A LOCOMOTIVE is, next to a marine engine, the most sensitive thing man ever made; and No. ·007, besides being sensitive, was new. The red paint was hardly dry on his spotless bumper-bar, his headlight shone like a fireman’s helmet, and his cab might have been a hardwood-finish parlour. They had run him into the round-house after his trial—he had said good-bye to his best friend in the shops, the overhead travelling-crane—the big world was just outside; and the other locos were taking stock of him. He looked at the semicircle of bold, unwinking headlights, heard the low purr and mutter of the steam mounting in the gauges—scornful hisses of contempt as a slack valve lifted a little—and would have given a month’s oil for leave to crawl through his own driving-wheels into the brick ash-pit beneath him. ·007 was an eight-wheeled ‘American’ loco, slightly different from others of his type, and as he stood he was worth ten thousand dollars on the Company’s books. But if you had bought him at his own valuation, after half an hour’s waiting in the darkish, echoing round-house, you would have saved exactly nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-eight cents. A heavy Mogul freight, with a short cowcatcher and a fire-box that came down within three inches of the rail, began the impolite game, speaking to a Pittsburgh Consolidation, who was visiting.

‘Where did this thing blow in from?’ he asked, with a dreamy puff of light steam.

‘It’s all I can do to keep track of our makes,’ was the answer, ‘without lookin’ after your back-numbers. ‘Guess it’s something Peter Cooper left over when he died.’

·007 quivered; his steam was getting up, but he held his tongue. Even a hand-car knows what sort of locomotive it was that Peter Cooper experimented upon in the far-away Thirties. It carried its coal and water in two apple-barrels, and was not much bigger than a bicycle.

Then up and spoke a small, newish switching-engine, with a little step in front of his bumper-timber, and his wheels so close together that he looked like a broncho getting ready to buck.

‘Something’s wrong with the road when a Pennsylvania gravel-pusher tells us anything about our stock, I think. That kid’s all right. Eustis designed him, and Eustis designed me. Ain’t that good enough?’

·007 could have carried the switching-loco round the yard in his tender, but he felt grateful for even this little word of consolation.

‘We don’t use hand-cars on the Pennsylvania,’ said the Consolidation. ‘That—er—peanut-stand’s old enough and ugly enough to speak for himself.’

‘He hasn’t bin spoken to yet. He’s bin spoken at. Hain’t ye any manners on the Pennsylvania?’ said the switching-loco.

‘You ought to be in the yard, Pony,’ said the Mogul, severely. ‘We’re all long-haulers here.’

‘That’s what you think,’ the little fellow replied. ‘You’ll know more ’fore the night’s out. I’ve bin down to Track 17, and the freight there—oh, Christmas!’

‘I’ve trouble enough in my own division,’ said a lean, light suburban loco with very shiny brake-shoes. My commuters wouldn’t rest till they got a parlour-car. They’ve hitched her back of all, and she hauls worse’n a snow-plough. I’ll snap her off some day sure, and then they’ll blame every one except their foolselves. They’ll be askin’ me to haul a vestibuled next!’

‘They made you in New Jersey, didn’t they?’ said Pony. ‘Thought so. Commuters and truck-waggons ain’t any sweet haulin’, but I tell you they’re a heap better’n cuttin’ out refrigerator-cars or oil-tanks. Why, I’ve hauled——’

‘Haul! You?’ said the Mogul contemptuously. ‘It’s all you can do to bunt a cold-storage car up the yard. Now, I—’ he paused a little to let the words sink in—‘I handle the Flying Freight—e-leven cars worth just anything you please to mention. On the stroke of eleven I pull out; and I’m timed for thirty-five an hour. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s me! Suburban traffic’s only but one degree better than switching. Express freight’s what pays.’

‘Well, I ain’t given to blowing, as a rule,’ began the Pittsburgh Consolidation.

‘No? You was sent in here because you grunted on the grade,’ Pony interrupted.

‘Where I grunt, you’d lie down, Pony; but, as I was saying, I don’t blow much. Notwithstandin’, if you want to see freight that is freight moved lively, you should see me warbling through the Alleghanies with thirty-seven ore-cars behind me, and my brake-men fightin’ tramps so’s they can’t attend to my tooter. I have to do all the holdin’ back then, and, though I say it, I’ve never had a load get away from me yet. No, sir. Haulin’ ’s one thing, but judgment and discretion’s another. You want judgment in my business.’

‘Ah! But—but are you not paralysed by a sense of your overwhelming responsibilities?’ said a curious, husky voice from a corner.

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‘Who’s that?’ ·007 whispered to the Jersey commuter.

‘Compound—experiment—N.G. She’s bin switchin’ in the B. & A. yards for six months, when she wasn’t in the shops. She’s economical (I call it mean) in her coal, but she takes it out in repairs. Ahem! I presume you found Boston somewhat isolated, madam, after your New York season?’

‘I am never so well occupied as when I am alone.’ The Compound seemed to be talking from halfway up her smoke-stack.

‘Sure,’ said the irreverent Pony, under his breath. ‘They don’t hanker after her any in the yard.’

‘But, with my constitution and temperament—my work lies in Boston—I find your outrecuidance——’

‘Outer which?’ said the Mogul freight.

‘Simple cylinders are good enough for me.’

‘Perhaps I should have, said faroucherie,’ hissed the Compound.

‘I don’t hold with any make of papier-mâché wheel,’ the Mogul insisted.

The Compound sighed pityingly, and said no more.

‘Git ’em all shapes in this world, don’t ye?’ said Pony. ‘That’s Mass’chusetts all over. They half start, an’ then they stick on a dead-centre, an’ blame it all on other folk’s ways o’ treatin’ them. Talkin’ o’ Boston, Comanche told me, last night, he had a hot-box just beyond the Newtons, Friday. That was why, he says, the Accommodation was held up. Made out no end of a tale, Comanche did.’

‘If I’d heard that in the shops, with my boiler out for repairs, I’d know ’t was one o’ Comanche’s lies,’ the New Jersey commuter snapped. ‘Hot-box! Him! What happened was they’d put an extra car on, and he just lay down on the grade and squealed. They had to send 127 to help him through. Made it out a hot-box, did he? Time before that he said he was ditched! Looked me square in the headlight and told me that as cool as—as a water-tank in a cold wave. Hot-box! You ask 127 about Comanche’s hot-box. Why, Comanche he was side-tracked, and 127 (he was just about as mad as they make ’em on account o’ being called out at ten o’clock at night) took hold and whirled her into Boston in seventeen minutes. Hot-box! Hot fraud! That’s what Comanche is.’

Then ·007 put both drivers and his pilot into it, as the saying is, for he asked what sort of thing a hot-box might be?

‘Paint my bell sky blue!’ said Pony, the switcher. ‘Make me a surface-railroad loco with a hardwood skirtin’-board round my wheels! Break me up and cast me into five-cent sidewalk-fakirs’ mechanical toys! Here’s an eight-wheel coupled “American” don’t know what a hot-box is! Never heard of an emergency-stop either, did ye? Don’t know what ye carry jack-screws for? You’re too innocent to be left alone with your own tender. Oh, you—you flat-car!’

There was a roar of escaping steam before any one could answer, and ·007 nearly blistered his paint off with pure mortification.

‘A hot-box,’ began the Compound, picking and choosing the words as though they were coal, ‘a hot-box is the penalty exacted from inexperience by haste. Ahem!’

‘Hot-box!’ said the Jersey Suburban. ‘It’s the price you pay for going on the tear. It’s years since I’ve had one. It’s a disease that don’t attack short-haulers, as a rule.’

‘We never have hot-boxes on the Pennsylvania,’ said the Consolidation. ‘They get ’em in New York—same as nervous prostration.’

‘Ah, go home on a ferry-boat,’ said the Mogul. ‘You think because you use worse grades than our road ’ud allow, you’re a kind of Alleghany angel. Now, I’ll tell you what you . . . Here’s my folk. Well, I can’t stop. See you later, perhaps.’

He rolled forward majestically to the turntable, and swung like a man-of-war in a tideway, till he picked up his track. ‘But as for you, you pea-green swivellin’ coffee-pot [this to ·007], you go out and learn something before you associate with those who’ve made more mileage in a week than you’ll roll up in a year. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s me! S’long.’

‘Split my tubes if that’s actin’ polite to a new member o’ the Brotherhood,’ said Pony. ‘There wasn’t any call to trample on ye like that. But manners was left out when Moguls was made. Keep up your fire, kid, an’ burn you own smoke. ’Guess we’ll all be wanted in a minute.’

Men were talking rather excitedly in the roundhouse. One man, in a dingy jersey, said that he hadn’t any locomotives to waste on the yard. Another man, with a piece of crumpled paper in his hand, said that the yard-master said that he was to say that if the other man said anything, he (the other man) was to shut his head. Then the other man waved his arms, and wanted to know if he was expected to keep locomotives in his hip-pocket. Then a man in a black Prince Albert, without a collar, came up dripping, for it was a hot August night, and said that what he said went; and between the three of them the locomotives began to go, too—first the Compound, then the Consolidation, then ·007.

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Now, deep down in his fire-box, ·007 had cherished a hope that as soon as his trial was done, he would be led forth with songs and shoutings, and attached to a green-and-chocolate vestibuled flyer, under charge of a bold and noble engineer, who would pat him on his back, and weep over him and call him his Arab steed. (The boys in the shops where he was built used to read wonderful stories of railroad life, and ·007 expected things to happen as he had heard.) But there did not seem to be many vestibuled flyers in the roaring, rumbling, electric-lighted yards, and his engineer only said:

‘Now, what sort of a fool-sort of an injector has Eustis loaded on to this rig this time?’ And he put the lever over with an angry snap, crying ‘Am I supposed to switch with this thing, hey?’

The collarless man mopped his head, and replied that, in the present state of the yard and freight and a few other things, the engineer would switch and keep on switching till the cows came home. ·007 pushed out gingerly, his heart in his headlight, so nervous that the clang of his own bell almost made him jump the track. Lanterns waved, or danced up and down, before and behind him; and on every side, six tracks deep, sliding backward and forward, with clashings of couplers and squeals of hand-brakes, were cars—more cars than ·007 had dreamed of. There were oil-cars, and hay-cars, and stock-cars full of lowing beasts, and ore-cars, and potato-cars with stovepipe-ends sticking out in the middle; cold-storage and refrigerator cars dripping ice-water on the tracks; ventilated fruit—and milk-cars; flat-cars with truck-waggons full of market-stuff; flat-cars loaded with reapers and binders, all red and green and gilt under the sizzling electric lights; flat cars piled high with strong-scented hides, pleasant hemlock-plank, or bundles of shingles; flat-cars creaking to the weight of thirty-ton castings, angle-irons, and rivet-boxes for some new bridge; and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of box-cars loaded, locked and chalked. Men—hot and angry—crawled among and between and under the thousand wheels; men took flying jumps through his cab, when he halted for a moment; men sat on his pilot as he went forward, and on his tender as he returned; and regiments of men ran along the tops of the box-cars beside him, screwing down brakes, waving their arms, and crying curious things.

He was pushed forward a foot at a time, whirled backwards, his rear drivers clinking and clanking, a quarter of a mile; jerked into a switch (yard-switches are very stubby and unaccommodating), bunted into a Red D, or Merchants’ Transport car, and, with no hint or knowledge of the weight behind him, started up anew. When his load was fairly on the move, three or four cars would be cut off, and ·007 would bound forward, only to be held hiccupping on the brake. Then he would wait a few minutes, watching the whirled lanterns, deafened with the clang of the bells, giddy with the vision of the sliding cars, his brake pump panting forty to the minute, his front coupler lying sideways on his cow-catcher, like a tired dog’s tongue in his mouth, and the whole of him covered with half-burnt coal-dust.

‘’Tisn’t so easy switching with a straight-backed tender,’ said his little friend of the round-house, bustling by at a trot. ‘But you’re cumin’ on pretty fair. Ever seen a flyin’ switch? No? Then watch me.’

Pony was in charge of a dozen heavy flat-cars. Suddenly he shot away from them with a sharp ‘Whutt!’ A switch opened in the shadows ahead; he turned up it like a rabbit, it snapped behind him, and the long line of twelve-foot-high lumber jolted on into the arms of a full-sized road-loco, who acknowledged receipt with a dry howl.

‘My man’s reckoned the smartest in the yard at that trick,’ he said, returning. ‘Gives me cold shivers when another fool tries it, though. That’s where my short wheel-base comes in. Like as not you’d have your tender scraped off if you tried it.’

·007 had no ambitions that way, and said so.

‘No? Of course this ain’t your regular business, but say, don’t you think it’s interestin’? Have you seen the yard-master? Well, he’s the greatest man on earth, an’ don’t you forget it. When are we through? Why, kid, it’s always like this, day an’ night—Sundays and week-days. See that thirty-car freight slidin’ in four, no, five tracks off? She’s all mixed freight, sent here to be sorted out into straight trains. That’s why we’re cuttin’ out the cars one by one.’ He gave a vigorous push to a west-bound car as he spoke, and started back with a little snort of surprise, for the car was an old friend—an M.T.K. box-car.

‘Jack my drivers, but it’s Homeless Kate. Why, Kate, ain’t there no gettin’ you back to your friends? There’s forty chasers out for you from your road, if there’s one. Who’s holdin’ you now?’

‘Wish I knew,’ whimpered Homeless Kate. ‘I belong in Topeka, but I’ve bin to Cedar Rapids; I’ve bin to Winnipeg; I’ve bin to Newport News; I’ve bin all down the old Atlanta and West Point; an’ I’ve bin to Buffalo. Maybe I’ll fetch up at Haverstraw. I’ve only bin out ten months, but I’m homesick—I’m just achin’ homesick.’

‘Try Chicago, Katie,’ said the switching-loco; and the battered old car lumbered down the track, jolting; ‘I want to be in Kansas when the sunflowers bloom.’

‘Yard’s full o’ Homeless Kates an’ Wanderin’ Willies,’ he explained to ·007. ‘I knew an old Fitchburg flat-car out seventeen months; an’ one of ours was gone fifteen ’fore ever we got track of her. Dunno quite how our men fix it. Swap around, I guess. Anyway, I’ve done my duty. She’s on her way to Kansas, via Chicago; but I’ll lay my next boilerful she’ll be held there to wait consignee’s convenience, and sent back to us with wheat in the fall.”

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Just then the Pittsburgh Consolidation passed, at the head of a dozen cars.

‘I’m goin’ home,’ he said proudly.

‘Can’t get all them twelve on to the flat. Break ’em in half, Dutchy! ‘cried Pony. But it was ·007 who was backed down to the last six cars, and he nearly blew up with surprise when he found himself pushing them on to a huge ferryboat. He had never seen deep water before, and shivered as the flat drew away and left his bogies within six inches of the black, shiny tide.

After this he was hurried to the freight-house, where he saw the yard-master, a smallish, white-faced man in shirt, trousers, and slippers, looking down upon a sea of trucks, a mob of bawling truckmen, and squadrons of backing, turning, sweating, spark-striking horses.

‘That’s shippers’ carts loadin’ on to the receivin’ trucks,’ said the small engine reverently. ‘But he don’t care. He lets ’em cuss. He’s the Czar—King—Boss! He says “Please,” and then they kneel down an’ pray. There’s three or four strings o’ to-day’s freight to be pulled before he can attend to them. When he waves his hand that way, things happen.’

A string of loaded cars slid out down the track, and a string of empties took their place. Bales, crates, boxes, jars, carboys, frails, cases, and packages; flew into them from the freight-house as though the cars had been magnets and they iron filings.

‘Ki-yah!’ shrieked little Pony. ‘Ain’t it great?’

A purple-faced truckman shouldered his way to the yard-master, and shook his fist under his nose.

The yard-master never looked up from his bundle of freight-receipts. He crooked his forefinger slightly, and a tall young man in a red shirt, lounging carelessly beside him, hit the truckman under the left ear, so that he dropped, quivering and clucking, on a hay-bale.

‘Eleven, seven, ninety-seven, L.Y.S.; fourteen ought ought three; nineteen thirteen; one one four; seventeen ought twenty-one M. B.; and the ten west-bound. All straight except the two last. Cut ’em off at the junction. An’ that’s all right. Pull that string.’ The yard-master, with mild blue eyes, looked out over the howling truckmen at the waters in the moonlight beyond, and hummed:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lawd Gawd made them all!

·007 moved the cars out and delivered them to the regular road-engine. He had never felt quite so limp in his life.

‘Curious, ain’t it?’ said Pony, puffing, on the next track. ‘You an’ me, if we got that man under our bumpers, we’d work him into red waste and not know what we’d done; but—up there—with the steam hummin’ in his boiler that awful quiet way . . .’

‘I know,’ said ·007. ‘Makes me feel as if I’d dropped my fire an’ was getting cold. He is the greatest man on earth.’

They were at the far north end of the yard now, under a switch-tower, looking down on the four-track way of the main traffic. The Boston Compound was to haul ·007’s string to some faraway northern junction over an indifferent road-bed, and she mourned aloud for the ninety-six pound rails of the B.&A.

‘You’re young; you’re young,’ she coughed. ‘You don’t realise your responsibilities.’

‘Yes, he does,’ said Pony sharply; ‘but he don’t lie down under ’em.’ Then, with a sidespurt of steam, exactly like a tough spitting ‘There ain’t more than fifteen thousand dollars’ worth o’ freight behind her anyway, and she carries on as if ’twere a hundred thousand—same as the Mogul’s. Excuse me, madam, but you’ve the track. . . . She’s stuck on a dead-centre again—bein’ specially designed not to.’

The Compound crawled across the tracks on a long slant, groaning horribly at each switch, and moving like a cow in a snow-drift. There was a little pause along the yard after her tail-lights had disappeared; switches locked crisply, and every one seemed to be waiting.

‘Now I’ll show you something worth,’ said Pony. ‘When the Purple Emperor ain’t on time, it’s about time to amend the Constitution. The first stroke of twelve is——’

‘Boom!’ went the clock in the big yard-tower, and far away ·007 heard a full vibrating ‘Yah! Yah! Yah!’ A headlight twinkled on the horizon like a star, grew an overpowering blaze, and whooped up the humming track to the roaring music of a happy giant’s song:

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With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!
Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah!
She climbed upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah!

The last defiant ‘yah! yah!’ was delivered a mile and a half beyond the passenger-depôt; but ·007 had caught one glimpse of the superb six-wheel-coupled racing-locomotive, who hauled the pride and glory of the road—the gilt-edged Purple Emperor, the millionaires’ south-bound express, laying the miles over his shoulder as a man peels a shaving from a soft board. The rest was a blur of maroon enamel, a bar of white light from the electrics in the cars, and a flicker of nickel-plated hand-rail on the rear platform.

‘Ooh!’ said ·007.

‘Seventy-five miles an hour these five miles. Baths, I’ve heard; barber’s shop; ticker; and a library and the rest to match. Yes, sir; seventy-five an hour! But he’ll talk to you in the roundhouse just as democratic as I would. And I—cuss—my wheel-base!—I’d kick clean off the track at half his gait. He’s the master of our Lodge. Cleans up at our house. I’ll introdooce you some day. He’s worth knowin’! There ain’t many can sing that song, either.’

·007 was too full of emotions to answer. He did not hear a raging of telephone-bells in the switch-tower, nor the man, as he leaned out and called to ·007’s engineer: ‘Got any steam?’

‘ ’Nough to run her a hundred mile out o’ this, if I could,’ said the engineer, who belonged to the open road and hated switching.

‘Then get. The Flying Freight’s ditched forty mile out, with fifty rod o’ track ploughed up. No; no one’s hurt, but both tracks are blocked. Lucky the wreckin’-car an’ derrick are this end of the yard. Crew’ll be along in a minute. Hurry! You’ve the track.’

‘Well, I could jest kick my little sawed-off self,’ said Pony, as ·007 was backed, with a bang, on to a grim and grimy car like a caboose, but full of tools—a flat-car and a derrick behind it. ‘Some folks are one thing, and some are another; but you’re in luck, kid. They push a wrecking-car. Now, don’t get rattled. Your wheel-base will keep you on the track, and there ain’t any curves worth mentionin’. Oh, say! Comanche told me there’s one section o’ saw-edged track that’s liable to jounce ye a little. Fifteen an’ a half out, after the grade at Jackson’s crossin’. You’ll know it by a farmhouse an’ a windmill and five maples in the dooryard. Windmill’s west o’ the maples. An’ there’s an eighty-foot iron bridge in the middle o’ that section with no guard-rails. See you later. Luck!’

Before he knew well what had happened, ·007 was flying up the track into the dumb dark world. Then fears of the night beset him. He remembered all he had ever heard of landslides, rain-piled boulders, blown trees, and strayed cattle, all that the Boston Compound had ever said of responsibility, and a great deal more that came out of his own head. With a very quavering voice he whistled for his first grade crossing (an event in the life of a locomotive), and his nerves were in no way restored by the sight of a frantic horse, and a white-faced man in a buggy less than a yard from his right shoulder. Then he was sure he would jump the track; felt his flanges mounting the rail at every curve; knew that his first grade would make him lie down even as Comanche had done at the Newtons. He swept down the grade to Jackson’s crossing, saw the windmill west of the maples, felt the badly-laid rails spring under him, and sweated big drops all over his boiler. At each jarring bump he believed an axle had smashed; and he took the eighty-foot bridge without the guard-rail like a hunted cat on the top of a fence. Then a wet leaf stuck against the glass of his headlight and threw a flying shadow on the track, so that he thought it was some little dancing animal that would feel soft if he ran over it; and anything soft underfoot frightens a locomotive as it does an elephant. But the men behind seemed quite calm. The wrecking-crew were climbing carelessly from the caboose to the tender—even jesting with the engineer, for he heard a shuffling of feet among the coal, and the snatch of a song, something like this:

Oh, the Empire State must learn to wait,
And the Cannon-ball go hang,
When the West-bound’s ditched, and the tool-car’s hitched,
And it’s ’way for the Breakdown Gang (Tara-ra!)
’Way for the Breakdown Gang!

‘Say! Eustis knew what he was doin’ when he designed this rig. She’s a hummer. New, too.’

‘Sniff! Phew! She is new. That ain’t paint. That’s——’

A burning pain shot through ·007’s right rear driver—a crippling, stinging pain.

‘This,’ said ·007, as he flew, ‘is a hot-box. Now I know what it means. I shall go to pieces, I guess. My first road-run, too!’

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‘Het a bit, ain’t she?’ the fireman ventured to suggest to the engineer.

‘She’ll hold for all we want of her. We’re ’most there. ‘Guess you chaps back had better climb into your car,’ said the engineer, his hand on the brake-lever. ‘I’ve seen men snapped off——’

But the crew fled laughing. They had no wish to be jerked on to the track. The engineer half turned his wrist, and ·007 found his drivers pinned firm.

‘Now it’s come!’ said ·007, as he yelled aloud, and slid like a sleigh. For the moment he fancied that he would jerk bodily from off his underpinning.

‘That must be the emergency-stop Pony guyed me about,’ he gasped, as soon as he could think. ‘Hot-box—emergency-stop. They both hurt; but now I can talk back in the round-house.’

He was halted, all hissing hot, a few feet in the rear of what doctors would call a compound-comminuted car. His engineer was kneeling down among his drivers, but he did not call ·007 his ‘Arab steed,’ nor cry over him, as the engineers did in the newspapers. He just bad-worded ·007, and pulled yards of charred cotton-waste from about the axles, and hoped he might some day catch the idiot who had packed it. Nobody else attended to him, for Evans, the Mogul’s engineer, a little cut about the head, but very angry, was exhibiting, by lantern-light, the mangled corpse of a slim blue pig.

‘’T weren’t even a decent-sized hog,’ he said. ‘’T were a shote.’

‘Dangerousest beasts they are,’ said one of the crew. ‘Get under the pilot an’ sort o’ twiddle ye off the track, don’t they?’

‘Don’t they?’ roared Evans, who was a red headed Welshman. ‘You talk as if I was ditched by a hog every fool-day o’ the week. I ain’t friends with all the cussed half-fed shotes in the State o’ New York. No, indeed! Yes, this is him—an’ look what he’s done!’

It was not a bad night’s work for one stray piglet. The Flying Freight seemed to have flown in every direction, for the Mogul had mounted the rails and run diagonally a few hundred feet from right to left, taking with him such cars as cared to follow. Some did not. They broke their couplers and lay down, while rear cars frolicked over them. In that game, they had ploughed up and removed and twisted a good deal of the left-hand track. The Mogul himself had waddled into a corn-field, and there he knelt—fantastic wreaths of green twisted round his crank-pins; his pilot covered with solid clods of field, on which corn nodded drunkenly; his fire put out with dirt (Evans had done that as soon as he recovered his senses); and his broken headlight half full of half-burnt moths. His tender had thrown coal all over him, and he looked like a disreputable buffalo who had tried to wallow in a general store. For there lay, scattered over the landscape, from the burst cars, typewriters, sewing-machines, bicycles in crates, a consignment of silver-plated imported harness, French dresses and gloves, a dozen finely moulded hardwood mantels, a fifteen-foot naphtha-launch, with. a solid brass bedstead crumpled around her bows, a case of telescopes and microscopes, two coffins, a case of very best candies, some gilt-edged dairy produce, butter and eggs in an omelette, a broken box of expensive toys, and a few hundred other luxuries. A camp of tramps hurried up from nowhere, and generously volunteered to help the crew. So the brakemen, armed with coupler-pins, walked up and down on one side, and the freight-conductor and the fireman patrolled the other with their hands in their hip-pockets. A long-bearded man came out of a house beyond the corn-field, and told Evans that if the accident had happened a little later in the year, all his corn would have been burned, and accused Evans of carelessness. Then he ran away, for Evans was at his heels shrieking, ‘’Twas his hog done it—his hog done it! Let me kill him! Let me kill him!’ Then the wrecking-crew laughed; and the farmer put his head out of a window and said that Evans was no gentleman.

But ·007 was very sober. He had never seen a wreck before, and it frightened him. The crew still laughed, but they worked at the same time; and ·007 forgot horror in amazement at the way they handled the Mogul freight. They dug round him with spades; they put ties in front of his wheels, and jack-screws under him; they embraced him with the derrick-chain and tickled him with crowbars; while ·007 was hitched on to wrecked cars and backed away till the knot broke or the cars rolled clear of the track. By dawn thirty or forty men’ were at work, replacing and ramming down the ties, gauging the rails and spiking them. By daylight all cars who could move had gone on in charge of another loco; the track was freed for traffic; and ·007 had hauled the old Mogul over a small pavement of ties, inch by inch, till his flanges bit the rail once more, and he settled down with a clank. But his spirit was broken, and his nerve was gone.

‘’T weren’t even a hog,’ he repeated dolefully; ‘’t were a shote; and you—you of all of ’em—had to help me on.’

‘But how in the whole long road did it happen?’ asked ·007, sizzling with curiosity.

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‘Happen! It didn’t happen! It just come! I sailed right on top of him around that last curve—thought he was a skunk. Yes; he was all as little as that. He hadn’t more’n squealed once ’fore I felt my bogies lift (he’d rolled right under the pilot), and I couldn’t catch the track again to save me. Swivelled clean off, I was. Then I felt him sling himself along, all greasy, under my left leadin’ driver, and, oh, Boilers! that mounted the rail. I heard my flanges zippin’ along the ties, an’ the next I knew I was playin’ “Sally, Sally Waters” in the corn, my tender shuckin’ coal through my cab, an’ old man Evans lying’ still an’ bleedin’ in front o’ me. Shook? There ain’t a stay or a bolt or a rivet in me that ain’t sprung to glory somewhere.’

‘Umm!’ said ·007. ‘What d’ you reckon you weigh?’

‘Without these lumps o’ dirt I’m all of a hundred thousand pound.’

‘And the shote?’

‘Eighty. Call him a hundred pounds at the outside. He’s worth about four’n a half dollars. Ain’t it awful? Ain’t it enough to give you nervous prostration? Ain’t it paralysin’? Why, I come just around that curve——’ and the Mogul told the tale again, for he was very badly shaken.

‘Well, it’s all in the day’s run, I guess,’ said ·007, soothingly; ‘an’—an’ a corn-field’s pretty soft fallin’.’

‘If it had bin a sixty-foot bridge, an’ I could ha’ slid off into deep water, an’ blown up an’ killed both men, same as others have done, I wouldn’t ha’ cared: but to be ditched by a shote—an’ you to help me out—in a corn-field—an’ an old hayseed in his nightgown cussin’ me like as if I was a sick truck-horse! . . . Oh, it’s awful! Don’t call me Mogul! I’m a sewin’-machine. They’ll guy my sand-box off in the yard.’

And ·007, his hot-box cooled and his experience vastly enlarged, hauled the Mogul freight slowly to the round-house.

‘Hello, old man! Bin out all night, hain’t ye?’ said the irrepressible Pony, who had just come off duty. ‘Well, I must say you look it. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s you! Go to the shops, take them vine-leaves out o’ your hair, an’ git ’em to play the hose on you.’

‘Leave him alone, Pony,’ said ·007 severely, as he was swung on the turn-table, ’or I’ll——’

‘’Didn’t know the old granger was any special friend o’ yours, kid. He wasn’t over civil to you last time I saw him.’

‘I know it; but I’ve seen a wreck since then, and it has about scared the paint off me. I’m not going to guy any one as long as I steam—not when they’re new to the business an’ anxious to learn. And I’m not goin’ to guy the old Mogul either, though I did find him wreathed around with roastin’-ears. ’Twas a little bit of a shote—not a hog—just a shote, Pony—no bigger’n a lump of anthracite—I saw it—that made all the mess. Anybody can be ditched, I guess.’

‘Found that out already, have you? Well, that’s a good beginnin’.’ It was the Purple Emperor, with his high, tight, plate-glass cab and green velvet cushion, waiting to be cleaned for his next day’s fly.

‘Let me make you two gen’lemen acquainted,’ said Pony. ‘This is our Purple Emperor, kid, whom you were admirin’ and, I may say, envyin’ last night. This is a new brother, worshipful sir, with most of his mileage ahead of him, but, so far as a serving brother can, I’ll answer for him.’

‘’Happy to meet you,’ said the Purple Emperor, with a glance round the crowded round-house. ‘I guess there are enough of us here to form a full meetin’. Ahem! By virtue of the authority vested in me as Head of the Road, I hereby declare and pronounce No. ·007 a full and accepted Brother of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotives, and as such entitled to all shop, switch, track, tank, and round-house privileges throughout my jurisdiction, in the Degree of Superior Flier, it bein’ well known and credibly reported to me that our Brother has covered forty-one miles in thirty-nine minutes and a half on an errand of mercy to the afflicted. At a convenient time, I myself will communicate to you the ‘Song and Signal of this Degree whereby you may be recognised in the darkest night. Take your stall, newly-entered Brother among Locomotives!’

