[a short tale]

WILL the public be good enough to look into this business? It has sent Crewe to bed, and Mottleby is applying for home leave, and I’ve lost my faith in man altogether, and the Club gives it up. Trivey is the only man who is unaffected by the catastrophe, and he says “I told you so.” We were all proud of Trivey at the Club, and would have crowned him with wreaths of Bougainvillea had he permitted the liberty. But Trivey was an austere man. The utmost that he permitted himself to say was: “I can stretch a little bit when I’m in the humour.” We called him the Monumental Liar. Nothing that the Club oflFered was too good for Trivey. He had the soft chair opposite the thermantidote in the hot weather, and he made up his own four at whist. When visitors came in—globe-trotters for choice—Trivey used to unmuzzle himself and tell tales that sent the globe-trotter out of the Club on tiptoe looking for snakes in his hat and tigers in the compound. Whenever a man from a strange Club came in Trivey used to call for a whisky and ginger-wine and rout that man on all points—from horses upward. There was a man whose nickname was “Ananias,” who came from the Prince’s Plungers to look at Trivey; and, though Trivey was only a civilian, the Plunger man resigned his title to the nickname before eleven o’clock. He made it over to Trivey on a card, and Trivey himg up the concession in his quarters. We loved Trivey—all of us; and now we don’t love him any more.

A man from the frontier came in and began to tell tales—some very good ones, and some better than good. He was an outsider, but he had a wonderful imagination—for the frontier. He told six stories before Trivey brought up his first line, and three more before Trivey hurled his reserves into the fray.

“When I was at Anungaracharlupillay in Madras,” said Trivey quietly, “there was a rogue elephant cutting about the district. And I came upon him asleep.” All the Club stopped talking here, until Trivey had finished the story. He told us that he, in the company of another man, had found the rogue asleep, but just as they got up to the brute’s head it woke up with a scream. Then Trivey, who was careful to explain that he was a “bit powerful about the arms,” caught hold of its ears as it rose, and hung there, kicking the animal in the eyes, which so bewildered it that it stayed screaming and frightened until Trivey’s ally shot it behind the shoulder, and the villagers ran in and hamstrung it. It evidently died from loss of blood. Trivey was hanging on the ears and kicking hard for nearly fifteen minutes. When the frontier man heard the story he put his hands in front of his face and sobbed audibly. We gave him all the drinks he wanted, and he recovered sufficiently to carry away eighty rupees at whist later on; but his nerve was irretrievably shattered. He will be no use on the frontier any more. The rest of the Club were very pleased with Trivey, because these frontier men, and especially the guides, want a great deal of keeping in order. Trivey was quite modest. He was a truly great soul, and popular applause never turned his head. As I have said, we loved Trivey, till that fatal day when Crewe announced that he had been transferred for a couple of months to Animgaracharlupillay. “Oh!” said Trivey, “I dare say they’ll remember about my rogue elephant down there. You ask ’em, Crewe.” Then we felt sorry for Trivey, because we were sure that he was arriving at that stage of mental decay when a man begins to believe in his own fictions. That spoils a man’s hand. Crewe wrote up once or twice to Mottleby, saying that he would bring back a story that would make our hair curl. Good stories are scarce in Madras, and we rather scoffed at the announcement. When Crewe returned it was easy to see that he was bursting with importance. He gave a big dinner at the Club and invited nearly everybody but Trivey, who went off after dinner to teach a young subaltern to play “snooker.” At coffee and cheroots, Crewe could not restrain himself any longer. “I say, you Johnnies, it’s all true—every single word of it—and you can throw the decanter at my head and I’ll apologise. The whole village was full of it. There was a rogue elephant, and it slept, and Trivey did catch hold of its ears and kick it in the eyes, and hang on for ten minutes, at least, and all the rest of it. I neglected my regular work to sift that story, and on my honour the tale’s an absolute fact. The headsman said so, all the shikaries said so, and all the villages corroborated it. Now would a whole village volunteer a lie that would do them no good?” You might have heard a cigar-ash fall after this statement. Then Mottleby said, with deep disgust: “What can you do with a man like that? His best and brightest lie, too!” “’Tisn’t!” shrieked Crewe. “It’s a fact—a nickel-plated, teak-wood, Tantalusaction, forty-five rupee fact.’’ “That only makes it worse,” said Mottleby; and we all felt that was true. We ran into the billiard-room to talk to Trivey, but he said we had put him off his stroke; and that was all the satisfaction we got out of him. Later on he repeated that he was a “bit powerful about the arms,” and went to bed. We sat up half the night devising vengeance on Trivey. We were very angry, and there was no hope of hushing up the tale. The man had taken us in completely, and now that we’ve lost our champion Ananias, all the frontier will laugh at us, and we shall never be able to trust a word that Trivey says.

I ask with Mottleby: “What can you do with a man like that?”

“Qui procul hinc—the legend’s writ,
    The frontier grave is far away;
Qui ante diem periit,
    Sed miles, sed pro patriâ.
(NEWBOLT)

THE Easter term was but a month old when Stettson major, a day-boy, contracted diphtheria, and the Head was very angry. He decreed a new and narrower set of bounds—the infection had been traced to an out-lying farmhouse—urged the prefects severely to lick all trespassers, and promised extra attentions from his own hand. There were no words bad enough for Stettson major, quarantined at his mother’s house, who had lowered the school-average of health. This he said in the gymnasium after prayers. Then he wrote some two hundred letters to as many anxious parents and guardians, and bade the school carry on. The trouble did not spread, but, one night, a dog-cart drove to the Head’s door, and in the morning the Head had gone, leaving all things in charge of Mr. King, senior house-master. The Head often ran up to town, where the school devoutly believed he bribed officials for early proofs of the Army Examination papers; but this absence was unusually prolonged.

‘Downy old bird!’ said Stalky to the allies, one wet afternoon, in the study. ‘He must have gone on a bend an’ been locked up, under a false name.’

‘What for?’ Beetle entered joyously into the libel.

‘Forty shillin’s or a month for hackin’ the chucker-out of the Pavvy on the shins. Bates always has a spree when he goes to town. ’Wish he was back, though. I’m about sick o’ King’s “whips an’ scorpions” an’ lectures on public-school spirit—yah!—and scholarship!’

‘“Crass an’ materialised brutality of the middle-classes—readin’ solely for marks. Not a scholar in the whole school,”’ M‘Turk quoted, pensively boring holes in the mantelpiece with a hot poker.

‘That’s rather a sickly way of spending an afternoon. ’Stinks, too. Let’s come out an’ smoke. Here’s a treat.’ Stalky held up a long Indian cheroot. ‘’Bagged it from my pater last holidays. I’m a bit shy of it, though; it’s heftier than a pipe. We’ll smoke it palaver-fashion. Hand it round, eh? Let’s lie up behind the old harrow on the Monkey-farm Road.’

‘Out of bounds. Bounds beastly strict these days, too. Besides, we shall cat.’ Beetle sniffed the cheroot critically. ‘It’s a regular Pomposo Stinkadore

‘You can; I shan’t. What d’you say, Turkey?’

‘Oh, may’s well, I s’pose.’

‘Chuck on your cap, then. It’s two to one, Beetle. Hout you come!’

They saw a group of boys by the notice-board in the corridor; little Foxy, the school sergeant, among them.

‘More bounds, I expect,’ said Stalky. ‘Hullo, Foxibus, who are you in mournin’ for?’ There was a broad band of crape round Foxy’s arm.

‘He was in my old regiment,’ said Foxy, jerking his head towards the notices, where a newspaper cutting was thumb-tacked between call-over lists.

‘By gum!’ quoth Stalky, uncovering as he read. ‘It’s old Duncan—Fat-Sow Duncan—killed on duty at something or other Kotal. “Rallyin’ his men with conspicuous gallantry.” He would, of course. “The body was recovered.” That’s all right. they cut ’em up sometimes, don’t they, Foxy?’

‘Horrid,’ said the sergeant briefly.

‘Poor old Fat-Sow! I was a fag when he left. How many does that make to us, Foxy?’

‘Mr. Duncan, he is the ninth. He came here when he was no bigger than little Grey tertius. My old regiment, too. Yiss, nine to us, Mr. Corkran, up to date.’

The boys went out into the wet, walking swiftly.

‘’Wonder how it feels—to be shot and all that,’ said Stalky, as they splashed down a lane. ‘Where did it happen, Beetle?’

‘Oh, out in India somewhere. We’re always rowin’ there. But look here, Stalky, what is the good o’ sittin’ under a hedge an’ cattin’? It’s be-eastly cold. It’s be-eastly wet, and we’ll be collared as sure as a gun.’

‘Shut up! Did you ever know your Uncle Stalky get you into a mess yet?’ Like many other leaders, Stalky did not dwell on past defeats.

They pushed through a dripping hedge, landed among water-logged clods, and sat down on a rust-coated harrow. The cheroot burned with sputterings of saltpetre. They smoked it gingerly, each passing to the other between closed forefinger and thumb.

‘Good job we hadn’t one apiece, ain’t it?’ said Stalky, shivering through set teeth. To prove his words he immediately laid all before them, and they followed his example. . . .

‘I told you,’ moaned Beetle, sweating clammy drops. ‘Oh, Stalky, you are a fool!’

‘Fe cat, tu cat, il cat. Nous cattons!’ M‘Turk handed up his contribution and lay hopelessly on the cold iron.

‘Something’s wrong with the beastly thing. I say, Beetle, have you been droppin’ ink on it?’

But Beetle was in no case to answer. Limp and empty, they sprawled across the harrow, the rust marking their ulsters in red squares and the abandoned cheroot-end reeking under their very cold noses. Then—they had heard nothing—the Head himself stood before them—the Head who should have been in town bribing examiners—the Head fantastically attired in old tweeds and a deer-stalker!

‘Ah,’ he said, fingering his moustache. ‘Very good. I might have guessed who it was. You will go back to the College and give my compliments to Mr. King and ask him to give you an extra-special licking. You will then do me five hundred lines. I shall be back to-morrow. Five hundred lines by five o’clock to-morrow. You are also gated for a week. This is not exactly the time for breaking bounds. Extra-special, please.’

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He disappeared over the hedge as lightly as he had come. There was a murmur of women’s voices in the deep lane.

‘Oh, you Prooshian brute!’ said M‘Turk as the voices died away. ‘Stalky, it’s all your silly fault.’

‘Kill him! Kill him!’ gasped Beetle.

‘I ca-an’t. I’m going to cat again . . . I don’t mind that, but King ‘ll gloat over us horrid. Extraspecial, ooh!’

Stalky made no answer—not even a soft one. They went to College and received that for which they had been sent. King enjoyed himself most thoroughly, for by virtue of their seniority the boys were exempt from his hand, save under special order. Luckily, he was no expert in the gentle art.

‘“Strange, how desire both outrun performance,”’ said Beetle irreverently, quoting from some Shakespeare play that they were cramming that term. They regained their study and settled down to the imposition.

‘You’re quite right, Beetle.’ Stalky spoke in silky and propitiating tones. ‘Now if the Head had sent us up to a prefect, we’d have got something to remember!’

‘Look here,’ M‘Turk began with cold venom, ‘we aren’t going to row you about this business, because it’s too bad for a row; but we want you to understand you’re jolly well excommunicated, Stalky. You’re a plain ass.’

‘How was I to know that the Head ’ud collar us? What was he doin’ in those ghastly clothes, too?’

‘Don’t try to raise a side-issue,’ Beetle grunted severely.

‘Well, it was all Stettson major’s fault. If he hadn’t gone an’ got diphtheria ’twouldn’t have happened. But don’t you think it rather rummy—the Head droppin’ on us that way?’

‘Shut up! You’re dead!’ said Beetle. ‘We’ve chopped your spurs off your beastly heels. We’ve cocked your shield upside down, and—and I don’t think you ought to be allowed to brew for a month.

‘Oh, stop jawin’ at me. I want——’

‘Stop? Why—why, we’re gated for a week.’ M‘Turk almost howled as the agony of the situation overcame him. ‘A lickin’ from King, five hundred lines, and a gating. D’you expect us to kiss you, Stalky, you beast?’

‘Drop rottin’ for a minute. I want to find out about the Head bein’ where he was.’

‘Well, you have. You found him quite well and fit. Found him making love to Stettson major’s mother. That was her in the lane—I heard her. And so we were ordered a licking before a day-boy’s mother. Bony old window, too,’ said M‘Turk. ‘Anything else you’d like to find out?’

‘I don’t care. I swear I’ll get even with him some day,’ Stalky growled.

‘’Looks like it,’ said M‘Turk. ‘Extra-special, week’s gatin’ and five hundred . . . and now you’re goin’ to row about it! ‘Help scrag him, Beetle!’ Stalky had thrown his Virgil at them.

The Head returned next day without explantion, to find the lines waiting for him and the school a little relaxed under Mr. King’s viceroyalty. Mr. King had been talking at and round and over the boys’ heads, in a lofty and promiscuous style, of public-school spirit and the traditions of ancient seats; for he always improved an occasion. Beyond waking in two hundred and fifty young hearts a lively hatred of all other foundations, he accomplished little—so little, indeed, that when, two days after the Head’s return, he chanced to come across Stalky & Co., gated but ever resourceful, playing marbles in the corridor, he said that he was not surprised—not in the least surprised. This was what he had expected from persons of their morale.

‘But there isn’t any rule against marbles, sir. Very interestin’ game,’ said Beetle, his knees white with chalk and dust. Then he received two hundred lines for insolence, besides an order to go to the nearest prefect for judgment and slaughter.

This is what happened behind the closed doors of Flint’s study, and Flint was then Head of the Games:—

‘Oh, I say, Flint. King has sent me to you for playin’ marbles in the corridor an’ shoutin’ “alley tor” an’ “knuckle down.”’

‘What does he suppose I have to do with that?’ was the answer.

‘Dunno. Well?’ Beetle grinned wickedly. ‘What am I to tell him? He’s rather wrathy about it.’

‘If the Head chooses to put a notice in the corridor forbiddin’ marbles, I can do something; but I can’t move on a house-master’s report. He knows that as well as I do.’

The sense of this oracle Beetle conveyed, all unsweetened, to King, who hastened to interview Flint.

Now Flint had been seven and a half years at the College, counting six months with a London crammer, from whose roof he had returned, homesick, to the Head for the final Army polish. There were four or five other seniors who had gone through much the same mill, not to mention boys, rejected by other establishments on account of a certain overwhelmingness, whom the Head had wrought into very fair shape. It was not a Sixth to be handled without gloves, as King found.

‘Am I to understand it is your intention to allow board-school games under your study windows, Flint? If so, I can only say——’ He said much, and Flint listened politely.

‘Well, sir, if the Head sees fit to call a prefects’ meeting we are bound to take the matter up. But the tradition of the school is that the prefects can’t move in any matter affecting the whole school without the Head’s direct order.’

Much more was then delivered, both sides a little losing their temper.

After tea, at an informal gathering of prefects in his study, Flint related the adventure.

‘He’s been playin’ for this for a week, and now he’s got it. You know as well as I do that if he hadn’t been gassing at us the way he has, that young devil Beetle wouldn’t have dreamed of marbles.’

‘We know that,’ said Perowne, ‘but that isn’t the question. On Flint’s showin’ King has called the prefects names enough to justify a first-class row. Crammers’ rejections, ill-regulated hobble-de-hoys, wasn’t it? Now it’s impossible for prefects——’

‘Rot,’ said Flint. ‘King’s the best classical cram we’ve got; and ’Tisn’t fair to bother the Head with a row. He’s up to his eyes with extra-tu. and Army work as it is. Besides, as I told King, we aren’t a public school. We’re a limited liability company payin’ four per cent. My father’s a shareholder, too.’

page 3

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ said Venner, a red-headed boy of nineteen.

‘Well, seems to me that we should be interferin’ with ourselves. We’ve got to get into the Army or—get out, haven’t we? King’s hired by the Council to teach us. All the rest’s flumdiddle. Can’t you see?’

It might have been because he felt the air was a little thunderous that the Head took his after-dinner cheroot to Flint’s study; but he so often began an evening in a prefect’s room that nobody suspected when he drifted in politely, after the knocks that etiquette demanded.

‘Prefects’ meeting?’ A cock of one wise eyebrow.

‘Not exactly, sir; we’re just talking things over. Won’t you take the easy chair?’

‘Thanks. Luxurious infants, you are.’ He dropped into Flint’s big half-couch and puffed for a while in silence. ‘Well, since you’re all here, I may confess that I’m the mute with the bowstring.’

The young faces grew serious. The phrase meant that certain of their number would be withdrawn from all further games for extra-tuition. It might also mean future success at Sandhurst; but it was present ruin for the First Fifteen.

‘Yes, I’ve come for my pound of flesh. I ought to have had you out before the Exeter match; but it’s our sacred duty to beat Exeter.’

‘Isn’t the Old Boys’ match sacred, too, sir?’ said Perowne. The Old Boys’ match was the event of the Easter term.

‘We’ll hope they aren’t in training. Now for the list. First I want Flint. It’s the Euclid that does it. You must work deductions with me. Perowne, extra mechanical drawing. Dawson goes to Mr. King for extra Latin, and Venner to me for German. Have I damaged the First Fifteen much?’ He smiled sweetly.

‘Ruined it, I’m afraid, sir,’ said Flint. ‘Can’t you let us off till the end of the term?’

‘Impossible. It will be a tight squeeze for Sandhurst this year.’

‘And all to be cut up by those vile Afghans, too,’ said Dawson. ‘’Wouldn’t think there’d be so much competition, would you?’

‘Oh, that reminds me. Crandall is coming down with the Old Boys—I’ve asked twenty of them, but we shan’t get more than a weak team. I don’t know whether he’ll be much use, though. He was rather knocked about, recovering poor old Duncan’s body.’

‘Crandall major—the Gunner?’ Perowne asked.

‘No, the minor—”Toffee” Crandall—in a native infantry regiment. He was almost before your time, Perowne.’

‘The papers didn’t say anything about him. We read about Fat-Sow, of course. What’s Crandall done, sir?’

‘I’ve brought over an Indian paper that his mother sent me. It was rather a—hefty, I think you say—piece of work. Shall I read it?’

The Head knew how to read. When he had finished the quarter-column of close type everybody thanked him politely.

‘Good for the old Coll.!’ said Perowne. ‘Pity he wasn’t in time to save Fat-Sow, though. That’s nine to us, isn’t it, in the last three years?’

‘Yes . . . And I took old Duncan off all games for extra-tu. five years ago this term,’ said the Head. ‘By the way, who do you hand over the Games to, Flint?’

‘Haven’t thought yet. Who’d you recommend, sir?’

‘No, thank you. I’ve heard it casually hinted behind my back that the Prooshian Bates is a downy bird, but he isn’t going to make himself responsible for a new Head of the Games. Settle it among yourselves. Good-night.’

‘And that’s the man,’ said Flint, when the door shut, ‘that you want to bother with a dame’s school row.’

‘I was only pullin’ your fat leg,’ Perowne returned hastily. ‘You’re so easy to draw, Flint.’

‘Well, never mind that. The Head’s knocked the First Fifteen to bits, and we’ve got to pick up the pieces, or the Old Boys will have a walk-over. Let’s promote all the Second Fifteen and make Big Side play up. There’s heaps of talent somewhere that we can polish up between now and the match.’

The case was represented so urgently to the school that even Stalky and M‘Turk, who affected to despise football, played one Big-Side game seriously. They were forthwith promoted ere their ardour had time to cool, and the dignity of their Caps demanded that they should keep some show of virtue. The match-team was worked at least four days out of seven, and the school saw hope ahead.

With the last week of the term the Old Boys began to arrive, and their welcome was nicely proportioned to their worth. Gentlemen cadets from Sandhurst and Woolwich, who had only left a year ago, but who carried enormous side, were greeted with a cheerful ‘Hullo! What’s the Shop like?’ from those who had shared their studies. Militia subalterns had more consideration, but it was understood they were not precisely of the true metal. Recreants who, failing for the Army, had gone into business or banks were received for old sake’s sake, but in no way made too much of. But when the real subalterns, officers and gentlemen full-blown—who had been to the ends of the earth and back again and so carried no side—came on the scene strolling about with the Head, the school divided right and left in admiring silence. And when one laid hands on Flint, even upon the Head of the Games, crying, ‘Good Heavens! What do you mean by growing in this way? You were a beastly little fag when I left,’ visible halos encircled Flint. They would walk to and fro in the corridor with the little red school-sergeant, telling news of old regiments; they would burst into form-rooms sniffing the well-remembered smells of ink and whitewash; they would find nephews and cousins in the lower forms and present them with enormous wealth; or they would invade the gymnasium and make Foxy show off the new stock on the bars.

Chiefly, though, they talked with the Head, who was father-confessor and agent-general to them all; for what they shouted in their unthinking youth, they proved in their thoughtless manhood—to wit, that the Prooshian Bates was ’a downy bird.’ Young blood who had stumbled into an entanglement with a pastry-cook’s daughter at Plymouth; experience who had come into a small legacy but mistrusted lawyers; ambition halting at cross-roads, anxious to take the one that would lead him farthest; extravagance pursued by the money-lender; arrogance in the thick of a regimental row—each carried his trouble to the Head; and Chiron showed him, in language quite unfit for little boys, a quiet and safe way round, out, or under. So they overflowed his house, smoked his cigars, and drank his health as they had drunk it all the earth over when two or three of the old school had foregathered.

page 4

‘Don’t stop smoking for a minute,’ said the Head. ‘The more you’re out of training the better for us. I’ve demoralised the First Fifteen with extra-tu.’

‘Ah, but we’re a scratch lot. Have you told ’em we shall need a substitute even if Crandall can play?’ said a Lieutenant of Engineers with the D.S.O. to his credit.

‘He wrote me he’d play, so he can’t have been much hurt. He’s coming down to-morrow morning.’

‘Crandall minor that was, and brought off poor Duncan’s body?’ The Head nodded. ‘Where are you going to put him? We’ve turned you out of house and home already, Head Sahib.’ This was a Squadron-Commander of Bengal Lancers, home on leave.

‘I’m afraid he’ll have to go up to his old dormitory. You know old boys can claim that privilege. Yes, I think leetle Crandall minor must bed down there once more.’

‘Bates Sahib’—a Gunner flung a heavy arm round the Head’s neck—‘you’ve got something up your sleeve. Confess! I know that twinkle.’

‘Can’t you see, you cuckoo?’ a Submarine Miner interrupted. ‘Crandall goes up to the dormitory as an object-lesson, for moral effect and so forth. Isn’t that true, Head Sahib?’

‘It is. You know too much, Purvis. I licked you for that in ‘79.’

‘You did, sir, and it’s my private belief you chalked the cane.’

‘N-no. But I’ve a very straight eye. Perhaps that misled you.

That opened the flood-gates of fresh memories, and they all told tales out of school.

When Crandall minor that was—Lieutenant R. Crandall of an ordinary Indian regiment—arrived from Exeter on the morning of the match, he was cheered along the whole front of the College, for the prefects had repeated the sense of that which the Head had read them in Flint’s study. When Prout’s house understood that he would claim his Old Boy’s right to a bed for one night, Beetle ran into King’s house next door and executed a public ‘gloat’ up and down the enemy’s big form-room, departing in a haze of ink-pots.

‘What d’you take any notice of these rotters for?’ said Stalky, playing substitute for the Old Boys, magnificent in black jersey, white knickers, and black stockings. ‘I talked to him up in the dormitory when he was changin’. Pulled his sweater down for him. He’s cut about all over the arms—horrid purply ones. He’s goin’ to tell us about it to-night. I asked him to when I was lacin’ his boots.’

‘Well, you have got cheek,’ said Beetle enviously.

‘Slipped out before I thought. But he wasn’t a bit angry. He’s no end of a chap. I swear I’m goin’ to play up like beans. Tell Turkey!’

The technique of that match belongs to a bygone age. Scrimmages were tight and enduring; hacking was direct and to the purpose; and round the scrimmage stood the school, crying, ‘Put down your heads and shove!’ Toward the end everybody lost all sense of decency, and mothers of day-boys too close to the touch-line heard language not included in the bills. No one was actually carried off the field, but both sides felt happier when time was called, and Beetle helped Stalky and M‘Turk into their overcoats. The two had met in the many-legged heart of things, and as Stalky said, had ‘done each other proud.’ As they swaggered woodenly behind the teams—substitutes do not rank as equals of hairy men—they passed a pony-carriage near the wall, and a husky voice cried, ‘Well played. Oh, played indeed!’ It was Stettson major, white-cheeked and hollow-eyed, who had fought his way to the ground under escort of an impatient coachman.

‘Hullo, Stettson,’ said Stalky, checking. ‘Is it safe to come near you yet?’

‘Oh yes. I’m all right. They wouldn’t let me out before, but I had to come to the match. Your mouth looks pretty plummy.’

‘Turkey trod on it accidental-done-a-purpose. Well, I’m glad you’re better, because we owe you something. You and your membranes got us into a sweet mess, young man.’

‘I heard of that,’ said the boy, giggling. ‘The Head told me.’

‘Dooce he did! When?’

‘Oh, come on up to Coll. My shin ‘ll stiffen if we stay jawin’ here.’

‘Shut up, Turkey. I want to find out about this. Well?’

‘He was stayin’ at our house all the time I was ill.’

‘What for? Neglectin’ the Coll. that way? ’Thought he was in town.’

‘I was off my head, you know, and they said I kept on callin’ for him.’

‘Cheek! You’re only a day-boy.’

‘He came just the same, and he about saved my life. I was all bunged up one night—just goin’ to croak, the doctor said—and they stuck a tube or somethin’ in my throat, and the Head sucked out the stuff.’

‘Ugh! ‘Shot if I would!’

‘He ought to have got diphtheria himself, the doctor said. So he stayed on at our house instead of going back. I’d ha’ croaked in another twenty minutes, the doctor says.’

Here the coachman, being under orders, whipped up and nearly ran over the three.

‘My Hat!’ said Beetle. ‘That’s pretty average heroic.’

‘Pretty average!’ M‘Turk’s knee in the small of his back cannoned him into Stalky, who punted him back. ‘You ought to be hung!’

‘And the Head ought to get the V.C.,’ said Stalky. ‘Why, he might have been dead and buried by now. But he wasn’t. But he didn’t. Ho! ho! He just nipped through the hedge like a lusty old blackbird. Extra-special, five hundred lines, an’ gated for a week—all sereno!’

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‘I’ve read o’ somethin’ like that in a book,’ said Beetle. ‘Gummy, what a chap! Just think of it!’

‘I’m thinking,’ said M‘Turk; and he delivered a wild Irish yell that made the team turn round.

‘Shut your fat mouth,’ said Stalky, dancing with impatience. ‘Leave it to your Uncle Stalky, and he’ll have the Head on toast. If you say a word, Beetle, till I give you leave, I swear I’ll slay you. Habeo Capitem crinibus minimis. I’ve got him by the short hairs! Now look as if nothing had happened.’

There was no need of guile. The school was too busy cheering the drawn match. It hung round the lavatories regardless of muddy boots while the team washed. It cheered Crandall minor whenever it caught sight of him, and it cheered more wildly than ever after prayers, because the Old Boys in evening dress, openly twirling their moustaches, attended, and instead of standing with the masters, ranged themselves along the wall immediately before the prefects; and the Head called them over, too—majors, minors, and tertiuses, after their old names.

‘Yes, it’s all very fine,’ he said to his guests after dinner, ‘but the boys are getting a little out of hand. There will be trouble and sorrow later, I’m afraid. You’d better turn in early, Crandall. The dormitory will be sitting up for you. I don’t know to what dizzy heights you may climb in your profession, but I do know you’ll never get such absolute adoration as you’re getting now.’

‘Confound the adoration. I want to finish my cigar, sir.’

‘It’s all pure gold. Go where glory waits, Crandall—minor.’

The setting of that apotheosis was a ten-bed attic dormitory, communicating through doorless openings with three others. The gas flickered over the raw pine wash-stands. There was an incessant whistling of draughts, and outside the naked windows the sea beat on the Pebbleridge.

‘Same old bed—same old mattress, I believe,’ said Crandall, yawning. ‘Same old everything. Oh, but I’m lame! I’d no notion you chaps could play like this.’ He caressed a battered shin. ‘You’ve given us all something to remember you by.’

It needed a few minutes to put them at their ease; and, in some way they could not understand, they were more easy when Crandall turned round and said his prayers—a ceremony he had neglected for some years.

‘Oh, I am sorry. I’ve forgotten to put out the gas.’

‘Please don’t bother,’ said the prefect of the dormitory. ‘Worthington does that.’

A nightgowned twelve-year-old, who had been waiting to show off, leaped from his bed to the bracket and back again, by way of a washstand.

‘How d’you manage when he’s asleep?’ said Crandall, chuckling.

‘Shove a cold cleek down his neck.’

‘It was a wet sponge when I was junior in the dormitory. . . . Hullo! What’s happening?’

The darkness had filled with whispers, the sound of trailing rugs, bare feet on bare boards, protests, giggles, and threats such as:

‘Be quiet, you ass! . . . Squattez-vous on the floor, then! . . . I swear you aren’t going to sit on my bed! . . . Mind the tooth-glass,’ etc.

‘Sta—Corkran said,’ the prefect began, his tone showing his sense of Stalky’s insolence, ‘that perhaps you’d tell us about that business with Duncan’s body.’

‘Yes—yes—yes,’ ran the keen whispers. ‘Tell us.’

‘There’s nothing to tell. What on earth are you chaps hoppin’ about in the cold for?’

‘Never mind us,’ said the voices. ‘Tell about Fat-Sow.’

So Crandall turned on his pillow and spoke to the generation he could not see.

‘Well, about three months ago he was commanding a treasure-guard—a cart full of rupees to pay troops with—five thousand rupees in silver. He was comin’ to a place called Fort Pearson, near Kalabagh.’

‘I was born there,’ squeaked a small fag. ‘It was called after my uncle.’

‘Shut up—you and your uncle! Never mind him, Crandall.’

‘Well, ne’er mind. The Afridis found out that this treasure was on the move, and they ambushed the whole show a couple of miles before he got to the fort, and cut up the escort. Duncan was wounded, and the escort hooked it. There weren’t more than twenty Sepoys all told, and there were any amount of Afridis. As things turned out, I was in charge at Fort Pearson. Fact was, I’d heard the firing and was just going to see about it, when Duncan’s men came up. So we all turned back together. They told me something about an officer, but I couldn’t get the hang of things till I saw a chap under the wheels of the cart out in the open, propped up on one arm, blazing away with a revolver. You see, the escort had abandoned the cart, and the Afridis—they’re an awfully suspicious gang—thought the retreat was a trap—sort of draw, you know—and the cart was the bait. So they had left poor old Duncan alone. ’Minute they spotted how few we were, it was a race across the flat who should reach old Duncan first. We ran, and they ran, and we won, and after a little hackin’ about they pulled off. I never knew it was one of us till I was right on top of him. There are heaps of Duncans in the service, and of course the name didn’t remind me. He wasn’t changed at all hardly. He’d been shot through the lungs, poor old man, and he was pretty thirsty. I gave him a drink and sat down beside him, and—funny thing, too—he said, “Hullo, Toffee!” and I said, “Hullo, Fat-Sow! hope you aren’t hurt,” or something of the kind. But he died in a minute or two—never lifted his head off my knees. . . . I say, you chaps out there will get your death of cold. Better go to bed.’

‘All right. In a minute. But your cuts—your cuts. How did you get wounded?’

‘That was when we were taking the body back to the Fort. They came on again, and there was a bit of a scrimmage.’

‘Did you kill any one?’

‘Yes. Shouldn’t wonder. Good-night.’

page 6

‘Good-night. Thank you, Crandall. Thanks awf’ly, Crandall. Good-night.’

The unseen crowds withdrew. His own dormitory rustled into bed and lay silent for a while.

‘I say, Crandall’—Stalky’s voice was tuned to a wholly foreign reverence.

‘Well, what?’

‘Suppose a chap found another chap croaking with diphtheria—all bunged up with it—and they stuck a tube in his throat and the chap sucked the stuff out, what would you say?’

‘Um,’ said Crandall reflectively. ‘I’ve only heard of one case, and that was a doctor. He did it for a woman.’

‘Oh, this wasn’t a woman. It was only a boy.’

‘Makes it all the finer, then. It’s about the bravest thing a man can do. Why?’

‘Oh, I heard of a chap doin’ it. That’s all.’

‘Then he’s a brave man.’

‘Would you funk it?’

‘Ra-ather. Anybody would. Fancy dying of diphtheria in cold blood.’

