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

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

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

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

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

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

To which Antonio answers:

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

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

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

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

There is no other cave for some two miles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

RUDYARD KIPLING.

2. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people:
but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.

3. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.

19. The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give
light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.

20. Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the Lord
shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.

ISAIAH 60 (Authorised Version – 1611)

page 1 of 4

THEY SEATED THEMSELVES in the heavy chairs on the pebbled floor beneath the eaves of the summer-house by the orchard. A table between them carried wine and glasses, and a packet of papers, with pen and ink. The larger man of the two, his doublet unbuttoned, his broad face blotched and scarred, puffed a little as he came to rest. The other picked an apple from the grass, bit it, and went on with the thread of the talk that they must have carried out of doors with them.

‘But why waste time fighting atomies who do not come up to your belly-button, Ben?’ he asked.

‘It breathes me – it breathes me, between bouts! You’d be better for a tussle or two.’

‘But not to spend mind and verse on ’em. What was Dekker to you? Ye knew he’d strike back – and hard.’

‘He and Marston had been baiting me like dogs … about my trade as they called it, though it was only my cursed stepfather’s. “Bricks and mortar,” Dekker said, and “hod-man”. And he mocked my face. ‘Twas clean as curds in my youth. This humour has come on me since.’

‘Ah! “Every man and his humour”? But why did ye not have at Dekker in peace – over the sack, as you do at me?’

‘Because I’d have drawn on him – and he’s no more worth a hanging than Gabriel. Setting aside what he wrote of me, too, the hireling dog has merit, of a sort. His Shoe-maker’s Holiday. Hey ? Though my Bartlemy Fair, when ’tis presented, will furnish out three of it and -‘

‘Ride all the easier. I have suffered two readings of it already. It creaks like an overloaded hay-wain,’ the other cut in. ‘You give too much.’

Ben smiled loftily, and went on. ‘But I’m glad I lashed him in my Poetaster, for all I’ve worked with him since. How comes it that I’ve never fought with thee, Will?’

First, Behemoth, the other drawled, ‘it needs two to engender any sort of iniquity. Second, the betterment of this present age – and the next, maybe – lies, in chief, on our four shoulders. If the Pillars of the Temple fall out, Nature, Art, and Learning come to a stand. Last, I am not yet ass enough to hawk up my private spites before the groundlings. What do the Court, citizens, or ‘prentices give for thy fallings-out or fallings-in with Dekker – or the Grand Devil?’

‘They should be taught, then – taught.’

‘Always that? What’s your commission to enlighten us?’

‘My own learning which I have heaped up, lifelong, at my own pains. My assured knowledge, also, of my craft and art. I’ll suffer no man’s mock or malice on it.’

‘The one sure road to mockery.’

‘I deny nothing of my brain-store to my lines. I – I build up my own works throughout.’

‘Yet when Dekker cries “hodman” y’are not content.’

Ben half heaved in his chair. ‘I’ll owe you a beating for that when I’m thinner. Meantime here’s on account. I say I build upon my own foundations; devising and perfecting my own plots; adorning ’em justly as fits time, place, and action. In all of which you sin damnably. I set no landward principalities on sea-beaches.’

‘They pay their penny for pleasure – not learning,’ Will answered above the apple-core.

‘Penny or tester, you owe ’em justice. In the facture of plays – nay, listen, Will – at all points they must he dressed historically – teres atque rotundus – in ornament and temper. As my Sejanus, of which the mob was unworthy.’

Here Will made a doleful face, and echoed, ‘Unworthy! I was – what did I play, Ben, in that long weariness? Some most grievous ass.’

‘The part of Caius Silius,’ said Ben stiffly.

Will laughed aloud. ‘True. “Indeed that place was not my sphere.”‘

It must have been a quotation, for Ben winced a little, ere he recovered himself and went on: ‘Also my Alchemist which the world in part apprehends. The main of its learning is necessarily yet hid from ’em. To come to your works, Will – ‘

‘I am a sinner on all sides. The drink’s at your elbow.’

‘Confession shall not save ye – nor bribery.’ Ben filled his glass. ‘Sooner than labour the right cold heat to devise your own plots you filch, botch, and clap ’em together out o’ ballads, broadsheets, old wives’ tales, chap-books – ‘

Will nodded with complete satisfaction. ‘Say on’, quoth he.

“Tis so with nigh all yours. I’ve known honester jack-daws. And whom among the learned do ye deceive? Reckoning up those – forty, is it? – your plays You’ve misbegot, there’s not six which have not plots common as Moorditch.’

‘Ye’re out, Ben. There’s not one. My Love’s Labour (how I came to write it, I know not) is nearest to lawful issue. My Tempest (how I came to write that, I know) is, in some part my own stuff. Of the rest, I stand guilty. Bastards all !

‘And no shame?’

‘None! Our business must be fitted with parts hot and hot – and the boys are more trouble than the men. Give me the bones of any stuff, I’ll cover ’em as quickly as any. But to hatch new plots is to waste God’s unreturning time like a -‘ – he chuckled – ‘like a hen.’

‘Yet see what ye miss! Invention next to Knowledge, whence it proceeds, being the chief glory of Art – ‘

‘Miss, say you? Dick Burbage – in my Hamlet that I botched for him when he had staled of our Kings? (Nobly he played it.) Was he a miss?’

Ere Ben could speak Will overbore him.

‘And when poor Dick was at odds with the world in general and womankind in special, I clapped him up my Lear for a vomit.’

‘An hotchpotch of passion, outrunning reason,’ was the verdict.

page 2

‘Not altogether. Cast in a mould too large for any boards to bear. (My fault!) Yet Dick evened it. And when he’d come out of his whoremongering aftermaths of repentance, I served him my Macbeth to toughen him. Was that a miss ?’

‘I grant your Macbeth as nearest in spirit to my Sejanus; showing for example: “How fortune plies her sports when she begins To practise ’em.” We’ll see which of the two lives longest.’

‘Amen! I’ll bear no malice among the worms.’

A liveried man, booted and spurred, led a saddle-horse through a gate into the orchard. At a sign from Will he tethered the beast to a tree, lurched aside, and stretched on the grass. Ben, curious as a lizard, for all his bulk, wanted to know what it meant.

‘There’s a nosing Justice of the Peace lost in thee,’ Will returned. ‘Yon’s a business I’ve neglected all this day for thy fat sake – and he by so much the drunker….Patience! It’s all set out on the table. Have a care with the ink!’

Ben reached unsteadily for the packet of papers and read the superscription:’ “To William Shakespeare, Gentleman, at his house of New Place in the town of Stratford, these – with diligence from M.S.” Why does the fellow withhold his name? Or is it one of your women? I’ll look.’

Muzzy as he was, he opened and unfolded a mass of printed papers expertly enough.

‘From the most learned divine, Miles Smith of Brazen Nose College,’ Will explained. ‘You know this business as well as I. The King has set all the scholars of England to make one Bible, which the Church shall be bound to, out of all the Bibles that men use.’

‘I knew.’ Ben could not lift his eyes from the printed page. ‘I’m more about Court than you think. The learning of Oxford and Cambridge – “most noble and most equal,” as I have said – and Westminster, to sit upon a clutch of Bibles. Those ‘ud be Geneva (my mother read to me out of it at her knee), Douai, Rheims, Coverdale, Matthew’s, the Bishops’, the Great, and so forth.’

‘They are all set down on the page there – text against text. And you call me a botcher of old clothes?’

‘Justly. But what’s your concern with this botchery? To keep peace among the Divines? There’s fifty of ’em at it as I’ve heard.’

‘I deal with but one. He came to know me when we played at Oxford – when the plague was too hot in London.’

‘I remember this Miles Smith now. Son of a butcher? Hey?’ Ben grunted.

‘Is it so?’ was the quiet answer. ‘He was moved, he said, with some lines of mine in Dick’s part. He said they were, to his godly apprehension, a parable, as it might be, of his reverend self, going down darkling to his tomb ‘twixt cliffs of ice and iron.’

‘What lines? I know none of thine of that power. But in my Sejanus -‘

These were in my Macbeth. They lost nothing at Dick’s mouth:-

‘ “To-morrow, and tomorrow, and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death -“

or something in that sort. Condell writes ’em out fair for him, and tells him I am Justice of the Peace (wherein he lied) and armiger, which brings me within the pale of God’s creatures and the Church. Little and little, then, this very reverend Miles Smith opens his mind to me. He and a half-score others, his cloth, are cast to furbish up the Prophets – Isaiah to Malachi. In his opinion by what he’d heard, I had some skill in words, and he’d condescend – ‘

‘How?’ Ben barked. ‘Condescend?’

‘Why not? He’d condescend to inquire o’ me privily, when direct illumination lacked, for a tricking-out of his words or the turn of some figure. For example ‘ – Will pointed to the papers – ‘here be the first three verses of the Sixtieth of Isaiah, and the nineteenth and twentieth of that same. Miles has been at a stand over ’em a week or more.’

‘They never called on me.’ Ben caressed lovingly the hand-pressed proofs on their lavish linen paper. ‘Here’s the Latin atop and’ – his thick forefinger ran down the slip – ‘some three – four – Englishings out of the other Bibles. They spare ’emselves nothing. Let’s to it together. Will you have the Latin first?’

‘Could I choke ye from that, Holofernes?’

Ben rolled forth, richly: “‘Surge, illumare, Jerusalem, quia venit lumen tuum, et gloria Domini super te orta est. Quia ecce tenebrae aperient terram et caligo populos. Super te autem orietur Dominus, et gloria ejus in te videbitur. Et ambulabunt gentes in lumine tuo, et reges in splendore ortus tui.” Er-hum? Think you to better that?’

‘How have Smith’s crew gone about it?’

‘Thus.’ Ben read from the paper. “‘Get thee up, O Jerusalem, and be bright, for thy light is at hand. and the glory of God has risen up upon thee.”‘

‘Up-pup-up!’ Will stuttered profanely.

Ben held on. “‘See how darkness is upon the earth and the peoples thereof.”‘

‘That’s no great stuff to put into Isaiah’s mouth. And further, Ben?’

“‘But on thee God shall shew light and on-” or “in,” is it?’ (.Ben held the proof closer to the deep furrow at the bridge of his nose.) ‘”on thee shall His glory be manifest. So that all peoples shall walk in thy light and the Kings in the glory of thy morning.”‘

‘It may be mended. Read me the Coverdale of it now. ‘Tis on the same sheet – to the right, Ben.’

‘Umm-umm! Coverdale saith, “And therefore get thee up betimes, for thy light cometh, and the glory of the Lord shall rise up upon thee. For lo! while the darkness and cloud covereth the earth and the people, the Lord shall shew thee light, and His glory shall be seen in thee. The Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness that springeth forth upon thee.” But “gentes” is for the most part, “peoples” Ben concluded.

page 3

‘Eh?’ said Will indifferently. ‘Art sure?’

This loosed an avalanche of instances from Ovid, Quintilian, Terence, Columella, Seneca, and others. Will took no heed till the rush ceased. but stared into the orchard through the September haze. ‘Now give me the Douai and Geneva for this “Get thee up, O Jerusalem,”‘ said he at last.

‘They’ll be all there.’ Ben referred to the proofs. “Tis “arise” in both,’ said he. “‘Arise and be bright” in Geneva. In the Douai ’tis “Arise and be illuminated.”‘

‘So? Give me the paper now.’ Will took it from his companion, rose, and paced towards a tree in the orchard, turning again, when he had reached it, by a well-worn track through the grass. Ben leaned forward in his chair. The other’s free hand went up warningly.

‘Quiet, man!’ said he. ‘I wait on my Demon!’ He fell into the stage-stride of his art at that time, speaking to the air.

‘How shall this open? “Arise?” No! “Rise!” Yes. And we’ll no weak coupling. ‘Tis a call to a City! “Rise – shine” . . . Nor yet any schoolmaster’s “because” – because Isaiah is not Holofernes. “Rise- shine; for thy light is come, and -!” ‘ He refreshed himself from the apple and the proofs as he strode. “‘And – and the glory of God!” – No “God’s”‘s over short. We need the long roll here.

“And the glory of the Lord is risen on thee.” (Isaiah speaks the part. We’ll have it from his own lips.) What’s next in Smith’s stuff? . . . “See how?” Oh, vile – vile! … And Geneva hath “Lo”? (Still, Ben! Still!) “Lo” is better by all odds: but to match the long roll of “the Lord” we’ll have it “Behold.” How goes it now? For, behold, darkness clokes the earth and – and -“What’s the colour and use of this cursed caligo, Ben? – “Et caligo populos.”‘

‘ “Mistiness” or, as in Pliny, “blindness.” And further-‘

‘No-o … Maybe, though, caligo will piece out tenebrae. “Quia ecce tenebrae operient terram et caligo populos.” Nay! “Shadow” and “mist” are not men enough for this work … Blindness. did ye say, Ben? … The blackness of ‘blindness atop of mere darkness? … By God, I’ve used it in my own stuff many times! “Gross” searches it to the hilts! “Darkness covers” – no -“clokes” (short always). “Darkness clokes the earth, and gross – gross darkness the people!” (But Isaiah’s prophesying, with the storm behind him. Can ye not feel it, Ben? It must be “shall”) – “Shall cloke the earth” … The rest comes clearer …. But on thee God Shall arise” … (Nay, that’s sacrificing the Creator to the Creature!) “But the Lord shall arise on thee”, and – yes, we sound that “thee” again – “and on thee shall” – No! … “And His glory shall be seen on thee.” Good!’ He walked his beat a little in silence, mumbling the two verses before he mouthed them.

‘I have it! Heark, Ben! “Rise – shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen on thee. For, behold, darkness shall cloke the earth, and gross darkness the people. But the Lord shall arise on thee, and His glory shall be seen upon thee.”‘

‘There’s something not all amiss there,’ Ben conceded.

‘My Demon never betrayed me yet, while I trusted him. Now for the verse that runs to the blast of rams’-horns. “Et ambulabunt gentes in lumine tuo, et reges in splendore ortus tui.” How goes that in the Smithy? “The Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness that springs forth upon thee?” The same in Coverdale and the Bishops’ – eh? We’ll keep “Gentiles,” Ben, for the sake of the indraught of the last syllable. But it might be “And the Gentiles shall draw.” No! The plainer the better! “The Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the splendour of -” (Smith’s out here! We’ll need something that shall lift the trumpet anew.) “Kings shall – shall – Kings to -” (Listen, Ben, but on your life speak not!) “Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to thy bright-ness” – No! “Kings to the brightness that springeth-” Serves not! … One trumpet must answer another. And the blast of a trumpet is always ai-ai. “The brightness of” – “Ortus” signifies “rising,” Ben – or what?’

‘Ay, or “birth,” or the East in general.’

‘Ass! ‘Tis the one word that answers to “light.” “Kings to the brightness of thy rising.” Look! The thing shines now within and without. God! That so much should lie on a word!’ He repeated the verse – “And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.”‘

He walked to the table and wrote rapidly on the proof margin all three verses as he had spoken them. ‘If they hold by this’, said he, raising his head, ‘they’ll not go far astray. Now for the nineteenth and twentieth verses. On the other sheet, Ben. What? What? Smith says he has held back his rendering till he hath seen mine? Then we’ll botch ’em as they stand. Read me first the Latin; next the Coverdale, and last the Bishops’. There’s a contagion of sleep in the air.’ He handed back the proofs, yawned, and took up his walk.

Obedient, Ben began: “‘Non erit tibi amplius Sol ad lucendum per diem, nec splendor Lunae illuminabit te.” Which Coverdale rendereth, “The Sun shall never be thy day light, and the light of the Moon shall never shine unto thee.” The Bishops read: “Thy sun shall never be thy daylight and the light of the moon shall never shine on thee.”‘

‘Coverdale is the better,’ said Will, and, wrinkling his nose a little,’The Bishops put out their lights clumsily. Have at it, Ben.’

Ben pursed his lips and knit his brow. ‘The two verses are in the same mode, changing a hand’s-breadth in the second. By so much, therefore, the more difficult.’

‘Ye see that, then?’ said the other, staring past him, and muttering as he paced, concerning suns and moons. Presently he took back the proof, chose him another apple, and grunted. ‘Umm-umm! “Thy Sun shall never be – No! Flat as a split viol. “Non erit tibi amplius Sol-“ That amplius must give tongue.

Ah! . . . “Thy Sun shall not – shall not – shall no more be thy light by day” A fair entry. “Nor?” – No! Not on the heels of “day.” “Neither” it must be – “Neither the Moon” – but here’s splendor and the rams’-horns again. (Therefore – ai-ai!) “Neither for brightness shall the Moon -” (Pest! It is the Lord who is taking the Moon’s place over Israel. It must be “thy Moon.”) “Neither for brightness shall thy Moon light – give – make – give light unto thee.” Ah! . . . Listen here! . . . “The Sun shall no more be thy light by day: neither for brightness shall thy Moon give light unto thee.” That serves, and more, for the first entry. What next, Ben?’

Ben nodded magisterially as Will neared him, reached out his hand for the proofs, and read: ‘”Sed erit tibi Dominus in lucem sempiternam et Deus tuus in gloriam tuam.” Here is a jewel of Coverdale’s that the Bishops have wisely stolen whole. Hear! “But the Lord Himself shall be thy everlasting light, and thy God shall be thy glory.”‘ Ben paused. ‘There’s a hand’s-breadth of splendour for a simple man to gather!’

‘Both hands rather. He’s swept the strings as divinely as David before Saul’, Will assented. ‘We’ll convey it whole, too…. What’s amiss now, Holofernes?’

For Ben was regarding him with a scholar’s cold pity. ‘Both hands! Will, hast thou ever troubled to master any shape or sort of prosody – the mere names of the measures and pulses of strung words?’

page 4

‘I beget some such stuff and send it to you to christen. What’s your wisdomhood in labour of?’

‘Naught. Naught. But not to know the names of the tools of his trade!’ Ben half muttered and pronounced some Greek word or other which conveyed nothing to the listener, who replied: ‘Pardon, then, for whatever sin it was. I do but know words for my need of ’em. Ben. Hold still awhile!’

He went back to his pacings and mutterings. “‘For the Lord Himself shall be thy – or thine? – everlasting light.” Yes. We’ll convey that.’ He repeated it twice. ‘Nay! Can be bettered. Hark ye, Ben. Here is the Sun going up to over-run and possess all Heaven for evermore. Therefore (Still, man!) we’ll harness the horses of the dawn. Hear their hooves? “The Lord Himself shall be unto thee thy everlasting light, and -” Hold again! After that climbing thunder must be some smooth check – like great wings gliding. Therefore we’ll not have “shall be thy glory,” but “And thy God thy glory!” Ay – even as an eagle alighteth! Good – good! Now again, the sun and moon of that twentieth verse, Ben.’

