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DAN had come to grief over his Latin, and was kept in; so Una went alone to Far Wood. Dan’s big catapult and the lead bullets that Hobden had made for him were hidden in an old hollow beech-stub on the west of the wood. They had named the place out of the verse in Lays of Ancient Rome.

From lordly Volaterrae,
Where scowls the far-famed hold,
Piled by the hands of giants
For Godlike Kings of old.

They were the ‘Godlike Kings,’ and when old Hobden piled some comfortable brushwood between the big wooden knees of Volaterrae, they called him ‘Hands of Giants.’

Una slipped through their private gap in the fence, and sat still awhile, scowling as scowlily and lordlily as she knew how; for ‘Volaterrae’ is an important watch-tower that juts out of Far Wood just as Far Wood juts out of the hillside. Pook’s Hill lay below her, and all the turns of the brook as it wanders out of the Willingford Woods, between hop-gardens, to old Hobden’s cottage at the Forge. The Sou’-West wind (there is always a wind by Volaterrae) blew from the bare ridge where Cherry Clack Windmill stands.

Now wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting things going to happen, and that is why on blowy days you stand up in Volaterrae and shout bits of the Lays to suit its noises.

Una took Dan’s catapult from its secret place, and made ready to meet Lars Porsena’s army stealing through the wind-whitened aspens by the brook. A gust boomed up the valley, and Una chanted sorrowfully:

‘Verbenna down to Ostia
Hath wasted all the plain;
Astur hath stormed Janiculum,
And the stout guards are slain.’

But the wind, not charging fair to the wood, started aside and shook a single oak in Gleason’s pasture. Here it made itself all small and crouched among the grasses, waving the tips of them as a cat waves the tip of her tail before she springs.

‘Now welcome—welcome, Sextus,’ sang Una, loading the catapult—

‘Now welcome to thy home!
Why dost thou stay, and turn away?
Here lies the road to Rome.’

She fired into the face of the lull, to wake up the cowardly wind, and heard a grunt from behind a thorn in the pasture.

‘Oh, my Winkie!’ she said aloud, and that was something she had picked up from Dan. ‘I b’lieve I’ve tickled up a Gleason cow.’

‘You little painted beast!’ a voice cried. ‘I’ll teach you to sling your masters!’

She looked down most cautiously, and saw a young man covered with hoopy bronze armour all glowing among the late broom. But what Una admired beyond all was his great bronze helmet with a red horse-tail that flicked in the wind. She could hear the long hairs rasp on his shimmery shoulder-plates.

‘What does the Faun mean,’ he said, half aloud to himself, ‘by telling me the Painted People have changed?’ He caught sight of Una’s yellow head. ‘Have you seen a painted lead-slinger?’ he called.

‘No-o,’ said Una. ‘But if you’ve seen a bullet—’

‘Seen?’ cried the man. ‘It passed within a hair’s-breadth of my ear.’

‘Well, that was me. I’m most awfully sorry.’

‘Didn’t the Faun tell you I was coming?’ He smiled.

‘Not if you mean Puck. I thought you were a Gleason cow. I—I didn’t know you were a—a—— What are you?’

He laughed outright, showing a set of splendid teeth. His face and eyes were dark, and his eyebrows met above his big nose in one bushy black bar.

‘They call me Parnesius. I have been a Centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion—the Ulpia Victrix. Did you sling that bullet?’

‘I did. I was using Dan’s catapult,’ said Una.

‘Catapults!’ said he. ‘I ought to know something about them. Show me!’

He leaped the rough fence with a rattle of spear, shield, and armour, and hoisted himself into Volaterrae as quickly as a shadow.

‘A sling on a forked stick. I understand!’ he cried, and pulled at the elastic. ‘But what wonderful beast yields this stretching leather?’

‘It’s laccy—elastic. You put the bullet into that loop, and then you pull hard.’

The man pulled, and hit himself square on his thumb-nail.

‘Each to his own weapon,’ he said, gravely, handing it back. ‘I am better with the bigger machine, little maiden. But it’s a pretty toy. A wolf would laugh at it. Aren’t you afraid of wolves?’

‘There aren’t any,’ said Una.

‘Never believe it! A wolf’s like a Winged Hat. He comes when he isn’t expected. Don’t they hunt wolves here?’

‘We don’t hunt,’ said Una, remembering what she had heard from grown-ups. ‘We preserve—pheasants. Do you know them?’

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‘I ought to,’ said the young man, smiling again, and he imitated the cry of the cock-pheasant so perfectly that a bird answered out of the wood.

‘What a big painted clucking fool is a pheasant,’ he said. ‘Just like some Romans!’

‘But you’re a Roman yourself, aren’t you?’ said Una.

‘Ye-es and no. I’m one of a good few thousands who have never seen Rome except in a picture. My people have lived at Vectis for generations. Vectis. That island West yonder that you can see from so far in clear weather.’

‘Do you mean the Isle of Wight? It lifts up just before rain, and you see it from the Downs.’

‘Very likely. Our Villa’s on the South edge of the Island, by the Broken Cliffs. Most of it is three hundred years old, but the cow-stables, where our first ancestor lived, must be a hundred years older. Oh, quite that, because the founder of our family had his land given him by Agricola at the Settlement. It’s not a bad little place for its size. In spring-time violets grow down to the very beach. I’ve gathered sea-weeds for myself and violets for my Mother many a time with our old nurse.’

