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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To which Antonio answers:

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

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

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

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

There is no other cave for some two miles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

RUDYARD KIPLING.

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AND Mrs. Skittleworth told the tale at a place called the Arts and Crafts, which, when you think of it, was unnecessary; Mrs. Skittleworth herself being all the arts and most of the crafts known to civilization.

She was then practising a few of them on the center divan opposite the entrance, where the fountain plays and the unhappy little pot-palms live. In the first place it was her sworn duty to keep an evasive eye upon a Miss Dormil, who was to be most strictly deprived of the comfort and society of a gentleman called Evans — Richard Evans — who had specially come to the Arts and Crafts to meet the young lady, who was under the chaperonage of Mrs. Skittleworth, according to the manners and customs of the British, who are barbarians. Now since Mrs. Skittleworth had conveyed Miss Dormil wholly and solely to meet Mr. Evans, and since she had to pretend that she saw neither him nor the girl, nor both together, or something equally logical, and since she uneasily suspected that Mrs. Dormil might at any moment arrive and drive the daughter home, and particularly since neither man nor maid seemed to have any idea of the lapse of time, you will understand that Mrs. Skittleworth’s attention was distracted from the door whereat she expected Skittleworth every minute to appear in the company of a man whom she most urgently desired to avoid.

I believe that I had the honor to supply the Missing Link, for on my wandering appearance her face brightened as a general’s when reinforcements pour past to battle.

“There is a man,” she said, “an Unutterable Man. He will arrive with Tom in ten minutes. I shall immediately introduce you to him with smirks and grins. You will more immediately talk. Talk about anything you understand least, but overwhelm him with your conversation as you value my friendship. Then I shall escape with Tom, catch Miss Dormil, drive the Evans boy into the stained-glass alcove — Good gracious! I hope he hasn’t taken the girl there already! — and return to meet, under Providence, the very respectable Mrs. Dormil, who will ask the Unutterable Man to dinner. He is always hungry and … he has dined there before. Then you must transfer yourself to the Evans boy, and while we are all eating our artful afternoon tea and the craftful crumpet in the lunch-place you must escape with him secretly. There ought to be two ways out of every place of appointment.” She poised for breath.

She was used to delivering orders with much clearness, and I gathered from the pucker between her eyebrows that she was in anxiety. Her theory that men do not marry their mothers-in-law, though many mothers-in-law think otherwise, was perpetually leading her into secondhand Comédie-Française embarrassments. All earth and Skittleworth — who at heart is just as bad — could not restrain her from helping forward the most undesirable match ever lighted among her circle of acquaintance. On the Other Side of the World, where I first had the honor of meeting her, this weakness did not alarm; in England — which, it must always be remembered, is the habitation of heathen the worse for being imperfectly converted — she was misunderstood. But all young maidens loved her.

And I said: “I hear and obey — on one condition.”

“On no conditions. You want me to tell you something. I refuse beforehand.”

“Very well, I shall begin to walk. I shall walk down Regent Street for hours and hours, and into the Mile End Road and when Mrs. Dormil comes to thank you for giving her dear Clara, who is so artistic, such a delightful afternoon, the Evans boy will hang in the background pulling pieces out of his gloves and Mrs. Dormil will not love you any more. Seriously, you went to the Theater of the Patent Deviltries —”

“No! Inner Sepulcher. Inner Sepulcher!” said Mrs. Skittleworth, with a shudder. “So glad we didn’t invite you.”

“So am I,” I said icily. “You made a box party, and by all accounts you all behaved abominably. You dropped opera-glasses on the heads of the bald, you conducted yourselves in such a manner that the entire house stopped to look at you, and you, overcome by shame, left at the end of the first act — weeping.”

“This,” said Mrs. Skittleworth pensively, “is the hand of Mrs. Bletchley. She told you that at tea. What else did you learn?”

“The trouble is that I could learn no more. Not one of your guests would speak. Geissler, who can babble about founders’ shares by the hour, was dumb. Skittleworth told me that I had better refer to you. I haven’t seen Miss Dormil to speak to, and the Evans boy declares that it was a most enjoyable evening, but that you all left because the play was dull. The Professor’s Zoetrope is not dull. It’s the best play in London. What was the catastrophe? Everybody is wanting to talk about it, and no one knows anything. Six people have kept a secret for ten days — surely that’s long enough. Tell, and I’ll carry the Evans boy off through the roof if I can’t smuggle him out any other way.”

‘Did anyone tell you it was Tom’s fault?’ began Mrs. Skittleworth cautiously, one eye on the door and another on the ironwork exhibits.

“They said Singleton gave the party — and so —”

“He did not. It was that man Geissler — the Chicago Jew. Ugh! Tom and he cluck like new laid hens over their offensive founders’ shares, whatever those may be. Things that grow up in a night out of nothing and are sold by telegraph.  I hate Geissler. I could never send him anything at dinner without hoping that the fat, or the drumstick, or the stuffing would choke him, and then I would never send for the doctor. Geissler found a box in the Inner Sepulcher. I know the shameful story now, but it almost reconciled me to the man for the moment. The very best box in the Inner Sepulcher — a five-guinea box that could have seated hordes — positive hordes. Do you know that he got it for twenty-five shillings? That was his ineffable meanness.”

“But a Chicago Jew is not always mean,” I adventured.

“Then he was a Levantine dragoman. I thank you for that. His father hauled Cook’s tourists up and down the Pyramids for pence. And the worst of it is that he doesn’t look like a Jew, and he ought to. We provided the dinner — he the box.”

“Who came?”

“Mrs. Eva van Agnew and Geissler, both in one cab — two; Tom and I — four; and Miss Dormil and the Evans boy — six. That was all. I never allow a fortuitous concourse of atoms at my table; and, besides, we have no extra leaf in it. I had immense trouble in cajoling Mrs. Dormil to let her daughter go alone. She wished to assist. Heaven knows, I despise her as honorably as I despise most women; but when she strips for festivities, I always think that she should be ‘hidden from the wise and prudent and’ — how does it go? She makes me feel very undressed with draughts blowing all over me. And, you know, you can’t say: ‘Won’t you put a counterpane over your shoulders, you dear fat thing?’ So they dined, and I was glad, because I knew neither of the young people would remember what they ate — they were in that stage; and Geissler was talking founders’ shares to Tom, and Eva van Agnew was trying to talk to me and watch Geissler at the same time. Geissler wouldn’t throw a word to her. There must have been a quarrel in the cab.”

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“But why were you so concerned about Miss Dormil and the Evans boy?”

“Because he had inflicted himself upon me four twilights out of the seven. He would arrive at half-past four and stay till half-past six, telling me that Miss Dormil was an angel and he was a ruffian, and did I think Mrs. Dormil could be brought to overlook his unworthiness? I liked it — I own I liked it immensely, even when he repeated himself for the twentieth time, and used to smash my drawing-room ornaments trying to make clear the intensity of his feelings. Oh, it’s a relief to catch a young man devoid of nerves, and the less honorable emotions, who does not talk cheap French novels, and knows exactly what he wants, and is humble about it. He confessed all his little sins in the past to me, and I know exactly how his future is going to be arranged, and therefore I assist him in the present. And so we dined, and then we bundled off — Tom and I and the children in the brougham, and Eva and the Israelite, whom I will never forgive, in a hansom; and we saw the play and came away early. Isn’t that enough for you?”

“You went in the brougham and the hansom — yes. And what happened after that?” I continued, unregarding.

“You won’t believe what I tell you.”

“You are speaking.”

“But even I — consider dear Mother Dormil, and do watch the entrance, please — may tell a fib.”

“Never without a motive.”

“Yes — that was the horror of it. It was so — without motive. So purposeless — so cruel; and yet there was a brassy vulgarity about it all that I can’t explain. Try to understand that I am telling you what happened as accurately as I can. We were late for the farce, of course, and the overture was beginning. Of all horrors, it was the Bronze Horse overture.”

“That’s only tinny — not terrifying, surely.”

“Wait! I had arranged things beautifully. Tom and I and Eva and Geissler were to sit in front, and the children at the back, because they were tall and wanted to talk. You know when you are absolutely certain of seeing a thing, you carry the outline of it in your mind’s eye so that it looks real, don’t you? When we trooped in, I was quite certain that I saw the stage, and so on, because a stage is naturally what you expect to see from the best box in the theatre. We banged the chairs about — they were horribly dusty — and then I heard the Evans boy saying ‘Good God!’ under his breath. Tom put his hand on my wrist, and drove my pet bracelet into the bone. ‘Don’t jump or scream,’ he said. ‘Look!”’

“A headless woman in a vacant chair, or a red dog, or something nice and magaziny. Mrs. Skittleworth, please don’t,” I whimpered, because Mrs. Skittleworth is much above that sort of entertainment.

“I knew you would,” she answered. “And now I’m sorry that I didn’t invite you. We looked out of the box at the stage, and at the house, and there was nothing whatever to be seen! Do you understand that? — Nothing whatever to be seen.”

“And what was it like?” I said with intense interest.

“It was awful. It was unspeakable. It was Chaos — raving, mad, howling Chaos! Have you ever been under chloroform, and do you know that die-away-and-away darkness when a train goes into a tunnel, through your head, and all the doors are being slammed, just before you lose consciousness? It was most like that feeling. But it wasn’t. The darkness — the absolute blankness was in your head and your eyes, and yet you were staring into it — staring with your soul as well as your eyes. And then, through it all, we heard the rustle of the house, and the music of the Bronze Horse. That tune is the most diabolical one in the world.”

“Then you could hear?”

“We could hear everything. That was a further horror. We could hear the people getting into their places below, and the crickle of the fans. You know what a hot house the Inner Sepulcher is. We could hear the rumble of traffic outside sometimes, but we could not see any single thing except ourselves in heaven above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.”

“And what happened?”

“I don’t quite remember. I think we must have all waited — I know I did — for the darkness to clear away. I felt as though I had been hit on the head, but would be all right presently if people took no notice and stood off from me, and, above all things, gave me air — plenty of air. Tom’s hand on mine prevented me from making an absolute exhibition of myself. You know how Ashdown frizzes my hair for functions — I was frizzed all over my head very prettily, and I friz through my frizzes; and while I was staring and feeling, oh! so deathly sick, I was distinctly conscious that my hair was tightening — Ashdown had frizzed it too well for it to stand on end — tightening and dragging my eyebrows up and up, so that I must have looked like an Aunt Sally at a fair.”

Mrs. Skittleworth laughed hysterically, and fluttered her very small hands.

A lean, unshorn, toadstool-colored young gentleman in a blue cloak which would have been useless on horseback or in a high wind, a dead-leaf silk throat-wrap, and a sort of football jersey that was doing duty as a shirt, threw himself down on the divan and curled his legs into esoteric attitudes. Mrs. Skittleworth shook the quaver out of her voice, jumped three notes on the piano, and began as one in the middle of things generally.

“And so, you know, they invented a sort of combination garment for the lower classes — to save washing. It’s very effective if it isn’t worn too long, especially at the wristbands and round the neck, but then they provide a clout called a belcher to wear there, and you can get them for one and sevenpence halfpenny in Westbourne Grove. And they come here and do a lot of good, and they are called Socialists. Of course the uniform confuses the sexes. If it’s a he, for instance, it’s wearing its petticoats where it shouldn’t, you know, and if it’s a she it wouldn’t wear a silk hat. But perhaps it’s an exhibit, and if we ask it…”

The young gentleman rose and regarded us with unholy eyes from the lunch balcony.

“A woman who cannot be vulgar on occasions does not know the meaning of True Deportment,” said Mrs. Skittleworth. “You should hear Mrs. Dormil bullying her governess. And where were we? Oh, yes, in that darkness of terror. I think we must have been there for years and years before we heard the rustle of the curtain and the servants’ opening dialogue in the Zoetrope. I wanted to scream at the top of my voice, but it occurred to me that I had been standing up for untold ages in the face of the house. So I sat down and Tom began patting my hand in an absent-minded way and saying: ‘Poor little woman!’ I remembered then that when I was fearfully ill and delirious on the Other Side of the World — no, I won’t say how many years ago — Tom used to sit by my bed for days and weeks doing exactly the same thing; and whenever I would half come to life I was conscious of one hand being patted and ‘poored.’ I knew endearment of that sort was not in place on the box-edge; but I couldn’t take my hand away for all the world. I wanted Tom as I have never wanted him in my life — not even when they all thought I was dying. And the dear boy patted my hand — bless him! He was as white as a sheet. Then I began to think of mother, exactly as a Frenchwoman would. I wondered where she was, and if this hideous darkness was her portion in the other world, and I wanted to step into it and find out and drag her in across the edge of the box. I reflected that I should fall on somebody’s head in the attempt, and I laughed aloud horribly in the one pathetic scene in the Zoetrope, where the Professor tells the little lodging-house servant the story of his life and his broken love-tale, and she cries and mops her face with the duster. And then I jumped, for I knew all the house was looking at me, and that upset the opera-glass, and I heard it fall and hit somebody below, and there was a scuffle, and every eye in everybody’s head, I knew, was fixed on our unhappy, unhappy box. That was the incident of laughing and throwing glasses about that Mrs. Bletchley makes so much of.  The thing dropped into the dark as a stone into water.”

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“But why in the world didn’t you all get up and run out, or complain or — or do something?”

“After the affair of the opera-glass? Mrs. Skittleworth’s party romping in a box, dropping glasses, laughing, and then running out like children in a country church when they’ve tipped hymn-books from the gallery? Never! I may be introduced to the other world against my will, but I know my duty to this, as long as I am in it. I was praying for the first act to end, for I was afraid I could not stand the tension!”

“And the others?”

“You may well ask. I looked round when my own feelings were a little under control. What a blessed thing is a British education! All the Jew that ever cheated in Israel came out in Geissler’s face. He was on the right of the box, half standing up in his chair and gripping the edge with both hands till the plush plumped up in red gores between his fingers. He was not looking at the stage, but into the darkness, and I was more than conscious that he must be staring fiendishly at the opposite box. Staring like a maniac. I felt that those stares were returned. Oh, I felt pins and needles all over, so sure I was that we were being watched while we were smitten with blindness! Complain? How could we complain? Can you go to an attendant at a theater and say, ‘We can’t see out of this box’ — a five-guinea box on the grand tier — the best in the house? If there is one place whence you ought to see all that is to be seen” — Mrs. Skittleworth nearly broke down at this point – “it’s a box. I’ll never take a box again. Give me stalls, or the gallery, where you are in touch with your neighbor and all see ghosts together.”

“Was there a ghost, then?”

“No, no, no — only their country: the room they had just left. Geissler may have seen some. He looked hideous — as though he were being burned alive. His shoulders were cramped up to the back of his head; but I don’t think he was afraid. He seemed to be in pain. Thinking of founders’ shares possibly. Eva made the most painful exhibition of us all. Promise you won’t tell, of course. Her place was empty, and she was down on the floor of the box — mercifully out of sight — her face hidden in a coat thrown over a chair. She had pressed herself into one corner like a frightened rabbit, and was praying. A box isn’t a place to pray in. At least, not when the house is full. You know Eva’s High Church — extremely so; and even in her agony she was intoning. I stooped down and tried to take one of her hands, and said: ‘Hush, dear, hush! think of your dress!’ but she only went on bleating, ‘Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from they ways I – I – like lost sheep,’ over and over again. She was kneeling on that little cheap silk of hers, and nothing in the wide world will ever get the dust out of it again; and she had bundled my heavy white ‘cloud’ over her head to shut out the dark, and she looked just like a lost sheep. I might as well have spoken to one. I am very sorry for Eva.”

“And the others?”

“They had arrived at a most complete understanding, and that nearly made me scream. I felt that I was responsible for everything — Chaos included. Clara was in the Evans boy’s arms, totally and completely, at the back of the box to the left; and to this day I cannot tell why all the house didn’t see them. They must have fancied it was the Day of Judgement. They were murmuring things that you very seldom hear from dress coats and evening frocks, and I honestly believe they never saw the darkness after they had explained themselves.”

“Poor Mrs. Dormil!”

“It wasn’t my fault. I only wished them to improve their acquaintance with each other. Am I responsible if the Powers of Darkness are leagued against me to precipitate matters? Yes, they were in each other’s arms expecting immediate translation. What I saw and said passed in a flash, though I have been so long telling it. The rest was interminable waiting for the first act to end, Eva praying on the floor, and the house rocking with laughter at the jokes, Geissler glaring into Tophet, Tom patting my hand, the children in another world — bless them! — and I playing propriety for them all. Taking an interest in the play in order to prove that I saw it all, and was as much amused as anybody, clapping when the unseen hosts clapped, and smirking when I felt it was time to smirk. I was almost obsequiously attentive to the Zoetrope, and I flatter myself that even the Bletchley woman will admit that I behaved perfectly.”

“Mrs. Skittleworth,” I said, in a voice broken with emotion, “I have long admired and respected you beyond any human being alive. I now worship you with fear and trembling. Men have won the Victoria Cross for less than that.”

Mrs. Skittleworth was graciously pleased to bow her head, always with one eye on the door. She continued:

“Then the curtain went down, and we fled. I have a dim recollection of flying into the cloak-room screaming like a peacock: ‘My things! My things! My things!’ Eva was close behind me. We fell together into the tire-woman’s arms. Luckily she was big, and ready with her blandishments at once. She said: ‘There! there! there! Never mind. ‘Ere’s your cloak, mum’; and I answered, thickly: ‘Yes, yes, yes. Of course — of course. Too hot, too cold; very fine weather indeed.’ She gave us both the best thing available and on the spot. It proved the existence of a conspiracy. It was brandy-and-soda-strong! You should have seen Eva and me gulping it down like washerwomen, while that dear tall Clara drifted about like a saint in a holy dream, conscious that there might have been something wrong somewhere, but more conscious that things were right. ‘We skipped down the passages. We dared not run, but we skipped; and Geissler and Eva went off in separate cabs. I know he volunteered to see her home, for I caught one gesture of hers that would have made the fortune of a tragedy actress. Villain as I am convinced he is, I admire that man for his nerve. Now comes the proof of the conspiracy. Our brougham was on hand when we came out. Generally Jobbins retires to a public-house, and Tom has to prance through the puddles and drag him out personally. But he was waiting, which was a greater miracle than anything else. I spoke to him about it the next day, complimenting him on his virtue.

”’Well, mum,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t ha’ kep’ the pore ‘orses ‘cept that every man of ’em in the theatre, an’ the policemen, an’ all the lot sez to me that you’d be out at the end of the fust act. And so you was, mum, an’ it was a good job I waited ‘stead o’ savin’ the pore ‘orses.’

“That is the only approach to an explanation that I have been able to arrive at — that, and the fact that Geissler got the box for twenty-five shillings. The entire theater staff of the Inner Sepulcher must know all about it, and yet . . . Can you believe? Do you believe? Try to speak the truth. Geissler has never given any sign of his existence to me since that night. Eva has gone out of town, and Clara and the Evans boy . . . you see. Somehow I feel as though I were responsible for everything. You do believe, don’t you?”

“Implicitly,” I replied. ‘If you cannot see a thing which is in front of you, who am I to dissent? Of course I believe. You intend to take no further steps?”

“None whatever. I’ll never set foot in that theater again. That’s all; and Tom doesn’t like me to talk about it. Clara won’t speak either, I’m certain. She imagines it was sent from heaven to assist the Evans boy to propose to her.”

“Poor Mrs. Dormil!”

“Yes, and here, for my many sins, she comes, without Tom or the other man. Fly! Catch Miss Dormil and walk ostentatiously with her while I lure the old lady to the food-troughs. The Evans boy can escape unseen if he has any sense.”

But at that crisis he had not, and they both glowered at me when I found them in the stained-glass alcove; and I had to explain matters apart to the Evans boy, and he left with the air of a baffled conspirator; and though I was dying to ask Miss Dormil twenty thousand questions, she being wrapped up in her own vain imaginings, I could never get any further than:

“What do you think of the Arts and Crafts?”

Cry ‘Murder!’ in the market-place, and each
Will turn upon his neighbour anxious eyes
That ask—‘Art thou the man?’  We hunted Cain,
Some centuries ago, across the world.
That bred the fear our own misdeeds maintain
Today.
(Vibart’s Moralities)

[a short tale]

SHAKESPEARE says something about worms, or it may be giants or beetles, turning if you tread on them too severely. The safest plan is never to tread on a worm—not even on the last new subaltern from Home, with his buttons hardly out of their tissue-paper, and the red of sappy English beef in his cheeks. This is a story of the worm that turned. For the sake of brevity, we will call Henry Augustus Ramsay Faizanne ‘The Worm,’ though he really was an exceedingly pretty boy, without a hair on his face, and with a waist like a girl’s, when he came out to the Second ‘Shikarris’ and was made unhappy in several ways. The ‘Shikarris’ are a high-caste regiment, and you must be able to do things well—play a banjo, or ride more than a little, or sing, or act,—to get on with them.