Ben read: ‘”Non occidet ultra Sol tuus et Luna tua non minuetur: quia erit tibi Dominus in lucem sempiternam et complebuntur dies luctus tui.”

Will snatched the paper and read aloud from the Coverdale version. “‘Thy Sun shall never go down, and thy Moon shall not be taken away …… What a plague’s Coverdale doing with his blocking ets and urs, Ben? What’s minuetur? … I’ll have it all anon.’

‘Minish – make less – appease – abate, as in-‘

‘So?’ Will threw the proofs back. ‘Then “wane” should serve. “Neither shall thy moon wane …. “Wane” is good, but over-weak for place next to “moon”‘ … He swore softly. ‘Isaiah hath abolished both earthly sun and moon. Exeunt ambo. Aha! I begin to see ! … Sol, the man, goes down – down stairs or trap – as needs be. Therefore “Go down” shall stand. “Set” would have been better- as a sword sent home in the scabbard – but it jars – it jars. Now Luna must retire herself in some simple fashion … Which? Ass that I be! ‘Tis common talk in all the plays…

“Withdrawn” … “Favour withdrawn” … “Countenance withdrawn.” “The Queen withdraws herself” … “Withdraw,” it shall be! “Neither shall thy moon withdraw herself.” (Hear her silver train rasp the boards, Ben?) “Thy sun shall no more go down – neither shall thy moon withdraw herself. For the Lord. . .” – ay, the Lord, simple of Himself – “shall be thine” – yes, “thine” here – “everlasting light, and”…How goes the ending, Ben?’

‘“Et complebuntur dies luctus tui.”‘ Ben read. ‘”And thy sorrowful days shall be rewarded thee,” says Coverdale.’

‘And the Bishops?’

‘”And thy sorrowful days shall be ended.”‘

‘By no means. And Douai?’

‘”Thy sorrow shall be ended.”‘

‘And Geneva?’

‘”And the days of thy mourning shall be ended.”‘

‘The Switzers have it! Lay the tail of Geneva to the head of Coverdale and the last is without flaw.

He began to thump Ben on the shoulder. ‘We have it! I have it all, Boanerges! Blessed be my Demon! Hear!

“The sun shall no more be thy light by day, neither for brightness the moon by night. But the Lord Himself shall be unto thee thy everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.”

‘ He drew a deep breath and went on.

‘“Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw herself, for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.”‘

The rain of triumphant blows began again. ‘If those other seven devils in London let it stand on this sort, it serves. But God knows what they can not turn upsee-dejee!’.

Ben wriggled. ‘Let be!’ he protested. ‘Ye are more moved by this jugglery than if the Globe were burned.’

‘Thatch – old thatch! And full of fleas! … But, Ben, ye should have heard my Ezekiel making mock of fallen Tyrus in his twenty-seventh chapter. Miles sent me the whole, for, he said, some small touches. I took it to the Bank – four o’clock of a summer morn; stretched out in one of our wherries – and watched London, Port and Town, up and down the river, waking all arrayed to heap more upon evident excess. Ay! “A merchant for the peoples of many isles” … “The ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy markets”? Yes! I saw all Tyre before me neighing her pride against lifted heaven… But what will they let stand of all mine at long last? Which? I’ll never know.’

He had set himself neatly and quickly to refolding and cording the packet while he talked. ‘That’s secret enough,’ he said at the finish.

‘He’ll lose it by the way.’ Ben pointed to the sleeper beneath the tree. ‘He’s owl-drunk.’

‘But not his horse,’ said Will. He crossed the orchard, roused the man; slid the packet into an holster which he carefully rebuckled; saw him out of the gate, and returned to his chair.

‘Who will know we had part in it?’ Ben asked.

‘God, maybe – if He ever lay ear to earth. I’ve gained and lost enough – lost enough.’ He lay back and sighed. There was long silence till he spoke half aloud. ‘And Kit that was my master in the beginning, he died when all the world was young.’

‘Knifed on a tavern reckoning – not even for a wench!’ Ben nodded.

‘Ay. But if he’d lived he’d have breathed me! ‘Fore God, he’d have breathed me!’

‘Was Marlowe, or any man, ever thy master, Will?’

‘He alone. Very he. I envied Kit. Ye do not know that envy, Ben?’

‘Not as touching my own works. When the mob is led to prefer a baser Muse, I have felt the hurt, and paid home. Ye know that – as ye know my doctrine of play-writing.’

‘Nay – not wholly – tell it at large,’ said Will, relaxing in his seat, for virtue had gone out of him. He put a few drowsy questions. In three minutes Ben had launched full-flood on the decayed state of the drama, which he was born to correct; on cabals and intrigues against him which he had fought without cease; and on the inveterate muddle-headedness of the mob unless duly scourged into approbation by his magisterial hand.

It was very still in the orchard now that the horse had gone. The heat of the day held though the sun sloped and the wine had done its work. Presently, Ben’s discourse was broken by a snort from the other chair.

‘I was listening, Ben! Missed not a word – missed not a word.’ Will sat up and rubbed his eyes. ‘Ye held me throughout.’ His head dropped again before he had done speaking.

Ben looked at him with a chuckle and quoted from one of his own plays:-
‘”Mine earnest vehement botcher And deacon also, Will, I cannot dispute with you.”‘

‘ He drew out flint, steel and tinder, pipe and tobacco-bag from somewhere round his waist, lit and puffed against the midges till he, too, dozed.

pages 1 of 7

ALL DAY I had followed at the heels of a pursuing army engaged on one of the finest battles that ever camp of exercise beheld. Thirty thousand troops had, by the wisdom of the Government of India, been turned loose over a few thousand square miles of country to practise in peace what they would never attempt in war. Consequently cavalry charged unshaken infantry at the trot. Infantry captured artillery by frontal attacks delivered in line of quarter columns, and mounted infantry skirmished up to the wheels of an armoured train which carried nothing more deadly than a twenty-five pounder Armstrong, two Nordenfeldts, and a few score volunteers all cased in three-eighths-inch boiler-plate. Yet it was a very lifelike camp. Operations did not cease at sundown; nobody knew the country and nobody spared man or horse. There was unending cavalry scouting and almost unending forced work over broken ground. The Army of the South had finally pierced the centre of the Army of the North, and was pouring through the gap hot-foot to capture a city of strategic importance. Its front extended fanwise, the sticks being represented by regiments strung out along the line of route backwards to the divisional transport columns and all the lumber that trails behind an army on the move. On its right the broken left of the Army of the North was flying in mass, chased by the Southern horse and hammered by the Southern guns till these had been pushed far beyond the limits of their last support. Then the flying sat down to rest, while the elated commandant of the pursuing force telegraphed that he held all in check and observation.

Unluckily he did not observe that three miles to his right flank a flying column of Northern horse with a detachment of Ghoorkhas and British troops had been pushed round as fast as the failing light allowed, to cut across the entire rear of the Southern Army,—to break, as it were, all the ribs of the fan where they converged by striking at the transport, reserve ammunition, and artillery supplies. Their instructions were to go in, avoiding the few scouts who might not have been drawn off by the pursuit, and create sufficient excitement to impress the Southern Army with the wisdom of guarding their own flank and rear before they captured cities. It was a pretty manœuvre, neatly carried out.

Speaking for the second division of the Southern Army, our first intimation of the attack was at twilight, when the artillery were labouring in deep sand, most of the escort were trying to help them out, and the main body of the infantry had gone on. A Noah’s Ark of elephants, camels, and the mixed menagerie of an Indian transport-train bubbled and squealed behind the guns, when there appeared from nowhere in particular British infantry to the extent of three companies, who sprang to the heads of the gun-horses and brought all to a standstill amid oaths and cheers.

‘How’s that, umpire?’ said the major commanding the attack, and with one voice the drivers and limber gunners answered ‘Hout!’ while the colonel of artillery sputtered.

‘All your scouts are charging our main body,’ said the major. ‘Your flanks are unprotected for two miles. I think we’ve broken the back of this division. And listen,—there go the Ghoorkhas!’

A weak fire broke from the rear-guard more than a mile away, and was answered by cheerful howlings. The Ghoorkhas, who should have swung clear of the second division, had stepped on its tail in the dark, but drawing off hastened to reach the next line of attack, which lay almost parallel to us five or six miles away.

Our column swayed and surged irresolutely,—three batteries, the divisional ammunition reserve, the baggage, and a section of the hospital and bearer corps. The commandant ruefully promised to report himself ‘cut up’ to the nearest umpire, and commending his cavalry and all other cavalry to the special care of Eblis, toiled on to resume touch with the rest of the division.

‘We’ll bivouac here to-night,’ said the major, ‘I have a notion that the Ghoorkhas will get caught. They may want us to re-form on. Stand easy till the transport gets away.’

A hand caught my beast’s bridle and led him out of the choking dust; a larger hand deftly canted me out of the saddle; and two of the hugest hands in the world received me sliding. Pleasant is the lot of the special correspondent who falls into such hands as those of Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd.

‘An’ that’s all right,’ said the Irishman calmly. ‘We thought we’d find you somewheres here by. Is there anything av yours in the transport? Orth’ris’ll fetch ut out.’

Ortheris did ‘fetch ut out,’ from under the trunk of an elephant, in the shape of a servant and an animal both laden with medical comforts. The little man’s eyes sparkled.

‘If the brutil an’ licentious soldiery av these parts gets sight av the thruck,’ said Mulvaney, making practised investigation, ‘they’ll loot ev’rything. They’re bein’ fed on iron-filin’s an’ dog-biscuit these days, but glory’s no compensation for a belly-ache. Praise be, we’re here to protect you, sorr. Beer, sausage, bread (soft an’ that’s a cur’osity), soup in a tin, whisky by the smell av ut, an’ fowls! Mother av Moses, but ye take the field like a confectioner! ’Tis scand’lus.’

‘Ere’s a orficer,’ said Ortheris significantly. ‘When the sergent’s done lushin’ the privit may clean the pot.’

I bundled several things into Mulvaney’s haversack before the major’s hand fell on my shoulder and he said tenderly, ‘Requisitioned for the Queen’s service. Wolseley was quite wrong about special correspondents: they are the soldier’s best friends. Come and take pot-luck with us to-night.’

And so it happened amid laughter and shoutings that my well-considered commissariat melted away to reappear later at the mess-table, which was a waterproof sheet spread on the ground. The flying column had taken three days’ rations with it, and there be few things nastier than Government rations—especially when Government is experimenting with German toys. Erbswurst, tinned beef of surpassing tinniness, compressed vegetables, and meat-biscuits may be nourishing, but what Thomas Atkins needs is bulk in his inside. The major, assisted by his brother officers, purchased goats for the camp, and so made the experiment of no effect. Long before the fatigue-party sent to collect brushwood had returned, the men were settled down by their valises, kettles and pots had appeared from the surrounding country, and were dangling over fires as the kid and the compressed vegetable bubbled together; there rose a cheerful clinking of mess-tins; outrageous demands for ‘a little more stuffin’ with that there liver-wing;’ and gust on gust of chaff as pointed as a bayonet and as delicate as a gun-butt.

‘The boys are in a good temper,’ said the major. ‘They’ll be singing presently. Well, a night like this is enough to keep them happy.’

Over our heads burned the wonderful Indian stars, which are not all pricked in on one plane, but, preserving an orderly perspective, draw the eye through the velvet darkness of the void up to the barred doors of heaven itself. The earth was a gray shadow more unreal than the sky. We could hear her breathing lightly in the pauses between the howling of the jackals, the movement of the wind in the tamarisks, and the fitful mutter of musketry-fire leagues away to the left. A native woman from some unseen hut began to sing, the mail-train thundered past on its way to Delhi, and a roosting crow cawed drowsily. Then there was a belt-loosening silence about the fires, and the even breathing of the crowded earth took up the story.

page 2

The men, full fed, turned to tobacco and song,—their officers with them. The subaltern is happy who can win the approval of the musical critics in his regiment, and is honoured among the more intricate step-dancers. By him, as by him who plays cricket cleverly, Thomas Atkins will stand in time of need, when he will let a better officer go on alone. The ruined tombs of forgotten Mussulman saints heard the ballad of Agra Town, The Buffalo Battery, Marching to Kabul, The long, long Indian Day, The Place where the Punkah-coolie died, and that crashing chorus which announces,

Youth’s daring spirit, manhood’s fire,
Firm hand and eagle eye,
Must he acquire, who would aspire
To see the gray boar die.

To-day, of all those jovial thieves who appropriated my commissariat and lay and laughed round that waterproof sheet, not one remains. They went to camps that were not of exercise and battles without umpires. Burmah, the Soudan, and the frontier,—fever and fight,—took them in their time.

I drifted across to the men’s fires in search of Mulvaney, whom I found strategically greasing his feet by the blaze. There is nothing particularly lovely in the sight of a private thus engaged after a long day’s march, but when you reflect on the exact proportion of the ‘might, majesty, dominion, and power’ of the British Empire which stands on those feet you take an interest in the proceedings.

‘There’s a blister, bad luck to ut, on the heel,’ said Mulvaney. ‘I can’t touch ut. Prick ut out, little man.’

Ortheris took out his house-wife, eased the trouble with a needle, stabbed Mulvaney in the calf with the same weapon, and was swiftly kicked into the fire.

‘I’ve bruk the best av my toes over you, ye grinnin’ child av disruption,’ said Mulvaney, sitting cross- legged and nursing his feet; then seeing me, ‘Oh, ut’s you, sorr! Be welkim, an’ take that maraudin’ scutt’s place. Jock, hold him down on the cindhers for a bit.’

But Ortheris escaped and went elsewhere, as I took possession of the hollow he had scraped for himself and lined with his greatcoat. Learoyd on the other side of the fire grinned affably and in a minute fell fast asleep.

‘There’s the height av politeness for you,’ said Mulvaney, lighting his pipe with a flaming branch. ‘But Jock’s eaten half a box av your sardines at wan gulp, an’ I think the tin too. What’s the best wid you, sorr, an’ how did you happen to be on the losin’ side this day whin we captured you?’

‘The Army of the South is winning all along the line,’ I said.

‘Then that line’s the hangman’s rope, savin’ your presence. You’ll learn to-morrow how we rethreated to dhraw thim on before we made thim trouble, an’ that’s what a woman does. By the same tokin, we’ll be attacked before the dawnin’ an’ ut would be betther not to slip your boots. How do I know that? By the light av pure reason. Here are three companies av us ever so far inside av the enemy’s flank an’ a crowd av roarin’, tarin’, squealin’ cavalry gone on just to turn out the whole hornet’s nest av them. Av course the enemy will pursue, by brigades like as not, an’ thin we’ll have to run for ut. Mark my words. I am av the opinion av Polonius whin he said, “Don’t fight wid ivry scutt for the pure joy av fightin’, but if you do, knock the nose av him first an’ frequint.” We ought to ha’ gone on an’ helped the Ghoorkhas.’

‘But what do you know about Polonius?’ I demanded. This was a new side of Mulvaney’s character.

‘All that Shakespeare iver wrote an’ a dale more that the gallery shouted,’ said the man of war, carefully lacing his boots. ‘Did I not tell you av Silver’s theatre in Dublin whin I was younger than I am now an’ a patron av the drama? Ould Silver wud never pay actor—man or woman their just dues, an’ by consequince his comp’nies was collapsible at the last minut. Thin the bhoys wud clamour to take a part, an’ oft as not ould Silver made them pay for the fun. Faith, I’ve seen Hamlut played wid a new black eye an’ the queen as full as a cornucopia. I remimber wanst Hogin that ’listed in the Black Tyrone an’ was shot in South Africa, he sejuced ould Silver into givin’ him Hamlut’s part instid av me that had a fine fancy for rhetoric in those days. Av course I wint into the gallery an’ began to fill the pit wid other people’s hats, an’ I passed the time av day to Hogin walkin’ through Denmark like a hamstrung mule wid a pall on his back. “Hamlut,” sez I, “there’s a hole in your heel. Pull up your shtockin’s, Hamlut,” sez I. “Hamlut, Hamlut, for the love av decincy dhrop that skull an’ pull up your shtockin’s.” The whole house begun to tell him that. He stopped his soliloquishms mid-between. “My shtockin’s may be comin’ down or they may not,” sez he, screwin’ his eye into the gallery, for well he knew who I was. “But afther this performince is over me an’ the Ghost’ll trample the tripes out av you, Terence, wid your ass’s bray!” An’ that’s how I come to know about Hamlut. Eyah! Those days, those days! Did you iver have onendin’ devilmint an’ nothin’ to pay for it in your life, sorr?’

‘Never, without having to pay,’ I said.

‘That’s thrue! ’Tis mane whin you considher on ut; but ut’s the same wid horse or fut. A headache if you dhrink, an’ a belly-ache if you eat too much, an’ a heart-ache to kape all down. Faith, the beast only gets the colic, an’ he’s the lucky man.’

He dropped his head and stared into the fire, fingering his moustache the while. From the far side of the bivouac the voice of Corbet-Nolan, senior subaltern of B company, uplifted itself in an ancient and much appreciated song of sentiment, the men moaning melodiously behind him.

The north wind blew coldly, she drooped from that hour,
My own little Kathleen, my sweet little Kathleen,
Kathleen, my Kathleen, Kathleen O’Moore!

With forty-five O’s in the last word: even at that distance you might have cut the soft South Irish accent with a shovel.

‘For all we take we must pay, but the price is cruel high,’ murmured Mulvaney when the chorus had ceased.

‘What’s the trouble?’ I said gently, for I knew that he was a man of an inextinguishable sorrow.

‘Hear now,’ said he. ‘Ye know what I am now. I know what I mint to be at the beginnin’ av my service. I’ve tould you time an’ again, an’ what I have not Dinah Shadd has. An’ what am I? Oh, Mary Mother av Hiven, an ould dhrunken, untrustable baste av a privit that has seen the reg’ment change out from colonel to drummer-boy, not wanst or twice, but scores av times! Ay, scores! An’ me not so near gettin’ promotion as in the first! An’ me livin’ on an’ kapin’ clear av clink, not by my own good conduck, but the kindness av some orf’cer-bhoy young enough to be son to me? Do I not know ut? Can I not tell whin I’m passed over at p’rade, tho’ I’m rockin’ full av liquor an’ ready to fall all in wan piece, such as even a suckin’ child might see,

page 3

bekaze, “Oh, ’tis only ould Mulvaney!” An’ whin I’m let off in ord’ly-room through some thrick of the tongue an’ a ready answer an’ the ould man’s mercy, is ut smilin’ I feel whin I fall away an’ go back to Dinah Shadd, thryin’ to carry ut all off as a joke? Not I! ’Tis hell to me, dumb hell through ut all; an’ next time whin the fit comes I will be as bad again. Good cause the reg’ment has to know me for the best soldier in ut. Better cause have I to know mesilf for the worst man. I’m only fit to tache the new drafts what I’ll niver learn myself; an’ I am sure, as tho’ I heard ut, that the minut wan av these pink-eyed recruities gets away from my “Mind ye now,” an’ “Listen to this, Jim, bhoy,”—sure I am that the sergint houlds me up to him for a warnin’. So I tache, as they say at musketry-instruction, by direct and ricochet fire. Lord be good to me, for I have stud some throuble!’