‘Was your nurse a—a Romaness too?’

‘No, a Numidian. Gods be good to her! A dear, fat, brown thing with a tongue like a cowbell. She was a free woman. By the way, are you free, maiden?’

‘Oh, quite,’ said Una. ‘At least, till tea-time; and in summer our governess doesn’t say much if we’re late.’

The young man laughed again—a proper understanding laugh.

‘I see,’ said he. ‘That accounts for your being in the wood. We hid among the cliffs.’

‘Did you have a governess, then?’

‘Did we not? A Greek, too. She had a way of clutching her dress when she hunted us among the gorse-bushes that made us laugh. Then she’d say she’d get us whipped. She never did, though, bless her! Aglaia was a thorough sportswoman, for all her learning.’

‘But what lessons did you do—when—when you were little?’

‘Ancient history, the Classics, arithmetic, and so on,’ he answered. ‘My sister and I were thickheads, but my two brothers (I’m the middle one) liked those things, and, of course, Mother was clever enough for any six. She was nearly as tall as I am, and she looked like the new statue on the Western Road—the Demeter of the Baskets, you know. And funny! Roma Dea ! How Mother could make us laugh!’

‘What at?’

‘Little jokes and sayings that every family has. Don’t you know?’

‘I know we have, but I didn’t know other people had them too,’ said Una. ‘Tell me about all your family, please.’

‘Good families are very much alike. Mother would sit spinning of evenings while Aglaia read in her corner, and Father did accounts, and we four romped about the passages. When our noise grew too loud the Pater would say, “Less tumult! Less tumult! Have you never heard of a Father’s right over his children? He can slay them, my loves—slay them dead, and the Gods highly approve of the action!” Then Mother would prim up her dear mouth over the wheel and answer: “H’m! I’m afraid there can’t be much of the Roman Father about you!” Then the Pater would roll up his accounts, and say, “I’ll show you!” and then—then, he’d be worse than any of us!’

‘Fathers can—if they like,’ said Una, her eyes dancing.

‘Didn’t I say all good families are very much the same?’

‘What did you do in summer?’ said Una. ‘Play about, like us?’

‘Yes, and we visited our friends. There are no wolves in Vectis. We had many friends, and as many ponies as we wished.’

‘It must have been lovely,’ said Una. ‘I hope it lasted for ever.’

‘Not quite, little maid. When I was about sixteen or seventeen, the Father felt gouty, and we all went to the Waters.’

‘What waters?’

‘At Aquae Sulis. Every one goes there. You ought to get your Father to take you some day.’

‘But where? I don’t know,’ said Una.

The young man looked astonished for a moment. ‘Aquae Sulis,’ he repeated. ‘The best baths in Britain. Just as good, I’m told, as Rome. All the old gluttons sit in hot water, and talk scandal and politics. And the Generals come through the streets with their guards behind them; and the magistrates come in their chairs with their stiff guards behind them; and you meet fortune-tellers, and goldsmiths, and merchants, and philosophers, and feather-sellers, and ultra-Roman Britons, and ultra-British Romans, and tame tribesmen pretending to be civilised, and Jew lecturers, and—oh, everybody interesting. We young people, of course, took no interest in politics. We had not the gout: there were many of our age like us. We did not find life sad.

‘But while we were enjoying ourselves without thinking, my sister met the son of a magistrate in the west—and a year afterwards she was married to him. My young brother, who was always interested in plants and roots, met the First Doctor of a Legion from the City of the Legions, and he decided that he would be an Army doctor. I do not think it is a profession for a well-born man, but then—I’m not my brother. He went to Rome to study medicine, and now he’s First Doctor of a Legion in Egypt—at Antinoe, I think, but I have not heard from him for some time.

‘My eldest brother came across a Greek philosopher, and told my Father that he intended to settle down on the estate as a farmer and a philosopher. You see’—the young man’s eyes twinkled—’his philosopher was a long-haired one!’

I‘ thought philosophers were bald,’ said Una.

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‘Not all. She was very pretty. I don’t blame him. Nothing could have suited me better than my eldest brother doing this, for I was only too keen to join the Army. I had always feared I should have to stay at home and look after the estate while my brother took this.’

He rapped on his great glistening shield that never seemed to be in his way.

‘So we were well contented—we young people—and we rode back to Clausentum along the Wood Road very quietly. But when we reached home, Aglaia, our governess, saw what had come to us. I remember her at the door, the torch over her head, watching us climb the cliff path from the boat. “Aie! Aie!” she said. “Children you went away. Men and a woman you return!” Then she kissed Mother, and Mother wept. Thus our visit to the Waters settled our fates for each of us, Maiden.’

He rose to his feet and listened, leaning on the shield-rim.

‘I think that’s Dan—my brother,’ said Una.

‘Yes; and the Faun is with him,’ he replied, as Dan with Puck stumbled through the copse.

‘We should have come sooner,’ Puck called, ‘but the beauties of your native tongue, O Parnesius, have enthralled this young citizen.’

Parnesius looked bewildered, even when Una explained.

‘Dan said the plural of “dominus” was “dominoes,” and when Miss Blake said it wasn’t he said he supposed it was “backgammon,” and so he had to write it out twice—for cheek, you know.’

Dan had climbed into Volaterrae, hot and panting.

