defendebat se—at four thousand pounds.’

‘Charcoal-burners, vicars, schismatics, and red brick facings,’ groaned the Wheel. ‘But this is sheer blasphemy. What waters have they let in upon me?’

‘Floods from the gutters. Faugh, this light is positively sickening!’ said the Cat, rearranging her fur.

‘We come down from the clouds or up from the springs, exactly like all other waters everywhere. Is that what’s surprising you?’ sang the Waters.

‘Of course not. I know my work if you don’t. What I complain of is your lack of reverence and repose. You’ve no instinct of deference towards your betters—your heartless parody of the Sacred volume (the Wheel meant Domesday Book) proves it.’

‘Our betters?’ said the Waters most solemnly. ‘What is there in all this dammed race that hasn’t come down from the clouds, or——’

‘Spare me that talk, please,’ the Wheel persisted. ‘You’d never understand. It’s the tone—your tone that we object to.’

‘Yes. It’s your tone,’ said the Black Rat, picking himself up limb by limb.

‘If you thought a trifle more about the work you’re supposed to do, and a trifle less about your precious feelings, you’d render a little more duty in return for the power vested in you—we mean wasted on you,’ the Waters replied.

‘I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge which you see fit to challenge so lightheartedly,’ the Wheel jarred.

‘Challenge him! Challenge him!’ clamoured the little waves riddling down through the tailrace. ‘As well now as later. Take him up!’

The main mass of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted structure almost into box-lids by saying: ‘Very good. Tell us what you suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment.’

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‘Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust reposed in me to reveal.’

‘Fiddle!’ said the Waters. ‘We knew it all along! The first direct question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are, by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or would you like it all in words of four syllables?’

‘Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a decent and—the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant monkish Latin much better than I can—a scholarly reserve does not necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects?’

‘Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton,’ said the Rat sympathetically, as one nursed in that bosom. ‘Charmin’ fellow—thorough scholar and gentleman. Such a pity!’

‘Oh, Sacred Fountains!’—the Waters were fairly boiling. ‘He goes out of his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland, circular, absolutely sincere imposter, you’re a miracle, O Wheel!’

‘I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an accepted and not altogether mushroom institution.’

‘Quite so,’ said the Waters. ‘Then go round—hard——’

‘To what end?’ asked the Wheel.

‘Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume—gassing is the proper word.’

‘It would be,’ said the Cat, sniffing.

‘That will show that your accumulators are full. When the accumulators are exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round and round again.’

‘The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking round and round for ever,’ said the Cat.

‘In order,’ the Rat said, ‘that you may throw raw and unnecessary illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we shall—er—have always with us. At the same time you will riotously neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life.’

‘Yes, Life,’ said the Cat, ‘with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying leaps—its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall.’

‘Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual,’ said the laughing Waters. ‘We shan’t interfere with you.’

‘On the tiles, forsooth!’ hissed the Cat.

‘Well, that’s what it amounts to,’ persisted the Waters. ‘We see a good deal of the minor graces of life on our way down to our job.’

‘And—but I fear I speak to deaf ears—do they never impress you?’ said the Wheel.

‘Enormously,’ said the Waters. ‘We have already learned six refined synonyms for loafing.’

‘But (here again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the wholly animal—ah—rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well-apportioned leisure of the finer type of intellect?’

‘Oh, yes. The bovine mind goes to sleep under a hedge and makes no bones about it when it’s shouted at. We’ve seen that—in haying-time—all along the meadows. The finer type is wide awake enough to fudge up excuses for shirking, and mean enough to get stuffy when its excuses aren’t accepted. Turn over!’

‘But, my good people, no gentleman gets stuffy as you call it. A certain proper pride, to put it no higher, forbids——’

‘Nothing that he wants to do if he really wants to do it. Get along! What are you giving us? D’you suppose we’ve scoured half heaven in the clouds and half earth in the mists, to be taken in at this time of the day by a bone-idle, old handquern of your type?’

‘It is not for me to bandy personalities with you. I can only say that I simply decline to accept the situation.’

‘Decline away. It doesn’t make any odds. They’ll probably put in a turbine if you decline too much.’

‘What’s a turbine?’ said the Wheel quickly.

‘A little thing you don’t see, that performs surprising revolutions. But you won’t decline. You’ll hang on to your two nice red-strapped axles and your new machine-moulded pinions like—a—like a leech on a lily stem! There’s centuries of work in your old bones if you’d only apply yourself to it; and, mechanically, an overshot wheel with this head of water is about as efficient as a turbine.’

‘So in future I am to be considered mechanically? I have been painted by at least five Royal Academicians.’

‘Oh, you can be painted by five hundred when you aren’t at work, of course. But while you are at work you’ll work. You won’t half-stop and think and talk about rare plants and dicky-birds and farinaceous fiduciary interests. You’ll continue to revolve, and this new head of water will see that you do so continue.’

‘It is a matter on which it would be exceedingly ill-advised to form a hasty or a premature conclusion. I will give it my most careful consideration,’ said the Wheel.

page 6

‘Please do,’ said the Waters gravely. ‘Hullo! Here’s the Miller again.’

The Cat coiled herself in a picturesque attitude on the softest corner of a sack, and the Rat without haste, yet certainly without rest, slipped behind the sacking as though an appointment had just occurred to him.

In the doorway, with the young Engineer, stood the Miller grinning amazedly.

‘Well—well—well! ’tis true-ly won’erful. An’ what a power o’ dirt! It come over me now looking at these lights, that I’ve never rightly seen my own mill before. She needs a lot bein’ done to her.’

‘Ah! I suppose one must make oneself moderately agreeable to the baser sort. They have their uses. This thing controls the dairy.’ The Cat, pincing on her toes, came forward and rubbed her head against the Miller’s knee.

‘Ay, you pretty puss,’ he said, stooping. ‘You’re as big a cheat as the rest of ’em that catch no mice about me. A won’erful smooth-skinned, rough-tongued cheat you be. I’ve more than half a mind——’

‘She does her work well,’ said the Engineer, pointing to where the Rat’s beady eyes showed behind the sacking. ‘Cats and Rats liven’ together—see?’

‘Too much they do—too long they’ve done. I’m sick and tired of it. Go and take a swim and larn to find your own vittles honest when you come out, Pussy.’

‘My word!’ said the Waters, as a sprawling Cat landed all unannounced in the centre of the tailrace. ‘Is that you, Mewsalina? You seem to have been quarrelling with your best friend. Get over to the left. It’s shallowest there. Up on that alder-root with all four paws. Goodnight!’

‘You’ll never get any they rats,’ said the Miller, as the young Engineer struck wrathfully with his stick at the sacking. ‘They’re not the common sort. They’re the old black English sort.’

‘Are they, by Jove? I must catch one to stuff, some day.’

Six months later, in the chill of a January afternoon, they were letting in the Waters as usual.

‘Come along! It’s both gears this evening,’ said the Wheel, kicking joyously in the first rush of the icy stream. ‘There’s a heavy load of grist just in from Lamber’s Wood. Eleven miles it came in an hour and a half in our new motor-lorry, and the Miller’s rigged five new five-candle lights in his cow-stables. I’m feeding ’em tonight. There’s a cow due to calve. Oh, while I think of it, what’s the news from Canton Rise?’

‘The waters are finding their level as usual—but why do you ask?’ said the deep outpouring Waters.

‘Because Mangles and Felden and the Miller are talking of increasing the plant here and running a saw-mill by electricity. I was wondering whether we——’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Waters, chuckling. ‘What did you say? ‘

‘Whether we, of course, had power enough for the job. It will be a biggish contract. There’s all Harpenden Brook to be considered and Batten’s Ponds as well, and Witches’ Spring, and the Churt Haw system.’

‘We’ve power enough for anything in the world,’ said the Waters. ‘The only question is whether you could stand the strain if we came down on you full head.’

‘Of course I can,’ said the Wheel. ‘Mangles is going to turn me into a set of turbines—beauties.’

‘Oh—er—I suppose it’s the frost that has made us a little thick-headed, but to whom are we talking?’ asked the amazed Waters.

‘To me—the Spirit of the Mill, of course.’

‘Not to the old Wheel, then?’

‘I happen to be living in the old Wheel just at present. When the turbines are installed I shall go and live in them. What earthly difference does it make?’

‘Absolutely none,’ said the Waters, ‘in the earth or in the waters under the earth. But we thought turbines didn’t appeal to you.’

‘Not like turbines? Me? My dear fellows, turbines are good for fifteen hundred revolutions a minute—and with our power we can drive ’em at full speed. Why, there’s nothing we couldn’t grind or saw or illuminate or heat with a set of turbines! That’s to say if all the Five Watersheds are agreeable.’

‘Oh, we’ve been agreeable for ever so long.’

‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Don’t know. Suppose it slipped our memory.’ The Waters were holding themselves in for fear of bursting with mirth.

‘How careless of you! You should keep abreast of the age, my dear fellows. We might have settled it long ago, if you’d only spoken. Yes, four good turbines and a neat brick penstock—eh? This old Wheel’s absurdly out of date.’

‘Well,’ said the Cat, who after a little proud seclusion had returned to her place impenitent as ever. ‘Praised be Pasht and the Old Gods, that whatever may have happened I, at least, have preserved the Spirit of the Mill!’

She looked round as expecting her faithful ally, the Black Rat; but that very week the Engineer had caught and stuffed him, and had put him in a glass case; he being a genuine old English black rat. That breed, the report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.

page 1 of 6

IN the days beyond compare and before the Judgments, a genius called Graydon foresaw that the advance of education and the standard of living would submerge all mind-marks in one mudrush of standardised reading-matter, and so created the Fictional Supply Syndicate to meet the demand.Since a few days’ work for him brought them more money than a week’s elsewhere, he drew many young men—some now eminent—into his employ. He bade them keep their eyes on the Sixpenny Dream Book, the Army and Navy Stores Catalogue (this for backgrounds and furniture as they changed), and The Hearthstone Friend, a weekly publication which specialised unrivalledly in the domestic emotions. Yet, even so, youth would not be denied, and some of the collaborated love-talk in ‘Passion Hath Peril,’ and ‘Ena’s Lost Lovers,’ and the account of the murder of the Earl in ‘The Wickwire Tragedies’—to name but a few masterpieces now never mentioned for fear of blackmail—was as good as anything to which their authors signed their real names in more distinguished years.