Now, in the darkest night, even as the Purple Emperor said, if you will stand on the bridge across the freight-yard, looking down upon the four-track way, at 2.30 A.M., neither before nor after, when the White Moth, that takes the overflow from the Purple Emperor, tears south with her seven vestibuled cream-white cars, you will hear, as the yard-clock makes the half-hour, a faraway sound like the bass of a violoncello, and then, a hundred feet to each word:

With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal!  Yah! Yah! Yah
Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter!  Yah! Yah! Yah
She climb upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—ghignai—shtingal!  Yah! Yah!

That is ·007 covering his one hundred and fifty six miles in two hundred and twenty-one minutes.

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BEFORE he was thirty he discovered that there was no one to play with him. Though the wealth of three toilsome generations stood to his account, though his tastes in the matter of books, bindings, rugs, swords, bronzes, lacquer, pictures, plate, statuary, horses, conservatories, and agriculture were educated and catholic, the public opinion of his country wanted to know why he did not go to office daily, as his father had before him.So he fled, and they howled behind him that he was an unpatriotic Anglomaniac, born to consume fruits, one totally lacking in public spirit. He wore an eye-glass; he had built a wall round his country house, with a high gate that shut, instead of inviting America to sit on his flower-beds; he ordered his clothes from England; and the press of his abiding city cursed him, from his eye-glass to his trousers, for two consecutive days.

When he rose to light again, it was where nothing less than the tents of an invading army in Piccadilly would make any difference to anybody. If he had money and leisure, England stood ready to give him all that money and leisure could buy. That price paid, she would ask no questions. He took his cheque-book and accumulated things—warily at first, for he remembered that in America things own the man. To his delight, he discovered that in England he could put his belongings under his feet; for classes, ranks, and denominations of people rose, as it were, from the earth, and silently and discreetly took charge of his possessions. They had been born and bred for that sole purpose—servants of the cheque-book. When that was at an end they would depart as mysteriously as they had come.

The impenetrability of this regulated life irritated him, and he strove to learn something of the human side of these people. He retired baffled, to be trained by his menials. In America, the native demoralizes the English servant. In England, the servant educates the master. Wilton Sargent strove to learn all they taught as ardently as his father had striven to wreck, before capture, the railways of his native land; and it must have been some touch of the old bandit railway blood that bade him buy, for a song, Holt Hangers, whose forty-acre lawn, as every one knows, sweeps down in velvet to the quadruple tracks of the Great Buchonian Railway. Their trains flew by almost continuously, with a bee-like drone in the day and a flutter of strong wings at night. The son of Merton Sargent had good right to be interested in them. He owned controlling interests in several thousand miles of track—not permanent-way—built on altogether different plans, where locomotives eternally whistled for grade-crossings, and parlour-cars of fabulous expense and unrestful design skated round curves that the Great Buchonian would have condemned as unsafe in a construction-line. From the edge of his lawn he could trace the chaired metals falling away, rigid as a bowstring, into the valley of the Prest, studded with the long perspective of the block-signals, buttressed with stone, and carried, high above all possible risk, on a forty-foot embankment.

Left to himself, he would have builded a private car, and kept it at the nearest railway station, Amberley Royal, five miles away. But those into whose hands he had committed himself for his English training had little knowledge of railways and less of private cars. The one they knew as something that existed in the scheme of things for their convenience. The other they held to be ‘distinctly American’; and, with the versatility of his race, Wilton Sargent had set out to be just a little more English than the English.

He succeeded to admiration. He learned not to redecorate Holt Hangers, though he warmed it; to leave his guests alone; to refrain from superfluous introductions; to abandon manners, of which he had great store, and to hold fast by manner which can after labour be acquired. He learned to let other people, hired for the purpose, attend to the duties for which they were paid. He learned—this he got from a ditcher on the estate—that every man with whom he came in contact had a decreed position in the fabric of the realm, which position Wilton would do well to consult. Last mystery of all, he learned to golf—well; and when an American knows the innermost meaning of ‘Don’t press, slow back, and keep your eye on the ball,’ he is, for practical purposes, denationalised.

His other education proceeded on the pleasantest lines. Was he interested in any conceivable thing in heaven above, or the earth. beneath, or the waters under the earth? Forthwith appeared at his table, guided by those safe hands into which he had fallen, the very men who had best said, done, written, explored, excavated, built, launched, created, or studied that one thing—herders of books and prints in the British Museum; specialists in scarabs, cartouches, and dynasties Egyptian; rovers and raiders from the heart of unknown lands; toxicologists; orchid-hunters; monographers on flint implements, carpets, prehistoric man, or early Renaissance music. They came, and they played with him. They asked no questions; they cared not so much as a pin who or what he was. They demanded only that he should be able to talk and listen courteously. Their work was done elsewhere and out of his sight.

There were also women.

‘Never,’ said Wilton Sargent to himself, ‘has an American seen England as I’m seeing it’; and he thought, blushing beneath the bedclothes, of the unregenerate and blatant days when he would steam to office, down the Hudson, in his twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going steam-yacht, and arrive by gradations, at Bleecker Street, hanging on to a leather strap between an Irish washerwoman and a German anarchist. If any of his guests had seen him then they would have said, ‘How distinctly American!’ and—Wilton did not care for that tone. He had schooled himself to an English walk, and, so long as he did not raise it, an English voice. He did not gesticulate with his hands; he sat down on most of his enthusiasms, but he could not rid himself of The Shibboleth. He would ask for the Worcestershire sauce. Even Howard, his immaculate butler, could not break him of this.

It was decreed that he should complete his education in a wild and wonderful manner, and that I should be in at that death.

Wilton had more than once asked me to Holt Hangers, for the purpose of showing how well the new life fitted him; and each time I had declared it creaseless. His third invitation was more informal than the others, and he hinted of some matter in which he was anxious for my sympathy or counsel, or both. There is room for an infinity of mistakes when a man begins to take liberties with his nationality; and I went down expecting things. A seven-foot dog-cart and a groom in the black Holt Hangers livery met me at Amberley Royal. At Holt Hangers I was received by a person of elegance and true reserve, and piloted to my luxurious chamber. There were no other guests in the house, and this set me thinking.

Wilton came into my room about half-an-hour before dinner, and though his face was masked with a drop-curtain of highly embroidered indifference, I could see that he was not at ease. In time, for he was then almost as difficult to move as one of my own countrymen, I extracted the tale—simple in its extravagance, extravagant in its simplicity. It seemed that Hackman of the British Museum had been staying with him about ten days before, boasting of scarabs. Hackman has a way of carrying really priceless antiquities on his tie-ring and in his trouser pockets. Apparently, he had intercepted something on its way to the Boulak Museum which, he said, was ‘a genuine Amen-Hotep—a queen’s scarab of the Fourth Dynasty.’ Now Wilton had bought from Cassavetti, whose reputation is not above suspicion, a scarab of much the same scarabeousness, and had left it in his London chambers. Hackman at a venture, but knowing Cassavetti, pronounced it an imposition. There was long discussion—savant versus millionaire, one saying: ‘But I know it cannot be’; and the other: ‘But I can and will prove it.’ Wilton found it necessary for his soul’s satisfaction to go up to town, then and there—a forty-mile run—and bring back the scarab before dinner. It was at this point that he began to cut corners with disastrous results. Amberley Royal station being five miles

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away, and the putting in of horses a matter of time, Wilton had told Howard, the immaculate butler, to signal the next train to stop; and Howard, who was more of a man of resource than his master gave him credit for, had, with the red flag of the ninth hole of the links which crossed the bottom of the lawn, signalled vehemently to the first up-train, and it had stopped. Here Wilton’s account became confused. He attempted; it seems, to get into that highly indignant express, and a guard restrained him with more or less force—hauled him, in fact, backwards from the window of a locked carriage. Wilton must have struck the gravel with some vehemence, for the consequences, he admitted, were a free fight on the line, in which he lost his hat, and was at last dragged into the guard’s van and set down breathless.

He had pressed money upon the man, and very foolishly had explained everything but his name. This he clung to, for he had a vision of tall headlines in the New York papers, and well knew no son of Merton Sargent could expect mercy that side the water. The guard, to Wilton’s amazement, refused the money on the grounds that this was a matter for the Company to attend to. Wilton insisted on his incognito, and, therefore, found two policemen waiting for him at St. Botolph terminus. When he expressed a wish to buy a new hat and telegraph to his friends, both policemen with one voice warned him that whatever he said would be used as evidence against him; and this had impressed Wilton tremendously.

‘They were so infernally polite,’ he said. ‘If they had clubbed me I wouldn’t have cared; but it was, “Step this way, sir,” and, “Up those stairs, please, sir,” till they jailed me—jailed me like a common drunk, and I had to stay in a filthy little cubby-hole of a cell all night.’

‘That comes of not giving your name and not wiring your lawyer,’ I replied. ‘What did you get? ‘

‘Forty shillings or a month,’ said Wilton, promptly,—‘next morning bright and early. They were working us off, three a minute. A girl in a pink hat—she was brought in at three in the morning—got ten days. I suppose, I was lucky. I must have knocked his senses out of the guard. He told the old duck on the bench that I had told him I was a sergeant in the army, and that I was gathering beetles on the track. That comes of trying to explain to an Englishman.’

‘And you?’

‘Oh, I said nothing. I wanted to get out. I paid my fine, and bought a new hat, and came up here before noon next morning. There were a lot of people in the house, and I told ’em I’d been unavoidably detained, and then they began to recollect engagements elsewhere. Hackman must have seen the fight on the track and made a story of it. I suppose they thought it was distinctly American—confound ’em! It’s the only time in my life that I’ve ever flagged a train, and I wouldn’t have done it but for that scarab. ’Twouldn’t hurt their old trains to be held up once in a while.’

‘Well, it’s all over now,’ I said, choking a little. ‘And your name didn’t get into the papers. It is rather transatlantic when you come to think of it.’

‘Over!’ Wilton grunted savagely. ‘It’s only just begun. That trouble with the guard was just common, ordinary assault—merely a little criminal business. The flagging of the train is civil, and means something quite different. They’re after me for that now.’

‘Who?’

‘The Great Buchonian. There was a man in court watching the case on behalf of the Company. I gave him my name in a quiet corner before I bought my hat, and—come to dinner now; I’ll show you the results afterwards.’

The telling of his wrongs had worked Wilton Sargent into a very fine temper, and I do not think that my conversation soothed him. In, the course of the dinner, prompted by a devil of pure mischief, I dwelt with loving insistence on certain smells and sounds of New York which go straight to the heart of the native in foreign parts; and Wilton began to ask. many questions about his associates aforetime—men of the New York Yacht Club, Storm King, or the Restigouche, owners of rivers, ranches, and shipping in their playtime, lords of railways, kerosene, wheat and cattle in their offices. When the green mint came, I gave him a peculiarly oily and atrocious cigar, of the brand they sell in the tessellated, electric-lighted, with-expensive-pictures-of-the-nude-adorned bar of the Pandemonium, and Wilton chewed the end for several minutes ere he lit it. The butler left us alone, and the chimney of the oak-panelled dining-room began to smoke.

‘That’s another! ‘said he, poking the fire savagely, and I knew what he meant. One cannot put steam-heat, in houses where Queen Elizabeth slept. The steady beat of a night-mail, whirling down the valley, recalled me to business. ‘What about the Great Buchonian? ‘I said.

‘Come into my study. That’s all—as yet.

It was a pile of Seidlitz-powders-coloured correspondence, perhaps nine inches high, and it looked very businesslike.

‘You can go through it,’ said Wilton. ‘Now I could take a chair and a red flag and go into Hyde Park and say the most atrocious things about your Queen, and preach anarchy and all that, y’ know, till I was hoarse, and no one would take any notice. The Police—damn’ em!—would protect me if I got into trouble. But for a little thing like flagging a dirty little sawed-off train,—running through my own grounds, too,—I get the whole British Constitution down on me as if I sold bombs. I don’t understand it.’

‘No more does the Great Buchonian—apparently.’ I was turning over the letters. ‘Here’s the traffic superintendent writing that it’s utterly incomprehensible that any man should . . . Good heavens, Wilton, you have done it!’ I giggled, as I read on.

‘What’s funny now?’ said my host.

‘It seems that you, or Howard for you, stopped the three-forty Northern up.’

‘I ought to know that! They all had their knife into me, from the engine-driver up.’

‘But it’s the three-forty—the “Induna”—surely you’ve heard of the Great Buchonian’s “Induna”?’

‘How the deuce am I to know, one train from another? They come along about every two minutes.’

‘Quite so. But this happens to be the “Induna,” the one train of the whole line. She’s timed for fifty-seven miles an hour. She was put on early in the Sixties, and she has never been stopped——’

‘I know! Since William the Conqueror came over, or King Charles hid in her smoke-stack. You’re as bad as the rest of these Britishers. If she’s been run all that while, it’s time she was flagged once or twice.’

The American was beginning to ooze out all over Wilton, and his small-boned hands were moving, restlessly.

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‘Suppose you flagged the Empire State Express, or the Western Cyclone?’

‘Suppose I did. I know Otis Harvey—or used to. I’d send him a wire, and he’d understand it was a ground-hog case with me. That’s exactly what I told this British fossil company here.’

‘Have you been answering their letters without legal advice, then?’

‘Of course I have.’

‘Oh, my sainted Country! Go ahead, Wilton.’

‘I wrote ’em that I’d be very happy to see their president and explain to him in three words all about it; but that wouldn’t do. ’Seems their president must be a god. He was too busy, and—well, you can read for yourself—they wanted explanations. The stationmaster at Amberley Royal—and he grovels before me, as a rule—wanted an explanation, and quick, too. The head sachem at St. Botolph’s wanted three or four, and the Lord High Mukkamuk that oils the locomotives, wanted one every fine day. I told ’em-—I’ve told ’em about fifty times—I stopped their holy and sacred train because I wanted to board her. Did they think I wanted to feel her pulse?’

‘You didn’t say that?’

‘“Feel her pulse” Of course not.’

‘No. “Board her.”’

‘What else could I say?’

‘My dear Wilton, what is the use of Mrs. Sherborne, and the Clays, and all that lot working over you for four years to make an Englishman out of you, if the very first time you’re rattled you go back to the vernacular?’

‘I’m through with Mrs. Sherborne and the rest of the crowd. America’s good enough for me. What ought I to have said? “Please,” or “Thanks awf’ly,” or how?’

There was no chance now of mistaking the man’s nationality. Speech, gesture, and step, so carefully drilled into him, had gone away with the borrowed mask of indifference. It was a lawful son of the Youngest People, whose predecessors were the Red Indian. His voice had risen to the high, throaty crow of his breed when they labour under excitement. His close-set eyes showed by turns unnecessary fear, annoyance beyond reason, rapid and purposeless flights of thought, the child’s lust for immediate revenge, and the child’s pathetic bewilderment, who knocks his head against the bad, wicked table. And on the other side, I knew, stood the Company, as unable as Wilton to understand.

‘And I could buy their old road three times over,’ he muttered, playing with a paper-knife, and moving restlessly to and fro.

‘You didn’t tell ’em that, I hope!’

There was no answer; but as I went through the letters, I felt that Wilton must have told them many surprising things. The Great Buchonian had first asked for an explanation of the stoppage of their Induna, and had found a certain levity in the explanation tendered. It then advised ‘Mr. W. Sargent’ to refer his solicitor to their solicitor, or whatever the legal phrase is.

‘And you didn’t?’ I said, looking up.

‘No. They were treating me exactly as if I had been a kid playing on the cable-tracks. There was not the least necessity for any solicitor. Five minutes quiet talk would have settled everything.’

I returned to the correspondence. The Great Buchonian regretted that owing to pressure of business none of their directors could accept Mr. W. Sargent’s invitation to run down and discuss the difficulty. The Great Buchonian was careful to point out that no animus underlay their action, nor was money their object. Their duty was to protect the interests of their line, and these interests could not be protected if a precedent were established whereby any of the Queen’s subjects could stop a train in mid-career. Again (this was another branch of the correspondence, not more than five heads of departments being concerned), the Company admitted that there was some reasonable doubt as to the duties of express-trains in all crises, and the matter was open to settlement by process of law till an authoritative ruling was obtained—from the House of Lords, if necessary.

‘That broke me all up,’ said Wilton, who was reading over my shoulder. ‘I knew I’d struck the British Constitution at last. The House of Lords—my Lord! And, anyway, I’m not one of the Queen’s subjects.’

‘Why, I had a notion that you’d got yourself naturalised.’

Wilton blushed hotly as he explained that very many things must happen to the British Constitution ere he took out his papers.

‘How does it all strike you?’ he said. ‘Isn’t the Great Buchonian crazy?’

‘I don’t know. You’ve done something that no one ever thought of doing before, and the Company don’t know what to make of it. I see they offer to send down their solicitor and another official of the Company to talk things over informally. Then here’s another letter suggesting that you put up a fourteen-foot wall, crowned with bottle-glass, at the bottom of the garden.’

‘Talk of British insolence! The man who recommends that (he’s another bloated functionary) says that I shall “derive great pleasure from watching the wall going up day by day”! Did you ever dream of such gall? I’ve offered ’em money enough to buy a new set of cars and pension the driver for three generations; but that doesn’t seem to be what they want. They expect me to go to the House of Lords and get a ruling, and build walls between times. Are they all stark, raving mad? One ’ud think I made a profession of flagging trains. How in Tophet was I to know their old Induna from a way-train? I took the first that came along, and I’ve been jailed and fined for that once already.’

‘That was for slugging the guard.’

‘He had no right to haul me out when I was half-way through a window.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘Their lawyer and the other official (can’t they trust their men unless they send ’em in pairs?) are coming here to-night. I told ’em I was busy, as a rule, till after dinner, but they might send along the entire directorate if it eased ’em any.’

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Now, after-dinner visiting, for business or pleasure, is the custom of the smaller American town, and not that of England, where the end of the day is sacred to the owner. Verily, Wilton Sargent had hoisted the striped flag of rebellion

‘Isn’t it time that the humour of the situation began to strike you, Wilton?’ I asked.

‘Where’s the humour of baiting an American citizen just because he happens to be a millionaire—poor devil!’ He was silent for a little time, and then went on: ‘Of course. Now I see!’ He spun round and faced me excitedly. ‘It’s as plain as mud. These ducks are laying their pipes to skin me.’

‘They say explicitly they don’t want money!’

‘That’s all a blind. So’s their addressing me as W. Sargent. They know well enough who I am. They know I’m the old man’s son. Why didn’t I think of that before?’

‘One minute, Wilton. If you climbed to the top of the dome of St. Paul’s and offered a reward to any Englishman who could tell you who or what Merton Sargent had been, there wouldn’t be twenty men in all London to claim it.’

‘That’s their insular provincialism, then. I don’t care a cent. The old man would have wrecked the Great Buchonian before breakfast for a pipe-opener. My God, I’ll do it in dead earnest! I’ll show ’em that they can’t bulldose a foreigner for flagging one of their little tin-pot trains, and—I’ve spent fifty thousand a year here, at least, for the last four years.’

I was glad I was not his lawyer. I re-read the correspondence, notably the letter which recommended him—almost tenderly, I fancied—to build a fourteen-foot brick wall at the end of his garden, and half-way through it a thought struck me which filled me with pure joy.

The footman ushered in two men, frock-coated, gray-trousered, smooth-shaven, heavy of speech and gait. It was nearly nine o’clock, but they looked as newly come from a bath. I could not understand why the elder and taller of the pair glanced at me as though we had an understanding, nor why he shook hands with an unEnglish warmth.

‘This simplifies the situation,’ he said in an undertone, and, as I stared, he whispered to his companion: ‘I fear I shall be of very little service at present. Perhaps, Mr. Folsom had better talk over the affair with Mr. Sargent.’

‘That is what I am here for,’ said Wilton.

The man of law smiled pleasantly, and said that he saw no reason why the difficulty should not be arranged in two minutes’ quiet talk. His air, as he sat down opposite Wilton, was soothing to the last degree. His companion drew me upstage. The mystery was deepening, but I followed meekly, and heard Wilton say, with an uneasy laugh:

‘I’ve had insomnia over this affair, Mr. Folsom. Let’s settle it one way or the other, for heaven’s sake!’

‘Ah! Has he suffered much from this lately?’ said my man, with a preliminary cough.

‘I really can’t say,’ I replied.

‘Then I suppose you have only lately taken charge here?’

‘I came this evening. I am not exactly in charge of anything.’

‘I see. Merely to observe the course of events—in case——’ He nodded.

‘Exactly.’ Observation, after all, is my trade.

He coughed again slightly, and then came to business.

‘Now,—I am asking solely for information’s sake,—do you find the delusions persistent?’

‘Which delusions?’

‘They are variable, then. That is distinctly curious, because—but do I understand that the type of the delusion varies? For example, Mr. Sargent believes that he can buy the Great Buchonian.’

‘Did he write you that?’

‘He made the offer to the Company—on a half-sheet of note-paper. Now, has he by chance gone to the other extreme, and believed that he is in danger of becoming a pauper? The curious economy in the use of a half-sheet of paper shows that some idea of that kind might have flashed through his mind; and the two delusions can coexist, but it is not common. As you must know, the delusion of vast wealth—the folly of grandeurs, I believe our friends the French call it—is, as a rule, persistent, to the exclusion of all others.’

Then I heard Wilton’s best English voice at the end of the study

‘My dear sir, I have explained twenty times already, I wanted to get that scarab in time for dinner. Suppose you had left an important legal document in the same way?’

‘That touch of cunning is very significant,’ my fellow—practitioner-since he insisted on it—muttered.

‘I am very happy, of course, to meet you; but if you had only sent your president down to dinner here, I could have settled the thing in half a minute. Why, I could have bought the Buchonian from him while your clerks were sending me this.’ Wilton dropped his hand heavily on the blue and white correspondence, and the lawyer started.

‘But, speaking frankly,’ the lawyer replied, ‘it is, if I may say so, perfectly inconceivable, even in the case of the most important legal documents, that any one should stop the three-forty express—the Induna—our Induna, my dear sir.’

‘Absolutely!’ my companion echoed; then to me in a lower tone: ‘You notice, again, the persistent delusion of wealth. I was called in when he wrote us that. You can see it is utterly im possible for the Company to continue to run their trains through the property of a man who may at any moment fancy himself divinely commissioned to stop all traffic. If he had only referred us to his lawyer—but, naturally, that he would not do under the circumstances. A pity—a great pity. He is so young. By the way, it is curious, is it not, to note the absolute conviction in the voice of those who are similarly afflicted,—heart-rending, I might say,—and the inability to follow a chain of connected thought.’

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‘I can’t see what you want,’ Wilton was saying to the lawyer.

‘It need not be more than fourteen feet high—a really desirable structure, and it would be possible to grow pear-trees on the sunny side.’ The lawyer was speaking in an unprofessional voice. ‘There are few things pleasanter than to watch, so to say, one’s own vine and fig-tree in full bearing. Consider the profit and amusement you would derive from it. If you could see your way to doing this, we could arrange all the details with your lawyer, and it is possible that the Company might bear some of the cost. I have put the matter, I trust, in a nutshell. If you, my dear sir, will interest yourself in building that wall, and will kindly give us the name of your lawyers, I dare assure you that you will hear no more from the Great Buchonian.’

‘But why am I to disfigure my lawn with a new brick wall?’

‘Gray flint is extremely picturesque.’

‘Gray flint, then, if you put it that way. Why the dickens must I go building towers of Babylon just because I have held up one of your trains—once?’

‘The expression he used in his third letter was that he wished to “board her,”’ said my companion in my ear. ‘That was very curious—a marine delusion impinging, as it were, upon a land one. What a marvellous world he must move in—and will before the curtain falls. So young, too—so very young!’

‘Well, if you want the plain English of it, I’m damned if I go wall-building to your order. You can fight it all along the line, into the House of Lords and out again, and get your rulings by the running foot if you like,’ said Wilton, hotly. ‘Great Heavens, man, I only did it once!’

‘We have at present no guarantee that you may not do it again; and, with our traffic, we must, in justice to our passengers, demand some form of guarantee. It must not serve as a precedent. All this might have been saved if you had only referred us to your legal representative.’ The lawyer looked appealingly around the room. The deadlock was complete.

‘Wilton,’ I asked, ‘may I try my hand now?’

‘Anything you like,’ said Wilton. ‘It seems I can’t talk English. I won’t build any wall, though.’ He threw himself back in his chair.

‘Gentlemen,’ I said deliberately, for I perceived that the doctor’s mind would turn slowly, ‘Mr. Sargent has very large interests in the chief railway systems of his own country.’

‘His own country?’ said the lawyer.

‘At that age? ‘said the doctor.

‘Certainly. He inherited them from his father, Mr. Sargent, who is an American.’

‘And proud of it,’ said Wilton, as though he had been a Western Senator let loose on the Continent for the first time.

‘My dear sir,’ said the lawyer, half rising, ‘why did you not acquaint the Company with this fact—this vital fact—early in our correspondence? We should have understood. We should have made allowances.’

‘Allowances be damned! Am I a Red Indian or a lunatic?’

The two men looked guilty.

‘If Mr. Sargent’s friend had told us as much in the beginning,’ said the doctor, very severely, ‘much might have been saved.’ Alas! I had made a life’s enemy of that doctor.

‘I hadn’t a chance,’ I replied. ‘Now, of course, you can see that a man who owns several thousand miles of line, as Mr. Sargent does, would be apt to treat railways a shade more casually than other people.’

‘Of course; of course. He is an American; that accounts. Still, it was the Induna; but I can quite understand that the customs of our cousins across the water differ in these particulars from ours. And do you always stop trains in this way in the States, Mr. Sargent?’

‘I should if occasion ever arose; but I’ve never had to yet. Are you going to make an international complication of the business?’

‘You need give yourself no further concern whatever in the matter. We see that there is no likelihood of this action of yours establishing a precedent, which was the only thing we were afraid of. Now that you understand that we cannot reconcile our system to any sudden stoppages, we feel quite sure that——’

‘I shan’t be staying long enough to flag another train,’ Wilton said pensively.

‘You are returning, then, to our fellow-kinsmen across the—ah—big pond, you call it?’

‘No, sir. The ocean—the North Atlantic Ocean. It’s three thousand miles broad, and three miles deep in places. I wish it were ten thousand.’

‘I am not so fond of sea-travel myself; but I think it is every Englishman’s duty once in his life to study the great branch of our Anglo-Saxon race across the ocean,’ said the lawyer.

‘If ever you come over, and care to flag any train on my system, I’ll—I’ll see you through,’ said Wilton.

‘Thank you—ah, thank you. You’re very kind. I’m sure I should enjoy myself immensely.’

‘We have overlooked the fact,’ the doctor whispered to me, ‘that your friend proposed to buy the Great Buchonian.’

‘He is worth anything from twenty to thirty million dollars—four to five million pounds,’ I answered, knowing that it would be hopeless to explain.

‘Really! That is enormous wealth, but the Great Buchonian is not in the market.’

‘Perhaps he does not want to buy it now.’

‘It would be impossible under any circumstances,’ said the doctor.

‘How characteristic!’ murmured the lawyer, reviewing matters in his mind. ‘I always understood from books that your countrymen were in a hurry. And so you would have gone forty miles to town and back—before dinner—to get a scarab? How intensely American! But you talk exactly like an Englishman, Mr. Sargent.’

‘That is a fault that can be remedied. There’s only one question I’d like to ask you. You said it was inconceivable that any man should stop a train on your system?’

‘And so it is—absolutely inconceivable.’

‘Any sane man, that is?’

‘That is what I meant, of course. I mean, with. excep——’

‘Thank you.’

The two men departed. Wilton checked himself as he was about to fill a pipe, took one of my cigars instead, and was silent for fifteen minutes.

Then said he: ‘Have you got a list of the Southampton sailings on you?’

Far away from the greystone wings, the dark cedars, the faultless gravel drives, and the mint-sauce lawns of Holt Hangers runs a river called the Hudson, whose unkempt banks are covered with the palaces of those wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Here, where the hoot of the Haverstraw brick-barge-tug answers the howl of the locomotive on either shore, you shall find, with a complete installation of electric light, nickel-plated binnacles; and a calliope attachment to her steam-whistle, the twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going steam-yacht Columbia, lying at her private pier, to take to his office, at an average speed of seventeen knots,—and the barges can look out for theme selves,—Wilton Sargent, American.

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THE weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet.

“That Cheyne boy’s the biggest nuisance aboard,” said a man in a frieze overcoat, shutting the door with a bang. “He isn’t wanted here. He’s too fresh.”

A white-haired German reached for a sandwich, and grunted between bites: “I know der breed. Ameriga is full of dot kind. I deli you you should imbort ropes’ ends free under your dariff.”

“Pshaw! There isn’t any real harm to him. He’s more to be pitied than anything,” a man from New York drawled, as he lay at full length along the cushions under the wet skylight. “They’ve dragged him around from hotel to hotel ever since he was a kid. I was talking to his mother this morning. She’s a lovely lady, but she don’t pretend to manage him. He’s going to Europe to finish his education.”

“Education isn’t begun yet.” This was a Philadelphian, curled up in a corner. “That boy gets two hundred a month pocket-money, he told me. He isn’t sixteen either.”

“Railroads, his father, aind’t it’?” said the German.

“Yep. That and mines and lumber and shipping. Built one place at San Diego, the old man has; another at Los Angeles; owns half a dozen railroads, half the lumber on the Pacific slope, and lets his wife spend the money,” the Philadelphian went on lazily. “The West don’t suit her, she says. She just tracks around with the boy and her nerves, trying to find out what’ll amuse him, I guess. Florida, Adirondacks, Lakewood, Hot Springs, New York, and round again. He isn’t much more than a second-hand hotel clerk now. When he’s finished in Europe he’ll be a holy terror.”

“What’s the matter with the old man attending to him personally’?” said a voice from the frieze ulster.

“Old man’s piling up the rocks. ‘Don’t want to be disturbed, I guess. He’ll find out his error a few years from now. ’Pity, because there’s a heap of good in the boy if you could get at it.”

“Mit a rope’s end; mit a rope’s end!” growled the German.

Once more the door banged, and a slight, slim-built boy perhaps fifteen years old, a half-smoked cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth, leaned in over the high footway. His pasty yellow complexion did not show well on a person of his years, and his look was a mixture of irresolution, bravado, and very cheap smartness. He was dressed in a cherry-coloured blazer, knickerbockers, red stockings, and bicycle shoes, with a red flannel cap at the back of the head. After whistling between his teeth, as he eyed the company, he said in a loud, high voice: “Say, it’s thick outside. You can hear the fish-boats squawking all around us. Say, wouldn’t it be great if we ran down one?”

“Shut the door, Harvey,” said the New Yorker. “Shut the door and stay outside. You’re not wanted here.”