‘I’ve run nearly all the way,’ he gasped, ‘and then Puck met me. How do you do, Sir?’

‘I am in good health,’ Parnesius answered. ‘See! I have tried to bend the bow of Ulysses, but——’ He held up his thumb.

‘I’m sorry. You must have pulled off too soon,’ said Dan. ‘But Puck said you were telling Una a story.’

‘Continue, O Parnesius,’ said Puck, who had perched himself on a dead branch above them. ‘I will be chorus. Has he puzzled you much, Una?’

‘Not a bit, except—I didn’t know where Ak—Ak something was,’ she answered.

‘Oh, Aquae Sulis. That’s Bath, where the buns come from. Let the hero tell his own tale.’

Parnesius pretended to thrust his spear at Puck’s legs, but Puck reached down, caught at the horse-tail plume, and pulled off the tall helmet.

‘Thanks, jester,’ said Parnesius, shaking his curly dark head. ‘That is cooler. Now hang it up for me . . . .

‘I was telling your sister how I joined the Army,’ he said to Dan.

‘Did you have to pass an Exam?’ Dan asked, eagerly.

‘No. I went to my Father, and said I should like to enter the Dacian Horse (I had seen some at Aquae Sulis); but he said I had better begin service in a regular Legion from Rome. Now, like many of our youngsters, I was not too fond of anything Roman. The Roman-born officers and magistrates looked down on us British-born as though we were barbarians. I told my Father so.

‘“I know they do,” he said; “but remember, after all, we are the people of the Old Stock, and our duty is to the Empire.”

‘“To which Empire?” I asked. “We split the Eagle before I was born.”

‘“What thieves’ talk is that?” said my Father. He hated slang.

‘“Well, Sir,” I said, “we’ve one Emperor in Rome, and I don’t know how many Emperors the outlying Provinces have set up from time to time. Which am I to follow?”

‘“Gratian,” said he. “At least he’s a sportsman.”

‘“He’s all that,” I said. “Hasn’t he turned himself into a raw-beef-eating Scythian?”

‘“Where did you hear of it?” said the Pater.

‘“At Aquae Sulis,” I said. It was perfectly true. This precious Emperor Gratian of ours had a bodyguard of fur-cloaked Scythians, and he was so crazy about them that he dressed like them. In Rome of all places in the world! It was as bad as if my own Father had painted himself blue!

‘“No matter for the clothes,” said the Pater. “They are only the fringe of the trouble. It began before your time or mine. Rome has forsaken her Gods, and must be punished. The great war with the Painted People broke out in the very year the temples of our Gods were destroyed. We beat the Painted People in the very year our temples were rebuilt. Go back further still.” . . . He went back to the time of Diocletian; and to listen to him you would have thought Eternal Rome herself was on the edge of destruction, just because a few people had become a little large-minded.

‘I knew nothing about it. Aglaia never taught us the history of our own country. She was so full of her ancient Greeks.

‘“There is no hope for Rome,’ said the Pater, at last. ‘She has forsaken her Gods, but if the Gods forgive us here, we may save Britain. To do that, we must keep the Painted People back. Therefore, I tell you, Parnesius, as a Father, that if your heart is set on service, your place is among men on the Wall—and not with women among the cities.”’

‘What Wall?’ asked Dan and Una at once.

‘Father meant the one we call Hadrian’s Wall. I’ll tell you about it later. It was built long ago, across North Britain, to keep out the Painted People—Picts you call them. Father had fought in the great Pict War that lasted more than twenty years, and he knew what fighting meant. Theodosius, one of our great Generals, had chased the little beasts back far into the North before I was born: down at Vectis of course we never troubled our heads about them. But when my Father spoke as he did, I kissed his hand, and waited for orders. We British-born Romans know what is due to our parents.’

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‘If I kissed my Father’s hand, he’d laugh,’ said Dan.

‘Customs change; but if you do not obey your father, the Gods remember it. You may be quite sure of that.

‘After our talk, seeing I was in earnest, the Pater sent me over to Clausentum to learn my foot-drill in a barrack full of foreign auxiliaries—as unwashed and unshaved a mob of mixed barbarians as ever scrubbed a breastplate. It was your stick in their stomachs and your shield in their faces to push them into any sort of formation. When I had learned my work the Instructor gave me a handful—and they were a handful!—of Gauls and Iberians to polish up till they were sent to their stations up-country. I did my best, and one night a villa in the suburbs caught fire, and I had my handful out and at work before any of the other troops. I noticed a quiet-looking man on the lawn, leaning on a stick. He watched us passing buckets from the pond; and at last he said to me: “Who are you?”

‘“A probationer, waiting for a command,” I answered. I didn’t know who he was from Deucalion!’

‘“Born in Britain?” he said.

‘“Yes, if you were born in Spain,” I said, for he neighed his words like an Iberian mule.

‘“And what might you call yourself when you are at home?” he said, laughing.

‘“That depends,” I answered; “sometimes one thing and sometimes another. But now I’m busy.”

‘He said no more till we had saved the family gods (they were respectable householders), and then he grunted across the laurels: “Listen, young sometimes-one-thing-and-sometimes-another. In future call yourself Centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth, the Ulpia Victrix. That will help me to remember you. Your Father and a few other people call me Maximus.”

‘He tossed me the polished stick he was leaning on, and went away. You might have knocked me down with it!’

‘Who was he?’ said Dan.