Among the young ravens driven to roost awhile on Graydon’s ark was James Andrew Manallace—a darkish, slow northerner of the type that does not ignite, but must be detonated. Given written or verbal outlines of a plot, he was useless; but, with a half-dozen pictures round which to write his tale, he could astonish.

And he adored that woman who afterwards became the mother of Vidal Benzaquen, and who suffered and died because she loved one unworthy. There was, also, among the company a mannered, bellied person called Alured Castorley, who talked and wrote about ‘Bohemia,’ but was always afraid of being ‘compromised’ by the weekly suppers at Neminaka’s Cafes in Hestern Square, where the Syndicate work was apportioned, and where everyone looked out for himself. He, too, for a time, had loved Vidal’s mother, in his own way.

Now, one Saturday at Neminaka’s, Graydon, who had given Manallace a sheaf of prints—torn from an extinct children’s book called Philippa’s Queen—on which to improvise, asked for results. Manallace went down into his ulster-pocket, hesitated a moment, and said the stuff had turned into poetry on his hands.

‘Bosh!’

‘That’s what it isn’t,’ the boy retorted. ‘It’s rather good.’

‘Then it’s no use to us.’ Graydon laughed. ‘Have you brought back the cuts?’

Manallace handed them over. There was a castle in the series; a knight or so in armour; an old lady in a horned head-dress; a young ditto; a very obvious Hebrew; a clerk, with pen and inkhorn, checking wine-barrels on a wharf; and a Crusader. On the back of one of the prints was a note, ‘If he doesn’t want to go, why can’t he be captured and held to ransom?’ Graydon asked what it all meant.

‘I don’t know yet. A comic opera, perhaps,’ said Manallace.

Graydon, who seldom wasted time, passed the cuts on to someone else, and advanced Manallace a couple of sovereigns to carry on with, as usual; at which Castorley was angry and would have said something unpleasant but was suppressed. Half-way through supper, Castorley told the company that a relative had died and left him an independence; and that he now withdrew from ‘hackwork’ to follow ‘Literature.’ Generally, the Syndicate rejoiced in a comrade’s good fortune, but Castorley had gifts of waking dislike. So the news was received with a vote of thanks, and he went out before the end, and, it was said, proposed to ’Dal Benzaquen’s mother, who refused him. He did not come back. Manallace, who had arrived a little exalted, got so drunk before midnight that a man had to stay and see him home. But liquor never touched him above the belt, and when he had slept awhile, he recited to the gas-chandelier the poetry he had made out of the pictures; said that, on second thoughts, he would convert it into comic opera; deplored the Upas-tree influence of Gilbert and Sullivan; sang somewhat to illustrate his point; and—after words, by the way, with a negress in yellow satin—was steered to his rooms.

In the course of a few years, Graydon’s foresight and genius were rewarded. The public began to read and reason upon higher planes, and the Syndicate grew rich. Later still, people demanded of their printed matter what they expected in their clothing and furniture. So, precisely as the three guinea hand-bag is followed in three weeks by its thirteen and sevenpence ha’penny, indistinguishable sister, they enjoyed perfect synthetic substitutes for Plot, Sentiment, and Emotion. Graydon died before the Cinemacaption school came in, but he left his widow twenty-seven thousand pounds.

Manallace made a reputation, and, more important, money for Vidal’s mother when her husband ran away and the first symptoms of her paralysis showed. His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation.

As he once said when urged to ‘write a real book’: ‘I’ve got my label, and I’m not going to chew it off. If you save people thinking, you can do anything with ’em.’ His output apart, he was genuinely a man of letters. He rented a small cottage in the country and economised on everything, except the care and charges of Vidal’s mother.

Castorley flew higher. When his legacy freed him from ‘hackwork,’ he became first a critic—in which calling he loyally scalped all his old associates as they came up—and then looked for some speciality. Having found it (Chaucer was the prey), he consolidated his position before he occupied it, by his careful speech, his cultivated bearing, and the whispered words of his friends whom he, too, had saved the trouble of thinking. It followed that, when he published his first serious articles on Chaucer, all the world which is interested in Chaucer said: ‘This is an authority.’ But he was no impostor. He learned and knew his poet and his age; and in a month-long dogfight in an austere literary weekly, met and mangled a recognised Chaucer expert of the day. He also, ‘for old sake’s sake,’ as he wrote to a friend, went out of his way to review one of Manallace’s books with an intimacy of unclean deduction (this was before the days of Freud) which long stood as a record. Some member of the extinct Syndicate took occasion to ask him if he would—for old sake’s sake—help Vidal’s mother to a new treatment. He answered that he had ‘known the lady very slightly and the calls on his purse were so heavy that,’ etc. The writer showed the letter to Manallace, who said he was glad Castorley hadn’t interfered. Vidal’s mother was then wholly paralysed. Only her eyes could move, and those always looked for the husband who had left her. She died thus in Manallace’s arms in April of the first year of the War.

During the War he and Castorley worked as some sort of departmental dishwashers in the Office of Co-ordinated Supervisals. Here Manallace came to know Castorley again. Castorley, having a sweet tooth, cadged lumps of sugar for his tea from a typist, and when she took to giving them to a younger man, arranged that she should be reported for smoking in unauthorised apartments. Manallace possessed himself of every detail of the affair, as compensation for the review of his book. Then there came a night when, waiting for a big air-raid, the two men had talked humanly, and Manallace spoke of Vidal’s mother. Castorley said something in reply, and from that hour—as was learned several years later—Manallace’s real life-work and interests began.

page 2

The War over, Castorley set about to make himself Supreme Pontiff on Chaucer by methods not far removed from the employment of poison-gas. The English Pope was silent, through private griefs, and influenza had carried off the learned Hun who claimed continental allegiance. Thus Castorley crowed unchallenged from Upsala to Seville, while Manallace went back to his cottage with the photo of Vidal’s mother over the mantelpiece. She seemed to have emptied out his life, and left him only fleeting interests in trifles. His private diversions were experiments of uncertain outcome, which, he said, rested him after a day’s gadzooking and vitalstapping. I found him, for instance, one week-end, in his toolshed-scullery, boiling a brew of slimy barks which were, if mixed with oak-galls, vitriol and wine, to become an ink-powder. We boiled it till the Monday, and it turned into an adhesive stronger than birdlime, and entangled us both.

At other times, he would carry me off, once in a few weeks, to sit at Castorley’s feet, and hear him talk about Chaucer. Castorley’s voice, bad enough in youth, when it could be shouted down, had, with culture and tact, grown almost insupportable. His mannerisms, too, had multiplied and set. He minced and mouthed, postured and chewed his words throughout those terrible evenings; and poisoned not only Chaucer, but every shred of English literature which he used to embellish him. He was shameless, too, as regarded self-advertisement and ‘recognition’—weaving elaborate intrigues; forming petty friendships and confederacies, to be dissolved next week in favour of more promising alliances; fawning, snubbing, lecturing, organising and lying as unrestingly as a politician, in chase of the Knighthood due not to him (he always called on his Maker to forbid such a thought) but as tribute to Chaucer. Yet, sometimes, he could break from his obsession and prove how a man’s work will try to save the soul of him. He would tell us charmingly of copyists of the fifteenth century in England and the Low Countries, who had multiplied the Chaucer MSS., of which there remained—he gave us the exact number—and how each scribe could by him (and, he implied, by him alone) be distinguished from every other by some peculiarity of letter-formation, spacing or like trick of pen-work; and how he could fix the dates of their work within five years. Sometimes he would give us an hour of really interesting stuff and then return to his overdue ‘recognition.’ The changes sickened me, but Manallace defended him, as a master in his own line who had revealed Chaucer to at least one grateful soul.

This, as far as I remembered, was the autumn when Manallace holidayed in the Shetlands or the Faroes, and came back with a stone ‘quern’—a hand corn-grinder. He said it interested him from the ethnological standpoint. His whim lasted till next harvest, and was followed by a religious spasm which, naturally, translated itself into literature. He showed me a battered and mutilated Vulgate of 1485, patched up the back with bits of legal parchments, which he had bought for thirty-five shillings. Some monk’s attempt to rubricate chapter-initials had caught, it seemed, his forlorn fancy, and he dabbled in shells of gold and silver paint for weeks.

That also faded out, and he went to the Continent to get local colour for a love-story, about Alva and the Dutch, and the next year I saw practically nothing of him. This released me from seeing much of Castorley, but, at intervals, I would go there to dine with him, when his wife—an unappetising, ash-coloured woman—made no secret that his friends wearied her almost as much as he did. But at a later meeting, not long after Manallace had finished his Low Countries’ novel, I found Castorley charged to bursting-point with triumph and high information hardly withheld. He confided to me that a time was at hand when great matters would be made plain, and ‘recognition’ would be inevitable. I assumed, naturally, that there was fresh scandal or heresy afoot in Chaucer circles, and kept my curiosity within bounds.

In time, New York cabled that a fragment of a hitherto unknown Canterbury Tale lay safe in the steel-walled vaults of the seven-million-dollar Sunnapia Collection. It was news on an international scale—the New World exultant—the Old deploring the ‘burden of British taxation which drove such treasures, etc.,’ and the lighterminded journals disporting themselves according to their publics; for ‘our Dan,’ as one earnest Sunday editor observed, ‘lies closer to the national heart than we wot of.’ Common decency made me call on Castorley, who, to my surprise, had not yet descended into the arena. I found him, made young again by joy, deep in just-passed proofs.

Yes, he said, it was all true. He had, of course, been in it from the first. There had been found one hundred and seven new lines of Chaucer tacked on to an abridged end of The Persone’s Tale, the whole the work of Abraham Mentzius, better known as Mentzel of Antwerp (1388 – 1438/9)—I might remember he had talked about him—whose distinguishing peculiarities were a certain Byzantine formation of his g’s, the use of a ‘sickle-slanted’ reed-pen, which cut into the vellum at certain letters; and, above all, a tendency to spell English words on Dutch lines, whereof the manuscript carried one convincing proof. For instance (he wrote it out for me), a girl praying against an undesired marriage, says:—

‘Ah Jesu-Moder, pitie my oe peyne.
Daiespringe mishandeelt cometh nat agayne.’