The Worm did nothing except fall off his pony, and knock chips out of gate-posts with his trap. Even that became monotonous after a time. He objected to whist, cut the cloth at billiards, sang out of tune, kept very much to himself, and wrote to his Mamma and sisters at Home. Four of these five things were vices which the ‘Shikarris’ objected to and set themselves to eradicate. Every one knows how subalterns are, by brother subalterns, softened and not permitted to be ferocious. It is good and wholesome, and does no one any harm, unless tempers are lost; and then there is trouble. There was a man once—

The ‘Shikarris’ shikarred The Worm very much, and he bore everything without winking. He was so good and so anxious to learn, and flushed so pink, that his education was cut short, and he was left to his own devices by every one except the Senior Subaltern, who continued to make life a burden to The Worm. The Senior Subaltern meant no harm; but his chaff was coarse and he didn’t quite understand where to stop. He had been waiting too long for his Company; and that always sours a man. Also he was in love, which made him worse.

One day, after he had borrowed The Worm’s trap for a lady who never existed, had used it himself all the afternoon, had sent a note to The Worm, purporting to come from the lady, and was telling the Mess all about it, The Worm rose in his place and said, in his quiet, ladylike voice—‘That was a very pretty sell; but I’ll lay you a month’s pay to a month’s pay when you get your step, that I work a sell on you that you’ll remember for the rest of your days, and the Regiment after you when you’re dead or broke.’ The Worm wasn’t angry in the least, and the rest of the Mess shouted. Then the Senior Subaltern looked at The Worm from the boots upwards, and down again, and said—‘Done, Baby.’ The Worm held the rest of the Mess to witness that the bet had been taken, and retired into a book with a sweet smile.

Two months passed, and the Senior Subaltern still educated The Worm, who began to move about a little more as the hot weather came on. I have said that the Senior Subaltern was in love. The curious thing is that a girl was in love with the Senior Subaltern. Though the Colonel said awful things, and the Majors snorted, and the married Captains looked unutterable wisdom, and the juniors scoffed, those two were engaged.

The Senior Subaltern was so pleased with getting his Company and his acceptance at the same time that he forgot to bother The Worm. The girl was a pretty girl, and had money of her own. She does not come into this story at all.

One night, at the beginning of the hot weather, all the Mess, except The Worm, who had gone to his own room to write Home letters, were sitting on the platform outside the Mess House. The Band had finished playing, but no one wanted to go in. And the Captains’ wives were there also. The folly of a man in love is unlimited. The Senior Subaltern had been holding forth on the merits of the girl he was engaged to, and the ladies were purring approval while the men yawned, when there was a rustle of skirts in the dark, and a tired, faint voice lifted itself.

‘Where’s my husband?’

I do not wish in the least to reflect on the morality of the ‘Shikarris’; but it is on record that four men jumped up as if they had been shot. Three of them were married men. Perhaps they were afraid that their wives had come from Home unbeknownst. The fourth said that he had acted on the impulse of the moment. He explained this afterwards.

Then the voice cried, ‘Oh, Lionel!’ Lionel was the Senior Subaltern’s name. A woman came into the little circle of light by the candles on the peg-tables, stretching out her hands to the dark where the Senior Subaltern was, and sobbing. We rose to our feet, feeling that things were going to happen and ready to believe the worst. In this bad, small world of ours, one knows so little of the life of the next man—which, after all, is entirely his own concern—that one is not surprised when a crash comes. Anything might turn up any day for any one. Perhaps the Senior Subaltern had been trapped in his youth. Men are crippled that way occasionally. We didn’t know; we wanted to hear; and the Captains’ wives were as anxious as we. If he had been trapped he was to be excused; for the woman from nowhere, in the dusty shoes and gray travelling-dress, was very lovely, with black hair and great eyes full of tears. She was tall, with a fine figure, and her voice had a running sob in it pitiful to hear. As soon as the Senior Subaltern stood up, she threw her arms round his neck, and called him ‘my darling,’ and said she could not bear waiting alone in England, and his letters were so short and cold, and she was his to the end of the world, and would he forgive her? This did not sound quite like a lady’s way of speaking. It was too demonstrative.

Things seemed black indeed, and the Captains’ wives peered under their eyebrows at the Senior Subaltern, and the Colonel’s face set like the Day of Judgment framed in gray bristles, and no one spoke for a while.

Next the Colonel said, very shortly, ‘Well, Sir?’ and the woman sobbed afresh. The Senior Subaltern was half choked with the arms round his neck, but he gasped out—‘It’s a damned lie! I never had a wife in my life!’ ‘Don’t swear,’ said the Colonel. ‘Come into the Mess. We must sift this clear somehow,’ and he sighed to himself, for he believed in his ‘Shikarris,’ did the Colonel.

We trooped into the ante-room, under the full lights, and there we saw how beautiful the woman was. She stood up in the middle of us all, sometimes choking with crying, then hard and proud, and then holding out her arms to the Senior Subaltern. It was like the fourth act of a tragedy. She told us how the Senior Subaltern had married her when he was Home on leave eighteen months before; and she seemed to know all that we knew, and more too, of his people and his past life. He was white and ashy-gray, trying now and again to break into the torrent of her words; and we, noting how lovely she was and what a criminal he looked, esteemed him a beast of the worst kind. We felt sorry for him, though.

I shall never forget the indictment of the Senior Subaltern by his wife. Nor will he. It was so sudden, rushing out of the dark, unannounced, into our dull lives. The Captains’ wives stood back; but their eyes were alight, and you could see that they had already convicted and sentenced the Senior Subaltern. The Colonel seemed five years older. One Major was shading his eyes with his hand and watching the woman from underneath it. Another was chewing his moustache and smiling quietly as if he were witnessing a play. Full in the open space in the centre, by the whist-tables, the Senior Subaltern’s terrier was hunting for fleas. I remember all this as clearly as though a photograph were in my hand. I remember the look of horror on the Senior Subaltern’s face. It was rather like seeing a man hanged, but much more interesting. Finally, the woman wound up by saying that the Senior Subaltern carried a double F.M. in tattoo on his left shoulder. We all knew that, and to our innocent minds it seemed to clinch the matter. But one of the bachelor Majors said very politely, ‘I presume that your marriage-certificate would be more to the purpose.’

That roused the woman. She stood up and sneered at the Senior Subaltern for a cur, and abused the Major and the Colonel and all the rest. Then she wept, and then she pulled a paper from her breast, saying imperially, ‘Take that! And let my husband—my lawfully wedded husband, read it aloud—if he dare!’

There was a hush, and the men looked into each other’s eyes as the Senior Subaltern came forward in a dazed and dizzy way, and took the paper. We were wondering, as we stared, whether there was anything against any one of us that might turn up later on. The Senior Subaltern’s throat was dry; but, as he ran his eye over the paper, he broke out into a hoarse cackle of relief, and said to the woman, ‘You young blackguard!’ But the woman had fled through a door, and on the paper was written, ‘This is to certify that I, The Worm, have paid in full my debts to the Senior Subaltern, and, further, that the Senior Subaltern is my debtor, by agreement on the 23d of February, as by the Mess attested, to the extent of one month’s Captain’s pay, in the lawful currency of the Indian Empire.’

Then a deputation set off for The Worm’s quarters, and found him, betwixt and between, unlacing his stays, with the hat, wig, and serge dress, on the bed. He came over as he was, and the ‘Shikarris’ shouted till the Gunners’ Mess sent over to know if they might have a share of the fun. I think we were all, except the Colonel and the Senior Subaltern, a little disappointed that the scandal had come to nothing. But that is human nature. There could be no two words about The Worm’s acting. It leaned as near to a nasty tragedy as anything this side of a joke can. When most of the Subalterns sat upon him with sofa-cushions to find out why he had not said that acting was his strong point, he answered very quietly, ‘I don’t think you ever asked me. I used to act at Home with my sisters.’ But no acting with girls could account for The Worm’s display that night. Personally, I think it was in bad taste; besides being dangerous. There is no sort of use in playing with fire, even for fun.

The ‘Shikarris’ made him President of the Regimental Dramatic Club; and, when the Senior Subaltern paid up his debt, which he did at once, The Worm sank the money in scenery and dresses. He was a good Worm; and the ‘Shikarris’ are proud of him. The only drawback is that he has been christened ‘Mrs. Senior Subaltern’ ; and, as there are now two Mrs. Senior Subalterns in the Station, this is sometimes confusing to strangers.

Later on, I will tell you of a case something like this, but with all the jest left out and nothing in it but real trouble.

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THE day that I chose to visit H.M.S. Peridot in Simon’s Bay was the day that the Admiral had chosen to send her up the coast. She was just steaming out to sea as my train came in, and since the rest of the Fleet were either coaling or busy at the rifle-ranges a thousand feet up the hill, I found myself stranded, lunchless, on the sea-front with no hope of return to Cape Town before 5 p.m. At this crisis I had the luck to come across my friend Inspector Hooper, Cape Government Railways, in command of an engine and a brake-van chalked for repair.‘If you get something to eat,’ he said, ‘I’ll run you down to Glengaritf siding till the goods comes along. It’s cooler there than here, you see.’

I got food and drink from the Greeks who sell all things at a price, and the engine trotted us a couple of miles up the line to a bay of drifted sand and a plank-platform half buried in sand not a hundred yards from the edge of the surf. Moulded dunes, whiter than any snow, rolled far inland up a brown and purple valley of splintered rocks and dry scrub. A crowd of Malays hauled at a net beside two blue and green boats on the beach; a picnic party danced and shouted barefoot where a tiny river trickled across the flat, and a circle of dry hills, whose feet were set in sands of silver, locked us in against a seven-coloured sea. At either horn of the bay the railway line, cut just above highwater mark, ran round a shoulder of piled rocks, and disappeared.

‘You see, there’s always a breeze here,’ said Hooper, opening the door as the engine left us in the siding on the sand, and the strong south-easter buffeting under Elsie’s Peak dusted sand into our tickey beer. Presently he sat down to a file full of spiked documents. He had returned from a long trip up-country, where he had been reporting on damaged rolling-stock, as far away as Rhodesia. The weight of the bland wind on my eyelids; the song of it under the car-roof, and high up among the rocks; the drift of fine grains chasing each other musically ashore; the tramp of the surf; the voices of the picnickers; the rustle of Hooper’s file, and the presence of the assured sun, joined with the beer to cast me into magical slumber. The hills of False Bay were just dissolving into those of fairyland when I heard footsteps on the sand outside, and the clink of our couplings.

‘Stop that!’ snapped Hooper, without raising his head from his work. ‘It’s those dirty little Malay boys, you see: they’re always playing with the trucks . . . .’

‘Don’t be hard on ’em. The railway’s a general refuge in Africa,’ I replied.

‘’Tis—up-country at any rate. That reminds me,’ he felt in his waistcoat-pocket, ‘I’ve got a curiosity for you from Wankies—beyond Bulawayo. It’s more of a souvenir perhaps than——’

‘The old hotel’s inhabited,’ cried a voice. ‘White men, from the language. Marines to the front! Come on, Pritch. Here’s your Belmont. Wha—i—i!’

The last word dragged like a rope as Mr. Pyecroft ran round to the open door, and stood looking up into my face. Behind him an enormous Sergeant of Marines trailed a stalk of dried seaweed, and dusted the sand nervously from his fingers.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘I thought the Hierophant was down the coast?’

‘We came in last Tuesday—from Tristan d’Acunha—for overhaul, and we shall be in dockyard ’ands for two months, with boiler-seatings.’

‘Come and sit down.’ Hooper put away the file.

‘This is Mr. Hooper of the Railway,’ I explained, as Pyecroft turned to haul up the black-moustached sergeant.

‘This is Sergeant Pritchard, of the Agaric, an old shipmate,’ said he. ‘We were strollin’ on the beach.’ The monster blushed and nodded. He filled up one side of the van when he sat down.

‘And this is my friend, Mr. Pyecroft,’ I added to Hooper, already busy with the extra beer which my prophetic soul had bought from the Greeks.

‘Moi aussi,’ quoth Pyecroft, and drew out beneath his coat a labelled quart bottle.

‘Why, it’s Bass!’ cried Hooper.

‘It was Pritchard,’ said Pyecroft. ‘They can’t resist him.’

‘That’s not so,’ said Pritchard mildly.

‘Not verbatim per’aps, but the look in the eye came to the same thing.’

‘Where was it?’ I demanded.

‘Just on beyond here—at Kalk Bay. She was slappin’ a rug in a back verandah. Pritch ’adn’t more than brought his batteries to bear, before she stepped indoors an’ sent it flyin’ over the wall.’

Pyecroft patted the warm bottle.

‘It was all a mistake,’ said Pritchard. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if she mistook me for Maclean. We’re about of a size.’

I had heard householders of Muizenberg, St. James, and Kalk Bay complain of the difficulty of keeping beer or good servants at the seaside, and I began to see the reason. None the less, it was excellent Bass, and I too drank to the health of that large-minded maid.

‘It’s the uniform that fetches ’em, an’ they fetch it,’ said Pyecroft. ‘My simple navy blue is respectable, but not fascinatin’. Now Pritch in ’is Number One rig is always “purr Mary, on the terrace”—ex officio as you might say.’

‘She took me for Maclean, I tell you,’ Pritchard insisted. ‘Why—why—to listen to him you wouldn’t think that only yesterday——’

‘Pritch,’ said Pyecroft, ‘be warned in time. If we begin tellin’ what we know about each other we’ll be turned out of the pub. Not to mention aggravated desertion on several occasions——’

‘Never anything more than absence without leaf—I defy you to prove it,’ said the Sergeant hotly. ‘An’ if it comes to that, how about Vancouver in ’87?’

‘How about it? Who pulled bow in the gig going ashore? Who told Boy Niven . . .?’

‘Surely you were court-martialled for that?’ I said. The story of Boy Niven who lured seven or eight able-bodied seamen and marines into the woods of British Columbia used to be a legend of the Fleet.

page 2

‘Yes, we were court-martialled to rights,’ said Pritchard, ‘but we should have been tried for murder if Boy Niven ’adn’t been unusually tough. He told us he had an uncle ’oo’d give us land to farm. ’E said he was born at the back o’ Vancouver Island, and all the time the beggar was a balmy Barnado Orphan!’

‘But we believed him, said Pyecroft. ‘I did—you did—Paterson did—an’ ’oo was the Marine that married the cocoanut-woman afterwards—him with the mouth?’

‘Oh, Jones, Spit-Kid Jones. I ’aven’t thought of ’im in years,’ said Pritchard. ‘Yes, Spit-Kid believed it, an’ George Anstey and Moon. We were very young an’ very curious.’

‘But lovin’ an’ trustful to a degree,’ said Pyecroft.

‘’Remember when ’e told us to walk in single file for fear o’ bears? ’Remember, Pye, when ’e ’opped about in that bog full o’ ferns an’ sniffed an’ said ’e could smell the smoke of ’is uncle’s farm ? An’ all the time it was a dirty little outlyin’ uninhabited island. We walked round it in a day, an’ come back to our boat lyin’ on the beach. A whole day Boy Niven kept us walkin’ in circles lookin’ for ’is uncle’s farm! He said his uncle was compelled by the law of the land to give us a farm!’

‘Don’t get hot, Pritch. We believed,’ said Pyecroft.

‘He’d been readin’ books. He only did it to get a run ashore an’ have himself talked of. A day an’ a night—eight of us—followin’ Boy Niven round an uninhabited island in the Vancouver archipelago! Then the picket came for us an’ a nice pack o’ idiots we looked!’

‘What did you get for it?’ Hooper asked.

‘Heavy thunder with continuous lightning for two hours. Thereafter sleet-squalls, a confused sea, and cold, unfriendly weather till conclusion o’cruise,’ said Pyecroft. ‘It was only what we expected, but what we felt—an’ I assure you, Mr. Hooper, even a sailor-man has a heart to break—was bein’ told that we able seamen an’ promisin’ marines ’ad misled Boy Niven. Yes, we poor back-to-the-landers was supposed to ’ave misled him! He rounded on us, o’ course, an’ got off easy.’

‘Excep’ for what we gave him in the steerin’-flat when we came out o’ cells. ’Eard anything of ’im lately, Pye?’

‘Signal Boatswain in the Channel Fleet, I believe—Mr. L. L. Niven is.’

‘An’ Anstey died o’ fever in Benin,’ Pritchard mused. ‘What come to Moon? Spit-Kid we know about.’

‘Moon—Moon! Now where did I last . . .? Oh yes, when I was in the Palladium. I met Quigley at Buncrana Station. He told me Moon ’ad run when the Astrild sloop was cruising among the South Seas three years back. He always showed signs o’ bein’ a Mormonastic beggar. Yes, he slipped off quietly an’ they ’adn’t time to chase ’im round the islands even if the navigatin’ officer ’ad been equal to the job.’

‘Wasn’t he?’ said Hooper.

‘Not so. Accordin’ to Quigley the Astrild spent half her commission rompin’ up the beach like a she-turtle, an’ the other half hatching turtles’ eggs on the top o’ numerous reefs. When she was docked at Sydney her copper looked like Aunt Maria’s washing on the line—an’ her ’midship frames was sprung. The commander swore the dockyard ’ad done it haulin’ the pore thing on to the slips. They do do strange things at sea, Mr. Hooper.’

‘Ah! I’m not a taxpayer,’ said Hooper, and opened a fresh bottle. The Sergeant seemed to be one who had a difficulty in dropping subjects.

‘How it all comes back, don’t it?’ he said. ‘Why, Moon must ’ave ’ad sixteen years’ service before he ran.’

‘It takes ’em at all ages. Look at—you know,’ said Pyecroft.

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘A service man within eighteen months of his pension is the party you’re thinkin’ of,’ said Pritchard. ‘A warrant ’oo’s name begins with a V., isn’t it?’

‘But, in a way o’ puttin’ it, we can’t say that he actually did desert,’ Pyecroft suggested.

‘Oh no,’ said Pritchard. ‘It was only permanent absence up-country without leaf. That was all.’

‘Up-country?’ said Hooper. ‘Did they circulate his description?’

‘What for?’ said Pritchard, most impolitely.

‘Because deserters are like columns in the war. They don’t move away from the line, you see. I’ve known a chap caught at Salisbury that way tryin’ to get to Nyassa. They tell me, but o’ course I don’t know, that they don’t ask questions on the Nyassa Lake Flotilla up there. I’ve heard of a P. and O. quartermaster in full command of an armed launch there.’

‘Do you think Click ’ud ha’ gone up that way?’ Pritchard asked.

‘There’s no saying. He was sent up to Bloemfontein to take over some Navy ammunition left in the fort. We know he took it over and saw it into the trucks. Then there was no more Click—then or thereafter. Four months ago it transpired, and thus the casus belli stands at present,’ said Pyecroft.

‘What were his marks?’ said Hooper again.

‘Does the Railway get a reward for returnin’ ’em, then?’ said Pritchard.

‘If I did d’you suppose I’d talk about it?’ Hooper retorted angrily.

‘You seemed so very interested,’ said Pritchard with equal crispness.

‘Why was he called Click?’ I asked, to tide over an uneasy little break in the conversation. The two men were staring at each other very fixedly.

page 3

‘Because of an ammunition hoist carryin’ away,’ said Pyecroft. ‘And it carried away four of ’is teeth-on the lower port side, wasn’t it, Pritch? The substitutes which he bought weren’t screwed home, in a manner o’ sayin’. When he talked fast they used to lift a little on the bedplate. ’Ence, “Click.” They called ’im a superior man, which is what we’d call a long, black-’aired, genteelly-speakin’,’alf-bred beggar on the lower deck.’

‘Four false teeth in the lower left jaw,’ said Hooper, his hand in his waistcoat-pocket. ‘What tattoo marks?’

‘Look here,’ began Pritchard, half rising. ‘I’m sure we’re very grateful to you as a gentleman for your ’orspitality, but per’aps we may ’ave made an error in——’

I looked at Pyecroft for aid—Hooper was crimsoning rapidly.

‘If the fat marine now occupying the foc’sle will kindly bring ’is status quo to an anchor yet once more, we may be able to talk like gentlemen—not to say friends,’ said Pyecroft. ‘He regards you, Mr. Hooper, as a emissary of the Law.’

‘I only wish to observe that when a gentleman exhibits such a peculiar, or I should rather say, such a bloomin’ curiosity in identification marks as our friend here——’

‘Mr. Pritchard,’ I interposed, ‘I’ll take all the responsibility for Mr. Hooper.’

‘An’ you’ll apologise all round,’ said Pyecroft. ‘You’re a rude little man, Pritch.’

‘But how was I——’ he began, wavering.

‘I don’t know an’ I don’t care. Apologise!’

The giant looked round bewildered and took our little hands into his vast grip, one by one.

‘I was wrong,’ he said meekly as a sheep. ‘My suspicions was unfounded. Mr. Hooper, I apologise.’

‘You did quite right to look out for your own end o’ the line,’ said Hooper. ‘I’d ha’ done the same with a gentleman I didn’t know, you see. If you don’t mind I’d like to hear a little more o’ your Mr. Vickery. It’s safe with me, you see.’