‘Maximus himself, our great General! The General of Britain who had been Theodosius’s right hand in the Pict War! Not only had he given me my Centurion’s stick direct, but three steps in a good Legion as well! A new man generally begins in the Tenth Cohort of his Legion, and works up.’

‘And were you pleased?’ said Una.

‘Very. I thought Maximus had chosen me for my good looks and fine style in marching, but, when I went home, the Pater told me he had served under Maximus in the great Pict War, and had asked him to befriend me.’

‘A child you were!’ said Puck, from above.

‘I was,’ said Parnesius. ‘Don’t begrudge it me, Faun. Afterwards—the Gods know I put aside the games!’ And Puck nodded, brown chin on brown hand, his big eyes still.

‘The night before I left we sacrificed to our ancestors—the usual little Home Sacrifice—but I never prayed so earnestly to all the Good Shades, and then I went with my Father by boat to Regnum, and across the chalk eastwards to Anderida yonder.’

‘Regnum? Anderida?’ The children turned their faces to Puck.

‘Regnum’s Chichester,’ he said, pointing towards Cherry Clack, and—he threw his arm South behind him—‘Anderida’s Pevensey.’

‘Pevensey again!’ said Dan. ‘Where Weland landed?’

‘Weland and a few others,’ said Puck. ‘Pevensey isn’t young—even compared to me!’

‘The headquarters of the Thirtieth lay at Anderida in summer, but my own Cohort, the Seventh, was on the Wall up North. Maximus was inspecting Auxiliaries—the Abulci, I think—at Anderida, and we stayed with him, for he and my Father were very old friends. I was only there ten days when I was ordered to go up with thirty men to my Cohort.’ He laughed merrily. ‘A man never forgets his first march. I was happier than any Emperor when I led my handful through the North Gate of the Camp, and we saluted the guard and the Altar of Victory there.’

‘How? How?’ said Dan and Una.

Parnesius smiled, and stood up, flashing in his armour.

‘So!’ said he; and he moved slowly through the beautiful movements of the Roman Salute, that ends with a hollow clang of the shield coming into its place between the shoulders.

‘Hai!’ said Puck. ‘That sets one thinking!’

‘We went out fully armed,’ said Parnesius, sitting down; ‘but as soon as the road entered the Great Forest, my men expected the pack-horses to hang their shields on. “No!” I said; “you can dress like women in Anderida, but while you’re with me you will carry your own weapons and armour.”

‘“But it’s hot,” said one of them, “and we haven’t a doctor. Suppose we get sunstroke, or a fever?”

‘“Then die,” I said, “and a good riddance to Rome! Up shield—up spears, and tighten your foot-wear!”

‘“Don’t think yourself Emperor of Britain already,” a fellow shouted. I knocked him over with the butt of my spear, and explained to these Roman-born Romans that, if there were any further trouble, we should go on with one man short. And, by the Light of the Sun, I meant it too! My raw Gauls at Clausentum had never treated me so.

‘Then, quietly as a cloud, Maximus rode out of the fern (my Father behind him), and reined up across the road. He wore the Purple, as though he were already Emperor; his leggings were of white buckskin laced with gold.

‘My men dropped like—like partridges.

‘He said nothing for some time, only looked, with his eyes puckered. Then he crooked his forefinger, and my men walked—crawled, I mean—to one side.

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‘“Stand in the sun, children,” he said, and they formed up on the hard road.

‘“What would you have done,” he said to me, “if I had not been here?”

‘“I should have killed that man,” I answered.

‘“Kill him now,” he said. “He will not move a limb.”

‘“No,” I said. “You’ve taken my men out of my command. I should only be your butcher if I killed him now.” Do you see what I meant?’ Parnesius turned to Dan.

‘Yes,’ said Dan. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair, somehow.’

‘That was what I thought,’ said Parnesius.

But Maximus frowned. “You’ll never be an Emperor,” he said. “Not even a General will you be.”

‘I was silent, but my Father seemed pleased.

‘“I came here to see the last of you,” he said.

‘“You have seen it,” said Maximus. “I shall never need your son any more. He will live and he will die an officer of a Legion—and he might have been Prefect of one of my Provinces. Now eat and drink with us,” he said. “Your men will wait till you have finished.”

‘My miserable thirty stood like wine-skins glistening in the hot sun, and Maximus led us to where his people had set a meal. Himself he mixed the wine.

‘“A year from now,” he said, “you will remember that you have sat with the Emperor of Britain—and Gaul.”

‘“Yes,” said the Pater, “you can drive two mules—Gaul and Britain.”

‘“Five years hence you will remember that you have drunk”—he passed me the cup and there was blue borage in it—“with the Emperor of Rome!”

‘“No; you can’t drive three mules; they will tear you in pieces,” said my Father.

‘“And you on the Wall, among the heather, will weep because your notion of justice was more to you than the favour of the Emperor of Rome.”

‘I sat quite still. One does not answer a General who wears the Purple.

‘“I am not angry with you,” he went on; “I owe too much to your Father——”

‘“You owe me nothing but advice that you never took,” said the Pater.

‘“——to be unjust to any of your family. Indeed, I say you may make a good Tribune, but, so far as I am concerned, on the Wall you will live, and on the Wall you will die,” said Maximus.

‘“Very like,” said my Father. “But we shall have the Picts and their friends breaking through before long. You cannot move all troops out of Britain to make you Emperor, and expect the North to sit quiet.”