Would I, please, note the spelling of ‘mishandeelt’? Stark Dutch and Mentzel’s besetting sin! But in his position one took nothing for granted. The page had been part of the stiffening of the side of an old Bible, bought in a parcel by Dredd, the big dealer, because it had some rubricated chapter-initials, and by Dredd shipped, with a consignment of similar odds and ends, to the Sunnapia Collection, where they were making a glass-cased exhibit of the whole history of illumination and did not care how many books they gutted for that purpose. There, someone who noticed a crack in the back of the volume had unearthed it. He went on: ‘They didn’t know what to make of the thing at first. But they knew about me! They kept quiet till I’d been consulted. You might have noticed I was out of England for three months.

‘ I was over there, of course. It was what is called a “spoil”—a page Mentzel had spoiled with his Dutch spelling—I expect he had had the English dictated to him—then had evidently used the vellum for trying out his reeds; and then, I suppose, had put it away. The “spoil” had been doubled, pasted together, and slipped in as stiffening to the old book-cover. I had it steamed open, and analysed the wash. It gave the flour-grains in the paste-coarse, because of the old millstone—and there were traces of the grit itself. What? Oh, possibly a handmill of Mentzel’s own time. He may have doubled the spoilt page and used it for part of a pad to steady wood-cuts on. It may have knocked about his workshop for years. That, indeed, is practically certain because a beginner from the Low Countries has tried his reed on a few lines of some monkish hymn—not a bad lilt tho’—which must have been common form. Oh yes, the page may have been used in other books before it was used for the Vulgate. That doesn’t matter, but this does. Listen! I took a wash, for analysis, from a blot in one corner—that would be after Mentzel had given up trying to make a possible page of it, and had grown careless—and I got the actual ink of the period! It’s a practically eternal stuff compounded on—I’ve forgotten his name for the minute—the scribe at Bury St. Edmunds, of course—hawthorn bark and wine. Anyhow, on his formula. That wouldn’t interest you either, but, taken with all the other testimony, it clinches the thing. (You’ll see it all in my Statement to the Press on Monday.) Overwhelming, isn’t it?’

‘Overwhelming,’ I said, with sincerity. ‘Tell me what the tale was about, though. That’s more in my line.’

page 3

‘I know it; but I have to be equipped on all sides. The verses are relatively easy for one to pronounce on. The freshness, the fun, the humanity, the fragrance of it all, cries—no, shouts—itself as Dan’s work. Why “Daiespringe mishandled” alone stamps it from Dan’s mint. Plangent as doom, my dear boy—plangent as doom! It’s all in my Statement. Well, substantially, the fragment deals with a girl whose parents wish her to marry an elderly suitor. The mother isn’t so keen on it, but the father, an old Knight, is. The girl, of course, is in love with a younger and a poorer man. Common form? Granted. Then the father, who doesn’t in the least want to, is ordered off to a Crusade and, by way of passing on the kick, as we used to say during the War, orders the girl to be kept in duresse till his return or her consent to the old suitor. Common form, again? Quite so. That’s too much for her mother. She reminds the old Knight of his age and infirmities, and the discomforts of Crusading. Are you sure I’m not boring you?’

‘Not at all,’ I said, though time had begun to whirl backward through my brain to a red-velvet, pomatum-scented side-room at Neminaka’s and Manallace’s set face intoning to the gas.

‘You’ll read it all in my Statement next week. The sum is that the old lady tells him of a certain Knight-adventurer on the French coast, who, for a consideration, waylays Knights who don’t relish crusading and holds them to impossible ransoms till the trooping-season is over, or they are returned sick. He keeps a ship in the Channel to pick ’em up and transfers his birds to his castle ashore, where he has a reputation for doing ’em well. As the old lady points out:

‘And if perchance thou fall into his honde
By God how canstow ride to Holilonde?’

‘You see? Modern in essence as Gilbert and Sullivan, but handled as only Dan could! And she reminds him that “Honour and olde bones” parted company long ago. He makes one splendid appeal for the spirit of chivalry:

Lat all men change as Fortune may send,
But Knighthood beareth service to the end,

and then, of course, he gives in

For what his woman willeth to be don
Her manne must or wauken Hell anon.

‘Then she hints that the daughter’s young lover, who is in the Bordeaux wine-trade, could open negotiations for a kidnapping without compromising him. And then that careless brute Mentzel spoils his page and chucks it! But there’s enough to show what’s going to happen. You’ll see it all in my Statement. Was there ever anything in literary finds to hold a candle to it? .. . And they give grocers Knighthoods for selling cheese!’

I went away before he could get into his stride on that course. I wanted to think, and to see Manallace. But I waited till Castorley’s Statement came out. He had left himself no loophole. And when, a little later, his (nominally the Sunnapia people’s) ‘scientific’ account of their analyses and tests appeared, criticism ceased, and some journals began to demand ‘public recognition.’ Manallace wrote me on this subject, and I went down to his cottage, where he at once asked me to sign a Memorial on Castorley’s behalf. With luck, he said, we might get him a K.B.E. in the next Honours List. Had I read the Statement?

‘I have,’ I replied. ‘But I want to ask you something first. Do you remember the night you got drunk at Neminaka’s, and I stayed behind to look after you?’

‘Oh, that time,’ said he, pondering. ‘Wait a minute! I remember Graydon advancing me two quid. He was a generous paymaster. And I remember—now, who the devil rolled me under the sofa—and what for?’

‘We all did,’ I replied. ‘You wanted to read us what you’d written to those Chaucer cuts.’

‘I don’t remember that. No! I don’t remember anything after the sofa-episode…. You always said that you took me home—didn’t you?’

‘I did, and you told Kentucky Kate outside the old Empire that you had been faithful, Cynara, in your fashion.’

‘Did I?’ said he. ‘My God! Well, I suppose I have.’ He stared into the fire. ‘What else?’

‘Before we left Neminaka’s you recited me what you had made out of the cuts—the whole tale! So—you see?’

‘Ye-es.’ He nodded. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘What are you?’

‘I’m going to help him get his Knighthood—first.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ll tell you what he said about ’Dal’s mother—the night there was that air-raid on the offices.’

He told it.

‘That’s why,’ he said. ‘Am I justified?’

He seemed to me entirely so.

‘But after he gets his Knighthood?’ I went on.

‘That depends. There are several things I can think of. It interests me.’

‘Good Heavens! I’ve always imagined you a man without interests.’

‘So I was. I owe my interests to Castorley. He gave me every one of ’em except the tale itself.’

‘How did that come?’

page 4

‘Something in those ghastly cuts touched off something in me—a sort of possession, I suppose. I was in love too. No wonder I got drunk that night. I’d been Chaucer for a week! Then I thought the notion might make a comic opera. But Gilbert and Sullivan were too strong.’

‘So I remember you told me at the time.’

‘I kept it by me, and it made me interested in Chaucer—philologically and so on. I worked on it on those lines for years. There wasn’t a flaw in the wording even in ’14. I hardly had to touch it after that.’

‘Did you ever tell it to anyone except me?’

‘No, only ’Dal’s mother—when she could listen to anything—to put her to sleep. But when Castorley said—what he did about her, I thought I might use it. ’Twasn’t difficult. He taught me. D’you remember my birdlime experiments, and the stuff on our hands? I’d been trying to get that ink for more than a year. Castorley told me where I’d find the formula. And your falling over the quern, too?’

‘That accounted for the stone-dust under the microscope?’

‘Yes. I grew the wheat in the garden here, and ground it myself. Castorley gave me Mentzel complete. He put me on to an MS. in the British Museum which he said was the finest sample of his work. I copied his “Byzantine g’s” for months.’

‘And what’s a “sickle-slanted” pen?’ I asked.

‘You nick one edge of your reed till it drags and scratches on the curves of the letters. Castorley told me about Mentzel’s spacing and margining. I only had to get the hang of his script.’

‘How long did that take you?’

‘On and off—some years. I was too ambitious at first—I wanted to give the whole poem. That would have been risky. Then Castorley told me about spoiled pages and I took the hint. I spelt “Dayspring mishandeelt” Mentzel’s way—to make sure of him. It’s not a bad couplet in itself. Did you see how he admires the “plangency” of it?’

‘Never mind him. Go on!’ I said.

He did. Castorley had been his unfailing guide throughout, specifying in minutest detail every trap to be set later for his own feet. The actual vellum was an Antwerp find, and its introduction into the cover of the Vulgate was begun after a long course of amateur bookbinding. At last, he bedded it under pieces of an old deed, and a printed page (1686) of Horace’s Odes, legitimately used for repairs by different owners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and at the last moment, to meet Castorley’s theory that spoiled pages were used in workshops by beginners, he had written a few Latin words in fifteenth century script the Statement gave the exact date—across an open part of the fragment. The thing ran: ‘Illa alma Mater ecca, secum afferens me acceptum. Nicolaus Atrib.’ The disposal of the thing was easiest of all. He had merely hung about Dredd’s dark bookshop of fifteen rooms, where he was well known, occasionally buying but generally browsing, till, one day, Dredd Senior showed him a case of cheap black-letter stuff, English and Continental—being packed for the Sunnapia people—into which Manallace tucked his contribution, taking care to wrench the back enough to give a lead to an earnest seeker.

‘And then?’ I demanded.

‘After six months or so Castorley sent for me. Sunnapia had found it, and as Dredd had missed it, and there was no money-motive sticking out, they were half convinced it was genuine from the start. But they invited him over. He conferred with their experts, and suggested the scientific tests. I put that into his head, before he sailed. That’s all. And now, will you sign our Memorial?’

I signed. Before we had finished hawking it round there was a host of influential names to help us, as well as the impetus of all the literary discussion which arose over every detail of the glorious trove. The upshot was a K.B.E. for Castorley in the next Honours List; and Lady Castorley, her cards duly printed, called on friends that same afternoon.

Manallace invited me to come with him, a day or so later, to convey our pleasure and satisfaction to them both. We were rewarded by the sight of a man relaxed and ungirt—not to say wallowing naked—on the crest of Success. He assured us that ‘The Title’ should not make any difference to our future relations, seeing it was in no sense personal, but, as he had often said, a tribute to Chaucer; ‘and, after all,’ he pointed out, with a glance at the mirror over the mantelpiece, ‘Chaucer was the prototype of the “veray parfit gentil Knight” of the British Empire so far as that then existed.’

On the way back, Manallace told me he was considering either an unheralded revelation in the baser Press which should bring Castorley’s reputation about his own ears some breakfast-time, or a private conversation, when he would make clear to Castorley that he must now back the forgery as long as he lived, under threat of Manallace’s betraying it if he flinched.