“Who’ll stop me?” he answered deliberately. “Did you pay for my passage, Mister Martin? ’Guess I’ve as good right here as the next man.”

He picked up some dice from a checker-board and began throwing, right hand against left.

“Say, gen’elmen, this is deader’n mud. Can’t we make a game of poker between us?”

There was no answer, and he puffed his cigarette, swung his legs, and drummed on the table with rather dirty fingers. Then he pulled out a roll of bills as if to count them.

“How’s your mamma this afternoon?” a man said. “I didn’t see her at lunch.”

“In her state-room, I guess. She’s ’most always sick on the ocean. I’m going to give the stewardess fifteen dollars for looking after her. I don’t go down more’n I can avoid. It makes me feel mysterious to pass that butler’s-pantry place. Say, this is the first time I’ve been on the ocean.”

“Oh, don’t apologise, Harvey.”

“Who’s apologising? This is the first time I’ve crossed the ocean, gen’elmen, and, except the first day, I haven’t been sick one little bit. No, sir!” He brought down his fist with a triumphant bang, wetted his finger, and went on counting the bills.

“Oh, you’re a high-grade machine, with the writing in plain sight,” the Philadelphian yawned. “You’ll blossom into a credit to your country if you don’t take care.”

“I know it. I’m an American—first, last, and all the time. I’ll show ’em that when I strike Europe. Pif! My cig’s out. I can’t smoke the truck the steward sells. Any gen’elman got a real Turkish cig on him?”

The chief engineer entered for a moment, red, smiling, and wet. “Say, Mac,” cried Harvey, cheerfully, “how are we hitting it?”

“Vara much in the ordinary way,” was the grave reply. “The young are as polite as ever to their elders, an’ their elders are e’en tryin’ to appreciate it.”

A low chuckle came from a corner. The German opened his cigar-case and handed a skinny black cigar to Harvey.

“Dot is der broper apparatus to smoke, my young friendt,” he said. “You vill dry it? Yes? Den you vill be efer so happy.”

Harvey lit the unlovely thing with a flourish: he felt that he was getting on in grown-up society.

“It would take more’n this to keel me over,” he said, ignorant that he was lighting that terrible article, a Wheeling “stogie.”

“Dot we shall bresently see,” said the German. “Where are we now, Mr. Mactonal?”

“Just there or thereabouts, Mr. Schaefer,” said the engineer. “We’ll be on the Grand Bank to-night; but in a general way o’ speakin’, we’re all among the fishing-fleet now. We’ve shaved three dories an’ near skelped the boom off a Frenchman since noon, an’ that’s close sailin’, ye may say.”

“You like my cigar, eh?” the German asked, for Harvey’s eyes were full of tears.

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“Fine, full flavour,” he answered through shut teeth. “Guess we’ve slowed down a little, haven’t we? I’ll skip out and see what the log says.”

“I might if I vhas you,” said the German.

Harvey staggered over the wet decks to the nearest rail. He was very unhappy; but he saw the deck-steward lashing chairs together, and, since he had boasted before the man that he was never seasick, his pride made him go aft to the second-saloon deck at the stern, which was finished in a turtle-back. The deck was deserted, and he crawled to the extreme end of it, near the flagpole. There he doubled up in limp agony, for the Wheeling “stogie” joined with the surge and jar of the screw to sieve out his soul. His head swelled; sparks of fire danced before his eyes; his body seemed to lose weight, while his heels wavered in the breeze. He was fainting from seasickness, and a roll of the ship tilted him over the rail on to the smooth lip of the turtle-back. Then a low, grey mother-wave swung out of the fog, tucked Harvey under one arm, so to speak, and pulled him off and away to leeward; the great green closed over him, and he went quietly to sleep.

He was roused by the sound of a dinner-horn such as they used to blow at a summer-school he had once attended in the Adirondacks. Slowly he remembered that he was Harvey Cheyne, drowned and dead in mid-ocean, but was too weak to fit things together. A new smell filled his nostrils; wet and clammy chills ran down his back, and he was helplessly full of salt water. When he opened his eyes, he perceived that he was still on the top of the sea, for it was running round him in silver-coloured hills, and he was lying on a pile of half-dead fish, looking at a broad human back clothed in a blue jersey.

“It’s no good,” thought the boy. “I’m dead, sure enough, and this thing is in charge.”

He groaned, and the figure turned its head, showing a pair of little gold rings half hidden in curly black hair.

“Aha! You feel some pretty well now’?” it said. “Lie still so: we trim better.”

With a swift jerk he sculled the flickering boat-head on to a foamless sea that lifted her twenty full feet, only to slide her into a glassy pit beyond. But this mountain-climbing did not interrupt blue-jersey’s talk. “Fine good job, I say, that I catch you. Eh, wha-at? Better good job, I say, your boat not catch me. How you come to fall out?”

“I was sick,” said Harvey; “sick, and couldn’t help it.”

“Just in time I blow my horn, and your boat she yaw a little. Then I see you come all down. Eh, wha-at? I think you are cut into baits by the screw, but you dreeft—dreeft to me, and I make a big fish of you. So you shall not die this time.”

“Where am I?” said Harvey, who could not see that life was particularly safe where he lay.

“You are with me in the dory—Manuel my name, and I come from schooner “We’re Here” of Gloucester. I live to Gloucester. By-and-by we get supper. Eh, wha-at?”

He seemed to have two pairs of hands and a head of cast-iron, for, not content with blowing through a big conch-shell, he must needs stand up to it, swaying with the sway of the flat-bottomed dory, and send a grinding, thuttering shriek through the fog. How long this entertainment lasted, Harvey could not remember, for he lay back terrified at the sight of the smoking swells. He fancied he heard a gun and a horn and shouting. Something bigger than the dory, but quite as lively, loomed alongside. Several voices talked at once; he was dropped into a dark, heaving hole, where men in oilskins gave him a hot drink and took off his clothes, and he fell asleep.

When he waked he listened for the first breakfast-bell on the steamer, wondering why his state-room had grown so small. Turning, he looked into a narrow, triangular cave, lit by a lamp hung against a huge square beam. A three-cornered table within arm’s reach ran from the angle of the bows to the foremast. At the after end, behind a well-used Plymouth stove, sat a boy about his own age, with a flat red face and a pair of twinkling grey eyes. He was dressed in a blue jersey and high rubber boots. Several pairs of the same sort of foot-wear, an old cap, and some worn-out woolen socks lay on the floor, and black and yellow oilskins swayed to and fro beside the bunks. The place was packed as full of smells as a bale is of cotton. The oilskins had a peculiarly thick flavour of their own which made a sort of background to the smells of fried fish, burnt grease, paint, pepper, and stale tobacco; but these, again, were all hooped together by one encircling smell of ship and salt water. Harvey saw with disgust that there were no sheets on his bed-place. He was lying on a piece of dingy ticking full of lumps and nubbles. Then, too, the boat’s motion was not that of a steamer. She was neither sliding nor rolling, but rather wriggling herself about in a silly, aimless way, like a colt at the end of a halter. Water-noises ran by close to his ear, and beams creaked and whined about him. All these things made him grunt despairingly and think of his mother.

“Feelin’ better?” said the boy, with a grin. “Hev some coffee?” He brought a tin cup full, and sweetened it with molasses.

“Isn’t there milk?” said Harvey, looking round the dark double tier of bunks as if he expected to find a cow there.

“Well, no,” said the boy. “Ner there ain’t likely to be till ’baout mid-September. ’Tain’t bad coffee. I made it.”

Harvey drank in silence, and the boy handed him a plate full of pieces of crisp fried pork, which he ate ravenously.

“I’ve dried your clothes. Guess they’ve shrunk some,” said the boy. “They ain’t our style much none of ’em. Twist round an’ see ef you’re hurt any.”

Harvey stretched himself in every direction, but could not report any injuries.

“That’s good,” the boy said heartily. “Fix yerself an’ go on deck. Dad wants to see you. I’m his son,—Dan, they call me,—an’ I’m cook’s helper an’ everything else aboard that’s too dirty for the men. There ain’t no boy here ’cep’ me sence Otto went overboard—an’ he was only a Dutchy, an’ twenty year old at that. How’d you come to fall off in a dead flat ca’am?”

“’Twasn’t a calm,” said Harvey, sulkily. “It was a gale, and I was seasick. ’Guess I must have rolled over the rail.”

“There was a little common swell yes’day an’ last night,” said the boy. “But ef thet’s your notion of a gale—” He whistled. “You’ll know more ’fore you’re through. Hurry! Dad’s waitin’.”

Like many other unfortunate young people, Harvey had never in all his life received a direct order—never, at least, without long, and sometimes tearful, explanations of the advantages of obedience and the reasons for the request. Mrs. Cheyne lived in fear of breaking his spirit, which, perhaps, was the reason that she herself walked on the edge of nervous prostration. He could not see why he should be expected to hurry for any man’s pleasure, and said so. “Your dad can come down here if he’s so anxious to talk to me. I want him to take me to New York right away. It’ll pay him.”

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Dan opened his eyes, as the size and beauty of this joke dawned on him. “Say, dad!” he shouted up the fo’c’sle hatch, “he says you kin slip down an’ see him ef you’re anxious that way. ’Hear, dad?”

The answer came back in the deepest voice Harvey had ever heard from a human chest: “Quit foolin’, Dan, and send him to me.”

Dan sniggered, and threw Harvey his warped bicycle shoes. There was something in the tones on the deck that made the boy dissemble his extreme rage and console himself with the thought of gradually unfolding the tale of his own and his father’s wealth on the voyage home. This rescue would certainly make him a hero among his friends for life. He hoisted himself on deck up a perpendicular ladder, and stumbled aft, over a score of obstructions, to where a small, thick-set, clean-shaven man with grey eyebrows sat on a step that led up to the quarter-deck. The swell had passed in the night, leaving a long, oily sea, dotted round the horizon with the sails of a dozen fishing-boats. Between them lay little black specks, showing where the dories were out fishing. The schooner, with a triangular riding-sail on the mainmast, played easily at anchor, and except for the man by the cabin-roof—“house” they call it—she was deserted.

“Mornin’—good afternoon, I should say. You’ve nigh slep’ the clock around, young feller,” was the greeting.

“Mornin’,” said Harvey. He did not like being called “young feller”; and, as one rescued from drowning, expected sympathy. His mother suffered agonies whenever he got his feet wet; but this mariner did not seem excited.

“Naow let’s hear all abaout it. It’s quite providential, first an’ last, fer all concerned. What might be your name? Where from (we mistrust it’s Noo York), an’ where baound (we mistrust it’s Europe)?”

Harvey gave his name, the name of the steamer, and a short history of the accident, winding up with a demand to be taken back immediately to New York, where his father would pay anything any one chose to name.

“H’m,” said the shaven man, quite unmoved by the end of Harvey’s speech. “I can’t say we think special of any man, or boy even, that falls overboard from that kind o’ packet in a flat ca’am. Least of all when his excuse is thet he’s seasick.”

“Excuse!” cried Harvey. “D’you suppose I’d fall overboard into your dirty little boat for fun?”

“Not knowin’ what your notions o’ fun may be, I can’t rightly say, young feller. But if I was you, I wouldn’t call the boat which, under Providence, was the means o’ savin’ ye, names. In the first place, it’s blame irreligious. In the second, it’s annoyin’ to my feelin’s—an’ I’m Disko Troop o’ the “We’re Here” o’ Gloucester, which you don’t seem rightly to know.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Harvey. “I’m grateful enough for being saved and all that, of course; but I want you to understand that the sooner you take me back to New York the better it’ll pay you.”

“Meanin’—haow?” Troop raised one shaggy eyebrow over a suspiciously mild blue eye.

“Dollars and cents,” said Harvey, delighted to think that he was making an impression. “Cold dollars and cents.” He thrust a hand into a pocket, and threw out his stomach a little, which was his way of being grand. “You’ve done the best day’s work you ever did in your life when you pulled me in. I’m all the son Harvey Cheyne has.”

“He’s bin favoured,” said Disko, drily.

“And if you don’t know who Harvey Cheyne is, you don’t know much—that’s all. Now turn her around and let’s hurry.”

Harvey had a notion that the greater part of America was filled with people discussing and envying his father’s dollars.

“Mebbe I do, an’ mebbe I don’t. Take a reef in your stummick, young feller. It’s full o’ my vittles.”

Harvey heard a chuckle from Dan, who was pretending to be busy by the stump-foremast, and the blood rushed to his face. “We’ll pay for that too,” he said. “When do you suppose we shall get to New York?”

“I don’t use Noo York any. Ner Boston. We may see Eastern Point abaout September; an’ your pa—I’m real sorry I hain’t heerd tell of him—may give me ten dollars efter all your talk. Then o’ course he mayn’t.”

“Ten dollars! Why, see here, I—” Harvey dived into his pocket for the wad of bills. All he brought up was a soggy packet of cigarettes.

“Not lawful currency, an’ bad for the lungs. Heave ’em overboard, young feller, and try ag’in.”

“It’s been stolen!” cried Harvey, hotly.

“You’ll hev to wait till you see your pa to reward me, then?”

“A hundred and thirty-four dollars—all stolen,” said Harvey, hunting wildly through his pockets. “Give them back.”

A curious change flitted across old Troop’s hard face. “What might you have been doin’ at your time o’ life with one hundred an’ thirty-four dollrs, young feller?”

“It was part of my pocket-money—for a month.” This Harvey thought would be a knockdown blow, and it was—indirectly.

“Oh! One hundred and thirty-four dollars is only part of his pocket-money—for one month only! You don’t remember hittin’ anything when you fell over, do you? Crack ag’in’ a stanchion, le’s say. Old man Hasken o’ the “East Wind””—Troop seemed to be talking to himself—“he tripped on a hatch an’ butted the mainmast with his head—hardish. ’Baout three weeks afterwards, old man Hasken he would hev it that the “East Wind” was a commerce-destroyin’ man-o’-war, so he declared war on Sable Island because it was Bridish, an’ the shoals run aout too far. They sewed him up in a bed-bag, his head an’ feet appearin’, fer the rest o’ the trip, an’ now he’s to home in Essex playin’ with little rag dolls.”

Harvey choked with rage, but Troop went on consolingly: “We’re sorry fer you. We’re very sorry fer you—an’ so young. We won’t say no more abaout the money, I guess.”

“’Course you won’t. You stole it.”

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“Suit yourself. We stole it ef it’s any comfort to you. Naow, abaout goin’ back. Allowin’ we could do it, which we can’t, you ain’t in no fit state to go back to your home, an’ we’ve jest come on to the Banks, workin’ fer our bread. We don’t see the ha’af of a hundred dollars a month, let alone pocket-money; an’ with good luck we’ll be ashore again somewheres abaout the first weeks o’ September.”

“But—but it’s May now, and I can’t stay here doin’ nothing just because you want to fish. I can’t, I tell you!”

“Right an’ jest; jest an’ right. No one asks you to do nothin’. There’s a heap as you can do, for Otto he went overboard on Le Have. I mistrust he lost his grip in a gale we f’und there. Anyways, he never come back to deny it. You’ve turned up, plain, plumb providential for all concerned. I mistrust, though, there’s ruther few things you kin do. Ain’t thet so?”

“I can make it lively for you and your crowd when we get ashore,” said Harvey, with a vicious nod, murmuring vague threats about “piracy,” at which Troop almost—not quite—smiled.

“Excep’ talk. I’d forgot that. You ain’t asked to talk more’n you’ve a mind to aboard the “We’re Here”. Keep your eyes open, an’ help Dan to do ez he’s bid, an’ sechlike, an’ I’ll give you—you ain’t wuth it, but I’ll give—ten an’ a ha’af a month; say thirty-five at the end o’ the trip. A little work will ease up your head, an’ you kin tell us all abaout your dad an’ your ma n’ your money efterwards.”

“She’s on the steamer,” said Harvey, his eyes fill-with tears. “Take me to New York at once.”

“Poor woman—poor woman! When she has you back she’ll forgit it all, though. There’s eight of us on the “We’re Here”, an’ ef we went back naow—it’s more’n a thousand mile—we’d lose the season. The men they wouldn’t hev it, allowin’ I was agreeable.”

“But my father would make it all right.”

“He’d try. I don’t doubt he’d try,” said Troop; “but a whole season’s catch is eight men’s bread; an’ you’ll be better in your health when you see him in the fall. Go forward an’ help Dan. It’s ten an’ a ha’af a month, ez I said, an’, o’ course, all f’und, same ez the rest o’ us.”

“Do you mean I’m to clean pots and pans and things?” said Harvey.

“An’ other things. You’ve no call to shout, young feller.”

“I won’t! My father will give you enough to buy this dirty little fish-kettle”—Harvey stamped on the deck—“ten times over, if you take me to New York safe; and—and—you’re in a hundred and thirty by me, anyway.”

“Ha-ow?” said Troop, the iron face darkening.

“How? You know how, well enough. On top of all that, you want me to do menial work”—Harvey was very proud of that adjective—“till the Fall. I tell you I will not. You hear?”

Troop regarded the top of the mainmast with deep interest for a while, as Harvey harangued fiercely all around him.

“Hsh!” he said at last. “I’m figurin’ out my responsibilities in my own mind. It’s a matter o’ jedgment.”

Dan Stole up and plucked Harvey by the elbow. “Don’t go to tamperin’ with dad any more,” he pleaded. “You’ve called him a thief two or three times over, an’ he don’t take that from any livin’ bein’.”

“I won’t!” Harvey almost shrieked, disregarding the advice; and still Troop meditated.

“Seems kinder unneighbourly,” he said at last, his eye travelling down to Harvey. “I don’t blame you, not a mite, young feller, nor you won’t blame me when the bile’s out o’ your systim. ’Be sure you sense what I say? Ten an’ a ha’af fer second boy on the schooner—an’ all f’und—fer to teach you an’ fer the sake o’ your health. Yes or no?”

“No!” said Harvey. “Take me back to New York or I’ll see you—”

He did not exactly remember what followed. He was lying in the scuppers, holding on to a nose that bled, while Troop looked down on him serenely.

“Dan,” he said to his son, “I was sot ag’in’ this young feller when I first saw him, on account o’ hasty jedgments. Never you be led astray by hasty jedgments, Dan. Naow I’m sorry for him, because he’s clear distracted in his upper works. He ain’t responsible fer the names he’s give me, nor fer his other statements nor fer jumpin’ overboard, which I’m abaout ha’af convinced he did. You be gentle with him, Dan, ’r I’ll give you twice what I’ve give him. Them hemmeridges clears the head. Let him sluice it off!”—Troop went down solemnly into the cabin, where he and the older men bunked, leaving Dan to comfort the luckless heir to thirty millions.

THE Boers had wrecked the three centre spans and blown huge pieces out of the stone piers. The wreckage lay adrift in the dirty water, and a section of the British Army was now picking up the pieces. A pontoon bridge had been thrown across the river. You reached it by way of a steep sandy track through the scrub; and on the north bank met a steeper, sandier scarp that climbed out past the haunches of the bridge under the edge of a rocky embankment. Till the temporary railway-trestle was finished, this plunge and that scramble were the only path into the Orange Free State. Hither came McManus, head of the Corporate Equatorial Bank of South Africa, on urgent business. He had been summoned to Bloemfontein by the Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief, who, with the High Commissioner, was then striving to disentangle some finances which President Steyn had dropped. In his inner pocket lay a pass calling on all officers, civil and military, to assist and expedite R. L. McManus, Esq., by every means in their power; for the State had need of him. And his time — which meant other people’s money as well as his own — was valuable.

McManus was not used to passes. As a rule of thirty years, few people interfered with his uprisings or downsittings. He was known to remotest Dutch farmers as an institution representing an institution, from the edge of the Kalahari desert to the outskirts of Portuguese territory — from Salisbury, where they lend money on mortgage, to the Cape Flats, where they foreclose on villa property. His grizzled head held most intimate knowledge of South Africa’s finances for the last quarter of a century; and his word, when they importuned him to speak, was law alike to speculative Bond or Progressive Ministries. Cape Town knew that he had been called up to Bloemfontein and flashed the news to Natal and Kimberley; nor need we for an instant doubt that Pretoria knew it within twelve hours of his departure from the coast. The Corporate Equatorial had been chased out of Bloemfontein with bad words early in the war. Its return signified more than an army corps victorious.

McManus, his Secretary, and half-a-dozen fellow-travellers came in a desolate evening to the southern end of Folly Bridge. A simple race of God-fearing herdsmen had been there before them. The platform, after three days’ vehement cleansing, still reeked of putrid onions, stable litter, and the remnants of bloody sheepskins. They had defiled the corners of every room they had lived in, as dirty little boys defile abandoned houses. They had removed everything save the door-locks, and had left in exchange a portrait in crayon on the wall of one ‘Chamerlain at Modder’, which represented an eye-glassed person dangling at a rope’s end.

‘My word! ‘said a New Zealand doctor, hoping to join his countrymen in the big camps to the North, ‘this is a lovely land to fight over! When do you suppose we go on to Bloemfontein?’

‘I’d give something to know why McManus is going up,’ said the Captain of a troop of Colonial Horse, returning from a Karoo hospital.

‘Who’s McManus?’ said the New Zealander.

‘Good Lord!’ the South African replied, aghast at his ignorance. ‘He’s McManus. He’s in the carriage now. You’ll see he won’t get out. He’s got all his skoff with him. He’ll have a decent dinner — soda-water too.’

The Colonial had been picked up out of the tangled Colesberg kopjes, where soda-water was scarce.

‘I’m going up with the Little Man’s private letters.’ This was an officer late of the Bengal Army.’ That ought to be good for a reserved compartment in a cattle-truck. Wonder how long we’ll have to wait.’ He stumbled forth, grasping the Commander-in-Chief’s private mail-bag. The noises of a full camp filled their ears, but the station was void and black.

‘There must be a Railway Staff Officer somewhere,’ a young and brisk Gunner murmured.’ Let’s find him. Isn’t that a light at the end of the platform? Phew! How the place stinks! ‘

They formed an untidy little procession, and, falling over sleeping men and stray baggage, found at last a bare room, lighted with three candles in beer-bottles, and somewhat over-furnished with two men, both in khaki—one of them very angry.

‘But — but — confound it all,’ said the latter. ‘How did it come to be broached, Guard?’

‘I don’t know, sir. My business is to report it to you. One case of whisky with the top smashed in, and a bottle gone between here an’ Arundel. They’re always doin’ it along the line, sir. I think it’s those dam’ Irregular Corps.’

Yes, that’s all very fine, but how did it come to be broached? Well, never mind — never mind. I shall report it, of course.’

‘Report it!’ whispered a Sapper, with documents for the Intelligence Department. ‘They’ve been looting the Staff’s Reserve baggage down the line. A lot they’ll care for one bottle o’ whisky missing.’

‘What can I do for you, gentlemen,’ said the Railway Staff Officer, when the train Guard had withdrawn.

‘We want to know how we can get on to Bloemfontein.’

‘Not another train till to-morrow night. You’ll have to wait till then.’ The R.S.O. drummed merrily on the table.

It meant a check of twenty-four hours, and someone said so.

‘It isn’t my fault,’ said the R.S.O. I assure you it would give me the greatest pleasure personally to shoot rubbish up the line, but I have my orders; and I’ve nothing more to do with it. I’ve noticed that every man who comes up thinks his business is the one thing I’ve got to attend to, and that the whole Army will go to pieces if he isn’t sent to the Front at once, but — Hullo! What do these Kaffirs want? Been out of the camp without a pass?’

Four Kaffirs were thrust into the room, and the company departed, leaving the R.S.O. to execute justice according to his own lights and those in the beer-bottles.

‘My word’ said the New Zealander. ‘But we didn’t make a fuss about not going up, did we Why was he so stuffy? Who is that man?’

‘He has been here precisely nine days,’ said a dry voice in the darkness. ‘Nine whole days in Africa. He has his orders. We’ll hear a lot about those orders before we leave. Now let’s see if we can whack up something to eat.’

‘Get a light first,’ said the Gunner. ‘If we could find some oil, we’d light the lamps in our carriage. Morgan, go an’ unscrew the lamps an’ bring ’em out here. I’ll look for oil. Hi.’ (This to a shadow that passed). ‘Where do you keep your lamp-oil?’

‘In the lamp-room, of course. I’m the Station-master,’ was the fretful reply.

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‘I beg your pardon. You must be awfully hard-worked. Don’t bother. We’ll get it.’

‘Thank you, sir. Yes, we’re working twenty hours a day. There’s the oil. I’ll strike a match, and you can get the cork out of — ‘ ‘No, you won’t! Chuck that match away. I’d sooner waste your oil than set myself alight, Morgan. Bring the lamps here. I’ll fill ’em.’

‘One of the lamps ain’t empty at all.’ Morgan’s voice came across the siding with a rising snarl. ‘It’s full. It’s trickling all down my cuff.’

‘Never mind. Bring what’s left. We must see to eat.’

The lamps were filled and lit rough-handedly; and plate by plate, and tin by tin, with jack-knives for tin-openers, a meal was dragged together.

The Railway Staff Officer suggested that it should be eaten in his room, and there enlarged on the duties and responsibilities of his office. But the company were tired. Moreover, R.S.O.’s were old birds to them. They knew not fewer than eighty of the breed, and some had been R.S.O.s themselves.

‘I think,’ said the New Zealand doctor, skewering cold tinned herring on a pocket-knife, ‘before I talked about shooting rubbish up the line, I’d try to burn a little of the muck that’s lying about the station. Sweeping isn’t any earthly good.’

‘Oh, that department is probably in charge of the Officer Commanding the Royal Engine-eahs,’ said the Colonial Captain, with a short dry laugh. He had served since the outbreak of the war, and counted thirteen engagements to his credit.

‘A little of the lamp-oil we wasted and a match would do wonders,’ the New Zealander insisted.

‘Don’t presume to dictate to the Army,’ an Imperial Officer said, proudly. ‘I’ll back an R.S.O. against anyone except’ — he looked across the table — ‘a Sapper.’

‘We’re learning. I swear we are learning.’ The young Engineer flushed. ‘We aren’t such fools as we were. The Colonials have taught us a lot. Take that Railway Pioneer Corps that’s laying down the new line on the north bank, for instance.’

‘Yes,’ the Colonial Captain grunted. ‘They’re the pick of the Rand — all mine-managers and machinists and engineers and boiler-makers. They’re working double shifts to finish the track, because they want to get home to Johannesburg. Yes, I know about them.’ Again he laughed unpleasantly.

‘What?’ the New Zealander asked.

‘Oh, the usual thing. They worked day and night, and, of course, they wanted more than Service rations, so their commandant, Phil Tenbroek — he’s a big mine-manager when he’s at home — bought a lot of Bovril and pea-meal, and made soup of it, and served it out to ’em at night. You can see their flare-lamps across the river now, if you look. Day and night they work. Well, the authorities found he’d spent five whole pounds Government money, and they told him he wasn’t to do it. Mind you, that’s now — now — now — when every day — what am I talking of? — every hour’s work means several thousands of pounds saved. Yes, they told him the expenditure was unauthorised.’

‘And then?’ said the young Sapper uneasily.

‘Oh, then. You know Phil Tenbroek. At least I do. Phil sent a wire to Port Elizabeth on his own hook for fifty pounds’ worth of Bovril and pea-meal. He paid out of his pocket, of course; but Philly wants to get back to the Rand as soon as possible, and, it seemed to him the sooner the new line was laid the better. And they’d have crippled the whole Corps — the best engineers in the world — for a fiver! Nice tale, isn’t it? True, too. Look at their flare-lamps! They work.’

Far away across the dark to the northward of the formless country ran a line of fire-dots. The Railway Pioneer Corps were at work on the new track that was to connect with the temporary trestle-bridge. A dull boom came up the gorge between the kopjes.

Blasting away the wreckage,’ the Colonial explained. ‘Risky work at night, but Phil told ’em he was in a hurry. Oh, Philly Tenbroek is a man. I bet he hasn’t taken off his clothes for a week.’

Morning, hot and sultry, put out the flare-lamps on the north of the river, and brought in a train-load of troops from the South to be added to the acres of dusty tentage around Folly Bridge. The travellers, including McManus, had seen men and guns and buck-wagons, doctors, dust and wounded — stony hills and scrub-strewn downs — a few hundred times before. It pleased them better to observe the R.S.O. as he faced the tenth day of his official life. The four Kaffirs had been disposed of, but he was still troubled about the broached whisky, and much annoyed by the eccentricities of lunatic civilians, who, solely for the jest of it, wished to know when they could get goods up to Bloemfontein. The big railway junction thirty miles behind him was also a nuisance. It complained of a congested goods-yard, and desired him to take trucks. Now, his desire was to keep his end of the line neat and open, and, so far, he had succeeded. He drew attention with pride to the long empty sidings, which he had ‘saved,’ though he did not exactly specify the purpose of his economies. There were far too many people, he said, anxious to go to Bloemfontein. Officers, of course, if their passes were in perfect order, might be allowed; but these idle civilians, he was free to say, annoyed him. They simply had no conception of military matters, and they never seemed to think a man had orders. However, he had his orders, and he meant to carry them out. What otherwise was the sense of orders? He paused very often for a reply. The station in the warm, close air stank to heaven.

‘Well, that’s all right,’ said the New Zealander, ‘but when I was quite finished with my orders, it seems to me I’d have another shot at the rubbish about here. My word! Look at all that unemployed labour in the camp! ‘

There were not fewer than two thousand men under the dusty hills. Some of them were being drilled.

McManus went for a walk through the mimosa bushes to look at the late bridge. It had cost a hundred thousand pounds, and somebody would have to account for the breakage. That, indirectly, was McManus’s department.

‘Have you seen McManus?’ cried a private of the Railway Pioneer Corps, as he rode up to the Colonial Captain sitting in the window of what had been Folly Bridge refreshment-room. ‘I’ve seen him. He looks as if he’d just come out of Adderley Street.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘No, but I wanted to ask him who he expects is going to pay for the bridge.’

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‘You will — on the Rand — after the war,’ the Captain drawled.

‘That’s what I supposed, but I wish to goodness McManus could work out some scheme of compensation that ‘ud hit the Transvaal hard.’

‘So do I — but the war expenses will have to be paid by the Rand just the same.’

‘That’s rather hard on us — working as volunteers to mend what the Boers have broken, and then to have the bill sent in to us at the end. McManus lent me two thousand once on stands I had in Johannesburg. I paid him before the war. Wish I hadn’t now. Well, I must go on. S’long.’

At four in the afternoon, a train was made up at Folly Bridge. Into this marched the passengers and their baggage, and at that hour appeared the R.S.O. to satisfy himself that all passes were in order and to issue a ukase.

‘You will be turned back at the other side of the river by the R.S.O. there if your passes are not countersigned by the Station Commandant here,’ he said, smiling.

‘The deuce! When was that order issued?’ the Colonial Captain demanded.