‘“I follow my destiny,” said Maximus.

‘“Follow it, then,” said my Father, pulling up a fern root; “and die as Theodosius died.”

‘“Ah!” said Maximus. “My old General was killed because he served the Empire too well. I may be killed, but not for that reason,” and he smiled a little pale grey smile that made my blood run cold.

‘“Then I had better follow my destiny,” I said, “and take my men to the Wall.”

‘He looked at me a long time, and bowed his head slanting like a Spaniard. “Follow it, boy,” he said. That was all. I was only too glad to get away, though I had many messages for home. I found my men standing as they had been put—they had not even shifted their feet in the dust, and off I marched, still feeling that terrific smile like an east wind up my back. I never halted them till sunset, and’—he turned about and looked at Pook’s Hill below him—‘then I halted yonder.’ He pointed to the broken, bracken covered shoulder of the Forge Hill behind old Hobden’s cottage.

‘There? Why, that’s only the old Forge where they made iron once,’ said Dan.

‘Very good stuff it was too,’ said Parnesius, calmly. ‘We mended three shoulder-straps here and had a spear-head riveted. The Forge was rented from the Government by a one-eyed smith from Carthage. I remember we called him Cyclops. He sold me a beaver-skin rug for my sister’s room.’

‘But it couldn’t have been here,’ Dan insisted.

‘But it was! From the Altar of Victory at Anderida to the First Forge in the Forest here is twelve miles seven hundred paces. It is all in the Road Book. A man doesn’t forget his first march. I think I could tell you every station between this and——’ He leaned forward, but his eye was caught by the setting sun.

It had come down to the top of Cherry Clack Hill, and the light poured in between the tree trunks so that you could see red and gold and black deep into the heart of Far Wood; and Parnesius in his armour shone as though he had been afire.

‘Wait,’ he said, lifting a hand, and the sunlight jinked on his glass bracelet. ‘Wait! I pray to Mithras!’

He rose and stretched his arms westward, with deep, splendid-sounding words.

Then Puck began to sing too, in a voice like bells tolling, and as he sang he slipped from Volaterrae to the ground, and beckoned the children to follow. They obeyed; it seemed as though the voices were pushing them along; and through the goldy-brown light on the beech leaves they walked, while Puck between them chanted something like this:

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‘Cur mundus militat sub vana gloria
Cujus prosperitas est transitoria?
Tam cito labitur ejus potentia
Quam vasa figuli quæ sunt fragilia.’

They found themselves at the little locked gates of the wood.

‘Quo Cæsar abiit celsus imperio?
Vel Dives splendidus totus in prandio?
Dic ubi Tullius——’

Still singing, he took Dan’s hand and wheeled him round to face Una as she came out of the gate. It shut behind her, at the same time as Puck threw the memory-magicking Oak, Ash, and Thorn leaves over their heads.

‘Well, you are jolly late,’ said Una. ‘Couldn’t you get away before?’

‘I did,’ said Dan. ‘I got away in lots of time, but—but I didn’t know it was so late. Where’ve you been?’

‘In Volaterrae—waiting for you.’

‘Sorry,’ said Dan. ‘It was all that beastly Latin.’

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THE room was blue with the smoke of three pipes and a cigar. The leave-season had opened in India, and the firstfruits on this side of the water were. ‘Tick’ Boileau, of the 45th Bengal Cavalry, who called on me, after three years’ absence, to discuss old things which had happened. Fate, who
always does her work handsomely, sent up the same staircase within the same hour The Infant, fresh from Upper Burma, and he and Boileau looking out of my window saw walking in the street one Nevin, late in a Gurkha regiment which had been through the Black Mountain Expedition. They yelled to him to come up, and the whole street was aware that they desired him to come up, and he came up, and there followed Pandemonium in my room because we had foregathered from the ends of the earth, and three of us were on a
holiday, and none of us were twenty-five, and all the delights of all London lay waiting our pleasure.Boileau took the only other chair, the Infant, by right of his bulk, the sofa; and Nevin, being a little man, sat cross-legged on the top of the revolving bookcase, and we all said, ‘Who’d ha’ thought it!’ and ‘What are you doing here?’ till speculation was exhausted and the talk went over to inevitable
‘shop.’ Boileau was full of a great scheme for winning a military attaché-ship at St. Petersburg; Nevin had hopes of the Staff College, and The Infant had been moving heaven and earth and the Horse Guards for a commission in the Egyptian army.‘What’s the use o’ that?’ said Nevin, twirling round on the bookcase.

‘Oh, heaps! ’Course, if you get stuck with a Fellaheen regiment, you’re sold; but if you are appointed to a Soudanese lot, you’re in clover. They are first-class fighting-men—and just think of the eligible central position of Egypt in the next row.’

This was putting the match to a magazine. We all began to explain the Central Asian question off hand, flinging army corps from the Helmund to Kashmir with more than Russian recklessness. Each of the boys made for himself a war to his own liking, and when we had settled all the details of Armageddon, killed all our senior officers, handled a division apiece, and nearly torn the Atlas in two in attempts to explain our theories, Boileau needs must lift up his voice above the clamour, and cry, ‘Anyhow it’ll be the Hell of a row!’ in tones that carried conviction far down the staircase.