He favoured the second plan. ‘If I pull the string of the shower-bath in the papers,’ he said, ‘Castorley might go off his veray parfit gentil nut. I want to keep his intellect.’

‘What about your own position? The forgery doesn’t matter so much. But if you tell this you’ll kill him,’ I said.

‘I intend that. Oh—my position? I’ve been dead since—April, Fourteen, it was. But there’s no hurry. What was it she was saying to you just as we left?’

‘She told me how much your sympathy and understanding had meant to him. She said she thought that even Sir Alured did not realise the full extent of his obligations to you.’

‘She’s right, but I don’t like her putting it that way.’

‘It’s only common form—as Castorley’s always saying.’

‘Not with her. She can hear a man think.’

‘She never struck me in that light.’

‘You aren’t playing against her.’

‘’Guilty conscience, Manallace?’

page 5

‘H’m! I wonder. Mine or hers? I wish she hadn’t said that. “More even than he realises it.” I won’t call again for awhile.’

He kept away till we read that Sir Alured, owing to slight indisposition, had been unable to attend a dinner given in his honour.

Inquiries brought word that it was but natural reaction, after strain, which, for the moment, took the form of nervous dyspepsia, and he would be glad to see Manallace at any time. Manallace reported him as rather pulled and drawn, but full of his new life and position, and proud that his efforts should have martyred him so much. He was going to collect, collate, and expand all his pronouncements and inferences into one authoritative volume.

‘I must make an effort of my own,’ said Manallace. ‘I’ve collected nearly all his stuff about the Find that has appeared in the papers, and he’s promised me everything that’s missing. I’m going to help him. It will be a new interest.’

‘How will you treat it?’ I asked.

‘I expect I shall quote his deductions on the evidence, and parallel ’em with my experiments—the ink and the paste and the rest of it. It ought to be rather interesting.’

‘But even then there will only be your word. It’s hard to catch up with an established lie,’ I said. ‘Especially when you’ve started it yourself.’

He laughed. ‘I’ve arranged for that—in case anything happens to me. Do you remember the “Monkish Hymn”?’

‘Oh yes! There’s quite a literature about it already.’

‘Well, you write those ten words above each other, and read down the first and second letters of ’em; and see what you get. My Bank has the formula.’

              Illa
              alma
              Mater
              ecca
              secum
              afferens
              me
              acceptum
              Nicolaus
              Atrub.

He wrapped himself lovingly and leisurely round his new task, and Castorley was as good as his word in giving him help. The two practically collaborated, for Manallace suggested that all Castorley’s strictly scientific evidence should be in one place, with his deductions and dithyrambs as appendices. He assured him that the public would prefer this arrangement, and, after grave consideration, Castorley agreed.

‘That’s better,’ said Manallace to me. ‘Now I sha’n’t have so many hiatuses in my extracts. Dots always give the reader the idea you aren’t dealing fairly with your man. I shall merely quote him solid, and rip him up, proof for proof, and date for date, in parallel columns. His book’s taking more out of him than I like, though. He’s been doubled up twice with tummy attacks since I’ve worked with him. And he’s just the sort of flatulent beast who may go down with appendicitis.’

We learned before long that the attacks were due to gall-stones, which would necessitate an operation. Castorley bore the blow very well. He had full confidence in his surgeon, an old friend of theirs; great faith in his own constitution; a strong conviction that nothing would happen to him till the book was finished, and, above all, the Will to Live.

He dwelt on these assets with a voice at times a little out of pitch and eyes brighter than usual beside a slightly-sharpening nose.

I had only met Gleeag, the surgeon, once or twice at Castorley’s house, but had always heard him spoken of as a most capable man. He told Castorley that his trouble was the price exacted, in some shape or other, from all who had served their country; and that, measured in units of strain, Castorley had practically been at the front through those three years he had served in the Office of Co-ordinated Supervisals. However, the thing had been taken betimes, and in a few weeks he would worry no more about it.

‘But suppose he dies?’ I suggested to Manallace.

‘He won’t. I’ve been talking to Gleeag. He says he’s all right.’

‘Wouldn’t Gleeag’s talk be common form?’

‘I wish you hadn’t said that. But, surely, Gleeag wouldn’t have the face to play with me—or her.’

‘Why not? I expect it’s been done before.’ But Manallace insisted that, in this case, it would be impossible.

The operation was a success and, some weeks later, Castorley began to recast the arrangement and most of the material of his book. ‘Let me have my way,’ he said, when Manallace protested. ‘They are making too much of a baby of me. I really don’t need Gleeag looking in every day now.’ But Lady Castorley told us that he required careful watching. His heart had felt the strain, and fret or disappointment of any kind must be avoided. ‘Even,’ she turned to Manallace, ‘though you know ever so much better how his book should be arranged than he does himself.’

‘But really,’ Manallace began. ‘I’m very careful not to fuss——’

She shook her finger at him playfully. ‘You don’t think you do; but, remember, he tells me everything that you tell him, just the same as he told me everything that he used to tell you. Oh, I don’t mean the things that men talk about. I mean about his Chaucer.’

‘I didn’t realise that,’ said Manallace, weakly.

‘I thought you didn’t. He never spares me anything; but I don’t mind,’ she replied with a laugh, and went off to Gleeag, who was paying his daily visit. Gleeag said he had no objection to Manallace working with Castorley on the book for a given time—say, twice a week—but supported Lady Castorley’s demand that he should not be over-taxed in what she called ‘the sacred hours.’ The man grew more and more difficult to work with, and the little check he had heretofore set on his self-praise went altogether.

‘He says there has never been anything in the History of Letters to compare with it,’ Manallace groaned. ‘He wants now to inscribe—he never dedicates, you know—inscribe it to me, as his “most valued assistant.” The devil of it is that she backs him up in getting it out soon. Why? How much do you think she knows?’

‘Why should she know anything at all?’

‘You heard her say he had told her everything that he had told me about Chaucer? (I wish she hadn’t said that!) If she puts two and two together, she can’t help seeing that every one of his notions and theories has been played up to. But then—but then . . . Why is she trying to hurry publication? She talks about me fretting him. She’s at him, all the time, to be quick.’

Castorley must have over-worked, for, after a couple of months, he complained of a stitch in his right side, which Gleeag said was a slight sequel, a little incident of the operation. It threw him back awhile, but he returned to his work undefeated.

The book was due in the autumn. Summer was passing, and his publisher urgent, and—he said to me, when after a longish interval I called—Manallace had chosen this time, of all, to take a holiday. He was not pleased with Manallace, once his indefatigable aide, but now dilatory, and full of time-wasting objections. Lady Castorley had noticed it, too.

Meantime, with Lady Castorley’s help, he himself was doing the best he could to expedite the book; but Manallace had mislaid (did I think through jealousy?) some essential stuff which had been dictated to him. And Lady Castorley wrote Manallace, who had been delayed by a slight motor accident abroad, that the fret of waiting was prejudicial to her husband’s health. Manallace, on his return from the Continent, showed me that letter.

‘He has fretted a little, I believe,’ I said.

Manallace shuddered. ‘If I stay abroad, I’m helping to kill him. If I help him to hurry up the book, I’m expected to kill him. She knows,’ he said.

page 6

‘You’re mad. You’ve got this thing on the brain.’

‘I have not! Look here! You remember that Gleeag gave me from four to six, twice a week, to work with him. She called them the “sacred hours.” You heard her? Well, they are! They are Gleeag’s and hers. But she’s so infernally plain, and I’m such a fool, it took me weeks to find it out.’

‘That’s their affair,’ I answered. ‘It doesn’t prove she knows anything about the Chaucer.’

‘She does! He told her everything that he had told me when I was pumping him, all those years. She put two and two together when the thing came out. She saw exactly how I had set my traps. I know it! She’s been trying to make me admit it.’

‘What did you do?’

‘’Didn’t understand what she was driving at, of course. And then she asked Gleeag, before me, if he didn’t think the delay over the book was fretting Sir Alured. He didn’t think so. He said getting it out might deprive him of an interest. He had that much decency. She’s the devil!’

‘What do you suppose is her game, then?’

‘If Castorley knows he’s been had, it’ll kill him. She’s at me all the time, indirectly, to let it out. I’ve told you she wants to make it a sort of joke between us. Gleeag’s willing to wait. He knows Castorley’s a dead man. It slips out when they talk. They say “He was,” not “He is.” Both of ’em know it. But she wants him finished sooner.’

‘I don’t believe it. What are you going to do?’

‘What can I? I’m not going to have him killed, though.’

Manlike, he invented compromises whereby Castorley might be lured up by-paths of interest, to delay publication. This was not a success. As autumn advanced Castorley fretted more, and suffered from returns of his distressing colics. At last, Gleeag told him that he thought they might be due to an overlooked gallstone working down. A second comparatively trivial operation would eliminate the bother once and for all. If Castorley cared for another opinion, Gleeag named a surgeon of eminence. ‘And then,’ said he, cheerily, ‘the two of us can talk you over.’ Castorley did not want to be talked over. He was oppressed by pains in his side, which, at first, had yielded to the liver-tonics Gleeag prescribed; but now they stayed—like a toothache—behind everything. He felt most at ease in his bedroom-study, with his proofs round him. If he had more pain than he could stand, he would consider the second operation. Meantime Manallace—‘the meticulous Manallace,’ he called him—agreed with him in thinking that the Mentzel page-facsimile, done by the Sunnapia Library, was not quite good enough for the great book, and the Sunnapia people were, very decently, having it re-processed. This would hold things back till early spring, which had its advantages, for he could run a fresh eye over all in the interval.

One gathered these news in the course of stray visits as the days shortened. He insisted on Manallace keeping to the ‘sacred hours,’ and Manallace insisted on my accompanying him when possible. On these occasions he and Castorley would confer apart for half an hour or so, while I listened to an unendurable clock in the drawing-room. Then I would join them and help wear out the rest of the time, while Castorley rambled. His speech, now, was often clouded and uncertain—the result of the ‘liver-tonics’; and his face came to look like old vellum.

It was a few days after Christmas—the operation had been postponed till the following Friday—that we called together. She met us with word that Sir Alured had picked up an irritating little winter cough, due to a cold wave, but we were not, therefore, to abridge our visit. We found him in steam perfumed with Friar’s Balsam. He waved the old Sunnapia facsimile at us. We agreed that it ought to have been more worthy. He took a dose of his mixture, lay back and asked us to lock the door. There was, he whispered, something wrong somewhere. He could not lay his finger on it, but it was in the air. He felt he was being played with. He did not like it. There was something wrong all round him. Had we noticed it? Manallace and I severally and slowly denied that we had noticed anything of the sort.