‘Well—ah! Er! Look here!’ The sentence ended in a grunt, for Stalky had leaped out of bed and with M‘Turk was sitting on the head of Beetle, who would have sprung the mine there and then.

Next day, which was the last of the term and given up to a few wholly unimportant examinations, began with wrath and war. Mr. King had discovered that nearly all his house—it lay, as you know, next door but one to Prout’s in the long range of buildings—had unlocked the doors between the dormitories and had gone in to listen to a story told by Crandall. He went to the Head, clamorous, injured, appealing; for he never approved of allowing so-called young men of the world to contaminate the morals of boyhood. ‘Very good,’ said the Head. He would attend to it.

‘Well, I’m awf’ly sorry,’ said Crandall guiltily. ‘I don’t think I told ’em anything they oughtn’t to hear. Don’t let them get into trouble on my account.’

‘Tck!’ the Head answered, with the ghost of a wink. ‘It isn’t the boys that make trouble; it’s the masters. However, Prout and King don’t approve of dormitory gatherings on this scale, and one must back up the house-masters. Moreover, it’s hopeless to punish two houses only, so late in the term. We must be fair and include everybody. Let’s see. They have a holiday task for the Easters, which, of course, none of them will ever look at. We will give the whole school, except prefects and study-boys, regular prep. to-night; and the Common-room will have to supply a master to take it. We must be fair to all.’

‘Prep. on the last night of the term. Whew!’ said Crandall, thinking of his own wild youth. ‘I fancy there will be larks.’

The school, frolicking among packed trunks, whooping down the corridor, and ‘gloating’ in form-rooms, received the news with amazement and rage. No school in the world did prep. on the last night of the term. This thing was monstrous, tyrannical, subversive of law, religion, and morality. They would go into the form-rooms, and they would take their degraded holiday task with them, but—here they smiled and speculated what manner of man the Common-room would send up against them. The lot fell on Mason, credulous and enthusiastic, who loved youth. No other master was anxious to take that ‘prep.,’ for the school lacked the steadying influence of tradition; and men accustomed to the ordered routine of ancient foundations found it occasionally insubordinate. The four long form-rooms, in which all below the rank of study-boys worked, received him with thunders of applause. Ere he had coughed twice they favoured him with a metrical summary of the marriage-laws of Great Britain, as recorded by the High Priest of the Israelites and commented on by the leader of the host. The lower forms reminded him that it was the last day, and that therefore he must ‘take it all in play.’ When he dashed off to rebuke them, the Lower Fourth and Upper Third began with one accord to be sick, loudly and realistically. Mr. Mason tried, of all vain things under heaven, to argue with them, and a bold soul at a back desk bade him ‘take fifty lines for not ’olding up ’is ’and before speaking.’ As one who prided himself upon the precision of his English this cut Mason to the quick, and while he was trying to discover the offender, the Upper and Lower Second, three form-rooms away, turned out the gas and threw ink-pots. It was a pleasant and stimulating ‘prep.’ The study-boys and prefects heard the echoes of it far off, and the Common-room at dessert smiled.

Stalky waited, watch in hand, till half-past eight.

‘If it goes on much longer the Head will come up,’ said he. ‘We’ll tell the studies first, and then the form-rooms. Look sharp!’

He allowed no time for Beetle to be dramatic or M‘Turk to drawl. They poured into study after study, told their tale, and went again so soon as they saw they were understood, waiting for no comment; while the noise of that unholy ‘prep.’ grew and deepened. By the door of Flint’s study they met Mason flying towards the corridor.

‘He’s gone to fetch the Head. Hurry up! Come on!’

They broke into Number Twelve form-room abreast and panting.

‘The Head! The Head! The Head!’ That call stilled the tumult for a minute, and Stalky leaping to a desk shouted, ‘He went and sucked the diphtheria stuff out of Stettson major’s throat when we thought he was in town. Stop rotting, you asses! Stettson major would have croaked if the Head hadn’t done it. The Head might have died himself. Crandall says it’s the bravest thing any livin’ man can do, and’—his voice cracked—‘the Head don’t know we know!’

M‘Turk and Beetle, jumping from desk to desk, drove the news home among the junior forms. There was a pause, and then, Mason behind him, the Head entered. It was in the established order of things that no boy should speak or move under his eye. He expected the hush of awe. He was received with cheers—steady, ceaseless cheering. Being a wise man he went away, and the forms were silent and a little frightened.

‘It’s all right,’ said Stalky. ‘He can’t do much. ’Tisn’t as if you’d pulled the desks up like we did when old Carleton took prep. once. Keep it up! Hear ’em cheering in the studies!’ He rocketed out with a yell, to find Flint and the prefects lifting the roof off the corridor.

page 7

When the Head of a limited liability company, paying four per cent., is cheered on his saintly way to prayers, not only by four form-rooms of boys waiting punishment, but by his trusted prefects, he can either ask for an explanation or go his road with dignity, while the senior housemaster glares like an excited cat and points out to a white and trembling mathematical master that certain methods—not his, thank God—usually produce certain results. Out of delicacy the Old Boys did not attend that call-over; and it was to the school drawn up in the gymnasium that the Head spoke icily.

‘It is not often that I do not understand you; but I confess I do not to-night. Some of you, after your idiotic performances at prep., seem to think me a fit person to cheer. I am going to show you that I am not.’

Crash—crash—crash—came the triple cheer that disproved it, and the Head glowered under the gas.

‘That is enough. You will gain nothing. The little boys (the Lower School did not like that form of address) will do me three hundred lines apiece in the holidays. I shall take no further notice of them. The Upper School will do me one thousand lines apiece in the holidays, to be shown up the evening of the day they come back. And further——’

‘Gummy, what a glutton!’ Stalky whispered.

‘For your behaviour towards Mr. Mason I intend to lick the whole of the Upper School to-morrow when I give you your journey-money. This will include the three study-boys I found dancing on the form-room desks when I came up. Prefects will stay after call-over.’

The school filed out in silence, but gathered in groups by the gymnasium door waiting what might befall.

‘And now, Flint,’ said the Head, ‘will you be good enough to give me some explanation of your conduct?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Flint desperately, ’if you save a chap’s life at the risk of your own when he’s dyin’ of diphtheria, and the Coll. finds it out, whawhat can you expect, sir?’

‘Um, I see. Then that noise was not meant for—ah, cheek. I can connive at immorality, but I cannot stand impudence. However, it does not excuse their insolence to Mr. Mason. I’ll forgo the lines this once, remember; but the lickings hold good.’

When this news was made public, the school, lost in wonder and admiration, gasped at the Head as he went to his house. Here was a man to be reverenced. On the rare occasions when he caned he did it very scientifically, and the execution of a hundred boys would be epic—immense.

‘It’s all right, Head Sahib. We know,’ said Crandall, as the Head slipped off his gown with a grunt in his smoking-room. ‘I found out just now from our substitute. He was gettin’ my opinion of your performance last night in the dormitory. I didn’t know then that it was you he was talkin’ about. Crafty young animal. Freckled chap with eyes—Corkran, I think his name is.’

‘Oh, I know him, thank you,’ said the Head; and reflectively, ‘Ye-es, I should have included them even if I hadn’t seen ’em.’

‘If the old Coll. weren’t a little above themselves already, we’d chair you down the corridor,’ said the Engineer. ‘Oh, Bates, how could you? You might have caught it yourself, and where would we have been then?’

‘I always knew you were worth twenty of us any day. Now I’m sure of it,’ said the Squadron Commander, looking round for contradictions.

‘He isn’t fit to manage a school, though. Promise you’ll never do it again, Bates Sahib. We—we can’t go away comfy in our minds if you take these risks,’ said the Gunner.

‘Bates Sahib, you aren’t ever goin’ to cane the whole Upper School, are you?’ said Crandall.

‘I can connive at immorality, as I said, but I can’t stand impudence. Mason’s lot is quite hard enough even when I back him. Besides, the men at the golf-club heard them singing “Aaron and Moses.” I shall have complaints about that from the parents of day-boys. Decency must be preserved.’

‘We’re coming to help,’ said all the guests.

The Upper School were caned one after the other, their overcoats over their arms, the brakes waiting in the road below to take them to the station, their journey-money on the table. The Head began with Stalky, M‘Turk, and Beetle. He dealt faithfully by them.

‘And here’s your journey-money. Good-bye, and pleasant holidays.’

‘Good-bye. Thank you, sir. Good-bye.’

They shook hands.

‘Desire don’t outrun performance—much—this mornin’. We got the cream of it,’ said Stalky. ‘Now wait till a few chaps come out, and we’ll really cheer him.’

‘Don’t wait on our account, please,’ said Crandall, speaking for the Old Boys. ‘We’re going to begin now.’

It was very well so long as the cheering was confined to the corridor, but when it spread to the gymnasium, when the boys awaiting their turn cheered, the Head gave it up in despair, and the remnant flung themselves upon him to shake hands.

Then they seriously devoted themselves to cheering till the brakes were hustled off the premises in dumb show.

‘Didn’t I say I’d get even with him?’ said Stalky on the box-seat, as they swung into the narrow Northam street. ‘Now all together—takin’ time from your Uncle Stalky:

It’s a way we have in the Army,
It’s a way we have in the Navy,
It’s a way we have in the Public Schools,
        Which nobody can deny!’

(a short tale)

LOOK out on a large scale map the place where the Chenab river falls into the Indus fifteen miles or so above the hamlet of Chachuran. Five miles west of Chachuran lies Bubbling Well Road, and the house of the gosain or priest of Arti-goth. It was the priest who showed me the road, but it is no thanks to him that I am able to tell this story.

Five miles west of Chachuran is a patch of the plumed jungle-grass, that turns over in silver when the wind blows, from ten to twenty feet high and from three to four miles square. In the heart of the patch hides the gosain of Bubbling Well Road. The villagers stone him when he peers into the daylight, although he is a priest, and he runs back again as a strayed wolf turns into tall crops. He is a one-eyed man and carries, burnt between his brows, the impress of two copper coins. Some say that he was tortured by a native prince in the old days; for he is so old that he must have been capable of mischief in the days of Runjit Singh. His most pressing need at present is a halter, and the care of the British Government.

These things happened when the jungle-grass was tall, and the villagers of Chachuran told me that a sounder of pig had gone into the Arti-goth patch. To enter jungle-grass is always an unwise proceeding, but I went, partly because I knew nothing of pig-hunting, and partly because the villagers said that the big boar of the sounder owned foot long tushes. Therefore I wished to shoot him, in order to produce the tushes in after years, and say that I had ridden him down in fair chase. I took a gun and went into the hot, close patch, believing that it would be an easy thing to unearth one pig in ten square miles of jungle. Mr. Wardle, the terrier, went with me because he believed that I was incapable of existing for an hour without his advice and countenance. He managed to slip in and out between the grass clumps, but I had to force my way, and in twenty minutes was as completely lost as though I had been in the heart of Central Africa. I did not notice this at first till I had grown wearied of stumbling and pushing through the grass, and Mr. Wardle was beginning to sit down very often and hang out his tongue very far. There was nothing but grass everywhere, and it was impossible to see two yards in any direction. The grass stems held the heat exactly as boiler-tubes do.

In half an hour, when I was devoutly wishing that I had left the big boar alone, I came to a narrow path which seemed to be a compromise between a native foot-path and a pig-run. It was barely six inches wide, but I could sidle along it in comfort. The grass was extremely thick here, and where the path was ill defined it was necessary to crush into the tussocks either with both hands before the face, or to back into it, leaving both hands free to manage the rifle. None the less it was a path, and valuable because it might lead to a place.

At the end of nearly fifty yards of fair way, just when I was preparing to back into an unusually stiff tussock, I missed Mr. Wardle, who for his girth is an unusually frivolous dog and never keeps to heel. I called him three times and said aloud, ‘Where has the little beast gone to?’ Then I stepped backwards several paces, for almost under my feet a deep voice repeated, ‘Where has the little beast gone?’ To appreciate an unseen voice thoroughly you should hear it when you are lost in stifling jungle grass. I called Mr. Wardle again and the underground echo assisted me. At that I ceased calling and listened very attentively, because I thought I heard a man laughing in a peculiarly offensive manner. The heat made me sweat, but the laughter made me shake. There is no earthly need for laughter in high grass. It is indecent, as well as impolite. The chuckling stopped, and I took courage and continued to call till I thought that I had located the echo somewhere behind and below the tussock into which I was preparing to back just before I lost Mr. Wardle. I drove my rifle up to the triggers between the grass-stems in a downward and forward direction. Then I waggled it to and fro, but it did not seem to touch ground on the far side of the tussock as it should have done. Every time that I grunted with the exertion of driving a heavy rifle through thick grass, the grunt was faithfully repeated from below, and when I stopped to wipe my face the sound of low laughter was distinct beyond doubting.

I went into the tussock, face first, an inch at a time, my mouth open and my eyes fine, full, and prominent. When I had overcome the resistance of the grass I found that I was looking straight across a black gap in the ground. That I was actually lying on my chest leaning over the mouth of a well so deep I could scarcely see the water in it.

There were things in the water,—black things,—and the water was as black as pitch with blue scum atop. The laughing sound came from the noise of a little spring, spouting half-way down one side of the well. Sometimes as the black things circled round, the trickle from the spring fell upon their tightly-stretched skins, and then the laughter changed into a sputter of mirth. One thing turned over on its back, as I watched, and drifted round and round the circle of the mossy brickwork with a hand and half an arm held clear of the water in a stiff and horrible flourish, as though it were a very wearied guide paid to exhibit the beauties of the place.

I did not spend more than half-an-hour in creeping round that well and finding the path on the other side. The remainder of the journey I accomplished by feeling every foot of ground in front of me, and crawling like a snail through every tussock. I carried Mr. Wardle in my arms and he licked my nose. He was not frightened in the least, nor was I, but we wished to reach open ground in order to enjoy the view. My knees were loose, and the apple in my throat refused to slide up and down. The path on the far side of the well was a very good one, though boxed in on all sides by grass, and it led me in time to a priest’s hut in the centre of a little clearing. When that priest saw my very white face coming through the grass he howled with terror and embraced my boots; but when I reached the bedstead set outside his door I sat down quickly and Mr. Wardle mounted guard over me. I was not in a condition to take care of myself.

When I awoke I told the priest to lead me into the open, out of the Arti-goth patch and to walk slowly in front of me. Mr. Wardle hates natives, and the priest was more afraid of Mr. Wardle than of me, though we were both angry. He walked very slowly down a narrow little path from his hut. That path crossed three paths, such as the one I had come by in the first instance, and every one of the three headed towards the Bubbling Well. Once when we stopped to draw breath, I heard the Well laughing to itself alone in the thick grass, and only my need for his services prevented my firing both barrels into the priest’s back.

When we came to the open the priest crashed back into cover, and I went to the village of Arti-goth for a drink. It was pleasant to be able to see the horizon all round, as well as the ground underfoot.

The villagers told me that the patch of grass was full of devils and ghosts, all in the service of the priest, and that men and women and children had entered it and had never returned. They said the priest used their livers for purposes of witchcraft. When I asked why they had not told me of this at the outset, they said that they were afraid they would lose their reward for bringing news of the pig.

Before I left I did my best to set the patch alight, but the grass was too green. Some fine summer day, however, if the wind is favourable, a file of old newspapers and a box of matches will make clear the mystery of Bubbling Well Road.

page 1 of 3

Tells how the Professor and I found the Precious Rediculouses and how they Chautauquaed at us. Puts into print some sentiments better left unrecorded, and proves that a neglected theory will blossom in congenial soil. Contains fragments of three lectures and a confession.

“But these, in spite of careful dirt.
Are neither green nor sappy;
Half conscious of the garden squirt.
The Spendlings look unhappy,”

OUT of the silence under the appletrees the Professor spake. One leg thrust from the hammock netting kicked lazily at the blue. There was the crisp crunch of teeth in an apple core.

“Get out of this,” said the Professor lazily. As it was on the banks of the Hughli, so on the green borders of the Musquash and the Ohio—eternal unrest, and the insensate desire to go ahead. I was lapped in a very trance of peace. Even the apples brought no indigestion.

“Permanent Nuisance, what is the matter now?” I grunted.

“G’long out of this and go to Niagara,” said the Professor in jerks. “Spread the ink of description through the waters of the Horseshoe falls—buy a papoose from the tame wild Indian who lives at the Clifton House—take a fifty-cent ride on the Maid of the Mist—go over the falls in a tub.”

“Seriously, is it worth the trouble? Everybody who has ever been within fifty miles of the falls has written his or her impressions. Everybody who has never seen the falls knows all about them, and—besides, I want some more apples. They’re good in this place, ye big fat man,” I quoted.

The Professor retired into his hammock for a while. Then he reappeared flushed with a new thought. “If you want to see something quite new let’s go to Chautauqua.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, it’s a sort of institution. It’s an educational idea, and it lives on the borders of a lake in New York State. I think you’ll find it interesting; and I know it will show you a new side of American life.”

In blank ignorance I consented. Everybody is anxious that I should see as many sides of American life as possible. Here in the East they demand of me what I thought of their West. I dare not answer that it is as far from their notions and motives as Hindustan from Hoboken—that the West, to this poor thinking, is an America which has no kinship with its neighbour. Therefore I congratulated them hypocritically upon “their West,”and from their lips learn that there is yet another America, that of the South—alien and distinct. Into the third country, alas! I shall not have time to penetrate. The newspapers and the oratory of the day will tell you that all feeling between the North and South is extinct. None the less the Northerner, outside his newspapers and public men, has a healthy contempt for the Southerner which the latter repays by what seems very like a deep-rooted aversion to the Northerner. I have learned now what the sentiments of the great American nation mean. The North speaks in the name of the country; the West is busy developing its own resources, and the Southerner skulks in his tents. His opinions do not count; but his girls are very beautiful.

So the Professor and I took a train and went to look at the educational idea. From sleepy, quiet little Musquash we rattled through the coal and iron districts of Pennsylvania, her coke ovens flaring into the night and her clamorous foundries waking the silence of the woods in which they lay. Twenty years hence woods and cornfields will be gone, and from Pittsburg to Shenango all will be smoky black as Bradford and Beverly: for each factory is drawing to itself a small town, and year by year the demand for rails increases. The Professor held forth on the labour question, his remarks being prompted by the sight of a train-load of Italians and Hungarians going home from mending a bridge.

“You recollect the Burmese,” said he. “The American is like the Burman in one way. He won’t do heavy manual labour. He knows too much. Consequently he imports the alien to be his hands—just as the Burman gets hold of the Madrassi. If he shuts down all labour immigration he will have to fill up his own dams, cut his cuttings and pile his own embankments. The American citizen won’t like that. He is racially unfit to be a labourer in muttee. He can invent, buy, sell and design, but he cannot waste his time on earthworks. Iswaste, this great people will resume contract labour immigration the minute they find the aliens in their midst are not sufficient for the jobs in hand. If the alien gives them trouble they will shoot him.”

“Yes, they will shoot him,” I said, remembering how only two days before some Hungarians employed on a line near Musquash had seen fit to strike and to roll down rocks on labourers hired to take their places, an amusement which caused the sheriflf to open fire with a revolver and wound or kill (it really does not much matter which) two or three of them. Only a man who earns ten pence a day in sunny Italy knows how to howl for as many shillings in America.

The composition of the crowd in the cars began to attract my attention. There were very many women and a few clergymen. Where you shall find these two together, there also shall be a fad, a hobby, a theory, or a mission.

“These people are going to Chautauqua,” said the Professor. “It’s a sort of open-air college—they call it—but you’ll understand things better when you arrive.” A grim twinkle in the back of his eye awakened all my fears.

“Can you get anything to drink there?”

“No.”

“Are you allowed to smoke?”

“Ye-es, in certain places.”

“Are we staying there over Sunday?”

“No.” This very emphatically.

Feminine shrieks of welcome: “There’s Sadie!” “Why, Maimie, is that yeou!” “Alfs in the smoker. Did you bring the baby?” and a profligate expenditure of kisses between bonnet and bonnet told me we had struck a gathering place of the clans. It was midnight. They swept us, this horde of clamouring women, into a Black Maria omnibus and a sumptuous hotel close to the borders of a lake—Lake Chautauqua. Morning showed as pleasant a place of summer pleasuring as ever I wish to see. Smooth-cut lawns of velvet grass, studded with tennis-courts, surrounded the hotel and ran down to the blue waters, which

page 2

were dotted with rowboats. Young men in wonderful blazers, and maidens in more wonderful tennis costumes; women attired with all the extravagance of unthinking Chicago or the grace of Washington (which is Simla) filled the grounds, and the neat French nurses and exquisitely dressed little children ran about together. There was pickerel-fishing for such as enjoyed it; a bowling-alley, unlimited bathing and a toboggan, besides many other amusements, all winding up with a dance or a concert at night. Women dominated the sham mediæval hotel, rampaged about the passages, flirted in the corridors and chased unruly children off the tennis-courts. This place was called Lakewood. It is a pleasant place for the unregenerate,

“We go up the lake in a steamer to Chautauqua,” said the Professor,

“But I want to stay here. This is what I understand and like.”

“No, you don’t. You must come along and be educated.”

All the shores of the lake, which is eighteen miles long, are dotted with summer hotels, camps, boat-houses and pleasant places of rest. You go there with all your family to fish and to flirt. There is no special beauty in the landscape of tame cultivated hills and decorous, woolly trees, but good taste and wealth have taken the place in hand, trimmed its borders and made it altogether delightful.

The institution of Chautauqua is the largest village on the lake. I can’t hope to give you an idea of it, but try to imagine the Charlesville at Mussoorie magnified ten times and set down in the midst of hundreds of tiny little hill houses, each different from its neighbour, brightly painted and constructed of wood. Add something of the peace of dull Dalhousie, flavour with a tincture of missions and the old Polytechnic, Cassell’s Self Educator and a Monday pop, and spread the result out flat on the shores of Naini Tal Lake, which you will please transport to the Dun. But that does not half describe the idea. We watched it through a wicket gate, where we were furnished with a red ticket, price forty cents, and five dollars if you lost it. I naturally lost mine on the spot and was fined accordingly.

Once inside the grounds on the paths that serpentined round the myriad cottages I was lost in admiration of scores of pretty girls, most of them with little books under their arms, and a pretty air of seriousness on their faces. Then I stumbled upon an elaborately arranged mass of artificial hillocks surrounding a mud puddle and a wormy streak of slime connecting it with another mud puddle. Little boulders topped with square pieces of putty were strewn over the hillocks—evidently with intention. When I hit my foot against one such boulder painted “Jericho,” I demanded information in aggrieved tones.

“Hsh!” said the Professor. “It’s a model of Palestine—the Holy Land—done to scale and all that, you know.”

Two young people were flirting on the top of the highest mountain overlooking Jerusalem; the mud puddles were meant for the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee, and the twisting gutter was the Jordan. A small boy sat on the city “Safed” and cast his line into Chautauqua Lake. On the whole it did not impress me. The hotel was filled with women, and a large blackboard in the main hall set forth the exercises for the day. It seemed that Chautauqua was a sort of educational syndicate, cum hotel, cum (very mild) Rosherville. There were annually classes of young women and young men who studied in the little cottages for two or three months in the year and went away to self-educate themselves. There were other classes who learned things by correspondence, and yet other classes made up the teachers. All these delights I had missed, but had arrived just in time for a sort of debauch of lectures which concluded the three months’ education. The syndicate in control had hired various lecturers whose names would draw audiences, and these men were lecturing about the labour problem, the servant-girl question, the artistic and political aspect of Greek life, the Pope in the Middle Ages and similar subjects, in all of which young women do naturally take deep delight. Professor Mahaffy (what the devil was he doing in that gallery?) was the Greek art side man, and a Dr. Gunsaulus handled the Pope. The latter I loved forthwith. He had been to some gathering on much the same lines as the Chautauqua one, and had there been detected, in the open daylight, smoking a cigar. One whole lighted cigar. Then his congregation or his class, or the mothers of both of them, wished to know whether this was the sort of conduct for a man professing temperance. I have not heard Dr, Gunsaulus lecture, but he must be a good man. Professor Mahaffy was enjoying himself. I sat close to him at tiffin and heard him arguing with an American professor as to the merits of the American Constitution. Both men spoke that the table might get the benefit of their wisdom, whence I argued that even eminent professors are eminently human.

“Now, for goodness’ sake, behave yourself,” said the Professor. “You are not to ask the whereabouts of a bar. You are not to laugh at anything you see, and you are not to go away and deride this Institution.”

Remember that advice. But I was virtuous throughout, and my virtue brought its own reward. The pariour of the hotel was full of conmiittees of women; some of them were Methodist Episcopalians, some were Congregationalists, and some were United Presbyterians; and some were faith healers and Christian Scientists, and all trotted about with notebooks in their hands and the expression of Atlas on their faces. They were connected with missions to the heathen, and so forth, and their deliberations appeared to be controlled by a male missionary. The Professor introduced me to one of them as their friend from India.

“Indeed,” said she; “and of what denomination are you?”

“I—I live in India,” I murmured.

“You are a missionary, then?”

I had obeyed the Professor’s orders all too well. “I am not a missionary,” I said, with, I trust, a decent amount of regret in my tones. She dropped me and I went to find the Professor, who had cowardly deserted me, and I think was laughing on the balcony. It is very hard to persuade a denominational American that a man from India is not a missionary. The home-returned preachers very naturally convey the impression that India is inhabited solely by missionaries.

I heard some of them talldng and saw how, all unconsciously, they were hinting the thing which was not. But prejudice governs me against my will. When a woman looks you in the face and pities you for having to associate with “heathen” and “idolaters”—Sikh Sirdar of the north, if you please, Mahommedan gentlemen and the simple-minded Jat of the Punjab—what can you do?

The Professor took me out to see the sights, and lest I should be further treated as a denominational missionary I wrapped myself in tobacco smoke. This ensures respectful treatment at Chautauqua. An amphitheatre capable of seating five thousand people is the centre-point of the show. Here the lecturers lecture and the concerts are held, and from here the avenues start. Each cottage is decorated according to the taste of the owner, and is full of girls. The verandahs are alive with them; they fill the sinuous walks; they hurry from lecture to lecture, hatless, and three under one sunshade; they retail little confidences walking arm-in-arm; they giggle for all the world like uneducated maidens, and they walk about and row on the lake with their

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very young men. The lectures are arranged to suit all tastes. I got hold of one called “The Eschatology of Our Saviour.” It set itself to prove the length, breadth and temperature of Hell from information garnered from the New Testament. I read it in the sunshine under the trees, with these hundreds of pretty maidens pretending to be busy all round; and it did not seem to match the landscape. Then I studied the faces of the crowd. One-quarter were old and worn; the balance were young, innocent, charming and frivolous. I wondered how much they really knew or cared for the art side of Greek life, or the Pope in the Middle Ages; and how much for the young men who walked with them. Also what their ideas of Hell might be. We entered a place called a museum (all the shows here are of an improving tendency) , which had evidently been brought together by feminine hands, so jumbled were the exhibits. There was a facsimile of the Rosetta stone, with some printed popular information; an Egyptian camel saddle, miscellaneous truck from the Holy Land, another model of the same, photographs of Rome, badly-blotched drawings of volcanic phenomena, the head of the pike that John Brown took to Harper’s Ferry that time his soul went marching on, casts of doubtful value, and views of Chautauqua, all bundled together without the faintest attempt at arrangement, and all very badly labelled.

It was the apotheosis of Popular Information. I told the Professor so, and he said I was an ass, which didn’t affect the statement in the least. I have seen museums like Chautauqua before, and well I know what they mean. If you do not understand, read the first part of Aurora Leigh. Lectures on the Chautauqua stamp I have heard before. People don’t get educated that way. They must dig for it, and cry for it, and sit up o’ nights for it; and when they have got it they must call it by another name or their struggle is of no avail. You can get a degree from this Lawn Tennis Tabernacle of all the arts and sciences at Chautauqua. Mercifully the students are womenfolk, and if they marry the degree is forgotten, and if they become school-teachers they can only instruct young America in the art of mispronouncing his own language. And yet so great is the perversity of the American girl that she can, scorning tennis and the allurements of boating, work herself nearly to death over the skittles of archaeology and foreign tongues, to the sorrow of all her friends.

Late that evening the contemptuous courtesy of the hotel allotted me a room in a cottage of quarter-inch planking, destitute of the most essential articles of toilette furniture. Ten shillings a day was the price of this shelter, for Chautauqua is a paying institution. I heard the Professor next door banging about like a big jack-rabbit in a very small packing-case. Presently he entered, holding between disgusted finger and thumb the butt end of a candle, his only light, and this in a house that would bum quicker than cardboard if once lighted.

“Isn’t it shameful? Isn’t it atrocious? A dâk bungalow khansamah wouldn’t dare to give me a raw candle to go to bed by. I say, when you describe this hole rend them to pieces. A candle stump! Give it ’em hot.”

You will remember the Professor’s advice to me not long ago. “’Fessor,” said I loftily (my own room was a windowless dog-kennel) , “this is unseemly. We are now in the most civilised country on earth, enjoying the advantages of an Institootion which is the flower of the civilisation of the nineteenth centiuy; and yet you kick up a fuss over being obliged to go to bed by the stump of a candle! Think of the Pope in the Middle Ages. Reflect on the art side of Greek life. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, and get out of this. You’re filling two-thirds of my room.”

Apropos of Sabbath, I have come across some lovely reading which it grieves me that I have not preserved. Chautauqua, you must know, shuts down on Sundays. With awful severity an eminent clergyman has been writing to the papers about the beauties of the system. The stalls that dispense terrible drinks of Moxie, typhoidal milk-shakes and sulphuric-acid-on-lime-bred soda-water are stopped; boating is forbidden; no steamer calls at the jetty, and the nearest railway station is three miles oflF, and you can’t hire a conveyance; the barbers must not shave you, and no milkman or butcher goes his rounds. The reverend gentleman enjoys this (he must wear a beard). I forget his exact words, but they run: “And thus, thank God, no one can supply himself on the Lord’s day with the luxuries or conveniences that he has neglected to procure on Saturday,” Of course, if you happen to linger inside the wicket gate—verily Chautauqua is a close preserve—over Sunday, you must bow gracefully to the rules of the place. But what are you to do with this frame of mind? The owner of it would send missions to convert the “heathen,” or would convert you at ten minutes’ notice; and yet if you called him a heathen and an idolater he would probably be very much offended.

Oh, my friends, I have been to one source of the river of missionary enterprise, and the waters thereof are bitter—bitter as hate, narrow as the grave! Not now do I wonder that the missionary in the East is at times, to our thinking, a little intolerant towards beliefs he cannot understand and people he does not appreciate. Rather it is a mystery to me that these delegates of an imperious ecclesiasticism have not a hundred times ere this provoked murder and fire among our wards. If they were true to the iron teachings of Centreville or Petumna or Chunkhaven, when they came they would have done so. For Centreville or Smithson or Squeehawken teach the only true creeds in all the world, and to err from their tenets, as laid down by the bishops and the elders, is damnation. How it may be in England at the centres of supply I cannot tell, but shall presently learn. Here in America I am afraid of these grim men of the denominations, who know so intimately the will of the Lord and enforce it to the uttermost. Left to themselves they would prayerfully, in all good faith and sincerity, slide gradually, ere a hundred years, from the mental inquisitions which they now work with some success to an institootion—be sure it would be an “institootion” with a journal of its own—not far different from what the Torquemada ruled aforetime. Does this seem extravagant? I have watched the expression on the men’s faces when they told me that they would rather see their son or daughter dead at their feet than doing such and such things—trampling on the grass on a Sunday, or something equally heinous—and I was grateful that the law of men stood between me and their interpretation of the law of God. They would assuredly slay the body for the soul’s sake and account it righteousness. And this would befall not in the next generation, perhaps, but in the next, for the very look I saw in a Eusufzai’s face at Peshawar when he turned and spat in my tracks I have seen this day at Chautauqua in the face of a preacher. The will was there, but not the power.

The Professor went up the lake on a visit, taking my ticket of admission with him, and I found a child, aged seven, fishing with a worm and pin, and spent the rest of the afternoon in his company. He was a delightful young citizen, full of information and apparently ignorant of denominations. We caught sunfish and catfish and pickerel together.

The trouble began when I attempted to escape through the wicket on the jetty and let the creeds fight it out among themselves. Without that ticket I could not go, unless I paid five dollars. That was the rule to prevent people cheating.