Entered, unperceived in the smoke, William the Silent. ‘Gen’elman to see you, sir,’ said he, and disappeared, leaving in his stead none other than Mr. Eustace Cleever. William would have introduced the Dragon of Wantley with equal disregard of present company.

‘I—I beg your pardon. I didn’t know that there was anybody—with you. I——’

But it was not seemly to allow Mr. Cleever to depart: he was a great man. The boys remained where they were, for any movement would have choked up the little room. Only when they saw his gray hairs they stood on their feet, and when The Infant caught the name, he said:

‘Are you—did you write that book called As it was in the Beginning?’

Mr. Cleever admitted that he had written the book.

‘Then—then I don’t know how to thank you, sir,’ said The Infant, flushing pink. ‘I was brought up in the country you wrote about—all my people live there; and I read the book in camp on the Hlinedatalone, and I knew every stick and stone, and the dialect too; and, by Jove! it was just like being at home and hearing the country-people talk. Nevin, you know As it was in the Beginning? So does Ti—Boileau.’

Mr. Cleever has tasted as much praise, public and private, as one man may safely swallow; but it seemed to me that the out-spoken admiration in The Infant’s eyes and the little stir in the little company came home to him very nearly indeed.

‘Won’t you take the sofa? ‘ said The Infant. ‘I’ll sit on Boileau’s chair, and——’here he looked at me to spur me to my duties as a host; but I was watching the novelist’s face. Cleever had not the least intention of going away, but settled himself on the sofa.

Following the first great law of the Army, which says ‘all property is common except money, and you’ve only got to ask the next man for that,’ The Infant offered tobacco and drink. It was the least he could do; but not the most lavish praise in the world held half as much appreciation and reverence as The Infant’s simple ‘Say when, sir,’ above the long glass.

Cleever said ‘when,’ and more thereto, for he was a golden talker, and he sat in the midst of hero-worship devoid of all taint of self-interest. The boys asked him of the birth of his book and whether it was hard to write, and how his notions came to him; and he answered with the same absolute simplicity as he was questioned. His big eyes twinkled, he dug his long thin hands into his gray beard and tugged it as he grew animated. He dropped little by little from the peculiar pinching of the broader vowels—the indefinable ‘Euh,’ that runs through the speech of the pundit caste—and the elaborate choice of words, to freely-mouthed ‘ows’ and ‘ois,’ and, for him at least, unfettered colloquialisms. He could not altogether understand the boys, who hung upon, his words so reverently. The line of the chin-strap, that still showed white and untanned on cheek-bone and jaw, the steadfast young eyes puckered at the corners of the lids with much staring through red-hot sunshine, the slow, untroubled breathing, and the curious, crisp, curt speech seemed to puzzle him equally. He could create men and women, and send them to the uttermost ends of the earth, to help delight and comfort; he knew every mood of the fields, and could interpret them to the cities, and he knew the hearts of many in city and the country, but he had hardly, in forty years, come into contact with the thing which is called a Subaltern of the Line. He told the boys this in his own way.

‘Well, how should you?’ said The Infant. ‘You—you’re quite different, y’ see, sir.’

The Infant expressed his ideas in his tone rather than his words, but Cleever understood the compliment.

‘We’re only Subs,’ said Nevin, ‘and we aren’t exactly the sort of men you’d meet much in your life, I s’pose.’

‘That’s true,’ said Cleever. ‘I live chiefly among men who write, and paint, and sculp, and so forth. We have our own talk and our own interests, and the outer world doesn’t trouble us much.’

‘That must be awfully jolly,’ said Boileau, at a venture. ‘We have our own shop, too, but ’tisn’t half as interesting as yours, of course. You know all the men who’ve ever done anything; and we only knock about from place to place, and we do nothing.’

‘The Army’s a very lazy profession if you choose to make it so,’ said Nevin. ‘When there’s nothing going on, there is nothing going on, and you lie up.’

‘Or try to get a billet somewhere, to be ready for the next show,’ said The Infant with a chuckle.

‘To me,’ said Cleever softly, ‘the whole idea of warfare seems so foreign and unnatural, so essentially vulgar, if I may say so, that I can hardly appreciate your sensations. Of course, though, any change from life in garrison towns must be a godsend to you.’

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Like many home-staying Englishmen, Cleever believed that the newspaper phrase he quoted covered the whole duty of the Army whose toils enabled him to enjoy his many-sided life in peace. The remark was not a happy one, for Boileau had just come off the Frontier, The Infant had been on the warpath for nearly eighteen months, and the little red man Nevin two months before had been sleeping under the stars at the peril of his life. But none of them tried to explain, till I ventured to point out that they had all seen service and were not used to idling. Cleever took in the idea slowly.

‘Seen service?’ said he. Then, as a child might ask, ‘Tell me. Tell me everything about everything.’

‘How do you mean?’ said The Infant, delighted at being directly appealed to by the great man.

‘Good Heavens! How am I to make you understand if you can’t see. In the first place, what is your age?’

‘Twenty-three next July,’ said The Infant promptly.

Cleever questioned the others with his eyes.

‘I’m twenty-four,’ said Nevin.

‘And I’m twenty-two,’ said Boileau.

‘And you’ve all seen service?’

‘We’ve all knocked about a little bit, sir, but The Infant’s the war-worn veteran. He’s had two years’ work in Upper Burma,’ said Nevin.

‘When you say work, what do you mean, you extraordinary creatures?’