‘It isn’t my fault. I’ve only got my orders, and —’ ‘Yes, yes, we know all that, but where is the Station Commandant?’

‘I don’t know. He was about here this morning, but he left after lunch.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ reflectively from a corner of the carriage.

‘Well, I hope you’ll get across all right, but I tell you now that unless your passes are countersigned by Smith, Station Commandant, you won’t be able to get across even if you were Kitchener himself.’

‘I’d give a month — I’d give three months’ pay to have K. on this platform now — and we’d see,’ said the officer with the Little Man’s letters.

‘I’m only giving you my orders —’

‘And you don’t know where Smith is?’

‘No.’

‘And you expect us to hunt him all around the camp, do you? We’ve been seventeen—twenty-two—hours on this blasted onion-heap, and you and Smith between you have only just discovered —’

‘Well, it isn’t my fault, I’m only —’

‘You ought to keep Smith on the premises then.’

‘That has nothing to do with me. I should recommend you to go out and look for him.’

‘Oh, I’ve no interest in the matter. I’m only going up with the Little Man’s private mail. Here’s the bag. I don’t care. If I’m stopped on the other side, it’s your look-out. I’m sure the Little Man would be quite pleased.’

‘Oh, there’s McManus,’ said the Colonial Captain, looking out of the window. ‘I suppose he’s hunting Smith. D’you think they’ll stop McManus if his pass isn’t countersigned by Smith?’

‘Who’s McManus?’ A giggle of deep delight interrupted the R.S.O. ‘Oh, that civilian! ‘Pon my word, you’d think Bloemfontein was Piccadilly. They’re all wanting to go up there.’

‘Thank you,’ said the Colonial. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to be turned back on the other side. Perhaps if we say we couldn’t find Smith they’ll forgive us.’

‘Well, I’m only giving you my word —’

The train rolled out nearly half a mile and halted in a deep cutting. The passengers stepped out over-ankles into the sand that slid under their feet, and their baggage followed them. A gaggle of Kaffirs marched away with bags and bedding-rolls, and the company followed depressedly. They expected to be met on the other side by a train from the North, which in God’s good time would go back to Bloemfontein.

‘But—but what do they want to stop in the middle of a cutting for?’ said the New Zealander. ‘I wouldn’t have minded walking a hundred yards on the level back there. They might have made a decent platform. I believe I’ve twisted my ankle climbing up the bank.’

‘Oh, this isn’t a patch to what it is on t’other side,’ said an officer on the bridge works. And they walked and they walked till they reached the pontoon, a hundred feet below. McManus’s face seemed a little set as it were — set, but in no wise greatly troubled.

‘Did McManus find Smith?’ said the Colonial, as they climbed the desperate north bank down which buck-wagons were sliding in billows of dust. Here again fifty men’s labour for two days would have greatly smoothed the road.

‘He said he didn’t,’ his companion replied.

‘Glory!’ said the Colonial, and, hopping over a boulder, fell into a bush. A hundred feet of river-bank through deep sand at the end of a mile walk is not easy to cover ; and it was a dewy-browed detachment that broke through the scrub and landed, panting, among the rocks at the gangers’ hut on the north side of the bridge. But the R.S.O. who received them there was cool and utterly calm. He wished to know whether their passes were in order, and a delicious awe fell on the company.

McManus climbed the slope into the Orange Free State easily and dispassionately, his lower jaw protruding, perhaps, one-sixteenth of an inch beyond its normal clinch. The travellers made a little semicircle about the R.S.O.—the R.S.O. of the North Bank of Folly Bridge- about him and about McManus, of the Corporate Equatorial Bank. It was heavenly weather. There was no accommodation of any sort of description, for the gangers’ hut was occupied by military telegraphers.

‘May I trouble you for your pass, please?’

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McManus produced it clumsily. He was more accustomed to demand than to supply documents of identification.

‘Yes — yes — this seems all right’— the company winked as with one eyelid —’ but I don’t see that it has been countersigned by Smith.’

‘Captain Smith was in his bath, when I went to him at Folly Bridge at three forty-five. He sent a verbal message that it would be all right — so far as I understood through the door at the time.’

‘I am afraid I can’t help that.’ The R.S.O. paused uneasily. McManus in grey tweeds, black bowler, and immaculate white collar, gave him not the slightest help.

‘This pass is no good.’ The sentence came out in a rush.

‘Indeed?’ There was a meekness about McManus and a silence on the little knot of bystanders that would have warned any other than an imported Imperial alien that that kopje was occupied in force.

‘No. You’ll have to go back across the river to get Smith’s signature. I can’t let you up on that pass.’ This very cheerfully.

Whole hierarchies had signed it. Lions and unicorns ramped on the top of it. It appealed, as has been said, to earth, fire, and water — to horseflesh, steam, and steel, and all in command thereof, to forward with speed and courtesy R. L. McManus to Bloemfontein; but it lacked the signature of Smith — that Smith who was then towelling himself two miles away.

‘I must go back?’ McManus’s clear eye travelled down the rocky slope behind him to the far pontoon and the further south bank, where a few soldiery, pink as prawns, and at that distance not much larger, were bathing; climbed the wooded bank beyond, and rested with disfavour on the domino-small houses of Folly Bridge.

‘Yes—go back, of course, and get Smith to sign it.’

A lesser man would have said: ‘I’ll see you damned first,’ but McManus was in no sense small. His face did not even flush. He turned away slowly, as though the matter had no further interest, and the R.S.O. dealt with the other passes. To be precise, not one carried the magic signature of Smith. The officer in charge of the Little Man’s private mail almost implored the R.S.O. to stop him for twenty-four hours because he wished to learn whether there was any truth in the current Army legend that under no circumstances would the Little Man swear. The officer in charge of the Staff’s mail followed suit. He had two bags of official correspondence for the Staff, and there were Generals among them who could swear. He, too, prayed to be turned back. The officer with the new maps for the Intelligence Department joined in his entreaties.

‘After all,’ said one cheerily, as they sat down on their bedding- rolls in the gathering dusk, ‘what does it matter, old man? You’re bound to be Stellenbosched in three days.’

Now Stellenbosch is not a name to use lightly, for there go the men who have not done quite so well; and the R.S.O.’s face clouded as he asked for an explanation.

‘Haven’t you stopped McManus?’ said an officer, who knew his man.

‘Who’s McManus?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry — never mind — you’ll find out before Tuesday.’

‘The only person I’ve stopped was that civilian who hadn’t had his pass signed by Smith. I can’t accept a verbal message across the Orange River.’

‘Quite right. You’ll be getting all your message on the wire from Bloemfontein in a little while. I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a trifle.’

‘I don’t think McManus minds much, though,’ the Colonial Captain struck in soothingly. ‘I spoke to him just now. He says he is going on.’

‘I’ll take dashed good care he doesn’t,’ said the R.S.O., exploding. This was something he could understand.

‘Yes — he’s going on in the train when she comes in — so you’ll have another chance, you see. If you stop him, I suppose he will go back to Cape Town, and he’ll tell the Little Man why. He’s rather busy, and he won’t be able to come up again.’

‘But — confound it all — does he expect the whole blessed Orange Free State to wait on his business?’

‘It would be a bad job if it didn’t — just now. He’s the head of the Corporate Equatorial Banking Corporation, and he has been called up to Bloemfontein rather urgently to put the finances of the place straight. He isn’t going up to start a hotel there, you know.’

Somebody lit a pipe; and in the hush you could hear the great river running through the dry hills. A far-away voice on the construction- engine backed close up to the bridge called to someone under a staging.

‘McManus going up to Bloemfontein to-night?’

‘Ye—es.’

‘That means business — thank God.’

‘Why—y?’

‘Why?’Cause they don’t care one scarlet weir for the whole Army — the Boers don’t. They reckon they can get them withdrawn if they win the game in London, but reopenin’ the Bank at Bloemfontein means business. That’s why. It teaches the Dutch more than twenty battles. Wonder they don’t try to cut the line and nab him to-night.’

The silence by the gangers’ hut continued unbroken for twenty puffs.

‘And he did wait outside Smith’s door, while Smith was washing — because I saw him. I wouldn’t have done it,’ said an Imperial Officer slowly,’ but I suppose he wished to see what sort of fools we can be when we go in for war.’

‘And you’ve told him to walk two miles back and two miles here again,’ said the New Zealander, ‘to get Smith’s signature.’

‘And there’s no guarantee Smith won’t be having a hair-cut and shampoo when he reaches there,’ the Colonial Captain added. We knew in Cape Town a week ago that McManus had been called up. But, of course, if he hasn’t got Smith’s signature, that settles it.’

‘What does it matter? Let the brute frolic round the kopjes till Smith’s dry. He’s only the boss of the biggest Bank in the country. Who cares how much they want him at Bloemfontein ? I’d put a guard on him, and march him back in irons, by Jove,’ said a Cavalry Officer. ‘I say, old man, didn’t it ever occur to you to knock off some of the points of these rocks that we’re supposed to sit on? They’re infernally nubbly.’

One by one the stars came out over the hills, and the flare-lamps of the never-sleeping Pioneer Corps puffed and blazed afresh in the river-bed.

Last of all came the train from the North, and when McManus and his Secretary went up to their labelled compartments reserved for them at Bloemfontein, the R.S.O. took no notice.

No more, for that matter, did McManus.

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‘A THROBBING vein,’ said Dr. Gilbert soothingly, ‘is the mother of delusion.’

‘Then how do you account for my knowing when the thing is due?’ Conroy’s voice rose almost to a break.

‘Of course, but you should have consulted a doctor before using—palliatives.’

‘It was driving me mad. And now I can’t give them up.’

‘Not so bad as that! One doesn’t form fatal habits at twenty-five. Think again. Were you ever frightened as a child?’

‘I don’t remember. It began when I was a boy.’

‘With or without the spasm? By the way, do you mind describing the spasm again?’

‘Well,’ said Conroy, twisting in the chair, ‘I’m no musician, but suppose you were a violin-string—vibrating—and some one put his finger on you? As if a finger were put on the naked soul! Awful!’

‘So’s indigestion—so’s nightmare—while it lasts.’

‘But the horror afterwards knocks me out for days. And the waiting for it . . . and then this drug habit! It can’t go on!’ He shook as he spoke, and the chair creaked.

‘My dear fellow,’ said the doctor, ‘when you’re older you’ll know what burdens the best of us carry. A fox to every Spartan.’

‘That doesn’t help me. I can’t! I can’t!’ cried Conroy, and burst into tears.

‘Don’t apologise,’ said Gilbert, when the paroxysm ended. ‘I’m used to people coming a little—unstuck in this room.’

‘It’s those tabloids!’ Conroy stamped his foot feebly as he blew his nose. ‘They’ve knocked me out. I used to be fit once. Oh, I’ve tried exercise and everything. But—if one sits down for a minute when it’s due—even at four in the morning-it runs up behind one.’

‘Ye-es. Many things come in the quiet of the morning. You always know when the visitation. is due?’

‘What would I give not to be sure!’ he sobbed.

‘We’ll put that aside for the moment. I’m thinking of a case where what we’ll call anæmia of the brain was masked (I don’t say cured) by vibration. He couldn’t sleep, or thought he couldn’t, but a steamer voyage and the thump of the screw——’

‘A steamer? After what I’ve told you!’ Conroy almost shrieked. ‘I’d sooner . . . ’

‘Of course not a steamer in your case, but a long railway journey the next time you think it will trouble you. It sounds absurd, but——’

‘I’d try anything. I nearly have,’ Conroy sighed.

‘Nonsense! I’ve given you a tonic that will clear that notion from your head. Give the train a chance, and don’t begin the journey by bucking yourself up with tabloids. Take them along, but hold them in reserve—in reserve.’

‘D’you think I’ve self-control enough, after what you’ve heard?’ said Conroy.

Dr. Gilbert smiled. ‘Yes. After what I’ve seen,’ he glanced round the room, ‘I have no hesitation in saying you have quite as much self-control as many other people. I’ll write you later about your journey. Meantime, the tonic,’ and he gave some general directions before Conroy left.

An hour later Dr. Gilbert hurried to the links, where the others of his regular week-end game awaited him. It was a rigid round, played as usual at the trot, for the tension of the week lay as heavy on the two King’s Counsels and Sir John Chartres as on Gilbert. The lawyers were old enemies of the Admiralty Court, and Sir John of the frosty eyebrows and Abernethy manner was bracketed with, but before, Rutherford Gilbert among nerve-specialists.

At the Club-house afterwards the lawyers renewed their squabble over a tangled collision case, and the doctors as naturally compared professional matters.

‘Lies—all lies,’ said Sir John, when Gilbert had told him Conroy’s trouble. ‘Post hoc, propter hoc. The man or woman who drugs is ipso facto a liar. You’ve no imagination.’

‘’Pity you haven’t a little—occasionally.

‘I have believed a certain type of patient in my time. It’s always the same. For reasons not given in the consulting-room they take to the drug. Certain symptoms follow. They will swear to you, and believe it, that they took the drug to mask the symptoms. What does your man use? Najdolene? I thought so. I had practically the duplicate of your case last Thursday. Same old Najdolene—same old lie.’

‘Tell me the symptoms, and I’ll draw my own inferences, Johnnie.’

‘Symptoms! The girl was rank poisoned with Najdolene. Ramping, stamping possession. Gad, I thought she’d have the chandelier down.’

‘Mine came unstuck too, and he has the physique of a bull,’ said Gilbert. ‘What delusions had yours?’

‘I Faces—faces with mildew on them. In any other walk of life we’d call it the Horrors. She told me, of course, she took the drugs to mask the faces. Post hoc, propter hoc again. All liars!’

‘What’s that?’ said the senior K.C. quickly. ‘Sounds professional.’

‘Go away! Not for you, Sandy.’ Sir John turned a shoulder against him and walked with Gilbert in the chill evening.

‘To Conroy in his chambers came, one week later, this letter:

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‘He knows I’m scarcely fit to look after myself,’ was Conroy’s thought. ‘And he wants me to look after a woman!’

Yet, at the end of half an hour’s irresolution, he accepted.

Now Conroy’s trouble, which had lasted for years, was this:

On a certain night, while he lay between sleep and wake, he would be overtaken by a long shuddering sigh, which he learned to know was the sign that his brain had once more conceived its horror, and in time—in due time—would bring it forth.

Drugs could so well veil that horror that it shuffled along no worse than as a freezing dream in a procession of disorderly dreams; but over the return of the event drugs had no control. Once that sigh had passed his lips the thing was inevitable, and through the days granted before its rebirth he walked in torment. For the first two years he had striven to fend it off by distractions, but neither exercise nor drink availed. Then he had come to the tabloids of the excellent M. Najdol. These guarantee, on the label, ‘Refreshing and absolutely natural sleep to the soul-weary.’ They are carried in a case with a spring which presses one scented tabloid to the end of the tube, whence it can be lipped off in stroking the moustache or adjusting the veil.

Three years of M. Najdol’s preparations do not fit a man for many careers. His friends, who knew he did not drink, assumed that Conroy had strained his heart through valiant outdoor exercises, and Conroy had with some care invented an imaginary doctor, symptoms, and regimen, which he discussed with them and with his mother in Hereford. She maintained that he would grow out of it, and recommended nux vomica.

When at last Conroy faced a real doctor, it was, he hoped, to be saved from suicide by a strait-waistcoat. Yet Dr. Gilbert had but given him more drugs—a tonic, for instance, that would couple railway carriages—and had advised a night in the train. Not alone the horrors of a railway journey (for which a man who dare keep no servant must e’en pack, label, and address his own bag), but the necessity for holding himself in hand before a stranger ‘a little shaken in her nerves.’

He spent a long forenoon packing, because when he assembled and counted things his mind slid off to the hours that remained of the day before his night, and he found himself counting minutes aloud. At such times the injustice of his fate would drive him to revolts which no servant should witness, but on this evening Dr. Gilbert’s tonic held him fairly calm while he put up his patent razors.

Waterloo Station shook him into real life. The change for his ticket needed concentration, if only to prevent shillings and pence turning into minutes at the booking-office; and he spoke quickly to a porter about the disposition of his bag. The old 10.8 from Waterloo to the West was an all-night caravan that halted, in the interests of the milk traffic, at almost every station.

Dr. Gilbert stood by the door of the one composite corridor coach; an older and stouter man behind him. ‘So glad you’re here!’ he cried. ‘Let me get your ticket.’

‘Certainly not,’ Conroy answered. ‘I got it myself—long ago. My bag’s in too,’ he added proudly.

‘I beg your pardon. Miss Henschil’s here. I’ll introduce you.’

‘But—but,’ he stammered—‘think of the state I’m in. If anything happens I shall collapse.’

‘Not you. You’d rise to the occasion like a bird. And as for the self-control you were talking of the other day’—Gilbert swung him round—‘look!’

A young man in an ulster over a silk-faced frock-coat stood by the carriage window, weeping shamelessly.

‘Oh, but that’s only drink,’ Conroy said. ‘I haven’t had one of my—my things since lunch.’

‘Excellent!’ said Gilbert. ‘I knew I could depend on you. Come along. Wait for a minute, Chartres.’

A tall woman, veiled, sat by the far window. She bowed her head as the doctor murmured Conroy knew not what. Then he disappeared and the inspector came for tickets.

‘My maid—next compartment,’ she said slowly.

Conroy showed his ticket, but in returning it to the sleeve-pocket of his ulster the little silver Najdolene case slipped from his glove and fell to the floor. He snatched it up as the moving train flung him into his seat.

‘How nice!’ said the woman. She leisurely lifted her veil, unbuttoned the first button of her left glove, and pressed out from its palm a Najdolene-case.

‘Don’t!’ said Conroy, not realising he had spoken.

‘I beg your pardon.’ The deep voice was measured, even, and low. Conroy knew what made it so.

‘I said “don’t”! He wouldn’t like you to do it!’

‘No, he would not.’ She held the tube with its ever-presented tabloid between finger and thumb. ‘But aren’t you one of the—ah—“soulweary” too?’

‘That’s why. Oh, please don’t! Not at first. I—I haven’t had one since morning. You—you’ll set me off!’

‘You? Are you so far gone as that?’

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He nodded, pressing his palms together. The train jolted through Vauxhall points, and was welcomed with the clang of empty milk-cans for the West.

After long silence she lifted her great eyes, and, with an innocence that would have deceived any sound man, asked Conroy to call her maid to bring her a forgotten book.

‘Conroy shook his head. ‘No. Our sort can’t read. Don’t!’

‘Were you sent to watch me?’ The voice never changed.

‘Me? I need a keeper myself much more—this night of all! ‘

‘This night? Have you a night, then? They disbelieved me when I told them of mine.’ She leaned back and laughed, always slowly. ‘Aren’t doctors stu-upid? They don’t know.’

She leaned her elbow on her knee, lifted her veil that had fallen, and, chin in hand, stared at him. He looked at her—till his eyes were blurred with tears.

‘Have I been there, think you?’ she said.

‘Surely—surely,’ Conroy answered, for he had well seen the fear and the horror that lived behind the heavy-lidded eyes, the fine tracing on the broad forehead, and the guard set about the desirable mouth.

‘Then—suppose we have one—just one apiece? I’ve gone without since this afternoon.’

He put up his hand, and would have shouted, but his voice broke.

‘Don’t! Can’t you see that it helps me to help you to keep it off? Don’t let’s both go down together.’

‘But I want one. It’s a poor heart that never rejoices. Just one. It’s my night.’

‘It’s mine—too. My sixty-fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh.’ He shut his lips firmly against the tide of visualised numbers that threatened to carry him along.

‘Ah, it’s only my thirty-ninth.’ She paused as he had done. ‘I wonder if I shall last into the sixties . . . . Talk to me or I shall go crazy. You’re a man. You’re the stronger vessel. Tell me when you went to pieces.’

‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—eight—I beg your pardon.’

‘Not in the least. I always pretend I’ve dropped a stitch of my knitting. I count the days till the last day, then the hours, then the minutes. Do you?’

‘I don’t think I’ve done very much else for the last——’ said Conroy, shivering, for the night was cold, with a chill he recognised.

‘Oh, how comforting to find some one who can talk sense! It’s not always the same date, is it? ’

‘What difference would that make?’ He unbuttoned his ulster with a jerk. ‘You’re a sane woman. Can’t you see the wicked—wicked—wicked’ (dust flew from the padded arm-rest as he struck it) ‘unfairness of it? What have I done?’

She laid her large hand on his shoulder very firmly.

‘If you begin to think over that,’ she said, ‘you’ll go to pieces and be ashamed. Tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine. Only be quiet—be quiet, lad, or you’ll set me off!’ She made shift to soothe him, though her chin trembled.

‘Well,’ said he at last, picking at the arm-rest between them, ‘mine’s nothing much, of course.’

‘Don’t be a fool! That’s for doctors—and mothers.’

‘It’s Hell,’ Conroy muttered. ‘It begins on a steamer—on a stifling hot night. I come out of my cabin. I pass through the saloon where the stewards have rolled up the carpets, and the boards are bare and hot and soapy.’

‘I’ve travelled too,’ she said.

‘Ah! I come on deck. I walk down a covered alleyway. Butcher’s meat, bananas, oil, that sort of smell.’

Again she nodded.

‘It’s a lead-coloured steamer, and the sea’s lead-coloured. Perfectly smooth sea—perfectly still ship, except for the engines running, and her waves going off in lines and lines and lines—dull grey’. ‘All this time I know something’s going to happen.

‘I know. Something going to happen,’ she whispered.

‘Then I hear a thud in the engine-room. Then the noise of machinery falling down—like fire-irons—and then two most awful yells. They’re more like hoots, and I know—I know while I listen—that it means that two men have died as they hooted. It was their last breath hooting out of them—in most awful pain. Do you understand?’

‘I ought to. Go on.’

‘That’s the first part. Then I hear bare feet running along the alleyway. One of the scalded men comes up behind me and says quite distinctly, “My friend! All is lost!” Then he taps me on the shoulder and I hear him drop down dead.’ He panted and wiped his forehead.

‘So that is your night?’ she said.

‘That is my night. It comes every few weeks—so many days after I get what I call sentence. Then I begin to count.’

‘Get sentence? D’ycu mean this? ‘She half closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and shuddered. ‘“Notice” I call it. Sir John thought it was all lies.’

She had unpinned her hat and thrown it on the seat opposite, showing the immense mass of her black hair, rolled low in the nape of the columnar neck and looped over the left ear. But Conroy had no eyes except for her grave eyes.

‘Listen now! ‘said she. ‘I walk down a road, a white sandy road near the sea. There are broken fences on either side, and Men come and look at me over them.’

‘Just men? Do they speak?’

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‘They try to. Their faces are all mildewy—eaten away,’ and she hid her face for an instant with her left hand. ‘It’s the Faces—the Faces!’

‘Yes. Like my two hoots. I know.’

‘Ah! But the place itself—the bareness—and the glitter and the salt smells, and the wind blowing the sand! The Men run after me and I run . . . . I know what’s coming too. One of them touches me.’

‘Yes! What comes then? We’ve both shirked that.’

‘One awful shock—not palpitation, but shock, shock, shock!’

‘As though your soul were being stopped—as you’d stop a finger-bowl humming?’ he said.

‘Just that,’ she answered. ‘One’s very soul—the soul that one lives by—stopped. So!’

She drove her thumb deep into the arm-rest. ‘And now,’ she whined to him, ‘now that we’ve stirred each other up this way, mightn’t we have just one?’

‘No,’ said Conroy, shaking. ‘Let’s hold on. We’re past’—he peered out of the black windows—‘Woking. There’s the Necropolis. How long till dawn?’

‘Oh, cruel long yet. If one dozes for a minute, it catches one.’

‘And how d’you find that this’—he tapped the palm of his glove—‘helps you?’

‘It covers up the thing from being too real—if one takes enough—you know. Only—only—one loses everything else. I’ve been no more than a bogie-girl for two years. What would you give to be real again? This lying’s such a nuisance.’

‘One must protect oneself—and there’s one’s mother to think of,’ he answered.

‘True. I hope allowances are made for us somewhere. Our burden—can you hear?—our burden is heavy enough.’

She rose, towering into the roof of the carriage. Conroy’s ungentle grip pulled her back.

‘Now you are foolish. Sit down,’ said he.

‘But the cruelty of it! Can’t you see it? Don’t you feel it? Let’s take one now—before I——’

‘Sit down!’ cried Conroy, and the sweat stood again on his forehead. He had fought through a few nights, and had been defeated on more, and he knew the rebellion that flares beyond control to exhaustion.

She smoothed her hair and dropped back, but for a while her head and throat moved with the sickening motion of a captured wry-neck.

‘Once,’ she said, spreading out her hands, ‘I ripped my counterpane from end to end. That takes strength. I had it then. I’ve little now. “All dorn,” as my little niece says. And you, lad?’

‘“All dorn”! Let me keep your case for you till the morning.’

‘But the cold feeling is beginning.’

‘Lend it me, then.’

‘And the drag down my right side. I shan’t be able to move in a minute.’

‘I can scarcely lift my arm myself,’ said Conroy. ‘We’re in for it.’

‘Then why are you so foolish? You know it’ll be easier if we have only one—only one apiece.’

She was lifting the case to her mouth. With tremendous effort Conroy caught it. The two moved like jointed dolls, and when their hands met it was as wood on wood.

‘You must—not!’ said Conroy. His jaws stiffened, and the cold climbed from his feet up.

‘Why—must—I—not?’ She repeated the words idiotically.

Conroy could only shake his head, while he bore down on the hand and the case in it.

Her speech went from her altogether. The wonderful lips rested half over the even teeth, the breath was in the nostrils only, the eyes dulled, the face set grey, and through the glove the hand struck like ice.

Presently her soul came back and stood behind her eyes—only thing that had life in all that place—stood and looked for Conroy’s soul. He too was fettered in every limb, but somewhere at an immense distance he heard his heart going about its work as the engine-room carries on through and beneath the all but overwhelming wave. His one hope, he knew, was not to lose the eyes that clung to his, because there was an Evil abroad which would possess him if he looked aside by a hairbreadth.

The rest was darkness through which some distant planet spun while cymbals clashed. (Beyond Farnborough the 10.8 rolls out many empty milk-cans at every halt.) Then a body came to life with intolerable pricklings. Limb by limb, after agonies of terror, that body returned to him, steeped in most perfect physical weariness such as follows a long day’s rowing. He saw the heavy lids droop over her eyes—the watcher behind them departed—and, his soul sinking into assured peace, Conroy slept.

Light on his eyes and a salt breath roused him without shock. Her hand still held his. She slept, forehead down upon it, but the movement of his waking waked her too, and she sneezed like a child.

‘I—I think it’s morning,’ said Conroy.

‘And nothing has happened! Did you see your Men? I didn’t see my Faces. Does it mean we’ve escaped? Did—did you take any after I went to sleep? I’ll swear I didn’t,’ she stammered.

‘No, there wasn’t any need. We’ve slept through it.’

‘No need! Thank God! There was no need! Oh, look!’

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The train was running under red cliffs along a sea-wall washed by waves that were colourless in the early light. Southward the sun rose mistily upon the Channel.

She leaned out of the window and breathed to the bottom of her lungs, while the wind wrenched down her dishevelled hair and blew it below her waist.

‘Well!’ she said with splendid eyes. ‘Aren’t you still waiting for something to happen?’

‘No. Not till next time. We’ve been let off,’ Conroy answered, breathing as deeply as she.

‘Then we ought to say our prayers.’

‘What nonsense! Some one will see us.’

‘We needn’t kneel. Stand up and say “Our Father.” We must!’

It was the first time since childhood that Conroy had prayed. They laughed hysterically when a curve threw them against an arm-rest.

‘Now for breakfast!’ she cried. ‘My maid—Nurse Blaber—has the basket and things. It’ll be ready in twenty minutes. Oh! Look at my hair! ‘and she went out laughing.

Conroy’s first discovery, made without fumbling or counting letters on taps, was that the London and South Western’s allowance of washing-water is inadequate. He used every drop, rioting in the cold tingle on neck and arms. To shave in a moving train balked him, but the next halt gave him a chance, which, to his own surprise, he took. As he stared at himself in the mirror he smiled and nodded. There were points about this person with the clear, if sunken, eye and the almost uncompressed mouth. But when he bore his bag back to his compartment, the weight of it on a limp arm humbled that new pride.

‘My friend,’ he said, half aloud, ‘you go into training. Your putty.’

She met him in the spare compartment, where her maid had laid breakfast.

‘By Jove,’ he said, halting at the doorway, ‘I hadn’t realised how beautiful you were!’

‘The same to you, lad. Sit down. I could eat a horse.’

‘I shouldn’t,’ said the maid quietly. ‘The less you eat the better.’ She was a small, freckled woman, with light fluffy hair and pale-blue eyes that looked through all veils.

‘This is Miss Blaber,’said Miss Henschil. ‘He’s one of the soul-weary too, Nursey.’

‘I know it. But when one has just given it up a full meal doesn’t agree. That’s why I’ve only brought you bread and butter.’

She went out quietly, and Conroy reddened.

‘We’re still children, you see,’ said Miss Henschil. ‘But I’m well enough to feel some shame of it. D’you take sugar?’

They starved together heroically, and Nurse Blaber was good enough to signify approval when she came to clear away.

‘Nursey?’ Miss Henschil insinuated, and flushed.

‘Do you smoke?’ said the nurse coolly to Conroy.

‘I haven’t in years. Now you mention it, I think I’d like a cigarette—or something.’

‘I used to. D’you think it would keep me quiet?’ Miss Henschil said.

‘Perhaps. Try these.’ The nurse handed them her cigarette-case.

‘Don’t take anything else,’ she commanded, and went away with the tea-basket.

‘Good!’ grunted Conroy, between mouthfuls of tobacco.

‘Better than nothing,’ said Miss Henschil; but for a while they felt ashamed, yet with the comfort of children punished together.

‘Now,’ she whispered, ‘who were you when you were a man?’

Conroy told her, and in return she gave him her history. It delighted them both to deal once more in worldly concerns—families, names, places, and dates—with a person of understanding.

She came, she said, of Lancashire folk—wealthy cotton-spinners, who still kept the broadened a and slurred aspirate of the old stock. She lived with an old masterful mother in an opulent world north of Lancaster Gate, where people in Society gave parties at a Mecca called the Langham Hotel.

She herself had been launched into Society there, and the flowers at the ball had cost eighty-seven pounds; but, being reckoned peculiar, she had made few friends among her own sex. She had attracted many men, for she was a beauty—the beauty, in fact, of Society, she said.

She spoke utterly without shame or reticence, as a life-prisoner tells his past to a fellow-prisoner; and Conroy nodded across the smoke-rings.

‘Do you remember when you got into the carriage?’ she asked. ‘(Oh, I wish I had some knitting!) Did you notice aught, lad?’

Conroy thought back. It was ages since. ‘Wasn’t there some one outside the door—crying? ‘he asked.