‘Lie down and go to sleep,’ said I, not being able to comfort or advise. ‘You’re the best man in the regiment, and, next to Ortheris, the biggest fool. Lie down and wait till we’re attacked. What force will they turn out? Guns, think you?’

‘Try that wid your lorrds an’ ladies, twistin’ an turnin’ the talk, tho’ you mint ut well. Ye cud say nothin’ to help me, an’ yet ye niver knew what cause I had to be what I am.’

‘Begin at the beginning and go on to the end,’ I said royally. ‘But rake up the fire a bit first.’

I passed Ortheris’s bayonet for a poker.

‘That shows how little we know what we do,’ said Mulvaney, putting it aside. ‘Fire takes all the heart out av the steel, an’ the next time, may be, that our little man is fighting for his life his bradawl’ll break, an’ so you’ll ha’ killed him, manin’ no more than to kape yourself warm. ’Tis a recruity’s thrick that. Pass the clanin’-rod, sorr.’

I snuggled down abashed; and after an interval the voice of Mulvaney began.

‘Did I iver tell you how Dinah Shadd came to be wife av mine?’

I dissembled a burning anxiety that I had felt for some months—ever since Dinah Shadd, the strong, the patient, and the infinitely tender, had of her own good love and free will washed a shirt for me, moving in a barren land where washing was not.

‘I can’t remember,’ I said casually. ‘Was it before or after you made love to Annie Bragin, and got no satisfaction?’

The story of Annie Bragin is written in another place. It is one of the many less respectable episodes in Mulvaney’s chequered career.

‘Before—before—long before, was that business av Annie Bragin an’ the corp’ril’s ghost. Niver woman was the worse for me whin I had married Dinah. There’s a time for all things, an’ I know how to kape all things in place—barrin’ the dhrink, that kapes me in my place wid no hope av comin’ to be aught else.’

‘Begin at the beginning,’ I insisted. ‘Mrs. Mulvaney told me that you married her when you were quartered in Krab Bokhar barracks.’

‘An’ the same is a cess-pit,’ said Mulvaney piously. ‘She spoke thrue, did Dinah. ’Twas this way. Talkin’ av that, have ye iver fallen in love, sorr?’

I preserved the silence of the damned. Mulvaney continued—

‘Thin I will assume that ye have not. I did. In the days av my youth, as I have more than wanst tould you, I was a man that filled the eye an’ delighted the sowl av women. Niver man was hated as I have bin. Niver man was loved as I—no, not within half a day’s march av ut! For the first five years av my service, whin I was what I wud give my sowl to be now, I tuk whatever was within my reach an’ digested ut—an’ that’s more than most men can say. Dhrink I tuk, an’ ut did me no harm. By the Hollow av Hiven, I cud play wid four women at wanst, an’ kape them from findin’ out anythin’ about the other three, an’ smile like a full-blown marigold through ut all. Dick Coulhan, av the battery we’ll have down on us to-night, could drive his team no better than I mine, an’ I hild the worser cattle! An’ so I lived, an’ so I was happy till afther that business wid Annie Bragin—she that turned me off as cool as a meat-safe, an’ taught me where I stud in the mind av an honest woman. ’Twas no sweet dose to swallow.

‘Afther that I sickened awhile an’ tuk thought to my reg’mental work; conceiting mesilf I wud study an’ be a sargint, an’ a major-gineral twinty minutes afther that. But on top av my ambitiousness there was an empty place in my sowl, an’ me own opinion av mesilf cud not fill ut. Sez I to mesilf, “Terence, you’re a great man an’ the best set-up in the reg’mint. Go on an’ get promotion.” Sez mesilf to me, “What for?” Sez I to mesilf, “For the glory av ut!” Sez mesilf to me, “Will that fill these two strong arrums av yours, Terence?”—“Go to the devil,” sez I to mesilf. “Go to the married lines,” sez mesilf to me. “’Tis the same thing,” sez I to mesilf. “Av you’re the same man, ut is,” said mesilf to me; an’ wid that I considhered on ut a long while. Did you iver feel that way, sorr?’

I snored gently, knowing that if Mulvaney were uninterrupted he would go on. The clamour from the bivouac fires beat up to the stars, as the rival singers of the companies were pitted against each other.

‘So I felt that way an’ a bad time ut was. Wanst, bein’ a fool, I wint into the married lines more for the sake av spakin’ to our ould colour-sergint Shadd than for any thruck wid women-folk. I was a corp’ril then—rejuced aftherwards, but a corp’ril then. I’ve got a photograft av mesilf to prove ut. “You’ll take a cup av tay wid us?” sez Shadd. “I will that,” I sez, “tho’ tay is not my divarsion.”

“‘’Twud be better for you if ut were,” sez ould Mother Shadd, an’ she had ought to know, for Shadd, in the ind av his service, dhrank bungfull each night.

‘Wid that I tuk off my gloves—there was pipeclay in thim, so that they stud alone—an’ pulled up my chair, lookin’ round at the china ornaments an’ bits av things in the Shadds’ quarters. They were things that belonged to a man, an’ no camp-kit, here to-day an’ dishipated next. “You’re comfortable in this place, sergint,” sez I. “’Tis the wife that did ut, boy,” sez he, pointin’ the stem av his pipe to ould Mother Shadd, an’ she smacked the top av his bald head apon the compliment. “That manes you want money,” sez she.

‘An’ thin—an’ thin whin the kettle was to be filled, Dinah came in—my Dinah—her sleeves rowled up to the elbow an’ her hair in a winkin’ glory over her forehead, the big blue eyes beneath twinklin’ like stars on a frosty night, an’ the tread av her two feet lighter than waste-paper from the colonel’s basket in ord’ly-room whin ut’s emptied. Bein’ but a shlip av a girl she went pink at seein’ me, an’ I twisted me moustache an’ looked at a picture forninst the wall. Niver show a woman that ye care the snap av a finger for her, an’ begad she’ll come bleatin’ to your boot-heels!’

‘I suppose that’s why you followed Annie Bragin till everybody in the married quarters laughed at you,’ said I, remembering that unhallowed wooing and casting off the disguise of drowsiness.

page 4

‘I’m layin’ down the gin’ral theory av the attack,’ said Mulvaney, driving his boot into the dying fire. ‘If you read the Soldier’s Pocket Book, which niver any soldier reads, you’ll see that there are exceptions. Whin Dinah was out av the door (an’ ’twas as tho’ the sunlight had shut too)—“Mother av Hiven, sergint,” sez I, “but is that your daughter?”—“I’ve believed that way these eighteen years,” sez ould Shadd, his eyes twinklin’; “but Mrs. Shadd has her own opinion, like iv’ry woman.”—“’Tis wid yours this time, for a mericle,” sez Mother Shadd. “Thin why in the name av fortune did I niver see her before?” sez I. “Bekaze you’ve been thrapesin’ round wid the married women these three years past. She was a bit av a child till last year, an’ she shot up wid the spring,” sez ould Mother Shadd. “I’ll thrapese no more,” sez I. “D’you mane that?” sez ould Mother Shadd, lookin’ at me side-ways like a hen looks at a hawk whin the chickens are runnin’ free. “Try me, an’ tell,” sez I. Wid that I pulled on my gloves, dhrank off the tay, an’ went out av the house as stiff as at gin’ral p’rade, for well I knew that Dinah Shadd’s eyes were in the small av my back out av the scullery window. Faith! that was the only time I mourned I was not a cav’l’ry man for the pride av the spurs to jingle.

‘I wint out to think, an’ I did a powerful lot av thinkin’, but ut all came round to that shlip av a girl in the dotted blue dhress, wid the blue eyes an’ the sparkil in them. Thin I kept off canteen, an’ I kept to the married quarthers, or near by, on the chanst av meetin’ Dinah. Did I meet her? Oh, my time past, did I not; wid a lump in my throat as big as my valise an’ my heart goin’ like a farrier’s forge on a Saturday morning? ’Twas “Good day to ye, Miss Dinah,” an “Good day t’you, corp’ril,” for a week or two, and divil a bit further could I get bekaze av the respect I had to that girl that I cud ha’ broken betune finger an’ thumb.’

Here I giggled as I recalled the gigantic figure of Dinah Shadd when she handed me my shirt.

‘Ye may laugh,’ grunted Mulvaney. ‘But I’m speakin’ the trut’, an’ ’tis you that are in fault. Dinah was a girl that wud ha’ taken the imperiousness out av the Duchess av Clonmel in those days. Flower hand, foot av shod air, an’ the eyes av the livin’ mornin’ she had that is my wife to-day—ould Dinah, and niver aught else than Dinah Shadd to me.

‘’Twas after three weeks standin’ off an’ on, an’ niver makin’ headway excipt through the eyes, that a little drummer-boy grinned in me face whin I had admonished him wid the buckle av my belt for riotin’ all over the place. “An’ I’m not the only wan that doesn’t kape to barricks,” sez he. I tuk him by the scruff av his neck,—my heart was hung on a hair-thrigger those days, you will onderstand—an’ “Out wid ut,” sez I, “or I’ll lave no bone av you unbreakable.”—“Speak to Dempsey,” sez he howlin.’ “Dempsey which?” sez I, “ye unwashed limb av Satan.”—“Av the Bob-tailed Dhragoons,” sez he. “He’s seen her home from her aunt’s house in the civil lines four times this fortnight.”—“Child!” sez I, dhroppin’ him, “your tongue’s stronger than your body. Go to your quarters. I’m sorry I dhressed you down.”

‘At that I went four ways to wanst huntin’ Dempsey. I was mad to think that wid all my airs among women I shud ha’ been chated by a basin-faced fool av a cav’lryman not fit to trust on a trunk. Presintly I found him in our lines—the Bobtails was quartered next us—an’ a tallowy, topheavy son av a she-mule he was wid his big brass spurs an’ his plastrons on his epigastrons an’ all. But he niver flinched a hair.

‘“A word wid you, Dempsey,” sez I. “You’ve walked wid Dinah Shadd four times this fortnight gone.”

‘“What’s that to you?” sez he. “I’ll walk forty times more, an’ forty on top av that, ye shovel-futted clod-breakin’ infantry lance-corp’ril.”

‘Before I cud gyard he had his gloved fist home on my cheek an’ down I went full-sprawl. “Will that content you?” sez he, blowin’ on his knuckles for all the world like a Scots Greys orf’cer. “Content!” sez I. “For your own sake, man, take off your spurs, peel your jackut, an’ onglove. ’Tis the beginnin’ av the overture; stand up!”

‘He stud all he know, but he niver peeled his jacket, an’ his shoulders had no fair play. I was fightin’ for Dinah Shadd an’ that cut on my cheek. What hope had he forninst me? “Stand up,” sez I, time an’ again whin he was beginnin’ to quarter the ground an’ gyard high an’ go large. “This isn’t ridin’-school,” I sez. “O man, stand up an’ let me get in at ye.” But whin I saw he wud be runnin’ about, I grup his shtock in my left an’ his waist-belt in my right an’ swung him clear to my right front, head undher, he hammerin’ my nose till the wind was knocked out av him on the bare ground. “Stand up,” sez I, “or I’ll kick your head into your chest!” and I wud ha’ done ut too, so ragin’ mad I was.

‘ “My collar bone’s bruk,” sez he. “Help me back to lines. I’ll walk wid her no more.” So I helped him back.’

‘And was his collar-bone broken?’ I asked, for I fancied that only Learoyd could neatly accomplish that terrible throw.

‘He pitched on his left shoulder-point. Ut was. Next day the news was in both barricks, an’ whin I met Dinah Shadd wid a cheek on me like all the reg’mintal tailor’s samples there was no “Good mornin’, corp’ril,” or aught else. “An’ what have I done, Miss Shadd,” sez I, very bould, plantin’ mesilf forninst her, “that ye should not pass the time of day?”

‘“Ye’ve half-killed rough-rider Dempsey,” sez she, her dear blue eyes fillin’ up.

‘“May be,” sez I. “Was he a friend av yours that saw ye home four times in the fortnight?”

‘“Yes,” sez she, but her mouth was down at the corners. “An’—an’ what’s that to you?” she sez.

‘“Ask Dempsey,” sez I, purtendin’ to go away.

‘“Did you fight for me then, ye silly man?” she sez, tho’ she knew ut all along.

‘“Who else?” sez I, an’ I tuk wan pace to the front.

‘“I wasn’t worth ut,” sez she, fingerin’ in her apron.

‘“That’s for me to say,” sez I. “Shall I say ut?”

‘“Yes,” sez she in a saint’s whisper, an’ at that I explained mesilf; and she tould me what ivry man that is a man, an’ many that is a woman, hears wanst in his life.

‘“But what made ye cry at startin’, Dinah, darlin’?” sez I.

‘“Your—your bloody cheek,” sez she, duckin’ her little head down on my sash (I was on duty for the day) an’ whimperin’ like a sorrowful angil.

page 5

‘Now a man cud take that two ways. I tuk ut as pleased me best an’ my first kiss wid ut. Mother av Innocence! but I kissed her on the tip av the nose an’ undher the eye; an’ a girl that lets a kiss come tumbleways like that has never been kissed before. Take note av that, sorr. Thin we wint hand in hand to ould Mother Shadd like two little childher, an’ she said ’twas no bad thing, an’ ould Shadd nodded behind his pipe, an’ Dinah ran away to her own room. That day I throd on rollin’ clouds. All earth was too small to hould me. Begad, I cud ha’ hiked the sun out av the sky for a live coal to my pipe, so magnificent I was. But I tuk recruities at squad-drill instid, an’ began wid general battalion advance whin I shud ha’ been balance-steppin’ them. Eyah! that day! that day!’

A very long pause. ‘Well?’ said I.

‘’Twas all wrong,’ said Mulvaney, with an enormous sigh. ‘An’ I know that ev’ry bit av ut was my own foolishness. That night I tuk maybe the half av three pints—not enough to turn the hair of a man in his natural senses. But I was more than half drunk wid pure joy, an’ that canteen beer was so much whisky to me. I can’t tell how it came about, but bekaze I had no thought for anywan except Dinah, bekaze I hadn’t slipped her little white arms from my neck five minuts, bekaze the breath of her kiss was not gone from my mouth, I must go through the married lines on my way to quarters, an’ I must stay talkin’ to a red-headed Mullingar heifer av a girl, Judy Sheehy, that was daughter to Mother Sheehy, the wife of Nick Sheehy, the canteen-sergint—the Black Curse av Shielygh be on the whole brood that are above groun’ this day!

‘“An’ what are ye houldin’ your head that high for, corp’ril?” sez Judy. “Come in an’ thry a cup av tay,” she sez, standin’ in the doorway. Bein’ an ontrustable fool, an’ thinkin’ av anything but tay, I wint.

‘“Mother’s at canteen,” sez Judy, smoothin’ the hair av hers that was like red snakes, an’ lookin’ at me corner-ways out av her green cats’ eyes. “Ye will not mind, corp’ril?”

‘“I can endure,” sez I; ould Mother Sheehy bein’ no divarsion av mine, nor her daughter too. Judy fetched the tea things an’ put thim on the table, leanin’ over me very close to get thim square. I dhrew back, thinkin’ av Dinah.

‘“Is ut afraid you are av a girl alone?” sez Judy.

‘“No,” sez I. “Why should I be?”

‘“That rests wid the girl,” sez Judy, dhrawin’ her chair next to mine.

‘“Thin there let ut rest,” sez I; an’ thinkin’ I’d been a trifle onpolite, I sez, “The tay’s not quite sweet enough for my taste. Put your little finger in the cup, Judy. ’Twill make ut necthar.”

‘“What’s necthar?” sez she.

‘“Somethin’ very sweet,” sez I; an’ for the sinful life av me I cud not help lookin’ at her out av the corner av my eye, as I was used to look at a woman.

‘“Go on wid ye, corp’ril,” sez she. “You’re a flirrt.”

‘“On me sowl I’m not,” sez I.

‘“Then you’re a cruel handsome man, an’ that’s worse,” sez she, heaving big sighs an’ lookin’ crossways.

‘“You know your own mind,” sez I.

‘“’Twud be better for me if I did not,” she sez.

‘“There’s a dale to be said on both sides av that,” sez I, unthinkin’.

‘“Say your own part av ut, then, Terence, darlin’,” sez she; “for begad I’m thinkin’ I’ve said too much or too little for an honest girl,” an’ wid that she put her arms round my neck an’ kissed me.

‘“There’s no more to be said afther that,” sez I, kissin’ her back again—Oh the mane scutt that I was, my head ringin’ wid Dinah Shadd! How does ut come about, sorr, that when a man has put the comether on wan woman, he’s sure bound to put it on another? ’Tis the same thing at musketry. Wan day ivry shot goes wide or into the bank, an’ the next, lay high lay low, sight or snap, ye can’t get off the bull’s-eye for ten shots runnin’.’

‘That only happens to a man who has had a good deal of experience. He does it without thinking,’ I replied.

‘Thankin’ you for the complimint, sorr, ut may be so. But I’m doubtful whether you mint ut for a complimint. Hear now; I sat there wid Judy on my knee tellin’ me all manner av nonsinse an’ only sayin’ “yes” an’ “no,” when I’d much better ha’ kept tongue betune teeth. An’ that was not an hour afther I had left Dinah! What I was thinkin’ av I cannot say. Presintly, quiet as a cat, ould Mother Sheehy came in velvet-dhrunk. She had her daughter’s red hair, but ’twas bald in patches, an’ I cud see in her wicked ould face, clear as lightnin’, what Judy wud be twenty years to come. I was for jumpin’ up, but Judy niver moved.

‘“Terence has promust, mother,” sez she, an’ the could sweat bruk out all over me. Ould Mother Sheehy sat down of a heap an’ began playin’ wid the cups. “Thin you’re a well-matched pair,” she sez very thick. “For he’s the biggest rogue that iver spoiled the Queen’s shoe-leather,” an’—

‘“I’m off, Judy,” sez I. “Ye should not talk nonsinse to your mother. Get her to bed, girl.”