‘Explain it, Infant,’ said Nevin.

‘Oh, keeping things in order generally, and running about after little dakus—that’s dacoits—and so on. There’s nothing to explain.’

‘Make that young Leviathan speak,’ said Cleever impatiently, above his glass.

‘How can he speak ?’ said I. ‘He’s done the work. The two don’t go together. But, Infant you’re ordered to bukh.’

‘What about? I’ll try.’

‘Bukh about a daur. You’ve been on heaps of ’em,’ said Nevin.

‘What in the world does that mean? Has the Army a language of its own ?’

The Infant turned very red. He was afraid he was being laughed at, and he detested talking before outsiders; but it was the author of As it was in the Beginning who waited.

‘It’s all so new to me,’ pleaded Cleever; ‘and—and you said you liked my book.’

This was a direct appeal that The Infant could understand, and he began rather flurriedly, with much slang bred of nervousness—

‘Pull me up, sir, if I say anything you don’t follow. About six months before I took my leave out of Burma, I was on the Hlinedatalone, up near the Shan States, with sixty Tommies—private soldiers, that is—and another subaltern, a year senior to me. The Burmese business was a subaltern’s war, and our forces were split up into little detachments, all running about the country and trying to keep the dacoits quiet. The dacoits were having a first-class time, y’ know—filling women up with kerosine and setting ’em alight, and burning villages, and crucifying people.’

The wonder in Eustace Cleever’s eyes deepened. He could not quite realise that the cross still existed in any form.

‘Have you ever seen a crucifixion?’ said he.

‘Of course not. ’Shouldn’t have allowed it if I had; but I’ve seen the corpses. The dacoits had a trick of sending a crucified corpse down the river on a raft, just to show they were keeping their tail up and enjoying themselves. Well, that was the kind of people I had to deal with.’

‘Alone?’ said Cleever. Solitude of the soul he could understand—none better—but he had never in the body moved ten miles from his fellows.

‘I had my men, but the rest of it was pretty much alone. The nearest post that could give me orders was fifteen miles away, and we used to heliograph to them, and they used to give us orders same way—too many orders.’

‘Who was your C.O.?’ said Boileau.

‘Bounderby — Major. Pukka Bounderby; more Bounder than pukka. He went out up Bhamo way. Shot, or cut down, last year,’ said The Infant.

‘What are these interludes in a strange tongue?’ said Cleever to me.

‘Professional information—like the Mississippi pilots’ talk,’ said I. ‘He did not approve of his major, who died a violent death. Go on, Infant.’

‘Far too many orders. You couldn’t take the Tommies out for a two days’ daur—that’s expedition—without being blown up for not asking leave. And the whole country was humming with dacoits. I used to send out spies, and act on their information. As soon as a man came in and told me of a gang in hiding, I’d take thirty men with some grub, and go out and look for them, while the other subaltern lay doggo in camp.’

‘Lay! Pardon me, but how did he lie?’ said Cleever.

’Lay doggo—lay quiet, with the other thirty men. When I came back, he’d take out his half of the men, and have a good time of his own.’

‘Who was he?’ said Boileau.

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Carter-Deecey, of the Aurungabadis. Good chap, but too zubberdusty, and went bokhar four days out of seven. He’s gone out, too. Don’t interrupt a man.’

Cleever looked helplessly at me.

‘The other subaltern,’ I translated swiftly, ‘came from a native regiment, and was overbearing in his demeanour. He suffered much from the fever of the country, and is now dead. Go on, Infant.’

‘After a bit we got into trouble for using the men on frivolous occasions, and so I used to put my signaller under arrest to prevent him reading the helio-orders. Then I’d go out and leave a message to be sent an hour after I got clear of the camp, something like this: “Received important information; start in an hour unless countermanded.” If I was ordered back, it didn’t much matter. I swore the C.O.’s watch was wrong, or something, when I came back. The Tommies enjoyed the fun, and—Oh, yes, there was one Tommy who was the bard of the detachment. He used to make up verses on everything that happened.’

‘What sort of verses?’ said Cleever.

‘Lovely verses; and the Tommies used to sing ’em. There was one song with a chorus, and it said something like this.’ The Infant dropped into the true barrack-room twang:

‘Theebaw, the Burma king, did a very foolish thing,
When ’e mustered ’ostile forces in ar-rai,
’E little thought that we, from far across the sea,
Would send our armies up to Mandalai!’

‘O gorgeous!’ said Cleever. ‘And how magnificently direct! The notion of a regimental bard is new to me, but of course it must be so.’

‘He was awf’ly popular with the men,’ said The Infant. ‘He had them all down in rhyme as soon as ever they had done anything. He was a great bard. He was always ready with an elegy when we picked up a Boh—that’s a leader of dacoits.’

‘How did you pick him up?’ said Cleever.

‘Oh! shot him if he wouldn’t surrender.’

‘You! Have you shot a man?’

There was a subdued chuckle from all three boys, and it dawned on the questioner that one experience in life which was denied to himself, and he weighed the souls of men in a balance, had been shared by three very young gentlemen of engaging appearance. He turned round on Nevin, who had climbed to the top of the bookcase, and was sitting crosslegged as before.

‘And have you, too?’

‘Think so,’ said Nevin sweetly. ‘In the Black Mountain. He was rolling cliffs on to my half-company, and spoiling our formation. I took a rifle from a man, and brought him down at the second shot.’