‘Why did Vickery run?’ I began, but Pyecroft’s smile made me turn my question to ‘Who was she?’

‘She kep’ a little hotel at Hauraki—near Auckland,’ said Pyecroft.

‘By Gawd!’ roared Pritchard, slapping his hand on his leg. ‘Not Mrs. Bathurst!’

Pyecroft nodded slowly, and the Sergeant called all the powers of darkness to witness his bewilderment.

‘So far as I could get at it, Mrs. B. was the lady in question.’

‘But Click was married,’ cried Pritchard.

‘An’ ’ad a fifteen-year-old daughter. ’E’s shown me her photograph. Settin’ that aside, so to say, ’ave you ever found these little things make much difference? Because I haven’t.’

‘Good Lord Alive an’ Watchin’! . . . Mrs. Bathurst. . . .’ Then with another roar: ‘You can say what you please, Pye, but you don’t make me believe it was any of ’er fault. She wasn’t that!’

‘If I was going to say what I please, I’d begin by callin’ you a silly ox an’ work up to the higher pressures at leisure. I’m trying to say solely what transpired. M’rover, for once you’re right. It wasn’t her fault.’

‘You couldn’t ’aven’t made me believe it if it ’ad been,’ was the answer.

Such faith in a Sergeant of Marines interested me greatly. ‘Never mind about that,’ I cried. ‘Tell me what she was like.’

‘She was a widow,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Left so very young and never re-spliced. She kep’ a little hotel for warrants and noncoms close to Auckland, an’ she always wore black silk, and ’er neck——’

‘You ask what she was like,’ Pritchard broke in. ‘Let me give you an instance. I was at Auckland first in ’97, at the end o’ the Marroquin’s commission, an’ as I’d been promoted I went up with the others. She used to look after us all, an’ she never lost by it—not a penny! “Pay me now,” she’d say, “or settle later. I know you won’t let me suffer. Send the money from home if you like.” Why, gentlemen all, I tell you I’ve seen that lady take her own gold watch an’ chain off her neck in the bar an’ pass it to a bosun ’oo’d come ashore without ’is ticker an’ ’ad to catch the last boat. “I don’t know your name,” she said, “but when you’ve done with it, you’ll find plenty that know me on the front. Send it back by one o’ them.” And it was worth thirty pounds if it was worth ’arf-a-crown. The little gold watch, Pye, with the blue monogram at the back. But, as I was sayin’, in those days she kep’ a beer that agreed with me—Slits it was called. One way an’ another I must ’ave punished a good few bottles of it while we was in the bay—comin’ ashore every night or so. Chaffin’ across the bar like, once when we were alone, “Mrs. B.,” I said, “when next I call I want you to remember that this is my particular just as you’re my particular.” (She’d let you go that far!) “Just as you’re my particular,” I said. “Oh, thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,” she says, an’ put ’er hand up to the curl be’ind ’er ear. Remember that way she had, Pye?’

‘I think so,’ said the sailor.

‘Yes, “Thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,” she says. “The least I can do is to mark it for you in case you change your mind. There’s no great demand for it in the Fleet,” she says, “but to make sure I’ll put it at the back o’ the shelf,” an’ she snipped off apiece of her hair ribbon with that old dolphin cigar-cutter on the bar – remember it, Pye?—an’ she tied a bow round what was left just four bottles. That was ’97-no, ’96. In ’98 I was in the Resilient—China station—full commission. In Nineteen One, mark you, I was in the Carthusian, back in Auckland Bay again. Of course I went up to Mrs. B.’s with the rest of us to see how things were goin’. They were the same as ever. (Remember the big tree on the pavement by the side-bar, Pye?) I never said anythin’ in special (there was too many of us talkin’ to her), but she saw me at once.’

‘That wasn’t difficult?’ I ventured.

‘Ah, but wait. I was comin’ up to the bar, when, “Ada,” she says to her niece, “get me Sergeant Pritchard’s particular,” and, gentlemen all, I tell you before I could shake ’ands with the lady, there were those four bottles o’ Slits, with ’er ’air-ribbon in a bow round each o’ their necks, set down in front o’ me, an’ as she drew the cork she looked at me under her eyebrows in that blindish way she had o’ lookin’, an’, “Sergeant Pritchard,” she says, “I do ’ope you ’aven’t changed your mind about your particulars.” That’s the kind o’ woman she was—after five years!’

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‘I don’t see her yet somehow,’ said Hooper, but with sympathy.

‘She—she never scrupled to feed a lame duck or set ’er foot on a scorpion at any time of ’er life,’ Pritchard added valiantly.

‘That don’t help me either. My mother’s like that for one.’

The giant heaved inside his uniform and rolled his eyes at the car-roof. Said Pyecroft suddenly:—

‘How many women have you been intimate with all over the world, Pritch?’

Pritchard ’blushed plum-colour to the short hairs of his seventeen-inch neck.

‘’Undreds,’ said Pyecroft. ‘So’ve I. How many of ’em can you remember in your own mind, settin’ aside the first—an’ per’aps the last—and one more?’

‘Few, wonderful few, now I tax myself,’ said Sergeant Pritchard relievedly.

‘An’ how many times might you ’ave been at Auckland?’

‘One—two,’ he began—‘why, I can’t make it more than three times in ten years. But I can remember every time that I ever saw Mrs. B.’

‘So can I—an’ I’ve only been to Auckland twice—how she stood an’ what she was sayin’ an’ what she looked like. That’s the secret. ’Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It. Some women’ll stay in a man’s memory if they once walk down a street, but most of ’em you can live with a month on end, an’ next commission you’d be put to it to certify whether they talked in their sleep or not, as one might say.’

‘Ah!’ said Hooper. ‘That’s more the idea. I’ve known just two women of that nature.’

‘An’ it was no fault o’ theirs ?’ asked Pritchard.

‘None whatever. I know that!’

‘An’ if a man gets struck with that kind o’ woman, Mr. Hooper?’ Pritchard went on.

‘He goes crazy—or just saves himself,’ was the slow answer.

‘You’ve hit it,’ said the Sergeant. ‘You’ve seen an’ known somethin’ in the course o’ your life, Mr. Hooper. I’m lookin’ at you!’ He set down his bottle.

‘And how often had Vickery seen her?’ I asked.

‘That’s the dark an’ bloody mystery,’ Pyecroft answered. ‘I’d never come across him till I come out in the Hierophant just now, an’ there wasn’t any one in the ship who knew much about him. You see, he was what you call a superior man. ’E spoke to me once or twice about Auckland and Mrs. B. on the voyage out. I called that to mind subsequently. There must ’ave been a good deal between ’em, to my way o’ thinkin’. Mind you, I’m only giving you my résumé of it all, because all I know is second-hand so to speak, or rather I should say more than second-’and.’

‘How?’ said Hooper peremptorily. ‘You must have seen it or heard it.’

‘Ye-es,’ said Pyecroft. ‘I used to think seein’ and hearin’ was the only regulation aids to ascertainin’ facts, but as we get older we get more accommodatin’. The cylinders work easier, I suppose . . . . Were you in Cape Town last December when Phyllis’s Circus came?’

‘No—up-country,’ said Hooper, a little nettled at the change of venue.

‘I ask because they had a new turn of a scientific nature called “Home and Friends for a Tickey.” ‘

‘Oh, you mean the cinematograph—the pictures of prize-fights and steamers. I’ve seen ’em upcountry.’

‘Biograph or cinematograph was what I was alludin’ to. London Bridge with the omnibuses—a troopship goin’ to the war—marines on parade at Portsmouth, an’ the Plymouth Express arrivin’ at Paddin’ton.’

‘Seen ’em all. Seen ’em all,’ said Hooper impatiently.

‘We Hierophants came in just before Christmas week an’ leaf was easy.’

‘I think a man gets fed up with Cape Town quicker than anywhere else on the station. Why, even Durban’s more like Nature. We was there for Christmas,’ Pritchard put in.

‘Not bein’ a devotee of Indian peeris, as our Doctor said to the Pusser, I can’t exactly say. Phyllis’s was good enough after musketry practice at Mozambique. I couldn’t get off the first two or three nights on account of what you might call an imbroglio with our Torpedo Lieutenant in the submerged flat, where some pride of the West Country had sugared up a gyroscope; but I remember Vickery went ashore with our Carpenter Rigdon—old Crocus we called him. As a general rule Crocus never left ’is ship unless an’ until he was ’oisted out with a winch, but when ’e went ’e would return noddin’ like a lily gemmed with dew. We smothered him down below that night, but the things ’e said about Vickery as a fittin’ playmate for a Warrant Officer of ’is cubic capacity, before we got him quiet, was what I should call pointed.’

‘I’ve been with Crocus—in the Redoubtable,’ said the Sergeant. ‘He’s a character if there is one.’

‘Next night I went into Cape Town with Dawson and Pratt; but just at the door of the Circus I came across Vickery. “Oh!” he says, “you’re the man I’m looking for. Come and sit next me. This way to the shillin’ places!” I went astern at once, protestin’ because tickey seats better suited my so-called finances. “Come on,” says Vickery, “I’m payin’.” Naturally I abandoned Pratt and Dawson in anticipation o’ drinks to match the seats. “No,” he says, when this was ’inted—“not now. Not now. As many as you please afterwards, but I want you sober for the occasion.” I caught ’is face under a lamp just then, an’ the appearance of it quite cured me of my thirst. Don’t mistake. It didn’t frighten me. It made me anxious. I can’t tell you what it was like, but that was the effect which it ’ad on me. If you want to know, it reminded me of those things in bottles in those herbalistic shops at Plymouth—preserved in spirits of wine. White an’ crumply things—previous to birth as you might say.’

‘You ’ave a beastial mind, Pye,’ said the Sergeant, relighting his pipe.

page 5

‘Perhaps. We were in the front row, an’ “Home an’ Friends” came on early. Vickery touched me on the knee when the number went up. “If you see anything that strikes you,” he says, “drop me a hint”; then he went on clicking. We saw London Bridge an’ so forth an’ so on, an’ it was most interestin’. I’d never seen it before. You ’eard a little dynamo like buzzin’, but the pictures were the real thing—alive an’ movin’.’

‘I’ve seen ’em,’ said Hooper. ‘Of course they are taken from the very thing itself—you see.’

‘Then the Western Mail came in to Paddin’ton on the big magic-lantern sheet. First we saw the platform empty an’ the porters standin’ by. Then the engine come in, head on, an’ the women in the front row jumped: she headed so straight. Then the doors opened and the passengers came out and the porters got the luggage just like life. Only—only when any one came down too far towards us that was watchin’, they walked right out o’ the picture, so to speak. I was ’ighly interested, I can tell you. So were all of us. I watched an old man with a rug ’oo’d dropped a book an’ was tryin’ to pick it up, when quite slowly, from be’ind two porters—carryin’ a little reticule an’ lookin’ from side to side—comes out Mrs. Bathurst. There was no mistakin’ the walk in a hundred thousand. She come forward—right forward—she looked out straight at us with that blindish look which Pritch alluded to. She walked on and on till she melted out of the picture—like—like a shadow jumpin’ over a candle, an’ as she went I ’eard Dawson in the tickey seats be’ind sing out: “Christ! there’s Mrs. B.!”’

Hooper swallowed his spittle and leaned forward intently.

‘Vickery touched me on the knee again. He was clickin’ his four false teeth with his jaw down like an enteric at the last kick. “Are you sure?” says he. “Sure,” I says, “didn’t you ’ear Dawson give tongue? Why, it’s the woman herself.” “I was sure before,” he says, “but I brought you to make sure. Will you come again with me tomorrow?”

‘“Willingly,” I says, “it’s like meetin’ old friends.”

‘“Yes,” he says, openin’ his watch, “very like. It will be four-and-twenty hours less four minutes before I see her again. Come and have a drink,” he says. “It may amuse you, but it’s no sort of earthly use to me.” He went out shaking his head an’ stumblin’ over people’s feet as if he was drunk already. I anticipated a swift drink an’ a speedy return, because I wanted to see the performin’ elephants. Instead o’ which Vickery began to navigate the town at the rate o’ knots, lookin’ in at a bar every three minutes approximate Greenwich time. I’m not a drinkin’ man, though there are those present’;—he cocked his unforgettable eye at me—‘who may have seen me more or less imbued with the fragrant spirit. None the less when I drink I like to do it at anchor an’ not at an average speed of eighteen knots on the measured mile. There’s a tank as you might say at the back o’ that big hotel up the hill—what do they call it?’

‘The Molteno Reservoir,’ I suggested, and Hooper nodded.

‘That was his limit o’ drift. We walked there an’ we come down through the Gardens—there was a South-Easter blowin’—an’ we finished up by the Docks. Then we bore up the road to Salt River, and wherever there was a pub Vickery put in sweatin’. He didn’t look at what he drunk—he didn’t look at the change. He walked an’ he drunk an’ he perspired in rivers. I understood why old Crocus ’ad come back in the condition ’e did, because Vickery an’ I ’ad two an’ a half hours o’ this gipsy manœuvre an’ when we got back to the station there wasn’t a dry atom on or in me.’

‘Did he say anything?’ Pritchard asked.

‘The sum total of ’is conversation from 7.45 p.m. till 11.15 p.m. was “Let’s have another.” Thus the mornin’ an’ the evenin’ were the first day, as Scripture says . . . . To abbreviate a lengthy narrative, I went into Cape Town for five consecutive nights with Master Vickers, and in that time I must ’ave logged about fifty knots over the ground an’ taken in two gallon o’ all the worst spirits south the Equator. The evolution never varied. Two shilling seats for us two; five minutes o’ the pictures, an’ perhaps forty-five seconds o’ Mrs. B. walking down towards us with that blindish look in her eyes an’ the reticule in her hand. Then out-walk—and drink till train time.’

‘What did you think?’ said Hooper, his hand fingering his waistcoat-pocket.

‘Several things,’ said Pyecroft. ‘To tell you the truth, I aren’t quite done thinkin’ about it yet. Mad? The man was a dumb lunatic—must ’ave been for months—years p’raps. I know somethin’ o’ maniacs, as every man in the Service must. I’ve been shipmates with a mad skipper—an’ a lunatic Number One, but never both together, I thank ’Eaven. I could give you the names o’ three captains now ’oo ought to be in an asylum, but you don’t find me interferin’ with the mentally afflicted till they begin to lay about ’em with rammers an’ winch-handles. Only once I crept up a little into the wind towards Master Vickers. “I wonder what she’s doin’ in England,” I says. “Don’t it seem to you she’s lookin’ for somebody?” That was in the Gardens again, with the South-Easter blowin’ as we were makin’ our desperate round. “She’s lookin’ for me,” he says, stoppin’ dead under a lamp an’ clickin’. When he wasn’t drinkin’, in which case all ’is teeth clicked on the glass, ’e was clickin’ ’is four false teeth like a Marconi ticker. “Yes! lookin’ for me,” he said, an’ he went on very softly an’ as you might say affectionately. “But,” he went on, “in future, Mr. Pyecroft, I should take it kindly of you if you’d confine your remarks to the drinks set before you. Otherwise,” he says, “with the best will in the world towards you, I may find myself guilty of murder! Do you understand?” he says. “Perfectly,” I says, “but would it at all soothe you to know that in such a case the chances o’ your being killed are precisely equivalent to the chances o’ me being outed.” “Why, no,” he says, “I’m almost afraid that ’ud be a temptation.” Then I said—we was right under the lamp by that arch at the end o’ the Gardens where the trams come round—“Assumin’ murder was done—or attempted murder—I put it to you that you would still be left so badly crippled, as one might say, that your subsequent capture by the police—to ’oom you would ’ave to explain—would be largely inevitable.” “That’s better,” ’e says, passin’ ’is hands over his forehead. “That’s much better, because,” he says, “do you know, as I am now, Pye, I’m not so sure if I could explain anything much.” Those were the only particular words I had with ’im in our walks as I remember.’

‘What walks!’ said Hooper. ‘Oh my soul, what walks!’

page 6

‘They were chronic,’ said Pyecroft gravely, ‘but I didn’t anticipate any danger till the Circus left. Then I anticipated that, bein’ deprived of ’is stimulant, he might react on me, so to say, with a hatchet. Consequently, after the final performance an’ the ensuin’ wet walk, I kep’ myself aloof from my superior officer on board in the execution of is duty, as you might put it. Consequently, I was interested when the sentry informs me while I was passin’ on my lawful occasions that Click had asked to see the captain. As a general rule warrant-officers don’t dissipate much of the owner’s time, but Click put in an hour and more be’ind that door. My duties kep’ me within eyeshot of it. Vickery came out first, an’ ’e actually nodded at me an’ smiled. This knocked me out o’ the boat, because, havin’ seen ’is face for five consecutive nights, I didn’t anticipate any change there more than a condenser in hell, so to speak. The owner emerged later. His face didn’t read off at all, so I fell back on his cox, ’oo’d been eight years with him and knew him better than boat signals. Lamson—that was the cox’s name—crossed ’is bows once or twice at low speeds an’ dropped down to me visibly concerned. “He’s shipped ’is court-martial face,” says Lamson. “Some one’s goin’ to be ’ung. I’ve never seen that look but once before, when they chucked the gun-sights overboard in the Fantastic.” Throwin’ gun-sights overboard, Mr. Hooper, is the equivalent for mutiny in these degenerate days. It’s done to attract the notice of the authorities an’ the Western Mornin’ News—generally by a stoker. Naturally, word went round the lower deck an’ we had a private over’aul of our little consciences. But, barrin’ a shirt which a second-class stoker said ’ad walked into ’is bag from the marines’ flat by itself, nothin’ vital transpired. The owner went about flyin’ the signal for “attend public execution,” so to say, but there was no corpse at the yard-arm. ’E lunched on the beach an’ ’e returned with ’is regulation harbour-routine face about 3 p.m. Thus Lamson lost prestige for raising false alarms. The only person ’oo might ’ave connected the epicycloidal gears correctly was one Pyecroft, when he was told that Mr. Vickery would go up-country that same evening to take over certain naval ammunition left after the war in Bloemfontein Fort. No details was ordered to accompany Master Vickery. He was told off first person singular—as a unit—by himself.’

The marine whistled penetratingly.

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Pyecroft. ‘I went ashore with him in the cutter an’ ’e asked me to walk through the station. He was clickin’ audibly, but otherwise seemed happy-ish.

‘“You might like to know,” he says, stoppin’ just opposite the Admiral’s front gate, “that Phyllis’s Circus will be performin’ at Worcester to-morrow night. So I shall see ’er yet once again. You’ve been very patient with me,” he says.

‘“Look here, Vickery,” I said, “this thing’s come to be just as much as I can stand. Consume your own smoke. I don’t want to know any more.”

‘“You!” he said. “What have you got to complain of?—you’ve only ’ad to watch. I’m it,” he says, “but that’s neither here nor there,” he says. “I’ve one thing to say before shakin’ ’ands. Remember,” ’e says—we were just by the Admiral’s garden-gate then—“remember that I am not a murderer, because my lawful wife died in childbed six weeks after I came out. That much at least I am clear of,” ’e says.

‘“Then what have you done that signifies?” I said. “What’s the rest of it?”

‘“The rest,” ’e says, “is silence,” an’ he shook ’ands and went clickin’ into Simonstown station.’

‘Did he stop to see Mrs. Bathurst at Worcester?’ I asked.

‘It’s not known. He reported at Bloemfontein, saw the ammunition into the trucks, and then ’e disappeared. Went out—deserted, if you care to put it so—within eighteen months of his pension, an’ if what ’e said about ’is wife was true he was a free man as ’e then stood. How do you read it off?’

‘Poor devil!’ said Hooper. ‘To see her that way every night! I wonder what it was.’

‘I’ve made my ’ead ache in that direction many a long night.’

‘But I’ll swear Mrs. B. ’ad no ’and in it,’ said the Sergeant, unshaken.

‘No. Whatever the wrong or deceit was, he did it, I’m sure o’ that. I ’ad to look at ’is face for five consecutive nights. I’m not so fond o’ navigatin’ about Cape Town with a South-Easter blowin’ these days. I can hear those teeth click, so to say.’

‘Ah, those teeth,’ said Hooper, and his hand went to his waistcoat-pocket once more. ‘Permanent things false teeth are. You read about ’em in all the murder trials.’

‘What d’you suppose the captain knew—or did?’ I asked.

‘I’ve never turned my searchlight that way,’ Pyecroft answered unblushingly.

We all reflected together, and drummed on empty beer bottles as the picnic-party, sunburned, wet, and sandy, passed our door singing ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee.’

‘Pretty girl under that kapje,’ said Pyecroft.

‘They never circulated his description?’ said Pritchard.

‘I was askin’ you before these gentlemen came,’ said Hooper to me, ‘whether you knew Wankies—on the way to the Zambesi—beyond Bulawayo?’

‘Would he pass there—tryin’ to get to that Lake what’s ’is name?’ said Pritchard.