‘“Nonsinse!” sez the ould woman, prickin’ up her ears like a cat an’ grippin’ the table-edge. “’Twill be the most nonsinsical nonsinse for you, ye grinnin’ badger, if nonsinse ’tis. Git clear, you. I’m goin’ to bed.”

‘I ran out into the dhark, my head in a stew an’ my heart sick, but I had sinse enough to see that I’d brought ut all on mysilf. “It’s this to pass the time av day to a panjandhrum av hellcats,” sez I. “What I’ve said, an’ what I’ve not said do not matther. Judy an’ her dam will hould me for a promust man, an’ Dinah will give me the go, an’ I desarve ut. I will go an’ get dhrunk,” sez I, “an’ forget about ut, for ’tis plain I’m not a marrin’ man.”

‘On my way to canteen I ran against Lascelles, colour-sergeant that was av E Comp’ny, a hard, hard man, wid a torment av a wife. “You’ve the head av a drowned man on your shoulders,” sez he; “an’ you’re goin’ where you’ll get a worse wan. Come back,” sez he. “Let me go,” sez I. “I’ve thrown my luck over the wall wid my own hand!”—“Then that’s not the way to get ut back again,” sez he. “Have out wid your throuble, ye fool-bhoy.” An’ I tould him how the matther was.

page 6

‘He sucked in his lower lip. “You’ve been thrapped,” sez he. “Ju Sheehy wud be the betther for a man’s name to hers as soon as can. An’ ye thought ye’d put the comether on her,—that’s the natural vanity of the baste. Terence, you’re a big born fool, but you’re not bad enough to marry into that comp’ny. If you said anythin’, an’ for all your protestations I’m sure ye did—or did not, which is worse,—eat ut all—lie like the father of all lies, but come out av ut free av Judy. Do I not know what ut is to marry a woman that was the very spit an’ image av Judy whin she was young? I’m gettin’ old an’ I’ve larnt patience, but you, Terence, you’d raise hand on Judy an’ kill her in a year. Never mind if Dinah gives you the go, you’ve desarved ut; never mind if the whole reg’mint laughs you all day. Get shut av Judy an’ her mother. They can’t dhrag you to church, but if they do, they’ll dhrag you to hell. Go back to your quarters and lie down,” sez he. Thin over his shoulder, “You must ha’ done with thim.”

‘Next day I wint to see Dinah, but there was no tucker in me as I walked. I knew the throuble wud come soon enough widout any handlin’ av mine, an’ I dreaded ut sore.

‘“I heard Judy callin’ me, but I hild straight on to the Shadds’ quarthers, an’ Dinah wud ha’ kissed me but I put her back.

‘“Whin all’s said, darlin’,” sez I, “you can give ut me if ye will, tho’ I misdoubt ’twill be so easy to come by then.”

‘I had scarce begun to put the explanation into shape before Judy an’ her mother came to the door. I think there was a verandah, but I’m forgettin.’

‘“Will ye not step in?” sez Dinah, pretty and polite, though the Shadds had no dealin’s with the Sheehys. Old Mother Shadd looked up quick, an’ she was the fust to see the throuble; for Dinah was her daughter.

‘“I’m pressed for time to-day,” sez Judy as bould as brass; “an’ I’ve only come for Terence,—my promust man. ’Tis strange to find him here the day afther the day.”

‘Dinah looked at me as though I had hit her, an’ I answered straight.

‘“There was some nonsinse last night at the Sheehys’ quarthers, an’ Judy’s carryin’ on the joke, darlin’,” sez I.

‘“At the Sheehys’ quarthers?” sez Dinah very slow, an’ Judy cut in wid: “He was there from nine till ten, Dinah Shadd, an’ the betther half av that time I was sittin’ on his knee, Dinah Shadd. Ye may look and ye may look an’ ye may look me up an’ down, but ye won’t look away that Terence is my promust man. Terence, darlin’, ’tis time for us to be comin’ home.”

‘Dinah Shadd niver said word to Judy. “Ye left me at half-past eight,” she sez to me, “an’ I niver thought that ye’d leave me for Judy,—promises or no promises. Go back wid her, you that have to be fetched by a girl! I’m done with you,” sez she, and she ran into her own room, her mother followin’. So I was alone wid those two women and at liberty to spake my sentiments.”

‘“Judy Sheehy,” sez I, “if you made a fool av me betune the lights you shall not do ut in the day. I niver promised you words or lines.”

‘“You lie,” sez ould Mother Sheehy, “an’ may ut choke you where you stand!” She was far gone in dhrink.

‘“An’ tho’ ut choked me where I stud I’d not change,” sez I. “Go home, Judy. I take shame for a decent girl like you dhraggin’ your mother out bare-headed on this errand. Hear now, and have ut for an answer. I gave my word to Dinah Shadd yesterday, an’, more blame to me, I was wid you last night talkin’ nonsinse but nothin’ more. You’ve chosen to thry to hould me on ut. I will not be held thereby for anythin’ in the world. Is that enough?”

‘Judy wint pink all over. “An’ I wish you joy av the perjury,” sez she, duckin’ a curtsey. “You’ve lost a woman that would ha’ wore her hand to the bone for your pleasure; an’ ’deed, Terence, ye were not thrapped.…” Lascelles must ha’ spoken plain to her. “I am such as Dinah is—’deed I am! Ye’ve lost a fool av a girl that’ll niver look at you again, an’ ye’ve lost what ye niver had,—your common honesty. If you manage your men as you manage your love-makin’, small wondher they call you the worst corp’ril in the comp’ny. Come away, mother,” sez she.

‘But divil a fut would the ould woman budge! “D’you hould by that?” sez she, peerin’ up under her thick gray eyebrows.

‘“Ay, an’ wud,” sez I, “tho’ Dinah gave me the go twinty times. I’ll have no thruck with you or yours,” sez I. “Take your child away, ye shameless woman.”

‘“An’ am I shameless?” sez she, bringin’ her hands up above her head. “Thin what are you, ye lyin’, schamin’, weak-kneed, dhirty-souled son av a sutler? Am I shameless? Who put the open shame on me an’ my child that we shud go beggin’ through the lines in the broad daylight for the broken word of a man? Double portion of my shame be on you, Terence Mulvaney, that think yourself so strong! By Mary and the saints, by blood and water an’ by ivry sorrow that came into the world since the beginnin’, the black blight fall on you and yours, so that you may niver be free from pain for another when ut’s not your own! May your heart bleed in your breast drop by drop wid all your friends laughin’ at the bleedin’! Strong you think yourself? May your strength be a curse to you to dhrive you into the divil’s hands against your own will! Clear-eyed you are? May your eyes see clear evry step av the dark path you take till the hot cindhers av hell put thim out! May the ragin’ dry thirst in my own ould bones go to you that you shall niver pass bottle full nor glass empty. God preserve the light av your onderstandin’ to you, my jewel av a bhoy, that ye may niver forget what you mint to be an’ do, whin you’re wallowin’ in the muck! May ye see the betther and follow the worse as long as there’s breath in your body; an’ may ye die quick in a strange land, watchin’ your death before ut takes you, an’ onable to stir hand or foot!”

‘I heard a scufflin’ in the room behind, and thin Dinah Shadd’s hand dhropped into mine like a rose-leaf into a muddy road.

‘“The half av that I’ll take,” sez she, “an’ more too if I can. Go home, ye silly talkin’ woman,—go home an’ confess.”

‘“Come away! Come away!” sez Judy, pullin’ her mother by the shawl. “’Twas none av Terence’s fault. For the love av Mary stop the talkin’!”

‘“An’ you!” said ould Mother Sheehy, spinnin’ round forninst Dinah. “Will ye take the half av that man’s load? Stand off from him, Dinah Shadd, before he takes you down too—you that look to be a quarther-master-sergeant’s wife in five years. You look too high, child. You shall wash for the quarther-master-sergeant, whin he plases to give you the job out av charity; but a privit’s wife you shall be to the end, an’ evry sorrow of a privit’s wife you shall know and niver a joy but wan, that shall go from you like the running tide from a rock. The pain av bearin’ you shall know but niver the pleasure av giving the breast; an’ you shall put away a man-child into the common ground wid niver a priest to say a prayer over him, an’ on that man-child ye shall think ivry day av your life. Think long, Dinah Shadd, for you’ll niver have another tho’ you pray till your knees are bleedin’. The mothers av childer shall mock you behind your back when you’re wringing over the wash-tub. You shall know what ut is to help a dhrunken

page 7

husband home an’ see him go to the gyard-room. Will that plase you, Dinah Shadd, that won’t be seen talkin’ to my daughter? You shall talk to worse than Judy before all’s over. The sergints’ wives shall look down on you contemptuous, daughter av a sergint, an’ you shall cover ut all up wid a smiling face whin your heart’s burstin’. Stand off av him, Dinah Shadd, for I’ve put the Black Curse of Shielygh upon him an’ his own mouth shall make ut good.”

‘She pitched forward on her head an’ began foamin’ at the mouth. Dinah Shadd ran out wid water, an’ Judy dhragged the ould woman into the verandah till she sat up.

‘“I’m old an’ forlore,” she sez, thremblin’ an’ cryin’, “and ’tis like I say a dale more than I mane.”

‘“When you’re able to walk,—go,” says ould Mother Shadd. “This house has no place for the likes av you that have cursed my daughter.”

‘“Eyah!” said the ould woman. “Hard words break no bones, an’ Dinah Shadd ’ll kape the love av her husband till my bones are green corn. Judy darlin’, I misremember what I came here for. Can you lend us the bottom av a taycup av tay, Mrs. Shadd?”

‘But Judy dhragged her off cryin’ as tho’ her heart wud break. An’ Dinah Shadd an’ I, in ten minutes we had forgot ut all.’

‘Then why do you remember it now?’ said I.

‘Is ut like I’d forget? Ivry word that wicked ould woman spoke fell thrue in my life aftherwards, an’ I cud ha’ stud ut all—stud ut all,—excipt when my little Shadd was born. That was on the line av march three months afther the regiment was taken with cholera. We were betune Umballa an’ Kalka thin, an’ I was on picket. Whin I came off duty the women showed me the child, an’ ut turned on uts side an’ died as I looked. We buried him by the road, an’ Father Victor was a day’s march behind wid the heavy baggage, so the comp’ny captain read a prayer. An’ since then I’ve been a childless man, an’ all else that ould Mother Sheehy put upon me an’ Dinah Shadd. What do you think, sorr?’

I thought a good deal, but it seemed better then to reach out for Mulvaney’s hand. The demonstration nearly cost me the use of three fingers. Whatever he knows of his weaknesses, Mulvaney is entirely ignorant of his strength.

‘But what do you think?’ he repeated, as I was straightening out the crushed fingers.

My reply was drowned in yells and outcries from the next fire, where ten men were shouting for ‘Orth’ris,’ ‘Privit Orth’ris,’ ‘Mistah Or—ther—ris!’ ‘Deah boy,’ ‘Cap’n Orth’ris,’ ‘Field-Marshal Orth’ris,’ ‘Stanley, you pen’north o’ pop, come ’ere to your own comp’ny!’ And the cockney, who had been delighting another audience with recondite and Rabelaisian yarns, was shot down among his admirers by the major force.

‘You’ve crumpled my dress-shirt ’orrid,’ said he, ‘an’ I shan’t sing no more to this ’ere bloomin’ drawin’-room.’

Learoyd, roused by the confusion, uncoiled himself, crept behind Ortheris, and slung him aloft on his shoulders.

‘Sing, ye bloomin’ hummin’ bird!’ said he, and Ortheris, beating time on Learoyd’s skull, delivered himself, in the raucous voice of the Ratcliffe Highway, of this song:—

My girl she give me the go onst,
When I was a London lad,
An’ I went on the drink for a fortnight,
An’ then I went to the bad.
The Queen she give me a shillin’
To fight for ’er over the seas;
But Guv’ment built me a fever-trap,
An’ Injia give me disease.

Chorus.
Ho! don’t you ’eed what a girl says,
An’ don’t you go for the beer;
But I was an ass when I was at grass,
An’ that is why I’m here.

I fired a shot at a Afghan,
The beggar ’e fired again,
An’ I lay on my bed with a ’ole in my ’ed,
An’ missed the next campaign!
I up with my gun at a Burman
Who carried a bloomin’ dab,
But the cartridge stuck and the bay’nit bruk,
An’ all I got was the scar.

Chorus.
Ho! don’t you aim at a Afghan,
When you stand on the sky-line clear;
An’ don’t you go for a Burman
If none o’ your friends is near.

I served my time for a corp’ral,
An’ wetted my stripes with pop,
For I went on the bend with a intimate friend,
An’ finished the night in the ‘shop.’
I served my time for a sergeant;
The colonel ’e sez ‘No!
The most you’ll see is a full C.B.’
An’…very next night ’twas so.

Chorus.
Ho! don’t you go for a corp’ral
Unless your ’ed is clear;
But I was an ass when I was at grass,
An’ that is why I’m ’ere.

I’ve tasted the luck o’ the army
In barrack an’ camp an’ clink,
An’ I lost my tip through the bloomin’ trip
Along o’ the women an’ drink.
I’m down at the heel o’ my service,
An’ when I am laid on the shelf,
My very wust friend from beginning to end
By the blood of a mouse was myself!

Chorus.
Ho! don’t you ’eed what a girl says,
An’ don’t you go for the beer;
But I was an ass when I was at grass
An’ that is why I’m ’ere.

‘Ay, listen to our little man now, singin’ an’ shoutin’ as tho’ trouble had niver touched him. D’ you remember when he went mad with the home-sickness?’ said Mulvaney, recalling a never-to-be-forgotten season when Ortheris waded through the deep waters if affliction and behaved abominably. ‘But he’s talkin’ bitter truth, though. Eyah!

‘My very worst frind from beginnin’ to ind
By the blood av a mouse was mesilf!’

When I woke I saw Mulvaney, the night-dew gemming his moustache, leaning on his rifle at picket, lonely as Prometheus on his rock, with I know not what vultures tearing his liver.

[a short tale]

LIKE Mr. Bunyan of old, I, Duncan Parrenness, Writer to the Most Honourable the East India Company, in this God-forgotten city of Calcutta, have dreamed a dream, and never since that Kitty my mare fell lame have I been so troubled. Therefore, lest I should forget my dream, I have made shift to set it down here. Though Heaven knows how unhandy the pen is to me who was always readier with sword than ink-horn when I left London two long years since.When the Governor-General’s great dance (that he gives yearly at the latter end of November) was finisht, I had gone to mine own room which looks over that sullen, un-English stream, the Hoogly, scarce so sober as I might have been. Now, roaring drunk in the West is but fuddled in the East, and I was drunk Nor’-Nor’ Easterly as Mr. Shakespeare might have said. Yet, in spite of my liquor, the cool night winds (though I have heard that they breed chills and fluxes innumerable) sobered me somewhat; and I remembered that I had been but a little wrung and wasted by all the sicknesses of the past four months, whereas those young bloods that came eastward with me in the same ship had been all, a month back, planted to Eternity in the foul soil north of Writers’ Buildings. So then, I thanked God mistily (though, to my shame, I never kneeled down to do so) for license to live, at least till March should be upon us again. Indeed, we that were alive (and our number was less by far than those who had gone to their last account in the hot weather late past) had made very merry that evening, by the ramparts of the Fort, over this kindness of Providence; though our jests were neither witty nor such as I should have liked my Mother to hear.

When I had lain down (or rather thrown me on my bed) and the fumes of my drink had a little cleared away, I found that I could get no sleep for thinking of a thousand things that were better left alone. First, and it was a long time since I had thought of her, the sweet face of Kitty Somerset, drifted as it might have been drawn in a picture, across the foot of my bed, so plainly, that I almost thought she had been present in the body. Then I remembered how she drove me to this accursed country to get rich, that I might the more quickly marry her, our parents on both sides giving their consent; and then how she thought better (or worse may be) of her troth, and wed Tom Sanderson but a short three months after I had sailed. From Kitty I fell a musing on Mrs. Vansuythen, a tall pale woman with violet eyes that had come to Calcutta from the Dutch Factory at Chinsura, and had set all our young men, and not a few of the factors, by the ears. Some of our ladies, it is true, said that she had never a husband or marriage-lines at all; but women, and specially those who have led only indifferent good lives themselves, are cruel hard one on another. Besides, Mrs. Vansuythen was far prettier than them all. She had been most gracious to me at the Governor-General’s rout, and indeed I was looked upon by all as her preux chevalier—which is French for a much worse word. Now, whether I cared so much as the scratch of a pin for this same Mrs. Vansuythen (albeit I had vowed eternal love three days after we met) I knew not then nor did till later on; but mine own pride, and a skill in the small sword that no man in Calcutta could equal, kept me in her affections. So that I believed I worshipt her.

When I had dismist her violet eyes from my thoughts, my reason reproacht me for ever having followed her at all; and I saw how the one year that I had lived in this land had so burnt and seared my mind with the flames of a thousand bad passions and desires, that I had aged ten months for each one in the Devil’s school. Whereat I thought of my Mother for a while, and was very penitent: making in my sinful tipsy mood a thousand vows of reformation—all since broken, I fear me, again and again. To-morrow, says I to myself, I will live cleanly for ever. And I smiled dizzily (the liquor being still strong in me) to think of the dangers I had escaped; and built all manner of fine Castles in Spain, whereof a shadowy Kitty Somerset that had the violet eyes and the sweet slow speech of Mrs. Vansuythen, was always Queen.

Lastly, a very fine and magnificent courage (that doubtless had its birth in Mr. Hastings’ Madeira) grew upon me, till it seemed that I could become Governor-General, Nawab, Prince, ay, even the Great Mogul himself, by the mere wishing of it. Wherefore, taking my first steps, random and unstable enough, towards my new kingdom, I kickt my servants sleeping without till they howled and ran from me, and called Heaven and Earth to witness that I, Duncan Parrenness, was a Writer in the service of the Company and afraid of no man. Then, seeing that neither the Moon nor the Great Bear were minded to accept my challenge, I lay down again and must have fallen asleep.