‘He’s—he’s the little man I was engaged to,’ she said. ‘But I made him break it off. I told him ’twas no good. But he won’t, yo’ see.’

‘That fellow? Why, he doesn’t come up to your shoulder.’

‘That’s naught to do with it. I think all the world of him. I’m a foolish wench’—her speech wandered as she settled herself cosily, one elbow on the arm-rest. ‘We’d been engaged—I couldn’t help that—and he worships the ground I tread on. But it’s no use. I’m not responsible, you see. His two sisters are against it, though I’ve the money. They’re right, but they think it’s the dri-ink,’ she drawled. ‘They’re Methody—the Skinners. You see, their grandfather that started the Patton Mills, he died o’ the dri-ink.’

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‘I see,’ said Conroy. The grave face before him under the lifted veil was troubled.

‘George Skinner.’ She breathed it softly. ‘I’d make him a good wife, by God’s gra-ace—if I could. But it’s no use. I’m not responsible. But he’ll not take “No” for an answer. I used to call him “Toots.” He’s of no consequence, yo’ see.’

‘That’s in Dickens,’ said Conroy, quite quickly, ‘I haven’t thought of Toots for years. He was at Doctor Blimber’s.’

‘And so—that’s my trouble,’ she concluded, ever so slightly wringing her hands. ‘But I—don’t you think—there’s hope now?’

‘Eh?’ said Conroy. ‘Oh yes! This is the first time I’ve turned my corner without help. With your help, I should say.’

‘It’ll come back, though.’

‘Then shall we meet it in the same way? Here’s my card. Write me your train, and we’ll go together.’

‘Yes. We must do that. But between times—when we want—’ She looked at her palm, the four fingers working on it. ‘It’s hard to give ’em up.’

‘I But think what we have gained already, and let me have the case to keep.’

She shook her head, and threw her cigarette out of the window. ‘Not yet.’

‘Then let’s lend our cases to Nurse, and we’ll get through to-day on cigarettes. I’ll call her while we feel strong.’

She hesitated, but yielded at last, and Nurse accepted the offerings with a smile.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said to Miss Henschil. ‘But if I were you’—to Conroy—, ‘I’d take strong exercise.’

When they reached their destination Conroy set himself to obey Nurse Blaber. He had no remembrance of that day, except one streak of blue sea to his left, gorse-bushes to his right, and, before him, a coast-guard’s track marked with white-washed stones that he counted up to the far thousands. As he returned to the little town he saw Miss Henschil on the beach below the cliffs. She kneeled at Nurse Blaber’s feet, weeping and pleading.

Twenty-five days later a telegram came to Conroy’s rooms: ‘Notice given. Waterloo again. Twenty fourth.’ That same evening he was wakened by the shudder and the sigh that told him his sentence had gone forth. Yet he reflected on his pillow that he had, in spite of lapses, snatched something like three weeks of life, which included several rides on a horse before breakfast—the hour one most craves Najdolene; five consecutive evenings on the river at Hammersmith in a tub where he had well stretched the white arms that passing crews mocked at; a game of rackets at his club; three dinners, one small dance, and one human flirtation with a human woman. More notable still, he had settled his month’s accounts, only once confusing petty cash with the days of grace allowed him. Next morning he rode his hired beast in the park victoriously. He saw Miss Henschil on horseback near Lancaster Gate, talking to a young man at the railings.

She wheeled and cantered toward him.

‘By Jove! How well you look!’ he cried, without salutation. ‘I didn’t know you rode.’

‘I used to once,’ she replied. ‘I’m all soft now.’

They swept off together down the ride.

‘Your beast pulls,’ he said.

‘Wa-ant him to. Gi-gives me something to think of. How’ve you been?’ she panted. ‘I wish chemists’ shops hadn’t red lights.’

‘Have you slipped out and bought some, then?’

‘You don’t know Nursey. Eh, but it’s good to be on a horse again! This chap cost me two hundred.’

‘Then you’ve been swindled,’ said Conroy.

‘I know it, but it’s no odds. I must go back to Toots and send him away. He’s neglecting his work for me.’

She swung her heavy-topped animal on his none too sound hocks. ‘’Sentence come, lad?’

‘Yes. But I’m not minding it so much this time.’

‘Waterloo, then—and God help us!’ She thundered back to the little frock-coated figure that waited faithfully near the gate.

Conroy felt the spring sun on his shoulders and trotted home. That evening he went out with a man in a pair oar, and was rowed to a standstill. But the other man owned he could not have kept the pace five minutes longer.

He carried his bag all down Number 3 platform at Waterloo, and hove it with one hand into the rack.

‘Well done!’ said Nurse Blaber, in the corridor. ‘We’ve improved too.’

Dr. Gilbert and an older man came out of the next compartment.

‘Hallo!’ said Gilbert. ‘Why haven’t you been to see me, Mr. Conroy? Come under the lamp. Take off your hat. No—no. Sit, you young giant. Ve-ry good. Look here a minute, Johnnie.’

A little, round-bellied, hawk-faced person glared at him.

‘Gilbert was right about the beauty of the beast,’ he muttered. ‘D’you keep it in your glove now?’ he went on, and punched Conroy in the short ribs.

‘No,’ said Conroy meekly, but without coughing. ‘Nowhere—on my honour! I’ve chucked it for good.’

‘Wait till you are a sound man before you say that, Mr. Conroy.’ Sir John Chartres stumped out, saying to Gilbert in the corridor, ‘It’s all very fine, but the question is shall I or we “Sir Pandarus of Troy become,” eh? We’re bound to think of the children.’

‘Have you been vetted?’ said Miss Henschil, a few minutes after the train started. ‘May I sit with you? I—I don’t trust myself yet. I can’t give up as easily as you can, seemingly.’

‘Can’t you? I never saw any one so improved in a month.’

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‘Look here!’ She reached across to the rack, single-handed lifted Conroy’s bag, and held it at arm’s length. ‘I counted ten slowly. And I didn’t think of hours or minutes,’ she boasted.

‘Don’t remind me,’ he cried.

‘Ah! Now I’ve reminded myself. I wish I hadn’t. Do you think it’ll be easier for us to-night?’

‘Oh, don’t.’ The smell of the carriage had brought back all his last trip to him, and Conroy moved uneasily.

‘I’m sorry. I’ve brought some games,’ she went on. ‘Draughts and cards—but they all mean counting. I wish I’d brought chess, but I can’t play chess. What can we do? Talk about something.’

‘Well, how’s Toots, to begin with?’ said Conroy.

‘Why? Did you see him on the platform?’

‘No. Was he there? I didn’t notice.’

‘Oh yes. He doesn’t understand. He’s desperately jealous. I told him it doesn’t matter. Will you please let me hold your hand? I believe I’m beginning to get the chill.’

‘Toots ought to envy me,’ said Conroy.

‘He does. He paid you a high compliment the other night. He’s taken to calling again—in spite of all they say.’

Conroy inclined his head. He felt cold, and knew surely he would be colder.

‘He said,’ she yawned. ‘(Beg your pardon.) He said he couldn’t see how I could help falling in love with a man like you; and he called himself a damned little rat, and he beat his head on the piano last night.’

‘The piano? You play, then?’

‘Only to him. He thinks the world of my accomplishments. Then I told him I wouldn’t have you if you were the last man on earth instead of only the best-looking—not with a million in each stocking.’

‘No, not with a million in each stocking,’ said Conroy vehemently. ‘Isn’t that odd?’

‘I suppose so—to any one who doesn’t know. Well, where was I? Oh, George as good as told me I was deceiving him, and he wanted to go away without saying good-night. He hates standing a-tiptoe, but he must if I won’t sit down.’

Conroy would have smiled, but the chill that foreran the coming of the Lier-in-Wait was upon him, and his hand closed warningly on hers.

‘And—and so—’ she was trying to say, when her hour also overtook her, leaving alive only the fear-dilated eyes that turned to Conroy. Hand froze on hand and the body with it as they waited for the horror in the blackness that heralded it. Yet through the worst Conroy saw, at an uncountable distance, one minute glint of light in his night. Thither would he go and escape his fear; and behold, that light was the light in the watchtower of her eyes, where her locked soul signalled to his soul: ‘Look at me!’

In time, from him and from her, the Thing sheered aside, that each soul might step down and resume its own concerns. He thought confusedly of people on the skirts of a thunderstorm, withdrawing from windows where the torn night is, to their known and furnished beds. Then he dozed, till in some drowsy turn his hand fell from her warmed hand.

‘That’s all. The Faces haven’t come,’ he heard her say. ‘All—thank God! I don’t feel even I need what Nursey promised me. Do you?’

‘No.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘But don’t make too sure.’

‘Certainly not. We shall have to try again next month. I’m afraid it will be an awful nuisance for you.’

‘Not to me, I assure you,’ said Conroy, and they leaned back and laughed at the flatness of the words, after the hells through which they had just risen.

‘And now,’ she said, strict eyes on Conroy, ‘why wouldn’t you take me—not with a million in each stocking? ‘

‘I don’t know. That’s what I’ve been puzzling over.’

‘So have I. We’re as handsome a couple as I’ve ever seen. Are you well off, lad?’

‘They call me so,’ said Conroy, smiling.

‘That’s North country.’ She laughed again. ‘Setting aside my good looks and yours, I’ve four thousand a year of my own, and the rents should make it six. That’s a match some old cats would lap tea all night to fettle up.’

‘It is. Lucky Toots!’ said Conroy.

‘Ay,’ she answered, ‘he’ll be the luckiest lad in London if I win through. Who’s yours?’

‘No—no one, dear. I’ve been in Hell for years. I only want to get out and be alive and—so on. Isn’t that reason enough?’

‘Maybe, for a man. But I never minded things much till George came. I was all stu-upid like.’

‘So was I, but now I think I can live. It ought to be less next month, oughtn’t it?’ he said.

‘I hope so. Ye-es. There’s nothing much for a maid except to be married, and — ask no more. Whoever yours is, when you’ve found her, she shall have a wedding present from Mrs. George Skinner that——’

‘But she wouldn’t understand it any more than Toots.’

‘He doesn’t matter—except to me. I can’t keep my eyes open, thank God! Good-night, lad.’

Conroy followed her with his eyes. Beauty there was, grace there was, strength, and enough of the rest to drive better men than George Skinner to beat their heads on piano-tops—but for the new-found life of him Conroy could not feel one flutter of instinct or emotion that turned to herward. He put up his feet and fell asleep, dreaming of a joyous, normal world recovered—with interest on arrears. There were many things in it, but no one face of any one woman.

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Thrice afterward they took the same train, and each time their trouble shrank and weakened. Miss Henschil talked of Toots, his multiplied calls, the things he had said to his sisters, the much worse things his sisters had replied; of the late (he seemed very dead to them) M. Najdol’s gifts for the soul-weary; of shopping, of house rents, and the cost of really artistic furniture and linen.

Conroy explained the exercises in which he delighted—mighty labours of play undertaken against other mighty men, till he sweated and; having bathed, slept. He had visited his mother, too, in Hereford, and he talked something of her and of the home-life, which his body, cut out of all clean life for five years, innocently and deeply enjoyed. Nurse Blaber was a little interested in Conroy’s mother, but, as a rule, she smoked her cigarette and read her paper-backed novels in her own compartment.

On their last trip she volunteered to sit with them, and buried herself in The Cloister and the Hearth while they whispered together. On that occasion (it was near Salisbury) at two in the morning, when the Lier-in-Wait brushed them with his wing, it meant no more than that they should cease talk for the instant, and for the instant hold hands, as even utter strangers on the deep may do when their ship rolls underfoot.

‘But still,’ said Nurse Blaber, not looking up, ‘I think your Mr. Skinner might feel jealous of all this.’

‘It would be difficult to explain,’ said Conroy.

‘Then you’d better not be at my wedding,’ Miss Henschil laughed.

‘After all we’ve gone through, too. But I suppose you ought to leave me out. Is the day fixed?’ he cried.

‘Twenty-second of September—in spite of both his sisters. I can risk it now.’ Her face was glorious as she flushed.

‘My dear chap!’ He shook hands unreservedly, and she gave back his grip without flinching. ‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am!’

‘Gracious Heavens!’ said Nurse Blaber, in a new voice. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon. I forgot I wasn’t paid to be surprised.’

‘What at? Oh, I see!’ Miss Henschil explained to Conroy. ‘She expected you were going to kiss me, or I was going to kiss you, or something.’

‘After all you’ve gone through, as Mr. Conroy said.’

‘But I couldn’t, could you?’ said Miss Henschil, with a disgust as frank as that on Conroy’s face.

‘It would be horrible—horrible. And yet, of course, you’re wonderfully handsome. How d’you account for it, Nursey?’

Nurse Blaber shook her head. ‘I was hired to cure you of a habit, dear. When you’re cured I shall go on to the next case—that senile-decay one at Bournemouth I told you about.’

‘And I shall be left alone with George! But suppose it isn’t cured,’ said Miss Henschil of a sudden. ‘Suppose it comes back again. What can I do? I can’t send for him in this way when I’m a married woman!’ She pointed like an infant.

‘I’d come, of course,’ Conroy answered. ‘But, seriously, that is a consideration.’

They looked at each other, alarmed and anxious, and then toward Nurse Blaber, who closed her book, marked the place, and turned to face them.

‘Have you ever talked to your mother as you have to me?’ she said.

‘No. I might have spoken to dad—but mother’s different. What d’you mean?’

‘And you’ve never talked to your mother either, Mr. Conroy?’

‘Not till I took Najdolene. Then I told her it was my heart. There’s no need to say anything, now that I’m practically over it, is there?’

‘Not if it doesn’t come back, but——’ She beckoned with a stumpy, triumphant finger that drew their heads close together. ‘You know I always go in and read a chapter to mother at tea, child.’

‘I know you do. You’re an angel.’ Miss Henschil patted the blue shoulder next her. ‘Mother’s Church of England now,’ she explained. ‘But she’ll have her Bible with her pikelets at tea every night like the Skinners.’

‘It was Naaman and Gehazi last Tuesday that gave me a clue. I said I’d never seen a case of leprosy, and your mother said she’d seen too many.’

‘Where? She never told me,’ Miss Henschil began.

‘A few months before you were born—on her trip to Australia—at Mola or Molo something or other. It took me three evenings to get it all out.’

‘Ay—mother’s suspicious of questions,’ said Miss Henschil to Conroy. ‘She’ll lock the door of every room she’s in, if it’s but for five minutes. She was a Tackberry from Jarrow way, yo’ see.’

‘She described your men to the life—men with faces all eaten away, staring at her over the fence of a lepers’ hospital in this Molo Island. They begged from her, and she ran, she told me, all down the street, back to the pier. One touched her and she nearly fainted. She’s ashamed of that still.’

‘My men? The sand and the fences? ‘Miss Henschil muttered.

‘Yes. You know how tidy she is and how she hates wind. She remembered that the fences were broken—she remembered the wind blowing. Sand—sun—salt wind—fences—faces—I got it all out of her, bit by bit. You don’t know what I know! And it all happened three or four months before you were born. There!’ Nurse Blaber slapped her knee with her little hand triumphantly.

‘Would that account for it?’ Miss Henschil shook from head to foot.

‘Absolutely. I don’t care who you ask! You never imagined the thing. It was laid on you. It happened on earth to you! Quick, Mr. Conroy, she’s too heavy for me! I’ll get the flask.’

Miss Henschil leaned forward and collapsed, as Conroy told her afterwards, like a factory chimney. She came out of her swoon with teeth that chartered on the cup.

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‘No—no,’ she said, gulping. ‘It’s not hysterics. Yo’ see I’ve no call to hev ’em any more. No call—no reason whatever. God be praised! Can’t yo’ feel I’m a right woman now?’

‘Stop hugging me!’ said Nurse Blaber. ‘You don’t know your strength. Finish the brandy and water. It’s perfectly reasonable, and I’ll lay long odds Mr. Conroy’s case is something of the same. I’ve been thinking——’

‘I wonder——’ said Conroy, and pushed the girl back as she swayed again.

Nurse Blaber smoothed her pale hair. ‘Yes. Your trouble, or something like it, happened somewhere on earth or sea to the mother who bore you. Ask her, child. Ask her and be done with it once for all.’

‘I will,’ said Conroy . . . . ‘There ought to be——’ He opened his bag and hunted breathlessly.

‘Bless you! Oh, God bless you, Nursey!’ Miss Henschil was sobbing. ‘You don’t know what this means to me. It takes it all off—from the beginning.’

‘But doesn’t it make any difference to you now?’ the nurse asked curiously. ‘Now that you’re rightfully a woman?’

Conroy, busy with his bag, had not heard. Miss Henschil stared across, and her beauty, freed from the shadow of any fear, blazed up within her. ‘I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘But it hasn’t changed anything. I want Toots. He has never been out of his mind in his life—except over silly me.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Conroy, stooping under the lamp, Bradshaw in hand. ‘If I change at Templecombe—for Bristol (Bristol—Hereford—yes)—I can be with mother for breakfast in her room and find out.’

‘Quick, then,’ said Nurse Blaber. ‘We’ve passed Gillingham quite a while. You’d better take some of our sandwiches.’ She went out to get them. Conroy and Miss Henschil would have danced, but there is no room for giants in a South-Western compartment.

‘Good-bye, good luck, lad. Eh, but you’ve changed already—like me. Send a wire to our hotel as soon as you’re sure,’ said Miss Henschil. ‘What should I have done without you?’

‘Or I?’ said Conroy. ‘But it’s Nurse that’s saving us really.’

‘Then thank her,’ said Miss Henschil, looking straight at him. ‘Yes, I would. She’d like it.’

When Nurse Blaber came back after the parting at Templecombe her nose and her eyelids were red, but, for all that, her face reflected a great light even while she sniffed over The Cloister and the Hearth.

Miss Henschil, deep in a house furnisher’s catalogue, did not speak for twenty minutes. Then she said, between adding totals of best, guest, and servants’ sheets, ‘But why should our times have been the same, Nursey?’

‘Because a child is born somewhere every second of the clock,’ Nurse Blaber answered.

‘And besides that, you probably set each other off by talking and thinking about it. You shouldn’t, you know.’

‘Ay, but you’ve never been in Hell,’ said Miss Henschil.

The telegram handed in at Hereford at 12.46 and delivered to Miss Henschil on the beach of a certain village at 2.7 ran thus:

‘“Absolutely confirmed. She says she remembers hearing noise of accident in engine-room returning from India eighty-five.”’

‘He means the year, not the thermometer,’ said Nurse Blaber, throwing pebbles at the cold sea.

‘“And two men scalded thus explaining my hoots.” (The idea of telling me that!) “Subsequently silly clergyman passenger ran up behind her calling for joke, ‘Friend, all is lost,’ thus accounting very words.”

Nurse Blaber purred audibly.

‘“She says only remembers being upset minute or two. Unspeakable relief. Best love Nursey, who is jewel. Get out of her what she would like best.” Oh, I oughtn’t to have read that,’ said Miss Henschil.

‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t want anything,’ said Nurse Blaber, ‘and if I did I shouldn’t get it.’

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TO Lieutenant John McHail,
151st (Kumharsen) P.N.I.,
Hakaiti via Tharanda,
Assam.

DEAR OLD MAN: Your handwriting is worse than ever, but as far as I can see among the loops and fish-hooks, you are lonesome and want to be comforted with a letter. I knew you wouldn’t write to me unless you needed something. You don’t tell me that you have left your regiment, but from what you say about “my battalion,” “my men,” and so forth, it seems as if you were raising military police for the benefit of the Chins. If that’s the case, I congratulate you. The pay is good. Ouless writes to me from some new fort something or other, saying that he has struggled into a billet of Rs. 700 (Military Police), and instead of being chased by writters as he used to be, is ravaging the country round Shillong in search of a wife. I am very sorry for the Mrs. Ouless of the future.

That doesn’t matter. You probably know more about the boys yonder than I do. If you’ll only send me from time to time some record of their movements I’ll try to tell you of things on this side of the water. You say “You don’t know what it is to hear from town.” I say “You don’t know what it is to hear from the dehat,” Now and again men drift in with news, but I don’t like hot-weather khubber. It’s all of the domestic occurrence kind. Old “Hat” Constable came to see me the other day. You remember the click in his throat before he begins to speak. He sat still, clicking at quarter-hour intervals, and after each click he’d say: “D’ye remember Mistress So-an’-So? Well, she’s dead o’ typhoid at Naogong.” When it wasn’t “Mistress So-an’-So” it was a man. I stood four clicks and four deaths, and then I asked him to spare me the rest. You seem to have had a bad season, taking it all round, and the women seem to have suffered most. Is that so?

We don’t die in London. We go out of town, and we make as much fuss about it as if we were going to the Neva. Now I understand why the transport is the first thing to break down when our army takes the field. The Englishman is cumbrous in his movements and very particular about his baskets and hampers and trunks—not less than seven of each—for a fifty-mile journey. Leave season began some weeks ago, and there is a burra-choop along the streets that you could shovel with a spade. All the people that say they are everybody have gone—quite two hundred miles away. Some of ’em are even on the Continent—and the clubs are full of strange folk. I found a Reform man at the Savage a week ago. He didn’t say what his business was, but he was dusty and looked hungry. I suppose he had come in for food and shelter.

Like the rest I’m on leave too. I converted myself into a Government Secretary, awarded myself one month on full pay with the chance of an extension, and went off. Then it rained and hailed, and rained again, and I ran up and down this tiny country in trains trying to find a dry place. After ten days I came back to town, having been stopped by the sea four times. I was rather like a kitten at the bottom of a bucke chasing its own tail. So I’m sitting here under a grey, muggy sky wondering what sort of time they are having at Simla. It’s August now. The rains would be nearly over, all the theatricals would be in full swing, and Jakko Hill would be just Paradise. You’re probably pink with prickly heat. Sit down quietly under the punkah and think of Umballa station, hot as an oven at four in the morning. Think of the dak-gharry slobbering in the wet, and the first little cold wind that comes round the first comer after the tonga is clear of Kalka. There’s a wind you and I know well. It’s blowing over the grass at Dugshai this very moment, and there’s a smell of hot fir trees all along and along from Solon to Simla, and some happy man is flying up that road with fragments of a tonga-bar in his eye, his pet terrier mider his arm, his thick clothes on the back-seat and the certainty of a month’s pure joy in front of him. Instead of which you’re being stewed at Hakaiti and I’m sitting in a second-hand atmosphere above a sausage-shop, watching three sparrows playing in a dirty-green tree and pretending that it’s summer, I have a view of very many streets.and a river. Except the advertisements on the walls, there isn’t one speck of colour as far as my eye can reach. The very cat, who is an amiable beast, comes off black under my hand, and I daren’t open the window for fear of smuts. And this is better than a soaked and sobbled country, with the corn-shocks standing like plover’s eggs in green moss and the oats lying flat in moist limips. We haven’t had any summer, and yesterday I smelt the raw touch of the winter. Just one little whiff to show that the year had turned. “Oh, what a happy land is England!”

I cannot understand the white man at home. You remember when we went out together and landed at the Apollo Bunder with all our sorrows before us, and went to Watson’s Hotel and saw the snake-charmers? You said: “It’ll take me all my lifetime to distinguish one nigger from another.” That was eight years ago. Now you don’t call them niggers any more, and you’re supposed—quite wrongly—to have an insight into native character, or else you would never have been allowed to recruit for the Kumharsens. I feel as I felt at Watson’s. They are so deathlily alike, especially the more educated. They all seem to read the same books, and the same newspapers telling ’em what to admire in the same books, and they all quote the same passages from the same books, and they write books on books about somebody else’s books, and they are penetrated to their boot-heels with a sense of the awful seriousness of their own views of the moment. Above that they seem to be, most curiously and beyond the right of ordinary people, divorced from the knowledge or fear of death. Of course, every man conceives that every man except himself is bound to die (you remember how Hallatt spoke the night before he went out) , but these men appear to be like children in that respect.

I can’t explain exactly, but it gives an air of unreality to their most earnest earnestnesses; and when a young man of views and culture and aspirations is in earnest, the trumpets of Jericho are silent beside him. Because they have everything done for them they know how everything ought to be done; and they are perfectly certain that wood pavements, policemen, shops and gaslight come in the regular course of nature. You can guess with these convictions how thoroughly and cocksurely they handle little trifles like colonial administration, the wants of the army, municipal sewage, housing of the poor, and so forth. Every third common need of average men is, in their mouths, a tendency or a movement or a federation affecting the world. It never seems to occur to ’em that the human instinct of getting as much as possible for money paid, or, failing money, for threats and fawnings, is about as old as Cain; and the burden of their bat is: “Me an’ a few mates o’ mine are going to make a new world.”

As long as men only write and talk they must think that way, I suppose. It’s compensation for playing with little things. And that reminds me. Do you know the University smile? You don’t by that name, but sometimes young civilians wear it for a very short time when they first come out. Something—I wonder if it’s our brutal chaff, or a billiard-cue, or which?—takes it out of their faces, and when they next differ with you they do so without smiling. But that smile flourishes in London. I’ve met it again and again. It expresses tempered grief, sorrow at your complete inability to march with the march of progress at the Universities, and a chastened contempt. There is one man who wears it as a garment. He is frivolously young—not more than thirty-five or forty—and all these years no one has removed that smile. He knows everything about everything on this earth, and above all he knows all about men under any and every condition of life. He knows all about the aggressive militarism of you and your friends; he isn’t quite sure of the necessity of an army; he is certain that colonial expansion is nonsense; and he is more than certain that the whole step of all our Empire must be regulated by the knowledge and foresight of the workingman. Then he smiles—smiles like a seraph with an M.A. degree. What can you do with a man like that? He has never seen an unmade road in his life; I think he believes that wheat grows on a tree and that beef is dug from a mine. He has never been forty miles from a railway, and he has never been called upon to issue an order to anybody except his well-fed servants. Isn’t it wondrous? And there are battalions and brigades of these men in town removed from the fear of want, living until they are seventy or eighty, sheltered, fed, drained and administered, expending their vast leisure in talking and writing.

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But the real fun begins much lower down the line. I’ve been associating generally and very particularly with the men who say that they are the only men in the world who work—and they call themselves the workingman. Now the workingman in America is a nice person. He says he is a man and behaves accordingly. That is to say, he has some notion that he is part and parcel of a great country. At least, he talks that way. But in this town you can see thousands of men meeting publicly on Sundays to cry aloud that everybody may hear that they are poor, downtrodden helots—in fact, “the pore workin’man.” At their clubs and pubs the talk is the same. It’s the utter want of self-respect that revolts. My friend the tobacconist has a cousin, who is, apparently, sound in mind and limb, aged twenty-three, clear-eyed and upstanding. He is a “skibbo” by trade—a painter of sorts. He married at twenty, and he has two children. He can spend three-quarters of an hour talking about his downtrodden condition. He works under another Raj-mistri, who has saved money and started a little shop of his own. He hates that Raj-mistri; he loathes the police; and his views on the lives and customs of the aristocracy are strange. He approves of every form of lawlessness, and he knows that everybody who holds authority is sure to be making a good thing out of it. Of himself as a citizen he never thinks. Of himself as an Ishmael he thinks a good deal. He is entitled to eight hours’ work a day and some time off—said time to be paid for; he is entitled to free education for his children—and he doesn’t want no bloomin’ clergyman to teach ’em; he is entitled to houses especially built for himself because he pays the bulk of the taxes of the country. He is not going to emigrate, not he; he reserves to himself the right of multiplying as much as he pleases; the streets must be policed for him while he demonstrates, immediately under my window, by the way, for ten consecutive hours, and I am probably a thief because my dothes are better than his. The proposition is a very simple one. He has no duties to the State, no personal responsibility of any kind, and he’d sooner see his children dead than soldiers of the Queen. The Government owes him everything because he is a pore workin’man. When the Guards tried their Board-school mutiny at the Wellington Barracks my friend was jubilant. “What did I tell your he said. “You see the very soldiers won’t stand it.”

“What’s it?”

“Bein’ treated like machines instead of flesh and blood. ’Course they won’t.”

The popular evening paper wrote that the Guards, with perfect justice, had rebelled against being treated like machines instead of flesh and blood. Then I thought of a certain regiment that lay in Mian Mir for three years and dropped four hundred men out of a thousand. It died of fever and cholera. There were no pretty nursemaids to work with it in the streets, because there were no streets. I saw how the Guards amused themselves and how their sergeants smoked in uniform. I pitied the Guards with their cruel sentry-goes, their three nights out of bed, and their unlimited supply of love and liquor.

Another man, not a workman, told me that the Guards’ riot—it’s impossible, as you know, to call this kick-up of the fatted flunkies of the army a mutiny—was only “a schoolboy’s prank”; and he could not see that if it was what he said it was, the Guards were no regiment and should have been wiped out decently and quietly. There again the futility of a sheltered people cropped up. You mustn’t treat a man like a machine in this country, but you can’t get any work out of a man till he has learned to work like a machine. D—— has just come home for a few months from the charge of a mountain battery on the frontier. He used to begin work at eight, and he was thankful if he got off at six; most of the time on his feet. When he went to the Black Mountain he was extensively engaged for nearly sixteen hours a day; and that on food at which the “pore workin’man” would have turned up his state-lifted nose. D—— on the subject of labour as understood by the white man in his own home is worth hearing. Though coarse—considerably coarse! But D—— doesn’t know all the hopeless misery of the business. When the small pig, oyster, furniture, carpet, builder or general shopman works his way out of the ruck he turns round and makes his old friends and employes sweat. He knows how near he can go to flaying ’em alive before they kick; and in this matter he is neither better nor worse than a bunnia or a havildar of our own blessed country. It’s the small employer of labour that skins his servant, exactly as the forty-pound householder works her one white servant to the bone and goes to drop pennies into the plate to convert the heathen in the East.

Just at present, as you have read, the person who calls himself the pore workin’man—the man I saw kicking fallen men in the mud by the docks last winter—has discovered a real, fine, new original notion; and he is workhlg it for all he is worth. He calls it the solidarity of labour bundobast; but it’s caste—four thousand years old, caste of Menu—with old shetts, mahajuns, guildtolls, excommunication and all the rest of it. All things considered, there isn’t anything much older than caste—it began with the second generation of man on earth—but to read the “advance” papers on the subject you’d imagine it was a revelation from Heaven. The real fun will begin—as it has begun and ended many times before—when the caste of skilled labour—that’s the pore workin’man—are pushed up and knocked about by the lower and unrecognised castes, who will form castes of their own and outcaste on the decision of their own punchayats. How these castes will scuffle and fight among themselves, and how astonished the Englishman will be!