Hooper shook his head and went on: ‘There’s a curious bit o’ line there, you see. It runs through solid teak forest—a sort o’ mahogany really—seventy-two miles without a curve. I’ve had a train derailed there twenty-three times in forty miles. I was up there a month ago relievin’ a sick inspector, you see. He told me to look out for a couple of tramps in the teak.’

‘Two?’ Pyecroft said. ‘I don’t envy that other man if——’

‘We get heaps of tramps up there since the war. The inspector told me I’d find ’em at M’Bindwe siding waiting to go North. He’d given ’em some grub and quinine, you see. I went up on a construction train. I looked out for ’em. I saw them miles ahead along the straight, waiting in the teak. One of ’em was standin’ up by the dead-end of the siding an’ the other was squattin’ down lookin’ up at ’im, you see.’

‘What did you do for ’em?’ said Pritchard.

page 7

‘There wasn’t much I could do, except bury ’em. There’d been a bit of a thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and as black as charcoal. That’s what they really were, you see—charcoal. They fell to bits when we tried to shift ’em. The man who was standin’ up had the false teeth. I saw ’em shinin’ against the black. Fell to bits he did too, like his mate squatting down an’ watchin’ him, both of ’em all wet in the rain. Both burned to charcoal, you see. And—that’s what made me ask about marks just now—the false-toother was tattooed on the arms and chest—a crown and foul anchor with M.V. above.’

‘I’ve seen that,’ said Pyecroft quickly. ‘It was so.’

‘But if he was all charcoal-like?’ said Pritchard, shuddering.

‘You know how writing shows up white on a burned letter? Well, it was like that, you see. We buried ’em in the teak and I kept . . . But he was a friend of you two gentlemen, you see.’

Mr. Hooper brought his hand away from his waistcoat-pocket—empty.

Pritchard covered his face with his hands for a moment, like a child shutting out an ugliness.

‘And to think of her at Hauraki!’ he murmured—‘with ’er ’air-ribbon on my beer. “Ada,” she said to her niece . . . Oh, my Gawd !’ . . .

‘On a summer afternoon,
when the honeysuckle blooms,
And all Nature seems at rest,
Underneath the bower,
’mid the perfume of the flower,
Sat a maiden with the one
she loves the best——’

sang the picnic-party waiting for their train at Glengariff.

‘Well, I don’t know how you feel about it,’ said Pyecroft, ‘but ’avin’ seen ’is face for five consecutive nights on end, I’m inclined to finish what’s left of the beer an’ thank Gawd he’s dead!’

[a short tale]

WHETHER Macdougal or Macdoodle be his name, the principle remains the same, as Mrs. Nickleby said. The gentleman appeared to hold authority in London, and by virtue of his position preached or ordained that music-halls were vulgar, if not improper. Subsequently, I gathered that the gentleman was inciting his associates to shut up certain music-halls on the ground of the vulgarity afore-said, and I saw with my own eyes that unhappy little managers were putting notices into the corners of their programmes begging the audience to report each and every impropriety. That was pitiful, but it excited my interest.

Now, to the upright and impartial mind—which is mine—all the diversions of Heathendom—which is the British—are of equal ethnological value. And it is true that some human beings can be more vulgar in the act of discussing etchings, editions of luxury, or their own emotions, than other human beings employed in swearing at each other across the street. Therefore, following a chain of thought which does not matter, I visited very many theatres whose licenses had never been interfered with. There I discovered men and women who lived and moved and behaved according to rules which in no sort regulate human life, by tradition dead and done with, and after the customs of the more immoral ancients and Barnum. At one place the lodging-house servant was an angel, and her mother a Madonna; at a second they sounded the loud timbrel o’er a whirl of bloody axes, mobs, and brown-paper castles, and said it was not a pantomime, but Art; at a third everybody grew fabulously rich and fabulously poor every twenty minutes, which was confusing; at a fourth they discussed the Nudities and Lewdities in false-palate voices supposed to belong to the aristocracy and that tasted copper in the mouth; at a fifth they merely climbed up walls and threw furniture at each other, which is notoriously the custom of spinsters and small parsons. Next morning the papers would write about the progress of the modem drama (that was the silver paper pantomime), and “graphic presentment of the realities of our highly complex civilisation.”  That was the angel housemaid. By the way, when an Englishman has been doing anything more than unusually Pagan, he generally consoles himself with “over-civilisation.” It’s the “martyr-to-nerves-dear” note in his equipment.

I went to the music-halls—the less frequented ones—and they were almost as dull as the plays, but they introduced me to several elementary truths. Ladies and gentlemen in eccentric, but not altogether unightly, costumes told me (a) that if I got drunk I should have a head next morning, and perhaps be fined by the magistrate; (b) that if I flirted promiscuously I should probably get into trouble; (c) that I had better tell my wife everything and be good to her, or she would be sure to find out for herself and be very bad to me; (d) that I should never lend money; or (e) fight with a stranger whose form I did not know. My friends (if I may be permitted to so call them) illustrated these facts with personal reminiscences and drove them home with kicks and prancings. At intervals circular ladies in pale pink and white would low to their audience to the effect that there was nothing half so sweet in life as “Love’s Young Dream,” and the billycock hats would look at the four-and-elevenpenny bonnets, and they saw that it was good and clasped hands on the strength of it. Then other ladies with shorter skirts would explain that when their husbands

"Stagger home tight about two,
An’ can’t light the candle,
We taik the broom ’andle
An’ show ‘em what women can do.”

Naturally, the billycocks, seeing what might befall, thought things over again, and you heard the bonnets murmuring softly under the clink of the lager-glasses: “Not me. Bill. Not me!” Now these things are basic and basaltic truths. Anybody can understand them. They are as old as Time. Perhaps the expression was occasionally what might be called coarse, but beer is beer, and best in a pewter, though you can, if you please, drink it from Venetian glass and call it something else. The halls give wisdom and not too lively entertainment for sixpence—ticket good for four pen’orth of refreshments, chiefly inky porter—and the people who listen are respectable folk living very grey skys who derive all the light side of their life, the food for their imagination and the crystallised expression of their views on Fate and Nemesis, from the affable ladies and gentlemen singers. They require a few green and gold maidens in short skirts to kick before them. Herein they are no better and no worse than folk who require fifty girls very much undressed, and a setting of music, or pictures that won’t let themselves be seen on account of their age and varnish, or statues and coins. All animals like salt, but some prefer rock-salt, red or black in lumps. But this is a digression.

Out of my many visits to the hall—I chose one hall, you understand, and frequented it till I could tell the mood it was in before I had passed the ticket-poll—was bom the Great Idea. I served it as a slave for seven days. Thought was not sufficient; experience was necessary. I patrolled Westminster, Blackfriars, Lambeth, the Old Kent Road, and many, many more miles of pitiless pavement to make sure of my subject. At even I drank my lager among the billycocks, and lost my heart to a bonnet. Goethe and Shakespeare were my precedents. I sympathised with them acutely, but I got my Message. A chance-caught refrain of a song which I understand is protected—to its maker I convey my most grateful acknowledgments—gave me what I sought. The rest was made up of four elementary truths, some humour, and, though I say it who should leave it to the press, pathos deep and genuine. I spent a penny on a paper which introduced me to a Great and Only who “wanted new songs.” The people desired them really. He was their ambassador, and taught me a great deal about the property-right in songs, concluding with a practical illustration, for he said my verses were just the thing and annexed them. It was long before he could hit on the step-dance which exactly elucidated the spirit of the text, and longer before he could jingle a pair of huge brass spurs as a dancing-girl jingles her anklets. That was my notion, and a good one.

The Great and Only possessed a voice like a bull, and nightly roared to the people at the heels of one who was winning triple encores with a priceless ballad beginning deep down in the bass: “We was shopmates—boozin’ shopmates.” I feared that song as Rachel feared Ristori. A greater than I had written it. It was a grim tragedy, lighted with lucid humour, wedded to music that maddened. But my “Great and Only” had faith in me, and I—I clung to the Great Heart of the People—my people—four hundred “when it’s all full, sir.” I had not studied them for nothing. I must reserve the description of my triumph for another “Turnover.”

There was no portent in the sky on the night of my triumph. A barrowful of onions, indeed, upset itself at the door, but that was a coincidence. The hall was crammed with billycocks waiting for “We was shopmates.” The great heart beat healthily. I went to my beer the equal of Shakespeare and Moliere at the wings in a first night. What would my public say? Could anything live after the abandon of “We was shopmates”? What if the redcoats did not muster in their usual strength. O my friends, never in your songs and dramas forget the redcoat. He has sympathy and enormous boots.

I believed in the redcoat; in the great heart of the people: above all in myself. The conductor, who advertised that he “doctored bad songs,” had devised a pleasant little lilting air for my needs, but it struck me as weak and thin after the thunderous surge of the “Shopmates.” I glanced at the gallery—the redcoats were there. The fiddle-bows creaked, and, with a jingle of brazen spurs, a forage-cap over his left eye, my Great and Only began to “chuck it off his chest.” Thus:

“At the back o’ the Knightsbridge Barricks,
When the fog was a-gatherin’ dim,
The Lifeguard talked to the Undercook,
An’ the girl she talked to ’im.”

“Twiddle – iddle – iddle’lum’tum-tum!” said the violins.

“Ling – a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-ting-ling!” said the spurs of the Great and Only, and through the roar in my ears I fancied I could catch a responsive hoof-beat in the gallery. The next four lines held the house to attention. Then came the chorus and the borrowed refrain. It took—it went home with a crisp click. My Great and Only saw his chance. Superbly waving his hand to embrace the whole audience, he invited them to join him in:

“You may make a mistake when you’re mashing a tart.
But you’ll learn to be wise when you’re older,
And don’t try for things that are out of your reach,
And that’s what the girl told the soldier, soldier, soldier.
And that’s what the girl told the soldier.”

I thought the gallery would never let go of the long-drawn howl on “soldier.” They clung to it as ringers to the kicking bell-rope. Then I envied no one—not even Shakespeare. I had my house hooked—gaffed under the gills, netted, speared, shot behind the shoulder—anything you please. That was pure joy! With each verse the chorus grew louder, and when my Great and Only had bellowed his way to the fall of the Lifeguard and the happy lot of the Undercook, the gallery rocked again, the reserved stalls shouted, and the pewters twinkled like the legs of the demented ballet-girls. The conductor waved the now frenzied orchestra to softer Lydian strains. My Great and Only warbled piano:

“At the back o’ Knightsbridge Barricks,
When the fog’s a-gatherin’ dim.
The Lifeguard waits for the Undercook,
But she won’t wait for ’im.”

“Ta-ra-rara-rara-ra-ra-rah!” rang a horn clear and fresh as a sword-cut. ’Twas the apotheosis of virtue.

“She’s married a man in the poultry line
That lives at ’Ighgate ’Ill,
An’ the Lifeguard walks with the ’ousemaid now,
An’ (awful pause) she can’t foot the bill!"

Who shall tell the springs that move masses? I had builded better than I knew. Followed yells, shrieks and wildest applause. Then, as a wave gathers to the curl-over, singer and sung to fill their chests and heave the chorus through the quivering roof—alto, horns, basses drowned, and lost in the flood—to the beach-like boom of beating feet:

“Oh, think o’ my song when you’re gowin’ it strong
An’ your boots is too little to ’old yer;
An’ don’t try for things that is out of your reach.
An’ that’s what the girl told the soldier, soldier, so-holdier!”

Ow! Hi! Yi! Wha-hup! Phew! Whew! Pwhit! Bang! Wang! Crr-rash! There was ample time for variations as the horns uplifted themselves and ere the held voices came down in the foam of sound—

“That’s what the girl told the soldier.”

Providence has sent me several joys, and I have helped myself to others, but that night, as I looked across the sea of tossing billycocks and rocking bonnets, my work, as I heard them give tongue, not once, but four times—their eyes sparkling, their mouths twisted with the taste of pleasure—I felt that I had secured Perfect Felicity. I am become greater than Shakespeare. I may even write plays for the Lyceum, but I never can recapture that first fine rapture that followed the Upheaval of the Anglo-Saxon four hundred of him and her. They do not call for authors on these occasions, but I desired no need of public recognition. I was placidly happy. The chorus bubbled up again and again throughout the evening, and a redcoat in the gallery insisted on singing solos about “a swine in the poultry line,” whereas I had written “man,” and the pewters began to fly, and afterwards the long streets were vocal with various versions of what the girl had really told the soldier, and I went to bed murmuring: “I have found my destiny.”

But it needs a more mighty intellect to write the Songs of the People. Some day a man will rise up from Bermondsey, Battersea or Bow, and he will be coarse, but clearsighted, hard but infinitely and tenderly humorous, speaking the people’s tongue, steeped in their lives and telling them in swinging, urging, dinging verse what it is that their inarticulate lips would express. He will make them songs. Such songs! And all the little poets who pretend to sing to the people will scuttle away like rabbits, for the girl (which, as you have seen, of course, is wisdom) will tell that soldier (which is Hercules bowed under his labours) all that she knows of Life and Death and Love.

And the same, they say, is a Vulgarity!

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

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NORTH of London stretches a country called ‘The Midlands,’ filled with brick cities, all absolutely alike, but populated by natives who, through heredity, have learned not only to distinguish between them but even between the different houses; so that at meals and at evening multitudes return, without confusion or scandal, each to the proper place.Last summer, desperate need forced me to cross that area, and I fell into a motor-licence ‘control’ which began in a market-town filled with unherded beeves carrying red numbered tickets on their rumps. An English-speaking policeman inspected my licence on a bridge, while the cattle blundered and blew round the car. A native in plain clothes lolled out an enormous mulberry-coloured tongue, with which he licked a numbered label, precisely like one of those on the behinds of the bullocks, and made to dab it on my wind-screen. I protested. ‘But it will save you trouble,’ he said. ‘You’re liable to be held up for your licence from now on. This is your protection. Everybody does it.’

‘Oh! If that’s the case——’ I began weakly.

He slapped it on the glass and I went forward —the man was right-all the cars I met were ‘protected’ as mine was—till I reached some county or other which marked the limit of the witch-doctoring, and entered, at twilight, a large-featured land where the Great North Road ran, bordered by wide way-wastes, between clumps of old timber.

Here the car, without warning, sobbed and stopped. One does not expect the make-and-break of the magneto—that tiny two-inch spring of finest steel—to fracture; and by the time we had found the trouble, night shut down on us. A rounded pile of woods ahead took one sudden star to its forehead and faded out; the way-waste melted into the darker velvet of the hedge; another star reflected itself in the glassy black of the bitumened road; and a weak moon struggled up out of a mist-patch from a valley. Our lights painted the grass unearthly greens, and the treeboles bone-white. A church clock struck eleven, as I curled up in the front seat and awaited the progress of Time and Things, with some notion of picking up a tow towards morning. It was long since I had spent a night in the open, and the hour worked on me. Time was when such nights, and the winds that heralded their dawns, had been fortunate and blessed; but those Gates, I thought, were for ever shut . . . .

I diagnosed it as a baker’s van on a Ford chassis, lit with unusual extravagance. It pulled up and asked what the trouble might be. The first sentence sufficed, even had my lights not revealed the full hairless face, the horn-rimmed spectacles, the hooded boots below, and the soft hat, fashioned on no block known to the Eastern trade, above, the yellow raincoat. I explained the situation. The resources of Mr. Henry Ford’s machines did not run to spare parts of my car’s type, but—it was a beautiful night for camping-out. He himself was independent of hotels. His outfit was a caravan hired these months past for tours of Great Britain. He had been alone since his wife died, of duodenal ulcer, five years ago. Comparative Ethnology was his present study. No, not a professor, nor, indeed, ever at any College, but a ‘realtor’—a dealer in real estate in a suburb of the great and cultured centre of Omaha, Nebraska. Had I ever heard of it? I had once visited the very place and there had met an unforgettable funeral-furnisher; but I found myself (under influence of the night and my Demon) denying all knowledge of the United States. I had, I said, never left my native land; but the passion of my life had ever been the study of the fortunes and future of the U.S.A.; and to this end I had joined three Societies, each of which regularly sent me all its publications.

He jerked her on to the grass beside my car, where our mingled lights slashed across the trunks of a little wood; and I was invited into his pitch-pine-lined caravan, with its overpowering electric installation, its flap-table, typewriter, drawers and lockers below the bunk. Then he spoke, every word well-relished between massy dentures; the inky-rimmed spectacles obscuring the eyes, and the face as expressionless as the unrelated voice.

He spoke in capital letters, a few of which I have preserved, on our National Spirit, which, he had sensed, was Homogeneous and in Ethical Contact throughout—Unconscious but Vitally Existent. That was his Estimate of our Racial Complex. It was an Asset, but a Democracy postulating genuine Ideals should be more multitudinously-minded and diverse in Outlook. I assented to everything in a voice that would have drawn confidences from pillar-boxes.

He next touched on the Collective Outlook of Democracy, and thence glanced at Herd Impulse, and the counter-balancing necessity for Individual Self-Expression. Here he began to search his pockets, sighing heavily from time to time.

‘Before my wife died, sir, I was rated a one-hundred-per-cent. American. I am now—but . . . Have you ever in Our Literature read a book called The Man Without a Country? I’m him!’ He still rummaged, but there was a sawing noise behind the face.

‘And you may say, first and last, drink did it!’ he added. The noise resumed. Evidently he was laughing, so I laughed too. After all, if a man must drink, what better lair than a caravan? At his next words I repented.

‘On my return back home after her burial, I first received my Primal Urge towards Self-Expression. Till then I had never realised myself . . . . Ah!’

He had found it at last in a breast pocket—a lank and knotty cigar.

‘And what, sir, is your genuine Opinion of Prohibition?’ he asked when the butt had been moistened to his liking.

‘Oh!—er! It’s a—a gallant adventure!’ I babbled, for somehow I had tuned myself to listen-in to tales of other things. He turned towards me slowly.

‘The Revelation qua Prohibition that came to me on my return back home from her funeral was not along those lines. This is the Platform I stood on.’ I became, thenceforward, one of vast crowds being addressed from that Platform.

‘There are Races, sir, which have been secluded since their origin from the microbes–the necessary and beneficent microbes—of Civ’lisation. Once those microbes are introdooced to ’em, those races re-act precisely in proportion to their previous immunity or Racial Virginity. Measles, which I’ve had twice and never laid by for, are as fatal to the Papuan as pneumonic plague to the White. Alcohol, for them, is disaster, degeneration, and death. Why? You can’t get ahead of Cause and Effect. Protect any race from its natural and God-given bacteria and you automatically create the culture for its decay, when that protection is removed. That, sir, is my Thesis.’

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The unlit cigar between his lips circled slowly, but I had no desire to laugh.

‘The virgin Red Indian fell for the Firewater of the Paleface as soon as it was presented to him. For Firewater, sir, he parted with his lands, his integrity, an’ his future. What is he now? An Ethnological Survival under State Protection. You get me? Immunise, or virg’nise, the Cit’zen of the United States to alcohol, an’ you as surely redooce him to the mental status an’ outlook of that Redskin. That is the Ne-mee-sis of Prohibition. And the Process has begun, sir. Haven’t you noticed it already’—he gulped—‘among Our People?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Men don’t always act as they preach, of course.’

‘You won’t abrade my National Complex. What’s the worst you’ve seen in connection with Our People—and Rum?’ The round lenses were full on me. I chanced it.

‘I’ve seen one of ’em on a cross-Channel boat, talking Prohibition in the bar—pretty full. He had three drinks while I listened.’

‘I thought you said you’d never quit England?’ he replied.

‘Oh, we don’t count France,’ I amended hastily.

‘Then was you ever at Monte Carlo? No? Well, I was—this spring. One of our tourist steamers unloaded three hundred of ’em at the port o’ Veel Franshe; and they went off to Monte Carlo to dine. I saw ’em, sir, come out of the dinner-hall of that vast Hotel opp’site the Cassino there, not drunk, but all—all havin’ drink taken. In that hotel lounge after that meal, I saw an elderly cit’zen up an’ kiss eight women, none of ’em specially young, sittin’ in a circle on the settees; the rest of his crowd applaudin’. Folk just shrugged their shoulders, and the French nigger on the door, I heard him say: “It’s only the Yanks tankin’ up.” It galled me. As a one-hundred-per-cent. American, it galled me unspeakably. And you’ve observed the same thing durin’ the last few years? ‘

I nodded. The face was working now in the yellow lights reflected from the close-buttoned raincoat. He dropped his hand on his knee and struck it again and again, before he steadied himself with the usual snap and grind of his superb dentist-work.