I was waked presently by my last words repeated two or three times, and I saw that there had come into the room a drunken man, as I thought, from Mr. Hastings’ rout. He sate down at the foot of my bed in all the world as it belonged to him, and I took note, as well as I could, that his face was somewhat like mine own grown older, save when it changed to the face of the Governor-General or my father, dead these six months. But this seemed to me only natural, and the due result of too much wine; and I was so angered at his entry all unannounced, that I told him, not over civilly, to go. To all my words he made no answer whatever, only saying slowly, as though it were some sweet morsel: ‘Writer in the Company’s service and afraid of no man.’ Then he stops short, and turning round sharp upon me, says that one of my kidney need fear neither man nor devil; that I was a brave young man, and like enough, should I live so long, to be Governor-General. But for all these things (and I supposed that he meant thereby the changes and chances of our shifty life in these parts) I must pay my price. By this time I had sobered somewhat, and being well waked out of my first sleep, was disposed to look upon the matter as a tipsy man’s jest. So, says I merrily: ‘And what price shall I pay for this palace of mine, which is but twelve feet square, and my five poor pagodas a month? The devil take you and your jesting: I have paid my price twice over in sickness.’ At that moment my man turns full toward me: so that by the moonlight I could see every line and wrinkle of his face. Then my drunken mirth died out of me, as I have seen the waters of our great rivers die away in one night; and I, Duncan Parrenness, who was afraid of no man, was taken with a more deadly terror than I hold it has ever been the lot of mortal man to know. For I saw that his face was my very own, but marked and lined and scarred with the furrows of disease and much evil living—as I once, when I was (Lord help me) very drunk indeed, have seen mine own face, all white and drawn and grown old, in a mirror. I take it that any man would have been even more greatly feared than I; for I am in no way wanting in courage.

After I had lain still for a little, sweating in my agony, and waiting until I should awake from this terrible dream (for dream I knew it to be), he says again that I must pay my price; and a little after, as though it were to be given in pagodas and sicca rupees: ‘What price will you pay?’ Says I, very softly: ‘For God’s sake let me be, whoever you are, and I will mend my ways from to-night.’ Says he, laughing a little at my words, but otherwise making no motion of having heard them: ‘Nay, I would only rid so brave a young ruffler as yourself of much that will be a great hindrance to you on your way through life in the Indies; for believe me,’ and here he looks full on me once more, ‘there is no return.’ At all this rigmarole, which I could not then understand, I was a good deal put aback and waited for what should come next. Says he very calmly: ‘Give me your trust in man.’ At that I saw how heavy would be my price, for I never doubted but that he could take from me all that he asked, and my head was, through terror and wakefulness, altogether cleared of the wine I had drunk. So I takes him up very short, crying that I was not so wholly bad as he would make believe, and that I trusted my fellows to the full as much as they were worthy of it. ‘It was none of my fault,’ says I, ‘if one-half of them were liars and the other half deserved to be burnt in the hand, and I would once more ask him to have done with his questions.’ Then I stopped, a little afraid, it is true, to have let my tongue so run away with me, but he took no notice of this, and only laid his hand lightly on my left breast and I felt very cold there for a while. Then he says, laughing more: ‘Give me your faith in women.’ At that I started in my bed as though I had been stung, for I thought of my sweet mother in England, and for a while fancied that my faith in God’s best creatures could neither be shaken nor stolen from me. But later, Myself’s hard eyes being upon me, I fell to thinking, for the second time that night, of Kitty (she that jilted me and married Tom Sanderson) and of Mistress Vansuythen, whom only my devilish pride made me follow, and how she was even worse than Kitty, and I worst of them all—seeing that with my life’s work to be done, I must needs go dancing down the Devil’s swept and garnished causeway, because, forsooth, there was a light woman’s smile at the end of it. And I thought that all women in the world were either like Kitty or Mistress Vansuythen (as indeed they have ever since been to me), and this put me to such an extremity of rage and sorrow, that I was beyond word glad when Myself’s hand fell again on my left breast, and I was no more troubled by these follies.

After this he was silent for a little, and I made sure that he must go or I awake ere long; but presently he speaks again (and very softly) that I was a fool to care for such follies as those he had taken from me, and that ere he went he would only ask me for a few other trifles such as no man, or for matter of that boy either, would keep about him in this country. And so it happened that he took from out of my very heart as it were, looking all the time into my face with my own eyes, as much as remained to me of my boy’s soul and conscience. This was to me a far more terrible loss than the two that I had suffered before. For though, Lord help me, I had travelled far enough from all paths of decent or godly living, yet there was in me, though I myself write it, a certain goodness of heart which, when I was sober (or sick) made me very sorry of all that I had done before the fit came on me. And this I lost wholly: having in place thereof another deadly coldness at the heart. I am not, as I have before said, ready with my pen, so I fear that what I have just written may not be readily understood. Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood: as our staring Indian day changes into night with never so much as the gray of twilight to temper the two extremes. This shall perhaps make my state more clear, if it be remembered that my torment was ten times as great as comes in the natural course of nature to any man. At that time I dared not think of the change that had come over me, and all in one night: though I have often thought of it since. ‘I have paid the price,’ says I, my teeth chattering, for I was deadly cold, ‘and what is my return?’ At this time it was nearly dawn, and Myself had begun to grow pale and thin against the white light in the east, as my mother used to tell me is the custom of ghosts and devils and the like. He made as if he would go, but my words stopt him and he laughed—as I remember that I laughed when I ran Angus Macalister through the sword-arm last August, because he said that Mrs. Vansuythen was no better than she should be. ‘What return?’—says he, catching up my last words—‘Why, strength to live as long as God or the Devil pleases, and so long as you live my young master, my gift.’ With that he puts something into my hand, though it was still too dark to see what it was, and when next I lookt up he was gone.

When the light came I made shift to behold his gift, and saw that it was a little piece of dry bread.

page 1 of 7

THE Army Class ‘English,’ which included the Upper Fifth, was trying to keep awake; for ‘English’ (Literature—Augustan epoch—eighteenth century came at last lesson, and that, on a blazing July afternoon; meant after every one had been bathing. Even Mr. King found it hard to fight against the snore of the tide along the Pebble Ridge, and spurred himself with strong words. Since, said he, the pearls of English Literature existed only to be wrenched from their settings and cast before young swine rooting for marks, it was his loathed business—in anticipation of the Army Preliminary Examination which, as usual, would be held at the term’s end, under the auspices of an official examiner sent down ad hoc—to prepare for the Form a General Knowledge test-paper, which he would give them next week. It would cover their studies, up to date, of the Augustans and King Lear, which was the selected—and strictly expurgated—Army Exam, play for that year. Now, English Literature, as he might have told them, was not divided into water-tight compartments, but flowed like a river. For example, Samuel Johnson, glory of the Augustans and no mean commentator of Shakespeare, was but one in a mighty procession which——

At this point Beetle’s nodding brows came down with a grunt on the desk. He had been soaking and sunning himself in the open sea-baths built out on the rocks under the cliffs, from two-fifteen to four-forty.

The Army Class took Johnson off their minds. With any luck, Beetle would last King till the tea-bell. King rubbed his hands and began to carve him. He had gone to sleep to show his contempt (a) for Mr. King, who might or might not matter, and (b) for the Augustans, who none the less were not to be sneered at by one whose vast and omnivorous reading, for which such extraordinary facilities had been granted (this was because the Head had allowed Beetle the run of his library), naturally overlooked such epigonoi as Johnson, Swift, Pope, Addison, and the like. Harrison Ainsworth and Marryat doubtless appealed——

Even so, Beetle salt-encrusted all over except his spectacles, and steeped in delicious languors, was sliding back to sleep again, when ‘Taffy’ Howell, the leading light of the Form, who knew his Marryat as well as Stalky did his Surtees, began in his patent, noiseless whisper: ‘“Allow me to observe—in the most delicate manner in the world—just to hint——”’

‘Under pretext of studying literature, a desultory and unformed mind would naturally return, like the dog of Scripture——’

‘“You’re a damned trencher-scrapin’, napkin-carryin’, shillin’—seekin’, up—an’—down—stairs &c.”’ Howell breathed.

Beetle choked aloud on the sudden knowledge that King was the ancient and eternal Chucks—later Count Shucksen—of Peter Simple. He had not realised it before.

‘Sorry, sir. I’m afraid I’ve been asleep, sir,’ he sputtered.

The shout of the Army Class diverted the storm. King was grimly glad that Beetle had condescended to honour truth so far. Perhaps he would now lend his awakened ear to a summary of the externals of Dr. Johnson, as limned by Macaulay. And he read, with intention, the just historian’s outline of a grotesque figure with untied shoe-strings, that twitched and grunted, gorged its food, bit its finger-nails, and neglected its ablutions. The Form hailed it as a speaking likeness of Beetle; nor were they corrected.

Then King implored him to vouchsafe his comrades one single fact connected with Dr. Johnson which might at any time have adhered to what, for decency’s sake, must, Mr. King supposed, be called his mind.

Beetle was understood to say that the only thing he could remember was in French.

‘You add, then, the Gallic tongue to your accomplishments? The information plus the accent? ’Tis well ! Admirable Crichton, proceed!’

And Beetle proceeded with the text of an old Du Maurier drawing in a back-number of Punch:

De tous ces défunts cockolores
Le moral Fénelon,
Michel Ange et Johnson
(Le Docteur) sont les plus awful bores.’

To which Howell, wooingly, just above his breath:

‘“Oh, won’t you come up, come up?”’

Result, as the tea-bell rang, one hundred lines, to be shown up at seven-forty-five that evening. This was meant to blast the pleasant summer interval between tea and prep. Howell, a favourite in ‘English’ as well as Latin, got off; but the Army Class crashed in to tea with a new Limerick.

The imposition was a matter of book-keeping, as far as Beetle was concerned; for it was his custom of rainy afternoons to fabricate store of lines in anticipation of just these accidents. They covered such English verse as interested him at the moment, and helped to fix the stuff in his memory. After tea; he drew the required amount from his drawer in Number Five Study, thrust it into his pocket, went up to the Head’s house, and settled himself in the big Outer Library where, ever since the Head had taken him off all mathematics, he did précis-work and French translation. Here he buried himself in a close-printed, thickish volume which had been his chosen browse for some time. A hideous account of a hanging, drawing, and quartering had first attracted him to it; but later he discovered the book (Curiosities of Literature was its name) full of the finest confused feeding—such as forgeries and hoaxes, Italian literary societies, religious and scholastic controversies of old when men (even that most dreary John Milton, of Lycidas) slanged each other, not without dust and heat, in scandalous pamphlets; personal peculiarities of the great; and a hundred other fascinating inutilities. This evening he fell on a description of wandering, mad Elizabethan beggars, known as Tom-a-Bedlams, with incidental references to Edgar who plays at being a Tom-a-Bedlam in Lear, but whom Beetle did not consider at all funny. Then, at the foot of a left-hand page, leaped out on him a verse—of incommunicable splendour, opening doors into inexplicable worlds—from a song which Tom-a-Bedlams were supposed to sing. It ran:

page 2

With a heart of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
With a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney,
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end—
Methinks it is no journey.

He sat, mouthing and staring before him, till the prep-bell rang and it was time to take his lines up to King’s study and lay them, as hot from the press, in the impot-basket appointed. He carried his dreams on to Number Five. They knew the symptoms of old.

‘Readin’ again,’ said Stalky, like a wife welcoming her spouse from the pot-house.

‘Look here, I’ve found out something——’ Beetle began. ‘Listen——’

‘No, you don’t—till afterwards. It’s Turkey’s prep.’ This meant it was a Horace Ode through which Turkey would take them for a literal translation, and all possible pitfalls. Stalky gave his businesslike attention, but Beetle’s eye was glazed and his mind adrift throughout, and he asked for things to be repeated. So, when Turkey closed the Horace, justice began to be executed.

‘I’m all right,’ he protested. ‘I swear I heard a lot what Turkey said. Shut up! Oh, shut up! Do shut up, you putrid asses.’ Beetle was speaking from the fender, his head between Turkey’s knees, and Stalky largely over the rest of him.

‘What’s the metre of the beastly thing?’ McTurk waved his Horace. ‘Look it up, Stalky. Twelfth of the Third.’

‘Ionicum a minore,’ Stalky reported, closing his book in turn. ‘Don’t let him forget it’; and Turkey’s Horace marked the metre on Beetle’s skull, with special attention to elisions. It hurt.

‘Miserar’ est neq’ arnori dare ludum neque dulci
Mala vino layer’ aut ex——

Got it? You liar! You’ve no ear at all! Chorus, Stalky! ‘

Both Horaces strove to impart the measure, which was altogether different from its accompaniment. Presently Howell dashed in from his study below.

‘Look out! If you make this infernal din we’ll have some one up the staircase in a sec.’

‘We’re teachin’ Beetle Horace. He was goin’ to burble us some muck he’d read,’ the tutors explained.

‘’Twasn’t muck! It was about those Tom-a-Bedlams in Lear.’

‘Oh!’ said Stalky. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

‘’Cause you didn’t listen. They had drinkin’-horns an’ badges, and there’s a Johnson note on Shakespeare about the meanin’ of Edgar sayin’ “My horn’s dry.” But Johnson’s dead-wrong about it. Aubrey says——’

‘Who’s Aubrey?’ Howell demanded. ‘Does King know about him?’

‘Dunno. Oh yes, an’ Johnson started to learn Dutch when he was seventy.’

‘What the deuce for?’ Stalky asked.

‘For a change after his Dikker, I suppose,’ Howell suggested.

‘And I looked up a lot of other English stuff, too. I’m goin’ to try it all on King.’

‘Showin’-off as usual,’ said the acid, McTurk, who, like his race, lived and loved to destroy illusions.

‘No. For a draw. He’s an unjust dog! If you read, he says you’re showin’-off. If you don’t, you’re a mark-huntin’ Philistine. What does he want you to do, curse him?’

‘Shut up, Beetle!’ Stalky pronounced. ‘There’s more than draws in this. You’ve cribbed your maths off me ever since you came to Coll. You don’t know what a co-sine is, even now. Turkey does all your Latin.’

‘I like that! Who does both your Picciolas?’

‘French don’t count. It’s time you began to work for your giddy livin’ an’ help us. You aren’t goin’ up for anythin’ that matters. Play for your side, as Heffles says, or die the death! You don’t want to die the death, again, do you? Now, let’s hear about that stinkard Johnson swottin’ Dutch. You’re sure it was Sammivel, not Binjamin? You are so dam’ inaccurate!’

Beetle conducted an attentive class on the curiosities of literature for nearly a quarter of an hour. As Stalky pointed out, he promised to be useful.

The Horace Ode next morning ran well; and King was content. Then, in full feather, he sailed round the firmament at large, and, somehow, apropos to something or other, used the word ‘della Cruscan’—‘if any of you have the faintest idea of its origin.’ Some one hadn’t caught it correctly; which gave Beetle just time to whisper ‘Bran—an’ mills’ to Howell, who said, promptly: ‘Hasn’t it somethin’ to do with mills—an’ bran, sir?’ King cast himself into poses of stricken wonder. ‘Oddly enough,’ said he, ‘it has.’

page 3

They were then told a great deal about some silly Italian Academy of Letters which borrowed its office furniture from the equipment of mediaeval flour-mills. And: ‘How has our Ap-Howell come by his knowledge?’ Howell, being, indeed, Welsh, thought that it might have been something he had read in the holidays. King openly purred over him.

‘If that had been me,’ Beetle observed while they were toying with sardines between lessons, ‘he’d ha’ dropped on me for showin’-off.’

‘See what we’re savin’ you from,’ Stalky answered. ‘I’m playin’ Johnson, ’member, this afternoon.’

That, too, came cleanly off the bat; and King was gratified by this interest in the Doctor’s studies. But Stalky hadn’t a ghost of a notion how he had come by the fact.

‘Why didn’t you say your father told you?’ Beetle asked at tea.

‘My-y Lord! Have you ever seen the guv’nor?’ Stalky collapsed shrieking among the piles of bread and butter. ‘Well, look here. Taffy goes in to-morrow about those drinkin’ horns an’ Tom-a-Bedlams. You cut up to the library after tea, Beetle. You know what King’s English papers are like. Look out useful stuff for answers an’ we’ll divvy at prep.’

At prep, then, Beetle, loaded with assorted curiosities, made his forecast. He argued that there were bound to be a good many ‘what-do-you-know-abouts’ those infernal Augustans. Pope was generally a separate item; but the odds were that Swift, Addison, Steele, Johnson, and Goldsmith would be lumped under one head. Dryden was possible, too, though rather outside the Epoch.

‘Dryden. Oh! “Glorious John!” ’Know that much, anyhow,’ Stalky vaunted.

‘Then lug in Claude Halcro in The Pirate,’ Beetle advised. ‘He’s always sayin’ “Glorious John.” King’s a hog on Scott, too.’

‘No-o. I don’t read Scott. You take this Hell Crow chap, Taffy.’

‘Right. What about Addison, Beetle?’ Howell asked.

‘’Drank like a giddy fish.’

‘We all know that,’ chorused the gentle children.

‘He said, “See how a Christian can die”; an’ he hadn’t any conversation, ’cause some one or other——’

‘Guessin’ again, as usual,’ McTurk sneered. ‘Who?’

‘’Cynical man called Mandeville—said he was a silent parson in a tie-wig.’

‘Right-ho! I’ll take the silent parson with wig and ’purtenances. Taffy can have the dyin’ Christian,’ Stalky decided.

Howell nodded, and resumed: ‘What about Swift, Beetle?’

‘’Died mad. Two girls. Saw a tree, an’ said: “I shall die at the top.” Oh yes, an’ his private amusements were “ridiculous an’ trivial.”’

Howell shook a wary head. ‘Dunno what that might let me in for with King. You can have it, Stalky.’

‘I’ll take that,’ McTurk yawned. ‘King doesn’t matter a curse to me, an’ he knows it. “Private amusements contemptible.”’ He breathed all Ireland into the last perverted word.

‘Right,’ Howell assented. ‘Bags I the dyin’ tree, then.’

‘’Cheery lot, these Augustans,’ Stalky sighed. ‘’Any more of ’em been croakin’ lately, Beetle?’

‘My Hat!’ the far-seeing Howell struck in. ‘King always gives us a stinker half-way down. What about Richardson—that “Clarissa” chap, y’know?’

‘I’ve found out lots about him,’ said Beetle, promptly. ‘He was the “Shakespeare of novelists.”’

‘King won’t stand that. He says there’s only one Shakespeare. ’Mustn’t rot about Shakespeare to King,’ Howell objected.

‘An’ he was “always delighted with his own works,”’ Beetle continued.

‘Like you,’ Stalky pointed out.

‘Shut up. Oh yes, an’——’ he consulted some hieroglyphics on a scrap of paper—‘the—the impassioned Diderot (dunno who he was) broke forth: “O Richardson, thou singular genius!”’

Howell and Stalky rose together, each clamouring that he had bagged that first.

‘I must have it!’ Howell shouted. ‘King’s never seen me breakin’ forth with the impassioned Diderot. He’s got to! Give me Diderot, you impassioned hound!’

‘Don’t upset the table. There’s tons more. An’ his genius was “fertile and prodigal.”’