With no longer break than a light fit of coughing, he fell into the hideous, helpless panic of the sick—those worse than captives who lie at the judgment and mercy of the hale for every office and hope. He wanted to go away. Would we help him to pack his Gladstone? Or, if that would attract too much attention in certain quarters, help him to dress and go out? There was an urgent matter to be set right, and now that he had The Title and knew his own mind it would all end happily and he would be well again. Please would we let him go out, just to speak to—he named her; he named her by her ‘little’ name out of the old Neminaka days? Manallace quite agreed, and recommended a pull at the ‘liver-tonic’ to brace him after so long in the house. He took it, and Manallace suggested that it would be better if, after his walk, he came down to the cottage for a week-end and brought the revise with him. They could then re-touch the last chapter. He answered to that drug and to some praise of his work, and presently simpered drowsily. Yes, it was good—though he said it who should not. He praised himself awhile till, with a puzzled forehead and shut eyes, he told us that she had been saying lately that it was too good—the whole thing, if we understood, was too good. He wished us to get the exact shade of her meaning. She had suggested, or rather implied, this doubt. She had said—he would let us draw our own inferences—that the Chaucer find had ‘anticipated the wants of humanity.’ Johnson, of course. No need to tell him that. But what the hell was her implication? Oh God! Life had always been one long innuendo! And she had said that a man could do anything with anyone if he saved him the trouble of thinking. What did she mean by that? He had never shirked thought. He had thought sustainedly all his life. It wasn’t too good, was it? Manallace didn’t think it was too good—did he? But this pick-pick-picking at a man’s brain and work was too bad, wasn’t it? What did she mean? Why did she always bring in Manallace, who was only a friend—no scholar, but a lover of the game—Eh?—Manallace could confirm this if he were here, instead of loafing on the Continent just when he was most needed.

‘I’ve come back,’ Manallace interrupted, unsteadily. ‘I can confirm every word you’ve said. You’ve nothing to worry about. It’s your find—your credit—your glory and—all the rest of it.’

‘Swear you’ll tell her so then,’ said Castorley. ‘She doesn’t believe a word I say. She told me she never has since before we were married. Promise!’

Manallace promised, and Castorley added that he had named him his literary executor, the proceeds of the book to go to his wife. ‘All profits without deduction,’ he gasped. ‘Big sales if it’s properly handled. You don’t need money . . . . Graydon’ll trust you to any extent. It ’ud be a long . . .’

He coughed, and, as he caught breath, his pain broke through all the drugs, and the outcry filled the room. Manallace rose to fetch Gleeag, when a full, high, affected voice, unheard for a generation, accompanied, as it seemed, the clamour of a beast in agony, saying: ‘I wish to God someone would stop that old swine howling down there! I can’t . . . I was going to tell you fellows that it would be a dam’ long time before Graydon advanced me two quid.’

We escaped together, and found Gleeag waiting, with Lady Castorley, on the landing. He telephoned me, next morning, that Castorley had died of bronchitis, which his weak state made it impossible for him to throw off. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ he added, in reply to the condolences I asked him to convey to the widow. ‘We might have come across something we couldn’t have coped with.’

Distance from that house made me bold.

‘You knew all along, I suppose? What was it, really?’

‘Malignant kidney-trouble—generalised at the end. ‘No use worrying him about it. We let him through as easily as possible. Yes! A happy release. . What? . . . Oh! Cremation. Friday, at eleven.’

There, then, Manallace and I met. He told me that she had asked him whether the book need now be published; and he had told her this was more than ever necessary, in her interests as well as Castorley’s.

‘She is going to be known as his widow—for a while, at any rate. Did I perjure myself much with him?’

‘Not explicitly,’ I answered.

‘Well, I have now—with her—explicitly,’ said he, and took out his black gloves. . . .

As, on the appointed words, the coffin crawled sideways through the noiselessly-closing doorflaps, I saw Lady Castorley’s eyes turn towards Gleeag.

page 1 of 5

‘SO the matter,’ the Regimental Chaplain concluded, ‘was correct; in every way correct. I am well pleased with Rutton Singh and Attar Singh. They have gathered the fruit of their lives.’He folded his arms and sat down on the verandah. The hot day had ended, and there was a pleasant smell of cooking along the regimental lines, where half-clad men went back and forth with leaf platters and water-goglets. The Subadar-Major, in extreme undress, sat on a chair, as befitted his rank; the Havildar-Major, his nephew, leaning respectfully against the wall. The Regiment was at home and at ease in its own quarters in its own district which takes its name from the great Muhammadan saint Mian Mir, revered by Jehangir and beloved by Guru Har Gobind, sixth of the great Sikh Gurus.

‘Quite correct,’ the Regimental Chaplain repeated.

No Sikh contradicts his Regimental Chaplain who expounds to him the Holy Book of the Grunth Sahib and who knows the lives and legends of all the Gurus.

The Subadar-Major bowed his grey head. The Havildar-Major coughed respectfully to attract attention and to ask leave to speak. Though he was the Subadar-Major’s nephew, and though his father held twice as much land as his uncle, he knew his place in the scheme of things. The Subadar-Major shifted one hand with an iron bracelet on the wrist.

‘Was there by any chance any woman at the back of it?’ the Havildar-Major murmured. ‘I was not here when the thing happened.’

‘Yes! Yes! Yes! We all know that thou wast in England eating and drinking with the Sahibs. We are all surprised that thou canst still speak Punjabi.’ The Subadar-Major’s carefully-tended beard bristled.

‘There was no woman,’ the Regimental Chaplain growled. ‘It was land. Hear, you! Rutton Singh and Attar Singh were the elder of four brothers. These four held land in—what was the village’s name?—oh, Pishapur, near Thori, in the Banalu Tehsil of Patiala State, where men can still recognise right behaviour when they see it. The two younger brothers tilled the land, while Rutton Singh and Attar Singh took service with the Regiment, according to the custom of the family.’

‘True, true,’ said the Havildar-Major. ‘There is the same arrangement in all good families.’

‘Then, listen again,’ the Regimental Chaplain went on. ‘Their kin on their mother’s side put great oppression and injustice upon the two younger brothers who stayed with the land in Patiala State. Their mother’s kin loosened beasts into the four brothers’ crops when the crops were green; they cut the corn by force when it was ripe; they broke down the water-courses; they defiled the wells; and they brought false charges in the law-courts against all four brothers. They did not spare even the cotton-seed, as the saying is.

‘Their mother’s kin trusted that the young men would thus be forced by weight of trouble, and further trouble and perpetual trouble, to quit their lands in Pishapur village in Banalu Tehsil in Patiala State. If the young men ran away, the land would come whole to their mother’s kin. I am not a regimental schoolmaster, but is it understood, child?’

‘Understood,’ said the Havildar-Major grimly. ‘Pishapur is not the only place where the fence eats the field instead of protecting it. But perhaps there was a woman among their mother’s kin?’

‘God knows!’ said the Regimental Chaplain. ‘Woman, or man, or law-courts, the young men would not be driven off the land which was their own by inheritance. They made appeal to Rutton Singh and Attar Singh, their brethren who had taken service with us in the Regiment, and so knew the world, to help them in their long war against their mother’s kin in Pishapur. For that reason, because their own land and the honour of their house was dear to them, Rutton Singh and Attar Singh needs must very often ask for leave to go to Patiala and attend to the lawsuits and cattle-poundings there.

‘It was not, look you, as though they went back to their own village and sat, garlanded with jasmine, in honour, upon chairs before the elders under the trees. They went back always to perpetual trouble, either of lawsuits, or theft, or strayed cattle; and they sat on thorns.’

‘I knew it,’ said the Subadar-Major. ‘Life was bitter for them both. But they were well-conducted men. It was not hard to get them their leave from the Colonel Sahib.’

‘They spoke to me also,’ said the Chaplain. “Let him who desires the four great gifts apply himself to the words of holy men.” That is written. Often they showed me the papers of the false lawsuits brought against them. Often they wept on account of the persecution put upon them by their mother’s kin. Men thought it was drugs when their eyes showed red.’

‘They wept in my presence too,’ said the Subadar-Major. ‘Well-conducted men of nine years’ service apiece. Rutton Singh was drill-Naik, too.’

‘They did all things correctly as Sikhs should,’ said the Regimental Chaplain. ‘When the persecution had endured seven years, Attar Singh took leave to Pishapur once again (that was the fourth time in that year only) and he called his persecutors together before the village elders, and he cast his turban at their feet and besought them by his mother’s blood to cease from their persecutions. For he told them earnestly that he had marched to the boundaries of his patience, and that there could be but one end to the matter.

‘They gave him abuse. They mocked him and his tears, which was the same as though they had mocked the Regiment. Then Attar Singh returned to the Regiment, and laid this last trouble before Rutton Singh, the eldest brother. But Rutton Singh could not get leave all at once.’

‘Because he was drill-Naik and the recruits were to be drilled. I myself told him so,’ said the Subadar-Major. ‘He was a well-conducted man. He said he could wait.’

‘But when permission was granted, those two took four days’ leave,’ the Chaplain went on.

page 2

‘I do not think Attar Singh should have taken Baynes Sahib’s revolver. He was Baynes Sahib’s orderly, and all that Sahib’s things were open to him. It was, therefore, as I count it, shame to Attar Singh,’ said the Subadar-Major.

‘All the words had been said. There was need of arms, and how could soldiers use Government rifles upon mere cultivators in the fields?’ the Regimental Chaplain replied. ‘Moreover, the revolver was sent back, together with a money-order for the cartridges expended. “Borrow not; but if thou borrowest, pay back soon!” That is written in the Hymns. Rutton Singh took a sword, and he and Attar Singh went to Pishapur and, after word given, the four brethren fell upon their persecutors in Pishapur village and slew seventeen, wounding ten. A revolver is better than a lawsuit. I say that these four brethren, the two with us, and the two mere cultivators, slew and wounded twenty-seven—all their mother’s kin, male and female.

‘Then the four mounted to their housetop, and Attar Singh, who was always one of the impetuous, said “My work is done,” and he made shinan (purification) in all men’s sight, and he lent Rutton Singh Baynes Sahib’s revolver, and Rutton Singh shot him in the head.