“You see,” quoth a man in charge, “you’ve no idea of the meanness of these people. Why, there was a lady this season—a prominent member of the Baptist connection—we know, but we can’t prove it that she had two of her hired girls in a cellar when the grounds were being canvassed for the annual poll-tax of five dollars a head. So she saved ten dollars. We can’t be too careful with this crowd. You’ve got to produce that ticket as a proof that you haven’t been living in the groimds for weeks and weeks.”

“For weeks and weeks!” The blue went out of the sky as he said it. “But I wouldn’t stay here for one week if I could help it,” I answered.

“No more would I,” he said earnestly.

Returned the Professor in a steamer, and him I basely left to make explanations about that ticket, while I returned to Lakewood— the nice hotel without any regulations. I feared that I should be kept in those terrible grounds for the rest of my life.

And it turned out an hour later that the same fear lay upon the Professor also. He arrived heated but exultant, having baffled the combined forces of all the denominations and recovered the five-dollar deposit. “I wouldn’t go inside those gates for anything,” he said. “I waited on the jetty. What do you think of it all?’

“It has shown me a new side of American life,” I responded. “I never want to see it again—and I’m awfully sorry for the girls who take it seriously. I suppose the bulk of them don’t. They just have a good time. But it would be better——”

“How?”

“If they all got married instead of pumping up interest in a bric-a-brac museum and advertised lectures, and having their names in the papers. One never gets to believe in the proper destiny of woman until one sees a thousand of ’em doing something different. I don’t like Chautauqua. There’s something wrong with it, and I haven’t time to find out where. But it is wrong.”

ONCE upon a time there lived at Simla a very pretty girl, the daughter of a poor but honest District and Sessions Judge. She was a good girl, but could not help knowing her power and using it. Her Mamma was very anxious about her daughter’s future, as all good Mammas should be.

When a man is a Commissioner and a bachelor, and has the right of wearing open-work jam-tart jewels in gold and enamel on his clothes, and of going through a door before every one except a Member of Council, a Lieutenant-Governor, or a Viceroy, he is worth marrying. At least, that is what ladies say. There was a Commissioner in Simla, in those days, who was, and wore and did all I have said. He was a plain man—an ugly man—the ugliest man in Asia, with two exceptions. His was a face to dream about and try to carve on a pipe-head afterwards. His name was Saggott—Barr-Saggott—Anthony Barr-Saggott and six letters to follow. Departmentally, he was one of the best men the Government of India owned. Socially, he was like unto a blandishing gorilla.

When he turned his attentions to Miss Beighton, I believe that Mrs. Beighton wept with delight at the reward Providence had sent her in her old age.

Mr. Beighton held his tongue. He was an easy-going man.

A Commissioner is very rich. His pay is beyond the dreams of avarice—is so enormous that he can afford to save and scrape in a way that would almost discredit a Member of Council. Most Commissioners are mean; but Barr-Saggott was an exception. He entertained royally; he horsed himself well; he gave dances; he was a power in the land; and he behaved as such.

Consider that everything I am writing of took place in an almost pre-historic era in the history of British India. Some folk may remember the years before lawn-tennis was born when we all played croquet. There were seasons before that, if you will believe me, when even croquet had not been invented, and archery—which was revived in England in 1844—was as great a pest as lawn-tennis is now. People talked learnedly about‘holding’ and ‘loosing,’ ‘steles,’ ‘reflexed bows,’ ‘56-pound bows,’ ‘backed’ or ‘self-yew bows,’ as we talk about ‘rallies,’ I volleys,’ ‘smashes,’ ‘returns,’ and ‘16-ounce rackets.’

Miss Beighton shot divinely over ladies’ distance—60 yards that is—and was acknowledged the best lady archer in Simla. Men called her ‘Diana of Tara-Devi.’

Barr-Saggott paid her great attention; and, as I have said, the heart of her mother was uplifted in consequence. Kitty Beighton took matters more calmly. It was pleasant to be singled out by a Commissioner with letters after his name, and to fill the hearts of other girls with bad feelings. But there was no denying the fact that Barr-Saggott was phenomenally ugly; and all his attempts to adorn himself only made him more grotesque. He was not christened ‘The Langur’—which means gray ape—for nothing. It was pleasant, Kitty thought, to have him at her feet, but it was better to escape from him and ride with the graceless Cubbon—the man in a Dragoon Regiment at Umballa—the boy with a handsome face and no prospects. Kitty liked Cubbon more than a little. He never pretended for a moment that he was anything less than head over heels in love with her; for he was an honest boy. So Kitty fled, now and again, from the stately wooings of Barr-Saggott to the company of young Cubbon, and was scolded by her Mamma in consequence. ‘But, Mother,’ she said, ‘Mr. Saggott is such—such a—is so fearfully ugly, you know!’

‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Beighton piously, ‘we cannot be other than an all-ruling Providence has made us. Besides, you will take precedence of your own Mother, you know? Think of that and be reasonable.’

Then Kitty put up her little chin and said irreverent things about precedence, and Commissioners, and matrimony. Mr. Beighton rubbed the top of his head; for he was an easy-going man.

Late in the season, when he judged that the time was ripe, Barr-Saggott developed a plan which did great credit to his administrative powers. He arranged an archery-tournament for ladies, with a most sumptuous diamond-studded bracelet as prize. He drew up his terms skilfully, and every one saw that the bracelet was a gift to Miss Beighton; the acceptance carrying with it the hand and the heart of Commissioner Barr-Saggott. The terms were a St. Leonard’s Round—thirty-six shots at sixty yards—under the rules of the Simla Toxophilite Society.

All Simla was invited. There were beautifully arranged tea-tables under the deodars at Annandale, where the Grand Stand is now; and, alone in its glory, winking in the sure, sat the diamond bracelet in a blue velvet case. Miss Beighton was anxious—almost too anxious—to compete. On the appointed afternoon all Simla rode down to Annandale to witness the Judgment of Paris turned upside down. Kitty rode with young Cubbon, and it was easy to see that the boy was troubled in his mind. He must be held innocent of everything that followed. Kitty was pale and nervous, and looked long at the bracelet. Barr-Saggott was gorgeously dressed, even more nervous than Kitty, and more hideous than ever.

Mrs. Beighton smiled condescendingly, as befitted the mother of a potential Commissioneress, and the shooting began; all the world standing a semicircle as the ladies came out one after the other.

Nothing is so tedious as an archery competition. They shot, and they shot, and they kept on shooting, till the sun left the valley, and little breezes got up in the deodars, and people waited for Miss Beighton to shoot and win. Cubbon was at one horn of the semicircle round the shooters, and Barr-Saggott at the other. Miss Beighton was last on the list. The scoring had been weak, and the bracelet, with Commissioner Barr-Saggott, was hers to a certainty.

The Commissioner strung her bow with his own sacred hands. She stepped forward, looked at the bracelet, and her first arrow went true to a hair—full into the heart of the ‘gold’—counting nine points.

Young Cubbon on the left turned white, and his Devil prompted Barr-Saggott to smile. Now horses used to shy when Barr-Saggott smiled. Kitty saw that smile. She looked to her left-front, gave an almost imperceptible nod to Cubbon, and went on shooting.

I wish I could describe the scene that followed. It was out of the ordinary and most improper. Miss Kitty fitted her arrows with immense deliberation, so that every one might see what she was doing. She was a perfect shot; and her 46-pound bow suited her to a nicety. She pinned the wooden legs of the target with great care four successive times. She pinned the wooden top of the target once, and all the ladies looked at each other. Then she began some fancy shooting at the white, which if you hit it, counts exactly one point. She put five arrows into the white. It was wonderful archery; but, seeing that her business was to make ‘golds’ and win the bracelet, Barr-Saggott turned a delicate green like young water-grass. Next, she shot over the target twice, then wide to the left twice—always with the same deliberation—while a chilly hush fell over the company, and Mrs. Beighton took out her handkerchief. Then Kitty shot at the ground in front of the target, and split several arrows. Then she made a red—or seven points—just to show what she could do if she liked, and she finished up her amazing performance with some more fancy shooting at the target supports. Here is her score as it was pricked off :

Barr-Saggott looked as if the last few arrowheads had been driven into his legs instead of the target’s, and the deep stillness was broken by a little snubby, mottled, half-grown girl saying in a shrill voice of triumph, ‘Then I’ve won!’

Mrs. Beighton did her best to bear up; but she wept in the presence of the people. No training could help her through such a disappointment. Kitty unstrung her bow with a vicious jerk, and went back to her place, while Barr-Saggott was trying to pretend that he enjoyed snapping the bracelet on the snubby girl’s raw, red wrist. It was an awkward scene—most awkward. Every one tried to depart in a body and leave Kitty to the mercy of her Mamma.

But Cubbon took her away instead, and—the rest isn’t worth printing.

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THE autumn batch of recruits for the Old Regiment had just been uncarted. As usual they were said to be the worst draft that had ever come from the Depôt. Mulvaney looked them over, grunted scornfully, and immediately reported himself very sick. ‘Is it the regular autumn fever?’ said the doctor, who knew something of Terence’s ways. ‘Your temperature’s normal.’

‘“Tis wan hundred and thirty-seven rookies to the bad, sorr. I’m not very sick now, but I will be dead if these boys are thrown at me in my rejuced condition. Doctor, dear, supposin’ you was in charge of three cholera camps an’——’

‘Go to hospital then, you old contriver,’ said the doctor, laughing.

Terence bundled himself into a blue bedgown—Dinah Shadd was away attending to a major’s lady, who preferred Dinah without a diploma to anybody else with a hundred,—put a pipe in his teeth, and paraded the hospital balcony, exhorting Ortheris to be a father to the new recruits.

‘They’re mostly your own sort, little man,’ he said, with a grin; ‘the top-spit av Whitechapel. I’ll interogue them whin they’re more like something they never will be,—an’ that’s a good honest soldier like me.’

Ortheris yapped indignantly. He knew as well as Terence what the coming work meant, and he thought Terence’s conduct mean. Then he strolled off to look at the new cattle, who were staring at the unfamiliar landscape with large eyes, and asking if the kites were eagles and the pariah-dogs jackals.

‘Well, you are a holy set of bean-faced beggars, you are,’ he said genially to a knot in the barrack square. Then, running his eye over them,—‘Fried fish an’ whelks is about your sort. Blimy if they haven’t sent some pink-eyed Jews too. You chap with the greasy ’ed, which o’ the Solomons was ‘your father, Moses?’

‘My name’s Anderson,’ said a voice sullenly.

‘Oh, Samuelson! All right, Samuelson! An’ ’ow many o’ the likes o’ you Sheenies are comin’ to spoil B Company?’

There is no scorn so complete as that of the old soldier for the new. It is right that this ‘should be so. A recruit must learn first that he is not a man but a thing, which in time, and by he mercy of Heaven, may develop into a soldier of the Queen if it takes care and attends to good advice. Ortheris’s tunic was open, his cap over-topped one eye, and his hands were behind his back as he walked round, growing more conemptuous at each step. The recruits did not dare to answer, for they were new boys in a strange school, who had called themselves soldiers at the Depôt in comfortable England.

‘Not a single pair o’ shoulders in the whole lot. I’ve seen some bad drafts in my time,—some bloomin’ bad drafts; but this ’ere draft beats any’ draft I’ve ever known. Jock, come an’ look at these squidgy, ham-shanked beggars.’

Learoyd was walking across the square. He arrived slowly, circled round the knot as a whale circles round a shoal of small fry, said nothing, and went away whistling.

‘Yes, you may well look sheepy,’ Ortheris squeaked to the boys. ‘It’s the likes of you; breaks the ’earts of the likes of us. We’ve got to lick you into shape, and never a ha’penny extry do we get for so doin’, and you ain’t never grateful neither. Don’t you go thinkin’ it’s the Colonel nor yet the company orf’cer that makes you. It’s us, you Johnnie Raws—you Johnnie bloomin’ Raws!’

A company officer had come up unperceived behind Ortheris at the end of this oration. ‘You may be right, Ortheris,’ he said quietly, ‘but I shouldn’t shout it.’ The recruits grinned as Ortheris saluted and collapsed.

Some days afterwards I was privileged to look over the new batch, and they were everything that Ortheris had said, and more. B Company had been devastated by forty or fifty of them; and B Company’s drill on parade was a sight to shudder at. Ortheris asked them lovingly whether they had not been sent out by mistake, and whether they had not better post themselves back to their friends. Learoyd thrashed them methodically one by one, without haste but without slovenliness; and the older soldiers took the remnants from Learoyd and went over them in their own fashion. Mulvaney stayed in hospital, and grinned from the balcony when Ortheris called him a shirker and other worse names.

‘By the grace av God we’ll brew men av them yet,’ Terence said one day. ‘Be vartuous an’ parsevere, me son. There’s the makin’s av colonels in that mob if we only go deep enough—wid a belt.’

‘We!’ Ortheris replied, dancing with rage. ‘I just love you and your “we’s.” ‘Ere’s B Company drillin’ like a drunk Militia reg’ment.’

‘So I’ve been officially acquent,’ was the answer from on high; ‘but I’m too sick this tide to make certain.’

‘An’ you, you fat H’irishman, sniftin’ an’ shirkin’ up there among the arrerroot an the sago!’

‘An’ the port wine,—you’ve forgot the port wine, Orth’ris: ’Tis none so bad.’ Terence smacked his lips provokingly.

‘And we’re wore off’ our feet with these ‘ere—kangaroos. Come out o’ that, an’ earn your pay. Come on down outer that, an’ do somethin’, ’stead o’ grinnin’ up there like a Jew monkey, you frowsy—’eaded Fenian!’

‘When I’m better av my various complaints I’ll have a little private talkin’ wid you. In the meanwhile,—duck!’

Terence flung an empty medicine bottle at Ortheris’s head and dropped into a long chair, and Ortheris came to tell me his opinion of Mulvaney three times over,—each time entirely varying all the words.

‘There’ll be a smash one o’ these days,’ he concluded. ‘Well, it’s none o’ my fault, but it’s ‘ard on B Company.’

It was very hard on B Company, for twenty seasoned men cannot push twice that number of fools into their places and keep their own places at the same time. The recruits should have been more evenly distributed through the regiment, but it seemed good to the Colonel to mass them in a company where there was a fair proportion of old soldiers. He found his reward early one morning when the battalion was advancing by companies in echelon from the right. The order was given to form company squares, which are compact little bricks of men very unpleasant for a line of charging cavalry to deal with. B Company was on the left flank, and had ample time to know what was going on. For that reason, presumably, it gathered itself into a thing like a decayed aloe-clump, the bayonets pointing anywhere in general and nowhere in particular; and in that clump, roundel, or mob, it stayed till the dust had gone down and the Colonel could see and speak. He did both, and the speaking part was admitted by the regiment to be the finest thing that the ‘old man’ had ever risen to since one delightful day at a sham-fight, when a cavalry division had occasion to walk over his line of skirmishers. He said, almost weeping, that he had given no order for rallying groups, and that he preferred to see a little dressing among the men occasionally. He then apologised for having mistaken B Company for men. He said that they were but weak little children, and that since he could not offer them each a perambulator and a nursemaid (this may sound comic to read, but B Company heard it by word of mouth and winced) perhaps the best thing for them to do would be to go back to squad-drill. To that end he proposed sending them, out of their turn, to garrison duty in Fort Amara, five miles away,—D Company were next for this detestable duty and nearly cheered the Colonel. There he devoutly hoped that their own subalterns would drill them to death, as they were of no use in their present life.

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It was an exceedingly painful scene, and I made haste to be near B Company barracks when parade was dismissed and the men were free to talk. There was no talking at first, because each old soldier took a new draft and kicked him very severely. The non-commissioned officers had neither eyes nor ears for these accidents. They left the barracks to themselves, and Ortheris improved the occasion by a speech. I did not hear that speech, but fragments of it were quoted for weeks afterwards. It covered the birth, parentage, and education of every man in the company by name: it gave a complete account of Fort Amara from a sanitary and social point of view; and it wound up with an abstract of the whole duty of a soldier, each recruit his use in life, and Ortheris’s views on the use and fate of the recruits of B Company.

‘You can’t drill, you can’t walk, you can’t shoot,—you,—you awful rookies! Wot’s the good of you? You eats and you sleeps, and you eats, and you goes to the doctor for medicine when your innards is out o’ order for all the world as if you was bloomin’ generals. An’ now you’ve topped it all, you bats’-eyed beggars, with getting us druv out to that stinkin’ Fort ’Ammerer. We’ll fort you when we get out there; yes, an’ we’ll ’ammer you too. Don’t you think you’ve come into the H’army to drink Heno, an’ club your comp‘ny, an’ lie on your cots an’ scratch your fat heads. You can do that at ’ome sellin’ matches, which is all you’re fit for, you keb-huntin’, penny-toy, bootlace, baggage-tout, ’orse-’oldin’, sandwich-backed se-werss, you.’ I’ve spoke you as fair as I know ’ow, and you give good ’eed, ’cause if Mulvaney stops skrimshanking—gets out o’ ’orspital—when we’re in the Fort, I lay your lives will be trouble to you.’

That was Ortheris’s peroration, and it caused B Company to be christened the Boot-black Brigade. With this disgrace on their slack shoulders they went to garrison duty at Fort Amara with their officers, who were under instructions to twist their little tails. The army, unlike every other profession, cannot be taught through shilling books. First a man must suffer, then he must learn his work, and the self-respect that that knowledge brings. The learning is hard, in a land where the army is not a red thing that walks down the street to be looked at, but a living tramping reality that may be needed at the shortest notice, when there is no time to say, ‘Hadn’t you better?’ and ‘Won’t you please?’

The company officers divided themselves into three. When Brander the captain was wearied, he gave over to Maydew, and when Maydew was hoarse he ordered the junior subaltern Ouless to bucket the men through squad and company drill, till Brander could go on again. Out of parade hours the old soldiers spoke to the recruits as old soldiers will, and between the four forces at work on them, the new draft began to stand on their feet and feel that they belonged to a good and honourable service. This was proved by their once or twice resenting Ortheris’s technical lectures.

‘Drop it now, lad,’ said Learoyd, coming to the rescue. ‘Th’ pups are biting back. They’re none so rotten as we looked for.’

‘Ho! Yes. You think yourself soldiers now, ’cause you don’t fall over each other on p’rade, don’t you? You think ’cause the dirt don’t cake off you week’s end to week’s end that you’re clean men. You think ’cause you can fire your rifle without more nor shuttin’ both eyes, you’re something to fight, don’t you? You’ll know later on,’ said Ortheris to the barrack-room generally. ‘Not but what you’re a little better than you was,’ he added, with a gracious wave of his cutty.

It was in this transition-stage that I came across the new draft once more. Their officers, in the zeal of youth forgetting that the old soldiers who stiffened the sections must suffer equally with the raw material under hammering, had made all a little stale and unhandy with continuous drill in the square, instead of marching the men into the open and supplying them with skirmishing drill. The month of garrison-duty in the Fort was nearly at an end, and B Company were quite fit for a self-respecting regiment to drill with. They had no style or spring,—that would come in time,—but so far as they went they were passable. I met Maydew one day and inquired after their health. He told me that young Ouless was putting a polish on a half-company of them in the great square by the east bastion of the Fort that afternoon. Because the day was Saturday I went off to taste the full beauty of leisure in watching another man hard at work.

The fat forty-pound muzzle-loaders on the east bastion made a very comfortable resting-place. You could sprawl full length on the iron warmed by the afternoon sun to blood heat, and command an easy view of the parade-ground which lay between the powder-magazine and the curtain of the bastion.

I saw a half-company called over and told off for drill, saw Ouless come from his quarters, tugging at his gloves, and heard the first ’Shun! that locks the ranks and shows that work has begun. Then I went off on my own thoughts; the squeaking of the boots and the rattle of the rifles making a good accompaniment, and the line of red coats and black trousers a suitable back-ground to them all. They concerned the formation of a territorial army for India,—an army of specially paid men enlisted for twelve years’ service in Her Majesty’s Indian possessions, with the option of extending on medical certificates for another five and the certainty of a pension at the end. They would be such an army as the world had never seen,—one hundred thousand trained men drawing annually five, no, fifteen thousand men from England, making India their home, and allowed to marry in reason. Yes, I thought, watching the line shift to and fro, break and re-form, we would buy back Cashmere from the drunken imbecile who was turning it into a hell, and there we would plant our much-married regiments,—the men who had served ten years of their time,—and there they should breed us white soldiers, and perhaps a second fighting-line of Eurasians. At all events Cashmere was the only place in India that the Englishman could colonise, and if we had foothold there we could, . . Oh, it was a beautiful dream! I left that territorial army swelled to a quarter of a million men far behind, swept on as far as an independent India, hiring warships from the mother-country, guarding Aden on the one side and Singapore on the other, paying interest on her loans with beautiful regularity, but borrowing no men from beyond her own borders—a colonised, manufacturing India with a permanent surplus and her own flag. I had just installed myself as Viceroy, and by virtue of my office had shipped four million sturdy thrifty natives to the Malayan Archipelago, where labour is always wanted and the Chinese pour in too quickly, when I became aware that things were not going smoothly with the half-company. There was a great deal too much shuffling and shifting and ‘as you wereing.’ The non-commissioned officers were snapping at the men, and I fancied Ouless backed one of his orders with an oath. He was in no position to do this, because he was a junior who had not yet learned to pitch his word of command in the same key twice running. Sometimes he squeaked, and sometimes he grunted; and a clear full voice with a ring in it has more to do with drill than people think. He was nervous both on parade and in mess, because he was unproven and knew it. One of his majors had said in his hearing, ‘Ouless has a skin or two to slough yet, and he hasn’t the sense to be aware of it.’ That remark had staved in Ouless’s mind and caused him to think about himself in little things, which is not the best training for a young man. He tried to be cordial at mess, and became overeffusive. Then he tried to stand on his dignity, and appeared sulky and boorish. He was only hunting for the just medium and the proper note, and had found neither because he had never faced himself in a big thing. With his men he was as ill at ease as he was with his mess, and his voice betrayed him. I heard two orders and then:—‘Sergeant, what is that rear-rank man doing, damn him?’ That was sufficiently bad. A company officer ought not to ask sergeants for information. He commands, and commands are not held by syndicates.

It was too dusty to see the drill accurately, but I could hear the excited little voice pitching from octave to octave, and the uneasy ripple of badgered or bad-tempered files running down the ranks. Ouless had come on parade as sick of his duty as were the men of theirs. The hot sun had told on everybody’s temper, but most of all on the youngest man’s. He had evidently lost his self-control, and not possessing the nerve or the knowledge to break off till he had recovered it again, was making bad worse by ill-language.

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The men shifted their ground and came close under the gun I was lying on. They were wheeling quarter-right and they did it very badly, in the natural hope of hearing Ouless swear again. He could have taught them nothing new, but they enjoyed the exhibition. Instead of swearing Ouless lost his head completely, and struck out nervously at the wheeling flank-man with a little Malacca riding-cane that he held in his hand for a pointer. The cane was topped with thin silver over lacquer, and the silver had worn through in one place, leaving a triangular flap sticking up. I had just time to see that Ouless had thrown away his commission by striking a soldier, when I heard the rip of cloth and a piece of gray shirt showed under the torn scarlet on the man’s shoulder. It had been the merest nervous flick of an exasperated boy, but quite enough to forfeit his commission, since it had been dealt in anger to a volunteer and no pressed man, who could not under the rules of the service reply. The effect of it, thanks to the natural depravity of things, was as though Ouless had cut the man’s coat off his back. Knowing the new draft by reputation, I was fairly certain that every one of them would swear with many oaths that Ouless had actually thrashed the man. In that case Ouless would do well to pack his trunk. His career as a servant of the Queen in any capacity was ended. The wheel continued, and the men halted and dressed immediately opposite my resting-place. Ouless’s face was perfectly bloodless. The flanking man was a dark red, and I could see his lips moving in wicked words. He was Ortheris! After seven years’ service and three medals, he had been struck by a boy younger than himself! Further, he was my friend and a good man, a proved man, and an Englishman. The shame of the thing made me as hot as it made Ouless cold, and if Ortheris had slipped in a cartridge and cleared the account at once I should have rejoiced. The fact that Ortheris, of all men, had been struck, proved, that the boy could not have known whom he was hitting; but he should have remembered that he was no longer a boy. And then I was sorry for him, and then I was angry again, and Ortheris stared in front of him and grew redder and redder.

The drill halted for a moment. No one knew why, for not three men could have seen the insult, the wheel being end-on to Ouless at the time. Then, led, I conceived, by the hand of Fate, Brander, the captain, crossed the drill-ground, and his eye was caught by not more than a square foot of gray shirt over a shoulder-blade that should have been covered by well-fitting tunic.

‘Heavens and earth!’ he said, crossing in three strides. ‘Do you let your men come on parade in rags, sir? What’s that scarecrow doing here? Fall out, that flank-man. What do you mean by—You, Ortheris! of all men. What the deuce do you mean?’

‘Beg y’ pardon, sir,’ said Ortheris. ‘I scratched it against the guard-gate running up to parade.’

‘Scratched it! Ripped it up, you mean. It’s half off your back.’

‘It was a little tear at first, sir, but in portin’ arms it got stretched, sir, an’—an’ I can’t look be’ind me. I felt it givin’, sir.’

‘Hm! ‘ said Brander. ‘I should think you did feel it give. I thought it was one of the new draft. You’ve a good pair of shoulders. Go on!’

He turned to go. Ouless stepped after him, very white, and said something in a low voice.

‘Hey, what? What? Ortheris,’ the voice dropped. I saw Ortheris salute, say something, and stand at attention.

‘Dismiss,’ said Brander curtly. The men were dismissed. ‘I can’t make this out. You say——?’ he nodded at Ouless, who said something again. Ortheris stood still, the torn flap of his tunic falling nearly to his waist-belt. He had, as Brander said, a good pair of shoulders, and prided himself on the fit of his tunic.

‘Beg y’ pardon, sir,’ I heard him say, ‘but I think Lieutenant Ouless has been in the sun too long. He don’t quite remember things, sir. I come on p’rade with a bit of a rip, and it spread, sir, through portin’ arms, as I ’ave said, sir.’

Brander looked from one face to the other and I suppose drew his own conclusions, for he told Ortheris to go with the other men who were flocking back to barracks. Then he spoke to Ouless and went away, leaving the boy in the middle of the parade-ground fumbling with his sword-knot.

He looked up, saw me lying on the gun, and came to me biting the back of his gloved forefinger, so completely thrown off his balance that he had not sense enough to keep his trouble to himself.

‘I say, you saw that, I suppose?’ He jerked his head back to the square, where the dust left by the departing men was settling down in white circles.

‘I did,’ I answered, for I was not feeling polite.

‘What the devil ought I to do?’ He bit his finger again. ‘I told Brander what I had done. I hit him.’

‘I’m perfectly aware of that,’ I said, ‘and I don’t suppose Ortheris has forgotten it already.’

‘Ye—es; but I’m dashed if I know what I ought to do. Exchange into another company, I suppose. I can’t ask the man to exchange, I suppose. Hey?’

The suggestion showed the glimmerings of proper sense, but he should not have come to me or any one else for help. It was his own affair, and I told him so. He seemed unconvinced, and began to talk of the possibilities of being cashiered. At this point the spirit moved me, on behalf of the unavenged Ortheris, to paint him a beautiful picture of his insignificance in the scheme of creation. He had a papa and a mamma seven thousand miles away, and perhaps some friends. They would feel his disgrace, but no one else would care a, penny. He would be only Lieutenant Ouless of the Old Regiment dismissed the Queen’s service for conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. The Commander-in-Chief, who would confirm the orders of the court-martial, would not know who he was; his mess would not speak of him; he would return to Bombay, if he had money enough to go home, more alone than when he had come out. Finally,—I rounded the sketch with precision,—he was only one tiny dab of red in the vast gray field of the Indian Empire. He must work this crisis out alone, and no one could help him, and no one cared—(this was untrue, because I cared immensely; he had spoken the truth to Brander on the spot)—whether he pulled through it or did not pull through it. At last his face set and his figure stiffened.

‘Thanks, that’s quite enough. I don’t want to hear any more,’ he said in a dry grating voice, and went to his own quarters.

Brander spoke to me afterwards and asked me some absurd question—whether I had seen Ouless cut the coat off Ortheris’s back. I knew that jagged sliver of silver would do its work well, but I contrived to impress on Brander the completeness, the wonderful completeness, of my disassociation from that drill. I began to tell him all about my dreams for the new territorial army in India, and he left me.

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I could not see Ortheris for some days, but I learnt that when he returned to his fellows he had told the story of the blow in vivid language. Samuelson, the Jew, then asserted that it was not good enough to live in a regiment where you were drilled off your feet and knocked about like a dog. The remark was a perfectly innocent one, and exactly tallied with Ortheris’s expressed opinions. Yet Ortheris had called Samuelson an unmentionable Jew, had accused him of kicking women on the head in London, and howling under the cat, had hustled him, as a bantam hustles a barn-door cock, from one end of the barrack-room to the other, and finally had heaved every single article of Samuelson’s valise and bedding-roll into the verandah and the outer dirt, kicking Samuelson every time that the bewildered creature stooped to pick anything up. My informant could not account for this inconsistency, but it seemed to me that Ortheris was working off his temper.

Mulvaney had heard the story in hospital. First his face clouded, then he spat, and then laughed. I suggested that he had better return to active duty, but he saw it in another light, and told me that Ortheris was quite capable of looking after himself and his own affairs. ‘An’ if I did come out,’ said Terence, ‘like as not I would be catchin’ young Ouless by the scruff av his trousies an’ makin’ an example av him before the men. Whin Dinah came back I would be under court-martial, an’ all for the sake av a little bit av a bhoy that’ll make an orf’cer yet. What’s he goin’ to do, sorr, do ye know?’

‘Which?’ said I.

‘Ouless, av course. I’ve no fear for the man. Begad, tho’, if ut had come to me—but ut could not have so come—I’d ha’ made him cut his wisdom-teeth on his own sword-hilt.’

‘I don’t think he knows himself what he means to do,’ I said.

‘I should not wonder,’ said Terence. ‘There’s a dale av thinkin’ before a young man whin he’s done wrong an’ knows ut, an’ is studyin’ how to put ut right. Give the word from me to our little man there, that if he had ha’ told on his shuperior orf’cer I’d ha’ come out to Fort Amara to kick him into the Fort ditch, an’ that’s a forty-fut drop.’

Ortheris was not in good condition to talk to. He wandered up and down with Learoyd brooding, so far as I could see, over his lost honour, and using, as I could hear, incendiary language. Learoyd would nod and spit and smoke and nod again, and he must have been a great comfort to Ortheris—almost as great a comfort as Samuelson, whom Ortheris bullied disgracefully. If the Jew opened his mouth in the most casual remark Ortheris would plunge down it with all arms and accoutrements, while the barrack-room stared and wondered.

Ouless had retired into himself to meditate. I saw him now and again, and he avoided me because I had witnessed his shame and spoken my mind on it. He seemed dull and moody, and found his half-company anything but pleasant to drill. The men did their work and gave him very little trouble, but just when they should have been feeling their feet, and showing that they felt them by spring and swing and snap, the elasticity died out, and it was only drilling with war-game blocks. There is a beautiful little ripple in a well-made
line of men, exactly like the play of a perfectly-tempered sword. Ouless’s half-company moved as a broom-stick moves, and would have broken as easily.

I was speculating whether Ouless had sent money to Ortheris, which would have been bad, or had apologised to him in private, which would have been worse, or had decided to let the whole affair slide, which would have been worst of all, when orders came to me to leave the station for a while. I had not spoken directly to Ortheris, for his honour was not my honour, and he was its only guardian, and he would not say anything except bad words.

I went away, and from time to time thought a great deal of that subaltern and that private in Fort Amara, and wondered what would be the upshot of everything.

When I returned it was early spring. B Company had been shifted from the Fort to regular duty in cantonments, the roses were getting ready to bud on the Mall, and the regiment, which had been at a camp of exercise among other things, was going through its spring musketry-course under an adjutant who had a notion that its shooting average was low. He had stirred up the company officers and they had bought extra ammunition for their men—the Government allowance is just sufficient to foul the rifling—and E Company, which counted many marksmen, was vapouring and offering to challenge all the other companies, and the third-class shots were very sorry that they had ever been born, and all the subalterns were a rich ripe saddle-colour from sitting at the butts six and eight hours a day.