‘My Rev’lation qua the Peril of Prohibition was laid on me on my return back home in the hour of my affliction. I’d been discussin’ Prohibition with Mrs. Tarworth only the week before. Her best friend, sir, a neighbour of ours, had filled one of the vases in our parlour with chrysanthemums out of a bust wreath. I can’t ever smell to those flowers now ’thout it all comin’ back. Yes, sir, in my hour of woe it was laid on me to warn my land of the Ne-mee-sis of Presumption. There’s only one Sin in the world—and that is Presumption. Without strong Presumption, sir, we’d never have fixed Prohibition the way we did . . . . An’ when I retired that night I reasoned it out that there was but one weapon for me to work with to convey my message to my native land. That, sir, was the Movies. So I reasoned it. I reasoned it so-oo! Now the Movies wasn’t a business I’d ever been interested in, though a regular attendant . . . . Well, sir, within ten days after I had realised the Scope an’ Imperativeness of my Rev’lation, I’d sold out an’ re-invested so’s everything was available. I quit Omaha, sir, the freest—the happiest—man in the United States.’

A puff of air from the woods licked through the open door of the caravan, trailing a wreath of mist with it. He pushed home the door.

‘So you started in on Anti-Prohibition films?’ I suggested.

‘Sir?—More! It was laid on me to feature the Murder of Immunised America by the Microbe of Modern Civ’lisation which she had presumptuously defied. That text inspired all the titling. Before I arrived at the concept of the Appeal, I was months studyin’ the Movie business in every State of Our Union, in labour and trava-il. The Complete Concept, sir, with its Potential’ties, came to me of a Sunday afternoon in Rand Park, Keokuk, Iowa—the centre of our native pearl-button industry. As a boy, sir, I used to go shell-tongin’ after mussels, in a shanty-boat on the Cumberland River, Tennessee, always hopin’ to find a thousand dollar pearl. (The shell goes to Keokuk for manufacture.) I found my pearl in Keokuk—where my Concept came to me! Excuse me!’

He pulled out a drawer of card-indexed photographs beneath the bunk, ran his long fingers down the edges, and drew out three.

The first showed the head of an elderly Red Indian chief in full war-paint, the lined lips compressed to a thread, eyes wrinkled, nostrils aflare, and the whole face lit by so naked a passion of hate that I started.

‘That,’ said Mr. Tarworth, ‘is the Spirit of the Tragedy—both of the Red Indians who initially, and of our Whites who subsequently, sold ’emselves and their heritage for the Firewater of the Paleface. The Captions run in diapason with that note throughout. But for a Film Appeal, you must have a balanced leet-motif interwoven with the footage. Now this close-up of the Red Man I’m showin’ you, punctuates the action of the dramma. He recurs, sir, watchin’ the progressive degradation of his own people, from the advent of the Paleface with liquor, up to the extinction of his race. After that, you see him, again, more and more dominant, broodin’ over an’ rejoicin’ in the downfall of the White American artificially virg’nised against Alcohol—the identical cycle repeated. I got this shot of Him in Oklahoma, one of our Western States, where there’s a crowd of the richest Red Indians (drawin’ oil-royalties) on earth. But they’ve got a Historical Society that chases ’em into paint and feathers to keep up their race-pride, and for the Movies. He was an Episcopalian and owns a Cadillac, I was told. The sun in his eyes makes him look that way. He’s indexed as “Rum-in-the-Cup” (that’s the element of Popular Appeal), but, say ’—the voice softened with the pride of artistry—‘ain’t He just it for my purposes?’

He passed me the second photo. The cigar rolled again and he held on:

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‘Now in every Film Appeal, you must balance your leet-motif by balancin’ the Sexes. The American Women, sir, handed Prohibition to Us while our boys were away savin’ you. I know the type—’born an’ bred with it. She watches throughout the film what She’s brought about—watches an’ watches till the final Catastrophe. She’s Woman Triumphant, balanced against Rum-in-the-Cup—the Degraded Male. I hunted the whole of the Middle West for Her in vain, ’fore I remembered—not Jordan, but Abanna and Parphar—Mrs. Tarworth’s best friend at home. I was then in Texarkhana, Arkansas, fixin’ up a deal I’ll tell you about; but I broke for Omaha that evenin’ to get a shot of Her. When I arrived so sudden she—she—thought, I guess, I meant to make her Number Two. That’s Her. You wouldn’t realise the Type, but it’s it.’

I looked;   saw the trained sweetness and unction in the otherwise hardish, ignorant eyes; the slightly open, slightly flaccid mouth; the immense unconscious arrogance, the immovable certitude of mind, and the other warning signs in the poise of the broad-cheeked head. He was fingering the third photo.

‘And when the American Woman realises the Scope an’ the Impact an’ the Irrevocability of the Catastrophe which she has created by Her Presumption, She—She registers Despair. That’s Her—at the finale.’

It was cruelty beyond justification to have pinned down any living creature in such agony of shame, anger, and impotence among life’s wreckage. And this was a well-favoured woman, her torment new-launched on her as she stood gripping the back of a stamped-velvet chair.

‘And so you went back to Texarkhana without proposing,’ I began.

‘Why, yes. There was only forty-seven minutes between trains. I told her so. But I got both shots.’

I must have caught my breath, for, as he took the photo back again, he explained: ‘In the Movie business we don’t employ the actool. This is only the Basis we build on to the nearest professional type. That secures controlled emphasis of expression. She’s only the Basis.’

‘I’m glad of that,’ I said. He lit his cigar, and relaxed beneath the folds of the loose coat.

‘Well, sir, having secured my leet-motifs and Sex-balances, the whole of the footage coverin’ the downfall of the Red Man was as good as given me by a bust Congregational Church that had been boosting Prohibition near Texarkhana. That was why I’d gone there. One of their ladies, who was crazy about Our National dealin’s with the Indian, had had the details documented in Washington; an’ the resultant film must have cost her any God’s dollars you can name. It was all there—the Red Man partin’ with his lands and furs an’ women to the early settlers for Rum; the liquor-fights round the tradin’-posts; the Government Agents swindlin’ ’em with liquor; an’ the Indians goin’ mad from it; the Black Hawk War; the winnin’ of the West—by Rum mainly—the whole jugful of Shame. But that film failed, sir, because folk in Arkansaw said it was an aspersion on the National Honour, and, anyway, buying land needful for Our inevitable development was more Christian than the bloody wars of Monarchical Europe. The Congregationalists wanted a new organ too; so I traded a big Estey organ for their film. My notion was to interweave it with parallel modern instances, from Monte Carlo and the European hotels, of White American Degradation; the Main Caption bein’: “The Firewater of the Paleface Works as Indifferently as Fate.” An’ old Rum-in-the-Cup’s close-up shows broodin’—broodin’—broodin’—through it all! You sense my Concept?’

He relighted his cigar.

‘I saw it like a vision. But, from there on; I had to rely on my own Complex for intuition. I cut out all modern side-issues—the fight against Prohibition; bootlegging; home-made Rum manufacture; wood-alcohol tragedies, an’ all that dope. ‘Dunno as I didn’t elim’nate to excess. The Revolt of the Red Blood Corpuscules should ha’ been stressed.’

‘What’s their share in it?’

‘Vital! They clean up waste and deleterious matter in the humane system. Under the microscope they rage like lions. Deprive ’em of their job by sterilisin’ an’ virginising the system, an’ the Red Blood Corpuscules turn on the humane system an’ destroy it bodily. Mentally, too, mebbe. Ain’t that a hell of a thought?’

‘Where did you get it from?’

‘It came to me—with the others,’ he replied as simply as Ezekiel might have told a fellow-captive beside Chebar. ‘But it’s too high for a Democracy. So I cut it right out. For Film purposes I assumed that, at an unspecified date, the United States had become virg’nised to liquor. The Taint was out of the Blood, and, apparently, the Instinct had aborted. “The Triumph of Presumption” is the Caption. But from there on, I fell down because, for the film Appeal, you cannot present such an Epoch without featurin’ confirmatory exhibits which, o’ course, haven’t as yet materialised. That meant that the whole Cultural Aspect o’ that Civ’lisation of the Future would have to be built up at Hollywood; an’ half a million dollars wouldn’t cover it. “The Vision of Virg’nised Civ’lisation.” A hell of a proposition! But it don’t matter now.’

He dropped his head and was still for a little.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘How does the idea work out—in your mind?’

‘In my mind? As inevitably, sir, as the Red Man’s Fall through Rum. My notion was a complete Cultural Exposay of a She—dom’nated Civ’hsation, built on a virginal basis qua alcohol, with immensely increased material Productivity (say, there’d be money in that from big Businesses demonstratin’ what they’ll prodooce a hundred years hence), and a side-wipe at the practically non-existent birth-rate.’

‘Why that, too?’ I asked.

He gave me the reason—a perfectly sound one—which has nothing to do with the tale, and went on:

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‘After that Vision is fully realised, the End comes—as remorselessly for the White as for the Red. How? The American Woman—you will recall the first close-up of that lady I showed you, interweavin’ throughout the narr’tive—havin’ accomplished all She set out to do, wishes to demonstrate to the world the Inteegral Significance of Her Life-work. Why not? She’s never been blamed in Her life. So delib’rately, out of High Presumption, the American Woman withdraws all inhibit’ry legislation, all barriers against Alcohol—to show what She has made of Her Men. The Captions here run—“The Zeenith of Presumption. America Stands by Herself—Guide and Saviour of Humanity.” “Let Evil do Its Damnedest! We are above It.” Say, ain’t that a hell of a thought?’

‘A bit extravagant, isn’t it?’

‘Extrav’gance? In the life of actool men an’ women? It don’t exist. Well, anyway, that’s my top-note before the day-bakkle. There’s an interval while the Great World-Wave is gatherin’ to sweep aside the Children of Presumption. Nothin’ eventuates for a while. The Machine of Virg’nised Civ’lisation functions by its own stored energy. And then, sir—then the World-Wave crashes down on the White as it crashed on the Red Skin! (All this while old Rum-in-the-Cup is growin’ more an’ more dom’nant, as I told you.) But now, owin’ to the artificialised mentality of the victims and the immune pop’lation, its effects are Cataclysmic. “The Alcohol Appeal, held back for five Generations, wakes like a Cyclone.” That’s the Horror I’m stressin’. And Europe, and Asia, and the Ghetto exploit America—cold. “A Virg’nised People let go all holts, and part with their All.” It is no longer a Dom’nationbut an Obsession. Then a Po-ssession! Then come the Levelled Bay’nets of Europe. Why so? Because the liquor’s peddled out, sir, under armed European guards to the elderly, pleadin’ American Whites who pass over their title-deeds—their businesses, fact’ries, canals, sky-scrapers, town-lots, farms, little happy-lookin’ homes—everything—for it. You can see ’em wadin’ into the ocean, from Oyster Bay to Palm Beach, under great flarin’ sunsets of National Decay, to get at the stuff sooner. And Europe’s got ’em by the gullet—peddlin’ out the cases, or a single bottle at a time, to each accordin’ to his need—under the Levelled Bay’nets of Europe.’

‘But why lay all the responsibility on Europe?’ I broke in. ‘Surely some progressive American Liquor Trust would have been m the game from the first?’

‘Sure! But the Appeal is National, and there are some things, sir, that the American People will not stand for. It was Europe or nothing. Otherwise, I could not have stressed the effect of the Levelled Bay’nets of Europe. You see those bay’nets keepin’ order in the vast cathedrals of the new religions—the broken whisky bottles round the altar—the Priest himself, old and virg’nised, pleadin’ and prayin’ with his flock till, in the zeenith of his agony an’ his denunciations, he too falls an’ wallows with the rest of ’em! Extrav’gant? No! Logic. An’ so it spreads, from West to East, from East to West up to the dividin’ line where the European and the Asiatic Liquor Trust have parcelled out the Land o’ Presumption. No paltry rum-peddlin’ at tradin’posts this time, but mile-long electric freight-trains, surgin’ and swoopin’ from San Francisco an’ Boston with their seven thousand ton of alcohol, till they meet head-on at the Liquor Line, an’ you see the little American People fawnin’ an’ pleadin’ round their big wheels an’ tryin’ to slip in under the Levelled Bay’nets of Europe to handle and touch the stuff, even if they can’t drink it. It’s horrible—horrible! “The Wages of Sin!” “The Death of the She-Dom’nated Sons of Presumption!”’

He stood up, his head high in the caravan’s resonant roof, and mopped his face.

‘Go on !’ I said.

‘There ain’t much more. You see the devirg’nised European an’ the immemorially sophisticated Asiatic, who can hold their liquor, spreadin’ out an’ occupyin’ the land (the signs in the streets register that) like—like a lavva-flow in Honolulu. There’s jest a hint, too, of the Return of the Great Scourge, an’ how it fed on all this fresh human meat. Jest a few feet of the flesh rottin’ off the bones—’same as when Syph’lis originated in the Re-nay-sanse Epoch. Last of all—date not specified—will be the herdin’ of the few survivin’ Americans into their reservation in the Yellowstone Park by a few slouchin’, crippled, remnants of the Redskins. ‘Get me? “Presumption’s Ultimate Reward.” “The Wheel Comes Full Circle.” An’ the final close-up of Rum-in-the-Cup with his Hate-Mission accomplished.’

He stooped again to the photos in the bunk-locker.

‘I shot that,’ he said, ‘when I was in the Yellowstone. It’s a document to build up my Last Note on. They’re jest a party of tourists watchin’ grizzly bears rakin’ in the hotel dumpheaps (they keep ’em to show). That wet light hits back well off their clothes, don’t it? ‘

I saw six or seven men and women, in pale-coloured raincoats, gathered, with no pretence at pose, in a little glade. One man was turning up his collar, another stooping to a bootlace, while a woman opened her umbrella over him. They faced towards a dimly defined heap of rubbish and tins; and they looked unutterably mean.

‘Yes.’ He took it back from me. ‘That would have been the final note—the dom’nant resolvin’ into a minor. But it don’t matter now.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ I said, stupidly enough.

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‘Not to me, sir. My Church—I’m a Fundamentalist, an’ I didn’t read ’em more than half the scenario—started out by disownin’ me for aspersin’ the National Honour. A bunch of our home papers got holt of it next. They said I was a ren’gade an’ done it for dollars. An’ then the ladies on the Social Betterment an’ Uplift Committees took a hand. In your country you don’t know the implications of that! I’m—I’m a one-hundred-per-cent. American, but—I didn’t know what men an’ women are. I guess none of us do at home, or we’d say so, instead o’ playin’ at being American Cit’zens. There’s no law with Us under which a man can be jailed for aspersin’ the National Honour. There’s no need. It got into the Legislature, an’ one Senator there he spoke for an hour, demandin’ to have me unanimously an’ internationally disavowed by—by my Maker, I presoom. No one else stood by me. I’d been to the big Jew combines that control the Movie business m our country. I’d been to Heuvelstein—he represents sixty-seven million dollars’ interests. They say he’s never read a scenario in his life. He read every last word of mine aloud. He laughed some, but he said he was doin’ well in a small way, and he didn’t propose to start up any pogroms against the Chosen in New York. He said I was ahead of my time. I know that. An’ then—my wife’s best friend was back of this—folk at home got talkin’ about callin’ for an inquiry into my state o’ mind, an’ whether I was fit to run my own affairs. I saw a lawyer or two over that, an’ I came to a realism’ sense of American Law an’ Justice. That was another of the things I didn’t know. It made me sick to my stummick, sir—sick with physical an’ mental terror an’ dread. So I quit. I changed my name an’ quit two years back. Those ancient prophets an’ martyrs haven’t got much on me in the things a Democracy hands you if you don’t see eye to eye with it. Therefore, I have no abidin’—place except this old caravan. Now, sir, we two are like ships that pass in the night, except, as I said, I’ll be very pleased to tow you into Doncaster this morning. Is there anythin’ about me strikes you in anyway as deviatin’ from sanity?’

‘Not m the least,’ I replied quickly. ‘But what have you done with your scenario?’

‘Deposited it in the Bank of England at London.’

‘Would you sell it?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Couldn’t it be produced here? ‘

‘I am a one-hundred-per-cent. American. The way I see it, I could not be a party to an indirect attack on my Native Land.’

Once again he ground his jaws. There did not seem to be much left to say. The heat in the shut caravan was more and more oppressive. Time had stood still with me listening. I was aware now that the owls had ceased hooting and that a night had gone out of the world. I rose from the bunk. Mr. Tarworth, carefully rebuttoning his raincoat, opened the door.

‘Good Lord Gord Almighty!’ he cried, with a child’s awed reverence. ‘It’s sun-up. Look! ‘

Daylight was just on the heels of dawn, with the sun following. The icy-blackness of the Great North Road banded itself with smoking mists that changed from solid pearl to writhing opal, as they lifted above hedge-row level. The dew-wet leaves of the upper branches turned suddenly into diamond facets, and that wind, which runs before the actual upheaval of the sun, swept out of the fragrant lands to the East, and touched my cheek—as many times it had touched it before, on the edge, or at the ends, of inconceivable experiences.

My companion breathed deeply, while the low glare searched the folds of his coat and the sags and wrinkles of his face. We heard the far-away pulse of a car through the infinite, clean-born, light-filled stillness. It neared and stole round the bend—a motor-hearse on its way to some early or distant funeral, one side of the bright oak coffin showing beneath the pall, which had slipped a little. Then it vanished in a blaze of wet glory from the sun-drenched road, amid the songs of a thousand birds.

Mr. Tarworth laid his hand on my shoulder.

‘Say, Neighbour,’ he said. ‘There’s somethin’ very soothin’ in the Concept of Death after all.’

Then he set himself, kindly and efficiently, to tow me towards Doncaster, where, when the day’s life should begin again, one might procure a new magneto make-and-break—that tiny two-inch spring of finest steel, failure of which immobilises any car.

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OUR drive till then had been quite a success. The other men in the car were my friend Woodhouse, young Ollyett, a distant connection of his, and Pallant, the M.P.. Woodhouse’s business was the treatment and cure of sick journals. He knew by instinct the precise moment in a newspaper’s life when the impetus of past good management is exhausted and it fetches up on the dead-centre between slow and expensive collapse and the new start which can be given by gold injections—and genius. He was wisely ignorant of journalism; but when he stooped on a carcase there was sure to be meat. He had that week added a half-dead, halfpenny evening paper to his collection, which consisted of a prosperous London daily, one provincial ditto, and a limp-bodied weekly of commercial leanings. He had also, that very hour, planted me with a large block of the evening paper’s common shares, and was explaining the whole art of editorship to Ollyett, a young man three years from Oxford, with coir-matting-coloured hair and a face harshly modelled by harsh experiences, who, I understood, was assisting in the new venture. Pallant, the long, wrinkled M.P., whose voice is more like a crane’s than a peacock’s, took no shares, but gave us all advice.‘You’ll find it rather a knacker’s yard,’ Woodhouse was saying. ‘Yes, I know they call me The Knacker; but it will pay inside a year. All my papers do. I’ve only one motto: Back your luck and back your staff. It’ll come out all right.’

Then the car stopped, and a policeman asked our names and addresses for exceeding the speed-limit. We pointed out that the road ran absolutely straight for half a mile ahead without even a sidelane. ‘That’s just what we depend on,’ said the policeman unpleasantly.

‘The usual swindle,’ said Woodhouse under his breath ‘What’s the name of this place?’

‘Huckley,’said the policeman. ‘H-u-c-k-l-e-y,’ and wrote something in his note-book at which young Ollyett protested. A large red man on a grey horse who had been watching us from the other side of the hedge shouted an order we could not catch. The policeman laid his hand on the rim of the right driving-door (Woodhouse carries his spare tyres aft), and it closed on the button of the electric horn. The grey horse at once bolted, and we could hear the rider swearing all across the landscape.

‘Damn it, man, you’ve got your silly fist on it! Take it off!’ Woodhouse shouted.

‘Ho!’ said the constable, looking carefully at his fingers as though we had trapped them. ‘That won’t do you any good either,’ and he wrote once more in his note-book before he allowed us to go.

This was Woodhouse’s first brush with motor law, and since I expected no ill consequences to myself, I pointed out that it was very serious. I took the same view myself when in due time I found that I, too, was summonsed on charges ranging from the use of obscene language to endangering traffic.

Judgment was done in a little pale-yellow market-town with a small, jubilee clock-tower and a large corn-exchange. Woodhouse drove us there in his car. Pallant, who had not been included in the summons, came with us as moral support. While we waited outside, the fat man on the grey horse rode up and entered into loud talk with his brother magistrates. He said to one of them—for I took the trouble to note it down—‘It falls away from my lodge-gates, dead straight, three-quarters of a mile. I’d defy any one to resist it. We rooked seventy pounds out of ’em last month. No car can resist the temptation. You ought to have one your side the county, Mike. They simply can’t resist it.’

‘Whew!’ said Woodhouse. ‘We’re in for trouble. Don’t you say a word—or Ollyett either! I’ll pay the fines and we’ll get it over as soon as possible. Where’s Pallant?’

‘At the back of the court somewhere,’ said Ollyett. ‘I saw him slip in just now.’

The fat man then took his seat on the Bench, of which he was chairman, and I gathered from a bystander that his name was Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., of Ingell Park, Huckley. He began with an allocution pitched in a tone that would have justified revolt throughout empires. Evidence, when the crowded little court did not drown it with applause, was given in the pauses of the address. They were all very proud of their Sir Thomas, and looked from him to us, wondering why we did not applaud too.