He is naturally lawless because he is a fighting animal; and his amazingly sheltered condition has made him inconsequent. I don’t like inconsequent lawlessness. I’ve seen it down at Bow Street, at the docks, by the G.P.O., and elsewhere. Its chief home, of course, is in that queer place called the House of Commons, but no one goes there who isn’t forced by business. It’s shut up at present, and the persons who belong to it are loose all over the face of the country, I don’t think—but I won’t swear—that any of them are spitting at policemen. One man appears to have been poaching, others are advocating various forms of murder and outrage—and nobody seems to care. The residue talk—just heavens, how they talk, and what wonderful fictions they tell! And they firmly believe, being ignorant of the mechanism of Government, that they administer the country. In addition, certain of their newspapers have elaborately worked up a famine in Ireland that could be engineered by two Deputy Commissioners and four average Stunts into a “woe” and a “calamity” that is going to overshadow the peace of the nation—even the Empire. I suppose they have their own sense of proportion, but they manage to keep it to themselves very successfully. What do you, who have seen half a countryside in deadly fear of its life, suppose that this people would do if they were chukkered and gabraowed? If they really knew what the fear of death and the dread of injury implied? If they died very swiftly, indeed, and could not count their futile lives enduring beyond next sundown? Some of the men from your—I mean our—part of the world say that they would be afraid and break and scatter and run. But there is no room in the island to run. The sea catches you, midwaist, at the third step. I am curious to see if the cholera, of which these people stand in most lively dread, gets a firm foothold in London. In that case I have a notion that there will be scenes and panics. They live too well here, and have too much to make life worth clinging to—clubs, and shop fronts, and gas, and theatres, and so forth—things that they affect to despise, and whereon and whereby they live like leeches. But I have written enough. It doesn’t exhaust the subject; but you won’t be grateful for other epistles. De Vitre of the Poona Irregular Moguls will have it that they are a tiddy-iddy people. He says that all their visible use is to produce loans for the colonies and men to be used up in developing India. I honestly believe that the average Englishman would faint if you told him it was lawful to use up human life for any purpose whatever. He believes that it has to be developed and made beautiful for the possessor, and in that belief talkatively perpetrates cruelties that would make Torquemada jump in his grave. Go to Alipur if you want to see. I am off to foreign parts—forty miles away—to catch fish for my friend the char-cat; also to shoot a little bird if I have luck.

Yours,  RUDYARD KIPLING

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TO Lieutenant John McHail,
151st (Kumharsen) N.I.,
Hakaiti via Tharanda.

Captain Sahib Bahadur! The last Pi gives me news of your step, and I’m more pleased about it than many. You’ve been “cavalry quick” in your promotion. Eight years and your company! Allahu! But it must have been that long, lean horse-head of yours that looks so wise and says so little that has imposed upon the authorities. My best congratulations. Let out your belt two holes, and be happy, as I am not.

Did I tell you in my last about going to Woking in search of a grave? The dust and the grime and the grey and the sausage-shop told on my spirits to such an extent that I solemnly took a train and went grave-hunting through the Necropolis—locally called the Necrapolis. I wanted an eligible, entirely detached site in a commanding position—six by three and bricked throughout. I found it, but the only drawback was that I must go back to town to the head office to buy it. One doesn’t go to town to haggle for tomb-space, so I deferred the matter and went fishing. All the same, there are very nice graves at Woking, and I shall keep my eye on one of ’em.

Since that date I seem to have been in four or five places, because there are labels on the bag. One of the places was Plymouth, where I found half a regiment at field exercises on the Hoe. They were practising the attack in three lines with the mixed rush at the end, even as it is laid down in the drill-book, and they charged subduedly across the Hoe. The people laughed. I was much more inclined to cry. Except the Major, there didn’t seem to be anything more than twenty years old in the regiment; and oh! but it was pink and white and chubby and undersized—just made to die succulently of disease. I fancied that some of our battalions out with you were more or less young and exposed, but a home battalion is a crêche, and it scares one to watch it. Eminent and distinguished Generals get up after dinner—I’ve listened to two of ’em—and explain that though the home battalion can only be regarded as a feeder to the foreign, yet all our battalions can be regarded as efficient; and if they aren’t efficient we shall find in our military reserve the nucleus—how I loath that lying word!—of the Lord knows what, but the speeches always end with allusions to the spirit of the English, their glorious past, and the certainty that when the hour of need comes the nation will “emerge victorious.” If (sic) the Engineer of the Hungerford Bridge told the Southeastern Railway that because a main girder had stood for thirty years without need of renewal it was therefore sure to stand for another fifty, he would probably get the sack. Our military authorities don’t get the sack. They are allowed to make speeches in public. Some day, if we live long enough, we shall see the glories of the past and the “sublime instinct of an ancient people” without one complete army corps, pitted against a few unsentimental long-range guns and some efficiently organised troops. Then the band will begin to play, and it will not play Rule Britannia until it has played some funny tunes first.

Do you remember Tighe? He was in the Deccan Lancers and retired because he got married. He is in Ireland now, and I met him the other day, idle, unhappy and dying for some work to do. Mrs. Tighe is equally miserable. She wants to go back to Poona instead of administering a big barrack of a house somewhere at the back of a bog. I quote Tighe here. He has, you may remember, a pretty tongue about him, and he was describing to me at length how a home regiment behaves when it is solemnly turned out for a week or a month training under canvas:

“About four in the mornin’, me dear boy, they begin pitchin’ their tents for the next day—four hours to pitch it, and the tent ropes a howlin’ tangle when all’s said and sworn. Then they tie their horses with strings to their big toes and go to bed in hollows and caves in the earth till the rain falls and the tents are flooded, and then, me dear boy, the men and the horses and the ropes and the vegetation of the country cuddle each other till the morning for the company’s sake. And next day it all begins again. Just when they are beginning to understand how to camp they are all put back into their boxes, and half of ’em have lung disease.”

But what is the use of snarling and grumbling? The matter will adjust itself later on, and the one nation on earth that talks and thinks most of the sanctity of human life will be a little astonished at the waste of life for which it will be responsible. In those days, my captain, the man who can command seasoned troops and have made the best use of those troops will be sought after and petted and will rise to honour. Remember the Hakaiti when next you measure the naked recruit.

Let us revisit calmer scenes. I’ve been down for three perfect days to the seaside. Don’t you remember what a really fine day means? A milk-white sea, as smooth as glass, with blue-white heat haze hanging over it, one little wave talking to itself on the sand, warm shingle, four bathing machines, cliff in the background, and half the babies in Christendom paddling and yelling. It was a queer little place, just near enough to the main line of traffic to be overlooked from morning till night. There was a baby—an Ollendorfian baby—with whom I fell madly in love. She lived down at the bottom of a great white sunbonnet; talked French and English in a clear, bell-like voice, and of such I fervently hope will the Kingdom of Heaven be. When she found that my French wasn’t equal to hers she condescendingly talked English and bade me build her houses of stones and draw cats for her through half the day. After I had done everything that she ordered she went off to talk to some one else. The beach belonged to that baby, and every soul on it was her servant, for I know that we rose with shouts when she paddled into three inches of water and sat down, gasping: “Mon Dieu! Je suis mort!” I know you like the little ones, so I don’t apologise for yarning about them. She had a sister aged seven and one-half—a lovely child, without a scrap of self-consciousness, and enormous eyes. Here comes a real tragedy. The girl—and her name was Violet—had fallen wildly in love with a little fellow of nine. They used to walk up the single street of the village with their arms round each other’s necks. Naturally, she did all the little wooings, and Hugh submitted quietly. Then devotion began to pall, and he didn’t care to paddle with Violet. Hereupon, as far as I can gather, she smote him on the head and threw him against a wall. Anyhow, it was very sweet and natural, and Hugh told me about it when I came down. “She’s so unrulable,” he said. “I didn’t hit her back, but I was very angry.” Of course, Violet repented, but Hugh grew suspicious, and at the psychological moment there came down from town a destroyer of delights and a separator of companions in the shape of a tricycle. Also there were many little boys on the beach—rude, shouting, romping little chaps—who said: “Come along!” “Hullo!” and used the wicked word “beastly!” Among these Hugh became a person of importance and began to realise that he was a man who could say “beastly,” and “Come on!” with the best of ’em. He preferred to run about with the little boys on wars and expeditions, and he wriggled away when Violet put her arm round his waist. Violet was hurt and angry, and I think she slapped Hugh. Relations were strained when I arrived because one morning Violet, after asking permission, invited Hugh to come to lunch. And that bad, Spanish-eyed boy deliberately filled his bucket with the cold seawater and dashed it over Violet’s pink ankles. (Joking apart, this seems to be about the best way of refusing an invitation that civilisation can invent. Try it on your Colonel.) She was madly angry for a moment, and then she said: “Let me carry you up the beach, ’cause of the shingles in your toes.” This was divine, but it didn’t move Hugh, and Violet went off to her mother. She sat down with her chin in her hand, looking out at the sea for a long time very sorrowfully. Then she said, and it was her first experience: “I know that Hugh cares more for his horrid bicycle than he does for me, and if he said he didn’t I wouldn’t believe him.”

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Up to date Hugh has said nothing. He is running about playing with the bold, bad little boys, and Violet is sitting on a breakwater, trying to find out why things are as they are. It’s a nice tale, and tales are scarce these days. Have you noticed how small and elemental is the stock of them at the world’s disposal? Men foregathered at that little seaside place, and, manlike, exchanged stories. They were all the same stories. One had heard ’em in the East with Eastern variations, and in the West with Western extravagances tacked on. Only one thing seemed new, and it was merely a phrase used by a groom in speaking of an ill-conditioned horse: “No, sir; he’s not ill in a manner o’ speaking, but he’s so to speak generally unfriendly with his innards as a usual thing.”

I entrust this to you as a sacred gift. See that it takes root in the land. “Unfriendly with his innards as a usual thing.” Remember. It’s better than laboured explanations in the rains. And I fancy it’s raw.

And now. But I had nearly forgotten. We’re a nation of grumblers, and that’s why other people call Anglo-Indians bores. I write feelingly because M——, just home on long leave, has for the second time sat on my devoted head for two hours simply and solely for the purpose of swearing at the Accountant-General. He has given me the whole history of his pay, prospects and promotion twice over, and in case I should misunderstand wants me to dine with him and hear it all for the third time. If M—— would leave the A.-G. alone he is a delightful man, as we all know; but he’s loose in London now, button-holing English friends and quoting leave and paycodes to them. He wants to see a Member of Parliament about something or other, and I believe he spends his nights rolled up in a rezai on the stairs of the India Office waiting to catch a secretary. I like the India Office. They are so beautifully casual and lazy, and their rooms look out over the Green Park, and they are never tired of admiring the view. Now and then a man comes in to report himself, and the secretaries and the under-secretaries and the chaprassies play battledore and shuttlecock with him until they are tired.

Some time since, when I was better, more serious and earnest than I am now, I preached a jehad up and down those echoing corridors, and suggested the abolition of the India Office and the purchase of a four-pound-ten American revolving bookcase to hold all the documents on India that were of public value or could be comprehended by the public. Now I am more frivolous because I am dropping gently into that grave at Woking; and yet I believe in the bookcase. India is bowed down with too much duftar as it is, and the House of Correction, Revision, Division and Supervision cannot do her much good. I saw a committee or a council file in the other day. Only one desirable tale came to me out of that office. If you’ve heard it before stop me. It began with a cutting from an obscure Welsh paper, I think, A man—a gardener—went mad, announced that Lord Cross was the Messiah and burned himself alive on a pile of garden refuse. That’s the first part. I never could get at the second, but I am credibly informed that the work of the India Office stood still for three weeks, while the entire staff took council how to break the news to the Secretary of State. I believe it still remains unbroken.

Decidedly, leave in England is a disappointing thing. I’ve wandered into two stations since I wrote the last. Nothing but the labels on the bag remain—oh, and a memory of a weighing-in at an East End fishing club. That was an experience. I foregathered with a man on the top of a ’bus, and we became great friends because we both agreed that gorgetackle for pike was only permissible in very weedy streams. He repeated his views, which were my views, nearly ten times, and in the evening invited me to this weighing-in, at, we’ll say, rooms of the Lea and Chertsey Piscatorial Anglers’ Benevolent Brotherhood. We assembled in a room at the top of a publichouse, the walls ornamented with stuffed fish and water-birds, and the anglers came in by twos and threes, and I was introduced to all of ’em as “the gen’elman I met just now.” This seemed to be good enough for all practical purposes. There were ten and five shilling prizes, and the affable and energetic clerk of the scales behaved as though he were weighing-in for the Lucknow races. The take of the day was one pound fifteen ounces of dace and roach, about twenty fingerlings, and the winner, who is in charge of a railway bookstall, described minutely how he had caught each fish. As a matter of fact, roach-fishing in the Lea and Thames is a fine art. Then there were drinks—modest little drinks—and they called upon me for a sentiment. You know how things go at the sergeants’ messes and some of the lodges. In a moment of brilliant inspiration I gave “free fishing in the parks” and brought down the whole house. Sah! free fishing for coarse fish in the Serpentine and the Green Park water would hurt nobody and do a great deal of good to many. The stocking of the water—but what does this interest you? The Englishman moves slowly. He is just beginning to understand that it is not sufiicient to set apart a certain amount of land for a lung of London and to turn people into it with “There, get along and play,” unless he gives ’em something to play with. Thirty years hence he will almost allow cafés and hired bands in Hyde Park.

To return for a moment to the fish club. I got away at eleven, and in darkness and despair had to make my way west for leagues and leagues across London. I was on the Mile End Road at midnight and there lost myself, and learned something more about the policeman. He is haughty in the East and always afraid that he is being chaffed. I honestly only wanted sailing directions to get homeward. One policeman said: “Get along. You know your way as well as I do.” And yet another: “You go back to the country where you comed from. You ain’t doin’ no good ’ere!” It was so deadly true that I couldn’t answer back, and there wasn’t an expensive cab handy to prove my virtue and respectability. Next time I visit the Lea and Chertsey Affabilities I’ll find out something about trains. Meantime I keep holiday dolefully. There is not anybody to play with me. They have all gone away to their own places. Even the Infant, who is generally the idlest man in the world, writes me that he is helping to steer a ten-ton yacht in Scottish seas. When she heels over too much the Infant is driven to the O.P. side and she rights herself. The Infant’s host says: “Isn’t this bracing? Isn’t this delightful?” And the Infant, who lives in dread of a chill bringing back his Indian fever, has to say “Ye-es,” and pretend to despise overcoats. Wallah! This is a cheerful worid.

RUDYARD KIPLING

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IT was the unreproducible slid r, as he said this was his ‘fy-ist’ visit to England, that told me he was a New Yorker from New York; and when, in the course of our long, lazy journey westward from Waterloo, he enlarged upon the beauties of his city, I, professing ignorance, said no word. He had, amazed and delighted at the man’s civility, given the London porter a shilling for carrying his bag nearly fifty yards; he had thoroughly investigated the first-class lavatory compartment, which the London and South-Western sometimes supply without extra charge; and now, half awed, half contemptuous, but wholly interested, he looked out upon the ordered English landscape wrapped in its Sunday peace, while I watched the wonder grow upon his face. Why were the cars so short and stilted? Why had every other freight-car a tarpaulin drawn over it? What wages would an engineer get now? Where was the swarming population of England he had read so much about. What was the rank of all those men on tricycles along the roads? When were we due at Plymouth?I told him all I knew, and very much that I did not. He was going to Plymouth to assist in a consultation upon a fellow-countryman who had retired to a place called The Hoe—was that up town or down town?—to recover from nervous dyspepsia. Yes, he himself was a doctor by profession, and how any one in England could retain any nervous disorder passed his comprehension. Never had he dreamed of an atmosphere so soothing. Even the deep rumble of London traffic was monastical by comparison with some cities he could name; and the country—why, it was Paradise. A continuance of it, he confessed, would drive him mad; but for a few months it was the most sumptuous rest cure in his knowledge.

‘I’ll come over every year after this,’ he said, in a burst of delight, as we ran between two ten foot hedges of pink and white may. ‘It’s seeing all the things I’ve ever read about. Of course it doesn’t strike you that way. I presume you belong here? What a finished land it is! It’s arrived. Must have been born this way. Now, where I used to live—Hello I what’s up?’

The train stopped in a blaze of sunshine at Framlynghame Admiral, which is made up entirely of the nameboard, two platforms, and an overhead bridge, without even the usual siding. I had never known the slowest of locals stop here before; but on Sunday all things are possible to the London and South-Western. One could hear the drone of conversation along the carriages, and, scarcely less loud, the drone of the bumblebees in the wallflowers up the bank. My companion thrust his head through the window and sniffed luxuriously.

‘Where are we now?’ said he.

‘In Wiltshire,’ said I.

‘Ah! A man ought to be able to write novels with his left hand in a country like this. Well, well! And so this is about Tess’s country, ain’t it? I feel just as if I were in a book. Say, the conduc—the guard has something on his mind. What’s he getting at? ‘

The splendid badged and belted guard was striding up the platform at the regulation official pace, and in the regulation official voice was saying at each door—

‘Has any gentleman here a bottle of medicine? A gentleman. has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.’

Between each five paces he looked at an official telegram in his hand, refreshed his memory, and said his say. The dreamy look on my companion’s face—he had gone far away with Tess—passed with the speed of a snap -shutter. After the manner of his countrymen, he had risen to the situation, jerked his bag down from the overhead rack, opened it, and I heard the click of bottles. ‘Find out where the man is,’ he said briefly. ‘I’ve got something here that will fix him—if he can swallow still.’

Swiftly I fled up the line of carriages in the wake of the guard. There was clamour in a rear compartment—the voice of one bellowing to be let out, and the feet of one who kicked. With the tail of my eye I saw the New York doctor hastening thither, bearing in his hand a blue and brimming glass from the lavatory compartment. The guard I found scratching his head unofficially, by the engine, and murmuring: ‘Well, I put a bottle of medicine off at Andover, I’m sure I did.’

‘Better say it again, any’ow,’ said the driver. ‘Orders is orders. Say it again.’

Once more the guard paced back, I, anxious to attract his attention, trotting at his heels.

‘In a minute—in a minute, sir,’ he said, waving an arm capable of starting all, the traffic on the London and South-Western Railway at a wave. ‘Has any gentleman here got a bottle of medicine? A gentleman has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.’

‘Where’s the man?’ I gasped.

‘Woking. ’Ere’s my orders.’ He showed me the telegram, on which were the words to be said. ‘’E must have left ’is bottle in the train, an’ took another by mistake. ’E’s been wirin’ from Woking awful, an’, now I come to think of it, I’m nearly sure I put a bottle of medicine off at Andover.’

‘Then the man that took the poison isn’t on the train?’

‘Lord, no, sir. No one didn’t take poison that way. ’E took it away with ’im, in ’is ’ands. ’E’s wirin’ from Wokin’. My orders was to ask everybody on the train, and I ’ave, an’ we’re four minutes late now. Are you comin’ on, sir? No? Right be’ind!’

There is nothing, unless, perhaps, the English language, more terrible than the workings of an English railway line. An instant before it seemed as though we were going to spend all eternity at Framlynghame Admiral, and now I was watching the tail of the train disappear round the curve of the cutting.

But I was not alone. On the one bench of the down platform sat the largest navvy I have ever seen in my life, softened and made affable (for he smiled generously) with liquor. In his huge hands he nursed an empty tumbler marked ‘L.S.W.R.’—marked also, internally, with streaks of blue-gray sediment. Before him, a hand on his shoulder, stood the doctor, and as I came within earshot this is what I heard him say: ‘Just you hold on to your patience for a minute or two longer, and you’ll be as right as ever you were in your life. I’ll stay with you till you’re better.’

‘Lord! I’m comfortable enough,’ said the navvy. ‘Never felt better in my life.’

Turning to me, the doctor lowered his voice. ‘He might have died while that fool conduct—guard was saying his piece. I’ve fixed him, though. The stuff’s due in about five minutes, but there’s a heap to him. I don’t see how we can make him take exercise.’

For the moment I felt as though seven pounds of crushed ice had been neatly applied in the form of a compress to my lower stomach.

‘How—how did you manage it?’ I gasped.

‘I asked him if he’d have a drink. He was knocking spots out of the car—strength of his constitution, I suppose. He said he’d go ’most anywhere for a drink, so I lured him on to the platform, and loaded him up. Cold-blooded people you Britishers are. That train’s gone, and no one seemed to care a cent.’

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‘We’ve missed it,’ I said.

He looked at me curiously.

‘We’ll get another before sundown, if that’s your only trouble. Say, porter, when’s the next train down?’

‘Seven forty-five,’ said the one porter, and passed out through the wicket-gate into the landscape. It was then three-twenty of a hot and sleepy afternoon. The station was absolutely deserted. The navvy had closed his eyes, and now nodded.

‘That’s bad,’ said the doctor. ‘The man, I mean, not the train. We must make him walk somehow—walk up and down:’

Swiftly as might be, I explained the delicacy of the situation, and the doctor from New York turned a full bronze-green. Then he swore comprehensively at the entire fabric of our glorious Constitution, cursing the English language, root, branch, and paradigm, through its most obscure derivatives. His coat and bag lay on the bench next to the sleeper. Thither he edged cautiously, and I saw treachery in his eye.

What devil of delay possessed him to slip on his spring overcoat, I cannot tell. They say a slight noise arouses a sleeper more surely than a heavy one, and scarcely had the doctor settled himself in his sleeves when the giant waked and seized that silkfaced collar in a hot right hand. There was rage in his face—rage and the realisation of new emotions.

‘I’m—I’m not so comfortable as I were,’ he said from the deeps of his interior. ‘You’ll wait along o’ me, you will.’ He breathed heavily through shut lips.

Now, if there was one thing more than another upon which the doctor had dwelt in his conversation with me, it was upon the essential law-abidingness, not to say gentleness, of his much-misrepresented country. And yet (truly, it may have been no more than a button that irked him) I saw his hand travel backwards to his right hip, clutch at something, and come away empty.

‘He won’t kill you,’ I said. ‘He’ll probably sue you in court, if I know my own people. Better give him some money from time to time.’

‘If he keeps quiet till the stuff gets in its work,’ the doctor answered, ‘I’m all right. If he doesn’t . . . my name is Emory—Julian B. Emory—193 ’Steenth Street, corner of Madison and——’

‘I feel worse than I’ve ever felt,’ said the navvy, with suddenness. ‘What—did—you—give—me—the—drink—for?’

The matter seemed to be so purely personal that I withdrew to a strategic position on the overhead bridge, and, abiding in the exact centre, looked on from afar.

I could see the white road that ran across the shoulder of Salisbury Plain, unshaded for mile after mile, and a dot in the middle distance, the back of the one porter returning to Framlynghame Admiral, if such a place existed, till seven forty-five. The bell of a church invisible clanked softly. There was a rustle in the horse-chestnuts to the left of the line, and the sound of sheep cropping close.

The peace of Nirvana lay upon the land, and, brooding in it, my elbow on the warm iron girder of the footbridge (it is a forty-shilling fine to cross by any other means), I perceived, as never before, how the consequences of our acts run eternal through time and through space. If we impinge never so slightly upon the life of a fellow-mortal, the touch of our personality, like the ripple of a stone cast into a pond, widens and widens in unending circles across the aeons, till the far-off gods themselves cannot say where action ceases. Also, it was I who had silently set before the doctor the tumbler of the first-class lavatory compartment now speeding Plymouthward. Yet I was, in spirit at least, a million leagues removed from that unhappy man of another nationality, who had chosen to thrust an inexpert finger into the workings of an alien life. The machinery was dragging him up and down the sunlit platform. The two men seemed to be learning polkamazurkas together, and the burden of their song, borne by one deep voice, was: ‘What did you give me the drink for? ‘

I saw the flash of silver in the doctor’s hand. The navvy took it and pocketed it with his left; but never for an instant did his strong right leave the doctor’s coat-collar, and as the crisis approached louder and louder rose his bull-like roar: ‘What did you give me the drink for?’

They drifted under the great twelve-inch pinned timbers of the footbridge towards the bench, and, I gathered, the time was very near at hand. The stuff was getting in its work. Blue, white, and blue again, rolled over the navvy’s face in waves, till all settled to one rich clay-bank yellow and—that fell which fell.

I thought of the blowing-up of Hell Gate; of the geysers in the Yellowstone Park; of Jonah and his whale; but the lively original, as I watched it foreshortened from above, exceeded all these things. He staggered to the bench, the heavy wooden seat cramped with iron cramps into the enduring stone, and clung there with his left hand. It quivered and shook, as a breakwater-pile quivers to the rush of landward-racing seas; nor was there lacking when he caught his breath, the ‘scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave.’ His right hand was upon the doctor’s collar, so that the two shook to one paroxysm, pendulums vibrating together, while I, apart, shook with them.

It was colossal—immense; but of certain manifestations the English language stops short. French only, the caryatid French of Victor Hugo, would have described it; so I mourned while I laughed, hastily shuffling and discarding inadequate adjectives. The vehemence of the shock spent itself, and the sufferer half fell, half knelt, across the bench. He was calling now upon God and his wife, huskily, as the wounded bull calls upon the unscathed herd to stay. Curiously enough, he used no bad language: that had gone from him with the rest. The doctor exhibited gold. It was taken, and retained. So, too, was the grip on the coat-collar.

‘If I could stand,’ boomed the giant despairingly, ‘I’d smash you—you an’ your drinks. I’m dyin’—dyin’—dyin’!’

‘That’s what you think,’ said the doctor. ‘You’ll find it will do you a lot of good’; and, making a virtue of a somewhat imperative necessity, he added: ‘I’ll stay by you. If you’d let go of me a minute I’d give you something that would settle you.’

‘You’ve settled me now, you damned anarchist. Takin’ the bread out of the mouth of an English workin’ man! But I’ll keep ’old of you till I’m well or dead. I never did you no harm. S’pose I were a little full? They pumped me out once at Guy’s with a stummick-pump. I could see that, but I can’t see this ’ere, an’ it’s killin’ of me by slow degrees.’

‘You’ll be all right in half an hour. What do you suppose I’d want to kill you for?’ said the doctor, who came of a logical breed.

“Ow do I know? Tell ’em in court. You’ll get seven years for this, you body-snatcher. That’s what you are—a bloomin’ body-snatcher. There’s justice, I tell you, in England; and my Union’ll prosecute, too. We don’t stand no tricks with people’s insides ’ere. They gave a woman ten years for a sight less than this. An’ you’ll ’ave to pay ’undreds an’ ’undreds o’ pounds, besides a pension to the missus. You’ll see, you physickin’ furriner. Where’s your licence to do such? You’ll catch it, I tell you!’

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Then I observed, what I had frequently observed before, that a man who is but reasonably afraid of an altercation with an alien has a most poignant dread of the operations of foreign law. The doctor’s voice was flute-like in its exquisite politeness, as he answered:

‘But I’ve given you a very great deal of money—fif—three pounds, I think.’

‘An’ what’s three pounds for poisonin’ the likes o’ me? They told me at Guy’s I’d fetch twenty—cold—on the slates. Ouh! It’s comin’ again.’

A second time he was cut down by the foot, as it were, and the straining bench rocked to and fro as I averted my eyes.

It was the very point of perfection in the heart of an English May-day. The unseen tides of the air had turned, and all nature was setting its face with the shadows of the horse-chestnuts towards the peace of the coming night. But there were hours yet, I knew—long, long hours of the eternal English twilight—to the ending of the day. I was well content to be alive—to abandon myself to the drift of Time and Fate; to absorb great peace through my skin, and to love my country with the devotion that three thousand miles of intervening sea bring to fullest flower. And what a garden of Eden it was, this fatted, clipped, and washen land! A man could camp in any open field with more sense of home and security than the stateliest buildings of foreign cities could afford. And the joy was that it was all mine inalienably—groomed hedgerow, spotless road, decent greystone cottage, serried spinney, tasselled copse, apple-bellied hawthorn, and well-grown tree. A light puff of wind—it scattered flakes of may over the gleaming rails—gave me a faint whiff as it might have been of fresh coconut, and I knew that the golden gorse was in bloom somewhere out of sight. Linnæus had thanked God on his bended knees. when he first saw a field of it; and, by the way, the navvy was on his knees too. But he was by no means praying. He was purely disgustful.

The doctor was compelled to bend over him, his face towards the back of the seat, and from what I had seen I supposed the navvy was now dead. If that were the case it would be time for me to go; but I knew that so long as a man trusts himself to the current of Circumstance, reaching out for and rejecting nothing that comes his way, no harm can overtake him. It is the contriver, the schemer, who is caught by the law, and never the philosopher. I knew that when the play was played, Destiny herself would move me on from the corpse; and I felt very sorry for the doctor.

In the-far distance, presumably upon the road that led to Framlynghame Admiral, there appeared a vehicle and a horse—the one ancient fly that almost every village can produce at need. This thing was advancing, unpaid by me, towards the station; would have to pass along the deep-cut lane, below the railway-bridge, and come out on the doctor’s side. I was in the centre of things, so all sides were alike to me. Here, then, was my machine from the machine. When it arrived, something would happen, or something else. For the rest, I owned my deeply interested soul.

The doctor, by the seat, turned so far as his cramped position allowed, his head over his left shoulder, and laid his right hand upon his lips. I threw back my hat and elevated my eyebrows in the form of a question. The doctor shut his eyes and nodded his head slowly twice or thrice, beckoning me to come. I descended cautiously, and it was as the signs had told. The navvy was asleep, empty to the lowest notch; yet his hand clutched still the doctor’s collar, and at the lightest movement (the doctor was really very cramped) tightened mechanically, as the hand of a sick woman tightens on that of the watcher. He had dropped, squatting almost upon his heels, and, falling lower, had dragged the doctor over to the left.

The doctor thrust his right hand, which was free, into his pocket, drew forth some keys, and shook his head. The navvy gurgled in his sleep. Silently I dived into my pocket, took out one sovereign, and held it up between finger and thumb Again the doctor shook his head. Money was not what was lacking to his peace. His bag had fallen from the’ seat to the ground. He looked towards it, and opened his mouth—O-shape. The catch was not a difficult one, and when I had mastered it, the doctor’s right forefinger was sawing the air. With an immense caution, I extracted from the bag such a knife as they use for cutting collops off legs. The doctor frowned, and with his first and second fingers imitated the action of scissors. Again I searched, and found a most diabolical pair of cocknosed shears, capable of vandyking the interiors of elephants. The doctor then slowly lowered his left shoulder till the navvy’s right wrist was supported by the bench, pausing a moment as the spent volcano rumbled anew. Lower and lower the doctor sank, kneeling now by the navvy’s side, till his head was on a level with, and just in front of, the great hairy fist, and—there was no tension on the coat-collar. Then light dawned on me.

Beginning a little to the right of the spinal column, I cut a huge demilune out of his new spring overcoat, bringing it round as far under his left side (which was the right side of the navvy) as I dared. Passing thence swiftly to the back of the seat, and reaching between the splines, I sawed through the silk-faced front on the left-hand side of the coat till the two cuts joined.