I went off to the butts after breakfast very full of curiosity to see how the new draft had come forward. Ouless was there with his men by the bald hillock that marks the six hundred yards’ range, and the men were in gray-green khaki, that shows the best points of a soldier and shades off into every background he may stand against. Before I was in hearing distance I could see, as they sprawled on the dusty grass, or stood up and shook themselves, that they were men made over again—wearing their helmets with the cock of self-possession, swinging easily, and jumping to the word of command. Coming nearer, I heard Ouless whistling Ballyhooley between his teeth as he looked down the range with his binoculars, and the back of Lieutenant Ouless was the back of a free man and an officer. He nodded as I came up, and I heard him fling an order to a non-commissioned officer in a sure and certain voice. The flag ran up from the target, and Ortheris threw himself down on his stomach to put in his ten shots. He winked at me over the breech-block as he settled himself, with the air of a man who has to go through tricks for the benefit of children.

‘Watch, you men,’ said Ouless to the squad behind. ‘He’s half your weight, Brannigan, but he isn’t afraid of his rifle.’

Ortheris had his little affectations and pet ways as the rest of us have. He weighed his rifle, gave it a little kick-up, cuddled down again, and fired across the ground that was beginning to dance in the sun-heat.

‘Miss!’ said a man behind.

‘Too much bloomin’ background in front,’ Ortheris muttered.

‘I should allow two feet for refraction,’ said Ouless.

Ortheris fired again, made his outer, crept in, found the bull and stayed there; the non-commissioned officer pricking off the shots.

‘Can’t make out ‘ow I missed that first,’ he said, rising, and stepping back to my side, as Learoyd took his place.

‘Is it company practice?’ I asked.

‘No. Only just knockin’ about. Ouless, ’e’s givin’ ten rupees for second-class shots. I’m outer it, of course, but I come on to show ’em the proper style o’ doin’ things. Jock looks like a sea-lion at the Brighton Aquarium sprawlin’ an’ crawlin’ down there, don’t ‘e? Gawd, what a butt this end of ’im would make.’

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‘B Company has come up very well,’ I said.

‘They ‘ad to. They’re none so dusty now, are they? Samuelson even, ’e can shoot sometimes. We’re gettin’ on as well as can be expected, thank you.’

‘How do you get on with——?’

‘Oh, ’im! First-rate! Theres nothin’ wrong with ’im.’

‘Was it all settled then?’

‘’Asn’t Terence told you? I should say it was. ’E’s a gentleman, ’e is.’

‘Let’s hear,’ I said.

Ortheris twinkled all over, tucked his rifle across his knees and repeated, ‘’E’s a gentleman. ’E’s an officer too. You saw all that mess in Fort ’Ammerer. ’Twasn’t none o’ my fault, as you can guess. Only some goat in the drill judged it was be’aviour or something to play the fool on p’rade. That’s why we drilled so bad. When ’e ’it me, I was so took aback I couldn’t do nothing, an’ when I wished for to knock ’im down the wheel ’ad gone on, an’ I was facin’ you there lyin’ on the guns. After the captain had come up an’ was raggin’ me about my tunic bein’ tore, I saw the young beggar’s eye, an’ ’fore I could ’elp myself I begun to lie like a good ’un. You ’eard that? It was quite instinkive, but, my! I was in a lather. Then he said to the captain, “I struck ’im!” sez ’e, an’ I ‘eard Brander whistle, an’ then I come out with a new set o’ lies all about portin’ arms an’ ’ow the rip growed, same as you ’eard. I done that too before I knew where I was. Then I give Samuelson what-for in barricks when he was dismissed. You should ha’ seen ’is kit by the time I’d finished with it. It was all over the bloomin’ Fort! Then me an’ Jock went off to Mulvaney in ’orspital, five-mile walk, an’ I was hoppin’ mad. Ouless, ’e knowed it was court-martial for me if I ’it ’im back—’e must ha’ knowed. Well, I sez to Terence, whisperin’ under the ’orspital balcony—“Terence,” sez I, “what in ’ell am I to do?” I told ’im all about the row same as you saw. Terence ’e whistles like a bloomin’ old bullfinch up there in ’orspital, an’ ’e sez, “You ain’t to blame,” sez ’e. “’Strewth,” sez I, “d’you suppose I’ve come ’ere five mile in the sun to take blame?” I sez. “I want that young beggar’s hide took off. I ain’t a bloomin’ conscrip’,” I sez. “I’m a private servin’ of the Queen, an’ as good a man as ’e is,” I sez, “for all ’is commission an’ ’is airs an’ ’is money,” sez I’

‘What a fool you were,’ I interrupted. Ortheris, being neither a menial nor an American, but a free man, had no excuse for yelping.

’That’s exactly what Terence said. I wonder you set it the same way so pat if ’e ’asn’t been talkin’ to you. ’E sez to me—“You ought to ’ave more sense,” ’e sez, “at your time of life. What differ do it make to you,” ’e sez, “whether ’e ’as a commission or no commission? That’s none o’ your affair. It’s between man an’ man,” ’e sez, “if ’e ’eld a general’s commission. Moreover,” ’e sez, “you don’t look ’andsome ’oppin’ about on your ’ind legs like that. Take him away, Jock.” Then ’e went inside, an’ that’s all I got outer Terence. Jock, ’e sez as slow as a march in slow time,—“Stanley,” ’e sez, “that young beggar didn’t go for to ’it you.” “I don’t give a damn whether ’e did or ’e didn’t. ’It me ’e did,” I sez. “Then you’ve only got to report to Brander,” sez Jock. “What d’yer take me for?” I sez, as I was so mad I nearly ’it Jock. An’ he got me by the neck an’ shoved my ’ead into a bucket o’ water in the cook-’ouse an’ then we went back to the Fort, an’ I give Samuelson a little more trouble with ’is kit. ’E sez to me, “I haven’t been strook without ’ittin’ back.” “Well, you’re goin’ to be now,” I sez, an’ I give ’im one or two for ’isself, an’ arxed ’im very polite to ’it back, but he didn’t. I’d ha’ killed ’im if ’e ’ad. That done me a lot o’ good.

‘Ouless ’e didn’t make no show for some days,—not till after you was gone; an’ I was feelin’ sick an’ miserable, an’ didn’t know what I wanted, ’cept to black his little eyes good. I ’oped ’e might send me some money for my tunic. Then I’d ha’ had it out with him on p’rade and took my chance. Terence was in ’orspital still, you see, an’ ’e wouldn’t give me no advice.

‘The day after you left, Ouless come across me carrying a bucket on fatigue, an’ ’e sez to me very quietly, “Ortheris, you’ve got to come out shootin’ with me,” ’e sez. I felt like to bunging the bucket in ’is eye, but I didn’t. I got ready to go instead. Oh, ’es a gentleman! We went out together, neither sayin’ nothin’ to the other till we was well out into the jungle beyond the river with ’igh grass all round,—pretty near that place where I went off my ’ead with you. Then ’e puts his gun down an’ sez very quietly: “Ortheris, I strook you on p’rade,” ’e sez. “Yes, sir,” sez I, “you did.” “I’ve been studying it out by myself,” ’e sez. “Oh, you ’ave, ’ave you?” sez I to myself, “an’ a nice time you’ve been about it, you bun-faced little beggar.” “Yes, sir,” sez I. “What made you screen me?” ’e sez. “I don’t know,” I sez, an’ no more I did, nor do. “I can’t ask you to exchange,” ’e sez. “An’ I don’t want to exchange myself,” sez ’e. “What’s comin’ now?” I thinks to myself. “Yes, sir,” sez I. He looks round at the ’igh grass all about, an’ ’e sez to himself more than to me,—“I’ve got to go through it alone, by myself!” ’E looked so queer for a minute that, s’elp me, I thought the little beggar was going to pray. Then he turned round again an’ ’e sez, “What do you think yourself?s ’e sez. “I don’t quite see what you mean, sir,” I sez. “What would you like?” ’e sez. An’ I thought for a minute ’e was goin’ to give me money, but ’e run ’is ’and up to the top-button of ’is shootin’ coat an’ loosed it. “Thank you, sir,” I sez. “I’d like that very well,” I sez, an’ both our coats was off an’ put down.’

‘Hooray!’ I shouted incautiously.

‘Don’t make a noise on the butts,’ said Ouless from the shooting-place. ‘It puts the men off.’

I apologised, and Ortheris went on.

‘Our coats was off, an’ ’e sez, “Are you ready?” sez ’e. “Come on then.” I come on, a bit uncertain at first, but he took me one under the chin that warmed me up. I wanted to mark the little beggar an’ I hit high, but he went an’ jabbed me over the heart like a good one. He wasn’t so strong as me, but he knew more, an’ in about two minutes I calls “Time.” ’E steps back,—it was in—fightin’ then: “Come on when you’re ready,” ’e sez; and when I had my wind I come on again, an’ I got ’im one on the nose that painted ’is little aristocratic white shirt for ’im. That fetched ’im, an’ I knew it quicker nor light. He come all round me, close-fightin’, goin’ steady for my heart. I held on all I could an’ split ’is ear, but then I began to hiccup, an’ the game was up. I come in to feel if I could throw ’im, an’ ’e got me one on the mouth that downed me an’—look ’ere!’

Ortheris raised the left corner of his upper lip. An eye-tooth was wanting.

‘’E stood over me an’ ’e sez, “Have you ’ad enough?” ’e sez. “Thank you, I ’ave,” sez I. He took my ’and an’ pulled me up, an’ I was pretty shook. “Now,” ’e sez, “I’ll apologise for ’ittin’ you. It was all my fault,” ’e sez, “an’ it wasn’t meant for you.” “I knowed that, sir,” I sez, “an’ there’s no need for no apology.” “Then it’s an accident,” ’e sez; “an’ you must let me pay for the coat; else it’ll be stopped out o’ your pay.” I wouldn’t ha’ took the money before, but I did then. ’E give me ten rupees,—enough to pay for a coat twice over, ’an we went down to the river to wash our faces, which was well marked. His was special. Then he sez to himself, sputterin’ the water out of ’is mouth, “I wonder if I done right?” ’e sez. “Yes, sir,” sez I; “ there’s no fear about that.” “It’s all well for you,” ’e sez, “but what about the comp’ny?” “Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” I sez, “I don’t think the comp’ny will give no trouble.” Then we went shootin’, an’ when we come back I was feelin’ as chirpy as a cricket, an’ I took an’ rolled Samuelson up an’ down the verandah, an’ give out to the comp’ny that the difficulty between me an’ Lieutenant Ouless was satisfactory put a stop to. I told Jock, o’ course, an’ Terence. Jock didn’t say nothing, but Terence ’e sez : “You’re a pair, you two. An’, begad, I don’t know which was the better man.” There ain’t nothin’ wrong with Ouless. ’E’s a gentleman all over, an’ ’e’s come on as much as B Comp’ny. I lay ’e’d lose ‘is commission, tho’, if it come out that ’e’d been fightin’ with a private. Ho! ho! Fightin’ all an afternoon with a bloomin’ private like me! What do you think?” he added, brushing the breech of his rifle.

‘I think what the umpires said at the sham fight; both sides deserve great credit. But I wish you’d tell me what made you save him in the first place.’

‘I was pretty sure that ’e ’adn’t meant it for me, though that wouldn’t ha’ made no difference if ’e’d been copped for it. An’ ’e was that young too that it wouldn’t ha’ been fair. Besides, if I had ha’ done that I’d ha’ missed the fight, and I’d ha’ felt bad all my time. Don’t you see it that way, sir.’

‘It was your right to get him cashiered if you chose,’ I insisted.

‘My right!’ Ortheris answered with deep scorn. ‘My right! I ain’t a recruity to go whinin’ about my rights to this an’ my rights to that, just as if I couldn’t look after myself. My rights! ’Strewth A’mighty! I’m a man.’

The last squad were finishing their shots in a storm of low-voiced chaff. Ouless withdrew to a little distance in order to leave the men at ease, and I saw his face in the full sunlight for a moment, before he hitched up his sword, got his men together, and marched them back to barracks. It was all right. The boy was proven.

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A FOX came out of his earth on the banks of the Great River Gihon, which waters Ethiopia. He saw a white man riding through the dry dhurra-stalks, and, that his destiny might be fulfilled, barked at him. The rider drew rein among the villagers round his stirrup.

“What,” said he, “is that?”

“That,” said the Sheikh of the village, “is a fox, O Excellency Our Governor.”

“It is not, then, a jackal?”

“No jackal, but Abu Hussein the father of cunning.”

“Also,” the white man spoke half aloud, “I am Mudir of this Province.”

“It is true,” they cried. “Ya, Saart el Mudir” (O Excellency Our Governor).

The Great River Gihon, well used to the moods of kings, slid between his mile-wide banks toward the sea, while the Governor praised God in a loud and searching cry never before heard by the river.

When he had lowered his right forefinger from behind his right ear, the villagers talked to him of their crops—barley, dhurrah, millet, onions, and the like. The Governor stood in his stirrups. North he looked up a strip of green cultivation a few hundred yards wide that lay like a carpet between the river and the tawny line of the desert. Sixty miles that strip stretched before him, and as many behind. At every half-mile a groaning water-wheel lifted the soft water from the river to the crops by way of a mud-built aqueduct. A foot or so wide was the water-channel; five foot or more high was the bank on which it ran, and its base was broad in proportion. Abu Hussein, misnamed the Father of Cunning, drank from the river below his earth, and his shadow was long in the low sun. He could not understand the loud cry which the Governor had cried.

The Sheikh of the village spoke of the crops from which the rulers of all lands draw revenue; but the Governor’s eyes were fixed, between his horse’s ears, on the nearest water-channel.

“Very like a ditch in Ireland,” he murmured, and smiled, dreaming of a razor-topped bank in distant Kildare.

Encouraged by that smile, the Sheikh continued. “When crops fail it is necessary to remit taxation. Then it is a good thing, O Excellency Our Governor, that you come and see the crops which have failed, and discover that we have not lied.”

“Assuredly.” The Governor shortened his reins. The horse cantered on, rose at the embankment of the water-channel, changed leg cleverly on top, and hopped down in a cloud of golden dust.

Abu Hussein from his earth watched with interest. He had never before seen such things.

“Assuredly,” the Governor repeated, and came back by the way he had gone. “It is always best to see for one’s self.”

An ancient and still bullet-speckled stern-wheel steamer, with a barge lashed to her side, came round the river bend. She whistled to tell the Governor his dinner was ready, and the horse, seeing his fodder piled on the barge, whinnied back.

“Moreover,” the Sheikh added, “in the days of the Oppression the Emirs and their creatures dispossessed many people of their lands. All up and down the river our people are waiting to return to their lawful fields.”

“Judges have been appointed to settle that matter,” said the Governor. “They will presently come in steamers and hear the witnesses.”

“Wherefore? Did the Judges kill the Emirs? We would rather be judged by the men who executed God’s judgment on the Emirs. We would rather abide by your decision, O Excellency Our Governor.”

The Governor nodded. It was a year since he had seen the Emirs stretched close and still round the reddened sheepskin where lay El Mahdi, the Prophet of God. Now there remained no trace of their dominion except the old steamer, once part of a Dervish flotilla, which was his house and office. She sidled into the shore, lowered a plank, and the Governor followed his horse aboard.

Lights burned on her till late, dully reflected in the river that tugged at her mooring-ropes. The Governor read, not for the first time, the administration reports of one John Jorrocks, M.F.H.

“We shall need,” he said suddenly to his Inspector, “about ten couple. I’ll get ’em when I go home. You’ll be Whip, Baker?”

The Inspector, who was not yet twenty-five, signified his assent in the usual manner, while Abu Hussein barked at the vast desert moon.

“Ha!” said the Governor, coming out in his pyjamas, “we’ll be giving you capivi in another three months, my friend.”

It was four, as a matter of fact, ere a steamer with a melodious bargeful of hounds anchored at that landing. The Inspector leaped down among them, and the homesick wanderers received him as a brother.

“Everybody fed ’em everything on board ship, but they’re real dainty hounds at bottom,” the Governor explained. “That’s Royal you’ve got hold of—the pick of the bunch—and the bitch that’s got, hold of you—she’s a little excited—is May Queen. Merriman, out of Cottesmore Maudlin, you know.”

“I know. ’Grand old bitch with the tan eyebrows,”’ the Inspector cooed. “Oh, Ben! I shall take an interest in life now. Hark to ’em! O hark!”

Abu Hussein, under the high bank, went about his night’s work. An eddy carried his scent to the barge, and three villages heard the crash of music that followed. Even then Abu Hussein did not know better than to bark in reply.

“Well, what about my Province?” the Governor asked.

“Not so bad,” the Inspector answered, with Royal’s head between his knees. “Of course, all the villages want remission of taxes, but, as far as I can see, the whole country’s stinkin’ with foxes. Our trouble will be choppin’ ’em in cover. I’ve got a list of the only villages entitled to any remission. What d’you call this flat-sided, blue-mottled beast with the jowl?”

“Beagle-boy. I have my doubts about him. Do you think we can get two days a week?”

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“Easy; and as many byes as you please. The Sheikh of this village here tells me that his barley has failed, and he wants a fifty per cent remission.”

“We’ll begin with him to-morrow, and look at his crops as we go. Nothing like personal supervision,” said the Governor.

They began at sunrise. The pack flew off the barge in every direction, and, after gambols, dug like terriers at Abu Hussein’s many earths. Then they drank themselves pot-bellied on Gihon water while the Governor and the Inspector chastised them with whips. Scorpions were added; for May Queen nosed one, and was removed to the barge lamenting. Mystery (a puppy, alas!) met a snake, and the blue-mottled Beagle-boy (never a dainty hound) ate that which he should have passed by. Only Royal, of the Belvoir tan head and the sad, discerning eyes, made any attempt to uphold the honour of England before the watching village.

“You can’t expect everything,” said the Governor after breakfast.

“We got it, though—everything except foxes. Have you seen May Queen’s nose?” said the Inspector.

“And Mystery’s dead. We’ll keep ’em coupled next time till we get well in among the crops. I say, what a babbling body-snatcher that Beagle-boy is! Ought to be drowned!”

“They bury people so damn casual hereabouts. Give him another chance,” the Inspector pleaded, not knowing that he should live to repent most bitterly.

“Talkin’ of chances,” said the Governor, “this Sheikh lies about his barley bein’ a failure. If it’s high enough to hide a hound at this time of year, it’s all right. And he wants a fifty per cent remission, you said?”

“You didn’t go on past the melon patch where I tried to turn Wanderer. It’s all burned up from there on to the desert. His other water-wheel has broken down, too,” the Inspector replied.

“Very good. We’ll split the difference and allow him twenty-five per cent off. Where’ll we meet to-morrow?”

“There’s some trouble among the villages down the river about their land-titles. It’s good goin’ ground there, too,” the Inspector said.

The next meet, then, was some twenty miles down the river, and the pack were not enlarged till they were fairly among the fields. Abu Hussein was there in force—four of him. Four delirious hunts of four minutes each—four hounds per fox—ended in four earths just above the river. All the village looked on.

“We forgot about the earths. The banks are riddled with ’em. This’ll defeat us,” said the Inspector.

“Wait a moment!” The Governor drew forth a sneezing hound. “I’ve just remembered I’m Governor of these parts.”

“Then turn out a black battalion to stop for us. We’ll need ’em, old man.”

The Governor straightened his back. “Give ear, O people!” he cried. “I make a new Law!”

The villagers closed in. He called:—

“Henceforward I will give one dollar to the man on whose land Abu Hussein is found. And another dollar”—he held up the coin—“to the man on whose land these dogs shall kill him. But to the man on whose land Abu Hussein shall run into a hole such as is this hole, I will give not dollars, but a most unmeasurable beating. Is it understood?”

“Our Excellency,” a man stepped forth, “on my land Abu Hussein was found this morning. Is it not so, brothers?”

None denied. The Governor tossed him over four dollars without a word.

“On my land they all went into their holes,” cried another. “Therefore I must be beaten.”

“Not so. The land is mine, and mine are the beatings.”

This second speaker thrust forward his shoulders already bared, and the villagers shouted.

“Hullo! Two men anxious to be licked? There must be some swindle about the land,” said the Governor. Then in the local vernacular: “What are your rights to the beating?”

As a river-reach changes beneath a slant of the sun, that which had been a scattered mob changed to a court of most ancient justice. The hounds tore and sobbed at Abu Hussein’s hearthstone, all unnoticed among the legs of the witnesses, and Gihon, also accustomed to laws, purred approval.

“You will not wait till the Judges come up the river to settle the dispute?” said the Governor at last.

“No!” shouted all the village save the man who had first asked to be beaten. “We will abide by Our Excellency’s decision. Let Our Excellency turn out the creatures of the Emirs who stole our land in the days of the Oppression.”

“And thou sayest?” the Governor turned to the man who had first asked to be beaten.

“I say I will wait till the wise Judges come down in the steamer. Then I will bring my many witnesses,” he replied.

“He is rich. He will bring many witnesses,” the village Sheikh muttered.

“No need. Thy own mouth condemns thee!” the Governor cried. “No man lawfully entitled to his land would wait one hour before entering upon it. Stand aside!” The man, fell back, and the village jeered him.

The second claimant stooped quickly beneath the lifted hunting-crop. The village rejoiced.

“Oh, Such an one; Son of such an one,” said the Governor, prompted by the Sheikh, “learn, from the day when I send the order, to block up all the holes where Abu Hussein may hide on—thy—land!”

The light flicks ended. The man stood up triumphant. By that accolade had the Supreme Government acknowledged his title before all men.

While the village praised the perspicacity of the Governor, a naked, pock-marked child strode forward to the earth, and stood on one leg, unconcerned as a young stork.

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“Hal” he said, hands behind his back. “This should be blocked up with bundles of dhurra stalks—or, better, bundles of thorns.”

“Better thorns,” said the Governor. “Thick ends innermost.”

The child nodded gravely and squatted on the sand.

“An evil day for thee, Abu Hussein,” he shrilled into the mouth of the earth. “A day of obstacles to thy flagitious returns in the morning.”

“Who is it?” the Governor asked the Sheikh. “It thinks.”

“Farag the Fatherless. His people were slain in the days of the Oppression. The man to whom Our Excellency has awarded the land is, as it were, his maternal uncle.”

“Will it come with me and feed the big dogs?” said the Governor.

The other peering children drew back. “Run!” they cried. “Our Excellency will feed Farag to the big dogs.”

“I will come,” said Farag. “And I will never go.” He threw his arm round Royal’s neck, and the wise beast licked his face.

“Binjamin, by Jove!” the Inspector cried.

“No!” said the Governor. “I believe he has the makings of a James Pigg!”

Farag waved his hand to his uncle, and led Royal on to the barge. The rest of the pack followed.

Gihon, that had seen many sports, learned to know the Hunt barge well. He met her rounding his bends on grey December dawns to music wild and lamentable as the almost forgotten throb of Dervish drums, when, high above Royal’s tenor bell, sharper even than lying Beagle-boy’s falsetto break, Farag chanted deathless war against Abu Hussein and all his seed. At sunrise the river would shoulder her carefully into her place, and listen to the rush and scutter of the pack fleeing up the gang-plank, and the tramp of the Governor’s Arab behind them. They would pass over the brow into the dewless crops where Gihon, low and shrunken, could only guess what they were about when Abu Hussein flew down the bank to scratch at a stopped earth, and flew back into the barley again. As Farag had foretold, it was evil days for Abu Hussein ere he learned to take the necessary steps and to get away crisply. Sometimes Gihon saw the whole procession of the Hunt silhouetted against the morning-blue, bearing him company for many merry miles. At every half mile the horses and the donkeys jumped the water-channels—up, on, change your leg, and off again like figures in a zoetrope, till they grew small along the line of waterwheels. Then Gibon waited their rustling return through the crops, and took them to rest on his bosom at ten o’clock. While the horses ate, and Farag slept with his head on Royal’s flank, the Governor and his Inspector worked for the good of the Hunt and his Province.

After a little time there was no need to beat any man for neglecting his earths. The steamer’s destination was telegraphed from waterwheel to waterwheel, and the villagers stopped out and put to according. If an earth were overlooked, it meant some dispute as to the ownership of the land, and then and there the Hunt checked and settled it in this wise: The Governor and the Inspector side by side, but the latter half a horse’s length to the rear; both bare-shouldered claimants well in front; the villagers half-mooned behind them, and Farag with the pack, who quite understood the performance, sitting down on the left. Twenty minutes were enough to settle the most complicated case, for, as the Governor said to a judge on the steamer, “One gets at the truth in a hunting-field a heap quicker than in your lawcourts.”

“But when the evidence is conflicting?” the Judge suggested.

“Watch the field. They’ll throw tongue fast enough if you’re running a wrong scent. You’ve never had an appeal from one of my decisions yet.”

The Sheikhs on horseback—the lesser folk on clever donkeys—the children so despised by Farag soon understood that villages which repaired their waterwheels and channels stood highest in the Governor’s favour. He bought their barley, for his horses.

“Channels,” he said, “are necessary that we may all jump them. They are necessary, moreover, for the crops. Let there be many wheels and sound channels—and much good barley.”

“Without money,” replied an aged Sheikh, “there are no waterwheels.”

“I will lend the money,” said the Governor.

“At what interest, O Our Excellency?”

“Take you two of May Queen’s puppies to bring up in your village in such a manner that they do not eat filth, nor lose their hair, nor catch fever from lying in the sun, but become wise hounds.”

“Like Ray-yal—not like Bigglebai?” (Already it was an insult along the River to compare a man to the shifty anthropophagous blue-mottled harrier.)

“Certainly, like Ray-yal—not in the least like Bigglebai. That shall be the interest on the loan. Let the puppies thrive and the waterwheel be built, and I shall be content,” said the Governor.

“The wheel shall be built, but, O Our Excellency, if by God’s favour the pups grow to be well-smelters, not filth-eaters, not unaccustomed to their names, not lawless, who will do them and me justice at the time of judging the young dogs?”

“Hounds, man, hounds! Ha-wands, O Sheikh, we call them in their manhood.”

“The ha-wands when they are judged at the Sha-ho. I have unfriends down the river to whom Our Excellency has also entrusted ha-wands to bring up.”

“Puppies, man! Pah-peaz we call them, O Sheikh, in their childhood.”

“Pah-peat. My enemies may judge my pah-peaz unjustly at the Sha-ho. This must be thought of.”

“I see the obstacle. Hear now! If the new waterwheel is built in a month without oppression, thou, O Sheikh, shalt be named one of the judges to judge the pah-peaz at the Sha-ho. Is it understood?”

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“Understood. We will build the wheel. I and my seed are responsible for the repayment of the loan. Where are my pah-peaz? If they eat fowls, must they on any account eat the feathers?”

“On no account must they eat the feathers. Farag in the barge will tell thee how they are to live.”

There is no instance of any default on the Governor’s personal and unauthorized loans, for which they called him the Father of Waterwheels. But the first puppyshow at the capital needed enormous tact and the presence of a black battalion ostentatiously drilling in the barrack square to prevent trouble after the prize-giving.

But who can chronicle the glories of the Gihon Hunt—or their shames? Who remembers the kill in the market-place, when the Governor bade the assembled sheikhs and warriors observe how the hounds would instantly devour the body of Abu Hussein; but how, when he had scientifically broken it up, the weary pack turned from it in loathing, and Farag wept because he said the world’s face had been blackened? What men who have not yet ridden beyond the sound of any horn recall the midnight run which ended—Beagleboy leading—among tombs; the hasty whip-off, and the oath, taken Abo e bones, to forget the worry? The desert run, when Abu Hussein forsook the cultivation, and made a six-mile point to earth in a desolate khor—when strange armed riders on camels swooped out of a ravine, and instead of giving battle, offered to take the tired hounds home on their beasts. Which they did, and vanished.

Above all, who remembers the death of Royal, when a certain Sheikh wept above the body of the stainless hound as it might have been his son’s—and that day the Hunt rode no more? The badly-kept log-book says little of this, but at the end of their second season (forty-nine brace) appears the dark entry: “New blood badly wanted. They are beginning to listen to beagle-boy.”

The Inspector attended to the matter when his leave fell due.

“Remember,” said the Governor, “you must get us the best blood in England—real, dainty hounds—expense no object, but don’t trust your own judgment. Present my letters of introduction, and take what they give you.

The Inspector presented his letters in a society where they make much of horses, more of hounds, and are tolerably civil to men who can ride. They passed him from house to house, mounted him according to his merits, and fed him, after five years of goat chop and Worcester sauce, perhaps a thought too richly.

The seat or castle where he made his great coup does not much matter. Four Masters of Foxhounds were at table, and in a mellow hour the Inspector told them stories of the Gihon Hunt. He ended: “Ben said I wasn’t to trust my own judgment about hounds, but I think there ought to be a special tariff for Empire-makers.”

As soon as his hosts could speak, they reassured him on this point.

“And now tell us about your first puppy-show all over again,” said one.

“And about the earth-stoppin’. Was that all Ben’s own invention?” said another.

“Wait a moment,” said a large, clean-shaven man—not an M.F.H.—at the end of the table. “Are your villagers habitually beaten by your Governor when they fail to stop foxes’ holes?”

The tone and the phrase were enough even if, as the Inspector confessed afterwards, the big, blue double-chinned man had not looked so like Beagle-boy. He took him on for the honour of Ethiopia.

“We only hunt twice a week—sometimes three times. I’ve never known a man chastised more than four times a week unless there’s a bye.”

The large loose-lipped man flung his napkin down, came round the table, cast himself into the chair next the Inspector, and leaned forward earnestly, so that he breathed in the Inspector’s face.

“Chastised with what?” he said.

“With the kourbash—on the feet. A kourbash is a strip of old hippo-hide with a sort of keel on it, like the cutting edge of a boar’s tusk. But we use the rounded side for a first offender.”

“And do any consequences follow this sort of thing? For the victim, I mean—not for you?”

“Ve-ry rarely. Let me be fair. I’ve never seen a man die under the lash, but gangrene may set up if the kourbash has been pickled.”

“Pickled in what?” All the table was still and interested.

“In copperas, of course. Didn’t you know that” said the Inspector.

“Thank God I didn’t.” The large man sputtered visibly.

The Inspector wiped his face and grew bolder.

“You mustn’t think we’re careless about our earthstoppers. We’ve a Hunt fund for hot tar. Tar’s a splendid dressing if the toe-nails aren’t beaten off. But huntin’ as large a country as we do, we mayn’t be back at that village for a month, and if the dressings ain’t renewed, and gangrene sets in, often as not you find your man pegging about on his stumps. We’ve a well-known local name for ’em down the river. We call ’em the Mudir’s Cranes. You see, I persuaded the Governor only to bastinado on one foot.”

“On one foot? The Mudir’s Cranes!” The large man turned purple to the top of his bald head. “ Would you mind giving me the local word for Mudir’s Cranes?”

From a too well-stocked memory the Inspector drew one short adhesive word which surprises by itself even unblushing Ethiopia. He spelt it out, saw the large man write it down on his cuff and withdraw. Then the Inspector translated a few of its significations and implications to the four Masters of Foxhounds. He left three days later with eight couple of the best hounds in England—a free and a friendly and an ample gift from four packs to the Gihon Hunt. He had honestly meant to undeceive the large blue mottled man, but somehow forgot about it.

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The new draft marks a new chapter in the Hunt’s history. From an isolated phenomenon in a barge it became a permanent institution with brick-built kennels ashore, and an influence social, political, and administrative, co-terminous with the boundaries of the province. Ben, the Governor, departed to England, where he kept a pack of real dainty hounds, but never ceased to long for the old lawless lot. His successors were ex-officio Masters of the Gihon Hunt, as all Inspectors were Whips. For one reason; Farag, the kennel huntsman, in khaki and puttees, would obey nothing under the rank of an Excellency, and the hounds would obey no one but Farag; for another, the best way of estimating crop returns and revenue was by riding straight to hounds; for a third, though Judges down the river issued signed and sealed land-titles to all lawful owners, yet public opinion along the river never held any such title valid till it had been confirmed, according to precedent, by the Governor’s hunting crop in the hunting field, above the wilfully neglected earth. True, the ceremony had been cut down to three mere taps on the shoulder, but Governors who tried to evade that much found themselves and their office compassed about with a great cloud of witnesses who took up their time with lawsuits and, worse still, neglected the puppies. The older sheikhs, indeed, stood out for the unmeasurable beatings of the old days—the sharper the punishment, they argued, the surer the title; but here the hand of modern progress was against them, and they contented themselves with telling tales of Ben the first Governor, whom they called the Father of Waterwheels, and of that heroic age when men, horses, and hounds were worth following.

This same Modern Progress which brought dog biscuit and brass water-taps to the kennels was at work all over the world. Forces, Activities, and Movements sprang into being, agitated themselves, coalesced, and, in one political avalanche, overwhelmed a bewildered, and not in the least intending it, England. The echoes of the New Era were borne into the Province on the wings of inexplicable cables. The Gihon Hunt read speeches and sentiments, and policies which amazed them, and they thanked God, prematurely, that their Province was too far off, too hot, and too hard worked to be reached by those speakers or their policies. But they, with others, under-estimated the scope and purpose of the New Era.