Taking its time from the chairman, the Bench rollicked with us for seventeen minutes. Sir Thomas explained that he was sick and tired of processions of cads of our type, who would be better employed breaking stones on the road than in frightening horses worth more than themselves or their ancestors. This was after it had been proved that Woodhouse’s man had turned on the horn purposely to annoy Sir Thomas, who ‘happened to be riding by’! There were other remarks too—primitive enough,—but it was the unspeakable brutality of the tone, even more than the quality of the justice, or the laughter of the audience that stung our souls out of all reason. When we were dismissed—to the tune of twenty-three pounds, twelve shillings and sixpence—we waited for Pallant to join us, while we listened to the next case—one of driving without a licence. Ollyett with an eye to his evening paper, had already taken very full notes of our own, but we did not wish to seem prejudiced.

‘It’s all right,’ said the reporter of the local paper soothingly. ‘We never report Sir Thomas in extenso. Only the fines and charges.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ Ollyett replied, and I heard him ask who every one in court might be. The local reporter was very communicative.

The new victim, a large, flaxen-haired man in somewhat striking clothes, to which Sir Thomas, now thoroughly warmed, drew public attention, said that he had left his licence at home. Sir Thomas asked him if he expected the police to go to his home address at Jerusalem to find it for him; and the court roared. Nor did Sir Thomas approve of the man’s name, but insisted on calling him ‘Mr. Masquerader,’ and every time he did so, all his people shouted. Evidently this was their established auto-da fé.

‘He didn’t summons me—because I’m in the House, I suppose. I think I shall have to ask a Question,’ said Pallant, reappearing at the close of the case.

‘I think I shall have to give it a little publicity too,’ said Woodhouse. ‘We can’t have this kind of thing going on, you know.’ His face was set and quite white. Pallant’s, on the other hand, was black, and I know that my very stomach had turned with rage. Ollyett was dumb.

‘Well, let’s have lunch,’ Woodhouse said at last. ‘Then we can get away before the show breaks up.’

We drew Ollyett from the arms of the local reporter, crossed the Market Square to the Red Lion and found Sir Thomas’s ‘Mr. Masquerader’ just sitting down to beer, beef and pickles.

‘Ah!’ said he, in a large voice. ‘Companions in misfortune. Won’t you gentlemen join me?’

‘Delighted,’ said Woodhouse. ‘What did you get?’

‘I haven’t decided. It might make a good turn, but—the public aren’t educated up to it yet. It’s beyond ’em. If it wasn’t, that red dub on the Bench would be worth fifty a week.’

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‘Where?’ said Woodhouse. The man looked at him with unaffected surprise.

‘At any one of My places,’ he replied. ‘But perhaps you live here?’

‘Good heavens! ‘cried young Ollyett suddenly. ‘You are Masquerier, then? I thought you were!’

‘Bat Masquerier.’ He let the words fall with the weight of an international ultimatum. ‘Yes, that’s all I am. But you have the advantage of me, gentlemen.’

For the moment, while we were introducing ourselves, I was puzzled. Then I recalled prismatic music-hall posters—of enormous acreage—that had been the unnoticed background of my visits to London for years past. Posters of men and women, singers, jongleurs, impersonators and audacities of every draped and undraped brand, all moved on and off in London and the Provinces by Bat Masquerier—with the long wedge-tailed flourish following the final ‘r.’

‘I knew you at once,’ said Pallant, the trained M.P., and I promptly backed the lie. Woodhouse mumbled excuses. Bat Masquerier was not moved for or against us any more than the frontage of one of his own palaces.

‘I always tell My people there’s a limit to the size of the lettering,’ he said. ‘Overdo that and the ret’na doesn’t take it in. Advertisin’ is the most delicate of all the sciences.’

‘There’s one man in the world who is going to get a little of it if I live for the next twenty-four hours,’ said Woodhouse, and explained how this would come about.

Masquerier stared at him lengthily with gunmetal-blue eyes.

‘You mean it?’ he drawled; the voice was as magnetic as the look.

‘I do,’ said Ollyett. ‘That business of the horn alone ought to have him off the Bench in three months.’ Masquerier looked at him even longer than he had looked at Woodhouse.

‘He told me,’ he said suddenly, ‘that my home-address was Jerusalem. You heard that?’

‘But it was the tone-the tone,’ Ollyett cried.

‘You noticed that, too, did you?’ said Masquerier. ‘That’s the artistic temperament. You can do a lot with it. And I’m Bat Masquerier,’ he went on. He dropped his chin in his fists and scowled straight in front of him . . . . ‘I made the Silhouettes—I made the Trefoil and the Jocunda. I made ’Dal Benzaguen.’ Here Ollyett sat straight up, for in common with the youth of that year he worshipped Miss Vidal Benzaguen of the Trefoil immensely and unreservedly. ‘“Is that a dressing-gown or an ulster you’re supposed to be wearing?” You heard that? . . . “And I suppose you hadn’t time to brush your hair either?” You heard that? . . . Now, you hear me!’ His voice filled the coffeeroom, then dropped to a whisper as dreadful as a surgeon’s before an operation. He spoke for several minutes. Pallant muttered ‘Hear! hear!’ I saw Ollyett’s eye flash—it was to Ollyett that Masquerier addressed himself chiefly,—and Woodhouse leaned forward with joined hands.

‘Are you with me?’ he went on, gathering us all up in one sweep of the arm. ‘When I begin a thing I see it through, gentlemen. What Bat can’t break, breaks him! But I haven’t struck that thing yet. This is no one-turn turn-it-down show. This is business to the dead finish. Are you with me, gentlemen? Good! Now, we’ll pool our assets. One London morning, and one provincial daily, didn’t you say? One weekly commercial ditto and one M.P.’

‘Not much use, I’m afraid,’ Pallant smirked.

‘But privileged. But privileged,’ he returned. ‘And we have also my little team—London, Blackburn, Liverpool, Leeds—I’ll tell you about Manchester later—and Me! Bat Masquerier.’ He breathed the name reverently into his tankard. ‘Gentlemen, when our combination has finished with Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., and everything else that is his, Sodom and Gomorrah will be a winsome bit of Merrie England beside ’em. I must go back to town now, but I trust you gentlemen will give me the pleasure of your company at dinner to-night at the Chop Suey—the Red Amber Room—and we’ll block out the scenario.’ He laid his hand on young Ollyett’s shoulder and added: ‘It’s your brains I want.’

Then he left, in a good deal of astrachan collar and nickel-plated limousine, and the place felt less crowded.

We ordered our car a few minutes later. As Woodhouse, Ollyett and I were getting in, Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., came out of the Hall of justice across the square and mounted his horse. I have sometimes thought that if he had gone in silence he might even then have been saved, but as he settled himself in the saddle he caught sight of us and must needs shout: ‘Not off yet? You’d better get away and you’d better be careful.’ At that moment Pallant, who had been buying picture-postcards, came out of the inn, took Sir Thomas’s eye and very leisurely entered the car. It seemed to me that for one instant there was a shade of uneasiness on the baronet’s grey-whiskered face.

‘I hope,’ said Woodhouse after several miles, ‘I hope he’s a widower.’

‘Yes,’ said Pallant. ‘For his poor, dear wife’s sake I hope that, very much indeed. I suppose he didn’t see me in Court. Oh, here’s the parish history of Huckley written by the Rector and here’s your share of the picture-postcards. Are we all dining with this Mr. Masquerier to-night? ‘

‘Yes!’ said we all.

If Woodhouse knew, nothing .of journalism, young Ollyett, who had graduated in a hard school, knew a good deal. Our halfpenny evening paper, which we will call The Bun to distinguish her from her prosperous morning sister, The Cake, was not only diseased but corrupt. We found this out when a man brought us the prospectus of a new oil-field and demanded sub-leaders on its prosperity. Ollyett talked pure Brasenose to him for three minutes. Otherwise he spoke and wrote trade-English—a toothsome amalgam of Americanisms and epigrams. But though the slang changes the game never alters, and Ollyett and I and, in the end, some others enjoyed it immensely. It was weeks ere we could see the wood for the trees, but so soon as the staff realised that they had proprietors who backed them right or wrong, and specially when they were wrong (which is the sole secret of journalism), and that their fate did not hang on any passing owner’s passing mood, they did miracles.

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But we did not neglect Huckley. As Ollyett said our first care was to create an ‘arresting atmosphere’ round it. He used to visit the village of week-ends, on a motor-bicycle with a side-car; for which reason I left the actual place alone and dealt with it in the abstract. Yet it was I who drew first blood. Two inhabitants of Huckley wrote to contradict a small, quite solid paragraph in The Bun that a hoopoe had been seen at Huckley and had, ‘of course, been shot by the local sportsmen.’ There was some heat in their letters, both of which we published. Our version of how the hoopoe got his crest from King Solomon was, I grieve to say, so inaccurate that the Rector himself—no sportsman as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy—wrote to us to correct it. We gave his letter good space and thanked him.

‘This priest is going to be useful,’ said Ollyett. ‘He has the impartial mind. I shall vitalise him.’

Forthwith he created M.L. Sigden, a recluse of refined tastes who in The Bun demanded to know whether this Huckley-of-the-Hoopoe was the Hugly of his boyhood and whether, by any chance, the fell change of name had been wrought by collusion between a local magnate and the railway, in the mistaken interests of spurious refinement. ‘For I knew it and loved it with the maidens of my day—eheu ab angulo!—as Hugly,’ wrote M.L. Sigden from Oxford.

Though other papers scoffed, The Bun was gravely sympathetic. Several people wrote to deny that Huckley had been changed at birth. Only the Rector—no philosopher as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy—had his doubts, which he laid publicly before Mr. M.L. Sigden, who suggested, through The Bun, that the little place might have begun life in Anglo-Saxon days as ‘Hogslea’ or among the Normans as ‘Argilé,’ on account of its much clay. The Rector had his own ideas too (he said it was mostly gravel), and M.L. Sigden had a fund of reminiscences. Oddly enough—which is seldom the case with free reading-matter—our subscribers rather relished the correspondence, and contemporaries quoted freely.

‘The secret of power,’ said Ollyett, ‘Is not the big stick. It’s the liftable stick.’ (This means the ‘arresting’ quotation of six or seven lines.) ‘Did you see the Spec. had a middle on “Rural Tenacities” last week. That was all Huckley. I’m doing a “Mobiquity” on Huckley next week.’

Our ‘Mobiquities’ were Friday evening accounts of easy motor-bike-cum-side-car trips round London, illustrated (we could never get that machine to work properly) by smudgy maps. Ollyett wrote the stuff with a fervour and a delicacy which I always ascribed to the side-car. His account of Epping Forest, for instance, was simply young love with its soul at its lips. But his Huckley “Mobiquity’ would have sickened a soap-boiler. It chemically combined loathsome familiarity, leering suggestion, slimy piety and rancid ‘social service’ in one fuming compost that fairly lifted me off my feet.

‘Yes,’ said he, after compliments. ‘It’s the most vital, arresting and dynamic bit of tump I’ve done up to date. Non nobis gloria! I met Sir Thomas Ingell in his own park. He talked to me again. He inspired most of it.’

‘Which? The “glutinous native drawl,” or “the neglected adenoids of the village children”?’ I demanded.

‘Oh, no! That’s only to bring in the panel doctor. It’s the last flight we—I’m proudest of.’

This dealt with ‘the crepuscular penumbra spreading her dim limbs over the boskage’; with jolly rabbits’; with a herd of ‘gravid polled Angus’; and with the ‘arresting, gipsy-like face of their swart, scholarly owner—as well known at the Royal Agricultural Shows as that of our late King-Emperor.’

‘“Swart” is good and so’s “gravid,”’ said I, but the panel doctor will be annoyed about the adenoids.’

‘Not half as much as Sir Thomas will about his face,’ said Ollyett. ‘And if you only knew what I’ve left out!’

He was right. The panel doctor spent his week-end (this is the advantage of Friday articles) in overwhelming us with a professional counterblast of no interest whatever to our subscribers. We told him so, and he, then and there, battered his way with it into the Lancet where they are keen on glands, and forgot us altogether. But Sir Thomas Ingell was of sterner stuff. He must have spent a happy week-end too. The letter which we received from him on Monday proved him to be a kinless loon of upright life, for no woman, however remotely interested in a man would have let it pass the home wastepaper-basket. He objected to our references to his own herd, to his own labours in his own village, which he said was a Model Village, and to our infernal insolence; but he objected most to our invoice of his features. We wrote him courteously to ask whether the letter was meant for publication. He, remembering, I presume, the Duke of Wellington, wrote back, ‘publish and be damned.’

‘Oh! This is too easy,’ Ollyett said as he began heading the letter.

‘Stop a minute,’ I said. ‘The game is getting a little beyond us. To-night’s the Bat dinner.’ (I may have forgotten to tell you that our dinner with Bat Masquerier in the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey had come to be a weekly affair.)

‘Hold it over till they’ve all seen it.’

‘Per haps you’re right,’ he said. ‘You might waste it.’

At dinner, then, Sir Thomas’s letter was handed round. Bat seemed to be thinking of other matters, but Pallant was very interested.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said presently. ‘Could you put something into The Bun to-morrow about foot-and-mouth disease in that fellow’s herd?’

‘Oh, plague if you like,’ Ollyett replied. ‘They’re only five measly Shorthorns. I saw one lying down in the park. She’ll serve as a substratum of fact.’

‘Then, do that; and hold the letter over meanwhile. I think I come in here,’ said Pallant.

‘Why?’ said I.

‘Because there’s something coming up in the House about foot-and-mouth, and because he wrote me a letter after that little affair when he fined you. ’Took ten days to think it over. Here you are,’ said Pallant. ‘House of Commons paper, you see.’

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We read

‘What did you answer?’ said Ollyett, when all our opinions had been expressed.

‘I told him I couldn’t do anything in the matter. And I couldn’t—then. But you’ll remember to put in that foot-and-mouth paragraph. I want something to work upon.’

‘It seems to me The Bun has done all the work up to date,’ I suggested. ‘When does The Cake come in?’

‘The Cake,’ said Woodhouse, and I remembered afterwards that he spoke like a Cabinet Minister on the eve of a Budget, ‘reserves to itself the fullest right to deal with situations as they arise.’

‘Ye-eh!’ Bat Masquerier shook himself out of his thoughts. ‘“Situations as they arise.” I ain’t idle either. But there’s no use fishing till the swim’s baited. You’—he turned to Ollyett’manufacture very good ground-bait . . . . I always tell My people—— What the deuce is that?’

There was a burst of song from another private dining-room across the landing. ‘It ees some ladies from the Trefoil,’ the waiter began.

‘Oh, I know that. What are they singing, though? ‘

He rose and went out, to be greeted by shouts of applause from that merry company. Then there was silence, such as one hears in the form-room after a master’s entry. Then a voice that we loved began again: ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May—nuts in May—nuts in May!’

‘It’s only ‘Dal—and some nuts,’ he explained when he returned. ‘She says she’s coming in to dessert.’ He sat down, humming the old tune to himself, and till Miss Vidal Benzaguen entered, he held us speechless with tales of the artistic temperament.

We obeyed Pallant to the extent of slipping into The Bun a wary paragraph about cows lying down and dripping at the mouth, which might be read either as an unkind libel or, in the hands of a capable lawyer, as a piece of faithful nature-study.

‘And besides,’ said Ollyett, ‘we allude to “gravid polled Angus.” I am advised that no action can lie in respect of virgin Shorthorns. Pallant wants us to come to the House to-night. He’s got us places for the Strangers’ Gallery. I’m beginning to like Pallant.’

‘Masquerier seems to like you,’ I said.

‘Yes, but I’m afraid of him,’ Ollyett answered with perfect sincerity. ‘I am. He’s the Absolutely Amoral Soul. I’ve never met one yet.’

We went to the House together. It happened to be an Irish afternoon, and as soon as I had got the cries and the faces a little sorted out, I gathered there were grievances in the air, but how many of them was beyond me.

‘It’s all right,’ said Ollyett of the trained ear. ‘They’ve shut their ports against—oh yes—export of Irish cattle! Foot-and-mouth disease at Ballyhellion. I see Pallant’s idea!’

The House was certainly all mouth for the moment, but, as I could feel, quite in earnest. A Minister with a piece of typewritten paper seemed to be fending off volleys of insults. He reminded me somehow of a nervous huntsman breaking up a fox in the face of rabid hounds.

‘It’s question-time. They’re asking questions,’ said Ollyett. ‘Look! Pallant’s up.’

There was no mistaking it. His voice, which his enemies said was his one parliamentary asset, silenced the hubbub as toothache silences mere singing in the ears. He said:

‘Arising out of that, may I ask if any special consideration has recently been shown in regard to any suspected outbreak of this disease on this side of the Channel?’

He raised his hand; it held a noon edition of The Bun. We had thought it best to drop the paragraph out of the later ones. He would have continued, but something in a grey frock-coat roared and bounded on a bench opposite, and waved another Bun. It was Sir Thomas Ingell.

‘As the owner of the herd so dastardly implicated——’ His voice was drowned in shouts of ‘Order!’—the Irish leading.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked Ollyett. ‘He’s got his hat on his head, hasn’t he?’

‘Yes, but his wrath should have been put as a question.’

‘Arising out of that, Mr. Speaker, Sirrr!’ Sir Thomas bellowed through a lull, ‘are you aware that—that all this is a conspiracy—part of a dastardly conspiracy to make Huckley ridiculous—to make us ridiculous? Part of a deep-laid plot to make me ridiculous, Mr. Speaker, Sir!’

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The man’s face showed almost black against his white whiskers, and he struck out swimmingly with his arms. His vehemence puzzled and held the House for an instant, and the Speaker took advantage of it to lift his pack from Ireland to a new scent. He addressed Sir Thomas Ingell in tones of measured rebuke, meant also, I imagine, for the whole House, which lowered its hackles at the word. Then Pallant, shocked and pained: ‘I can only express my profound surprise that in response to my simple question the honourable member should have thought fit to indulge in a personal attack. If I have in any way offended——’

Again the Speaker intervened, for it appeared that he regulated these matters.

He, too, expressed surprise, and Sir Thomas sat back in a hush of reprobation that seemed to have the chill of the centuries behind it. The Empire’s work was resumed.

‘Beautiful!’ said I, and I felt hot and cold up my back.

‘And now we’ll publish his letter,’ said Ollyett. We did—on the heels of his carefully reported outburst. We made no comment. With that rare instinct for grasping the heart of a situation which is the mark of the Anglo-Saxon, all our contemporaries and, I should say, two-thirds of our correspondents demanded how such a person could be made more ridiculous than he had already proved himself to be. But beyond spelling his name ‘Injle,’ we alone refused to hit a man when he was down.

‘There’s no need,’ said Ollyett. ‘The whole press is on the huckle from end to end.’

Even Woodhouse was a little astonished at the ease with which it had come about, and said as much.

‘Rot!’ said Ollyett. ‘We haven’t really begun. Huckley isn’t news yet.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Woodhouse, who had grown to have great respect for his young but by no means distant connection.

‘Mean? By the grace of God, Master Ridley, I mean to have it so that when Huckley turns over in its sleep, Reuters and the Press Association jump out of bed to cable.’ Then he went off at score about certain restorations in Huckley Church which, he said—and he seemed to spend his every week-end there—had been perpetrated by the Rector’s predecessor, who had abolished a ‘leper-window’ or a ‘squinch-hole’ (whatever these may be) to institute a lavatory in the vestry. It did not strike me as stuff for which Reuters or the Press Association would lose much sleep, and I left him declaiming to Woodhouse about a fourteenth-century font which, he said, he had unearthed in the sexton’s tool-shed.

My methods were more on the lines of peaceful penetration. An odd copy, in The Bun’s rag-and-bone library, of Hone’s Every-Day Book had revealed to me the existence of a village dance founded, like all village dances, on Druidical mysteries connected with the Solar Solstice (which isalwaysunchallengeable) and Midsummer Morning, which is dewy and refreshing to the London eye. For this I take no credit—Hone being a mine any one can work—but that I rechristened that dance, after I had revised it, ‘The Gubby’ is my title to immortal fame. It was still to be witnessed, I wrote, ‘In all its poignant purity at Huckley, that last home of significant mediæval survivals’; and I fell so in love with my creation that I kept it back for days, enamelling and burnishing.

‘You’s better put it in,’ said Ollyett at last. ‘It’s time we asserted ourselves again. The other fellows are beginning to poach. You saw that thing in the Pinnacle about Sir Thomas’s Model Village? He must have got one of their chaps down to do it.’

‘Nothing like the wounds of a friend,’ I said. ‘That account of the non-alcoholic pub alone was——’

‘I liked the bit best about the white-tiled laundry and the Fallen Virgins who wash Sir Thomas’s dress shirts. Our side couldn’t come within a mile of that, you know. We haven’t the proper flair for sexual slobber.’