‘All right! I don’t mind bein’ “fertile and prodigal” for a change,’ Stalky volunteered. ‘King’s going to enjoy this exam. If he was the Army Prelim. chap we’d score.’

‘The Prelim. questions will be pretty much like King’s stuff,’ Beetle assured them.

page 4

‘But it’s always a score to know what your examiner’s keen on,’ Howell said, and illustrated it with an anecdote. ‘’Uncle of mine stayin’ with my people last holidays——’

‘Your Uncle Diderot?’ Stalky asked.

‘No, you ass! Captain of Engineers. He told me he was up for a Staff exam. to an old Colonel-bird who believed that the English were the lost Tribes of Israel, or something like that. He’d written tons o’ books about it.’

‘All Sappers are mad,’ said Stalky. ‘That’s one of the things the guv’nor did tell me.’

‘Well, ne’er mind. My uncle played up, o’course. ’Said he’d always believed it, too. And so he got nearly top-marks for field-fortification. ’Didn’t know a thing about it, either, he said.’

‘Good biznai!’ said Stalky. ‘Well, go on, Beetle. What about Steele?’

‘Can’t I keep anything for myself?’

‘Not much! King’ll ask you where you got it from, and you’d show off, an’ he’d find out. This ain’t your silly English Literature, you ass. It’s our marks. Can’t you see that?’

Beetle very soon saw it was exactly as Stalky had said.

Some days later a happy, and therefore not too likeable, King was explaining to the Reverend John in his own study how effort, zeal, scholarship, the humanities, and perhaps a little natural genius for teaching, could inspire even the mark-hunting minds of the young. His text was the result of his General Knowledge paper on the Augustans and King Lear.

‘Howell,’ he said, ‘I was not surprised at. He has intelligence. But, frankly, I did not expect young Corkran to burgeon. Almost one might believe he occasionally read a book.’

‘And McTurk too?’

‘Yes. He had somehow arrived at a rather just estimate of Swift’s lighter literary diversions. They are contemptible. And in the “Lear” questions—they were all attracted by Edgar’s character—Stalky had dug up something about Aubrey on Tom-a-Bedlams from some unknown source. Aubrey, of all people! I’m sure I only alluded to him once or twice.’

‘Stalky among the prophets of “English”! And he didn’t remember where he’d got it either?’

‘No. Boys are amazingly purblind and limited. But if they keep this up at the Army Prelim., it is conceivable the Class may not do itself discredit. I told them so.’

‘I congratulate you. Ours is the hardest calling in the world, with the least reward. By the way, who are they likely to send down to examine us?’

‘It rests between two, I fancy. Martlett—with me at Balliol—and Hume. They wisely chose the Civil Service. Martlett has published a brochure on Minor Elizabethan Verse—journeyman work, of course—enthusiasms, but no grounding. Hume I heard of lately as having infected himself in Germany with some Transatlantic abominations about Shakespeare and Bacon. He was Sutton.’ (The Head, by the way, was a Sutton man.)

King returned to his examination-papers and read extracts from them, as mothers repeat the clever sayings of their babes.

‘Here’s old Taffy Howell, for instance—apropos to Diderot’s eulogy of Richardson. “The impassioned Diderot broke forth: ‘Richardson, thou singular genius!’”’

It was the Reverend John who stopped himself, just in time, from breaking forth. He recalled that, some days ago, he had heard Stalky on the stairs of Number Five, hurling the boots of many fags at Howell’s door and bidding the ‘impassioned Diderot’ within ‘break forth’ at his peril.

‘Odd,’ said he, gravely, when his pipe drew again. ‘Where did Diderot say that?’

‘I’ve forgotten for the moment. Taffy told me he’d picked it up in the course of holiday reading.’

‘Possibly. One never knows what heifers the young are ploughing with. Oh! How did Beetle do?’

‘The necessary dates and his handwriting defeated him, I’m glad to say. I cannot accuse myself of having missed any opportunity to castigate that boy’s inordinate and intolerable conceit. But I’m afraid it’s hopeless. I think I touched him somewhat, though, when I read Macaulay’s stock piece on Johnson. The others saw it at once.’

‘Yes, you told me about that at the time,’ said the Reverend John, hurriedly.

‘And our esteemed Head having taken him off maths for this précis-writing—whatever that means!—has turned him into a most objectionable free-lance. He was without any sense of reverence before, and promiscuous cheap fiction—which is all that his type of reading means—aggravates his worst points. When it came to a trial he was simply nowhere.’

‘Ah, well! Ours is a hard calling—specially if one’s sensitive. Luckily, I’m too fat.’ The Reverend John went out to bathe off the Pebble Ridge, girt with a fair linen towel whose red fringe signalled from half a mile away.

page 5

There lurked on summer afternoons, round the fives-court or the gym, certain watchful outcasts who had exhausted their weekly ration of three baths, and who were too well known to Cory the bathman to outface him by swearing that they hadn’t. These came in like sycophantic pups at walk, and when the Reverend John climbed the Pebble Ridge, more than a dozen of them were at his heels, with never a towel among them. One could only bathe off the Ridge with a House Master, but by custom, a dozen details above a certain age, no matter whence recruited, made a ‘House’ for bathing, if any kindly Master chose so to regard them. Beetle led the low, growing reminder: ‘House! House, sir? We’ve got a House now, Padre.’

‘Let it be law as it is desired,’ boomed the Reverend John. On which word they broke forward, hirpling over the unstable pebbles and stripping as they ran, till, when they touched the sands, they were as naked as God had made them, and as happy as He intended them to be.

It was half-flood—dead-smooth, except for the triple line of combers, a mile from wing to wing, that broke evenly with a sound of ripping canvas, while their sleek rear-guards formed up behind. One swam forth, trying to copy the roll, rise, and dig-out of the Reverend John’s sidestroke, and manoeuvred to meet them so that they should crash on one’s head, when for an instant one glanced down arched perspectives of beryl, before all broke in fizzy, electric diamonds, and the pulse of the main surge slung one towards the beach. From a good comber’s crest one was hove up almost to see Lundy on the horizon. In its long cream-streaked trough, when the top had turned over and gone on, one might be alone in mid-Atlantic. Either way it was divine. Then one capered on the sands till one dried off; retrieved scattered flannels, gave thanks in chorus to the Reverend John, and lazily trailed up to five-o’clock call-over, taken on the lower cricket field.

‘Eight this week,’ said Beetle, and thanked Heaven aloud.

‘Bathing seems to have sapped your mind,’ the Reverend John remarked. ‘Why did you do so vilely with the Augustans?’

‘They are vile, Padre. So’s Lear.’

‘The other two did all right, though.’

‘I expect they’ve been swottin’,’ Beetle grinned.

‘I’ve expected that, too, in my time. But I want to hear about the “impassioned Diderot,” please.’

‘Oh, that was Howell, Padre. You mean when Diderot broke forth: “Richardson, thou singular genius”? He’d read it in the holidays somewhere.’

‘I beg your pardon. Naturally, Taffy would read Diderot in the holidays. Well, I’m sorry I can’t lick you for this; but if any one ever finds out anything about it, you’ve only yourself to thank.’

Beetle went up to College and to the Outer Library, where he had on tap the last of a book called Elsie Venner, by a man called Oliver Wendell Holmes—all about a girl who was interestingly allied to rattlesnakes. He finished what was left of her, and cast about for more from the same hand, which he found on the same shelf, with the trifling difference that the writer’s Christian name was now Nathaniel, and he did not deal in snakes. The authorship of Shakespeare was his theme—not that Shakespeare with whom King oppressed the Army Class, but a low-born, poaching, ignorant, immoral village lout who could not have written one line of any play ascribed to him. (Beetle wondered what King would say to Nathaniel if ever they met.) The real author was Francis Bacon, of Bacon’s Essays, which did not strike Beetle as any improvement. He had ‘done’ the essays last term. But evidently Nathaniel’s views annoyed people, for the margins of his book—it was second-hand, and the old label of a public library still adhered—flamed with ribald, abusive, and contemptuous comments by various hands. They ranged from ‘Rot!’ ‘Rubbish!’ and such-like to crisp counter-arguments. And several times some one had written: ‘This beats Delia.’ One copious annotator dissented, saying: ‘Delia is supreme in this line,’ ‘Delia beats this hollow.’ ‘See Delia’s Philosophy, page so and so.’ Beetle grieved he could not find anything about Delia (he had often heard King’s views on lady-writers as a class) beyond a statement by Nathaniel, with pencilled exclamation-points rocketing all round it, that ‘Delia Bacon discovered in Francis Bacon a good deal more than Macaulay.’ Taking it by and large, with the kind help of the marginal notes, it appeared that Delia and Nathaniel between them had perpetrated every conceivable outrage against the Head-God of King’s idolatry: and King was particular about his idols. Without pronouncing on the merits of the controversy, it occurred to Beetle that a well-mixed dose of Nathaniel ought to work on King like a seidlitz powder. At this point a pencil and a half sheet of impot-paper came into action, and he went down to tea so swelled with Baconian heresies and blasphemies that he could only stutter between mouthfuls. He returned to his labours after the meal, and was visibly worse at prep.

‘I say,’ he began, ‘have you ever heard that Shakespeare never wrote his own beastly plays?’

‘’Fat lot of good to us!’ said Stalky. ‘We’ve got to swot ’em up just the same. Look here! This is for English parsin’ to-morrow. It’s your biznai.’ He read swiftly from the school Lear (Act II. Sc. 2) thus

STEWARD:         ’Never any:
It pleased the King his master, very late,
To strike at me, upon his misconstruction;
When he, conjunct, an’ flatterin’ his displeasure,
Tripped me behind: bein’ down, insulted, railed,
And put upon him such a deal of man,
That worthy’d him, got praises of the King
For him attemptin’ who was self-subdued;
And, in the fleshment of this dread exploit,
Drew on me here again.

‘Now then, my impassioned bard, construez! That’s Shakespeare.’

‘’Give it up! He’s drunk,’ Beetle declared at the end of a blank half minute.

page 6

‘No, he isn’t,’ said Turkey. ‘He’s a steward—on the estate—chattin’ to his employers.’

‘Well—look here, Turkey. You ask King if Shakespeare ever wrote his own plays, an’ he won’t give a dam’ what the steward said.’

‘I’ve not come here to play with ushers,’ was McTurk’s view of the case.

‘I’d do it,’ Beetle protested, ‘only he’d slay me! He don’t love me when I ask about things. I can give you the stuff to draw him—tons of it!’ He broke forth into a précis, interspersed with praises, of Nathaniel Holmes and his commentators—especially the latter. He also mentioned Delia, with sorrow that he had not read her. He spoke through nearly the whole of prep; and the upshot of it was that McTurk relented and promised to approach King next ‘English’ on the authenticity of Shakespeare’s plays.

The time and tone chosen were admirable. While King was warming himself by a preliminary canter round the Form’s literary deficiencies, Turkey coughed in a style which suggested a reminder to a slack employee that it was time to stop chattering and get to work. As King began to bristle, Turkey inquired: ‘I’d be glad to know, sir, if it’s true that Shakespeare did not write his own plays at all?’

‘Good God!’ said King most distinctly. Turkey coughed again piously. ‘They all say so in Ireland, sir.’

‘Ireland—Ireland—Ireland!’ King overran Ireland with one blast of flame that should have been written in letters of brass for instruction to-day. At the end, Turkey coughed once more, and the cough said: ‘It is Shakespeare, and not my country, that you are hired to interpret to me.’ He put it directly, too: ‘An’ is it true at all about the alleged plays, sir?’

‘It is not,’ Mr. King whispered, and began to explain, on lines that might, perhaps, have been too freely expressed for the parents of those young (though it gave their offspring delight), but with a passion, force, and wealth of imagery which would have crowned his discourse at any university. By the time he drew towards his peroration the Form was almost openly applauding. Howell noiselessly drummed the cadence of ‘Bonnie Dundee’ on his desk; Paddy Vernon framed a dumb: ‘Played! Oh, well played, sir!’ at intervals; Stalky kept tally of the brighter gems of invective; and Beetle sat aghast but exulting among the spirits he had called up. For though their works had never been mentioned, and though Mr. King said he had merely glanced at the obscene publications, he seemed to know a tremendous amount about Nathaniel and Delia—especially Delia.

‘I told you so!’ said Beetle, proudly, at the end.

‘What? Him! I wasn’t botherin’ myself to listen to him an’ his Delia,’ McTurk replied.

Afterwards King fought his battle over again with the Reverend John in the Common Room.

‘Had I been that triple ass Hume, I might have risen to the bait. As it is, I flatter myself I left them under no delusions as to Shakespeare’s authenticity. Yes, a small drink, please. Virtue has gone out of me indeed. But where did they get it from?’

‘The devil! The young devil,’ the Reverend John muttered, half aloud.

‘I could have excused devilry. It was ignorance. Sheer, crass, insolent provincial ignorance! I tell you, Gillett, if the Romans had dealt faithfully with the Celt, ab initio, this—this would never have happened.’

‘Quite so. I should like to have heard your remarks.’

‘I’ve told ’em to tell me what they remember of them, with their own conclusions, in essay form next week.’

Since he had loosed the whirlwind, the fairminded Beetle offered to do Turkey’s essay for him. On Turkey’s behalf, then, he dealt with Shakespeare’s lack of education, his butchering, poaching, drinking, horse-holding, and errandrunning as Nathaniel had described them; lifted from the same source pleasant names, such as ‘rustic’ and ‘sorry poetaster,’ on which last special hopes were built; and expressed surprise that one so ignorant could have done ‘what he was attributed to.’ His own essay contained no novelties. Indeed, he withheld one or two promising ‘subsequently transpireds’ for fear of distracting King.

But, when the essays were read, Mr. King confined himself wholly to Turkey’s pitiful, puerile, jejune, exploded, unbaked, half-bottomed thesis. He touched, too, on the ‘lie in the soul,’ which was, fundamentally, vulgarity—the negation of Reverence and the Decencies. He broke forth into an impassioned defence of ‘mere atheism,’ which he said was often no more than mental flatulence—transitory and curable by knowledge of life—in no way comparable, for essential enormity, with the debasing pagan abominations to which Turkey had delivered himself. He ended with a shocking story about one Jowett, who seemed to have held some post of authority where King came from, and who had told an atheistical undergraduate that if he could not believe in a Personal God by five that afternoon he would be expelled—as, with tears of rage in his eyes, King regretted that he could not expel McTurk. And Turkey blew his nose in the middle of it.

But the aim of education being to develop individual judgment, King could not well kill him for his honest doubts about Shakespeare. And he himself had several times quoted, in respect to other poets: ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.’ So he treated Turkey in Form like a coiled puff-adder; and there was a tense peace among the Augustans. The only ripple was the day before the Army Examiner came, when Beetle inquired if he ‘need take this exam., sir, as I’m not goin’ up for anything.’ Mr. King said there was great need—for many reasons, none of them flattering to vanity.

As far as the Army Class could judge, the Examiner was not worse than his breed, and the written ‘English’ paper ran closely on the lines of King’s mid-term General Knowledge test. Howell played his ‘impassioned Diderot’ to the Richardson lead; Stalky his parson in the wig; McTurk his contemptible Swift; Beetle, Steele’s affectionate notes out of the spunginghouse to ‘Dearest Prue,’ all in due order. There were, however, one or two leading questions about Shakespeare. A boy’s hand shot up from a back bench.

‘In answering Number Seven—reasons for Shakespeare’s dramatic supremacy,’ he said, ’are we to take it Shakespeare did write the plays he is supposed to have written, sir?’

page 7

The Examiner hesitated an instant. ‘It is generally assumed that he did.’ But there was no reproof in his words. Beetle began to sit down slowly.

Another hand and another voice: ‘Have we got to say we believe he did, sir? Even if we do not?’

‘You are not called upon to state your beliefs. But we can go into that at viva voce this afternoon—if it interests you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘What did you do that for?’ Paddy Vernon demanded at dinner.

‘It’s the lost tribes of Israel game, you ass,’ said Howell.

‘To make sure,’ Stalky amplified. ‘If he was like King, he’d have shut up Beetle an’ Turkey at the start, but he’d have thought King gave us the Bacon notion. Well, he didn’t shut ’em up; so they’re playin’ it again this afternoon. If he stands it then, he’ll be sure King gave us the notion. Either way, it’s dead-safe for us, an’ King.’

At the afternoon’s viva voce, before they sat down to the Augustans, the Examiner wished to hear, ‘with no bearing on the examination, of course,’ from those two candidates who had asked him about Question Seven. Which were they?

‘Take off your gigs, you owl,’ said Stalky between his teeth. Beetle pocketed them and looked into blurred vacancy with a voice coming out of it that asked: ‘Who—what gave you that idea about Shakespeare?’ From Stalky’s kick he knew the question was for him.

‘Some people say, sir, there’s a good deal of doubt about it nowadays, sir.’

‘Ye-es, that’s true, but——’

‘It’s his knowin’ so much about legal phrases.’ Turkey was in support—a lone gun barking somewhere to his right.

‘That is a crux, I admit. Of course, whatever one may think privately, officially Shakespeare is Shakespeare. But how have you been taught to look at the question?’

‘Well, Holmes says it’s impossible he could——’

‘On the legal phraseology alone, sir,’ McTurk chimed in.

‘Ah, but the theory is that Shakespeare’s experiences in the society of that day brought him in contact with all the leading intellects.’ The Examiner’s voice was quite colloquial now.

‘But they didn’t think much of actors then, sir, did they?’ This was Howell cooing like a cushat dove. ‘I mean——’

The Examiner explained the status of the Elizabethan actor in some detail, ending: ‘And that makes it the more curious, doesn’t it?’

‘And this Shakespeare was supposed to be writin’ plays and actin’ in ’em all the time?’ McTurk asked, with sinister meaning.

‘Exactly what I—what lots of people have pointed out. Where did he get the time to acquire all his special knowledge?’

‘Then it looks as if there was something in it, doesn’t it, sir?’

‘That,’ said the Examiner, squaring his elbows at ease on the desk, ‘is a very large question which——’

‘Yes, sir!’—in half-a-dozen eagerly attentive keys . . . .

For decency’s sake a few Augustan questions were crammed in conscience-strickenly, about the last ten minutes. Howell took them since they involved dates, but the answers, though highly marked, were scarcely heeded. When the clock showed six-thirty the Examiner addressed them as ‘Gentlemen’ ; and said he would have particular pleasure in speaking well of this Army Class, which had evinced such a genuine and unusual interest in English Literature, and which reflected the greatest credit on their instructors. He passed out: the Form upstanding, as custom was.