One by one, the Provinces of the Empire were hauled up and baited, hit and held, lashed under the belly, and forced back on their haunches for the amusement of their new masters in the parish of Westminster. One by one they fell away, sore and angry, to compare stripes with each other at the ends of the uneasy earth. Even so the Gihon Hunt, like Abu Hussein in the old days, did not understand. Then it reached them through the Press that they habitually flogged to death good revenue-paying cultivators who neglected to stop earths; but that the few, the very few who did not die under hippohide whips soaked in copperas, walked about on their gangrenous ankle-bones, and were known in derision as the Mudir’s Cranes. The charges were vouched for in the House of Commons by a Mr. Lethabie Groombride, who had formed a Committee, and was disseminating literature: The Province groaned; the Inspector—now an Inspector of Inspectors—whistled. He had forgotten the gentleman who sputtered in people’s faces.

“He shouldn’t have looked so like Beagle-boy!” was his sole defence when he met the Governor at breakfast on the steamer after a meet.

“You shouldn’t have joked with an animal of that class,” said Peter the Governor. “Look what Farag has brought me!”

It was a pamphlet, signed on behalf of a Committee by a lady secretary, but composed by some person who thoroughly understood the language of the Province. After telling the tale of the beatings, it recommended all the beaten to institute criminal proceedings against their Governor, and, as soon as might be, to rise against English oppression and tyranny. Such documents were new in Ethiopia in those days.

The Inspector read the last half page. “But—but,” he stammered, “this is impossible. White men don’t write this sort of stuff.”

“Don’t they, just?” said the Governor. “They get made Cabinet Ministers for doing it too. I went home last year. I know.”

“It’ll blow over,” said the Inspector weakly.

“Not it. Groombride is coming down here to investigate the matter in a few days.”

“For himself?”

“The Imperial Government’s behind him. Perhaps you’d like to look at my orders.” The Governor laid down an uncoded cable. The whiplash to it ran: “You will afford Mr. Groombride every facility for his inquiry, and will be held responsible that no obstacles are put in his way to the fullest possible examination of any witnesses which he may consider necessary. He will be accompanied by his own interpreter, who must not be tampered with.”

“That’s to me—Governor of the Province!” said Peter the Governor.

“It seems about enough,” the Inspector answered.

Farag, kennel-huntsman, entered the saloon, as was his privilege.

“My uncle, who was beaten by the Father of Waterwheels, would approach, O Excellency,” he said, “and there are others on the bank.”

“Admit,” said the Governor.

There tramped aboard sheikhs and villagers to the number of seventeen. In each man’s hand was a copy of the pamphlet; in each man’s eye terror and uneasiness of the sort that Governors spend and are spent to clear away. Farag’s uncle, now Sheikh of the village, spoke: “It is written in this book, Excellency, that the beatings whereby we hold our lands are all valueless. It is written that every man who received such a beating from the Father of Waterwheels who slow the Emirs, should instantly begin a lawsuit, because the title to his land is not valid.”

“It is so written. We do not wish lawsuits. We wish to hold the land as it was given to us after the days of the Oppression,” they cried.

The Governor glanced at the Inspector. This was serious. To cast doubt on the ownership of land means, in Ethiopia, the letting in of waters, and the getting out of troops.

“Your titles are good,” said the Governor. The Inspector confirmed with a nod.

“Then what is the meaning of these writings which came from down the river where the Judges are?” Farag’s uncle waved his copy. “By whose order are we ordered to slay you, O Excellency Our Governor?”

“It is not written that you are to slay me.”

“Not in those very words, but if we leave an earth unstopped, it is the same as though we wished to save Abu Hussein from the hounds. These writings say: ‘Abolish your rulers.’ How can we abolish except we kill? We hear rumours of one who comes from down the river soon to lead us to kill.”

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“Fools!” said the Governor. “Your titles are good. This is madness!”

“It is so written,” they answered like a pack.

“Listen,” said the Inspector smoothly. “I know who caused the writings to be written and sent. He is a man of a blue-mottled jowl, in aspect like Bigglebai who ate unclean matters. He will come up the river and will give tongue about the beatings.”

“Will he impeach our land-titles? An evil day for him!”

“Go slow, Baker,” the Governor whispered. “They’ll kill him if they get scared about their land.”

“I tell a parable.” The Inspector lit a cigarette. “Declare which of you took to walk the children of Milkmaid?”

“Melik-meid First or Second?” said Farag quickly.

“The second—the one which was lamed by the thorn.”

“No—no. Melik-meid the Second strained her shoulder leaping my water-channel,” a sheikh cried. “Melik-meid the First was lamed by the thorns on the day when Our Excellency fell thrice.”

“True—true. The second Melik-meid’s mate was Malvolio, the pied hound,” said the Inspector.

“I had two of the second Melik-meid’s pups,” said Farag’s uncle. “They died of the madness in their ninth month.”

“And how did they do before they died?” said the Inspector.

“They ran about in the sun, and slavered at the mouth till they died.”

“Wherefore?”

“God knows. He sent the madness. It was no fault of mine.”

“Thy own mouth hath answered thee.” The Inspector laughed. “It is with men as it is with dogs. God afflicts some with a madness. It is no fault of ours if such men run about in the sun and froth at the mouth. The man who is coming will emit spray from his mouth in speaking, and will always edge and push in towards his hearers. When ye see and hear him ye will understand that he is afflicted of God: being mad. He is in God’s hands.”

“But our titles—are our titles to our lands good?” the crowd repeated.

“Your titles are in my hands—they are good,” said the Governor.

“And he who wrote the writings is an afflicted of God?” said Farag’s uncle.

“The Inspector hath said it,” cried the Governor. “Ye will see when the man comes. O sheikhs and men, have we ridden together and walked puppies together, and bought and sold barley for the horses that after these years we should run riot on the scent of a madman—an afflicted of God?”

“But the Hunt pays us to kill mad jackals,” said Farag’s uncle. “And he who questions my titles to my land “

“Aahh! ’Ware riot!” The Governor’s hunting-crop cracked like a three-pounder. “By Allah,” he thundered, “if the afflicted of God come to any harm at your hands, I myself will shoot every hound and every puppy, and the Hunt shall ride no more. On your heads be it. Go in peace, and tell the others.”

“The Hunt shall ride no more,” said Farag’s uncle. “Then how can the land be governed? No—no, O Excellency Our Governor, we will not harm a hair on the head of the afflicted of God. He shall be to us as is Abu Hussein’s wife in the breeding season.”

When they were gone the Governor mopped his forehead.

“We must put a few soldiers in every village this Groombride visits, Baker. Tell ’em to keep out of sight, and have an eye on the villagers. He’s trying ’em rather high.”

“O Excellency,” said the smooth voice of Farag, laying the Field and Country Life square on the table, “is the afflicted of God who resembles Bigglebai one with the man whom the Inspector met in the great house in England, and to whom he told the tale of the Mudir’s Cranes?”

“The same man, Farag,” said the Inspector.

“I have often heard the Inspector tell the tale to Our Excellency at feeding-time in the kennels; but since I am in the Government service I have never told it to my people. May I loose that tale among the villages?”

The Governor nodded. “No harm,” said he.

The details of Mr. Groombride’s arrival, with his interpreter, whom he proposed should eat with him at the Governor’s table, his allocution to the Governor on the New Movement, and the sins of Imperialism, I purposely omit. At three in the afternoon Mr. Groombride said: “I will go out now and address your victims in this village.”

“Won’t you find it rather hot?” said the Governor. “They generally take a nap till sunset at this time of year.”

Mr. Groombride’s large, loose lips set. “That,” he replied pointedly, “would be enough to decide me. I fear you have not quite mastered your instructions. May I ask you to send for my interpreter? I hope he has not been tampered with by your subordinates.”

He was a yellowish boy called Abdul, who had well eaten and drunk with Farag. The Inspector, by the way, was not present at the meal.

“At whatever risk, I shall go unattended,” said Mr. Groombride. “Your presence would cow them from giving evidence. Abdul, my good friend, would you very kindly open the umbrella?”

He passed up the gang-plank to the village, and with no more prelude than a Salvation Army picket in a Portsmouth slum, cried: “Oh, my brothers!”

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He did not guess how his path had been prepared. The village was widely awake. Farag, in loose, flowing garments, quite unlike a kennel huntsman’s khaki and puttees, leaned against the wall of his uncle’s house. “Come and see the afflicted of God,” he cried musically, “whose face, indeed, resembles that of Bigglebai.”

The village came, and decided that on the whole Farag was right.

“I can’t quite catch what they are saying,” said Mr. Groombride.

“They saying they very much pleased to see you, Sar,” Adbul interpreted.

“Then I do think they might have sent a deputation to the steamer; but I suppose they were frightened of the officials. Tell them not to be frightened, Abdul.”

“He says you are not to be frightened,” Abdul explained. A child here sputtered with laughter. “Refrain from mirth,” Farag cried. “The afflicted of God is the guest of The Excellency Our Governor. We are responsible for every hair of his head.”

“He has none,” a voice spoke. “He has the white and the shining mange.”

“Now tell them what I have come for, Abdul, and please keep the umbrella well up. I think I shall reserve myself for my little vernacular speech at the end.”

“Approach! Look! Listen!” Abdul chanted. “The afflicted of God will now make sport. Presently he will speak in your tongue, and will consume you with mirth. I have been his servant for three weeks. I will tell you about his undergarments and his perfumes for his head.”

He told them at length.

“And didst thou take any of his perfume bottles?” said Farag at the end.

“I am his servant. I took two,” Abdul replied.

“Ask him,” said Farag’s uncle, “what he knows about our land-titles. Ye young men are all alike.” He waved a pamphlet. Mr. Groombride smiled to see how the seed sown in London had borne fruit by Gihon. Lo! All the seniors held copies of the pamphlet.

“He knows less than a buffalo. He told me on the steamer that he was driven out of his own land by Demah-Kerazi which is a devil inhabiting crowds and assemblies,” said Abdul.

“Allah between us and evil!” a woman cackled from the darkness of a hut. “Come in, children, he may have the Evil Eye.”

“No, my aunt,” said Farag. “No afflicted of God has an evil eye. Wait till ye hear his mirth-provoking speech which he will deliver. I have heard it twice from Abdul.”

“They seem very quick to grasp the point. How far have you got, Abdul?”

“All about the beatings, sar. They are highly interested.”

“Don’t forget about the local self-government, and please hold the umbrella over me. It is hopeless to destroy unless one first builds up.”

“He may not have the Evil Eye,” Farag’s uncle grunted, “but his devil led him too certainly to question my land-title. Ask him whether he still doubts my land-title?”

“Or mine, or mine?” cried the elders.

“What odds? He is an afflicted of God,” Farag called. “Remember the tale I told you.”

“Yes, but he is an Englishman, and doubtless of influence, or Our Excellency would not entertain him. Bid the down-country jackass ask him.”

“Sar,” said Abdul, “these people, much fearing they may be turned out of their land in consequence of your remarks. Therefore they ask you to make promise no bad consequences following your visit.”

Mr. Groombride held his breath and turned purple. Then he stamped his foot.

“Tell them,” he cried, “that if a hair of any one of their heads is touched by any official on any account whatever, all England shall ring with it. Good God! What callous oppression! The dark places of the earth are full of cruelty.” He wiped his face, and throwing out his arms cried: “Tell them, oh! tell the poor, serfs not to be afraid of me. Tell them I come to redress their wrongs—not, heaven knows, to add to their burden.”

The long-drawn gurgle of the practised public speaker pleased them much.

“That is how the new water-tap runs out in the kennel,” said Farag. “The Excellency Our Governor entertains him that he may make sport. Make him say the mirth-moving speech.”

“What did he say about my land-titles?” Farag’s uncle was not to be turned.

“He says,” Farag interpreted, “that he desires, nothing better than that you should live on your lands in peace. He talks as though he believed himself to be Governor.”

“Well. We here are all witnesses to what he has said. Now go forward with the sport.” Farag’s uncle smoothed his garments. “How diversely hath Allah made His creatures! On one He bestows strength to slay Emirs; another He causes to go mad and wander in the sun, like the afflicted sons of Melik-meid.”

“Yes, and to emit spray from the mouth, as the Inspector told us. All will happen as the Inspector foretold,” said Farag. “ I have never yet seen the Inspector thrown out during any run.”

“I think,” Abdul plucked at Mr. Groombride’s sleeves, “I think perhaps it is better now, Sar, if you give your fine little native speech. They not understanding English, but much pleased at your condescensions.”

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“Condescensions?” Mr. Groombride spun round. “If they only knew how I felt towards them in my heart! If I could express a tithe of my feelings! I must stay here and learn the language. Hold up the umbrella, Abdull I think my little speech will show them I know something of their vie intime.”

It was a short, simple; carefully learned address, and the accent, supervised by Abdul on the steamer, allowed the hearers to guess its meaning, which was a request to see one of the Mudir’s Cranes; since the desire of the speaker’s life, the object to which he would consecrate his days, was to improve the condition of the Mudir’s Cranes. But first he must behold them with his own eyes. Would, then, his brethren, whom he loved, show him a Mudir’s Crane whom he desired to love?

Once, twice, and again in his peroration he repeated his demand, using always—that they might see he was acquainted with their local argot—using always, I say, the word which the Inspector had given him in England long ago—the short, adhesive word which, by itself, surprises even unblushing Ethiopia.

There are limits to the sublime politeness of an ancient people. A bulky, blue-chinned man in white clothes, his name red-lettered across his lower shirtfront, spluttering from under a green-lined umbrella almost tearful appeals to be introduced to the Unintroducible; naming loudly the Unnameable; dancing, as it seemed, in perverse joy at mere mention of the Unmentionable—found those limits. There was a moment’s hush, and then such mirth as Gihon through his centuries had never heard—a roar like to the roar of his own cataracts in flood. Children cast themselves on the ground, and rolled back and forth cheering and whooping; strong men, their faces hidden in their clothes, swayed in silence, till the agony became insupportable, and they threw up their heads and bayed at the sun; women, mothers and virgins, shrilled shriek upon mounting shriek, and slapped their thighs as it might have been the roll of musketry. When they tried to draw breath, some half-strangled voice would quack out the word, and the riot began afresh. Last to fall was the city-trained Abdul. He held on to the edge of apoplexy, then collapsed, throwing the umbrella from him.

Mr. Groombride should not be judged too harshly. Exercise and strong emotion under a hot sun, the shock of public ingratitude, for the moment rued his spirit. He furled the umbrella, and with it beat the prostrate Abdul, crying that he had been betrayed. In which posture the Inspector, on horseback, followed by the Governor, suddenly found him.

“That’s all very well,” said the Inspector, when he had taken Abdul’s dramatically dying depositions on the steamer, “but you can’t hammer a native merely because he laughs at you. I see nothing for it but the law to take its course.”

“You might reduce the charge to—er—tampering with an interpreter,” said the Governor. Mr. Groombride was too far gone to be comforted.

“It’s the publicity that I fear,” he wailed. “Is there no possible means of hushing up the affair? You don’t know what a question—a single question in the House means to a man of my position—the ruin of my political career, I assure you.”

“I shouldn’t have imagined it,” said the Governor thoughtfully.

“And, though perhaps I ought not to say it, I am not without honour in my own country—or influence. A word in season, as you know, Your Excellency. It might carry an official far.”

The Governor shuddered.

“Yes, that had to come too,” he said to himself. “Well, look here. If I tell this man of yours to withdraw the charge against you, you can go to Gehenna for aught I care. The only condition I make is that if you write—I suppose that’s part of your business about your travels, you don’t praise me!”

So far Mr. Groombride has loyally adhered to this understanding.

Part One

PERSONS CHIEFLY INTERESTED

• His Excellency the Viceroy and Governor-General of India.
• Charles Hilton Hawley (lieutenant at large).
• Lieutenant-Colonel J. Scriffshaw (not so much at large).
• Major Decker (a persuasive Irishman).
• Peroo (an Aryan butler).
• Mrs. Hauksbee (a lady with a will of her own).
• Mrs. Scriffshaw (a lady who believes she has a will of her own).
• May Holt (niece of the above).
• Assunta (an Aryan lady’s-maid).
• Aides-de-Camp, Dancers, Horses, and Devils as Required.

SCENE—The imperial city of Simla, on a pine-clad mountain seven thousand feet above the level of the sea. Gray roofs of houses peering through green; white clouds going to bed in the valley below, purple clouds of sunset sitting on the peaks above. Smell of wood-smoke and pine-cones. A curtained verandah-room in Mrs. Hauksbee’s house, overlooking Simla, shows Mrs. Hauksbee, in black cachemire tea-gown opening over cream front, seated in a red-cushioned chair, her foot on a Khokand rug, Russian china tea things on red lacquered table beneath red-shaded lamps. On a cushion at her feet, Miss Holt — gray riding-habit, soft gray felt terai hat, blue and gold puggree, buff gauntlets in lap, and glimpse of spurred riding-boot. They have been talking as the twilight gathers. Mrs. Hauksbee crosses over to the piano in a natural pause of the conversation and begins to play.

May. (Without changing her position.) Yes. That’s nice. Play something.

Mrs. H.What?

May. Oh! Anything. Only I don’t want to hear about sighing over tombs, and saying Nevermore.

Mrs. H. Have you ever known me do that? May, you’re in one of your little tempers this afternoon.

May. So would a Saint be. I’ve told you why. Horrid old thing! — isn’t she?

Mrs. H. (Without prelude) —
Fair Eve knelt close to the guarded gate in the hush of an Eastern spring,
She saw the flash of the Angel’s sword, the gleam of the Angel’s wing—

May. (Impetuously.) And now you’re laughing at me!

Mrs. H. (Shaking her head, continues the song for a verse; then crescendo) —

And because she was so beautiful, and because she could not see
How fair were the pure white cyclamens crushed dying at her knee.
(That’s the society of your aunt, my dear.)

He plucked a Rose from the Eden Tree where the four great rivers meet.

May. Yes. I know you’re laughing at me. Now somebody’s going to die, of course. They always do.

Mrs. H. No. Wait and see what is going to happen. (The puckers pass out of May’s face as she listens) —

And though for many a Cycle past that Rose in the dust hath lain
With her who bore it upon her breast when she passed from grief to pain,
(Retard)—
There was never a daughter of Eve but once, ere the tale of years be done,
Shall know the scent of the Eden Rose, but once beneath the sun!
Though the years may bring her joy or pain, fame, sorrow, or sacrifice,
The hour that brought her the scent of the Rose she lived it in Paradise!
(Concludes with arpeggio chords.)

May. (Shuddering.) Ah! don’t. How good that is! What is it?

Mrs. H. Something called ‘The Eden Rose’. An old song to a new setting.

May. Play it again!

Mrs. H. (I thought it would tell.) No, dear. (Returning to her place by the tea-things.) And so that amiable aunt of yours won’t let you go to the dance?

May. She says dancing’s wicked and sinful ; and it’s only a Volunteer ball, after all.

Mrs. H. Then why are you so anxious to go?

May. Because she says I mustn’t! Isn’t that sufficient reason? And because —

Mrs. H. Ah, it’s that ‘because’ I want to hear about, dear.

May. Because I choose. Mrs. Hauksbee — dear Mrs. Hauksbee — you will help me, won’t you ?

Mrs. H. (Slowly.) Ye – es. Because I choose. Well?

May. In the first place, you’ll take me under your wing, won’t you? And, in the second, you’ll keep me there, won’t you ?

Mrs. H. That will depend a great deal on the Hawley Boy’s pleasure, won’t it?

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May. (Flushing.) Char — Mr. Hawley has nothing whatever to do with it.

Mrs. H. Of course not. But what will your aunt say?

May. She will be angry with me, but not with you. She is pious — oh! so pious! — and she would give anything to be put on that lady’s committee for — what is it? — giving pretty dresses to half-caste girls. Lady Bieldar is the secretary, and she won’t speak to Aunt on the Mall. You’re Lady Bieldar’s friend. Aunt daren’t quarrel with you, and, besides, if I come here after dinner tonight, how are you to know that everything isn’t correct?

Mrs. H. On your own pretty head be the talking to! I’m willing to chaperon to an unlimited extent.

May. Bless you! and I’ll love you always for it!

Mrs. H. There, again, the Hawley Boy might have something to say. You’ve been a well-conducted little maiden so far, May. Whence this sudden passion for Volunteer balls? (Turning down lamp and lowering voice as she takes the girl’s hand.) Won’t you tell me? I’m not very young, but I’m not a grim griffin, and I think I’d understand, dear.

May. (After a pause, and swiftly.) His leave is nearly ended. He goes down to the plains to his regiment the day after tomorrow, and —

Mrs. H. Has he said anything?

May. I don’t know. I don’t think so. Don’t laugh at me, please! But I believe me it would nearly break my heart if he didn’t.

Mrs. H. (Smiling to herself.) Poor child! And how long has this been going on?

May. Ever so long ! Since the beginning of the world — or the begin- ning of the season. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to help it. And last time we met I was just as rude as I could be — and — and he thought I meant it.

Mrs. H. How strange! Seeing that he is a man too (half aloud) — and probably with experiences of his own!

May. (Dropping Mrs. H.’s hand.) I don’t believe that, and — I won’t. He couldn’t!

Mrs. H. No, dear. Of course he hasn’t had experiences. Why should he? I was only teasing! But when do I pick you up tonight, and how?

May. Aunt’s dining out somewhere — with goody-goody people. I dine alone with Uncle John — and he sleeps after dinner. I shall dress then. I simply daren’t order my ‘rickshaw. The trampling of four coolies in the verandah would wake the dead. I shall have Dandy brought round quietly, and slip away.

Mrs. H. But won’t riding crumple your frock horribly?

May. (Rising.) Not in the least, if you know how. I’ve ridden ten miles to a dance, and come in as fresh as though I had just left my brougham. A plain head hunting-saddle — swing up carefully — throw a waterproof over the skirt and an old shawl over the body, and there you are! Nobody notices in the dark, and Dandy knows when he feels a high heel that he must behave.

Mrs. H. And what are you wearing?

May. My very, very bestest — slate body, smoke-coloured tulle skirt, and the loveliest steel-worked little shoes that ever were. Mother sent them. She doesn’t know Aunt’s views. That, and awfully pretty yellow roses — teeny-weeny ones. And you’ll wait for me here, won’t you — you Angel! — at half-past nine? (Shortens habit and whirls Mrs. H. down the verandah. Winds up with a kiss.) There!

Mrs. H. (Holding her at arm’s length and looking into her eyes.) And the next one will be given to—

May. (Blushing furiously.) Uncle John — when I get home.

Mrs. H. Hypocrite! Go along, and be happy! (As May mounts her horse in the garden.) At half-past nine, then? And can you curl your own wig? But I shall be here to put the last touches to you.

Mrs. H. (In the verandah alone, as the stars come out.) Poor child! Dear child! And Charley Hawley too! God gie us a guid conceit of oorselves! But I think they are made for each other! I wonder whether that Eurasian dress – reform committee is susceptible of improvements. I wonder whether — O youth, youth!

Enter Peroo, the butler, with a note on a tray.

Mrs. H. (Reading.) ‘Help! Help! Help! The decorations are vile — the Volunteers are fighting over them. The roses are just beginning to come in. Mrs. Mallowe has a headache. I am on a step- ladder and the verge of tears! Come and restore order, if you have any regard for me! Bring things and dress; and dine with us. — Constance’. How vexatious! But I must go, I suppose. I hate dressing in other people’s rooms — and Lady Bieldar takes all the chairs. But I’ll tell Assunta to wait for May. (Passes into house, gives orders, and departs. The clock-hands in the dining-room mark half-past seven.)

Enter Assunta, the lady’s-maid, to Peroo, squatting on the hearth-run.

Assunta. Peroo, there is an order that I am to remain on hand till the arrival of a young lady. (Squats at his side.)

Peroo. Hah!

Assunta. I do not desire to wait so long. I wish to go to my house.

Peroo. Hah!

Assunta. My house is in the bazar. There is an urgency that I should go there.

Peroo. To meet a lover?

Assunta. No — black beast! To tend my children, who be honest born. Canst thou say that of thine?

Peroo. (Without emotion.) That is a lie, and thou art a woman of notoriously immoral carriage.

Assunta. For this, my husband, who is a man, shall break thy lizard’s back with a bamboo.

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Peroo. For that, I, who am much honoured and trusted in this house, can, by a single word, secure his dismissal, and, owing to my influence among the servants of this town, can raise the bad name against ye both. Then ye will starve for lack of employ.

Assunta. (Fawning.) That is true. Thy honour is as great as thy influence, and thou art an esteemed man. Moreover, thou art beautiful; especially as to thy moustachios.

Peroo. So other women, and of higher caste than thou, sweeper’s wife, have told me.

Assunta. The moustachios of a fighting-man — of a very swashbuckler! Ahi! Peroo, how many hearts hast thou broken with thy fine face and those so huge moustachios?

Peroo. (Twirling moustache.) One or two — two or three. It is a matter of common talk in the bazars. I speak not of the matter myself. (Hands her betel-nut and lime wrapped in the leaf. They chew in silence.)

Assunta. Peroo!

Peroo. Hah!

Assunta. I greatly desire to go away, and not to wait.

Peroo. Go, then!

Assunta. But what wilt thou say to the mistress?

Peroo. That thou hast gone.

Assunta. Nay, but thou must say that one came crying with news that my littlest babe was smitten with fever, and that I fled weeping. Else it were not wise to go.

Peroo. Be it so! But I shall need a little tobacco to solace me while I wait for the return of the mistress alone.

Assunta. It shall come; and it shall be of the best. (A snake is a snake, and a bearer is a thieving ape till he dies!) I go. It was the fever of the child — the littlest babe of all — remember. (And now, if my lover finds I am late, he will beat me, judging that I have been unfaithful.) (Exit.)

(At half-past nine enter tumultuously May, a heavy shawl over her shoulders, a skirt of smoke-coloured tulle showing beneath.)

May. Mrs. Hauksbee! Oh! She isn’t here. And I dared not get Aunt’s ayah to help. She would have told Uncle John — and I can’t lace it myself. (Peroo hands note. May reads.) ‘So sorry. Dragged off to put the last touches to the draperies. Assunta will look after you’. Sorry! You may well be sorry, wicked woman! Draperies, indeed! You never thought of mine, and — all up the back, too. (To Peroo) Where’s Assunta?

Peroo. (Bowing to the earth.) By your honoured favour, there came a man but a short time ago crying that the ayah’s baby was smitten with fever, and she fled, weeping, to tend it. Her house is a mile hence. Is there any order?

May. How desperately annoying! (Looking into fire, her eyes soften- ing.) Her baby! )With a little shiver, passing right hand before eyes.) Poor woman! (A pause.)

But what am I to do? I can’t even creep into the cloak-room as I am, and trust to someone to put me to rights; and the shawl’s a horrid old plaid! Who invented dresses to lace up the back? It must have been a man! I’d like to put him into one! What am I to do? Perhaps the Colley-Haughton girls haven’t left yet. They’re sure to be dining at home. I might run up to their rooms and wait till they came. Eva wouldn’t tell, I know.

(Remounts Dandy, and rides up the hill to house immediately above,, enters glazed hall cautiously, and calls up staircase in an agonised whisper, huddling her shawl about her.) Jenny! Eva! Eva! Jenny! They’re out too, and, of course, their ayah’s gone!

Sir Henry Colley-Haughton. (Opening door of dining-room, where he has been finishing an after-dinner cigar, and stepping into hall.) I thought I heard a — Miss Holt! I didn’t know you were going with my girls. They’ve just left.

May. (Confusedly.) I wasn’t. I didn’t — that is, it was partly my fault. (With desperate earnestness.) Is Lady Haughton in?

Sir Henry. She’s with the girls. Is there anything that I can do? I’m going to the dance in a minute. Perhaps I might ride with you!

May. Not for worlds! Not for anything! It was a mistake. I hope the girls are quite well.

Sir Henry. (With bland wonder.) Perfectly, thanks. (Moves through hall towards horse.)

May. (mounting in haste.) ‘No; Please don’t hold my stirrup! I can manage perfectly, thanks!

(Canters out of the garden to side road shadowed by pines. Sees beneath her the lights of Simla town in orderly constellations, and on a bare ridge the illuminated bulk of the Simla Town-hall, shining like a cut-paper transparency. The main road is firefly-lighted with the moving ‘rickshaw lamps all climbing towards the Town-hall. The wind brings up a few bars of a waltz. A monkey in the darkness of the wood wakes and croons dolefully).

And now, where in the world am I to go? May, you bad girl ! This all comes of disobeying aunts and wearing dresses that lace up the back, and — trusting Mrs. Hauksbee. Everybody is going. I must wait a little till that crowd has thinned. Perhaps — perhaps Mrs. Lefevre might help me. It’s a horrid road to her poky little house, but she’s very kind, even if she is pious.

(Thrusts Dandy along an almost inaccessible path; halts in the shadow of a clump of rhododendron, and watches the lighted windows of Mrs. Lefevre’s small cottage.)

Oh! horror! so that’s where Aunt is dining! Back, Dandy, back! Dandy, dearest, step softly! (Regains road, panting.) I’ll never forgive Mrs. Hauksbee! — never. And there’s the band beginning ‘God save the Queen’, and that means the Viceroy has come; and Charley will think I’ve disappointed him on purpose, because I was so rude last time. And I’m all but ready. Oh! it’s cruel, cruel! I’ll go home, and I’ll go straight to bed, and Charley may dance with any other horrid girl he likes!

(The last of the ‘rickshaw lights pass her as she reaches the main road. Clatter of stones overhead and squeak of a saddle as a big horse picks his way down a steep path above, and a robust baritone chants)—

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Our King went forth to Normandie
With power of might and chivalry;
The Lord for him wrought wondrously,
Therefore now may England cry,
Deo Gratias !

(Swings into main road, and the young moon shows a glimpse of the cream, and silver of the Deccan Irregular Horse uniform under rider’s opened cloak.>

May. (Leaning forward and taking reins short.) That’s Charley! What a splendid voice! Just like a big, strong angel’s! I wonder what he is so happy about? How he sits his horse! And he hasn’t anything round his neck, and he’ll catch his death of cold! If he sees me riding in this direction, he may stop and ask me why, and I can’t explain. Fate’s against me tonight. I’ll canter past quickly. Bless you, Charley!

(Canters up the main road, under the shadow of the pines, as Hawley canters down. Dandy’s hoofs keep the tune ‘There was never a daughter of Eve’ etc. All Earth wakes, and tells the Stars. The Occupants of the Little Simla Cemetery stir in their sleep.)

PINES OF THE CEMETERY (to the OCCUPANTS)

Lie still, lie still! O earth to earth returning !
Brothers beneath, what wakes you to your pain?

The OCCUPANTS (underground)

Earth’s call to earth — the old unstifled yearning,
To clutch our lives again.
By summer shrivelled and by winter frozen,
Ye cannot thrust us wholly from the light,
Do we not know, who were of old his chosen,
Love rides abroad tonight?
By all that was our own of joy or sorrow,
By Pain foredone, Desire snatched away !
By hopeless weight of that unsought Tomorrow,
Which is our lot today,
By vigil in our chambers ringing hollow,
With Love’s foot overhead to mock our dearth,
We who have come would speak for those who follow —
Be pitiful, O Earth!

(The Devil of Chance, in the similitude of a gray ape, runs out on the branch of an overhanging tree, singing—

On a road that is pied as a panther’s hide
The shadows flicker and dance.
And the leaves that make them, my hand shall shake them—
The hand of the Devil of Chance.
Echo from the Snows on the Thibet road —
The little blind Devil of Chance.
The Devil (swinging the branch furiously)—
Yea, chance and confusion and error
The chain of their destiny wove;
And the horse shall be smitten with terror,
And the maiden made sure of her love!

(Dandy shies at the waving shadows, and cannons into Hawley’s horse, off shoulder to off shoulder. Hawley catches the reins.)

The Devil, above (letting the branch swing back)—
On a road that is pied as a panther’s hide
The souls of the twain shall dance!
And the passions that shake them, my hand shall wake them—
The hand of the Devil of Chance.
(Echo)
The little blind Devil of Chance.

Hawley. (Recovering himself.) Confou — er — hm! Oh, Miss Holt! And to what am I indebted for this honour?

May. Dandy shied. I hope you aren’t hurt?