‘That’s what I’m always saying,’ I retorted. ‘Leave ’em alone. The other fellows are doing our work for us now. Besides I want to touch up my “Gubby Dance” a little more.’

‘No. You’ll spoil it. Let’s shove it in to-day. For one thing it’s Literature. I don’t go in for compliments as you know, but, etc. etc.’

I had a healthy suspicion of young Ollyett in every aspect, but though I knew that I should have to pay for it, I fell to his flattery, and my priceless article on the ‘Gubby Dance’ appeared. Next Saturday he asked me to bring out The Bun in his absence, which I naturally assumed would be connected with the little maroon side-car. I was wrong.

On the following Monday I glanced at The Cake at breakfast-time to make sure, as usual, of her inferiority to my beloved but unremunerative Bun. I opened on a heading: ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat.’ I read . . . I read that the Geoplanarian Society—a society devoted to the proposition that the earth is flat—had held its Annual Banquet and Exercises at Huckley on Saturday, when after convincing addresses, amid scenes of the greatest enthusiasm, Huckley village had decided by an unanimous vote of 438 that the earth was flat. I do not remember that I breathed again till I had finished the two columns of description that followed. Only one man could have written them. They were flawless-crisp, nervous, austere yet human, poignant, vital, arresting—most distinctly arresting—dynamic enough to shift a city—and quotable by whole sticks at a time. And there was a leader, a grave and poised leader, which tore me in two with mirth, until I remembered that I had been left out—infamously and unjustifiably dropped. I went to Ollyett’s rooms. He was breakfasting, and, to do him justice, looked conscience-stricken.

I‘t wasn’t my fault,’ he began. ‘It was Bat Masquerier. I swear I would have asked you to come if——’

‘Never mind that,’ I said. ‘It’s the best bit of work you’ve ever done or will do. Did any of it happen?’

‘Happen? Heavens! D’you think even I could have invented it?’

‘Is it exclusive to The Cake?’ I cried.

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‘It cost Bat Masquerier two thousand,’ Ollyett replied. ‘D’you think he’d let any one else in on that? But I give you my sacred word I knew nothing about it till he asked me to come down and cover it. He had Huckley posted in three colours, “The Geoplanarians’ Annual Banquet and Exercises.” Yes, he invented “Geoplanarians.” He wanted Huckley to think it meant aeroplanes. Yes, I know that there is a real Society that thinks the world’s flat—they ought to be grateful for the lift—but Bat made his own. He did! He created the whole show, I tell you. He swept out half his Halls for the job. Think of that—on a Saturday! They—we went down in motor char-à-bancs—three of ’em—one pink, one primrose, and one forget-me-not-blue—twenty people in each one and “The Earth is Flat” on each side and across the back. I went with Teddy Rickets and Lafone from the Trefoil, and both the Silhouette Sisters, and—wait a minute!—the Crossleigh Trio. You know the Every-Day Dramas Trio at the Jocunda—Ada Crossleigh, “Bunt” Crossleigh, and little Victorine? Them. And there was Hoke Ramsden, the lightning-change chap in Morgiana and Drexel—and there was Billy Turpeen. Yes, you know him! The North London Star. “I’m the Referee that got himself disliked at Blackheath.” That chap! And there was Mackaye-—that one-eyed Scotch fellow that all Glasgow is crazy about. Talk of subordinating yourself for Art’s sake! Mackaye was the earnest inquirer who got converted at the end of the meeting. And there was quite a lot of girls I didn’t know, and—oh, yes—there was ’Dal! ’Dal Benzaguen herself! We sat together, going and coming. She’s all the darling there ever was. She sent you her love, and she told me to tell you that she won’t forget about Nellie Farren. She says you’ve given her an ideal to work for. She? Oh, she was the Lady Secretary to the Geoplanarians, of course. I forget who were in the other brakes—provincial stars mostly—but they played up gorgeously. The art of the music-hall’s changed since your day. They didn’t overdo it a bit. You see, people who believe the earth is flat don’t dress quite like other people. You may have noticed that I hinted at that in my account. It’s a rather flat-fronted Ionic style—neo-Victorian, except for the bustles, ’Dal told me,—but ’Dal looked heavenly in it! So did little Victorine. And there was a girl in the blue brake—she’s a provincial—but she’s coming to town this winter and she’ll knock ’em—Winnie Deans. Remember that! She told Huckley how she had suffered for the Cause as a governess in a rich family where they believed that the world is round, and how she threw up her job sooner than teach immoral geography. That was at the overflow meeting outside the Baptist chapel. She knocked ’em to sawdust! We must look out for Winnie . . . . But Lafone! Lafone was beyond everything. Impact, personality—conviction—the whole bag o’ tricks! He sweated conviction. Gad, he convinced me while he was speaking! (Him? He was President of the Geoplanarians, of course. Haven’t you read my account?) It is an infernally plausible theory. After all, no one has actually proved the earth is round, have they?’

‘Never mind the earth. What about Huckley?’

‘Oh, Huckley got tight. That’s the worst of these model villages if you let ’em smell fire-water. There’s one alcoholic pub in the place that Sir Thomas can’t get rid of. Bat made it his base, He sent down the banquet in two motor lorries—dinner for five hundred and drinks for ten thousand. Huckley voted all right. Don’t you make any mistake about that. No vote, no dinner. A unanimous vote—exactly as I’ve said. At least, the Rector and the Doctor were the only dissentients. We didn’t count them. Oh yes, Sir Thomas was there. He came and grinned at us through his park gates. He’ll grin worse to-day. There’s an aniline dye that you rub through a stencil-plate that eats about a foot into any stone and wears good to the last. Bat had both the lodge-gates stencilled “The Earth is flat!” and all the barns and walls they could get at . . . . Oh Lord, but Huckley was drunk! We had to fill ’em up to make ’em forgive us for not being aeroplanes. Unthankful yokels! D’you realise that Emperors couldn’t have commanded the talent Bat decanted on ’em? Why, ’Dal alone was . . . . And by eight o’clock not even a bit of paper left! The whole show packed up and gone, and Huckley hoo-raying for the earth being flat.’

‘Very good,’ I began. ‘I am, as you know, a one-third proprietor of The Bun.’

‘I didn’t forget that,’ Ollyett interrupted. ‘That was uppermost in my mind all the time. I’ve got a special account for The Bun to-day—it’s an idyll—and just to show how I thought of you, I told ’Dal, coming home, about your Gubby Dance, and she told Winnie. Winnie came back in our char-à-banc. After a bit we had to get out and dance it in a field. It’s quite a dance the way we did it—and Lafone invented a sort of gorilla lockstep procession at the end. Bat had sent down a film-chap on the chance of getting something. He was the son of a clergyman—a most dynamic personality. He said there isn’t anything for the cinema in meetings qua meetings—they lack action. Films are a branch of art by themselves. But he went wild over the Gubby. He said it was like Peter’s vision at Joppa. He took about a million feet of it. Then I photoed it exclusive for The Bun. I’ve sent ’em in already, only remember we must eliminate Winnie’s left leg in the first figure. It’s too arresting . . . . And there you are! But I tell you I’m afraid of Bat. That man’s the Personal Devil. He did it all. He didn’t even come down himself. He said he’d distract his people.’

‘Why didn’t he ask me to come?’ I persisted.

‘Because he said you’d distract me. He said he wanted my brains on ice. He got ’em. I believe it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.’ He reached for The Cake and re-read it luxuriously. ‘Yes, out and away the best—supremely quotable,’ he concluded, and—after another survey—‘By God, what a genius I was yesterday!’

I would have been angry, but I had not the time. That morning, Press agencies grovelled to me in The Bun office for leave to use certain photos, which, they understood, I controlled, of a certain village dance. When I had sent the fifth man away on the edge of tears, my self-respect came back a little. Then there was The Bun’s poster to get out. Art being elimination, I fined it down to two words (one too many, as it proved)—‘The Gubby!’ in red, at which our manager protested; but by five o’clock he told me that I was the Napoleon of Fleet Street. Ollyett’s account in The Bun of the Geoplanarians’ Exercises and Love Feast lacked the supreme shock of his version in The Cake, but it bruised more; while the photos of ‘The Gubby’ (which, with Winnie’s left leg, was why I had set the doubtful press to work so early) were beyond praise and, next day, beyond price. But even then I did not understand.

A week later, I think it was, Bat Masquerier telephoned to me to come to the Trefoil.

‘It’s your turn now,’ he said. ‘I’m not asking Ollyett. Come to the stage-box.’

I went, and, as Bat’s guest, was received as Royalty is not. We sat well back and looked out on the packed thousands. It was Morgiana and Drexel, that fluid and electric review which Bat—though he gave Lafone the credit—really created.

‘Ye-es,’ said Bat dreamily, after Morgiana had given ‘the nasty jar’ to the Forty Thieves in their forty oil ‘combinations.’ ‘As you say, I’ve got ’em and I can hold ’em. What a man does doesn’t matter much; and how he does it don’t matter either. It’s the when—the psychological moment. ’Press can’t make up for it; money can’t; brains can’t. A lot’s luck, but all the rest is genius. I’m not speaking about My people now. I’m talking of Myself.’

Then ’Dal—she was the only one who dared—knocked at the door and stood behind us all alive and panting as Morgiana. Lafone was carrying the police-court scene, and the house was ripped up crossways with laughter.

‘Ah! Tell a fellow now,’ she asked me for the twentieth time, ‘did you love Nellie Farren when you were young?’

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‘Did we love her?’ I answered. ‘“If the earth and the sky and the sea”—There were three million of us, ’Dal, and we worshipped her.’

‘How did she get it across?’ ’Dal went on.

‘She was Nellie. The houses used to coo over her when she came on.’

‘I’ve had a good deal, but I’ve never been cooed over yet,’ said ’Dal wistfully.

‘It isn’t the how, it’s the when,’ Bat repeated. ‘Ah!’

He leaned forward as the house began to rock and peal full-throatedly. ’Dal fled. A sinuous and silent procession was filing into the police-court to a scarcely audible accompaniment. It was dressed—but the world and all its picture-palaces know how it was dressed. It danced and it danced, and it danced the dance which bit all humanity in the leg for half a year, and it wound up with the lockstep finale that mowed the house down in swathes, sobbing and aching. Somebody in the gallery moaned, ‘Oh Gord, the Gubby!’ and we heard the word run like a shudder, for they had not a full breath left among them. Then ’Dal came on, an electric star in her dark hair, the diamonds flashing in her three-inch heels—a vision that made no sign for thirty counted seconds while the police-court scene dissolved behind her into Morgiana’s Manicure Palace, and they recovered themselves. The star on her forehead went out, and a soft light bathed her as she took—slowly, slowly to the croon of adoring strings—the eighteen paces forward. We saw her first as a queen alone; next as a queen for the first time conscious of her subjects, and at the end, when her hands fluttered, as a woman delighted, awed not a little, but transfigured and illuminated with sheer, compelling affection and goodwill. I caught the broken mutter of welcome—the coo which is more than tornadoes of applause. It died and rose and died again lovingly.

‘She’s got it across,’ Bat whispered. ‘I’ve never seen her like this. I told her to light up the star, but I was wrong, and she knew it. She’s an artist.’

‘’Dal, you darling!’ some one spoke, not loudly but it carried through the house.

‘Thank you!’ ’Dal answered, and in that broken tone one heard the last fetter riveted. ‘Good evening, boys! I’ve just come from—now—where the dooce was it I have come from?’ She turned to the impassive files of the Gubby dancers, and went on: ‘Ah, so good of you to remind me, you dear, bun-faced things. I’ve just come from the village—The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat.’

She swept into that song with the full orchestra. It devastated the habitable earth for the next six months. Imagine, then, what its rage and pulse must have been at the incandescent hour of its birth! She only gave the chorus once. At the end of the second verse, ‘Are you with me, boys?’ she cried, and the house tore it clean away from her—‘Earth was flat—Earth was flat.   Flat as my hat—Flatter than that’—drowning all but the bassoons and double-basses that marked the word.

‘Wonderful,’ I said to Bat. ‘And it’s only “Nuts in May” with variations.’

‘Yes—but I did the variations,’ he replied.

At the last verse she gestured to Carlini the conductor, who threw her up his baton. She caught it with a boy’s ease. ‘Are you with me?’ she cried once more, and—the maddened house behind her—abolished all the instruments except the guttural belch of the double-basses on ‘Earth’—The Village that voted the Earth was flat—Earth was flat!’ It was delirium. Then she picked up the Gubby dancers and led them in a clattering improvised lockstep thrice round the stage till her last kick sent her diamond-hilted shoe Catherine-wheeling to the electrolier.

I saw the forest of hands raised to catch it, heard the roaring and stamping pass through hurricanes to full typhoon; heard the song, pinned down by the faithful double-basses as the bull-dog pins down the bellowing bull, overbear even those; till at last the curtain fell and Bat took me round to her dressing-room, where she lay spent after her seventh call. Still the song, through all those white-washed walls, shook the reinforced concrete of the Trefoil as steam pile-drivers shake the flanks of a dock.

‘I’m all out—first time in my life. Ah! Tell a fellow now, did I get it across?’ she whispered huskily.

‘You know you did,’ I replied as she dipped her nose deep in a beaker of barley-water. ‘They cooed over you.’

Bat nodded. ‘And poor Nellie’s dead—in Africa, ain’t it?’

‘I hope I’ll die before they stop cooing,’ said ’Dal.

‘“Earth was flat—Earth was flat!”’ Now it was more like mine-pumps in flood.

‘They’ll have the house down if you don’t take another,’ some one called.

‘Bless ’em!’ said ’Dal, and went out for her eighth, when in the face of that cataract she said yawning, ‘I don’t know how you feel, children, but I’m dead. You be quiet.’

‘Hold a minute,’ said Bat tome. ‘I’ve got to hear how it went in the provinces. Winnie Deans had it in Manchester, and Ramsden at Glasgow—and there are all the films too. I had rather a heavy week-end.’

The telephones presently reassured him.

‘It’ll do,’ said he. ‘And he said my home address was Jerusalem.’ He left me humming the refrain of ‘The Holy City.’ Like Ollyett I found myself afraid of that man.

When I got out into the street and met the disgorging picture-palaces capering on the pavements and humming it (for he had put the gramophones on with the films), and when I saw far to the south the red electrics flash ‘Gubby’ across the Thames, I feared more than ever.

A few days passed which were like nothing except, perhaps, a suspense of fever in which the sick man perceives the searchlights of the world’s assembled navies in act to converge on one minute fragment of wreckage—one only in all the black and agony-strewn sea. Then those beams focussed themselves. Earth as we knew it—the full circuit of our orb—laid the weight of its impersonal and searing curiosity on this Huckley which had voted that it was flat. It asked for news about Huckley—where and what it might be, and how it talked—it knew how it danced—and how it thought in its wonderful soul. And then, in all the zealous, merciless press, Huckley was laid out for it to look at, as a drop of pond water is exposed on the sheet of a magic-lantern show. But Huckley’s sheet was only coterminous with the use of type among mankind. For the precise moment that was necessary, Fate ruled it that there should be nothing of first importance in the world’s idle eye. One atrocious murder, a political crisis, an incautious or heady continental statesman, the mere catarrh of a king, would have wiped out the significance of our message, as a passing cloud annuls the urgent helio. But it was halcyon weather in every respect. Ollyett and I did not need to lift our little fingers any more than the Alpine climber whose last sentence has unkeyed the arch of the avalanche. The thing roared and pulverised and swept beyond eyesight all by itself—all by itself. And once well away, the fall of kingdoms could not have diverted it.

Ours is, after all, a kindly earth. While The Song ran and raped it with the cataleptic kick of ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,’ multiplied by the West African significance of ‘Everybody’s doing it,’ plus twice the infernal elementality of a certain tune in Dona et Gamma; when for all practical purposes, literary, dramatic, artistic, social, municipal, political, commercial, and administrative, the Earth was flat, the Rector of Huckley wrote to us—again as a lover of accuracy—to point out that the Huckley vote on ‘the alleged flatness of this scene of our labours here below’ was not unanimous; he and the doctor having voted against it. And the great Baron Reuter himself (I am sure it could have been none other) flashed that letter in full to the front, back, and both wings of this scene of our labours. For Huckley was News. The Bun also contributed a photograph which cost me some trouble to fake.

‘We are a vital nation,’ said Ollyett while we were discussing affairs at a Bat dinner. ‘Only an Englishman could have written that letter at this present juncture.’

‘It reminded me of a tourist in the Cave of the Winds under Niagara. Just one figure in a mackintosh. But perhaps you saw our photo?’ I said proudly.

‘Yes,’ Bat replied. ‘I’ve been to Niagara, too. And how’s Huckley taking it?’

‘They don’t quite understand, of course,’ said Ollyett. ‘But it’s bringing pots of money into the place. Ever since the motor-bus excursions were started——’

‘I didn’t know they had been,’ said Pallant.

‘Oh yes. Motor char-à-bancs—uniformed guides and key-bugles included. They’re getting a bit fed up with the tune there nowadays,’ Ollyett added.

‘They play it under his windows, don’t they?’ Bat asked. ‘He can’t stop the right of way across his park.’

‘He cannot,’ Ollyett answered. ‘By the way, Woodhouse, I’ve bought that font for you from the sexton. I paid fifteen pounds for it.’

‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ asked Woodhouse.

‘You give it to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is fourteenth-century work all right. You can trust me.’

‘Is it worth it—now?’ said Pallant. ‘Not that I’m weakening, but merely as a matter of tactics?’

‘But this is true,’ said Ollyett. ‘Besides, it is my hobby, I always wanted to be an architect. I’ll attend to it myself. It’s too serious for The Bun and miles too good for The Cake.’

He broke ground in a ponderous architectural weekly, which had never heard of Huckley. There was no passion in his statement, but mere fact backed by a wide range of authorities. He established beyond doubt that the old font at Huckley had been thrown out, on Sir Thomas’s instigation, twenty years ago, to make room for a new one of Bath stone adorned with Limoges enamels; and that it had lain ever since in a corner of the sexton’s shed. He proved, with learned men to support him, that there was only one other font in all England to compare with it. So Woodhouse bought it and presented it to a grateful South Kensington which said it would see the earth still flatter before it returned the treasure to purblind Huckley. Bishops by the benchful and most of the Royal Academy, not to mention ‘Margaritas ante Porcos,’ wrote fervently to the papers. Punch based a political cartoon on it; the Times a third leader, ‘The Lust of Newness’; and the Spectator a scholarly and delightful middle, ‘Village Hausmania.’ The vast amused outside world said in all its tongues and types: ‘Of course! This is just what Huckley would do!’ And neither Sir Thomas nor the Rector nor the sexton nor any one else wrote to deny it.

‘You see,’ said Ollyett, ‘this is much more of a blow to Huckley than it looks—because every word of it’s true. Your Gubby dance was inspiration, I admit, but it hadn’t its roots in——’

‘Two hemispheres and four continents so far,’ I pointed out.

‘Its roots in the hearts of Huckley was what I was going to say. Why don’t you ever comedown and look at the place? You’ve never seen it since we were stopped there.’

‘I’ve only my week-ends free,’ I said, ‘and you seem to spend yours there pretty regularly—with the side-car. I was afraid——’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he said cheerily. ‘We’re quite an old engaged couple now. As a matter of fact, it happened after “the gravid polled Angus” business. Come along this Saturday. Woodhouse says he’ll run us down after lunch. He wants to see Huckley too.’

Pallant could not accompany us, but Bat took his place.

‘It’s odd,’ said Bat, ‘that none of us except Ollyett has ever set eyes on Huckley since that time. That’s what I always tell My people. Local colour is all right after you’ve got your idea. Before that, it’s a mere nuisance.’ He regaled us on the way down with panoramic views of the success—geographical and financial—of ‘The Gubby’ and The Song.

‘By the way,’ said he, ‘I’ve assigned ’Dal all the gramophone rights of “The Earth.” She’s a born artist. ’Hadn’t sense enough to hit me for triple-dubs the morning after. She’d have taken it out in coos.’

‘Bless her! And what’ll she make out of the gramophone rights? ‘I asked.

‘Lord knows! ‘he replied. ‘I’ve made fifty-four thousand my little end of the business, and it’s only just beginning. Hear that!’

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A shell-pink motor-brake roared up behind us to the music on a key-bugle of ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat.’ In a few minutes we overtook another, in natural wood, whose occupants were singing it through their noses.

‘I don’t know that agency. It must be Cook’s,’ said Ollyett. ‘They do suffer.’ We were never out of ear-shot of the tune the rest of the way to Huckley.

Though I knew it would be so, I was disappointed with the actual aspect of the spot we had—it is not too much to say—created in the face of the nations. The alcoholic pub; the village green; the Baptist chapel; the church; the sexton’s shed; the Rectory whence the so-wonderful letters had come; Sir Thomas’s park gatepillars still violently declaring ‘The Earth is flat,’ were as mean, as average, as ordinary as the photograph of a room where a murder has been committed. Ollyett, who, of course, knew the place specially well, made the most of it to us. Bat, who had employed it as a back-cloth to one of his own dramas, dismissed it as a thing used and emptied, but Woodhouse expressed my feelings when he said: ‘Is that all—after all we’ve done? ‘

‘I know,’ said Ollyett soothingly. ‘“Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing: When Ilion like a mist rose into towers.” I’ve felt the same sometimes, though it has been Paradise for me. But they do suffer.’