‘So Attar Singh abandoned his body, as an insect abandons a blade of grass. But Rutton Singh, having more work to do, went down from the housetop and sought an enemy whom he had forgotten—a Patiala man of this regiment who had sided with the persecutors. When he overtook the man, Rutton Singh hit him twice with bullets and once with the sword.’

‘But the man escaped and is now in the hospital here,’ said the Subadar-Major. ‘The doctor says he will live in spite of all.’

‘Not Rutton Singh’s fault. Rutton Singh left him for dead. Then Rutton Singh returned to the housetop, and the three brothers together, Attar Singh being dead, sent word by a lad to the police station for an army to be dispatched against them that they might die with honours. But none came. And yet Patiala State is not under English law and they should know virtue there when they see it!

‘So, on the third day, Rutton Singh also made shinan, and the youngest of the brethren shot him also in the head, and he abandoned his body.

‘Thus was all correct. There was neither heat, nor haste, nor abuse in the matter from end to end. There remained alive not one man or woman of their mother’s kin which had oppressed them. Of the other villagers of Pishapur, who had taken no part in the persecutions, not one was slain. Indeed, the villagers sent them food on the housetop for those three days while they waited for the police who would not dispatch that army.

‘Listen again! I know that Attar Singh and Rutton Singh omitted no ceremony of the purifications, and when all was done Baynes Sahib’s revolver was thrown down from the housetop, together with three rupees twelve annas; and order was given for its return by post.’

‘And what befell the two younger brethren who were not in the services’ the Havildar-Major asked.

‘Doubtless they too are dead, but since they were not in the Regiment their honour concerns themselves only. So far as we were touched, see how correctlv we came out of the matter! I think the King should be told; for where could you match such a tale except among us Sikhs? Sri wah guru ji ki Khalsa! Sri wah guru ji ki futteh!’ said the Regimental Chaplain.

‘Would three rupees twelve annas pay for the used cartridges?’ said the Havildar-Major.

‘Attar Singh knew the just price. All Baynes Sahib’s gear was in his charge. They expended one tin box of fifty cartouches, lacking two which were returned. As I said—as I say—the arrangement was made not with heat nor blasphemies as a Mussulman would have made it; not with cries nor caperings as an idolater would have made it; but conformably to the ritual and doctrine of the Sikhs. Hear you! “Though hundreds of amusements are offered to a child it cannot live without milk. If a man be divorced from his soul and his soul’s desire he certainly will not stop to play upon the road, but he will make haste with his pilgrimage.” That is written. I rejoice in my disciples.’

‘True! True! Correct! Correct!’ said the Subadar-Major. There was a long, easy silence. One heard a water-wheel creaking somewhere and the nearer sound of meal being ground in a quern.

‘But he—’ the Chaplain pointed a scornful chin at the Havildar-Major.—‘he has been so long in England that——’

‘Let the lad alone,’ said his uncle. ‘He was but two months there, and he was chosen for good cause.’

Theoretically, all Sikhs are equal. Practically, there are differences, as none know better than well-born, land-owning folk, or long-descended chaplains from Amritsar.

‘Hast thou heard anything in England to match my tale? ‘the Chaplain sneered.

‘I saw more than I could understand, so I have locked up my stories in my own mouth,’ the Havildar-Major replied meekly.

‘Stories? What stories? I know all the stories about England,’ said the Chaplain. ‘I know that terains run underneath their bazaars there, and as for their streets stinking with mota-kahars, only this morning I was nearly killed by Duggan Sahib’s mota-kahar. That young man is a devil.”

‘I expect Grunthi-jee,’ said the Subadar-Major, ‘you and I grow too old to care for the Kahar-ki-nautch—the Bearer’s dance.’ He named one of the sauciest of the old-time nautches, and smiled at his own pun. Then he turned to his nephew. ‘When I was a lad and came back to my village on leave, I waited the convenient hour, and, the elders giving permission, I spoke of what I had seen elsewhere.’

‘Ay, my father,’ said the Havildar-Major, softly and affectionately. He sat himself down with respect, as behoved a mere lad of thirty with a bare half-dozen campaigns to his credit.

page 3

‘There were four men in this affair also,’ he began, ’and it was an affair that touched the honour, not of one regiment, nor two, but of all the Army in Hind. Some part of it I saw; some I heard; but all the tale is true. My father’s brother knows, and my priest knows, that I was in England on business with my Colonel, when the King—the Great Queen’s son—completed his life.

‘First, there was a rumour that sickness was upon him. Next, we knew that he lay sick in the Palace. A very great multitude stood outside the Palace by night and by day, in the rain as well as the sun, waiting for news.

‘Then came out one with a written paper, and set it upon a gate-side—the word of the King’s death—and they read, and groaned. This I saw with my own eyes, because the office where my Colonel Sahib went daily to talk with Colonel Forsyth Sahib was at the east end of the very gardens where the Palace stood. They are larger gardens than Shalimar here’—he pointed with his chin up the lines—‘or Shahdera across the river.

‘Next day there was a darkness in the streets, because all the city’s multitude were clad in black garments, and they spoke as a man speaks in the presence of his dead—all those multitudes. In the eyes, in the air, and in the heart, there was blackness. I saw it. But that is not my tale.

‘After ceremonies had been accomplished, and word had gone out to the Kings of the Earth that they should come and mourn, the new King—the dead King’s son—gave commandment that his father’s body should be laid, coffined, in a certain Temple which is near the river. There are no idols in that Temple; neither any carvings, nor paintings, nor gildings. It is all grey stone, of one colour as though it were cut out of the live rock. It is larger than—yes, than the Durbar Sahib at Amritsar, even though the Akal Bunga and the Baba-Atal were added. How old it may be God knows. It is the Sahibs’ most sacred Temple.

‘In that place, by the new King’s commandment, they made, as it were, a shrine for a saint, with lighted candles at the head and the feet of the Dead, and duly appointed watchers for every hour of the day and the night, until the dead King should be taken to the place of his fathers, which is at Wanidza.

‘When all was in order, the new King said, “Give entrance to all people,” and the doors were opened, and O my uncle! O my teacher! all the world entered, walking through that Temple to take farewell of the Dead. There was neither distinction, nor price, nor ranking in the host, except an order that they should walk by fours.

‘As they gathered in the streets without—very, very far off—so they entered the Temple, walking by fours: the child, the old man; mother, virgin, harlot, trader, priest; of all colours and faiths and customs under the firmament of God, from dawn till late at night. I saw it. My Colonel gave me leave to go. I stood in the line, many hours, one koss, two koss, distant from the temple.’

‘Then why did the multitude not sit down under the trees?’ asked the priest.

‘Because we were still between houses. The city is many koss wide,’ the Havildar-Major resumed. ‘I submitted myself to that slow-moving river and thus—thus—a pace at a time—I made pilgrimage. There were in my rank a woman, a cripple, and a lascar from the ships.

‘When we entered the Temple, the coffin itself was as a shoal in the Ravi River, splitting the stream into two branches, one on either side of the Dead; and the watchers of the Dead, who were soldiers, stood about It, moving no more than the still flame of the candles. Their heads were bowed; their hands were clasped; their eyes were cast upon the ground—thus. They were not men, but images, and the multitude went past them in fours by day, and, except for a little while, by night also.

‘No, there was no order that the people should come to pay respect. It was a free-will pilgrimage. Eight kings had been commanded to come—who obeyed—but upon his own Sahibs the new King laid no commandment. Of themselves they came.

‘I made pilgrimage twice: once for my Salt’s sake, and once again for wonder and terror and worship. But my mouth cannot declare one thing of a hundred thousand things in this matter. There were lakhs of lakhs, crores of crores of people. I saw them.’

‘More than at our great pilgrimages?’ the Regimental Chaplain demanded.

‘Yes. Those are only cities and districts coming out to pray. This was the world walking in grief. And now, hear you! It is the King’s custom that four swords of Our Armies in Hind should stand always before the Presence in case of need.’

‘The King’s custom, our right,’ said the Subadar-Major curtly.

‘Also our right. These honoured ones are changed after certain months or years, that the honour may be fairly spread. Now it chanced that when the old King—the Queen’s son—completed his days, the four that stood in the Presence were Goorkhas. Neither Sikhs alas, nor Pathans, IZajputs, nor Jats. Goorkhas, my father.’

‘Idolaters,’ said the Chaplain.

‘But soldiers; for I remember in the Tirah’ the Havildar-Major began.

‘But soldiers, for I remember fifteen campaigns. Go on,’ said the Subadar-Major.

‘And it was their honour and right to furnish one who should stand in the Presence by day and by night till It went out to burial. There were no more than four all told—four old men to furnish that guard.’

‘Old? Old? What talk is this of old men?’ said the Subadar-Major.

‘Nay. My fault! Your pardon!’ The Havildar-Major spread a deprecating hand. ‘They were strong, hot, valiant men, and the youngest was a lad of forty-five.’

‘That is better,’ the Subadar-Major laughed.

page 4

‘But for all their strength and heat they could not eat strange food from the Sahibs’ hands. There was no cooking place in the Temple; but a certain Colonel Forsyth Sahib, who had understanding, made arrangement whereby they should receive at least a little caste-clean parched grain; also cold rice maybe, and water which was pure. Yet, at best, this was no more than a hen’s mouthful, snatched as each came off his guard. They lived on grain and were thankful, as the saying is.

‘One hour’s guard in every four was each man’s burden, for, as I have shown, they were but four all told; and the honour of Our Armies in Hind was on their heads. The Sahibs could draw upon all the armies in England for the other watchers—thousands upon thousands of fresh men—if they needed; but these four were but four.

‘The Sahibs drew upon the Granadeers for the other watchers. Granadeers be very tall men under very tall bearskins, such as Fusilier regiments wear in cold weather. Thus, when a Granadeer bowed his head but a very little over his stock, the bearskin sloped and showed as though he grieved exceedingly. Now the Goorkhas wear flat, green caps——’

‘I see, I see,’ said the Subadar-Major impatiently.

‘They are bull-necked, too; and their stocks are hard, and when they bend deeply—deeply—to match the Granadeers—they come nigh to choking themselves. That was a handicap against them, when it came to the observance of ritual.

‘Yet even with their tall, grief-declaring bearskins, the Granadeers could not endure the full hour’s guard in the Presence. There was good cause, as I will show, why no man could endure that terrible hour. So for them the hour’s guard was cut to one-half. What did it matter to the Sahibs? They could draw on ten thousand Granadeers. Forsyth Sahib, who had comprehension, put this choice also before the four, and they said, “No, ours is the Honour of the Armies of Hind. Whatever the Sahibs do, we will suffer the full hour.”