All Earth, the Flowers, the Trees, and the Moonlight (together to Hawley). Speak now, or for ever hold your peace!

Hawley (Drawing reins tighter, keeping his horse’s off shoulder to Dandy’s side.) My fault entirely. (It comes easily now.) Not much hurt, are you (leaning off side, and putting his arm round her), my May? It’s awfully mean, I know, but I meant to speak weeks ago, only you never gave a fellow the chance — ‘specially last time. (Moistens his lips.) I’m not fit — I’m utterly— (in a gruff whisper) — I’m utterly unworthy, and — and you aren’t angry, May, are you? I thought you might have cared a little bit. Do you care, darl —?

May (Her head falling on his right shoulder. The arm tightens.) Oh! don’t — don’t!

Hawley. (Nearly tumbling off his horse.) Only one, darling. We can talk at the dance!

May. But I can’t go to the dance.

Hawley. (Taking another promptly as head is raised.) Nonsense! You must, dear, now. Remember I go down to my Regiment the day after to-morrow, and I shan’t see you again. (Catches glimpse of steel-gray slipper in stirrup.) Why, you’re dressed for it!

May. Yes, but I can’t go! I’ve — torn my dress.

Hawley. Run along and put on a new one; only be quick. Shall I wait here?

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May. No! Go away! Go at once!

Hawley. You’ll find me opposite the cloakroom.

May. Yes, yes! Anything! Good-night!

(Hawley canters up the road, and the song breaks out again fortissimo.)

May. (Absently, picking up reins.) Yes, indeed. My king went forth to Normandie; and — I shall never get there. Let me think, though! Let me think! It’s all over now — all over! I wonder what I ought to have said! I wonder what I did say! Hold up, Dandy ; you need some one to order you about. It’s nice to have some one nice to order you about. (Flicks horse, who capers.)

Oh, don’t jiggit, Dandy! I feel so trembly and faint. But I shan’t see him for ever so long . . . But we understand now. (Dandy turns down path to Mrs. Scriffshaw’s house.) And I wanted to go to the dance so much before, and now I want to go worse than ever! (Dismounts, runs into house, and weeps with her head on the drawing-room table.)

(Enter Scriffshaw, grizzled Lieutenant-Colonel.)

Scriffshaw. May! Bless my soul, what’s all this? What’s all this? (Shawl slips.) And, bless my soul, what’s all this?

May. N—nothing. Only I’m miserable and wretched.

Scriffshaw. But where have you been? I thought you were in your own room.

May. (With icy desperation.) I was, till you had fallen asleep. Then I dressed myself for a dance — this dance that Aunt has forbidden me to go to. Then I took Dandy out, and then — (collapsing and wriggling her shoulders) — doesn’t it show enough?

Scriffshaw. (Critically.) It does, dear, I thought those things — er — laced up the front.

May. This one doesn’t. That’s all. (Weeps afresh.)

Scriffshaw. Then what are you going to do? Bless my soul, May don’t cry!

May. I will cry, and I’ll sit here till Aunt comes home, and then she’ll see what I’ve been trying to do, and I’ll tell her that I hate her, and ask her to send me back to Calcutta!

Scriffshaw. But — but if she finds you in this dress she’ll be furiously angry with me!

May. For allowing me to put it on? So much the better. Then you’ll know what it is to be scolded by Aunt.

Scriffshaw. I knew that before you were born. (Standing by May’s bowed head.)

(She’s my sister’s child, and I don’t think Alice has the very gentlest way with girls. I’m sure her mother wouldn’t object if we took her to twenty dances. She can’t find us amusing company — and Alice will be simply beside herself under any circumstances. I know her tempers after those ‘refreshing evenings’ at the Lefevres’.)

May, dear, don’t cry like that!

May. I will! I will! I will! You — you don’t know why!

Scriffshaw. (Revolving many matters) We may just as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

May. (Raising head swiftly.) Uncle John!

Scriffshaw. You see, my dear, your aunt can’t be a scrap more angry than she will be if you don’t take off that frock. She looks at the intention of things.

May. Yes; disobedience, of course. (And I’ll only obey one person in the wide living world.) Well?

Scriffshaw. Your aunt may be back at any moment. I can’t face her.

May. Well?

Scriffshaw. Let’s go to the dance. I’ll jump into my uniform, and then see if I can’t put those things straight. We may just as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. (And there’s the chance of a rubber.) Give me five minutes, and we’ll fly. (Dives into his room, leaving May astounded.)

Scriffshaw. (From the room.) Tell them to bring round Dolly Bobs. We can get away quicker on horseback.

May. But really, Uncle, hadn’t you better go in a ‘rickshaw? Aunt says —

Scriffshaw. We’re in open mutiny now. We’ll ride. (Emerges in full uniform.) There!

May. Oh, Uncle John! you look perfectly delightful — and so martial, too!

Scriffshaw. I was martial once. Suppose your aunt came in? Let me see if I can lace those things of yours. That’s too tight — eh?

May. No! Much, much tighter. You must bring the edges together. Indeed you must. And lace it quick! Oh! what if Aunt should come? Tie it in a knot! Any sort of knot.

Scriffshaw. (Lacing bodice after a fashion of his own devising.) Yes — yes! I see! Confound! That’s all right! (They pass into the garden and mount their horses.) Let go her head! By Jove, May, how well you ride!

May. (As they race through the shadows neck and neck.) (Small blame to me. I’m riding to my love.) Go along, Dandy Boy! Wasn’t that Aunt’s ‘rickshaw that passed just now? She’ll come to the dance and fetch us back.

Scriffshaw. (After the gallop.) Who cares?

Part Two

SCENE – Main ball-room of the Simla Town-hall; dancing-floor grooved and tongued teak, vaulted roof, and gallery round the walls. Four hundred people dispersed in couples. Banners, bayonet-stars on walls ; red and gold, blue and gold, chocolate, buff, rifle-green, black and other uniforms under glare of a few hundred lamps. Cloak and supper-rooms at the sides, with alleys leading to Chinese-lanterned verandahs. Hawley, at entrance, receives May as she drops from her horse and passes towards cloak-rooms.

page 6

Hawley. (As he pretends to rearrange shawl.) Oh, my love, my love, my love!

May. (Her eyes on the ground.) Let me go and get these things off. I’m trying to control my eyes, but it is written on my face. (Dashes into cloak-room.)

Newly married Wife of Captain of Engineers to Husband. No need to ask what has happened there, Dick.

Husband. No, bless ’em both, whoever they are!

Hawley. (Under his breath.) Damn his impertinence!

(May comes from cloak-room, having completely forgotten to do more than look at her face and hair in the glass.)

Hawley. Here’s the programme, dear!

May. (Returning it with pretty gesture of surrender.) Here’s the programme — dear!

(Hawley draws line from top to bottom, initials, and returns card.) May. You can’t! It’s perfectly awful! But — I should have been angry if you hadn’t. (Taking his arm.) Is it wrong to say that?

Hawley. It sounds delicious. We can sit out all the squares and dance all the round dances. There are heaps of square dances at Volunteer balls. Come along!

May. One minute! I want to tell my chaperon something.

Hawley. Come along! You belong to me now.

May. (Her eyes seeking Mrs. Hauksbee, who is seated on an easy-chair by an alcove.) But it was so awfully sudden!

Hawley. My dear infant! When a girl throws herself literally into a man’s arms —

May. I didn’t! Dandy shied

Hawley. Don’t shy to conclusions. That man is never going to let her go. Come!

(May catches Mrs. H.’s eye. Telegraphs a volume, and receives by return two. Turns to go with Hawley.)

Mrs. H. (As she catches sight of back of May’s dress.) Oh, horror! Assunta shall die tomorrow! (Sees Scriffshaw fluctuating uneasily among the chaperons, and following his niece’s departure with the eye of an artist.)

Mrs.H. (Furiously.) Colonel Scriffshaw, you — you did that?

Scriffshaw. (Imbecilely.) The lacing? Yes. I think it will hold.

Mrs. H. You monster ! Go and tell her. No don’t! (Falling back in chair.) I have lived to see every proverb I believed in a lie. The maid has forgotten her attire! (What a handsome couple they make! Anyhow, he doesn’t care, and she doesn’t know.) How did you come here, Colonel Scriffshaw?

Scriffshaw. Strictly against orders. (Uneasily.) I’m afraid I shall have my wife looking for me.

Mrs. H. I fancy you will. (Sees reflection of herself in the mirrors — black-lace dinner dress, blood-red poinsettia at shoulder and girdle to secure single brace of black lace. Silver shoes, silver-handled black fan.) (You’re looking pretty tonight, dear. I wish your husband were here.)

(Aloud, to drift of expectant men.) No, no, no ! For the hundredth time, Mrs. Hauksbee is not dancing this evening. (Her hands are full, or she is in error. Now, the chances are that I shan’t see May again till it is time to go, and I may see Mrs. Scriffshaw at any moment.)

Colonel, will you take me to the supper-room? The hall’s chilly without perpetual soups. (Goes out on Colonel’s arm. Passing the cloak-room, sees portion of Mrs. Scriffshaw’s figure.) (Before me the Deluge!) If I were you, Colonel Scriffshaw, I’d go to the whist-room, and — stay there.

(S.follows the line of her eye, and blanches as he flies.) She has come — to — take them home, and she is quite capable of it. What shall I do? (Looks across the supper-tables. Sees Major Decker, a big black-haired Irishman, and attacks him among the meringues.) Major Decker! Dear Major Decker! If ever I was a friend of yours, help me now!

Major D. I will indeed. What is it?

Mrs. H. (Walking him back deftly in the direction of the cloak-room door.) I want you to be very kind to a very dear friend of mine — a Mrs. Scriffshaw. She doesn’t come to dances much, and, being very sensitive, she feels neglected if no one asks her to dance. She really waltzes divinely, though you might not think it. There she is, walking out of the cloak-room now, in the high dress. Please come and be introduced. (Under her eyelashes.) You’re an Irishman, Major, and you’ve got a way with you.

(Planting herself in front of Mrs. S.)Mrs. Scriffshaw, may I wah-wah-wah Decker? — wah-wah-wah Decker? Mrs. Scuffles. (Flies hastily.) Saved for a moment! And now, if I can enlist the Viceroy on my side, I may do something.

Major D. (To Mrs. S.) The pleasure of a dance with you, Mrs. Scruffun?

Mrs. Scriffshaw. (Backing, and filling in the doorway.) Sirr!

Major D. (Smiling persuasively.) You’ve forgotten me, I see! I had the pleasure o’ meeting you — (there’s missionary in every line o’ that head)—at — at — the last Presbyterian Conference.

Mrs. S. (Strict Wesleyan Methodist.) I was never there.

Major D. (Retiring en échelon towards two easy-chairs.) Were ye not, now? That’s queer. Let’s sit down here and talk over it, and perhaps we will strike a chord of mutual reminiscence. (Sits down exhaustedly.) And if it was not at the Conference, where was it?

Mrs. S. (Icily, looking for her husband.) I apprehend that our paths in the world are widely different.

Major D. (My faith ! they are !) Not the least in the world. (Mrs. S. shudders.) Are you sitting in a draught? Shall we try a turn at the waltz now?

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Mrs. S. (Rising to the expression of her abhorrence.) My husband is Colonel Scriffshaw. I should be much obliged if you would find him for me.

Major D. (Throwing up his chin.) Scriffshaw, begad! I saw him just now at the other end of the room. (I’ll get a dance out of the old woman, or I’ll die for it.) We’ll just waltz up there an’ inquire. (Hurls Mrs. S. into the waltz. Revolves ponderously.)

(Mrs.Hauksbee has perjured herself — but not on my behalf. She’s ruining my instep.) No, he’s not at this end. (Circling slowly.) We’ll just go back to our chairs again. If he won’t dance with so magnificent a dancer as his wife, he doesn’t deserve to be here, or anywhere else. That’s my one sound knee-cap she’s kicking now.) (Halts at point of departure.) And now we’ll watch for him here.

Mrs. S. (Panting.) Abominable! Infamous!

Major D. Oh no! He’s not so bad as that! Prob’bly playin’ whist in the kyard-rooms. Will I look for him? (Departs, leaving Mrs. S. purple in the face among the chaperons, and passes Mrs. H. in close conversation with a partner.)

Major D. (To Mrs. H., not noticing her partner.) She’s kicked me to pieces. She can dance no more than a Windsor chair, an’ now she’s sent me to look for her husband. You owe me something for this.

(The Viceroy, by Jove!)

Mrs. H. (Turning to her partner and concluding story.) A base betrayal of confidence, of course; but the woman’s absolutely without tact, and capable of making a scene at a minute’s notice, besides doing her best to wreck the happiness of two lives, after her treatment at Major Decker’s hands. But on the Dress Reform Committee, and under proper supervision, she would be most valuable.

HIS Excellency the Viceroy and Governor-General of India. (Diplomatic uniform, stars, etc.) But surely the work of keeping order among the waltzers is entrusted to abler hands. I cannot, cannot fight! I — I only direct armies.

Mrs. H. No. But your Excellency has not quite grasped the situation. (Explains it with desperate speed, one eye on Mrs. S. panting on her chair.) So you see! Husband fled to the whist-room for refuge; girl with lover, who goes down the day after tomorrow; and she is loose. She will be neither to hold nor to bind after the Major’s onslaught, save by you. And on a committee — she really would —

HIS Excellency. I see. I am penetrated with an interest in Eurasian dress reform. I never felt so alive to the importance of committees before.(Screwing up his eyes to see across the room.) But pardon me — my sight is not so good as it has been — which of that line of Mothers in Israel do I attack! The wearied one who is protesting with a fan against this scene of riot and dissipation?

Mrs. H. Can you doubt for a moment? I’m afraid your task is a heavy one, but the happiness of two —

HIS Excellency. (Wearily.) Hundred and fifty million souls? Ah, yes! And yet they say a Viceroy is overpaid. Let us advance, It will not talk to me about its husband’s unrecognised merits, will it? You have no idea how inevitably the conversation drifts in that direction when I am left alone with a lady. They tell me of Poor Tom, or Dear Dick, or Persecuted Paul, before I have time to explain that these things are really regulated by my Secretaries. On my honour, I sometimes think that the ladies of India are polyandrous !

Mrs. H. Would it be so difficult to credit that they love their husbands?

HIS Excellency. That also is possible. One of your many claims to my regard is that you have never mentioned your husband.

Mrs. H. (Sweetly.) No; and as long as he is where he is, I have not the least intention of doing so.

HIS Excellency. (As they approach the row of eminently self- conscious chaperons.) And, by the way, where is he?

(Mrs. H. lays her fan lightly over her heart, bows her head, and moves on.)

HIS Excellency. (As the chaperons become more self-conscious, drifting to vacant chair at Mrs. S.’s side.) That also is possible. I do not recall having seen him elsewhere, at any rate. (Watching Mrs. S.) How very like twenty thousand people that I could remember if I had time!

(Glides into vacant chair. Mrs. S. colours to the temples; chaperons exchange glances. In a voice of strained honey.) May I be pardoned for attacking you so brusquely on matters of public importance, Mrs. Scriffshaw? But my times are not my own, and I have heard so much about the good work you carry on so successfully. (When she has quite recovered I may learn what that work was.)

(Mrs. S., in tones meant for the benefit of all the chaperons, discourses volubly, with little gasps, of her charitable mission work.)

HIS Excellency. How interesting! Of course, quite natural! What we want most on our dress reform committee is a firm hand and enormous local knowledge. Men are so tactless. You have been too proud, Mrs. Scriffshaw, to offer us your help in that direction. So, you see, I come to ask it as a favour. (Gives Mrs. S. to understand that the Eurasian dress reform committee cannot live another hour without her help and comfort.)

First Aide. (By doorway within eye-reach of His Excellency.) What in the world is His Excellency tackling now?

Second Aide. (In attitude of fascination.) Looks as if it had been a woman once. Anyhow, it isn’t amusing him. I know that smile when he is in acute torment.

Mrs. H. (Coming up behind him.) ‘Now the Serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field!’

Second Aide. (Turning.) Ah! Your programme full, of course,Mrs. Hauksbee?

Mrs. H. I’m not dancing, and you should have asked me before. You Aides have no manners.

First Aide. You must excuse him. Hugh’s a blighted being. He’s watching somebody dance with somebody else, and somebody’s wanting to dance with him.

Mrs. H. (Keenly, under her eyebrows.) You’re too young for that rubbish.

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Second Aide. It’s his imagination. He’s all right, but Government House duty is killing me. My heart’s in the plains with a dear little, fat little, lively little nine-foot tiger. I want to sit out over that kill instead of watching over His Excellency.

Mrs. H. Don’t they let the Aides out to play, then?

Second Aide. Not me. I’ve got to do most of Duggy’s work while he runs after —

Mrs. H. Never mind! A discontented Aide is a perpetual beast. One of you boys will take me to a chair, and then leave me. No, I don’t want the delights of your conversation.

Second Aide. (As first goes off.) When Mrs. Hauksbee is attired in holy simplicity it generally means — larks!

HIS Excellency. (To Mrs. Scriffshaw.) . . . And so we all wanted to see more of you. I felt I was taking no liberty when I dashed into affairs of State at so short a notice. It was with the greatest difficulty I could find you. Indeed, I hardly believed my eyes when I saw you waltzing so divinely just now. (She will first protest, and next perjure herself.)

Mrs. S. (Weakly.) But I assure you —

HIS Excellency. My eyes are not so old that they cannot recognise a good dancer when they see one.

Mrs. S. (With a simper.) But only once in a way, Your Excellency.

HIS Excellency. (Of course.) That is too seldom — much too seldom. You should set our younger folk an example. These slow swirling waltzes are tiring. I prefer — as I see you do — swifter measures.

Major D. (Entering main door in strict charge of Scriffshaw, who fears the judgement.) Yes! she sent me to look for you, after giving me the dance of the evening. I’ll never forget it!

Scriffshaw. (His jaw dropping.) My — wife — danced — with — you! I mean — anybody!

Major D. Anybody! Aren’t I somebody enough? (Looking across room.) Faith! you’re right, though! There she is in a corner flirting with the Viceroy! I was not good enough for her. Well, it’s no use to interrupt ’em.

Scriffshaw. Certainly not! We’ll — we’ll get a drink and go back to the whist-rooms. (Alice must be mad! At any rate, I’m safe, I sup- pose.)

(HIS Excellency rises and fades away from Mrs. Scriffshaw’s side after a long and particular pressure of the hand. Mrs. S. throws herself back in her chair with the air of one surfeited with similar attentions, and the chaperons begin to talk.)

HIS Excellency. (Leaning over Mrs. H.’s chair with an absolutely expressionless countenance.) She is a truly estimable lady — one that I shall count it an honour to number among my friends. No! she will not move from her place, because I have expressed a hope that, a little later on in the dance, we may renew our very interesting conversation. And now, if I could only get my boys together, I think I would go home. Have you seen any Aide who looked as though a Viceroy belonged to him?

Mrs. H. The feet of the young men are at the door without. You leave early.

HIS Excellency. Have I not done enough?

Mrs. H. (Half rising from her chair.) Too much, alas! Too much! Look!

HIS Excellency. (Regarding Mrs. Scriffshaw, who has risen and is moving towards a side door.) How interesting! By every law known to me she should have waited in that chair — such a comfortable chair — for my too tardy return. But now she is loose! How has this happened?

Mrs. H. (Half to herself, shutting and opening fan.) She is looking for May! I know it! Oh! why wasn’t she isolated? One of those women has taken revenge on Mrs. Scriffshaw’s new glory — you — by telling her that May has been sitting out too much with Mr. Hawley.

HIS Excellency. Blame me! Always blame a Viceroy! (Mrs. H. moves away.) What are you meditating?

Mrs. H. Following — watching — administering — anything! I fly! I know where they are!

HIS Excellency. The plot thickens! May I come to administer?

Mrs. H. (Over her shoulder.) If you can!

(Mrs. H. flies down a darkened corridor speckled with occasional Chinese lanterns, and establishes herself behind a pillar as Mrs. S. sweeps by to the darkest end, where May and Hawley are sitting very close together. HIS Excellency follows Mrs. H.)

Mrs. S. (To both the invisibles.) Well!

HIS Excellency. (To Mrs. H. in a whisper.) Now, I should be afraid. I should run away.

Mrs. S. (In a high pitched voice of the matron.) May, go to the cloak-room at once, and wait till I come. I wonder you expect any one to speak to you after this! (May hurries down corridor very considerably agitated.)

HIS Excellency. (As May passes, slightly raising his voice, and with all the deference due to half a dozen Duchesses.) May an old man be permitted to offer you his arm, my dear? (To Mrs. H.) I entreat — I command you to delay the catastrophe till I return!

Mrs. H. (Plunging into the darkness, and halting before a dead wall.) Oh! I thought there was a way round! (Pretends to discover the two.) Mrs. Scriffshaw and Mr. Hawley! (With exaggerated emphasis.) Mrs. Scriffshaw — Oh ! Mrs. Scriffshaw! — how truly shocking! What will that dear, good husband of yours say? (Smothered chuckle from Hawley, who otherwise preserves silence. Snorts of indignation from Mrs. S.)

Mrs. H (Hidden by pillar of observation.) Now, in any other woman that would have been possibly weak — certainly vulgar. But I think it has answered the purpose.

HIS Excellency. (Returning, and taking up his post at her side.) Poor little girl! She was shaking all over. What an enormous amount of facile emotion exists in the young! What is about to —

Mrs. S. (In a rattling whisper to Hawley.) Take me to some quieter place.

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Hawley. On my word, you seem to be accustomed to very quiet places. I’m sorry I don’t know any more secluded nook; but if you have anything to say —

Mrs. S. Say, indeed! I wish you to understand that I consider your conduct abominable, sir!

Hawley. (In level, expressionless voice.) Yes? Explain yourself.

Mrs. S. In the first place, you meet my niece at an entertainment of which I utterly disapprove —

Hawley. To the extent of dancing with Major Decker, the most notorious loose fish in the whole room? Yes.

Mrs. S. (Hotly.) That was not my fault. It was entirely against my inclination.

Hawley. It takes two to make a waltz. Presumably, you are capable of expressing your wishes — are you not?

Mrs. S. I did. It was — only — and I couldn’t —

Hawley. (Relentlessly.) Well, it’s a most serious business. I’ve been talking it over with May.

Mrs. S. May!

Hawley. Yes, May; and she has assured me that you do not do — er — this sort of thing often. She assured me of that.

Mrs. S. But by what right —

Hawley. You see, May has promised to marry me, and one can’t be too careful about one’s connections.

HIS Excellency. (To Mrs. H.) That young man will go far! This is invention indeed.

Mrs. H. He seems to have marched some paces already. (Blessed be the chance that led me to the Major! I can always say that I meant

Mrs. S. May has promised . . . this is worse than ever! And I was not consulted!

Hawley. If 1 had known the precise hour, you know, I might possibly have chosen to take you into my confidence.

Mrs. S. May should have told me.

Hawley. You mustn’t worry May about it. Is that perfectly clear to you?

HIS Excellency. (To Mrs. H.) What a singularly flat, hopeless tone he has chosen to talk in — as if he were speaking to a coolie from a distance.

Mrs. H. Yes. It’s the one note that will rasp through her over-strained nerves.

HIS Excellency. You know him well?

Mrs. H. I trained him.

HIS Excellency. Then she collapses.

Mrs. H. If she does not, all my little faith in man is gone for ever.

Mrs. S. (To Hawley.) This is perfectly monstrous! It’s conduct utterly unworthy of a man, much less a gentleman. What do I know of you, or your connections, or your means?

Hawley. Nothing. How could you?

Mrs. S. How could I? … Because — because I insist on knowing?

Hawley. Then am I to understand that you are anxious to marry me? Suppose we talk to the Colonel about that ?

HIS Excellency. (To Mrs. H.) Very far, indeed, will that young man go.

Mrs. S. (Almost weeping with anger.) Will you let me pass ? I — I want to go away. I’ve no language at my command that could convey to you —

Hawley. Then surely it would be better to wait here till the inspira- tion comes?

Mrs. S. But this is insolence!

Hawley. You must remember that you drove May, who, by the way, is a woman, out of this place like a hen. That was insolence, Mrs.Scriffshaw — to her.

Mrs. S. To her ? She’s my husband’s sister’s child.

Hawley. And she is going to do me the honour of carrying my name. I am accountable to your husband’s sister in Calcutta. Sit down, please.

HIS Excellency. She will positively assault him in a minute. I can hear her preparing for a spring.

Mrs. H. He will be able to deal with that too, if it happens. (I trained him. Bear witness, heaven and earth, I trained him, that his tongue should guard his head with my sex.)

Mrs. S. (Feebly.) What shall I do? What can I do? (Through her teeth.) I hate you!

HIS Excellency. (Critically.) Weak. The end approaches.

Mrs. S. You’re not the sort of man I should have chosen for anybody’s husband.

Hawley. I can’t say your choice seems particularly select — Major Decker, for instance. And believe me, you are not required to choose husbands for anybody.

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(Mrs. Scriffshaw looses all the double-thonged lightnings of her tongue, condemns Hawley as no gentleman, an imposter, possibly a bigamist, a defaulter, and every other unpleasant character she has ever read of; announces her unalterable intention of refusing to recognise the engagement, and of harrying May tooth and talon; and renews her request to be allowed to pass. No answer.)

HIS Excellency. What a merciful escape! She might have attacked me on the chairs in this fashion. What will he do now?

Mrs. H. I have faith — illimitable faith.

Mrs. S. (At the end of her resources.) Well, what have you to say?

Hawley. (In a placid and most insinuating drawl.) Aunt Alice — give — me — a — kiss.

HIS Excellency. Beautiful! Oh! thrice beautiful! And my Secretaries never told me there were men like this in the Empire.

Mrs. S. (Bewilderedly, beginning to sob.) Why — why should I?

Hawley. Because you will make — you really will — a delightful aunt-in-law, and it will save such a lot of trouble when May and I are married, and you have to accept me as a relation.

Mrs. S. (Weeping gently.) But — but you’re taking the management of affairs into your own hands.

Hawley. Quite so. They are my own affairs. And do you think that my aunt is competent to manage other people’s affairs when she doesn’t know whether she means to dance or sit out, and when she chooses the very worst —

Mrs. S. (Appealingly.) Oh, don’t — don’t! Please, don’t! (Bursts into tears.)

HIS Excellency. (To Mrs. H.) Unnecessarily brutal, surely? She’s crying.

Mrs. H. No! It’s nothing. We all cry — even the worst of us.

Hawley. Well?

Mrs. S. (Sniffling, with a rustle.) There!

Hawley. No, no, no! I said give it to me! (It is given.)

HIS Excellency. (Carried away.) And I? What am I doing here, pretending to govern India, while that man languishes in a lieutenant’s uniform?

Mrs. H. (Speaking very swiftly and distinctly.) It rests with Your Excellency to raise him to honour. He should go down the day after tomorrow. A month at Simla, now, would mean Paradise to him, and one of your Aides is dying for a little tiger-shooting.

HIS Excellency. But would such an Archangel of Insolence condescend to run errands for me?

Mrs. H. You can but try.

HIS Excellency. I shall be afraid of him; but we’ll see if we can get the Commander-in-Chief to lend him to me.

Hawley. (To Mrs. S.) There, there, there! It’s nothing to make a fuss about, is it? Come along, Aunt Alice, and I’ll tuck you into your ‘rickshaw, and you shall go home quite comfy, and the Colonel and I will bring May home later. I go down to my regiment the day after tomorrow, worse luck! So you won’t have me long to trouble you. But we quite understand each other, don’t we? (Emerges from the darkness, very tenderly escorting the very much shaken Mrs. Scriffshaw.)

HIS Excellency. (To Mrs. H. as the captive passes.) I feel as if I ought to salute that young man; but I must go to the ball-room. Send him to me as soon as you can. (Drifts in direction of music. Hawley returns to Mrs. H.)

Hawley. (Mopping his forehead.) Phew! I have had easier duties.

Mrs. H. How could you? How dared you? I builded better than I knew. It was cruel, but it was superb.

Hawley. Who taught me? Where’s May?

Mrs. H. In the cloak-room — being put to rights — I fervently trust.

Hawley. (Guiltily.) They wear their fringes so low on their foreheads that one can’t —

Mrs. H. (Laughing.) Oh, you goose! That wasn’t it. His Excellency wants to speak to you! (Hawley turns to ball-room as Mrs. H. flings herself down in a chair.)

Mrs. H. (Alone.) For two seasons, at intervals, I formed the infant mind. Heavens, how raw he was in the beginning! And never once throughout his schooling did he disappoint you, dear. Never once, by word or look or sign, did he have the unspeakable audacity to fall in love with you. No, he chose his maiden, then he stopped his confidences, and conducted his own wooing, and in open fight slew his aunt-in-law. But he never, being a wholesome, dear, delightful boy, fell in love with you, Mrs. Hauksbee; and I wonder whether you liked it or whether you didn’t. Which? … You certainly never gave him a chance . . . but that was the very reason why . . . (Half aloud.) Mrs. Hauksbee, you are an idiot!

(Enters main ball-room just in time to see HIS Excellency conferring with Hawley, Aides in background.)

HIS Excellency. Have you any very pressing employments in the plains, Mr. Hawley?

Hawley. Regimental duty. Native Cavalry, sir.

HIS Excellency. And, of course, you are anxious to return at once?

Hawley. Not in the least, sir.

HIS Excellency. Do you think you could relieve one of my boys here for a month?

Hawley. Most certainly, sir

Second Aide. (Behind Viceroy’s shoulders, shouting in dumb show.) My tiger! My tiger! My tigerling!

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HIS Excellency. (Lowering his voice and regarding Hawley be- tween his eyes.) But could we trust you — ahem! — not to insist on ordering kisses at inopportune moments from — people?

Hawley. (Dropping eyes.) Not when I’m on duty, sir.

HIS Excellency. (Turning.) Then I’ll speak to the Commander-in- Chief about it.

Mrs. H. (As she sees gratified expression of the Viceroy’s and Hawley’s lowered eyes.) I am sometimes sorry that I am a woman, but I’m very glad that I’m not a man, and — I shouldn’t care to be an angel. (Mrs. Scriffshaw and May pass — the latter properly laced, the former regarding the lacing.) So that’s settled at last.

(To Mrs. S.) Your husband, Mrs. Scriffshaw? Yes, I know. But don’t be too hard on him. Perhaps he never did it, after all.

Mrs. S. (With a grunt of infinite contempt.) Mrs. Hauksbee, that man has tried to lace me!

Mrs. H. (Then he’s bolder than I thought. She will avenge all her outrages on the Colonel.) May, come and talk to me a moment, dear.

First Aide. (To Hawley, as the Viceroy drifts away.) Knighted on the field of battle, by Jove! What the deuce have you been doing to His Excellency?

Second Aide. I’ll bet on it that Mrs. Hauksbee is at the bottom of this, somehow. I told her what I wanted, and —

Hawley. Never look a gift tiger in the mouth. It’s apt to bite. (Departs in search of May.)

HIS Excellency. (To Mrs. H. as he passes her sitting out with May.) No, I am not so afraid of your young friend. Have I done well?

Mrs. H.Exceedingly. (In a whisper, including May.) She is a pretty girl, isn’t she?

HIS Excellency. (Regarding mournfully, his chin on his breast.) O youth, youth, youth !Si la jeunesse savait — si la vieillesse pouvait.

Mrs. H.(Incautiously.) Yes, but in this case we have seen that youth did know quite as much as was good for it, and— (Stops.)

HIS Excellency. And age had power, and used it. Sufficient reward, perhaps; but I hardly expected the reminder from you.

Mrs. H. No. I won’t try to excuse it. Perhaps the slip is as well, for it reminds me that I am but mortal, and in watching you controlling the destinies of the universe I thought I was as the gods!

HIS Excellency. Thank you! I go to be taken away. But it has been an interesting evening.

Scriffshaw. (Very much disturbed after the Viceroy has passed on, to Mrs. H.) Now, what in the world was wrong with my lacing? My wife didn’t appear angry about my bringing May here. I’m informed she danced several dances herself. But she — she gave it me awfully in the supper-room for my — ahem! — lady’s-maid’s work. Fearfully she gave it me! What was wrong? It held, didn’t it?

May. (From her chair.) It was beautiful, Uncle John. It was the best thing in the world you could have done. Never mind. I forgive you. (To Hawley, behind her.) No, Charley. No more dances for just a little while. Ask Mrs. Hauksbee now.

(Alarums and Excursions. The ball-room is rent in twain as the Viceroy, Aides, etc., file out between Lines of Volunteers and Uniforms.)