‘He’s goin’ to congratulate King,’ said Howell. ‘Don’t make a row! “Don’t—make—a—noise—Or else you’ll wake the Baby!”’ . . .

Mr. King of Balliol, after Mr. Hume of Sutton had complimented him, as was only just, before all his colleagues in Common Room, was kindly taken by the Reverend John to his study, where he exploded on the hearth-rug.

‘He—he thought I had loosed this—this rancid Baconian rot among them. He complimented me on my breadth of mind—my being abreast of the times! You heard him? That’s how they think at Sutton. It’s an open stye! A lair of bestial! They have a chapel there, Gillett, and they pray for their souls—their souls!’

‘His particular weakness apart, Hume was perfectly sincere about what you’d done for the Army Class. He’ll report in that sense, too. That’s a feather in your cap, and a deserved one. He said their interest in Literature was unusual. That is all your work, King.’

‘But I bowed down in the House of Rimmon while he Baconised all over me!—poor devil of an usher that I am! You heard it! I ought to have spat in his eye! Heaven knows I’m as conscious of my own infirmities as my worst enemy can be; but what have I done to deserve this? What have I done?’

‘That’s just what I was wondering,’ the Reverend John replied. ‘Have you, perchance, done anything?’

‘Where? How?’

‘In the Army Class, for example.’

‘Assuredly not! My Army Class? I couldn’t wish for a better—keen, interested enough to read outside their allotted task—intelligent, receptive! They’re head and shoulders above last year’s. The idea that I, forsooth, should, even by inference, have perverted their minds with this imbecile and unspeakable girls’-school tripe that Hume professes! You at least know that I have my standards; and in Literature and in the Classics, I hold maxima debetur pueris reverentia.’

‘It’s singular, not plural, isn’t it?’ said the Reverend John. ‘But you’re absolutely right as to the principle! . . . Ours is a deadly calling, King—especially if one happens to be sensitive.’

[a short tale]

THE POLICEMAN rode through the Himalayan forest, under the moss-draped oaks, and his orderly trotted after him. ‘It’s an ugly business, Bhere Singh,’ said the Policeman. ‘Where are they?’

‘It is a very ugly business,’ said Bhere Singh; ‘and as for them, they are, doubtless, now frying in a hotter fire than was ever made of spruce-branches.’

‘Let us hope not,’ said the Policeman, ‘for, allowing for the difference between race and race, it’s the story of Francesca da Rimini, Bhere Singh.’

Bhere Singh knew nothing about Francesca da Rimini, so he held his peace until they came to the charcoal-burners’ clearing where the dying flames said ‘whit, whit, whit’ as they fluttered and whispered over the white ashes. It must have been a great fire when at full height. Men had seen it at Donga Pa across the valley winking and blazing through the night, and said that the charcoal-burners of Kodru were getting drunk. But it was only Suket Singh, Sepoy of the 102nd Punjab Native Infantry, and Athira, a woman, burning—burning—burning.

This was how things befell; and the Policeman’s Diary will bear me out.

Athira was the wife of Madu, who was a charcoal-burner, one-eyed and of a malignant disposition. A week after their marriage, he beat Athira with a heavy stick. A month later, Suket Singh, Sepoy, came that way to the cool hills on leave from his regiment, and electrified the villagers of Kodru with tales of service and glory under the Government, and the honour in which he, Suket Singh, was held by the Colonel Sahib Bahadur. And Desdemona listened to Othello as Desdemonas have done all the world over, and, as she listened, she loved.

‘I’ve a wife of my own,’ said Suket Singh, ‘though that is no matter when you come to think of it. I am also due to return to my regiment after a time, and I cannot be a deserter—I who intend to be Havildar.’ There is no Himalayan version of ‘I could not love thee, dear, as much, Loved I not Honour more;’ but Suket Singh came near to making one.

‘Never mind,’ said Athira, ‘stay with me, and, if Madu tries to beat me, you beat him.’

‘Very good,’ said Suket Singh; and he beat Madu severely, to the delight of all the charcoal-burners of Kodru.

‘That is enough,’ said Suket Singh, as he rolled Madu down the hillside. ‘Now we shall have peace.’ But Madu crawled up the grass slope again, and hovered round his hut with angry eyes.

‘He’ll kill me dead,’ said Athira to Suket Singh. ‘You must take me away.’

‘There’ll be a trouble in the Lines. My wife will pull out my beard; but never mind,’ said Suket Singh, ‘I will take you.’

There was loud trouble in the Lines, and Suket Singh’s beard was pulled, and Suket Singh’s wife went to live with her mother and took away the children. ‘That’s all right,’ said Athira; and Suket Singh said, ‘Yes, that’s all right.’

So there was only Madu left in the hut that looks across the valley to Donga Pa; and, since the beginning of time, no one has had any sympathy for husbands so unfortunate as Madu.

He went to Juseen Dazé, the wizard-man who keeps the Talking Monkeys’s Head.

‘Get me back my wife,’ said Madu.

‘I can’t,’ said Juseen Dazé, ‘until you have made the Sutlej in the valley run up the Donga Pa.’

‘No riddles,’ said Madu, and he shook his hatchet above Juseen Dazé’s white head.

‘Give all your money to the headmen of the village,’ said Juseen Dazé; ‘and they will hold a communal Council, and the Council will send a message that your wife must come back.’

So Madu gave up all his worldly wealth, amounting to twenty-seven rupees, eight annas, three pice, and a silver chain, to the Council of Kodru. And it fell as Juseen Dazé foretold.

They sent Athira’s brother down into Suket Singh’s regiment to call Athira home. Suket Singh kicked him once round the Lines, and then handled him over to the Havildar, who beat him with a belt.

‘Come back,’ yelled Athira’s brother.

‘Where to?’ said Athira.

‘To Madu,’ said he.

‘Never,’ said she.

‘Then Juseen Dazé will send a curse, and you will wither away like a barked tree in the springtime,’ said Athira’s brother. Athira slept over these things.

Next morning she had rheumatism. ‘I am beginning to wither away like a barked tree in the springtime,’ she said. ‘That is the curse of Juseen Dazé.’

And she really began to wither away because her heart was dried up with fear, and those who believe in curses die from curses. Suket Singh, too, was afraid because he loved Athira better than his very life. Two months passed, and Athira’s brother stood outside the regimental Lines again and yelped, ‘Aha! You are withering away. Come back.’

‘I will come back,’ said Athira.

‘Say rather that we we will come back,’ said Suket Singh.

‘Ai; but when?’ said Athira’s brother.

‘Upon a day very early in the morning,’ said Suket Singh; and he tramped off to apply to the Colonel Sahib Bahadur for one week’s leave.

‘I am withering away like a barked tree in the spring,’ moaned Athira.

‘You will be better soon,’ said Suket Singh; and he told her what was in his heart, and the two laughed together softly, for they loved each other. But Athira grew better from that hour.

They went away together, travelling third-class by train as the regulations provided, and then in a cart to the low hills, and on foot to the high ones. Athira sniffed the scent of the pines of her own hills, the wet Himalayan hills. ‘It is good to be alive,’ said Athira.

‘Hah!’ said Suket Singh. ‘Where is the Kodru road, and where is the Forest Ranger’s house?…’

‘It cost forty rupees twelve years ago,’ said the Forest Ranger handing the gun.

‘Here are twenty,’ said Suket Singh, ‘and you must give me the best bullets.’

‘It is very good to be alive,’ said Athira wistfully, sniffing the scent of the pine-mould; and they waited till the night had fallen upon Kodru and the Donga Pa. Madu had stacked the dry wood for the next day’s charcoal-burning on the spur above his house. ‘It is courteous in Madu to save us this trouble,’ said Suket Singh, as he stumbled on the pile, which was twelve feet square and four high. ‘We must wait till the moon rises.’

When the moon rose, Athira knelt upon the pile. ‘If it were only a Government Snider,’ said Suket Singh ruefully, squinting down the wire-bound barrel of the Forest Ranger’s gun.

‘Be quick,’ said Athira; and Suket Singh was quick; but Athira was quick no longer. Then he lit the pile at the four corners and climbed on to it, re-loading the gun.

The little flames began to peer up between the big logs atop of the brushwood. ‘The Government should teach us to pull the triggers with our toes,’ said Suket Singh grimly to the moon. That was the last public observation of Sepoy Suket Singh.

Upon a day, early in the morning, Madu came to the pyre and shrieked very grievously, and ran away to catch the Policeman who was on tour in the district.

‘The base-born has ruined four rupees’ worth of charcoal wood,’ Madu gasped. ‘He has also killed my wife, and he has left a letter which I cannot read, tied to a pine bough.’

In the stiff, formal hand taught in the regimental school, Sepoy Suket Singh had written—

‘Let us be burned together, if anything remain over, for we have made the necessary prayers. We have also cursed Madu, and Malak the brother of Athira—both evil men. Send my service to the Colonel Sahib Bahadur.’

The policeman looked long and curiously at the marriage bed of red and white ashes on which lay, dull black, the barrel of the Ranger’s gun. He drove his spurred heel absently into a half-charred log, and the chattering sparks flew upwards. ‘Most extraordinary people,’ said the Policeman.

‘Whe-w, whew, ouiou,’ said the little flames.

The Policeman entered the dry bones of the case, for the Punjab Government does not approve of romancing, in his Diary.

‘But who will pay me those four rupees? said Madu.

page 1 of 6

THE children were at the Theatre, acting to Three Cows as much as they could remember of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Their father had made them a small play out of the big Shakespeare one, and they had rehearsed it with him and with their mother till they could say it by heart. They began where Nick Bottom the weaver comes out of the bushes with a donkey’s head on his shoulders, and finds Titania Queen of the Fairies asleep. Then they skipped to the part where Bottom asks three little fairies to scratch his head and bring him honey, and they ended where he falls asleep in Titania’s arms. Dan was Puck and Nick Bottom, as well as all three Fairies. He wore a pointy-eared cloth cap for Puck, and a paper donkey’s head out of a Christmas cracker—but it tore if you were not careful—for Bottom. Una was Titania, with a wreath of columbines and a foxglove wand.

The Theatre lay in a meadow called the Long Slip. A little millstream, carrying water to a mill two or three fields away, bent round one corner of it, and in the middle of the bend lay a large old Fairy Ring of darkened grass, which was the stage. The mill-stream banks, overgrown with willow, hazel, and guelder-rose, made convenient places to wait in till your turn came; and a grown-up who had seen it said that Shakespeare himself could not have imagined a more suitable setting for his play. They were not, of course, allowed to act on Midsummer Night itself, but they went down after tea on Midsummer Eve, when the shadows were growing, and they took their supper—hard-boiled eggs, Bath Oliver biscuits, and salt in an envelope—with them. Three Cows had been milked and were grazing steadily with a tearing noise that one could hear all down the meadow; and the noise of the mill at work sounded like bare feet running on hard ground. A cuckoo sat on a gatepost singing his broken June tune, ‘cuckoo-cuk,’ while a busy kingfisher crossed from the millstream to the brook which ran on the other side of the meadow. Everything else was a sort of thick, sleepy stillness smelling of meadow-sweet and dry grass.

Their play went beautifully. Dan remembered all his parts—Puck, Bottom, and the three Fairies—and Una never forgot a word of Titania—not even the difficult piece where she tells the Fairies how to feed Bottom with ‘apricocks, green figs, and dewberries,’ and all the lines end in ‘ies.’ They were both so pleased that they acted it three times over from beginning to end before they sat down in the unthistly centre of the Ring to eat eggs and Bath Olivers. This was when they heard a whistle among the alders on the bank, and they jumped.

The bushes parted. In the very spot where Dan had stood as Puck they saw a small, brown, broad-shouldered, pointy-eared person with a snub nose, slanting blue eyes, and a grin that ran right across his freckled face. He shaded his forehead as though he were watching Quince, Snout, Bottom, and the others rehearsing Pyramus and Thisbe, and, in a voice as deep as Three Cows asking to be milked, he began:

‘What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here,
So near the cradle of the fairy Queen?’

He stopped, hollowed one hand round his ear, and, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, went on:

‘What, a play toward? I’ll be an auditor;
An actor too, perhaps, if I see cause:’

The children looked and gasped. The small thing—he was no taller than Dan’s shoulder—stepped quietly into the Ring.

‘I’m rather out of practice,’ said he; ‘but that’s the way my part ought to be played.’

Still the children stared at him—from his dark blue cap, like a big columbine flower, to his bare, hairy feet. At last he laughed.

‘Please don’t look like that. It isn’t my fault. What else could you expect?’ he said.

‘We didn’t expect any one,’ Dan answered, slowly. ‘This is our field.’

‘Is it?’ said their visitor, sitting down. ‘Then what on Human Earth made you act Midsummer Night’s Dream three times over, on Midsummer Eve, in the middle of a Ring, and under—right under one of my oldest hills in Old England? Pook’s Hill—Puck’s Hill—Puck’s Hill—Pook’s Hill! It’s as plain as the nose on my face.’

He pointed to the bare, fern-covered slope of Pook’s Hill that runs up from the far side of the mill-stream to a dark wood. Beyond that wood the ground rises and rises for five hundred feet, till at last you climb out on the bare top of Beacon Hill, to look over the Pevensey Levels and the Channel and half the naked South Downs.

‘By Oak, Ash, and Thorn!’ he cried, still laughing. ‘If this had happened a few hundred years ago you’d have had all the People of the Hills out like bees in June!’

‘We didn’t know it was wrong,’ said Dan.

‘Wrong!’ The little fellow shook with laughter. ‘Indeed, it isn’t wrong. You’ve done something that Kings and Knights and Scholars in old days would have given their crowns and spurs and books to find out. If Merlin himself had helped you, you couldn’t have managed better! You’ve broken the Hills—you’ve broken the Hills! It hasn’t happened in a thousand years.’

‘We—we didn’t mean to,’ said Una.

‘Of course you didn’t! That’s just why you did it. Unluckily the Hills are empty now, and all the People of the Hills are gone. I’m the only one left. I’m Puck, the oldest Old Thing in England, very much at your service if—if you care to have anything to do with me. If you don’t, of course you’ve only to say so, and I’ll go.’

He looked at the children and the children looked at him for quite half a minute. His eyes did not twinkle any more. They were very kind, and there was the beginning of a good smile on his lips.

Una put out her hand. ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘We like you.’

‘Have a Bath Oliver,’ said Dan, and he passed over the squashy envelope with the eggs.

‘By Oak, Ash, and Thorn,’ cried Puck, taking off his blue cap, ‘I like you too. Sprinkle a plenty salt on the biscuit, Dan, and I’ll eat it with you. That’ll show you the sort of person I am. Some of us’—he went on, with his mouth full—, ‘couldn’t abide Salt, or Horse-shoes over a door, or Mountain-ash berries, or Running Water, or Cold Iron, or the sound of Church Bells. But I’m Puck!’

He brushed the crumbs carefully from his doublet and shook hands.

page 2

‘We always said, Dan and I,’ Una stammered, ‘that if it ever happened we’d know ex-actly what to do; but—but now it seems all different somehow.’

‘She means meeting a fairy,’ said Dan. ‘I never believed in ’em—not after I was six, anyhow.’

‘I did,’ said Una. ‘At least, I sort of half believed till we learned “Farewell Rewards.” Do you know “Farewell Rewards and Fairies”?’

‘Do you mean this?’ said Puck. He threw his big head back and began at the second line:—

‘Good housewives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies
Do fare as well as they;
And though they sweep their hearths no less

(‘Join in, Una!’)

Than maids were wont to do,
Yet who of late for cleanliness
Finds sixpence in her shoe?’

The echoes flapped all along the flat meadow.

‘Of course I know it,’ he said.

‘And then there’s the verse about the Rings,’ said Dan. ‘When I was little it always made me feel unhappy in my inside.’

‘“Witness those rings and roundelays,” do you mean ?’ boomed Puck, with a voice like a great church organ.

‘Of theirs which yet remain,
Were footed in Queen Mary’s days
On many a grassy plain.
But since of late Elizabeth,
And later James came in,
Are never seen on any heath
As when the time hath been.’

‘It’s some time since I heard that sung, but there’s no good beating about the bush: it’s true. The People of the Hills have all left. I saw them come into Old England and I saw them go. Giants, trolls, kelpies, brownies, goblins, imps; wood, tree, mound, and water spirits; heath-people, hill-watchers, treasure-guards, good people, little people, pishogues, leprechauns, night-riders, pixies, nixies, gnomes, and the rest—gone, all gone! I came into England with Oak, Ash, and Thorn, and when Oak, Ash, and Thorn are gone I shall go too.’

Dan looked round the meadow—at Una’s oak by the lower gate, at the line of ash trees that overhang Otter Pool where the mill-stream spills over when the mill does not need it, and at the gnarled old white-thorn where Three Cows scratched their necks.

‘It’s all right,’ he said; and added, ‘I’m planting a lot of acorns this autumn too.’

‘Then aren’t you most awfully old?’ said Una.

‘Not old—fairly long-lived, as folk say hereabouts. Let me see—my friends used to set my dish of cream for me o’ nights when Stonehenge was new. Yes, before the Flint Men made the Dewpond under Chanctonbury Ring.’

Una clasped her hands, cried ‘Oh!’ and nodded her head.

‘She’s thought a plan,’ Dan explained. ‘She always does like that when she thinks a plan.’

‘I was thinking—suppose we saved some of our porridge and put it in the attic for you. They’d notice if we left it in the nursery.’

‘Schoolroom,’ said Dan, quickly, and Una flushed, because they had made a solemn treaty that summer not to call the schoolroom the nursery any more.

‘Bless your heart o’ gold!’ said Puck. ‘You’ll make a fine considering wench some market-day. I really don’t want you to put out a bowl for me; but if ever I need a bite, be sure I’ll tell you.’

He stretched himself at length on the dry grass, and the children stretched out beside him, their bare legs waving happily in the air. They felt they could not be afraid of him any more than of their particular friend old Hobden the hedger. He did not bother them with grownup questions, or laugh at the donkey’s head, but lay and smiled to himself in the most sensible way.

‘Have you a knife on you?’ he said at last.

Dan handed over his big one-bladed outdoor knife, and Puck began to carve out a piece of turf from the centre of the Ring.

‘What’s that for—Magic?’ said Una, as he pressed up the square of chocolate loam that cut like so much cheese.

‘One of my little magics,’ he answered, and cut another. ‘You see, I can’t let you into the Hills because the People of the Hills have gone; but if you care to take seizin from me, I may be able to show you something out of the common here on Human Earth. You certainly deserve it.’

‘What’s taking seizin?’ said Dan, cautiously.

page 3

‘It’s an old custom the people had when they bought and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it over to the buyer, and you weren’t lawfully seized of your land—it didn’t really belong to you—till the other fellow had actually given you a piece of it—like this.’ He held out the turves.