Cautiously as the box-turtle of his native heath, the doctor drew away sideways and to the right, with the air of a frustrated burglar coming out from under a bed, and stood up free, one black diagonal shoulder projecting through the gray of his ruined overcoat. I returned the scissors to the bag, snapped the catch, and held all out to him as the wheels of the fly rang hollow under the railway arch.

It came at a foot-pace past the wicket-gate of the station, and the doctor stopped it with a whisper. It was going some five miles across country to bring home from church some one—I could not catch the name—because his own carriage-horses were lame. Its destination happened to be the one place in all the world that the doctor was most burningly anxious to visit, and he promised the driver untold gold to drive to some ancient flame of his—Helen Blazes, she was called.

‘Aren’t you coming, too?’ he said, bundling his overcoat into his bag.

Now the fly had been so obviously sent to the doctor, and to no one else, that I had no concern with it. Our roads, I saw, divided, and there was, further, a need upon me to laugh.

‘I shall stay here,’ I said. ‘It’s a very pretty country.’

‘My God!’ he murmured, as softly as he shut the door, and I felt that it was a prayer.

Then he went out of my life, and I shaped my course for the railway-bridge. It was necessary to pass by the bench once more, but the wicket was between us. The departure of the fly had waked the navvy. He crawled on to the seat, and with malignant eyes watched the driver flog down the road.

‘The man inside o’ that,’ he called, ‘’as poisoned me. ’E’s a body-snatcher. ’E’s comin’ back again when I’m cold. ’Ere’s my evidence!’

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He waved his share of the overcoat, and I went my way, because I was hungry. Framlynghame Admiral village is a good two miles from the station, and I waked the holy calm of the evening every step of that way with shouts and yells, casting myself down in the flank of the good green hedge when I was too weak to stand. There was an inn,—a blessed inn with a thatched roof, and peonies in the garden,—and I ordered myself an upper chamber in which the Foresters held their courts, for the laughter was not all out of me. A bewildered woman brought me ham and eggs, and I leaned out of the mullioned window, and laughed between mouthfuls. I sat long above the beer and the perfect smoke that followed, till the light changed in the quiet street, and I began to think of the seven forty-five down, and all that world of the Arabian Nights I had quitted.

Descending, I passed a giant in moleskins who filled the low-ceiled tap-room. Many empty plates stood before him, and beyond them a fringe of the Framlynghame Admiralty, to whom he was unfolding a wondrous tale of anarchy, of body-snatching, of bribery, and the Valley of the Shadow from the which he was but newly risen. And as he talked he ate, and as he ate he drank, for there was much room in him; and anon he paid royally, speaking of justice and the law, before whom all Englishmen are equal, and all foreigners and anarchists vermin and slime.

On my way to the station he passed me with great strides, his head high among the low-flying bats, his feet firm on the packed road metal, his fists clenched, and his breath coming sharply. There was a beautiful smell in the air—the smell of white dust, bruised nettles, and smoke, that brings tears to the throat of a man who sees his country but seldom—a smell like the echoes of the lost talk of lovers; the infinitely suggestive odour of an immemorial civilisation. It was a perfect walk; and, lingering on every step, I came to the station just as the one porter lighted the last of a truck-load of lamps, and set them back in the lamp-room, while he dealt tickets to four or five of the population, who, not contented with their own peace, thought fit to travel. It was no ticket that the navvy seemed to need. He was sitting on a bench wrathfully grinding a tumbler into fragments with his heel. I abode in obscurity at the end of the platform, interested as ever, thank heaven, in my surroundings. There was a jar of wheels on the road. The navvy rose as they approached, strode through the wicket, and laid a hand upon a horse’s bridle that brought the beast up on his hireling hind-legs. It was the providential fly coming back, and for a moment I wondered whether the doctor had been mad enough to revisit his practice.

‘Get away; you’re drunk,’ said the driver.

‘I’m not,’ said the navvy. ‘I’ve been waitin’ ’ere hours and hours. Come out, you beggar inside there.’

‘Go on, driver,’ said a voice I did not know—a crisp, clear, English voice.

‘All right,’ said the navvy. ‘You wouldn’t ’ear me when I was polite. Now will you come?’

There was a chasm in the side of the fly, for he had wrenched the door bodily off its hinges, and was feeling within purposefully. A well-booted leg rewarded him, and there came out, not with delight, hopping on one foot, a round and grayhaired Englishman, from whose armpits dropped hymn-books, but from his mouth an altogether different service of song.

‘Come on, you bloomin’ body-snatcher! You thought I was dead, did you?’ roared the navvy. And the respectable gentleman came accordingly, inarticulate with rage.

‘’Ere’s a man murderin’ the Squire,’ the driver shouted, and fell from his box upon the navvy’s neck.

To do them justice, the people of Framlynghame Admiral, so many as were on the platform, rallied to the call in the best spirit of feudalism. It was the one porter who beat the navvy on the nose with a ticket-punch, but it was the three third-class tickets who attached themselves to his legs and freed the captive.

‘Send for a constable! lock him up!’ said that man, adjusting his collar; and unitedly they cast him into the lamp-room, and turned the key, while the driver mourned over the wrecked fly.

Till then the navvy, whose only desire was justice, had kept his temper nobly. Then he went Berserk before our amazed eyes. The door of the lamp-room was generously constructed, and would not give an inch, but the window he tore from its fastenings and hurled outwards. The one porter counted the damage in a loud voice, and the others, arming themselves with agricultural implements from the station garden, kept up a ceaseless winnowing before the window, themselves backed close to the wall, and bade the prisoner think of the gaol. He answered little to the point, so far as they could understand; but seeing that his exit was impeded, he took a lamp and hurled it through the wrecked sash. It fell on the metals and went out. With inconceivable velocity, the others, fifteen in all, followed looking like rockets in the gloom, and with the last (he could have had no plan) the Berserk rage left him as the doctor’s deadly brewage waked up, under the stimulus of violent exercise and a very full meal, to one last cataclysmal exhibition, and—we heard the whistle of the seven forty-five down.

They were all acutely interested in as much of the wreck as they could see, for the station smelt to heaven of oil, and the engine skittered over broken glass like a terrier in a cucumber-frame. The guard had to hear of it, and the Squire had his version of the brutal assault, and heads were out all along the carriages as I found me a seat.

‘What is the row?’ said a young man, as I entered. ‘Man drunk?’

‘Well, the symptoms, so far as my observation has gone, more resemble those of Asiatic cholera than anything else,’ I answered, slowly and judicially, that every word might carry weight in the appointed scheme of things. Till then, you will observe, I had taken no part in that war.

He was an Englishman, but he collected his belongings as swiftly as had the American, ages before, and leaped upon the platform, crying, ‘Can I be of any service? I’m a doctor.’

From the lamp-room I heard a wearied voice wailing: ‘Another bloomin’ doctor!’

And the seven forty-five carried me on, a step nearer to Eternity, by the road that is worn and seamed and channelled with the passions, and weaknesses, and warring interests of man who is immortal and master of his fate.

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KNOW, O MY MASTERS AND NOBLE PERSONS, there was, in the days of the Caliph Haroun Alrashid, a certain Afrit of little sense and great power, named Beiman Be-uql [Faithless and Senseless], dwelling in the city of Bagdad, who had devised brazen engines that ran upon iron roads. These, by the perfection of their operations, dilated the heart with wonder and the eye with amazement, for they resembled, as it were, litters drawn by fire-breathing dragons. Now the Afrit did not make benefactions for the sake of the approbation of Allah, but for money. For such-and-such pieces of money the brazen engines of unexampled celerity accommodated themselves to the desires of the adventurous. They bore the lover to his beloved, the merchant to his market, the fisherman to his nets, and the weaver to his loom, as was permitted by the All-Merciful. The people of Bagdad, who are both amorous and adventurous, disported themselves by day and by night on these engines, and gave the Afrit gold as from a catapult; and some twelve merchants of the city entered into a partnership with the Afrit, for the gains that accrued. Accordingly the Afrit became slothful and of a negligent disposition, forgetting that which is written:

‘Except sword contend against sword in battle how shall a sword be sharpened? Except his neighbour contend against him in the market-place even the Very Veracious would sell rotten figs at enormous profit.’

Allah (Whose Name be exalted!) caused the belly of the Afrit to expand with fatness, and his eyes to be darkened with over-much meat; and he dismounted from the steed of zeal and stretched himself upon the pillow of shamelessness, and ceased to concern himself at all with the comings and the goings of his brazen engines.

The rumour of these things reached the ears of the Prince of the Faithful (whose perspicacity be rewarded!), and he called Mesrour, chief of the Eunuchs, and Giaffar into his presence, and he said: ‘What is the complaint against the Afrit that his engines are lacking in celerity?’ Upon which Mesrour kissed the ground, and said: ‘O my Lord, let the Prince of the Faithful go out into the city and make enquiry.’ Then Mesrour fetched the clothes of three Frankish merchants, and they went out, all three, disguised as Frankish merchants, to the place of the brazen engines, which is over against the chief quarter of Bagdad. And they met a young man with a pair of linen drawers upon his shoulder and a linen cloth under his arm – for he would bathe in the water – and as he walked he wept and recited the following verses:

‘May Allah preserve the pure-intentioned from the engines of the Afrit! I am old in calamity, but expert in resignation. I enter the engines constrained only by stringent necessity: They regard the efflux of time as a drunkard regards the fallen petals of his chaplet: and they attain their ends solely by the fortuitousness of unmitigated fatuity.’

Then they went into the caravanserai appointed for the coming and the departure, and it was as though a battle had passed that way; for the caravanserai was full of smoke, black and white, and the ground was piled with the baggage of the faithful – pots, and bundles, and food, and medicaments, and the implements of exercise and diversion, all in little heaps, and by each heap stood distressful women and children not a few, imploring guidance. Hereupon the Caliph enquired: ‘What have these done to merit extinction?’ And Giaffar replied: ‘They go a journey in the brazen engines,’ and he recited the following verses:

‘The Mercy of Allah is upon all things created, whereby the ignorant emerge from vicissitude. If it seem good in the eyes of the Fashioner of Events, doubt not that these, even these, shall ultimately arrive at their destination.’

Then came a servant of the Afrit clad in bluish raiment, and cried: ‘With thy permission!’ and smote the legs of Giaffar from under him by means of a small wheeled cart which he wheeled in haste, and he recited the following verses:

‘O True Believers! The first is behind the third, and the third is before the second. Advance boldly and turn to the right! Continue and turn to the left, for that brazen engine which departs for Lawaz and Isbahan upon the hour of second prayer lacking one eighth of an hour.

Come hither, O true Believers, and behold the brazen engine which departs for Raidill: but go elsewhere if thou wouldst behold the towers of Harundill!

Ya Illah! Allah! Six is four and three is five; but the second and third are only little engines from Sha’ham.’

Then the Afrits of the engines shrieked with a lamentable shrieking, and the faithful were cast into turmoil. Then came Mesrour with written bonds which he had purchased from the Afrit for money, and upon each bond was written the following verses:

‘By the merit of this white bond it is permitted to such an one, the son of such an one, to enter into such-and-such an one of my engines, and to sit in the place appointed for such as hold the white bonds, and to proceed to such-and-such a place.

But it is forbidden to such an one to linger more than a day after that he has purchased the bond: nor may he give away the bond even to his maternal uncle, but must strictly seat himself at the hour appointed. Moreover, I take Allah to witness that I wash my hands thrice of all that may befall this person, either by the sloth and negligence of my Afrits, or by the sloth and negligence of any other Afrits, or by the errors of any of the creatures of Allah!’

And it was signed with the seal of the Afrit. And the Caliph said: ‘This is a notable bond. Whither go we?’

And Mesrour said: ‘To Isbahan by way of Lawaz. Come swiftly.’ So through the Protection of Allah, Who protects whom He will, they entered the litter appointed for such as hold the white bonds of the Afrit – a room of six seats and no more, of a bluish colour, with windows upon either side, and in the roof a lamp. Now there followed upon their heels the wife of a fisherman, perfumed with new wine, a woman of scandalous aspect; and four children who had never known the baths; and two men, sons of a kabab-seller; and a gambler upon the swiftness of horses; and a maiden, whose hair was like brass wire, who leered with the leer of invitation; and the wet-nurse of a sickly one.

When the Caliph perceived that their bonds were written on blue or brown paper only, and not one upon white, he said: ‘This is the place appointed solely for such as have the white bonds. I conjure ye by Allah, remove elsewhere!’ But they laughed, and the wife of the fisherman demanded of the maiden her opinion as to whether the Caliph resembled a water-bird of antiquity, and the two sons of the kabab-seller said: ‘Behold his hair!’ which is the salutation of the unseemly. But the wet-nurse said: ‘Has Allah deprived thee of understanding, that thou hast forgotten the day is Saturday?’

At this the Caliph laughed and replied: ‘What is the merit of this one day which, by the ordinances of Allah, hath recurred once in the seven since the beginning?’ And the wet-nurse recited the following verses:

‘When the carpet of Opportunity is unrolled before thee, do not consider where thou shalt sit, but leap swiftly into the middle thereof, and take firm hold on all four comers.

Let the proud man be abashed, but consider thou thine own advancement.

What are the colours of bonds to the true believer, or the gradations of affluence to such as go in haste?’

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So the Caliph said: ‘Of what good is the Afrit’s bond?’ And the maiden with the hair like brass wire laughed and said: ‘None to thee, O my beloved, but much to the Afrit,’ and she spoke with laxity of the Caliph’s wife (for she thought him to be a Frankish merchant) and of the legs and visage of Mesrour. So they abounded in impure talk and contention upon the way, and the wife of the fisherman vomited the wine from her stomach, and the Caliph’s heart became contracted on account of the incommodiousness of the situation.

Thus they reached the city of Lawaz, and waited for a brazen engine to bear them to Isbahan. Now there are some eight alley-ways in that city for the entry and departure of the engines, but no man, not even the servants of the Afrit, knows by which alley-way any one engine will enter or depart. And lest men should by study attain enlightenment the place is without lamps, and the alley-ways are joined by magic bridges and corridors, and mazes that are each the work of Afrits. Therefore the adventurous must lay hold upon the bridle of courage and pursue the ball of his goal with the mallet of ferocity.

After a great while Mesrour said: ‘O Prince of the Faithful, there is no escape from this pestilent locality till the Afrit brings a new engine, and it is reported to me by the veracious, whose skins are wrinkled through long waiting, that that engine is not here.’ Now upon the wall of the place was written: ‘At the hour of evening prayer a brazen engine will depart for Isbahan.’ This was written in large characters, but beneath had the Afrit written the following verses:

‘O true believers, who can do more than set forth his holy intentions?

This is a heart-lifting verse to read – the verse of the engines arriving and departing.

Consider it no more than as a song sung in a rose-garden, or as the voice of the nightingale among roses.

I have bound roses round the rod of Inaccuracy, and wreathed Emptiness with a desirable wreath:

But of the coming and the going of the engines I have washed my hands thrice.’

And it was signed with the seal of the Afrit.

Then the Caliph’s liver grew congested, and he said: ‘What are the promises of this impure Afrit?’ And Mesrour said; ‘As a stake in bran! Behold his shamelessness, and the names of those whom he has afflicted.’ And upon another wall was written that all might read:

‘Such an one, the son of such an one, was upon such-and-such a day beaten with fifty strokes of the ferash for that he tampered with a white bond of the Afrit.

And such an one, the son of such another, was fined an hundred pieces of gold because he gave the half of a white bond to his maternal uncle.

O true believers, read and fear!’

And the Caliph said: ‘Not content with afflicting us by the means of his own idleness and uncleanliness, he afflicts the faithful by means of the law. Assuredly I will subject him to the operations of a law which he does not comprehend, and pursue him with a torment which he has not in the least anticipated.’

Then they leaped upon a brazen engine that came out of the darkness, and it bore them to a city called ‘Alisham, and it ceased; and they waited in an extreme discomfort for yet other engines which came not. For three days and three nights the Caliph, and Mesrour, and Giaffar resigned the direction of their feet into the hands of the Afrit, but Allah (Whose Power is uplifting) maintained them alive. Throughout the length and the breadth of the Caliph’s dominions there was not one brazen engine which arrived upon the hour appointed; nor within an hour of that hour; nor was there any shame or penitence among the servants of the Afrit. There was no dependence upon their veracity and no refuge under the shadow of their assertions. And the Caliph spoke with men anxious to see their sick who desired them; and with merchants hastening to the market; with lovers seeking their beloveds; with women purchasing commodities; with muleteers, and craftsmen, and butchers, and courtezans, and widows, and the pious, and the clean and the unclean who had confided themselves to the engines of the Afrit. There was but one thing certain in all the machinations of the Afrit – that he had taken the money of the true believers, and that he had cheated them all every one. Then the Caliph returned to his palace and bathed and refreshed himself, and repaired to the Lady Zobeide, his wife, and told her all that story. And she said: ‘O my Lord, I conjure thee to chastise the Afrit with a heavy chastisement.’ And the Caliph said: ‘He is an Afrit. How may a creature of Allah chastise a son of fire?’ Then the Lady Zobeide recited the following verses:

‘At the end and the beginning of all events permitted upon the Footstool of God sits either a Man or a Woman.

Can a Woman be more than a Woman? No, or she would be in Paradise. Can a Man be more than a Man? No, or he would be elsewhere.

Allah be exalted, Who has decreed that we of flesh and blood, confident in integrity, meet with nothing in the world other than Men or Women!’

And the Caliph took counsel with the Lady Zobeide and together they devised an excellent device.

Know, O masters and noble persons, that the first of the twelve merchants of Bagdad who had associated themselves with the Afrit for the sake of gain was called Ali, son of Abu Bakr, and he was wealthy and he loaned money to the Afrit and took usury therefor. His stall was in the market, but his house where he received his friends was in the rich quarter of the city of Bagdad.

Upon a day appointed, when he was making merry with his friends, there came to Ali a messenger with a message, written upon pale paper, and the message said:

‘Peace be unto thee, O Ali, son of Abu Bakr. I am a man with red hair, the father of three sons and two daughters. Also my income is sufficient for my needs. I am delayed an hour upon my journey by the faithlessness of one of thy brazen engines, and I tell thee this for the love I bear thee.’

And Ali said: ‘Whose is this shamelessness? I am no more than an overseer of the partnership with the Afrit. What have I to do with brazen engines?’ Then came a second messenger with a second message and it said:

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‘May we never be made sad by thy loss, O Ali, son of Abu Bakr. I am a widow lame of one leg, and I bear a little black bag. Moreover, it rains and I am cold. One of thy brazen engines has experienced a contraction of the interior, whereby it has ceased to proceed. Send hither an implement for its repair, if thou lovest me.’

And the skin of Ali’s forehead wrinkled, and he cursed the widow and her forefathers, and said: ‘By Allah, am I the refuge of the destitute? Bring no more such messages to this house, O messengers, but take them to my stall in the market that the clerks may receive them. This house is the house of my rest.’

And the messengers said: ‘Little rest for thee, O son of Abu Bakr, for there walks an host behind us bearing messages which are not to thy clerks, but to thee! Doubtless thou hast relieved a city by stealth, which is only now known to the grateful.’

And there came a third messenger with a package, intricately corded, demanding a price and receipt, and in its heart was a huge stone delicately wrapped, and on the wrapping was this message:

‘Allah preserve thee, O chief of the Directors of the brazen engines! I am the son of a barber newly affianced to be wed. It is reported to me in the city of Krahidin that one of thy brazen engines has not arrived upon the hour appointed. I myself use not thy brazen engines, preferring mules when there is any haste; but I have found upon the roadside this large stone which, it may be, falling upon the iron road, has delayed thy engine. I send it thee for a love-gift, worthy of acceptation.’

Then the moisture ceased in the mouth of Ali, son of Abu Bakr, and his eyes manifested anxiety, and he said: ‘What is this calamity which has come upon me from associating with Afrits? May Allah confound all red-haired men, with all lame widows and the affianced sons of barbers!’

Then entered Fatima his wife, and her countenance was dark, and she bit her lips and said: ‘What dost thou know of Cypress-Branch, O man of impure associates?’ And he said: ‘I am in no humour to jest. Begone!’ And she exhibited a message upon pale paper which the messengers had delivered to her, and she read it aloud, and it said:

‘To the Lady Fatima, wife of Ali, Greeting! Kiss thy husband for me. I am slender as an Oriental willow-shoot, and of unequalled gait. Ali has caused me to be delayed in the city of Tabriziz because of the unveracity of his brazen engines. Wherefore I am unable to bestow upon him the kiss of affection, and supplicate thee to be my substitute.’

And the message was signed ‘Cypress-Branch.’

Then Ali took off his turban and cast it upon the floor, and tore his hair, for his wife was old and of an unforgiving disposition, and she ceased not to load him with reproaches for an hour; and she retired into her apartments and wept. Then Ali left her and went out, and he saw a multitude of messengers advancing in their stately procession, or sitting in the court and playing games of chance upon his doorstep, or winking upon his female slaves. In each man’s hand was a message upon pale paper, or a packet intricately corded, demanding receipt, and to none might the messages be given except to Ali, son of Abu Bakr. So he dismissed his friends and forsook diversion, and he wrote receipts until evening, and he wept and said: ‘By Allah, this life is unendurable!’

Then there came a messenger to him and cried: ‘I conjure thee by thy ancestors to hasten to the hall of the merchants, O son of Abu Bakr, for they have called a council and thy attendance is requisite.’ And Ali said: ‘It is the custom of those who are in partnership with the Afrit to meet but four times a year. Wherefore do they meet now?’

And the messenger said: ‘Inconvenience has overtaken them and they are afraid.’

Then Ali put on his turban and washed his face and went to the hall of the merchants, and the first that greeted him cried: ‘O son of Abu Bakr, hast thou seen the inscriptions by the roadside where our brazen engines go up and down?’

And Ali said: ‘No, I have sufficiency of sorrow in mine own house.’

And they told him that within a night had sprung up intolerable inscriptions over against all the fields through which the brazen engines passed.

Then Ali laughed and said; ‘This is the work of a red-haired man and of a woman lame in one leg and of the newly affianced son of a barber.’ And they said: ‘Allah preserve thy understanding, O Ali! Thou art mad.’ And he laughed yet louder and said; ‘It is the work of Cypress-Branch.’ Upon this the unmarried drew away from him, fearing the excess of his madness, but such as were married embraced him and said: ‘Is thy house also darkened by the machinations of Cypress-Branch and Jasmine, and Musk and Almond-Blossom? Verily this is an evil day for the upright.’ So Ali’s bosom expanded, for he said: ‘Fellowship in calamity diminishes the sharpness of sorrow. Shew me the inscriptions.’

The first inscription was white and blue, three-and-thirty times repeated upon high poles to the left and right hand of the iron road to Isbahan, and it said:

‘There are no engines like the brazen engines of the Afrit. Let us therefore thank Allah!’

The second inscription was blue on white, an hundred times repeated upon painted wood to the left and right hand of the iron road to Krahidin and Tabriziz; and it said only:

‘O True Believer, why dost thou not walk?’

And the third inscription was red upon black, an hundred and nineteen times repeated on the right and the left hand of the iron road, and it said:

‘When the Artificer of all Things created Eternity He foresaw that the brazen engines of the Afrit would require a reasonable time to reach their destination.’

This was the nature of the three inscriptions, and they were offensive to all the twelve merchants. Then said Ali, son of Abu Bakr: ‘Let us issue a proclamation demanding the heads of those who have caused the intolerable inscriptions to be written, lest we become a mock to the people of Bagdad.’ This they did, but there appeared forthwith an officer of the law, and cried: ‘I conjure ye by your pure forefathers to declare by what authority ye have issued the proclamation: for I am the servant of a great company of the oppressed, who have hired the ground in the fields whereon those inscriptions stand. May Allah render them salutary to you, O merchants!’ And he haled them before the Caliph on account of their proclamation, and the people assembled in multitude like pelicans on a lake and waited on the judgment of the Caliph. Then the Prince of the Faithful took up the first inscription and said: ‘What is your complaint, O traffickers with the Afrit; for it is not said whether there be engines worse or better than the engines of the Afrit, but only that there are no engines resembling them? This is no more than extreme laudation: yet if there be doubt, call thy witnesses.’ And the twelve merchants scratched with the toe of distress upon the ankle

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of embarrassment and said nothing, and the Caliph spoke to the people: ‘O True Believers, are there any engines like to the engines of the Afrit?’ Then there came forward seven-and-fifty men, young and old, and thirty-four women, old and young, and said that were there no engines like to the engines of the Afrit. And he said: ‘Do ye thank Allah therefor?’ And they said: ‘We thank Allah by day and by night.’ So he fined the twelve merchants a thousand pieces of gold each. Then he took the second inscription and said: ‘Where was this found?’ And the merchants said: ‘In a field.’ And he said: ‘Do men walk in a field?’ And they said: ‘Yes.’ And he said: ‘Do the brazen engines walk in the field?’ And they said: ‘No.’ Then the Caliph said: ‘Where is the offence of this enquiry, seeing that those who go by the brazen engines are not walking, and that those who walk in the fields are not in the brazen engines?’ And he fined the twelve merchants two thousand pieces of gold each. And he took up the third inscription, and the veins of his forehead swelled, and he said: ‘Do ye deny that Allah created Eternity?’ And they said: ‘We do not deny.’ And he said: ‘Do ye deny that the brazen engines require a reasonable time wherein to reach their destination?’ And they said: ‘We do not deny.’ And he said: ‘Do ye know for what reason Allah created Eternity?’ And they said: ‘Who are we to fathom the secrets of Allah?’ Then he said: ‘What is your complaint?’ and he fined them three thousand pieces of gold each, and the people extolled the justice of the Caliph (upon whom be blessing!), but the merchants wept.

When they had returned to their hall. Ali, son of Abu Bakr, said: ‘By Allah, O my masters, we have fallen into grievous calamity, and I see no method of delivery from the inscriptions wherewith we are tormented, except we expedite these accursed engines.’ And the merchants said: ‘It is impossible, for it hath never been.’ Then Ali recited the following verses:

‘We are as those who have ascended a blossoming mulberry-tree, from which there is access neither to Heaven nor to Earth.

When the charioteer is Eblis, and the reins are held by the son of Eblis, who may talk of what is possible or impossible?’

So they took counsel with the Afrit, and by the Permission of Allah, to Whom nought is impossible of accomplishment, the merchants caused one brazen engine to arrive in the caravanserai upon the hour appointed. And they swooned with amazement. And when they were recovered they went, some to the baths, and some to the wine-sellers, and some to the inner apartments. About second cockcrow Ali, son of Abu Bakr, was washing himself in the baths and there came a messenger from the Caliph mounted upon a white camel, bearing a dress of honour, and he cast it upon Ali wet from the bath and constrained him by the wrist and said: ‘This is the reward of diligence.’ And Ali said: ‘I conjure thee by Allah, O interpreter of the way, compliment me with no more compliments, for I am sick of compliments, but fetch me the towels.’ And the messenger said: ‘I am but the mouth of the Prince of the Faithful, who hath need of thee!’ And Ali groaned and wept and said: ‘Am I not already sufficiently afflicted?’ And the messenger said; ‘Doubt not there are companions!’ And he sat him upon a high white camel of unbridled disposition, and led him before the Caliph. And there were gathered in the courtyard of the palace the eleven his companions, each upon a white camel of a lofty nature, and each attired in a dress of honour; and they were speechless because of the honour that had been done them. At the hour that men can distinguish a black thread from a white, the Prince of the Faithful appeared at an upper window and he said: ‘O persons of integrity, it is reported to me that a brazen engine has arrived upon the hour appointed,’ and he ceased not to extol their wisdom and diligence, their perspicacity and their zeal, until the hour of second prayer, in the presence of the city of Bagdad. And when the sun was high and men had eaten-all except Ali, son of Abu Bakr, and those eleven his mates upon the camels, he said: ‘O True Believers, I conjure ye by the benefits that ye have received from the Afrit that ye do not let these men of pure countenances at any time go unrewarded for their endeavours. If, therefore, one of their delectable brazen engines arrive upon the hour appointed, acquaint me of the circumstance that I may honour them in this fashion, and in others, upon whatever hour of the day or the night that that brazen engine may arrive.’ And the people said:’Upon the head and the eye.’

Then he gave the merchants permission to depart and they returned to their houses. But the people of Bagdad sat by their doorsteps waiting for word of the arrival of yet another brazen engine upon the hour appointed. So the merchants within ate in haste and drank expeditiously and denied themselves to their wives, and remained far from their stalls in the market, and forsook the company of musicians. When a second brazen engine arrived upon the hour appointed, the people of Bagdad broke in upon them with salutations, and set them all upon tall camels of unbridled dispositions, and the messengers of the Caliph cast upon them dresses of honour, and they were borne to the very presence of the Caliph, who in all respects entreated them as before, for a very long while. But when that second engine arrived the Caliph (may his mercy be requited!) excused Ali, son of Abu Bakr, from the attendance; and when the third engine arrived he excused Hussein of the Fishmarkets from the attendance; and so with the other engines as they arrived, for he said: ‘If I make this honour common how shall it be prized? Verily punctuality is an unheard-of virtue, rarer than the egg of the Roc, but we must also remember the infirmities of mankind.’

The people of Bagdad delighted rapturously to do honour to the remnant of the twelve merchants. When the fifth brazen engine arrived upon the hour appointed, they beat drums and cymbals; and for the sixth engine they closed all the markets; for the seventh engine they lit torches and shouted; and for the eighth they burned fires, red, white, and blue, in all the wards; for the ninth they assembled the Army and exercised them in the exercises of war; for the tenth they invited their friends and acquaintances, in number like netted fish, who came drawn by brazen engines from Isbahan and Lawaz, from Krahidin and Tabriziz; for the eleventh they extended the arm of allurement to all the inhabitants of the earth as far as a brazen engine might travel, nor were the inhabitants undesirous to attend to assist and to admire; for the twelfth, when there was called but one merchant to the presence of the Caliph, they altogether abandoned gravity and delivered themselves in multitudes, together with vast assemblies from other cities, to the dominion of mirth and excess. On that day at one time they beat gongs and the instruments of music. they blew upon horns without ceasing; they burned coloured fires, and they exercised the Army, and they closed the markets, and they waved banners and recited verses in honour of the twelve merchants and their wives and their daughters and their sons unborn, so that for a day’s journey round Bagdad the clouds quaked with tumult. And when the merchants had occasion to come forth the inhabitants of Bagdad pursued them with the steeds of unbitted praise, and buried them beneath the blossoms of importunate compliment, so that the merchants covered the face of humility with the hand of modesty.

And Ali, son of Abu Bakr, joined himself to a company of those rejoicing and said: ‘I conjure ye by your most remote ancestors, declare to me in what way ye have profited by the laudations wherewith ye have belauded us? For it is brought to my notice that through seven weeks the inhabitants of Bagdad have abandoned the pursuit of all trade and gain, that they may pursue me and my associates with an unmerited honour.’