‘Forsyth Sahib, seeing that they were—knowing that they could neither sleep long nor eat much, said, “Is it great suffering?” They said, “It is great honour. We will endure.”

‘Forsyth Sahib, who loves us, said then to the eldest, “Ho, father, tell me truly what manner of burden it is; for the full hour’s watch breaks up our men like water.”

‘The eldest answered, “Sahib, the burden is the feet of the multitude that pass us on either side. Our eyes being lowered and fixed, we see those feet only from the knee down—a river of feet, Sahib, that never—never—never stops. It is not the standing without any motion; it is not hunger; nor is it the dead part before the dawn when maybe a single one comes here to weep. It is the burden of the unendurable procession of feet from the knee down, that never—never—never stops!”

‘Forsyth Sahib said, “By God, I had not considered that! Now I know why our men come trembling and twitching off that guard. But at least, my father, ease the stock a little beneath the bent chin for that one hour.”

‘The eldest said, “We are in the Presence. Moreover He knew every button and braid and hook of every uniform in all His armies.”

‘Then Forsyth Sahib said no more, except to speak about their parched grain, but indeed they could not eat much after their hour, nor could they sleep much because of eye-twitchings and the renewed procession of the feet before the eyes. Yet they endured each his full hour—not half an hour—his one full hour in each four hours.’

‘Correct! correct!’ said the Subadar-Major and the Chaplain together. ‘We come well out of this affair.’

‘But seeing that they were old men,’ said the Subadar-Major reflectively, ‘very old men, worn out by lack of food and sleep, could not arrangements have been made, or influence have been secured, or a petition presented, whereby a well-born Sikh might have eased them of some portion of their great burden, even though his substantive rank——’

‘Then they would most certainly have slain me,’ said the ftavildar-Major with a smile.

‘And they would have done correctly,’ said the Chaplain. ‘What befell the honourable ones later?’

‘This. The Kings of the earth and all the Armies sent flowers and such-like to the dead King’s palace at Wanidza, where the funeral offerings were accepted. There was no order given, but all the world made oblation. So the four took counsel—three at a time—and either they asked Forsyth Sahib to choose flowers, or themselves they went forth and bought flowers—I do not know; but, however it was arranged, the flowers were bought and made in the shape of a great drum-like circle weighing half a maund.

‘Forsyth Sahib had said, “Let the flowers be sent to Wanidza with the other flowers which all the world is sending.” But they said among themselves, “It is not fit that these flowers, which are the offerings of His Armies in Hind, should come to the Palace of the Presence by the hands of hirelings or messengers, or of any man not in His service.”

‘Hearing this, Forsyth Sahib, though he was much occupied with office-work, said, “Give me the flowers, and I will steal a time and myself take them to Wanidza.”

The eldest said, “Since when has Forsyth Sahib worn sword?”

‘Forsyth Sahib said, “But always. And I wear it in the Presence when I put on uniform. I am a Colonel in the Armies of Hind.” The eldest said, “Of what regiment? “And Forsyth Sahib looked on the carpet and pulled the hair of his lip. He saw the trap.’

‘Forsyth Sahib’s regiment was once the old Forty-sixth Pathans which was called——’ the Subadar-Major gave the almost forgotten title, adding that he had met them in such and such campaigns, when Forsyth Sahib was a young captain.

The Havildar-Major took up the tale, saying, ‘The eldest knew that also, my father. He laughed, and presently Forsyth Sahib laughed.

‘“It is true,” said Forsyth Sahib. “I have no regiment. For twenty years I have been a clerk tied to a thick pen. Therefore I am the more fit to be your orderly and messenger in this business.”

page 5

‘The eldest then said, “If it were a matter of my life or the honour of any of my household, it would be easy.” And Forsyth Sahib joined his hands together, half laughing, though he was ready to weep, and he said, “Enough! I ask pardon. Which one of you goes with the offering?”

‘The eldest said, feigning not to have heard, “Nor must they be delivered by a single sword—as though we were pressed for men in His service,” and they saluted and went out.’

‘Were these things seen, or were they told thee?’ said the Subadar-Major.

‘I both saw and heard in the office full of books and papers where my Colonel Sahib consulted Forsyth Sahib upon the business that had brought my Colonel Sahib to England.’

‘And what was that business?’ the Regimental Chaplain asked of a sudden, looking full at the Havildar-Major, who returned the look without a quiver.

‘That was not revealed to me,’ said the Havildar-Major.

‘I heard it might have been some matter touching the integrity of certain regiments,’ the Chaplain insisted.

‘The matter was not in any way open to my ears,’ said the Havildar-Major.

‘Humph!’ The Chaplain drew his hard road-worn feet under his robe. ‘Let us hear the tale that it is permitted thee to tell,’ he said, and the Havildar-Major went on

‘So then the three, having returned to the Temple, called the fourth, who had only forty-five years, when he came off guard, and said, “We go to the Palace at Wanidza with the offerings. Remain thou in the Presence, and take all our guards, one after the other, till we return.”

‘Within that next hour they hired a large and strong mota-kahar for the journey from the Temple to Wanidza, which is twenty koss or more, and they promised expedition. But he who took their guards said, “It is not seemly that we should for any cause appear to be in haste. There are eighteen medals with eleven clasps and three Orders to consider. Go at leisure. I can endure.”

‘So the three with the offerings were absent three hours and a half, and having delivered the offering at Wanidza in the correct manner they returned and found the lad on guard, and they did not break his guard till his full hour was ended. So he endured four hours in the Presence, not stirring one hair, his eyes abased, and the river of feet, from the knee down, passing continually before his eyes. When he was relieved, it was seen that his eyeballs worked like weavers’ shuttles.

‘And so it was done—not in hot blood, not for a little while, nor yet with the smell of slaughter and the noise of shouting to sustain, but in silence, for a very long time, rooted to one place before the Presence among the most terrible feet of the multitude.’

‘Correct!’ the Chaplain chuckled.

‘But the Goorkhas had the honour,’ said the Subadar-Major sadly.

‘Theirs was the Honour of His Armies in Hind, and that was Our Honour,’ the nephew replied.

‘Yet I would one Sikh had been concerned in it—even one low-caste Sikh. And after?’

‘They endured the burden until the end—until It went out of the Temple to be laid among the older kings at Wanidza. When all was accomplished and It was withdrawn under the earth, Forsyth Sahib said to the four, “The King gives command that you be fed here on meat cooked by your own cooks. Eat and take ease, my fathers.”

‘So they loosed their belts and ate. They had not eaten food except by snatches for some long time; and when the meat had given them strength they slept for very many hours; and it was told me that the procession of the unendurable feet ceased to pass before their eyes any more.’

He threw out one hand palm upward to show that the tale was ended.

‘We came well and cleanly out of it,’ said the Subadar-Major.

‘Correct! Correct! Correct!’ said the Regimental Chaplain. ‘In an evil age it is good to hear such things, and there is certainly no doubt that this is a very evil age.’

[a short tale]

THIS was how it happened; and the truth is also an allegory of Empire.

‘I met him at the corner of my garden, an empty basket on his head, and an unclean cloth round his loins. That was all the property to which Naboth had the shadow of a claim when I first saw him. He opened our acquaintance by begging. He was very thin and showed nearly as many ribs as his basket; and he told me a long story about fever and a lawsuit, and an iron cauldron that had been seized by the court in execution of a decree. I put my hand into my pocket to help Naboth, as kings of the East have helped alien adventurers to the loss of their kingdoms. A rupee had hidden in my waistcoat lining. I never knew it was there, and gave the trove to Naboth as a direct gift from Heaven. He replied that I was the only legitimate Protector of the Poor he had ever known.

Next morning he reappeared, a little fatter in the round, and curled himself into knots in the front verandah. He said I was his father and his mother, and the direct descendant of all the gods in his Pantheon, besides controlling the destinies of the universe. He himself was but a sweetmeat-seller, and much less important than the dirt under my feet. I had heard this sort of thing before, so I asked him what he wanted. My rupee, quoth Naboth, had raised him to the everlasting heavens, and he wished to prefer a request. He wished to establish a sweetmeat-pitch near the house of his benefactor, to gaze on my revered countenance as I went to and fro illumining the world. I was graciously pleased to give permission, and he went away with his head between his knees.

Now at the far end of my garden the ground slopes toward the public road, and the slope is crowned with a thick shrubbery. There is a short carriage-road from the house to the Mall, which passes close to the shrubbery. Next afternoon I saw that Naboth had seated himself at the bottom of the slope, down in the dust of the public road, and in the full glare of the sun, with a starved basket of greasy sweets in front of him. He had gone into trade once more on the strength of my munificent donation, and the ground was as Paradise by my honoured favour. Remember, there was only Naboth, his basket, the sunshine, and the gray dust when the sap of my Empire first began.

Next day he had moved himself up the slope nearer to my shrubbery, and waved a palm-leaf fan to keep the flies off the sweets. So I judged that he must have done a fair trade.

Four days later I noticed that he had backed himself and his basket under the shadow of the shrubbery, and had tied an Isabella-coloured rag between two branches in order to make more shade. There were plenty of sweets in his basket. I thought that trade must certainly be looking up.

Seven weeks later the Government took up a plot of ground for a Chief Court close to the end of my compound, and employed nearly four hundred coolies on the foundations. Naboth bought a blue and white striped blanket, a brass lamp-stand, and a small boy, to cope with the rush of trade, which was tremendous.

Five days later he bought a huge, fat, red-backed account-book, and a glass ink-stand. Thus I saw that the coolies had been getting into his debt, and that commerce was increasing on legitimate lines of credit. Also I saw that the one basket had grown into three, and that Naboth had backed and hacked into the shrubbery, and made himself a nice little clearing for the proper display of the basket, the blanket, the books, and the boy.

One week and five days later he had built a mud fire-place in the clearing, and the fat account-book was overflowing. He said that God created few Englishmen of my kind, and that I was the incarnation of all human virtues. He offered me some of his sweets as tribute, and by accepting these I acknowledged him as my feudatory under the skirt of my protection.

Three weeks later I noticed that the boy was in the habit of cooking Naboth’s mid-day meal for him, and Naboth was beginning to grow a stomach. He had hacked away more of my shrubbery, and owned another and a fatter account-book.