BAND IN THE GALLERY—

God save our gracious Queen,
Heaven bless our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the Queen!

Hawley. (Behind Mrs. H.’s chair.) Amen, your Imperial Majesty!

Mrs. H. (Looking up, head thrown back on left shoulder.) Thank you! Yes, you can have the next if you want it. Mrs. Hauksbee isn’t sitting out any more.

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HE had suffered from the disease of the century since his early youth, and before he was thirty he was heavily marked with it. He and a few friends had rearranged Heaven very comfortably, but the reorganisation of Earth, which they called Society, was even greater fun. It demanded Work in the shape of many taxi-rides daily; hours of brilliant talk with brilliant talkers; some sparkling correspondence; a few silences (but on the understanding that their own turn should come soon) while other people expounded philosophies; and a fair number of picture-galleries, tea-fights, concerts, theatres, music-halls, and cinema shows; the whole trimmed with lovemaking to women whose hair smelt of cigarette-smoke. Such strong days sent Frankwell Midmore back to his flat assured that he and his friends had helped the World a step nearer the Truth, the Dawn, and the New Order.His temperament, he said, led him more towards concrete data than abstract ideas. People who investigate detail are apt to be tired at the day’s end. The same temperament, or it may have been a woman, made him early attach himself to the Immoderate Left of his Cause in the capacity of an experimenter in Social Relations. And since the Immoderate Left contains plenty of women anxious to help earnest inquirers with large independent incomes to arrive at evaluations of essentials, Frankwell Midmore’s lot was far from contemptible.

At that hour Fate chose to play with him. A widowed aunt, widely separated by nature, and more widely by marriage, from all that Midmore’s mother had ever been or desired to be, died and left him possessions. Mrs. Midmore, having that summer embraced a creed which denied the existence of death, naturally could not stoop to burial; but Midmore had to leave London for the dank country at a season when Social Regeneration works best through long, cushioned conferences, two by two, after tea. There he faced the bracing ritual of the British funeral, and was wept at across the raw grave by an elderly coffin-shaped female with a long nose, who called him ‘Master Frankie’; and there he was congratulated behind an echoing top-hat by a man he mistook for a mute, who turned out to be his aunt’s lawyer. He wrote his mother next day, after a bright account of the funeral:

‘So far as I can understand, she has left me between four and five hundred a year. It all comes from Ther Land, as they call it down here. The unspeakable attorney, Sperrit, and a green-eyed daughter, who hums to herself as she tramps but is silent on all subjects except “huntin’,” insisted on taking me to see it. Ther Land is brown and green in alternate slabs like chocolate and pistachio cakes, speckled with occasional peasants who do not utter. In case it should not be wet enough there is a wet brook in the middle of it. Ther House is by the brook. I shall look into it later. If there should be any little memento of Jenny that you care for, let me know. Didn’t you tell me that mid-Victorian furniture is coming into the market again? Jenny’s old maid—it is called Rhoda Dolbie—tells me that Jenny promised it thirty pounds a year. The will does not. Hence, I suppose, the tears at the funeral. But that is close on ten per cent of the income. I fancy Jenny has destroyed all her private papers and records of her vie intime, if, indeed, life be possible in such a place. The Sperrit man told me that if I had means of my own I might come and live on Ther Land. I didn’t tell him how much I would pay not to! I cannot think it right that any human being should exercise mastery over others in the merciless fashion our tom-fool social system permits; so, as it is all mine, I intend to sell it whenever the unholy Sperrit can find a purchaser.’

And he went to Mr. Sperrit with the idea next day, just before returning to town.

‘Quite so,’ said the lawyer. ‘I see your point, of course. But the house itself is rather old-fashioned—hardly the type purchasers demand nowadays. There’s no park, of course, and the bulk of the land is let to a life-tenant, a Mr. Sidney. As long as he pays his rent, he can’t be turned out, and even if he didn’t’—Mr. Sperrit’s face relaxed a shade—‘you might have a difficulty.’

‘The property brings four hundred a year, I understand,’ said Midmore.

‘Well, hardly—ha-ardly. Deducting land and income tax, tithes, fire insurance, cost of collection and repairs of course., it returned two hundred and eighty-four pounds last year. The repairs are rather a large item—owing to the brook. I call it Liris—out of Horace, you know.’

Midmore looked at his watch impatiently.

‘I suppose you can find somebody to buy it?’ he repeated.

‘We will do our best, of course, if those are your instructions. Then, that is all except’—here Midmore half rose, but Mr. Sperrit’s little grey eyes held his large brown ones firmly—‘except about Rhoda Dolbie, Mrs. Werf’s maid. I may tell you that we did not draw up your aunt’s last will. She grew secretive towards the last—elderly people often do—and had it done in London. I expect her memory failed her, or she mislaid her notes. She used to put them in her spectacle-case. . . . My motor only takes eight minutes to get to the station, Mr. Midmore . . . but, as I was saying, whenever she made her will with us, Mrs. Werf always left Rhoda thirty pounds per annum. Charlie, the wills!’ A clerk with a baldish head and a long nose dealt documents on to the table like cards, and breathed heavily behind Midmore. ‘It’s in no sense a legal obligation, of course,’ said Mr. Sperrit. ‘Ah, that one is dated January the 11th, eighteen eighty-nine.’

Midmore looked at his watch again and found himself saying with no good grace: ‘Well, I suppose she’d better have it—for the present at any rate.’

He escaped with an uneasy feeling that two hundred and fifty-four pounds a year was not exactly four hundred, and that Charlie’s long nose annoyed him. Then he returned, first-class, to his own affairs.

Of the two, perhaps three, experiments in Social Relations which he had then in hand, one interested him acutely. It had run for some months and promised most variegated and interesting developments, on which he dwelt luxuriously all the way to town. When he reached his flat he was not well prepared for a twelve-page letter explaining, in the diction of the Immoderate Left which rubricates its I’s and illuminates its T’s, that the lady had realised greater attractions in another Soul. She re-stated, rather than pleaded, the gospel of the Immoderate Left as her justification, and ended in an impassioned demand for her right to express herself in and on her own life, through which, she pointed out, she could pass but once. She added that if, later, she should discover Midmore was ‘essentially complementary to her needs,’ she would tell him so. That Midmore had himself written much the same sort of epistle—barring the hint of return—to a woman of whom his needs for self-expression had caused him to weary three years before, did not assist him in the least. He expressed himself to the gas-fire in terms essential but not complimentary. Then he reflected on the detached criticism of his best friends and her best friends, male and female, with whom he and she and others had talked so openly while their gay adventure was in flower. He recalled, too—this must have been about midnight—her analysis from every angle, remote and most intimate, of the mate to whom she had been adjudged under the base convention which is styled marriage. Later, at that bad hour when the cattle wake for a little, he remembered her in other aspects and went down into the hell appointed; desolate, desiring, with no God to call upon. About eleven o’clock next morning Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite called upon him ‘for they had made appointment together’ to see how he took it; but the janitor told them that Job had gone—into the country, he believed.

page 2

Midmore’s relief when he found his story was not written across his aching temples for Mr. Sperrit to read—the defeated lover, like the successful one, believes all earth privy to his soul—was put down by Mr. Sperrit to quite different causes. He led him into a morning-room. The rest of the house seemed to be full of people, singing to a loud piano idiotic songs about cows, and the hall smelt of damp cloaks.

‘It’s our evening to take the winter cantata,’ Mr. Sperrit explained. ‘It’s “High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire.” I hoped you’d come back. There are scores of little things to settle. As for the house, of course, it stands ready for you at any time. I couldn’t get Rhoda out of it—nor could Charlie for that matter. She’s the sister, isn’t she, of the nurse who brought you down here when you were four, she says, to recover from measles?’

‘Is she? Was I?’ said Midmore through the bad tastes in his mouth. ‘D’you suppose I could stay there the night?’

Thirty joyous young voices shouted appeal to some one to leave their ‘pipes of parsley—’ollow’ollow—’ollow!’ Mr. Sperrit had to raise his voice above the din.

‘Well, if I asked you to stay here, I should never hear the last of it from Rhoda. She’s a little cracked, of course, but the soul of devotion and capable of anything. Ne sit ancillae, you know.’

‘Thank you. Then I’ll go. I’ll walk.’ He stumbled out dazed and sick into the winter twilight, and sought the square house by the brook.

It was not a dignified entry, because when the door was unchained and Rhoda exclaimed, he took two valiant steps into the hall and then fainted—as men sometimes will after twenty-two hours of strong emotion and little food.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said when he could speak. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, his head on Rhoda’s lap.

‘Your ’ome is your castle, sir,’ was the reply in his hair. ‘I smelt it wasn’t drink. You lay on the sofa till I get your supper.’

She settled him in a drawing-room hung with yellow silk, heavy with the smell of dead leaves and oil lamp. Something murmured soothingly in the background and overcame the noises in his head. He thought he heard horses’ feet on wet gravel and a voice singing about ships and flocks and grass. It passed close to the shuttered baywindow.

But each will mourn his own, she saith,
And sweeter woman ne’er drew breath
Than my son’s wife, Elizabeth . . .
Cusha—cusha—cusha—calling.

The hoofs broke into a canter as Rhoda entered with the tray. ‘And then I’ll put you to bed,’ she said. ‘Sidney’s coming in the morning.’ Midmore asked no questions. He dragged his poor bruised soul to bed and would have pitied it all over again, but the food and warm sherry and water drugged him to instant sleep.

Rhoda’s voice wakened him, asking whether he would have ‘’ip, foot, or sitz,’ which he understood were the baths of the establishment. ‘Suppose you try all three,’ she suggested. ‘They’re all yours, you know, sir.’

He would have renewed his sorrows with the daylight, but her words struck him pleasantly. Everything his eyes opened upon was his very own to keep for ever. The carved four-post Chippendale bed, obviously worth hundreds; the wavy walnut William and Mary chairs—he had seen worse ones labelled twenty guineas apiece; the oval medallion mirror; the delicate eighteenth-century wire fireguard; the heavy brocaded curtains were his—all his. So, too, a great garden full of birds that faced him when he shaved; a mulberry tree, a sun-dial, and a dull, steel-coloured brook that murmured level with the edge of a lawn a hundred yards away. Peculiarly and privately his own was the smell of sausages and coffee that he sniffed at the head of the wide square landing, all set round with mysterious doors and Bartolozzi prints. He spent two hours after breakfast in exploring his new possessions. His heart leaped up at such things as sewing-machines, a rubber-tyred bath-chair in a tiled passage, a malachite-headed Malacca cane, boxes and boxes of unopened stationery, seal-rings, bunches of keys, and at the bottom of a steel-net reticule a little leather purse with seven pounds ten shillings in gold and eleven shillings in silver.

‘You used to play with that when my sister brought you down here after your measles,’ said Rhoda as he slipped the money into his pocket. ‘Now, this was your pore dear auntie’s businessroom.’ She opened a low door. ‘Oh, I forgot about Mr. Sidney! There he is.’ An enormous old man with rheumy red eyes that blinked under downy white eyebrows sat in an Empire chair, his cap in his hands. Rhoda withdrew sniffing. The man looked Midmore over in silence, then jerked a thumb towards the door. ‘I reckon she told you who I be,’ he began. ‘I’m the only farmer you’ve got. Nothin’ goes off my place ’thout it walks on its own feet. What about my pig-pound?’

‘Well, what about it?’ said Midmore.

‘That’s just what I be come about. The County Councils are getting more particular. Did ye know there was swine fever at Pashell’s? There be. It’ll ’ave to be in brick.’

‘Yes,’ said Midmore politely.

‘I’ve bin at your aunt that was, plenty times about it. I don’t say she wasn’t a just woman, but she didn’t read the lease same way I did. I be used to bein’ put upon, but there’s no doing any longer ’thout that pig-pound.’

‘When would you like it?’ Midmore asked. It seemed the easiest road to take.

‘Any time or other suits me, I reckon. He ain’t thrivin’ where he is, an’ I paid eighteen shillin’ for him.’ He crossed his hands on his stick and gave no further sign of life.

‘Is that all?’ Midmore stammered.

‘All now—excep’’—he glanced fretfully at the table beside him—‘excep’ my usuals. Where’s that Rhoda?’

Midmore rang the bell. Rhoda came in with a bottle and a glass. The old man helped himself to four stiff fingers, rose in one piece, and stumped out. At the door he cried ferociously: ‘Don’t suppose it’s any odds to you whether I’m drowned or not, but them floodgates want a wheel and winch, they do. I be too old for liftin’ ’em with the bar—my time o’ life.’

‘Good riddance if ’e was drowned,’ said Rhoda. ‘But don’t you mind him. He’s only amusin’ himself. Your pore dear auntie used to give ’im ’is usual—’tisn’t the whisky you drink—an’ send ’im about ’is business.’

‘I see. Now, is a pig-pound the same thing as a pig-sty?’

Rhoda nodded. ‘’E needs one, too, but ’e ain’t entitled to it. You look at ’is lease—third drawer on the left in that Bombay cab’net—an’ next time ’e comes you ask ’im to read it. That’ll choke ’im off, because ’e can’t!’

There was nothing in Midmore’s past to teach him the message and significance of a hand-written lease of the late ’eighties, but Rhoda interpreted.

‘It don’t mean anything reelly,’ was her cheerful conclusion, ‘excep’ you mustn’t get rid of him anyhow, an’ ’e can do what ’e likes always. Lucky for us ’e do farm; and if it wasn’t for ’is woman——’

‘Oh, there’s a Mrs. Sidney, is there?’

‘Lor, no! The Sidneys don’t marry. They keep. That’s his fourth since—to my knowledge. He was a takin’ man from the first.’

‘Any families?’

‘They’d he grown up by now if there was, wouldn’t they? But you can’t spend all your days considerin’ ’is interests. That’s what gave your pore aunt ’er indigestion. ’Ave you seen the gun-room?’

Midmore held strong views on the immorality of taking life for pleasure. But there was no denying that the late Colonel Werf’s seventy-guinea breechloaders were good at their filthy job. He loaded one, took it out and pointed—merely pointed—it at a cock-pheasant which rose out of a shrubbery behind the kitchen, and the flaming bird came down in a long slant on the lawn, stone dead. Rhoda from the scullery said it was a lovely shot, and told him lunch was ready.

He spent the afternoon gun in one hand, a map in the other, beating the bounds of his lands. They lay altogether in a shallow, uninteresting valley, flanked with woods and bisected by a brook. Up stream was his own house; down stream, less than half a mile, a low red farm-house squatted in an old orchard, beside what looked like small lockgates on the Thames. There was no doubt as to ownership. Mr. Sidney saw him while yet far off, and bellowed at him about pig-pounds and floodgates. These last were two great sliding shutters of weedy oak across the brook, which were prised up inch by inch with a crowbar along a notched strip of iron, and when Sidney opened them they at once let out half the water. Midmore watched it shrink between its aldered banks like some conjuring trick. This, too, was his very own.

page 3

‘I see,’ he said. ‘How interesting! Now, what’s that bell for?’ he went on, pointing to an old ship’s bell in a rude belfry at the end of an outhouse. ‘Was that a chapel once?’ The red-eyed giant seemed to have difficulty in expressing himself for the moment and blinked savagely.

‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘My chapel. When you ’ear that bell ring you’ll ’ear something. Nobody but me ud put up with it—but I reckon it don’t make any odds to you.’ He slammed the gates down again, and the brook rose behind them with a suck and a grunt.

Midmore moved off, conscious that he might be safer with Rhoda to hold his conversational hand. As he passed the front of the farm-house a smooth fat woman, with neatly parted grey hair under a widow’s cap, curtsied to him deferentially through the window. By every teaching of the Immoderate Left she had a perfect right to express herself in any way she pleased, but the curtsey revolted him. And on his way home he was hailed from behind a hedge by a manifest idiot with no roof to his mouth, who hallooed and danced round him.

‘What did that beast want?’ he demanded of Rhoda at tea.

‘Jimmy? He only wanted to know if you ’ad any telegrams to send. ’E’ll go anywhere so long as ’tisn’t across running water. That gives ’im ’is seizures. Even talkin’ about it for fun like makes ’im shake.’

‘But why isn’t he where he can be properly looked after?’

‘What ’arm’s ’e doing? ’E’s a love-child, but ’is family can pay for ’im. If ’e was locked up ’e’d die all off at once, like a wild rabbit. Won’t you, please, look at the drive, sir?’

Midmore looked in the fading light. The neat gravel was pitted with large roundish holes, and there was a punch or two of the same sort on the lawn.

‘That’s the ’unt comin’ ’ome,’ Rhoda explained. ‘Your pore dear auntie always let ’em use our drive for a short cut after the Colonel died. The Colonel wouldn’t so much because he preserved; but your auntie was always an ’orsewoman till ’er sciatica.’

‘Isn’t there some one who can rake it over or—or something?’ said Midmore vaguely.

‘Oh yes. You’ll never see it in the morning, but—you was out when they came ’ome an’ Mister Fisher—he’s the Master—told me to tell you with ’is compliments that if you wasn’t preservin’ and cared to ’old to the old understandin’, ’is gravelpit is at your service same as before. ’E thought, perhaps, you mightn’t know, and it ’ad slipped my mind to tell you. It’s good gravel, Mister Fisher’s, and it binds beautiful on the drive. We ’ave to draw it, o’ course, from the pit, but——’

Midmore looked at her helplessly.

‘Rhoda,’ said he, ‘what am I supposed to do?’

‘Oh, let ’em come through,’ she replied. ‘You never know. You may want to ’unt yourself some day.’

That evening it rained and his misery returned on him, the worse for having been diverted. At last he was driven to paw over a few score books in a panelled room called the library, and realised with horror what the late Colonel Werf’s mind must have been in its prime. The volumes smelt of a dead world as strongly as they did of mildew. He opened and thrust them back, one after another, till crude coloured illustrations of men on horses held his eye. He began at random and read a little, moved into the drawing-room with the volume, and settled down by the fire still reading. It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time—a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give Midmore’s own criticism), but he read on, fascinated, and behold, from the pages leaped, as it were, the brother to the red-eyed man of the brook, bellowing at a landlord (here Midmore realised that he was that very animal) for new barns; and another man who, like himself again, objected to hoof-marks on gravel. Outrageous as thought and conception were, the stuff seemed to have the rudiments of observation. He dug out other volumes by the same author, till Rhoda came in with a silver candlestick.

‘Rhoda,’ said he, ‘did you ever hear about a character called James Pigg—and Batsey?’

‘Why, o’ course,’ said she. ‘The Colonel used to come into the kitchen in ’is dressin’-gown an’ read us all those Jorrockses.’

‘Oh, Lord!’ said Midmore, and went to bed with a book called Handley Cross under his arm, and a lonelier Columbus into a stranger world the wet-ringed moon never looked upon.

Here we omit much. But Midmore never denied that for the epicure in sensation the urgent needs of an ancient house, as interpreted by Rhoda pointing to daylight through attic-tiles held in place by moss, gives an edge to the pleasure of Social Research elsewhere. Equally he found that the reaction following prolonged research loses much of its grey terror if one knows one can at will bathe the soul in the society of plumbers (all the water-pipes had chronic appendicitis), village idiots (Jimmy had taken Midmore under his weak wing and camped daily at the drive-gates), and a giant with red eyelids whose every action is an unpredictable outrage.

Towards spring Midmore filled his house with a few friends of the Immoderate Left. It happened to be the day when, all things and Rhoda working together, a cartload of bricks, another of sand, and some bags of lime had been despatched to build Sidney his almost daily-demanded pigpound. Midmore took his friends across the flat fields with some idea of showing them Sidney as a type of ‘the peasantry.’ They hit the minute when Sidney, hoarse with rage, was ordering bricklayer, mate, carts and all off his premises. The visitors disposed themselves to listen.

‘You never give me no notice about changin’ the pig,’ Sidney shouted. The pig—at least eighteen inches long—reared on end in the old sty and smiled at the company.

‘But, my good man——’ Midmore opened.

‘I ain’t! For aught you know I be a dam’ sight worse than you be. You can’t come and be’ave arbit’ry with me. You are be’avin’ arbit’ry! All you men go clean away an’ don’t set foot on my land till I bid ye.’

‘But you asked’—Midmore felt his voice jump up—‘to have the pig-pound built.’

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‘I ‘Spose I did. That’s no reason you shouldn’t send me notice to change the pig. ’Comin’ down on me like this ’thout warnin’! That pig’s got to be got into the cowshed an’ all.’

‘Then open the door and let him run in,’ said Midmore.

‘Don’t you be’ave arbit’ry with me! Take all your dam’ men ’ome off my land. I won’t be treated arbit’ry.’

The carts moved off without a word, and Sidney went into the house and slammed the door.

‘Now, I hold that is enormously significant,’ said a visitor. ‘Here you have the logical outcome of centuries of feudal oppression—the frenzy of fear.’ The company looked at Midmore with grave pain.

‘But he did worry my life out about his pig-sty,’ was all Midmore found to say.

Others took up the parable and proved to him if he only held true to the gospels of the Immoderate Left the earth would soon be covered with jolly little’ pig-sties, built in the intervals of morris-dancing by ‘the peasant’ himself.

Midmore felt grateful when the door opened again and Mr. Sidney invited them all to retire to the road which, he pointed out, was public. As they turned the corner of the house, a smooth-faced woman in a widow’s cap curtsied to each of them through the window.

Instantly they drew pictures of that woman’s lot, deprived of all vehicle for self-expression—‘the set grey life and apathetic end,’ one quoted—and they discussed the tremendous significance of village theatricals. Even a month ago Midmore would have told them all that he knew and Rhoda had dropped about Sidney’s forms of self-expression. Now, for some strange reason, he was content to let the talk run on from village to metropolitan and world drama.

Rhoda advised him after the visitors left that ‘If he wanted to do that again’ he had better go up to town.

‘But we only sat on cushions on the floor,’ said her master.

‘They’re too old for romps,’ she retorted, ‘an’ it’s only the beginning of things. I’ve seen what I’ve seen. Besides, they talked and laughed in the passage going to their baths—such as took ’em.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Rhoda,’ said Midmore. No man—unless he has loved her—will casually dismiss a woman on whose lap he has laid his head.

‘Very good,’ she snorted, ‘but that cuts both ways. An’ now, you go down to Sidney’s this evenin’ and put him where he ought to be. He was in his right about you givin’ ’im notice about changin’ the pig, but he ’adn’t any right to turn it up before your company. No manners, no pig-pound. He’ll understand.’

Midmore did his best to make him. He found himself reviling the old man in speech and with a joy quite new in all his experience. He wound up—it was a plagiarism from a plumber—by telling Mr. Sidney that he looked like a turkey-cock, had the morals of a parish bull, and need never hope for a new pig-pound as long as he or Midmore lived.

‘Very good,’ said the giant. ‘I reckon you thought you ’ad something against me, and now you’ve come down an’ told it me like man to man. Quite right. I don’t bear malice. Now, you send along those bricks an’ sand, an’ I’ll make a do to build the pig-pound myself. If you look at my lease you’ll find out you’re bound to provide me materials for the repairs. Only—only I thought there’d be no ’arm in my askin’ you to do it throughout like.’

Midmore fairly gasped. ‘Then, why the devil did you turn my carts back when—when I sent them up here to do it throughout for you?’

Mr. Sidney sat down on the floodgates, his eyebrows knitted in thought.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said slowly. ‘’Twas too dam’ like cheatin’ a suckin’ baby. My woman, she said so too.’

For a few seconds the teachings of the Immoderate Left, whose humour is all their own, wrestled with those of Mother Earth, who has her own humours. Then Midmore laughed till he could scarcely stand. In due time Mr. Sidney laughed too—crowing and wheezing crescendo till it broke from him in roars. They shook hands, and Midmore went home grateful that he had held his tongue among his companions.

When he reached his house he met three or four men and women on horseback, very muddy indeed, coming down the drive. Feeling hungry himself, he asked them if they were hungry. They said they were, and he bade them enter. Jimmy took their horses, who seemed to know him. Rhoda took their battered hats, led the women upstairs for hairpins, and presently fed them all with tea-cakes, poached eggs, anchovy toast, and drinks from a coromandel-wood liqueur case which Midmore had never known that he possessed.

‘And I will say,’ said Miss Connie Sperrit, her spurred foot on the fender and a smoking muffin in her whip hand, ‘Rhoda does one top-hole. She always did since I was eight.’

‘Seven, Miss, was when you began to ’unt,’ said Rhoda, setting down more buttered toast.

‘And so,’ the M.F.H. was saying to Midmore, ‘when he got to your brute Sidney’s land, we had to whip ’em off. It’s a regular Alsatia for ’em. They know it. Why’—he dropped his voice—‘I don’t want to say anything against Sidney as your tenant, of course, but I do believe the old scoundrel’s perfectly capable of putting down poison.’

‘Sidney’s capable of anything,’ said Midmore with immense feeling; but once again he held his tongue. They were a queer community; yet when they had stamped and jingled out to their horses again, the house felt hugely big and disconcerting.

This may be reckoned the conscious beginning of his double life. It ran in odd channels that summer—a riding school, for instance, near Hayes Common and a shooting ground near Wormwood Scrubs. A man who has been saddle-galled or shoulder-bruised for half the day is not at his London best of evenings; and when the bills for his amusements come in he curtails his expenses in other directions. So a cloud settled on Midmore’s name. His London world talked of a hardening of heart and a tightening of purse-strings which signified disloyalty to the Cause. One man, a confidant of the old expressive days, attacked him robustiously and demanded account of his soul’s progress. It was not furnished, for Midmore was calculating how much it would cost to repave stables so dilapidated that even the village idiot apologised for putting visitors’ horses into them. The man went away, and served up what he had heard of the pig-pound episode as a little newspaper sketch, calculated to

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annoy. Midmore read it with an eye as practical as a woman’s, and since most of his experiences had been among women, at once sought out a woman to whom he might tell his sorrow at the disloyalty of his own familiar friend. She was so sympathetic that he went on to confide how his bruised heart—she knew all about it—had found so-lace, with along O, in another quarter which he indicated rather carefully in case it might be betrayed to other loyal friends. As his hints pointed directly towards facile Hampstead, and as his urgent business was the purchase of a horse from a dealer, Beckenham way, he felt he had done good work. Later, when his friend, the scribe, talked to him alluringly of ‘secret gardens’ and those so-laces to which every man who follows the Wider Morality is entitled, Midmore lent him a five-pound note which he had got back on the price of a ninety-guinea bay gelding. So true it is, as he read in one of the late Colonel Werf’s books, that ‘the young man of the present day would sooner lie under an imputation against his morals than against his knowledge of horse-flesh.’

Midmore desired more than he desired anything else at that moment to ride and, above all, to jump on a ninety-guinea bay gelding with black points and a slovenly habit of hitting his fences. He did not wish many people except Mr. Sidney, who very kindly lent his soft meadow behind the floodgates, to be privy to the matter, which he rightly foresaw would take him to the autumn. So he told such friends as hinted at country week-end visits that he had practically let his newly inherited house. The rent, he said, was an object to him, for he had lately lost large sums through ill-considered benevolences. He would name no names, but they could guess. And they guessed loyally all round the circle of his acquaintance as they spread the news that explained so much.

There remained only one couple of his once intimate associates to pacify. They were deeply sympathetic and utterly loyal, of course, but as curious as any of the apes whose diet they had adopted. Midmore met them in a suburban train, coming up to town, not twenty minutes after he had come off two hours’ advanced tuition (one guinea an hour) over hurdles in a hall. He had, of course, changed his kit, but his too heavy bridle-hand shook a little among the newspapers. On the inspiration of the moment, which is your natural liar’s best hold, he told them that he was condemned to a rest-cure. He would lie in semi-darkness drinking milk, for weeks and weeks, cut off even from letters. He was astonished and delighted at the ease with which the usual lie confounds the unusual intellect. They swallowed it as swiftly as they recommended him to live on nuts and fruit; but he saw in the woman’s eyes the exact reason she would set forth for his retirement. After all, she had as much right to express herself as he purposed to take for himself; and Midmore believed strongly in the fullest equality of the sexes.

That retirement made one small ripple in the strenuous world. The lady who had written the twelve-page letter ten months before sent him another of eight pages, analysing all the motives that were leading her back to him—should she come?—now that he was ill and alone. Much might yet be retrieved, she said, out of the waste of jarring lives and piteous misunderstandings. It needed only a hand.

But Midmore needed two, next morning very early, for a devil’s diversion, among wet coppices, called ‘cubbing.’

‘You haven’t a bad seat,’ said Miss Sperrit through the morning-mists. ‘But you’re worrying him.’

‘He pulls so,’ Midmore grunted.

‘Let him alone, then. Look out for the branches,’ she shouted, as they whirled up a splashy ride. Cubs were plentiful. Most of the hounds attached themselves to a straight-necked youngster of education who scuttled out of the woods into the open fields below.

‘Hold on!’ some one shouted. ‘Turn ’em, Midmore. That’s your brute Sidney’s land. It’s all wire.’

‘Oh, Connie, stop!’ Mrs. Sperrit shrieked as her daughter charged at a boundary-hedge.

‘Wire be damned! I had it all out a fortnight ago. Come on!’ This was Midmore, buffeting into it a little lower down.

‘I knew that!’ Connie cried over her shoulder, and she flitted across the open pasture, humming to herself.

‘Oh, of course! If some people have private information, they can afford to thrust.’ This was a snuff-coloured habit into which Miss Sperrit had cannoned down the ride.

‘What! ’Midmore got Sidney to heel? You never did that, Sperrit.’ This was Mr. Fisher, M.F.H., enlarging the breach Midmore had made.

‘No, confound him!’ said the father testily.

‘Go on, sir! Injecto ter pulvere—you’ve kicked half the ditch into my eye already.’

They killed that cub a little short of the haven his mother had told him to make for—a two-acre Alsatia of a gorse-patch to which the M.F.H. had been denied access for the last fifteen seasons. He expressed his gratitude before all the field and Mr. Sidney, at Mr. Sidney’s farmhouse door.

‘And if there should be any poultry claims——’ he went on.

‘There won’t be,’ said Midmore. ‘It’s too like cheating a sucking child, isn’t it, Mr. Sidney?’

‘You’ve got me! ‘was all the reply. ’I be used to bein’ put upon, but you’ve got me, Mus’ Midmore.’

Midmore pointed to a new brick pig-pound built in strict disregard of the terms of the lifetenant’s lease. The gesture told the tale to the few who did not know, and they shouted.

Such pagan delights as these were followed by pagan sloth of evenings when men and women elsewhere are at their brightest. But Midmore preferred to lie out on a yellow silk couch, reading works of a debasing vulgarity; or, by invitation, to dine with the Sperrits and savages of their kidney. These did not expect flights of fancy or phrasing. They lied, except about horses, grudgingly and of necessity, not for art’s sake; and, men and women alike, they expressed themselves along their chosen lines with the serene indifference of the larger animals. Then Midmore would go home and identify them, one by one, out of the natural-history books by Mr. Surtees, on the table beside the sofa. At first they looked upon him coolly, but when the tale of the removed wire and the recaptured gorse had gone the rounds, they accepted him for a person willing to play their games. True, a faction suspended judgment for a while, because they shot, and hoped that Midmore would serve the glorious mammon of pheasant-raising rather than the unkempt god of fox-hunting. But after he had shown his choice, they did not ask by what intellectual process he had arrived at it. He hunted three, sometimes four, times a week, which necessitated not only one bay gelding £94:10s.), but a mannerly white-stockinged chestnut (£114), and a black mare, rather long in the back but with a mouth of silk (£150), who so evidently preferred to carry a lady that it would have been cruel to have baulked her. Besides, with that handling she could be sold at a profit. And besides, the hunt was a quiet, intimate, kindly little hunt, not anxious for strangers, of good report in the Field, the servant of one M.F.H., given to hospitality, riding well its own horses, and, with the exception of Midmore, not novices. But as Miss Sperrit observed, after the M.F.H. had said some things to him at a gate: ‘It is a pity you don’t know as much as your horse, but you will in time. It takes years and yee-ars. I’ve been at it for fifteen and I’m only just learning. But you’ve made a decent kick-off.’

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So he kicked off in wind and wet and mud, wondering quite sincerely why the bubbling ditches and sucking pastures held him from day to day, or what so-lace he could find on off days in chasing grooms and bricklayers round outhouses.