‘But it’s our own meadow,’ said Dan, drawing back. ‘Are you going to magic it away?’

Puck laughed. ‘Iknow it’s your meadow, but there’s a great deal more in it than you or your father ever guessed. Try!’

He turned his eyes on Una.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said. Dan followed her example at once.

‘Now are you two lawfully seized and possessed of all Old England,’ began Puck, in a sing-song voice. ‘By Right of Oak, Ash, and Thorn are you free to come and go and look and know where I shall show or best you please. You shall see What you shall see and you shall hear What you shall hear, though It shall have happened three thousand year; and you shall know neither Doubt nor Fear. Fast! Hold fast all I give you.’

The children shut their eyes, but nothing happened.

‘Well?’ said Una, disappointedly opening them. ‘I thought there would be dragons.’

‘“Though It shall have happened three thousand year,”’ said Puck, and counted on his fingers. ‘No; I’m afraid there were no dragons three thousand years ago.’

‘But there hasn’t happened anything at all,’ said Dan.

‘Wait awhile,’ said Puck. ‘You don’t grow an oak in a year—and Old England’s older than twenty oaks. Let’s sit down again and think. I can do that for a century at a time.’

‘Ah, but you’re a fairy,’ said Dan.

‘Have you ever heard me use that word yet?’ said Puck, quickly.

‘No. You talk about “the People of the Hills,” but you never say “fairies,”’ said Una. ‘I was wondering at that. Don’t you like it?’

‘How would you like to be called “mortal” or “human being” all the time?’ said Puck; ‘or “son of Adam” or “daughter of Eve”?’

‘I shouldn’t like it at all,’ said Dan. ‘That’s how the Djinns and Afrits talk in the Arabian Nights.’

‘And that’s how I feel about saying—that word that I don’t say. Besides, what you call them are made-up things the People of the Hills have never heard of—little buzzflies with butterfly wings and gauze petticoats, and shiny stars in their hair, and a wand like a school-teacher’s cane for punishing bad boys and rewarding good ones. I know ’em!’

‘We don’t mean that sort,’ said Dan. ‘We hate ’em too.’

‘Exactly,’ said Puck. ‘Can you wonder that the People of the Hills don’t care to be confused with that painty-winged, wand-waving, sugar-and-shake-your-head set of impostors? Butterfly wings, indeed! I’ve seen Sir Huon and a troop of his people setting off from Tintagel Castle for Hy-Brasil in the teeth of a sou’-westerly gale, with the spray flying all over the Castle, and the Horses of the Hills wild with fright. Out they’d go in a lull, screaming like gulls, and back they’d be driven five good miles inland before they could come head to wind again. Butterfly-wings! It was Magic—Magic as black as Merlin could make it, and the whole sea was green fire and white foam with singing mermaids in it. And the Horses of the Hills picked their way from one wave to another by the lightning flashes! That was how it was in the old days!’

‘Splendid,’ said Dan, but Una shuddered.

‘I’m glad they’re gone, then; but what made the People of the Hills go away?’ Una asked.

‘Different things. I’ll tell you one of them some day—the thing that made the biggest flit of any,’ said Puck. ‘But they didn’t all flit at once. They dropped off, one by one, through the centuries. Most of them were foreigners who couldn’t stand our climate. They flitted early.’

‘How early?’ said Dan.

‘A couple of thousand years or more. The fact is they began as Gods. The Phoenicians brought some over when they came to buy tin; and the Gauls, and the Jutes, and the Danes, and the Frisians, and the Angles brought more when they landed. They were always landing in those days, or being driven back to their ships, and they always brought their Gods with them. England is a bad country for Gods. Now, I began as I mean to go on. A bowl of porridge, a dish of milk, and a little quiet fun with the country folk in the lanes was enough for me then, as it is now. I belong here, you see, and I have been mixed up with people all my days. But most of the others insisted on being Gods, and having temples, and altars, and priests, and sacrifices of their own.’

‘People burned in wicker baskets?’ said Dan. ‘Like Miss Blake tells us about?’

‘All sorts of sacrifices,’ said Puck. ‘If it wasn’t men, it was horses, or cattle, or pigs, or metheglin—that’s a sticky, sweet sort of beer. I never liked it. They were a stiff-necked, extravagant set of idols, the Old Things. But what was the result? Men don’t like being sacrificed at the best of times; they don’t even like sacrificing their farm-horses. After a while men simply left the Old Things alone, and the roofs of their temples fell in, and the Old Things had to scuttle out and pick up a living as they could. Some of them took to hanging about trees, and hiding in graves and groaning o’ nights. If they groaned loud enough and long enough they might frighten a poor countryman into sacrificing a hen, or leaving a pound of butter for them. I remember one Goddess called Belisama. She became a common wet water-spirit somewhere in Lancashire. And there were hundreds of other friends of mine. First they were Gods. Then they were People of the Hills, and then they flitted to other places because they couldn’t get on with the English for one reason or another. There was only one Old Thing, I remember, who honestly worked for his living after he came down in the world. He was called Weland, and he was a smith to some Gods. I’ve forgotten their names, but he used to make them swords and spears. I think he claimed kin with Thor of the Scandinavians.’

‘Heroes of Asgard Thor?’ said Una. She had been reading the book.

‘Perhaps,’ answered Puck. ‘None the less, when bad times came, he didn’t beg or steal. He worked; and I was lucky enough to be able to do him a good turn.’

‘Tell us about it,’ said Dan. ‘I think I like hearing of Old Things.’

page 4

They rearranged themselves comfortably, each chewing a grass stem. Puck propped himself on one strong arm and went on:

‘Let’s think! I met Weland first on a November afternoon in a sleet storm, on Pevensey Level——’

‘Pevensey? Over the hill, you mean?’ Dan pointed south.

‘Yes; but it was all marsh in those days, right up to Horsebridge and Hydeneye. I was on Beacon Hill—they called it Brunanburgh then—when I saw the pale flame that burning thatch makes, and I went down to look. Some pirates—I think they must have been Peofn’s men—were burning a village on the Levels, and Weland’s image—a big, black wooden thing with amber beads round its neck—lay in the bows of a black thirty-two-oar galley that they had just beached. Bitter cold it was! There were icicles hanging from her deck and the oars were glazed over with ice, and there was ice on Weland’s lips. When he saw me he began a long chant in his own tongue, telling me how he was going to rule England, and how I should smell the smoke of his altars from Lincolnshire to the Isle of Wight. I didn’t care? I’d seen too many Gods charging into Old England to be upset about it. I let him sing himself out while his men were burning the village, and then I said (I don’t know what put it into my head), “Smith of the Gods,” I said, “the time comes when I shall meet you plying your trade for hire by the wayside.”’

‘What did Weland say?’ said Una. ‘Was he angry?’

‘He called me names and rolled his eyes, and I went away to wake up the people inland. But the pirates conquered the country, and for centuries Weland was a most important God. He had temples everywhere—from Lincolnshire to the Isle of Wight, as he said—and his sacrifices were simply scandalous. To do him justice, he preferred horses to men; but men or horses, I knew that presently he’d have to come down in the world—like the other Old Things. I gave him lots of time—I gave him about a thousand years—and at the end of ’em I went into one of his temples near Andover to see how he prospered. There was his altar, and there was his image, and there were his priests, and there were the congregation, and everybody seemed quite happy, except Weland and the priests. In the old days the congregation were unhappy until the priests had chosen their sacrifices; and so would you have been. When the service began a priest rushed out, dragged a man up to the altar, pretended to hit him on the head with a little gilt axe, and the man fell down and pretended to die. Then everybody shouted: “A sacrifice to Weland! A sacrifice to Weland!”’

‘And the man wasn’t really dead?’ said Una.

‘Not a bit. All as much pretence as a dolls’ tea-party. Then they brought out a splendid white horse, and the priest cut some hair from its mane and tail and burned it on the altar, shouting, “A sacrifice!” That counted the same as if a man and a horse had been killed. I saw poor Weland’s face through the smoke, and I couldn’t help laughing. He looked so disgusted and so hungry, and all he had to satisfy himself was a horrid smell of burning hair. Just a dolls’ tea-party’

‘I judged it better not to say anything then (’twouldn’t have been fair), and the next time I came to Andover, a few hundred years later, Weland and his temple were gone, and there was a Christian bishop in a church there. None of the People of the Hills could tell me anything about him, and I supposed that he had left England.’ Puck turned; lay on the other elbow, and thought for a long time.

‘Let’s see,’ he said at last. ‘It must have been some few years later—a year or two before the Conquest, I think—that I came back to Pook’s Hill here, and one evening I heard old Hobden talking about Weland’s Ford.’

‘If you mean old Hobden the hedger, he’s only seventy-two. He told me so himself,’ said Dan. ‘He’s a intimate friend of ours.’

‘You’re quite right,’ Puck replied. ‘I meant old Hobden’s ninth great-grandfather. He was a free man and burned charcoal hereabouts. I’ve known the family, father and son, so long that I get confused sometimes. Hob of the Dene was my Hobden’s name, and he lived at the Forge cottage. Of course, I pricked up my ears when I heard Weland mentioned, and I scuttled through the woods to the Ford just beyond Bog Wood yonder.’ He jerked his head westward, where the valley narrows between wooded hills and steep hop-fields.

‘Why, that’s Willingford Bridge,’ said Una. ‘We go there for walks often. There’s a kingfisher there.’

‘It was Weland’s Ford then, dear. A road led down to it from the Beacon on the top of the hill—a shocking bad road it was—and all the hillside was thick, thick oak-forest, with deer in it. There was no trace of Weland, but presently I saw a fat old farmer riding down from the Beacon under the greenwood tree. His horse had cast a shoe in the clay, and when he came to the Ford he dismounted, took a penny out of his purse, laid it on a stone, tied the old horse to an oak, and called out: “Smith, Smith, here is work for you!” Then he sat down and went to sleep. You can imagine how I felt when I saw a whitebearded, bent old blacksmith in a leather apron creep out from behind the oak and begin to shoe the horse. It was Weland himself. I was so astonished that I jumped out and said: “What on Human Earth are you doing here, Weland?”’

‘Poor Weland!’ sighed Una.

He pushed the long hair back from his forehead (he didn’t recognise me at first). Then he said: “You ought to know. You foretold it, Old Thing. I’m shoeing horses for hire. I’m not even Weland now,” he said. “They call me Wayland-Smith.”’

‘Poor chap!’ said Dan. ‘What did you say?’

‘What could I say? He looked up, with the horse’s foot on his lap, and he said, smiling, “I remember the time when I wouldn’t have accepted this old bag of bones as a sacrifice, and now I’m glad enough to shoe him for a penny.”

‘“Isn’t there any way for you to get back to Valhalla, or wherever you come from?” I said.

‘“I’m afraid not,” he said, rasping away at the hoof. He had a wonderful touch with horses. The old beast was whinnying on his shoulder. “You may remember that I was not a gentle God in my Day and my Time and my Power. I shall never be released till some human being truly wishes me well.”

‘“Surely,” said I, “the farmer can’t do less than that. You’re shoeing the horse all round for him.”

‘“Yes,” said he, “and my nails will hold a shoe from one full moon to the next. But farmers and Weald clay,’ said he, “are both uncommon cold and sour.”

‘Would you believe it, that when that farmer woke and found his horse shod he rode away without one word of thanks? I was so angry that I wheeled his horse right round and walked him back three miles to the Beacon, just to teach the old sinner politeness.’

‘Were you invisible?’ said Una. Puck nodded, gravely.

page 5

‘The Beacon was always laid in those days ready to light, in case the French landed at Pevensey; and I walked the horse about and about it that lee-long summer night. The farmer thought he was bewitched—well, he was, of course—and began to pray and shout. I didn’t care! I was as good a Christian as he any fair-day in the County, and about four o’clock in the morning a young novice came along from the monastery that used to stand on the top of Beacon Hill.’

‘What’s a novice?’ said Dan.

‘It really means a man who is beginning to be a monk, but in those days people sent their sons to a monastery just the same as a school. This young fellow had been to a monastery in France for a few months every year, and he was finishing his studies in the monastery close to his home here. Hugh was his name, and he had got up to go fishing hereabouts. His people owned all this valley. Hugh heard the farmer shouting, and asked him what in the world he meant. The old man spun him a wonderful tale about fairies and goblins and witches; and I know he hadn’t seen a thing except rabbits and red deer all that night. (The People of the Hills are like otters—they don’t show except when they choose.) But the novice wasn’t a fool. He looked down at the horse’s feet, and saw the new shoes fastened as only Weland knew how to fasten ’em. (Weland had a way of turning down the nails that folks called the Smith’s Clinch.)

‘“H’m!” said the novice. “Where did you get your horse shod?”

‘The farmer wouldn’t tell him at first, because the priests never liked their people to have any dealings with the Old Things. At last he confessed that the Smith had done it. “What did you pay him?” said the novice. “Penny,” said the farmer, very sulkily. “That’s less than a Christian would have charged,” said the novice. “I hope you threw a ‘Thank you’ into the bargain.” “No,” said the farmer; “Wayland-Smith’s a heathen.” “Heathen or no heathen,” said the novice, “you took his help, and where you get help there you must give thanks.”

“What?” said the farmer—he was in a furious temper because I was walking the old horse in circles all this time—“What, you young jackanapes?” said he. “Then by your reasoning I ought to say ‘Thank you’ to Satan if he helped me?” “Don’t roll about up there splitting reasons with me,” said the novice. “Come back to the Ford and thank the Smith, or you’ll be sorry.”

‘Back the farmer had to go. I led the horse, though no one saw me, and the novice walked beside us, his gown swishing through the shiny dew and his fishing-rod across his shoulders spearwise. When we reached the Ford again—it was five o’clock and misty still under the oaks—the farmer simply wouldn’t say “Thank you.” He said he’d tell the Abbot that the novice wanted him to worship heathen gods. Then Hugh the novice lost his temper. He just cried, “Out!” put his arm under the farmer’s fat leg, and heaved him from his saddle on to the turf, and before he could rise he caught him by the back of the neck and shook him like a rat till the farmer growled, “Thank you, Wayland-Smith.”’

‘Did Weland see all this?’ said Dan.

‘Oh, yes, and he shouted his old war-cry when the farmer thudded on to the ground. He was delighted. Then the novice turned to the oak tree and said, “Ho, Smith of the Gods! I am ashamed of this rude farmer; but for all you have done in kindness and charity to him and to others of our people, I thank you and wish you well.” Then he picked up his fishing-rod—it looked more like a tall spear than ever—and tramped off down your valley.’

‘And what did poor Weland do?’ said Una.

‘He laughed and he cried with joy, because he had been released at last, and could go away. But he was an honest Old Thing. He had worked for his living and he paid his debts before he left. “I shall give that novice a gift,” said Weland. “A gift that shall do him good the wide world over and Old England after him. Blow up my fire, Old Thing, while I get the iron for my last task.” Then he made a sword—a dark grey, wavy-lined sword—and I blew the fire while he hammered. By Oak, Ash, and Thorn, I tell you, Weland was a Smith of the Gods! He cooled that sword in running water twice, and the third time he cooled it in the evening dew, and he laid it out in the moonlight and said Runes (that’s charms) over it, and he carved Runes of Prophecy on the blade. “Old Thing,” he said to me, wiping his forehead, “this is the best blade that Weland ever made. Even the user will never know how good it is. Come to the monastery.”

‘We went to the dormitory where the monks slept, we saw the novice fast asleep in his cot, and Weland put the sword into his hand, and I remember the young fellow gripped it in his sleep. Then Weland strode as far as he dared into the Chapel and threw down all his shoeing-tools-his hammers, and pincers, and rasps—to show that he had done with them for ever. It sounded like suits of armour falling, and the sleepy monks ran in, for they thought the monastery had been attacked by the French. The novice came first of all, waving his new sword and shouting Saxon battle-cries. When they saw the shoeing-tools they were very bewildered, till the novice asked leave to speak, and told what he had done to the farmer, and what he had said to Wayland-Smith, and how, though the dormitory light was burning, he had found the wonderful rune-carved sword in his cot.

‘The Abbot shook his head at first, and then he laughed and said to the novice: “Son Hugh, it needed no sign from a heathen God to show me that you will never be a monk. Take your sword, and keep your sword, and go with your sword, and be as gentle as you are strong and courteous. We will hang up the Smith’s tools before the Altar,” he said, “because, whatever the Smith of the Gods may have been in the old days, we know that he worked honestly for his living and made gifts to Mother Church.” Then they went to bed again, all except the novice, and he sat up in the garth playing with his sword. Then Weland said to me by the stables: “Farewell, Old Thing; you had the right of it. You saw me come to England, and you see me go. Farewell!”

With that he strode down the hill to the corner of the Great Woods—Woods Corner, you call it now—to the very place where he had first landed—and I heard him moving through the thickets towards Horsebridge for a little, and then he was gone. That was how it happened. I saw it.’

Both children drew a long breath.

‘But what happened to Hugh the novice?’ said Una.

‘And the sword?’ said Dan.

Puck looked down the meadow that lay all quiet and cool in the shadow of Pook’s Hill. A corncrake jarred in a hay-field near by, and the small trouts of the brook began to jump. A big white moth flew unsteadily from the alders and flapped round the children’s heads, and the least little haze of water-mist rose from the brook.

‘Do you really want to know?’ Puck said.

‘We do,’ cried the children. ‘Awfully!’

page 6

‘Very good. I promised you that you shall see What you shall see, and you shall hear What you shall hear, though It shall have happened three thousand year; but just now it seems to me that, unless you go back to the house, people will be looking for you. I’ll walk with you as far as the gate.’

‘Will you be here when we come again?’ they asked.

‘Surely, sure-ly,’ said Puck. ‘I’ve been here some time already. One minute first, please.’

He gave them each three leaves—one of Oak, one of Ash, and one of Thorn.

‘Bite these,’ said he. ‘Otherwise you might be talking at home of what you’ve seen and heard, and—if I know human beings—they’d send for the doctor. Bite!’

They bit hard, and found themselves walking side by side to the lower gate. Their father was leaning over it.

‘And how did your play go?’ he asked.

‘Oh, splendidly,’ said Dan. ‘Only afterwards, I think, we went to sleep. It was very hot and quiet. Don’t you remember, Una?’

Una shook her head and said nothing.

‘I see,’ said her father.

‘Late—late in the evening Kilmeny came home,
For Kilmeny had been she could not tell where,
And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare.

‘But why are you chewing leaves at your time of life, daughter? For fun?’

‘No. It was for something, but I can’t azactly remember,’ said Una.

And neither of them could till——