Eleven weeks later Naboth had eaten his way nearly through that shrubbery, and there was a reed hut with a bedstead outside it, standing in the little glade that he had eroded. Two dogs and a baby slept on the bedstead. So I fancied Naboth had taken a wife. He said that he had, by my favour, done this thing, and that I was several times finer than Krishna.

Six weeks and two days later a mud wall had grown up at the back of the hut. There were fowls in front and it smelt a little. The Municipal Secretary said that a cess-pool was forming in the public road from the drainage of my compound, and that I must take steps to clear it away. I spoke to Naboth. He said I was Lord Paramount of his earthly concerns, and the garden was all my own property, and sent me some more sweets in a second-hand duster.

Two months later a coolie bricklayer was killed in a scuffle that took place opposite Naboth’s Vineyard. The Inspector of Police said it was a serious case; went into my servants’ quarters; insulted my butler’s wife, and wanted to arrest my butler. The curious thing about the murder was that most of the coolies were drunk at the time. Naboth pointed out that my name was a strong shield between him and his enemies, and he expected that another baby would be born to him shortly.

Four months later the hut was all mud walls, very solidly built, and Naboth had used most of my shrubbery for his five goats. A silver watch and an aluminium chain shone upon his very round stomach. My servants were alarmingly drunk several times, and used to waste the day with Naboth when they got the chance. I spoke to Naboth. He said, by my favour and the glory of my countenance, he would make all his women- folk ladies, and that if any one hinted that he was running an illicit still under the shadow of the tamarisks, why, I, his Suzerain, was to prosecute.

A week later he hired a man to make several dozen square yards of trellis-work to put round the back of his hut, that his women-folk might be screened from the public gaze. The man went away in the evening, and left his day’s work to pave the short cut from the public road to my house. I was driving home in the dusk, and turned the corner by Naboth’s Vineyard quickly. The next thing I knew was that the horses of the phaeton were stamping and plunging in the strongest sort of bamboo net-work. Both beasts came down. One rose with nothing more than chipped knees. The other was so badly kicked that I was forced to shoot him.

Naboth is gone now, and his hut is ploughed into its native mud with sweetmeats instead of salt for a sign that the place is accursed. I have built a summer-house to overlook the end of the garden, and it is as a fort on my frontier whence I guard my Empire.

I know exactly how Ahab felt. He has been shamefully misrepresented in the Scriptures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cast him into jail,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Whence comest thou?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And who was thy father?”

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

“And thy father”s name?” said I.

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

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

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

“May I see that God?”

“In a little while—at twilight time.”

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

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

“Even so. And what was thy mother?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And why?”

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

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

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

“Which thou hast stolen.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The State groaned unanimously.

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

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

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

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

I know that breed.

[a short tale]

IT makes me blush pink all over to think about it, but, none the less, I have brought the tale to you, confident that you will understand. An invitation to tea arrived at my address. The English are very peculiar people about their tea. They don’t seem to understand that it is a function at which any one who is passing down the Mall may present himself. They issue formal cards—just as if tea-drinking were like dancing. My invitation said that I was to tea from 4:30 till 6 p.m., and there was never a word of lawn-tennis on the whole of the card. I knew the English were heavy eaters, but this amazed me. “What in the wide world,” thought I, “will they find to do for an hour and a half? Perhaps they’ll play games, as it’s near Christmas time. They can’t sit out in the verandah, and chabutras are impossible,”

Wherefore I went to this house prepared for anything. There was a fine show of damp wraps in the hall, and a cheerful babble of voices from the other side of the drawing-room door. The hostess ran at me, vehemently shouting: “Oh, I am so glad you have come. We were all talking about you.” As the room was entirely filled with strangers, chiefly female, I reflected that they couldn’t have said anything very bad. Then I was introduced to everybody, and some of the people were talking in couples, and didn’t want to be interrupted in the least, and some were behind settees, and some were in difficulty with their tea-cups, and one and all had exactly the same name. That is the worst of a lisping hostess.

Almost before I had dropped the last limp hand, a burly rufiian, with a beard, rumbled in my ear: “I trust you were satisfied with my estimate of your powers in last week’s Concertina?”

Now I don’t see the Concertina because it’s too expensive, but I murmured: “Immense! immense! Most gratifying. Totally undeserved.” And the ruffian said: “In a measure, yes. Not wholly. I flatter myself that——”

“Oh, not in the least,” said I. “No sugar, thanks.” This to the hostess, who was waving Sally Lunns under my nose. A female, who could not have been less than seven feet high, came on, half speed ahead, through the fog of the tea-steam, and docked herself on the sofa just like an Inman liner.

“Have you ever considered,” said she, “the enormous moral responsibility that rests in the hands of one who has the gift of literary expression? In my own case—but you surely know my collaborator.”

A much huger woman arrived, cast anchor, and docked herself on the other side of the sofa. She was the collaborator. Together they confided to me that they were desperately in earnest about the amelioration of something or other. Their collective grievance against me was that I was not in earnest.

“We have studied your works—all,” said the five-thousand-ton four-master, “and we cannot believe that you are in earnest,” “Oh, no,” I said hastily, “I never was.” Then I saw that that was the wrong thing to say, for the eight-thousand-ton palace Cunarder signalled to the sister ship, saying; “You see, my estimate was correct.”

“Now, my complaint against him is that he is too savagely farouche” said a weedy young gentleman with tow hair, who ate Sally Lunns like a workhouse orphan. “Faroucherie in his age is a fatal mistake.”

I reflected a moment on the possibility of getting that young gentleman out into a large and dusty maidan and gently chukkering him before chota hazri. He looked too sleek to me as he then stood. But I said nothing, because a tiny-tiny woman with beady-black eyes shrilled: “I disagree with you entirely. He is too much bound by the tradition of the commonplace. I have seen in his later work signs that he is afraid of his public. You must never be afraid of your public.”

Then they began to discuss me as though I were dead and buried under the hearth-rug, and they talked of “tones” and “notes” and lights” and “shades” and tendencies.

“And which of us do you think is correct in her estimate of your character?” said the tiny-tiny woman when they had made me out (a) a giddy Lothario; (b) a savage; (c) a pre-Rafaelite angel; (d) co-equal and co-eternal with half a dozen gentlemen whose names I had never heard; (e) flippant; (f ) penetrated with pathos; (g) an open atheist; (h) a young man of the Roman Catholic faith with a mission in life.

I smiled idiotically, and said I really didn’t know.

Then a man entered whom I knew, and I fled to him for comfort. “Have I missed the fun?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

I explained, snorting, what had befallen.

“Ay,” said he quietly, “you didn’t go the right way to work. You should have stood on the hearth-rug and fired off epigrams. That’s what I did after I had written Down in the Doldrums, and was fed with crumpets in consequence.”

A woman plumped down by my side and twisted her hands into knots, and hung her eyes over her cheek-bones. I thought it was too many muffins, till she said: “Tell me, oh, tell me, was such-and-such in such a one of your books—was he real? Was he quite real? Oh, how lovely! How sweet! How precious!” She alluded to that drunken ruffian Mulvaney, who would have driven her into fits had he ever set foot on her doorstep in the flesh. I caught the half of a wink in my friend’s eye as he removed himself and left me alone to tell fibs about the evolution of Private Mulvaney. I said anything that came uppermost, and my answers grew so wild that the woman departed.

Then I heard the hostess whispering to a girl, a nice, round, healthy English maiden. “Go and talk to him,” she said. “Talk to him about his books.”

I gritted my teeth, and waited till the maiden was close at hand and about to begin. There was a lovely young man at the end of the room sucking a stick, and I felt sure that the maiden would much have preferred talking to him. She smiled prefatorily.

“It’s hot here,” I said; “let’s go over to the window”; and I plumped down on a three-seated settee, with my back to the young man, leaving only one place for the maiden. I was right. I signalled up the man who had written Down in the Doldrums, and talked to him as fast as I knew how. When he had to go, and the young man with him, the maiden became enthusiastic, not to say gushing. But I knew that those compliments were for value received. Then she explained that she was going out to India to stay with her married aunt, wherefore she became as a sister unto me on the spot. Her mamma did not seem to know much about Indian outfits, and I waxed eloquent on the subject.

“It’s all nonsense,” I said, “to fill your boxes with things that can be made just as well in the country. What you want are walking-dresses and dinner-dresses as good as ever you can get, and gloves tinned up, and odds and ends of things generally. All the rest, unless you’re extravagant, the dharzee can make in the verandah. Take underclothing, for instance.” I was conscious that my loud and cheerful voice was ploughing through one of those ghostly silences that sometimes fall upon a company. The English only wear their outsides in company. They have nothing to do with underclothing. I could feel that without being told. So the silence cut short the one matter in which I could really have been of use.

On the pavement my friend who wrote Down in the Doldrums was waiting to walk home with me. “What in the world does it all mean?” I said. “Nothing,” said he. “You’ve been asked there as a small deputy lion to roar in place of a much bigger man. You growled, though.”

“I should have done much worse if I’d known,” I grunted. “Ah,” said he, “you haven’t arrived at the real fun of the show. Wait till they’ve made you jump through hoops and your turn’s over, and you can sit on a sofa and watch the new men being brought up and put through their paces. You’ve nothing like that in India. How do you manage your parties?”

And I thought of smooth-cut lawns in the gloaming, and tables spread under mighty trees, and men and women, all intimately acquainted with each other, strolling about in the lightest of raiment, and the old dowagers criticising the badminton, and the young men in riding-boots making rude remarks about the claret cup, and the host circulating through the mob and saying: “Hah, Piggy,” or Bobby or Flatnose, as the nickname might be, “have another peg,” and the hostess soothing the bashful youngsters and talking khitmatgars with the Judge’s wife, and the last new bride hanging on her husband’s arm and saying: “Isn’t it almost time to go home, Dicky, dear?” and the little fat owls chuckling in the bougainvilleas and the horses stamping and squealing in the carriage-drive, and everybody saying the most awful things about everybody else, but prepared to do anything for anybody else just the same, and I gulped a great gulp of sorrow and homesickness.

“You wouldn’t understand,” said I to my friend. “Lets go to a pot-house, where cabbies call, and drink something.”

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

page 1 of 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death halted their leader, and asked a question.

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

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

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

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

page 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who is she?’ said St. Peter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘’Bad case?’ Death demanded at last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

St. Peter smiled benignantly and rubbed his hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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