And the merry-makers said: ‘May we never lose thy presence, O son of Abu Bakr!’ and they recited the following verses

‘Have we wasted a day, or forty days, in unseemly revelry?

Still we have revelled, and the remembrances of our diversions will not soon depart from us.

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But we assert that our merry-making was not flagitious, and that the echo of our laughter shall not perish out of men’s hearts.

Give us an equal occasion, and we will disport ourselves anew, lest any should believe us incapable of more than a little mirth.

Truly our benevolence is inexhaustible, and our goodwill knows neither beginning nor end. This is but a foretaste of our favours. We have unexpended a million million others.’

Then Ali said: ‘Is this of a truth your intention?’ And the merry-makers said: ‘Have we not already proved it, or shall we set thee again upon the camel and delight thee with amazing caresses?’

Then he trembled excessively, and the sweat leaped out upon his forehead like seed-pearls, and he said: ‘I hear and I obey and I toil,’ and he cast off his garments and bought a leathern apron and a porter’s knot and went down to the caravanserai to oversee and to expedite the brazen engines.

But he found in the caravanserai, attired in leathern aprons, adorned with porters’ knots, the eleven his companions, and the sweat stood out upon their foreheads also like seed-pearls by reason of the vehemence with which they laboured both to oversee and to expedite the engines. And Ali said: ‘I am not alone in affliction.’ And they said: ‘By Allah, dost thou call this affliction? It is altogether Paradise by the side of the honours to which we have been subjected, and we purpose to endure in it to our lives’ end rather than to incur again the attentions of the inhabitants of Bagdad’…And they recited the following verses:

Against all things, except Ridicule, hath Allah fortified the hearts of men; but even the most vicious desire not to be made a butt; and the brazen-faced preserve still a remnant of shame.

When sweet words are useless the fool speaks sourly; but the wise man maketh his speech yet sweeter, till the teeth of such as hear it ache from excess of sweetness.

Hast thou forgotten the red-headed man, or the widow lame of one leg, or the newly affianced son of the barber, or the inscriptions in colour like to the rainbow, or the lamentable chapter of the camels?

Be sure that these are prepared against the day of Dereliction, and will inevitably return at the hour of Unpunctuality.

Allah hath applied a goad to the extremities of our reason. He hath sent a remembrancer into our secret apartments, and an open shame about our feet going forth.

Alas for the days when, free and uncontrolled, we lived among the valleys of Bagdad, merrily, and in no very good fame!’

So, then, these twelve merchants, who were partners with the Afrit, laboured unremittingly for many years in honesty and sobriety and zeal and devotion to expedite the engines of the Afrit; and having, by the Permission of Allah, attained these ends, they were each at the appointed hour overtaken by Death, the separator of companions, the divider of real estate, the terminator of leases, the herdsman of heriots, and the completor of operations.

Extolled be the excellence of Allah-al-Bari Who alone is the contriver of wonderful things; the Artificer of the destinies of the Universe, and the Compeller of the hearts of men!

The Unedited Autobiography of Private Ortheris.

(a short tale)

IF there was one thing on which Golightly prided himself more than another, it was looking like ‘an Officer and a Gentleman.’ He said it was for the honour of the Service that he attired himself so elaborately; but those who knew him best said that it was just personal vanity. There was no harm about Golightly—not an ounce. He recognised a horse when he saw one, and could do more than fill a cantle. He played a very fair game at billiards, and was a sound man at the whist-table. Everyone liked him; and nobody ever dreamed of seeing him handcuffed on a station platform as a deserter. But this sad thing happened.

He was going down from Dalhousie, at the end of his leave—riding down. He had run his leave as fine as he dared, and wanted to come down in a hurry.

It was fairly warm at Dalhousie, and, knowing what to expect below, he descended in a new khaki suit—tight fitting—of a delicate olive-green; a peacock-blue tie, white collar, and a snowy white Solah helmet. He prided himself on looking neat even when he was riding post. He did look neat, and he was so deeply concerned about his appearance before he started that he quite forgot to take anything but some small change with him. He left all his notes at the hotel. His servants had gone down the road before him, to be ready in waiting at Pathankote with a change of gear. That was what he called travelling in, ‘light marching-order.’ He was proud of his faculty of organisation—what we call bundobust.

Twenty-two miles out of Dalhousie it began to rain—not a mere hill-shower, but a good, tepid, monsoonish downpour. Golightly bustled on, wishing that he had brought an umbrella. The dust on the roads turned into mud, and the pony mired a good deal. So did Golightly’s khaki gaiters. But he kept on steadily and tried to think how pleasant the coolth was.

His next pony was rather a brute at starting, and, Golightly’s hands being slippery with the rain, contrived to get rid of Golightly at a corner. He chased the animal, caught it, and went ahead briskly. The spill had not improved his clothes or his temper, and he had lost one spur. He kept the other one employed. By the time that stage was ended the pony had had as much exercise as he wanted, and, in spite of the rain, Golightly was sweating freely. At the end of another miserable half hour Golightly found the world disappear before his eyes in clammy pulp. The rain had turned the pith of his huge and snowy solah-topee into an evil-smelling dough, and it had closed on his head like a half-opened mushroom. Also the green lining was beginning to run.

Golightly did not say anything worth recording here. He tore off and squeezed up as much of the brim as was in his eyes and ploughed on. The back of the helmet was flapping on his neck, and the sides stuck to his ears, but the leather band and green lining kept things roughly together, so that the hat did not actually melt away where it flapped.

Presently, the pulp and the green stuff made a sort of slimy mildew which ran over Golightly in several directions—down his back and bosom for choice. The khaki colour ran too—it was really shockingly bad dye—and sections of Golightly were brown, and patches were violet, and contours were ochre, and streaks were ruddy-red, and blotches were nearly white, according to the nature and peculiarities of the dye. When he took out his handkerchief to wipe his face, and the green of the hat-lining and the purple stuff that had soaked through on to his neck from the tie became thoroughly mixed, the effect was amazing.

Near Dhar the rain stopped and the evening sun came out and dried him up slightly. It fixed the colours, too. Three miles from Pathankote the last pony fell dead lame, and Golightly was forced to walk. He pushed on into Pathankote to find his servants. He did not know then that his khitmatgar had stopped by the roadside to get drunk, and would come on the next day saying that he had sprained his ankle. When he got into Pathankote he couldn’t find his servants, his boots were stiff and ropy with mud, and there were large quantities of dust about his body. The blue tie had run as much as the khaki. So he took it off with the collar and threw it away. Then he said something about servants generally and tried to get a peg. He paid eight annas for the drink, and this revealed to him that he had only six annas more in his pocket—or in the world as he stood at that hour.

He went to the Station-Master to negotiate for a firstclass ticket to Khasa, where he was stationed. The booking-clerk said something to the Station-Master, the Station-Master said something to the Telegraph Clerk, and the three looked at him with curiosity. They asked him to wait for half an hour, while they telegraphed to Amritsar for authority. So he waited and four constables came and grouped themselves picturesquely round him. Just as he was preparing to ask them to go away, the Station-Master said that he would give the Sahib a ticket to Amritsar, if the Sahib would kindly come inside the booking-office. Golightly stepped inside, and the next thing he knew was that a constable was attached to each of his legs and arms, while the Station-Master was trying to cram a mail-bag over his head.

There was a very fair scuffle all round the booking office, and Golightly took a nasty cut over his eye through falling against a table. But the constables were too much for him, and they and the Station-Master handcuffed him securely. As soon as the mail-bag was slipped, he began expressing his opinions, and the head constable said, ‘Without doubt this is the soldier-Englishman we required. Listen to the abuse!’ Then Golightly asked the Station-Master what the this and the that the proceedings meant. The Station-Master told him he was ‘Private John Binkle of the ——Regiment, 5ft. 9in., fair hair, gray eyes, and a dissipated appearance, no marks on the body,’ who had deserted a fortnight ago. Golightly began explaining at great length; and the more he explained the less the Station-Master believed him. He said that no Lieutenant could look such a ruffian as did Golightly, and that his instructions were to send his capture under proper escort to Amritsar. Golightly was feeling very damp and uncomfortable, and the language he used was not fit for publication, even in an expurgated form. The four constables saw him safe to Amritsar in an ‘Intermediate’ compartment, and he spent the four-hour journey in abusing them as fluently as his knowledge of the vernaculars allowed.

At Amritsar he was bundled out on the platform into the arms of a Corporal and two men of the —— Regiment. Golightly drew himself up and tried to carry off matters jauntily. He did not feel too jaunty in handcuffs, with four constables behind him, and the blood from the cut on his forehead stiffening on his left cheek. The Corporal was not jocular either. Golightly got as far as— ‘This is a very absurd mistake, my men,’ when the Corporal told him to ‘stow his lip’ and come along. Golightly did not want to come along. He desired to stop and explain. He explained very well indeed, until the Corporal cut in with ‘You a orficer! It’s the like o’ you as brings disgrace on the likes of us. Bloomin’ fine orficer you are! I know your regiment. The Rogue’s March is the quickstep where you come from. You’re a black shame to the Service.’

Golightly kept his temper, and began explaining all over again from the beginning. Then he was marched out of the rain into the refreshment-room, and told not to make a qualified fool of himself. The men were going to run him up to Fort Govindghar. And ‘running up’ is a performance almost as undignified as the Frog March.

Golightly was nearly hysterical with rage and the chill and the mistake and the handcuffs and the headache that the cut on his forehead had given him. He really laid himself out to express what was in his mind. When he had quite finished and his throat was feeling dry, one of the men said, ‘I’ve ’eard a few beggars in the clink blind, stiff and crack on a bit; but I’ve never ’eard any one to touch this ’ere “orficer.” ’ They were not angry with him. They rather admired him. They had some beer at the refreshment-room, and offered Golightly some too, because he had ‘swore won’erful.’ They asked him to tell them all about the adventures of Private John Binkle while he was loose on the country-side; and that made Golightly wilder than ever. If he had kept his wits about him he would have been quiet until an officer came; but he attempted to run.

Now the butt of a Martini in the small of your back hurts a great deal, and rotten, rain-soaked khaki tears easily when two men are yerking at your collar.

Golightly rose from the floor feeling very sick and giddy, with his shirt ripped open all down his breast and nearly all down his back. He yielded to his luck, and at that point the down-train from Lahore came in, carrying one of Golightly’s Majors.

This is the Major’s evidence in full—

‘There was the sound of a scuffle in the second-class refreshment-room, so I went in and saw the most villainous loafer that I ever set eyes on. His boots and breeches were plastered with mud and beer-stains. He wore a muddy-white dunghill sort of thing on his head, and it hung down in slips on his shoulders which were a good deal scratched. He was half in and half out of a shirt as nearly in two pieces as it could be, and he was begging the guard to look at the name on the tail of it. As he had rucked the shirt all over his head I couldn’t at first see who he was, but I fancied that he was a man in the first stage of D.T. from the way he swore while he wrestled with his rags. When he turned round, and I had made allowances for a lump as big as a pork-pie over one eye, and some green war-paint on the face, and some violet stripes round the neck, I saw that it was Golightly. He was very glad to see me,’ said the Major, ‘and he hoped I would not tell the Mess about it. I didn’t, but you can, if you like, now that Golightly has gone Home.’

Golightly spent the greater part of that summer in trying to get the Corporal and the two soldiers tried by Court-Martial for arresting an ‘officer and a gentleman.’ They were, of course, very sorry for their error. But the tale leaked into the regimental canteen, and thence ran about the Province.

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We’re goin’ ‘ome, we’re goin’ ‘ome—
Our ship is at the shore,
An’ you mus’ pack your ‘aversack,
For we won’t come back no more.
Ho, don’t you grieve for me,
My lovely Mary Ann,
For I’ll marry you yet on a fourp’ny bit,
As a time expired ma-a-an!
(Barrack-room Ballad)

AN AWFUL thing has happened! My friend, Private Mulvaney, who went home in the Serapis, time-expired, not very long ago, has come back to India as a civilian! It was all Dinah Shadd’s fault. She could not stand the poky little lodgings, and she missed her servant Abdullah more than words could tell. The fact was that the Mulvaneys had been out here too long, and had lost touch of England. Mulvaney knew a contractor on one of the new Central India lines, and wrote to him for some sort of work. The contractor said that if Mulvaney could pay the passage he would give him command of a gang of coolies for old sake’s sake. The pay was eighty-five rupees a month, and Dinah Shadd said that if Terence did not accept she would make his life a “basted purgathory.” Therefore the Mulvaneys came out as “civilians,” which was a great and terrible fall; though Mulvaney tried to disguise it by saying that he was “Ker’nel on the railway line, an’ a consequinshal man.”

He wrote me an invitation, on a tool-indent form, to visit him; and I came down to the funny little “construction” bungalow at the side of the line. Dinah Shadd had planted peas about and about, and nature had spread all manner of green stuff round the place. There was no change in Mulvaney except the change of clothing, which was deplorable, but could not be helped. He was standing upon his trolly, haranguing a gangman, and his shoulders were as well drilled and his big, thick chin was as clean-shaven as ever.

“I’m a civilian now,” said Mulvaney. “Cud you tell that I was iver a martial man? Don’t answer, Sorr, av you’re strainin’ betune a complimint an’ a lie. There’s no houldin’ Dinah Shadd now she’s got a house av her own. Go inside, an’ dhrink tay out av chiny in the drrrrawin’-room, an’ thin we’ll dhrink like Christians undher the tree here. Scutt, ye naygur-folk! There’s a Sahib come to call on me, an’ that’s more than he’ll iver do for you onless you run! Get out, an’ go on pilin’ up the earth, quick, till sundown.”

When we three were comfortably settled under the big sisham in front of the bungalow, and the first rush of questions and answers about Privates Ortheris and Learoyd and old times and places had died away, Mulvaney said, reflectively: “Glory be, there’s no p’rade to-morrow, an’ no bun-headed Corp’ril-bhoy to give you his lip. An’ yit I don’t know. ’Tis harrd to be something ye niver were an’ niver meant to be, an’ all the ould days shut up along wid your papers. Eyah! I’m growin’ rusty, an’ ’tis the will av God that a man mustn’t serve his Quane for time an’ all.”

He helped himself to a fresh peg, and sighed furiously.

“Let your beard grow, Mulvaney,” said I, “and then you won’t be troubled with those notions. You’ll be a real civilian.”

Dinah Shadd had told me in the drawing-room of her desire to coax Mulvaney into letting his beard grow. “’Twas so civilian-like,” said poor Dinah, who hated her husband’s hankering for his old life.

“Dinah Shadd, you’re a dishgrace to an honust, clane-scraped man!” said Mulvaney, without replying to me. “Grow a beard on your own chin, darlint, and lave my razors alone. They’re all that stand betune me and dis-ris-pect-ability. Av I didn’t shave, I wud be torminted wid an outrajis thurrst; for there’s nothin’ so dhryin’ to the throat as a big billy-goat beard waggin’ undher the chin. Ye wudn’t have me dhrink always, Dinah Shadd? By the same token, you’re kapin’ me crool dhry now. Let me look at that whiskey.”

The whiskey was lent and returned, but Dinah Shadd, who had been just as eager as her husband in asking after old friends, rent me with:—

“I take shame for you, Sorr, coming down here—though the Saints know you’re as welkim as the daylight whin you do come—an’ upsettin’ Terence’s head wid your nonsense about—about fwhat’s much betther forgotten. He bein’ a civilian now, an’ you niver was aught else. Can you not let the Arrmy rest? ’Tis not good for Terence.”

I took refuge by Mulvaney, for Dinah Shadd has a temper of her own.

“Let be—let be,” said Mulvaney. “’Tis only wanst in a way I can talk about the ould days.” Then to me—“Ye say Dhrumshticks is well, an’ his lady tu’? I niver knew how I liked the gray garron till I was shut av him an’ Asia.”—“Dhrumshticks” was the nickname of the Colonel commanding Mulvaney’s old regiment.—“ Will you be seein’ him again? You will. Thin tell him”—Mulvaney’s eyes began to twinkle—“tell him wid Privit——”

“Mister, Terence,” interrupted Dinah Shadd.

“Now the Divil an’ all his angils an’ the Firmament av Hiven fly away wid the ‘Mister,’ an’ the sin av makin’ me swear be on your confession, Dinah Shadd! Privit, I tell ye. Wid Privit Mulvaney’s best obedience, that but for me the last time-expired wud be still pullin’ hair on their way to the sea.”

He threw himself back in the chair, chuckled, and was silent.

“Mrs. Mulvaney,” I said, “please take up the whiskey, and don’t let him have it until he has told the story.”

Dinah Shadd dexterously whipped the bottle away, saying at the same time, “’Tis nothing to be proud av,” and thus captured by the enemy, Mulvaney spake:—

“’Twas on Chuseday week. I was behaderin’ round wid the gangs on the ’bankmint—I’ve taught the hoppers how to kape step an’ stop screechin’—whin a head-gangman comes up to me, wid about two inches av shirt-tail hanging round his neck an’ a disthressful light in his oi. ‘Sahib,’ sez he, ‘there’s a reg’mint an’ a half av soldiers up at the junction, knockin’ red cinders out av ivrything an’ ivrybody! They thried to hang me in my cloth,’ he sez, ‘an’ there will be murdher an’ ruin an’ rape in the place before nightfall! They say they’re comin’ down here to wake us up. What will we do wid our women-folk?’

“’Fetch my throlly!” sez I; “my heart’s sick in my ribs for a wink at anything wid the Quane’s uniform on ut. Fetch my throlly, an’ six av the jildiest men, and run me up in shtyle.’”

“He tuk his best coat,” said Dinah Shadd, reproachfully.

“’Twas to do honour to the Widdy. I cud ha’ done no less, Dinah Shadd. You and your digresshins interfere wid the coorse av the narrative. Have you iver considhered fwhat I wud look like wid me head shaved as well as me chin? You bear that in your mind, Dinah darlin’.

“I was throllied up six miles, all to get a shquint at that draf’. I knew ’twas a spring draf’ goin’ home, for there’s no rig’mint hereabouts, more’s the pity.”

“Praise the Virgin!” murmured Dinah Shadd. But Mulvaney did not hear.

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“Whin I was about three-quarters av a mile off the rest-camp, powtherin’ along fit to burrst, I heard the noise av the men, an’, on my sowl, Sorr, I cud catch the voice av Peg Barney bellowin’ like a bison wid the belly-ache. You remimber Peg Barney that was in D Comp’ny—a red, hairy scraun, wid a scar on his jaw? Peg Barney that cleared out the Blue Lights’ Jubilee meetin’ wid the cook-room mop last year?

“Thin I knew ut was a draf’ av the Ould Rig’mint, an’ I was conshumed wid sorrow for the bhoy that was in charge. We was harrd scrapin’s at any time. Did I iver tell you how Horker Kelley wint into clink nakid as Phoebus Apollonius, wid the shirts av the Corp’ril an’ file undher his arrum? An’ he was a moild man! But I’m digresshin’. ’Tis a shame both to the rig’mints and the Arrmy sendin’ down little orf’cer bhoys wid a draf’ av strong men mad wid liquor an’ the chanst av gettin’ shut av India, an’ niver a punishment that’s fit to be given right down an’ away from cantonmints to the dock! ’Tis this nonsinse. Whin I am servin’ my time, I’m undher the Articles av War, an’ can be whipped on the peg for thim. But whin I’ve served my time, I’m a Reserve man, an’ the Articles av War haven’t any hould on me. An orf’cer can’t do anythin’ to a time-expired savin’ confinin’ him to barricks. ’Tis a wise rig’lation, bekaze a time-expired does not have any barricks; bein’ on the move all the time. ’Tis a Solomon av a rig’lation, is that. I wud like to be inthroduced to the man that made ut. ’Tis easier to get colts from a Kibbereen horse-fair into Galway than to take a bad draf’ over ten miles av counthry. Consiquintly that rig’lation—for fear that the men wud be hurt by the little orf’cer bhoy. No matther. The nearer my throlly came to the rest-camp, the woilder was the shine, an’ the louder was the voice of Peg Barney. ‘’Tis good I am here,’ thinks I to mysilf, ‘for Peg alone is employmint for two or three.’ He bein’, I well knew, as copped as a dhrover.

“Faith, that rest-camp was a sight! The tent-ropes was all skew- nosed, an’ the pegs looked as dhrunk as the men—fifty av thim—the scourin’s, an’ rinsin’s, an’ Divil’s lavin’s av the Ould Rig’mint. I tell you, Sorr, they were dhrunker than any men you’ve ever seen in your mortial life. How does a draf’ get dhrunk? How does a frog get fat? They suk ut in through their shkins.

“There was Peg Barney sittin’ on the groun’ in his shirt—wan shoe off an’ wan shoe on—whackin’ a tent-peg over the head wid his boot, an’ singin’ fit to wake the dead. ’Twas no clane song that he sung, though. ’Twas the Divil’s Mass.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Whin a bad egg is shut av the Army, he sings the Divil’s Mass for a good riddance; an’ that manes swearin’ at ivrything from the Commandher-in-Chief down to the Room-Corp’ril, such as you niver in your days heard. Some men can swear so as to make green turf crack! Have you iver heard the Curse in an Orange Lodge? The Divil’s Mass is ten times worse, an’ Peg Barney was singin’ ut, whackin’ the tent-peg on the head wid his boot for each man that he cursed. A powerful big voice had Peg Barney, an’ a hard swearer he was whin sober. I stood forninst him, an’ ’twas not me oi alone that cud tell Peg was dhrunk as a coot.

“‘Good mornin’, Peg,’ I sez, whin he dhrew breath afther dursin’ the Adj’tint-Gen’ral; ‘I’ve put on my best coat to see you, Peg Barney,’ sez I.

“‘Thin take ut off again,’ sez Peg Barney, latherin’ away wid the boot; ‘take ut off an’ dance, ye lousy civilian!’

“Wid that he begins cursin’ ould Dhrumshticks, being so full he dane disrernimbers the Brigade-Major an’ the Judge-Advokit-Gen’ral.

“‘Do you not know me, Peg?’ sez I, though me blood was hot in me wid being called a civilian.”

“An’ him a decent married man!” wailed Dinah Shadd.

“‘I do not,’ sez Peg, ‘but dhrunk or sober I’ll tear the hide off your back wid a shovel whin I’ve stopped singin’.’

“’Say you so, Peg Barney?’ sez I. ‘’Tis clear as mud you’ve forgotten me. I’ll assist your autobiography.’ Wid that I stretched Peg Barney, boot an’ all, an’ wint into the camp. An awful sight ut was!

“‘Where’s the orf’cer in charge av the detachment?’ sez I to Scrub Greene—the manest little worm that ever walked.

“‘There’s no orf’cer, ye ould cook,’ sez Scrub; ‘we’re a bloomin’ Republic.’

“‘Are you that?’ sez I; ‘thin I’m O’Connell the Dictator, an’ by this you will larn to kape a civil tongue in your rag-box.’

“Wid that I stretched Scrub Greene an’ wint to the orf’cer’s tent. ’Twas a new little bhoy—not wan I’d iver seen before. He was sittin’ in his tent, purtendin’ not to ’ave ear av the racket.

“I saluted—but for the life av me I mint to shake hands whin I went in. ’Twas the sword hangin’ on the tent-pole changed my will.

“‘Can’t I help, Sorr?’ sez I; ‘’tis a strong man’s job they’ve given you, an’ you’ll be wantin’ help by sundown.’ He was a bhoy wid bowils, that child, an’ a rale gintleman.

“‘Sit down,’ sez he.

“‘Not before my orf’cer,’ sez I; an’ I tould him fwhat my service was.

“‘I’ve heard av you,’ sez he. ‘You tuk the town av Lungtungpen nakid.’

“‘Faith,’ thinks I, ‘that’s Honour an’ Glory’; for ’twas Lift’nint Brazenose did that job. ‘I’m wid ye, Sorr,’ sez I, ‘if I’m av use. They shud niver ha’ sent you down wid the draf’. Savin’ your presince, Sorr,’ I sez, ‘’tis only Lift’nint Hackerston in the Ould Rig’mint can manage a Home draf’.’

“‘I’ve niver had charge of men like this before,’ sez he, playin’ wid the pens on the table; ‘an’ I see by the Rig’lations——’

“‘Shut your oi to the Rig’lations, Sorr,’ I sez, ‘till the throoper’s into blue wather. By the Rig’lations you’ve got to tuck thim up for the night, or they’ll be runnin’ foul av my coolies an’ makin’ a shiverarium half through the counthry. Can you trust your non-coms, Sorr?’

“‘Yes,’ sez he.

“‘Good,’ sez I; ‘there’ll be throuble before the night. Are you marchin’, Sorr?’

“‘To the next station,’ sez he.

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“‘Betther still,’ sez I; ‘there’ll be big throuble.’

“‘Can’t be too hard on a Home draf,’ sez he; ‘the great thing is to get thim in-ship.’

“‘Faith, you’ve larnt the half av your lesson, Sorr,’ sez I, ‘but av you shtick to the Rig’lations you’ll niver get thim inship at all, at all. Or there won’t be a rag av kit betune thim whin you do.’

“‘Twas a dear little orf’cer bhoy, an’ by way av kapin’ his heart up, I tould him fwhat I saw wanst in a draf in Egypt.”

“What was that, Mulvaney?” said I.

“Sivin an’ fifty men sittin’ on the bank av a canal, laughin’ at a poor little squidgereen av an orf’cer that they’d made wade into the slush an’ pitch things out av the boats for their Lord High Mightinesses. That made me orf’cer bhoy woild wid indignation.

“‘Soft an’ aisy, Sorr,’ sez I; ‘you’ve niver had your draf’ in hannd since you left cantonmints. Wait till the night, an’ your work will be ready to you. Wid your permission, Sorr, I will investigate the camp, an’ talk to me ould frinds. ’Tis no manner av use thryin’ to shtop the divilmint now.’

“Wid that I wint out into the camp an’ inthrojuced mysilf to ivry man sober enough to remimber me. I was some wan in the ould days, an’ the bhoys was glad to see me—all excipt Peg Barney wid a eye like a tomata five days in the bazar, an’ a nose to match. They come round me an’ shuk me, an’ I tould thim I was in privit employ wid an income av me own, an’ a drrrawin’-room fit to bate the Quane’s; an’ wid me lies an’ me shtories an’ nonsinse gin’rally, I kept ’em quiet in wan way an’ another, knockin’ roun’ the camp. ’Twas bad even thin whin I was the Angil av Peace.

“I talked to me ould non-coms—they was sober—an’ betune me an’ thim we wore the draf’ over into their tents at the proper time. The little orf’cer bhoy he comes round, dacint an’ civil-spoken as might be.

“‘Rough quarters, men,’ sez he, ‘but you can’t look to be as comfortable as in barricks. We must make the best av things. I’ve shut my eyes to a dale av dog’s thricks today, an’ now there must be no more av ut.’

“No more we will. Come an’ have a dhrink, me son,’ sez Peg Barney, staggerin’ where he stud. Me little orf’cer bhoy kep’ his timper.

“‘You’re a sulky swine, you are,’ sez Peg Barney, an’ at that the men in the tent began to laugh.

“I tould you me orf’cer bhoy had bowils. He cut Peg Barney as near as might be on the eye that I’d squshed whin we first met. Peg wint spinnin’ acrost the tent.

“Peg him out, Sorr,’ sez I, in a whishper.

“Peg him out!’ sez me orf’cer bhoy, up loud, just as if ’twas battalion p’rade an’ he pickin’ his wurrds from the Sargint.

“The non-coms tuk Peg Barney—a howlin’ handful he was—an’ in three minut’s he was pegged out—chin down, tight-dhrawn—on his stummick, a tent-peg to each arm an’ leg, swearin’ fit to turn a naygur white.

“I tuk a peg an’ jammed ut into his ugly jaw—‘Bite on that, Peg Barney,’ I sez; ‘the night is settin’ frosty, an’ you’ll be wantin’ divarsion before the mornin’. But for the Rig’lations you’d be bitin’ on a bullet now at the thriangles, Peg Barney,’ sez I.

“All the draf’ was out av their tents watchin’ Barney bein’ pegged.

“‘’Tis agin the Rig’lations! He strook him!’ screeches out Scrub Greene, who was always a lawyer; an’ some of the men tuk up the shoutin’.

“‘Peg out that man!’ sez me orf’cer bhoy, niver losin’ his timper; an’ the non-coms wint in and pegged out Scrub Greene by the side av Peg Barney.

“I cud see that the draf’ was comin’ roun’. The men stud not knowin’ fwhat to do.

“‘Get to your tents!’ sez me orf’cer bhoy. ‘Sargint, put a sinthry over these two men.’

“The men wint back into the tents like jackals, an’ the rest av the night there was no noise at all excipt the stip av the sinthry over the two, an’ Scrub Greene blubberin’ like a child. ’Twas a chilly night, an’ faith, ut sobered Peg Barney.

“Just before Revelly, me orf’cer bhoy comes out an’ sez: ‘Loose those men an’ send thim to their tents!’ Scrub Greene wint away widout a word, but Peg Barney, stiff wid the cowld, stud like a sheep, thryin’ to make his orf’cer undherstand he was sorry for playin’ the goat.

“There was no tucker in the draf’ whin ut fell in for the march, an’ divil a wurrd about ‘illegality’ cud I hear.

“I wint to the ould Colour-Sargint and I sez:—‘Let me die in glory,’ sez I. ‘I’ve seen a man this day!’

“‘A man he is,’ sez ould Hother; ‘the draf’s as sick as a herrin’. They’ll all go down to the sea like lambs. That bhoy has the bowils av a cantonmint av Gin’rals.’

“‘Amin,’ sez I, ‘an’ good luck go wid him, wheriver he be, by land or by sea. Let me know how the draf’ gets clear.’

“An’ do you know how they did? That bhoy, so I was tould by letter from Bombay, bully-damned ’em down to the dock, till they cudn’t call their sowls their own. From the time they left me eye till they was ’tween decks, not wan av thim was more than dacintly dhrunk. An’ by the Holy Articles av War, whin they wint aboord they cheered him till they cudn’t spake, an’ that, mark you, has not come about wid a draf’ in the mim’ry av livin’ man! You look to that little orf’cer bhoy. He has bowils. ’Tis not ivry child that wud chuck the Rig’lations to Flanders an’ stretch Peg Barney on a wink from a brokin an’ dilapidated ould carkiss like mysilf. I’d be proud to serve——”

“Terence, you’re a civilian,” said Dinah Shadd warningly.

“So I am—so I am. Is ut likely I wud forget ut? But he was a gran’ bhoy all the same, an’ I’m only a mud-tipper wid a hod on me shoulthers. The whiskey’s in the heel av your hand, Sorr. Wid your good lave we’ll dhrink to the Ould Rig’mint—three fingers—standin’ up!”

And we drank.