To make sure he up-rooted himself one weekend of heavy mid-winter rain, and re-entered his lost world in the character of Galahad fresh from a rest-cure. They all agreed, with an eye over his shoulder for the next comer, that he was a different man; but when they asked him for the symptoms of nervous strain, and led him all through their own, he realised he had lost much of his old skill in lying. His three months’ absence, too, had put him hopelessly behind the London field. The movements, the allusions, the slang of the game had changed. The couples had rearranged themselves or were re-crystallizing in fresh triangles, whereby he put his foot in it badly. Only one great soul (he who had written the account of the pig-pound episode) stood untouched by the vast flux of time, and Midmore lent him another fiver for his integrity. A woman took him, in the wet forenoon, to a pronouncement on the Oneness of Impulse in Humanity, which struck him as a polysyllabic résumé of Mr. Sidney’s domestic arrangements, plus a clarion call to ‘shock civilisation into common-sense.’

‘And you’ll come to tea with me to-morrow?’ she asked, after lunch, nibbling cashew nuts from a saucer. Midmore replied that there were great arrears of work to overtake when a man had been put away for so long.

‘But you’ve come back like a giant refreshed . . . . I hope that Daphne’—this was the lady of the twelve and the eight-page letter—‘will be with us too. She has misunderstood herself, like so many of us,’ the woman murmured, ‘but I think eventually . . .’ she flung out her thin little hands. ‘However, these are things that each lonely soul must adjust for itself.’

‘Indeed, yes,’ said Midmore with a deep sigh. The old tricks were sprouting in the old atmosphere like mushrooms in a dung-pit. He passed into an abrupt reverie, shook his head, as though stung by tumultuous memories, and departed without any ceremony of farewell to—catch a mid-afternoon express where a man meets associates who talk horse, and weather as it affects the horse, all the way down. What worried him most was that he had missed a day with the hounds.

He met Rhoda’s keen old eyes without flinching; and the drawing-room looked very comfortable that wet evening at tea. After all, his visit to town had not been wholly a failure. He had burned quite a bushel of letters at his flat. A flat—here he reached mechanically toward the worn volumes near the sofa—a flat was a consuming animal. As for Daphne . . . he opened at random on the words: ‘His lordship then did as desired and disclosed a tableau of considerable strength and variety.’ Midmore reflected: ‘And I used to think . . . But she wasn’t . . . We were all babblers and skirters together . . . I didn’t babble much—thank goodness—but I skirted.’ He turned the pages backward for more Sortes Surteesianae, and read ‘When at length they rose to go to bed it struck each man as he followed his neighbour upstairs, that the man before him walked very crookedly.’ He laughed aloud at the fire.

‘What about to-morrow?’ Rhoda asked, entering with garments over her shoulder. ‘It’s never stopped raining since you left. You’ll be plastered out of sight an’ all in five minutes. You’d better wear your next best, ’adn’t you? I’m afraid they’ve shrank. ’Adn’t you best try ’em on?’

‘Here?’ said Midmore.

‘’Suit yourself. I bathed you when you wasn’t larger than a leg o’ lamb,’ said the ex-ladies’maid.

‘Rhoda, one of these days I shall get a valet, and a married butler.’

‘There’s many a true word spoke in jest. But nobody’s huntin’ to-morrow.’

‘Why? Have they cancelled the meet?’

‘They say it only means slipping and over-reaching in the mud, and they all ’ad enough of that to-day. Charlie told me so just now.’

‘Oh!’ It seemed that the word of Mr. Sperrit’s confidential clerk had weight.

‘Charlie came down to help Mr. Sidney lift the gates,’ Rhoda continued.

‘The flood-gates? They are perfectly easy to handle now. I’ve put in a wheel and a winch.’

‘When the brook’s really up they must be took clean out on account of the rubbish blockin’ ’em. That’s why Charlie came down.’

Midmore grunted impatiently. ‘Everybody has talked to me about that brook ever since I came here. It’s never done anything yet.’

‘This ’as been a dry summer. If you care to look now, sir, I’ll get you a lantern.’

She paddled out with him into a large wet night. Half-way down the lawn her light was reflected on shallow brown water, pricked through with grass blades at the edges. Beyond that light, the brook was strangling and kicking among hedges and tree-trunks.

‘What on earth will happen to the big rosebed?’ was Midmore’s first word.

‘It generally ’as to be restocked after a flood. Ah!’ she raised her lantern. ‘There’s two garden-seats knockin’ against the sun-dial. Now, that won’t do the roses any good.’

‘This is too absurd. There ought to be some decently thought-out system—for—for dealing with this sort of thing.’ He peered into the rushing gloom. There seemed to be no end to the moisture and the racket. In town he had noticed nothing.

‘It can’t be ’elped,’ said Rhoda. ‘It’s just what it does do once in just so often. We’d better go back.’

All earth under foot was sliding in a thousand liquid noises towards the hoarse brook. Somebody wailed from the house: ‘’Fraid o’ the water! Come ’ere! ’Fraid o’ the water!’

‘That’s Jimmy. Wet always takes ’im that way,’ she explained. The idiot charged into them, shaking with terror.

‘Brave Jimmy! How brave of Jimmy! Come into the hall. What Jimmy got now?’ she crooned. It was a sodden note which ran: ‘Dear Rhoda—Mr. Lotten, with whom I rode home this afternoon, told me that if this wet keeps up, he’s afraid the fish-pond he built last year, where Coxen’s old mill-dam was, will go, as the dam did once before, he says. If it does it’s bound to come down the brook. It may be all right, but perhaps you had better lookout. C.S.’

‘If Coxen’s dam goes, that means . . . I’ll ’ave the drawing-room carpet up at once to be on the safe side. The claw-’ammer is in the libery.’

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‘Wait a minute. Sidney’s gates are out, you said?’

‘Both. He’ll need it if Coxen’s pond goes …. I’ve seen it once.’

‘I’ll just slip down and have a look at Sidney. Light the lantern again, please, Rhoda.’

‘You won’t get him to stir. He’s been there since he was born. But she don’t know anything. I’ll fetch your waterproof and some top-boots.’

‘’Fraid o’ the water! ’Fraid o’ the water!’ Jimmy sobbed, pressed against a corner of the hall, his hands to his eves.

‘All right, Jimmy. Jimmy can help play with the carpet,’ Rhoda answered, as Midmore went forth into the darkness and the roarings all round. He had never seen such an utterly unregulated state of affairs. There was another lantern reflected on the streaming drive.

‘Hi! Rhoda! Did you get my note? I came down to make sure. I thought, afterwards, Jimmy might funk the water!’

‘It’s me—Miss Sperrit,’ Midmore cried. ‘Yes, we got it, thanks.’

‘You’re back, then. Oh, good! . . . Is it bad down with you?’

‘I’m going to Sidney’s to have a look.’

‘You won’t get him out. ’Lucky I met Bob Lotten. I told him he hadn’t any business impounding water for his idiotic trout without rebuilding the dam.’

‘How far up is it? I’ve only been there once.

‘Not more than four miles as the water will come. He says he’s opened all the sluices.’

She had turned and fallen into step beside him, her hooded head bowed against the thinning rain. As usual she was humming to herself.

‘Why on earth did you come out in this weather?’ Midmore asked.

‘It was worse when you were in town. The rain’s taking off now. If it wasn’t for that pond, I wouldn’t worry so much. There’s Sidney’s bell. Come on!’ She broke into a run. A cracked bell was jangling feebly down the valley.

‘Keep on the road!’ Midmore shouted. The ditches were snorting bank-full on either side, and towards the brook-side the fields were afloat and beginning to move in the darkness.

‘Catch me going off it! There’s his light burning all right.’ She halted undistressed at a little rise. ‘But the flood’s in the orchard. Look!’ She swung her lantern to show a front rank of old apple-trees reflected in still, out-lying waters beyond the half-drowned hedge. They could hear above the thud-thud of the gorged flood-gates, shrieks in two keys as monotonous as a steam-organ.

‘The high one’s the pig.’ Miss Sperrit laughed.

‘All right! I’ll get her out. You stay where you are, and I’ll see you home afterwards.’

‘But the water’s only just over the road,’ she objected.

‘Never mind. Don’t you move. Promise?’

‘All right. You take my stick, then, and feel for holes in case anything’s washed out anywhere. This is a lark!’

Midmore took it, and stepped into the water that moved sluggishly as yet across the farm road which ran to Sidney’s front door from the raised and metalled public road. It was half way up to his knees when he knocked. As he looked back Miss Sperrit’s lantern seemed to float in midocean.

‘You can’t come in or the water’ll come with you. I’ve bunged up all the cracks,’ Mr. Sidney shouted from within. ‘Who be ye?’

‘Take me out! Take me out!’ the woman shrieked, and the pig from his sty behind the house urgently seconded the motion.

‘I’m Midmore! Coxen’s old mill-dam is likely to go, they say. Come out!’

‘I told ’em it would when they made a fishpond of it. ’Twasn’t ever puddled proper. But it’s a middlin’ wide valley. She’s got room to spread . . . . Keep still, or I’ll take and duck you in the cellar! . . . You go ’ome, Mus’ Midmore, an’ take the law o’ Mus’ Lotten soon’s you’ve changed your socks.’

‘Confound you, aren’t you coming out?’

‘To catch my death o’ cold? I’m all right where I be. I’ve seen it before. But you can take her. She’s no sort o’ use or sense . . . . Climb out through the window. Didn’t I tell you I’d plugged the door-cracks, you fool’s daughter?’ The parlour window opened, and the woman flung herself into Midmore’s arms, nearly knocking him down. Mr. Sidney leaned out of the window, pipe in mouth.

‘Take her ’ome,’ he said, and added oracularly

‘Two women in one house,
Two cats an’ one mouse,
Two dogs an’ one bone—
Which I will leave alone.

I’ve seen it before.’ Then he shut and fastened the window.

‘A trap! A trap! You had ought to have brought a trap for me. I’ll be drowned in this wet,’ the woman cried.

‘Hold up! You can’t be any wetter than you are. Come along!’ Midmore did not at all like the feel of the water over his boot-tops.

‘Hooray! Come along!’ Miss Sperrit’s lantern, not fifty yards away, waved cheerily.

The woman threshed towards it like a panic-stricken goose, fell on her knees, was jerked up again by Midmore, and pushed on till she collapsed at Miss Sperrit’s feet.

‘But you won’t get bronchitis if you go straight to Mr. Midmore’s house,’ said the unsympathetic maiden.

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‘O Gawd! O Gawd! I wish our ’eavenly Father ’ud forgive me my sins an’ call me ’ome,’ the woman sobbed. ‘But I won’t go to ’is ’ouse! I won’t.’

‘All right, then. Stay here. Now, if we run,’ Miss Sperrit whispered to Midmore, ‘she’ll follow us. Not too fast!’

They set off at a considerate trot, and the woman lumbered behind them, bellowing, till they met a third lantern—Rhoda holding Jimmy’s hand. She had got the carpet up, she said, and was escorting Jimmy past the water that he dreaded.

‘That’s all right,’ Miss Sperrit pronounced.

‘Take Mrs. Sidney back with you, Rhoda, and put her to bed. I’ll take Jimmy with me. You aren’t afraid of the water now, are you, Jimmy?’

‘Not afraid of anything now.’ Jimmy reached for her hand. ‘But get away from the water quick.’

‘I’m coming with you,’ Midmore interrupted.

‘You most certainly are not. You’re drenched. She threw you twice. Go home and change. You may have to be out again all night. It’s only half-past seven now. I’m perfectly safe.’ She flung herself lightly over a stile, and hurried uphill by the footpath, out of reach of all but the boasts of the flood below.

Rhoda, dead silent, herded Mrs. Sidney to the house.

‘You’ll find your things laid out on the bed,’ she said to Midmore as he came up. ‘I’ll attend to—to this. She’s got nothing to cry for.’

Midmore raced into dry kit, and raced uphill to be rewarded by the sight of the lantern just turning into the Sperrits’ gate. He came back by way of Sidney’s farm, where he saw the light twinkling across three acres of shining water, for the rain had ceased and the clouds were stripping overhead, though the brook was noisier than ever. Now there was only that doubtful mill-pond to look after—that and his swirling world abandoned to himself alone.

‘We shall have to sit up for it,’ said Rhoda after dinner. And as the drawing-room commanded the best view of the rising flood, they watched it from there for a long time, while all the clocks of the house bore them company.

‘’Tisn’t the water, it’s the mud on the skirtingboard after it goes down that I mind,’ Rhoda whispered. ‘The last time Coxen’s mill broke, I remember it came up to the second—no, third—step o’ Mr. Sidney’s stairs.’

‘What did Sidney do about it?’

‘He made a notch on the step. ’E said it was a record. Just like ’im.’

‘It’s up to the drive now,’ said Midmore after another long wait. ‘And the rain stopped before eight, you know.’

‘Then Coxen’s dam ’as broke, and that’s the first of the flood-water.’ She stared out beside him. The water was rising in sudden pulses—an inch or two at a time, with great sweeps and lagoons and a sudden increase of the brook’s proper thunder.

‘You can’t stand all the time. Take a chair,’ Midmore said presently.

Rhoda looked back into the bare room. ‘The carpet bein’ up does make a difference. Thank you, sir, I will ’ave a set-down.’

‘’Right over the drive now,’ said Midmore. He opened the window and leaned out. ‘Is that wind up the valley, Rhoda?’

‘No, that’s it! But I’ve seen it before.’

There was not so much a roar as the purposeful drive of a tide across a jagged reef, which put down every other sound for twenty minutes. A wide sheet of water hurried up to the little terrace on which the house stood, pushed round either corner, rose again and stretched, as it were, yawning beneath the moonlight, joined other sheets waiting for them in unsuspected hollows, and lay out all in one. A puff of wind followed.

‘It’s right up to the wall now. I can touch it with my finger.’ Midmore bent over the window-sill.

‘I can ’ear it in the cellars,’ said Rhoda dolefully. ‘Well, we’ve done what we can! I think I’ll ’ave a look.’ She left the room and was absent half an hour or more, during which time he saw a full-grown tree hauling itself across the lawn by its naked roots. Then a hurdle knocked against the wall, caught on an iron foot-scraper just outside, and made a square-headed ripple. The cascade through the cellar-windows diminished.

‘It’s dropping,’ Rhoda cried, as she returned. ‘It’s only tricklin’ into my cellars now.’

‘Wait a minute. I believe—I believe I can see the scraper on the edge of the drive just showing!’

In another ten minutes the drive itself roughened and became gravel again, tilting all its water towards the shrubbery.

‘The pond’s gone past,’ Rhoda announced. ‘We shall only ’ave the common flood to contend with now.. You’d better go to bed.’

‘I ought to go down and have another look at Sidney before daylight.’

‘No need. You can see ’is light burnin’ from all the upstairs windows.’

‘By the way. I forgot about her. Where’ve you put her?’

‘In my bed.’ Rhoda’s tone was ice. ‘I wasn’t going to undo a room for that stuff.’

‘But it—it couldn’t be helped,’ said Midmore. ‘She was half drowned. One mustn’t be narrow-minded, Rhoda, even if her position isn’t quite—er—regular.’

‘Pfff! I wasn’t worryin’ about that.’ She leaned forward to the window. ‘There’s the edge of the lawn showin’ now. It falls as fast as it rises. Dearie’—the change of tone made Midmore jump—‘didn’t you know that I was ’is first? That’s what makes it so hard to bear.’ Midmore looked at the long lizard-like back and had no words.

She went on, still talking through the black window-pane:

page 9

‘Your pore dear auntie was very kind about it. She said she’d make all allowances for one, but no more. Never any more . . . . Then, you didn’t know ’oo Charlie was all this time?’

‘Your nephew, I always thought.’

‘Well, well,’ she spoke pityingly. ‘Everybody’s business being nobody’s business, I suppose no one thought to tell you. But Charlie made ’is own way for ’imself from the beginnin’! . . . But her upstairs, she never produced anything. Just an ’ousekeeper, as you might say. ’Turned over an’ went to sleep straight off. She ’ad the impudence to ask me for ’ot sherry-gruel.’

‘Did you give it to her,’ said Midmore.

‘Me? Your sherry? No!’

The memory of Sidney’s outrageous rhyme at the window, and Charlie’s long nose (he thought it looked interested at the time) as he passed the copies of Mrs. Werf’s last four wills, overcame Midmore without warning.

‘This damp is givin’ you a cold,’ said Rhoda, rising. ‘There you go again! Sneezin’s a sure sign of it. Better go to bed. You can’t do anythin’ excep’’—she stood rigid, with crossed arms—‘about me.’

‘Well. What about you?’ Midmore stuffed the handkerchief into his pocket.

‘Now you know about it, what are you goin’ to do—sir?’

She had the answer on her lean cheek before the sentence was finished.

‘Go and see if you can get us something to eat, Rhoda. And beer.’

‘I expec’ the larder ’ll be in a swim,’ she replied, ‘but old bottled stuff don’t take any harm from wet.’ She returned with a tray, all in order, and they ate and drank together, and took observations of the falling flood till dawn opened its bleared eyes on the wreck of what had been a fair garden. Midmore, cold and annoyed, found himself humming:

That flood strewed wrecks upon the grass,
That ebb swept out the flocks to sea.

There isn’t a rose left, Rhoda!

An awesome ebb and flow it was
To many more than mine and me.
But each will mourn his . . .

It’ll cost me a hundred.’

‘Now we know the worst,’ said Rhoda, ‘we can go to bed. I’ll lay on the kitchen sofa. His light’s burnin’ still.’

‘And she?’

‘Dirty old cat! You ought to ’ear ’er snore!’

At ten o’clock in the morning, after a maddening hour in his own garden on the edge of the retreating brook, Midmore went off to confront more damage at Sidney’s. The first thing that met him was the pig, snowy white, for the water had washed him out of his new sty, calling on high heaven for breakfast. The front door had been forced open, and the flood had registered its own height in a brown dado on the walls. Midmore chased the pig out and called up the stairs.

‘I be abed o’ course. Which step ’as she rose to?’ Sidney cried from above. ‘The fourth? Then it’s beat all records. Come up.’

‘Are you ill?’ Midmore asked as he entered the room. The red eyelids blinked cheerfully. Mr. Sidney, beneath a sumptuous patch-work quilt, was smoking.

‘Nah! I’m only thankin’ God I ain’t my own landlord. Take that cheer. What’s she done?’

page 10

‘It hasn’t gone down enough for me to make sure.’

‘Them floodgates o’ yourn ’ll be middlin’ far down the brook by now; an’ your rose-garden have gone after ’em. I saved my chickens, though. You’d better get Mus’ Sperrit to take the law o’ Lotten an’ ’is fish-pond.’

‘No, thanks. I’ve trouble enough without that.’

‘Hev ye?’ Mr. Sidney grinned. ‘How did ye make out with those two women o’ mine last night? I lay they fought.’

‘You infernal old scoundrel!’ Midmore laughed.

‘I be—an’ then again I bain’t,’ was the placid answer. ‘But, Rhoda, she wouldn’t ha’ left me last night. Fire or flood, she wouldn’t.’

‘Why didn’t you ever marry her?’ Midmore asked.

‘Waste of good money. She was willin’ without.’

There was a step on the gritty mud below, and a voice humming. Midmore rose quickly saying: ‘Well, I suppose you’re all right now.’

‘I be. I ain’t a landlord, nor I ain’t young—nor anxious. Oh, Mus’ Midmore! Would it make any odds about her thirty pounds comin’ regular if I married her? Charlie said maybe ’twould.’

‘Did he?’ Midmore turned at the door.

‘And what did Jimmy say about it?’

‘Jimmy?’ Mr. Sidney chuckled as the joke took him. ‘Oh, he’s none o’ mine. He’s Charlie’s look-out.’

Midmore slammed the door and ran downstairs

‘Well, this is a—sweet—mess,’ said Miss Sperrit in shortest skirts and heaviest riding-boots. ‘I had to come down and have a look at it. “The old mayor climbed the belfry tower.” ’Been up all night nursing your family?’

‘Nearly that! Isn’t it cheerful?’ He pointed through the door to the stairs with small twig-drift on the last three treads.

‘It’s a record, though,’ said she, and hummed to herself:

‘That flood strewed wrecks upon the grass,
That ebb swept out the flocks to sea.’

‘You’re always singing that, aren’t you?’ Midmore said suddenly as she passed into the parlour where slimy chairs had been stranded at all angles.

‘Am I? Now I come to think of it I believe I do. They say I always hum when I ride. Have you noticed it?’

‘Of course I have. I notice every——’

‘Oh,’ she went on hurriedly. ‘We had it for the village cantata last winter—“The Brides of Enderby.”’

‘No! “High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire.”’ For some reason Midmore spoke sharply.

‘Just like that.’ She pointed to the befouled walls. ‘I say. . . . Let’s get this furniture a little straight . . . . You know it too?’

‘Every word, since you sang it, of course.’

‘When?’

‘The first night I ever came down. You rode past the drawing-room window in the dark singing it—“And sweeter woman——”’

‘I thought the house was empty then. Your aunt always let us use that short cut. Ha—hadn’t we better get this out into the passage? It’ll all have to come out anyhow. You take the other side.’ They began to lift a heavyish table. Their words came jerkily between gasps and their faces were as white as—a newly washed and very hungry pig.

‘Look out!’ Midmore shouted. His legs were whirled from under him, as the table, grunting madly, careened and knocked the girl out of sight.

The wild boar of Asia could not have cut down a couple more scientifically, but this little pig lacked his ancestor’s nerve and fled shrieking over their bodies.

‘Are you hurt, darling?’ was Midmore’s first word, and ‘No—I’m only winded—dear,’ was Miss Sperrit’s, as he lifted her out of her corner, her hat over one eye and her right cheek a smear of mud.

They fed him a little later on some chicken-feed that they found in Sidney’s quiet barn, a pail of buttermilk out of the dairy, and a quantity of onions from a shelf in the back-kitchen.

‘Seed-onions, most likely,’ said Connie. ‘You’ll hear about this.’

‘What does it matter? They ought to have been gilded. We must buy him.’

‘And keep him as long as he lives,’ she agreed. ‘But I think I ought to go home now. You see, when I came out I didn’t expect . . . Did you?’

‘No! Yes . . . . It had to come. . . . But if any one had told me an hour ago! . . . Sidney’s unspeakable parlour—and the mud on the carpet.’

‘Oh, I say! Is my cheek clean now?’

‘Not quite. Lend me your hanky again a minute, darling . . . . What a purler you came!’

‘You can’t talk. ’Remember when your chin hit that table and you said “blast”! I was just going to laugh.’

page 11

‘You didn’t laugh when I picked you up. You were going “oo-oo-oo” like a little owl.’

‘My dear child——’

‘Say that again!’

‘My dear child. (Do you really like it? I keep it for my best friends.) My dee-ar child, I thought I was going to be sick there and then. He knocked every ounce of wind out of me—the angel! But I must really go.’

They set off together, very careful not to join hands or take arms.

‘Not across the fields,’ said Midmore at the stile. ‘Come round by—by your own place.’

She flushed indignantly.

‘It will be yours in a little time,’ he went on, shaken with his own audacity.

‘Not so much of your little times, if you please!’ She shied like a colt across the road; then instantly, like a colt, her eyes lit with new curiosity as she came in sight of the drive-gates.

‘And not quite so much of your airs and graces, Madam,’ Midmore returned, ‘or I won’t let you use our drive as a short cut any more.’

‘Oh, I’ll be good. I’ll be good.’ Her voice changed suddenly. ‘I swear I’ll try to be good, dear. I’m not much of a thing at the best. What made you . . .’

‘I’m worse—worse! Miles and oceans worse. But what does it matter now?’

They halted beside the gate-pillars.

‘I see!’ she said, looking up the sodden carriage sweep to the front door porch where Rhoda was slapping a wet mat to and fro. ‘I see. . . . Now, I really must go home. No! Don’t you come. I must speak to Mother first all by myself.’

He watched her up the hill till she was out of sight.

It must be clearly understood that I am not at all proud of this performance. In Florida men sometimes hook and land, on rod and tackle a little finer than a steam-crane and chain, a mackerel-like fish called ‘tarpon’, which sometime run up to 120 lb. Those men stuff their captures and exhibit them in glass cases and become puffed up. On the Columbia River sturgeon of 150 lb. weight are taken with the line. When the sturgeon is hooked the line is fixed to the nearest pine tree or steamboat-wharf, and after some hours or days the sturgeon surrenders himself, if the pine or the line do not give way. The owner of the line then states on oath that he has caught a sturgeon, and he, too, becomes proud.

These things are mentioned to show how light a creel will fill the soul of a man with vanity. I am not proud. It is nothing to me that I have hooked and played seven hundred pounds weight of quarry. All my desire is to place the little affair on record before the mists of memory breed the miasma of exaggeration. The minnow cost eighteen-pence. It was a beautiful quill minnow, and the tackle-maker said that it could be thrown as a fly. He guaranteed further in respect to the triangles — it glittered with triangles — that, if necessary, the minnow would hold a horse. A man who speaks too much truth is just as offensive as a man who speaks too little. None the less, owing to the defective condition of the present law of libel, the tackle-maker’s name must be withheld.

The minnow and I and a rod went down to a brook to attend to a small jack who lived between two clumps of flags in the most cramped swim that he could select. As a proof that my intentions were strictly honourable, I may mention that I was using a light split-cane rod — very dangerous if the line runs through weeds, but very satisfactory in clean water, inasmuch as it keeps a steady strain on the fish and prevents him from taking liberties. I had an old score against the jack. He owed me two live-bait already, and I had reason to suspect him of coming up-stream and interfering with a little bleak-pool under a horse-bridge which lay entirely beyond his sphere of legitimate influence. Observe, therefore, that my tackle and my motives pointed clearly to jack, and jack alone; though I knew that there were monstrous big perch in the brook. The minnow was thrown as a fly several times, and, owing to my peculiar, and hitherto unpublished, methods of fly throwing, nearly six pennyworth of the triangles came off, either in my coat-collar, or my thumb, or the back of my hand. Fly fishing is a very gory amusement.

The jack was not interested in the minnow, but towards twilight a boy opened a gate of the field and let in some twenty or thirty cows and half-a-dozen cart-horses, and they were all very much interested. The horses galloped up and down the field and shook the banks, but the cows walked solidly and breathed heavily, as people breathe who appreciate the Fine Arts.

By this time I had given up all hope of catching my jack fairly, but I wanted the live-bait and bleak-account settled before I went away, even if I tore up the bottom of the brook. Just before I had quite made up my mind to borrow a tin of chloride of lime from the farm-house — another triangle had fixed itself in my fingers — I made a cast which for pure skill, exact judgment of distance, and perfect coincidence of hand and eye and brain, would have taken every prize at a bait-casting tournament. That was the first half of the cast. The second was postponed because the quill minnow would not return to its proper place, which was under the lobe of my left ear. It had done thus before, and I supposed it was in collision with a grass tuft, till I turned round and saw a large red and white bald faced cow trying to rub what would be withers in a horse with her nose. She looked at me reproachfully, and her look said as plainly as words: —’The season is too far advanced for gadflies. What is this strange Disease?’ I replied, ‘Madam, I must apologise for an unwarrantable liberty on the part of my minnow, but if you will have the goodness to keep still until I can reel in, we will adjust this little difficulty.’

I reeled in very swiftly and cautiously, but she would not wait. She put her tail in the air and ran away. It was a purely involuntary motion on my part: I struck. Other anglers may contradict me, but I firmly believe that if a man had foul-hooked his best friend through the nose, and that friend ran, the man would strike by instinct. I struck, therefore, and the reel began to sing just as merrily as though I had caught my jack. But had it been a jack, the minnow would have come away. I told the tackle-maker this much afterwards, and he laughed and made allusions to the guarantee about holding a horse. Because it was a fat innocent she-cow that had done me no harm the minnow held – held like an anchor-fluke in coral moorings – and I was forced to dance up and down an interminable field very largely used by cattle. It was like salmon fishing in a nightmare. I took gigantic strides, and every stride found me up to my knees in marsh. But the cow seemed to skate along the squashy green by the brook, to skim over the miry backwaters, and to float like a mist through the patches of rush that squirted black filth over my face. Sometimes we whirled through a mob of her friends — there were no friends to help me — and they looked scandalized; and sometimes a young and frivolous cart-horse would join in the chase for a few miles, and kick solid pieces of mud into my eyes; and through all the mud, the milky smell of kine, the rush and the smother, I was aware of my own voice crying:— ‘Pussy, pussy, pussy! Pretty pussy! Come along then, puss-cat!’ You see it is so hard to speak to a cow properly, and she would not listen — no, she would not listen.

Then she stopped, and the moon got up behind the pollards to tell the cows to lie down; but they were all on their feet, and they came trooping to see. And she said, ‘I haven’t had my supper, and I want to go to bed, and please don’t worry me.’ And I said, ‘The matter has passed beyond any apology. There are three courses open to you, my dear lady. If you’ll have the common sense to walk up to my creel I’ll get my knife and you shall have all the minnow. Or, again, if you’ll let me move across to your near side, instead, of keeping me so, coldly on your off side, the thing will come away in one tweak. I can’t pull it out over your withers. Better still, go to a post and rub it out, dear. It won’t hurt much, but if you think I’m going to lose my rod to please you, you are mistaken.’ And she said, ‘I don’t understand what you are saying. I am very, very unhappy.’ And I said, ‘It’s all your fault for trying to fish. Do go to the nearest gate-post, you nice fat thing, and rub it out.’

For a moment I fancied, she was taking my advice. She ran away, and I followed. But all the other cows came with us in a bunch, and I thought of Phaeton trying to drive the Chariot of the Sun, and Texan cowboys killed by stampeding cattle, and ‘Green Grow the Rushes, oh!’ and Solomon and Job, and ‘loosing the hounds of Orion,’ and hooking Behemoth, and Wordsworth who talks about whirling round with stones and rocks and trees, and ‘Here we go round the Mulberry Bush’, and ‘Pippin Hill’, and ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’, and most especially the top joint of my rod. Again she stopped — but nowhere in the neighbourhood of my knife — and her sisters stood moonfaced round her. It seemed that she might, now, run towards me, and I looked for a tree, because cows are very different from salmon, who only jump against the line, and never molest the fisherman.

What followed was worse than any direct attack. She began to buck-jump, to stand on her head and her tail alternately, to leap into the sky, all four feet together, and to dance on her hind legs. It was so violent and improper, so desperately unladylike, that I was inclined to blush, as one would blush at the sight of a prominent statesman sliding down a fire escape, or a duchess chasing her cook with a skillet. That flopsome abandon might go on all night in the lonely meadow among the mists, and if it went on all night — this was pure inspiration — I might be able to worry through the fishing line with my teeth.

Those who desire an entirely new sensation should chew with all their teeth, and against time, through a best waterproofed silk line, one end of which belongs to a mad cow dancing fairy rings in the moonlight; at the same time keeping one eye on the cow and the other on the top joint of a split-cane rod. She buck-jumped and I bit on the slack just in front of the reel; and I am in a position to state that that line was cored with steel wire throughout the particular section which I attacked. This has been formally denied by the tackle-maker, who is not to be believed.

The wheep of the broken line running through the rings told me that henceforth the cow and I might be strangers. I had already bidden goodbye to some tooth or teeth; but no price is too great for freedom of the soul.

‘Madam,’ I said, ‘the minnow and twenty feet of very superior line are your alimony without reservation. For the wrong I have unwittingly done to you I express my sincere regret. At the same time, may I hope that Nature, the kindest of nurses, will in due season —’ She or one of her companions must have stepped on her spare end of the line in the dark, for she bellowed wildly and ran away, followed by all the cows. I hoped the minnow was disengaged at last; and before I went away looked at my watch, fearing to find it nearly midnight. My last cast for the jack was made at 6.23 p.m. There lacked still three and a half minutes of the half-hour; and I would have sworn that the moon was paling before the dawn!

*   *   *   *   *   *

‘Simminly someone were chasing they cows down to bottom o’ Ten Acre,’ said the farmer that evening. ”Twasn’t you, sir?’ ‘Now under what earthly circumstances do you suppose I should chase your cows? I wasn’t fishing for them, was I?’ Then all the farmer’s family gave themselves up to jam-smeared laughter for the rest of the evening, because that was a rare and precious jest, and it was repeated for months, and the fame of it spread from that farm to another, and yet another at least three miles away, and it will be used again for the benefit of visitors when the freshets come down in spring.

But to the greater establishment of my honour and glory I submit in print this bald statement of fact, that I may not, through forgetfulness, be tempted later to tell how I hooked a bull on a Marlow Buzz, how he ran up a tree and took to water; and how I played him along the London road for thirty miles, and gaffed him at Smithfield. Errors of this kind may creep in with the lapse of years, and it is my ambition ever to be a worthy member of that fraternity who pride themselves on never deviating by one hair’s breadth from the absolute and literal truth.