The fourth brake in thirty minutes had just turned into Sir Thomas’s park to tell the Hall that ‘The Earth was flat’; a knot of obviously American tourists were kodaking his lodge gates; while the tea-shop opposite the lych-gate was full of people buying postcards of the old font as it had lain twenty years in the sexton’s shed. We went to the alcoholic pub and congratulated the proprietor.

‘It’s bringin’ money to the place,’ said he. ‘But in a sense you can buy money too dear. It isn’t doin’ us any good. People are laughin’ at us. That’s what they’re doin’ . . . . Now, with regard to that Vote of ours you may have heard talk about . . . .’

‘For Gorze sake, chuck that votin’ business,’ cried an elderly man at the door. ‘Money-gettin’ or no money-gettin’, we’re fed up with it.’

‘Well, I do think,’ said the publican, shifting his ground, ‘I do think Sir Thomas might ha’ managed better in some things.’

‘He tole me,’—the elderly man shouldered his way to the bar—‘he tole me twenty years ago to take an’ lay that font in my tool-shed. He tole me so himself. An’ now, after twenty years, me own wife makin’ me out little better than the common ’angman!’

‘That’s the sexton,’ the publican explained. ‘His good lady sells the postcards—if you ’aven’t got some. But we feel Sir Thomas might ha’ done better.’

‘What’s he got to do with it?’ said Woodhouse.

‘There’s nothin’ we can trace’ome to ‘im in so many words, but we think he might ’ave saved us the font business. Now, in regard to that votin’ business——’

‘Chuck it! Oh, chuck it!’ the sexton roared, ‘or you’ll ’ave me cuttin’ my throat at cock-crow. ’Ere’s another parcel of fun-makers!’

A motor-brake had pulled up at the door and a multitude of men and women immediately descended. We went out to look. They bore rolled banners, a reading-desk in three pieces, and, I specially noticed, a collapsible harmonium, such as is used on ships at sea.

‘Salvation Army?’ I said, though I saw no uniforms.

Two of them unfurled a banner between poles which bore the legend: ‘The Earth is flat.’ Woodhouse and I turned to Bat. He shook his head. ‘No, no! Not me . . . . If I had only seen their costumes in advance!’

‘Good Lord!’ said Ollyett. ‘It’s the genuine Society!’

The company advanced on the green with the precision of people well broke to these movements. Scene-shifters could not have been quicker with the three-piece rostrum, nor stewards with the harmonium. Almost before its cross-legs had been kicked into their catches, certainly before the tourists by the lodge-gates had begun to move over, a woman sat down to it and struck up a hymn:

Hear ther truth our tongues are telling,
Spread ther light from shore to shore,
God hath given man a dwelling
Flat and flat for evermore.

When ther Primal Dark retreated,
When ther deeps were undesigned,
He with rule and level meted
Habitation for mankind!

I saw sick envy on Bat’s face. ‘Curse Nature,’ he muttered. ‘She gets ahead of you every time. To think I forgot hymns and a harmonium!’

Then came the chorus

Hear ther truth our tongues are telling,
Spread ther light from shore to shore—
Oh, be faithful! Oh, be truthful!
Earth is flat for evermore.

They sang several verses with the fervour of Christians awaiting their lions. Then there were growlings in the air. The sexton, embraced by the landlord, two-stepped out of the pub-door. Each was trying to outroar the other. ‘Apologising in advarnce for what he says,’ the landlord shouted: ‘You’d better go away’ (here the sexton began to speak words). ‘This isn’t the time nor yet the place for—for any more o’ this chat.’

The crowd thickened. I saw the village police-sergeant come out of his cottage buckling his belt.

‘But surely,’ said the woman at the harmonium, ‘there must be some mistake. We are not suffragettes.’

‘Damn it! They’d be a change,’ cried the sexton. ‘You get out of this! Don’t talk! I can’t stand it for one! Get right out, or we’ll font you!’

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The crowd which was being recruited from every house in sight echoed the invitation. The sergeant pushed forward. A man beside the reading-desk said: ‘But surely we are among dear friends and sympathisers. Listen to me for a moment.’

It was the moment that a passing char-à-banc chose to strike into The Song. The effect was instantaneous. Bat, Ollyett, and I, who by divers roads have learned the psychology of crowds, retreated towards the tavern door. Woodhouse, the newspaper proprietor, anxious, I presume, to keep touch with the public, dived into the thick of it. Every one else told the Society to go away at once. When the lady at the harmonium (I began to understand why it is sometimes necessary to kill women) pointed at the stencilled park pillars and called them ‘the cromlechs of our common faith,’ there was a snarl and a rush. The police-sergeant checked it, but advised the Society to keep on going. The Society withdrew into the brake fighting, as it were, a rearguard action of oratory up each step. The collapsed harmonium was hauled in last, and with the perfect unreason of crowds, they cheered it loudly, till the chauffeur slipped in his clutch and sped away. Then the crowd broke up, congratulating all concerned except the sexton, who was held to have disgraced his office by having sworn at ladies. We strolled across the green towards Woodhouse, who was talking to the police-sergeant near the park-gates, We were not twenty yards from him when we saw Sir Thomas Ingell emerge from the lodge and rush furiously at Woodhouse with an uplifted stick, at the same time shrieking: ‘I’ll teach you to laugh, you——’ but Ollyett has the record of the language. By the time we reached them, Sir Thomas was on the ground; Woodhouse, very white, held the walking-stick and was saying to the sergeant

‘I give this person in charge for assault.’

‘But, good Lord!’ said the sergeant, whiter than Woodhouse. ‘It’s Sir Thomas.’

‘Whoever it is, it isn’t fit to be at large,’ said Woodhouse. The crowd suspecting something wrong began to reassemble, and all the English horror of a row in public moved us, headed by the sergeant, inside the lodge. We shut both park-gates and lodge-door.

‘You saw the assault, sergeant,’ Woodhouse went on. ‘You can testify I used no more force than was necessary to protect myself. You can testify that I have not even damaged this person’s property. (Here! take your stick, you!) You heard the filthy language he used.’

‘I—I can’t say I did,’ the sergeant stammered.

‘Oh, but we did!’ said Ollyett, and repeated it, to the apron-veiled horror of the lodge-keeper’s wife.

Sir Thomas on a hard kitchen chair began to talk. He said he had ‘stood enough of being photographed like a wild beast,’ and expressed loud regret that he had not killed ‘that man,’ who was ‘conspiring with the sergeant to laugh at him.’

‘’Ad you ever seen ’im before, Sir Thomas?’ the sergeant asked.

‘No! But it’s time an example was made here. I’ve never seen the sweep in my life.’

I think it was Bat Masquerier’s magnetic eye that recalled the past to him, for his face changed and his jaw dropped. ‘But I have!’ he groaned. ‘I remember now.’

Here a writhing man entered by the back door. He was, he said, the village solicitor. I do not assert that he licked Woodhouse’s boots, but we should have respected him more if he had and been done with it. His notion was that the matter could be accommodated, arranged and compromised for gold, and yet more gold. The sergeant thought so too. Woodhouse undeceived them both. To the sergeant he said, ‘Will you or will you not enter the charge?’ To the village solicitor he gave the name of his lawyers, at which the man wrung his hands and cried, ‘Oh, Sir T., Sir T.!’ in a miserable falsetto, for it was a Bat Masquerier of a firm. They conferred together in tragic whispers.

‘I don’t dive after Dickens,’ said Ollyett to Bat and me by the window, ‘but every time I get into a row I notice the police-court always fills up with his characters.’

‘I’ve noticed that too,’ said Bat. ‘But the odd thing is you mustn’t give the public straight Dickens—not in My business. I wonder why that is.’

Then Sir Thomas got his second wind and cursed the day that he, or it may have been we, were born. I feared that though he was a Radical he might apologise and, since he was an M.P., might lie his way out of the difficulty. But he was utterly and truthfully beside himself. He asked foolish questions—such as what we were doing in the village at all, and how much blackmail Woodhouse expected to make out of him. But neither Woodhouse nor the sergeant nor the writhing solicitor listened. The upshot of their talk, in the chimney-corner, was that Sir Thomas stood engaged to appear next Monday before his brother magistrates on charges of assault, disorderly conduct, and language calculated, etc. Ollyett was specially careful about the language.

Then we left. The village looked very pretty in the late light—pretty and tuneful as a nest of nightingales.

‘You’ll turn up on Monday, I hope,’ said Woodhouse, when we reached town. That was his only allusion to the affair.

So we turned up—through a world still singing that the Earth was flat—at the little clay-coloured market-town with the large Corn Exchange and the small jubilee memorial. We had some difficulty in getting seats in the court. Woodhouse’s imported London lawyer was a man of commanding personality, with a voice trained to convey blasting imputations by tone. When the case was called, he rose and stated his client’s intention not to proceed with the charge. His client, he went on to say, had not entertained, and, of course, in the circumstances could not have entertained, any suggestion of accepting on behalf of public charities any moneys that might have been offered to him on the part of Sir Thomas’s estate. At the same time, no one acknowledged more sincerely than his client the spirit in which those offers had been made by those entitled to make them. But, as a matter of fact—here he became the man of the world colloguing with his equals—certain—er—details had come to his client’s knowledge since the lamentable outburst, which . . . He shrugged his shoulders. Nothing was served by going into them, but he ventured to say that, had those painful circumstances only been known earlier, his client would—again ‘of course’—never have dreamed—— A gesture concluded the sentence, and the ensnared Bench looked at Sir Thomas with new and withdrawing eyes. Frankly, as they could see, it would be nothing less than cruelty to proceed further with this—er—unfortunate affair. He asked leave, therefore, to withdraw the charge in toto, and at the same time to express his client’s deepest sympathy with all who had been in any way distressed, as his client had been, by the fact and the publicity of proceedings which he could, of course, again assure them that his client would never have dreamed of instituting if, as he hoped he had made plain, certain facts had been before his client at the time when . . . But he had said enough. For his fee it seemed to me that he had.

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Heaven inspired Sir Thomas’s lawyer—all of a sweat lest his client’s language should come out—to rise up and thank him. Then, Sir Thomas—not yet aware what leprosy had been laid upon him, but grateful to escape on any terms—followed suit. He was heard in interested silence, and people drew back a pace as Gehazi passed forth.

‘You hit hard,’ said Bat to Woodhouse afterwards. ‘His own people think he’s mad.’

‘You don’t say so? I’ll show you some of his letters to-night at dinner,’ he replied.

He brought them to the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey. We forgot to be amazed, as till then we had been amazed, over The Song or ‘The Gubby,’ or the full tide of Fate that seemed to run only for our sakes. It did not even interest Ollyett that the verb ‘to buckle’ had passed into the English leader-writers’ language. We were studying the interior of a soul, flash-lighted to its grimiest corners by the dread of ‘losing its position.’

‘And then it thanked you, didn’t it, for dropping the case?’ said Pallant.

‘Yes, and it sent me a telegram to confirm.’ Woodhouse turned to Bat. ‘Now d’you think I hit too hard? ‘he asked.

‘No—o!’ said Bat. ‘After all—I’m talking of every one’s business now—one can’t ever do anything in Art that comes up to Nature in any game in life. Just think how this thing has——’

‘Just let me run through that little case of yours again,’ said Pallant, and picked up The Bun which had it set out in full.

‘Any chance of ’Dal looking in on us to-night?’ Ollyett began.

‘She’s occupied with her Art too,’ Bat answered bitterly. ‘What’s the use of Art? Tell me, some one!’ A barrel-organ outside promptly pointed out that the Earth was flat. ‘The gramophone’s killing street organs, but I let loose a hundred-and-seventy-four of those hurdygurdys twelve hours after The Song,’ said Bat. ‘Not counting the Provinces.’ His face brightened a little.

‘Look here!’ said Pallant over the paper. ‘I don’t suppose you or those asinine J.P.’s knew it—but your lawyer ought to have known that you’ve all put your foot in it most confoundedly over this assault case.’

‘What’s the matter?’ said Woodhouse.

‘It’s ludicrous. It’s insane. There isn’t two penn’orth of legality in the whole thing. Of course, you could have withdrawn the charge, but the way you went about it is childish—besides being illegal. What on earth was the Chief Constable thinking of?’

‘Oh, he was a friend of Sir Thomas’s. They all were for that matter,’ I replied.

‘He ought to be hanged. So ought the Chairman of the Bench. I’m talking as a lawyer now.’

‘Why, what have we been guilty of? Misprision of treason or compounding a felony—or what?’ said Ollyett.

‘I’ll tell you later.’ Pallant went back to the paper with knitted brows, smiling unpleasantly from time to time. At last he laughed.

‘Thank you!’he said to Woodhouse. ‘It ought to be pretty useful—for us.’

‘What d’you mean?’ said Ollyett.

‘For our side. They are all Rads who are mixed up in this—from the Chief Constable down. There must be a Question. There must be a Question.’

‘Yes, but I wanted the charge withdrawn in my own way,’ Woodhouse insisted.

‘That’s nothing to do with the case. It’s the legality of your silly methods. You wouldn’t understand if I talked till morning.’ He began to pace the room, his hands behind him. ‘I wonder if I can get it through our Whip’s thick head that it’s a chance . . . . That comes of stuffing the Bench with radical tinkers,’ he muttered.

‘Oh, sit down!’ said Woodhouse.

‘Where’s your lawyer to be found now?’ he jerked out.

‘At the Trefoil,’ said Bat promptly. ‘I gave him the stage-box for to-night. He’s an artist too.’

‘Then I’m going to see him,’ said Pallant. ‘Properly handled this ought to be a godsend for our side.’ He withdrew without apology.

‘Certainly, this thing keeps on opening up, and up,’ I remarked inanely.

‘It’s beyond me!’ said Bat. ‘I don’t think if I’d known I’d have ever . . . Yes, I would, though. He said my home address was——’

‘It was his tone—his tone! ‘Ollyett almost shouted. Woodhouse said nothing, but his face whitened as he brooded.

‘Well, any way,’ Bat went on, ‘I’m glad I always believed in God and Providence and all those things. Else I should lose my nerve. We’ve put it over the whole world—the full extent of the geographical globe. We couldn’t stop it if we wanted to now. It’s got to burn itself out. I’m not in charge any more. What d’you expect’ll happen next. Angels?’

I expected nothing. Nothing that I expected approached what I got. Politics are not my concern, but, for the moment, since it seemed that they were going to ‘huckle’ with the rest, I took an interest in them. They impressed me as a dog’s life without a dog’s decencies, and I was confirmed in this when an unshaven and unwashen Pallant called on me at ten o’clock one morning, begging for a bath and a couch.

‘Bail too?’ I asked. He was in evening dress and his eyes were sunk feet in his head.

‘No,’ he said hoarsely. ‘All night sitting. Fifteen divisions. ’Nother to-night. Your place was nearer than mine, so——’ He began to undress in the hall.

When he awoke at one o’clock he gave me lurid accounts of what he said was history, but which was obviously collective hysteria. There had been a political crisis. He and his fellow M.P.’s had ‘done things’—I never quite got at the things—for eighteen hours on end, and the pitiless Whips were even then at the telephones to herd ’em up to another dog-fight. So he snorted and grew hot all over again while he might have been resting.

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‘I’m going to pitch in my question about that miscarriage of justice at Huckley this afternoon, if you care to listen to it,’ he said. ‘It’ll be absolutely thrown away—in our present state. I told ’em so; but it’s my only chance for weeks. P’raps Woodhouse would like to come.’

‘I’m sure he would. Anything to do with Huckley interests us,’ I said.

‘It’ll miss fire, I’m afraid. Both sides are absolutely cooked. The present situation has been working up for some time. You see the row was bound to come, etc. etc.,’ and he flew off the handle once more.

I telephoned to Woodhouse, and we went to the House together. It was a dull, sticky afternoon with thunder in the air. For some reason or other, each side was determined to prove its virtue and endurance to the utmost. I heard men snarling about it all round me. ‘If they won’t spare us, we’ll show ’em no mercy.’ ‘Break the brutes up from the start. They can’t stand late hours.’ ‘Come on! No shirking! I know you’ve had a Turkish bath,’ were some of the sentences I caught on our way. The House was packed already, and one could feel the negative electricity of a jaded crowd wrenching at one’s own nerves, and depressing the afternoon soul.

‘This is bad!’ Woodhouse whispered. ‘There’ll be a row before they’ve finished. Look at the Front Benches!’ And he pointed out little personal signs by which I was to know that each man was on edge. He might have spared himself. The House was ready to snap before a bone had been thrown. A sullen minister rose to reply to a staccato question. His supporters cheered defiantly. ‘None o’ that! None o’ that!’ came from the Back Benches. I saw the Speaker’s face stiffen like the face of a helmsman as he humours a hard-mouthed yacht after a sudden following sea. The trouble was barely met in time. There came a fresh, apparently causeless gust a few minutes later—savage, threatening, but futile. It died out—one could hear the sigh—in sudden wrathful realisation of the dreary hours ahead, and the ship of state drifted on.

Then Pallant—and the raw House winced at the torture of his voice—rose. It was a twenty-line question, studded with legal technicalities. The gist of it was that he wished to know whether the appropriate Minister was aware that there had been a grave miscarriage of justice on such and such a date, at such and such a place, before such and such justices of the peace, in regard to a case which arose——

I heard one desperate, weary I damn! ‘float’ up from the pit of that torment. Pallant sawed on—’out of certain events which occurred at the village of Huckley.’

The House came to attention with a parting of the lips like a hiccough, and it flashed through my mind . . . . Pallant repeated, ‘Huckley. The village——’

‘That voted the Earth was flat.’ A single voice from a back Bench sang it once like a lone frog in a far pool.

‘Earth was flat,’ croaked another voice opposite.

‘Earth was flat.’ There were several. Then several more.

It was, you understand, the collective, over, strained nerve of the House, snapping, strand by strand to various notes, as the hawser parts from its moorings.

‘The Village that voted the Earth was flat.’ The tune was beginning to shape itself: More voices were raised and feet began to beat time. Even so it did not occur to me that the thing would——

‘The Village that voted the Earth was flat!’ It was easier now to see who were not singing. There were still a few. Of a sudden (and this proves the fundamental instability of the crossbench mind) a cross-bencher leaped on his seat and there played an imaginary double-bass with tremendous maestro-like wagglings of the elbow.

The last strand parted. The ship of state drifted out helpless on the rocking tide of melody.

‘The Village that voted the Earth was flat!
The Village that voted the Earth was flat!’

The Irish first conceived the idea of using their order-papers as funnels wherewith to reach the correct ‘vroom—vroom’ on ‘Earth.’ Labour, always conservative and respectable at a crisis, stood out longer than any other section, but when it came in it was howling syndicalism. Then, without distinction of Party, fear of constituents, desire for office, or hope of emolument, the House sang at the tops and at the bottoms of their voices, swaying their stale bodies and epileptically beating with their swelled feet. They sang ‘The Village that voted the Earth was flat’: first, because they wanted to, and secondly—which is the terror of that song—because they could not stop. For no consideration could they stop.

Pallant was still standing up. Some one pointed at him and they laughed. Others began to point, lunging, as it were, in time with the tune. At this moment two persons came in practically abreast from behind the Speaker’s chair, and halted appalled. One happened to be the Prime Minister and the other a messenger. The House, with tears running down their cheeks, transferred their attention to the paralysed couple. They pointed six hundred forefingers at them. They rocked, they waved, and they rolled while they pointed, but still they sang. When they weakened for an instant, Ireland would yell: ‘Are ye with me, bhoys?’ and they all renewed their strength like Antaeus. No man could say afterwards what happened in the Press or the Strangers’ Gallery. It was the House, the hysterical and abandoned House of Commons that held all eyes, as it deafened all ears. I saw both Front Benches bend forward, some with their foreheads on their despatch-boxes, the rest with their faces in their hands; and their moving shoulders jolted the House out of its last rag of decency. Only the Speaker remained unmoved. The entire press of Great Britain bore witness next day that he had not even bowed his head. The Angel of the Constitution, for vain was the help of man, foretold him the exact moment at which the House would have broken into ‘The Gubby.’ He is reported to have said: ‘I heard the Irish beginning to shuffle it. So I adjourned.’ Pallant’s version is that he added: ‘And I was never so grateful to a private member in all my life as I was to Mr. Pallant.’

He made no explanation. He did not refer to orders or disorders. He simply adjourned the House till six that evening. And the House adjourned—some of it nearly on all fours.

I was not correct when I said that the Speaker was the only man who did not laugh. Woodhouse was beside me all the time. His face was set and quite white—as white, they told me, as Sir Thomas Ingell’s when he went, by request, to a private interview with his Chief Whip.