‘Good heavens! And how did you feel afterwards?‘

‘Thirsty. I wanted a smoke, too.’

Cleever looked at Boileau — the youngest. Surely his hands were guiltless of blood.

Boileau shook his head and laughed. ‘Go on, Infant,’ said he.

‘And you too?’ said Cleever.

‘’Fancy so. It was a case of cut, cut or be cut, with me; so I cut—One. I couldn’t do any more, sir.’

Cleever looked as though he would like to ask many questions, but The Infant swept on, in the full tide of his tale.

‘Well, we were called insubordinate young whelps at last, and strictly forbidden to take the Tommies out any more without orders. I wasn’t sorry, because Tommy is such an exacting sort of creature. He wants to live as though he were in barracks all the time. I was grubbing on fowls and boiled corn, but my Tommies wanted their pound of fresh meat, and their half ounce of this, and their two ounces of t’other thing, and they used to come to me and badger me for plug-tobacco when we were four days in jungle. I said: “I can get you Burma tobacco, but I don’t keep a canteen up my sleeve.” They couldn’t see it. They wanted all the luxuries of the season, confound ’em.’

‘You were alone when you were dealing with these men?’ said Cleever, watching The Infant’s face under the palm of his hand. He was getting new ideas, and they seemed to trouble him.

‘Of course, unless you count the mosquitoes. They were nearly as big as the men. After I had to lie doggo I began to look for something to do; and I was great pals with a man called Hicksey in the Police, the best man that ever stepped on earth; a first-class man.’

Cleever nodded applause. He knew how to appreciate enthusiasm.

‘Hicksey and I were as thick as thieves. He had some Burma mounted police—rummy chaps, armed with sword and snider carbine. They rode punchy Burma ponies with string stirrups, red cloth saddles, and red bell-rope head-stalls. Hicksey used to lend me six or eight of them when I asked him—nippy little devils, keen as mustard. But they told their wives too much, and all my plans got known, till I learned to give false marching orders over-night, and take the men to quite a different village in the morning.
Then we used to catch the simple daku before breakfast, and made him very sick. It’s a ghastly country on the Hlinedatalone; all bamboo jungle, with paths about four feet wide winding through it. The dakus knew all the paths, and potted at us as we came round a corner; but the mounted police knew the paths as well as the dakus, and we used to go stalking ’em in and out. Once we flushed ’em, the men on the ponies had the advantage of the men on foot. We held all the country absolutely quiet, for ten miles round, in about a month. Then we took Boh Na-ghee, Hicksey and I and the Civil officer. That was a lark!’

‘I think I am beginning to understand a little,’ said Cleever. ‘It was a pleasure to you to administer and fight?‘

page 4

‘Rather! There’s nothing nicer than a satisfactory little expedition, when you find your plans fit together, and your conformation’s teek—correct, you know, and the whole sub-chiz—I mean, when everything works out like formula on a blackboard. Hicksey had all the information about the Boh. He had been burning villages and murdering people right and left, and cutting up Government convoys and all that. He was lying doggo in a village about fifteen miles off, waiting to get a fresh gang together. So we arranged to take thirty mounted police, and turn him out before he could plunder into our newly-settled villages. At the last minute, the Civil officer in our part of the world thought he’d assist at the performance.’

‘Who was he?’ said Nevin.

‘His name was Dennis,’ said The Infant slowly. ‘And we’ll let it stay so. He’s a better man now than he was then.’

‘But how old was the Civil power?’ said Cleever. ‘The situation is developing itself.’

‘He was about six-and-twenty, and he was awf’ly clever. He knew a lot of things, but I don’t think he was quite steady enough for dacoit-hunting. We started overnight for Boh Na-ghee’s village, and we got there just before morning, without raising an alarm. Dennis had turned out armed to his teeth—two revolvers, a carbine, and all sorts of things. I was talking to Hicksey about posting the men, and Dennis edged his pony in between us, and said, “What shall I do? What shall I do? Tell me what to do, you fellows.” We didn’t take much notice; but his pony tried to bite me in the leg, and I said, “Pull out a bit, old man, till we’ve settled the attack.” He kept edging in, and fiddling with his reins and his revolvers, and saying, “Dear me! Dear me! Oh, dear me! What do you think I’d better do?” The man was in a deadly funk, and his teeth were chattering.’

‘I sympathise with the Civil power,’ said Cleever. ‘Continue, young Clive.’

‘The fun of it was, that he was supposed to be our superior officer. Hicksey took a good look at him, and told him to attach himself to my party. ’Beastly mean of Hicksey, that. The chap kept on edging in and bothering, instead of asking for some men and taking up his own position, till I got angry, and the carbines began popping on the other side of the village. Then I said, “For God’s sake be quiet, and sit down where you are! If you see anybody come out of the village, shoot at him.” I knew he couldn’t hit a hayrick at a yard. Then I took my men over the garden wall—over the palisades, y’ know—somehow or other, and the fun began. Hicksey had found the Boh in bed under a mosquito-curtain, and he had taken a flying jump on to him.’

‘A flying jump!’ said Cleever. ‘Is that also war?’

‘Yes,’ said The Infant, now thoroughly warmed. ‘Don’t you know how you take a flying jump on to a fellow’s head at school, when he snores in the dormitory? The Boh was sleeping in a bedful of swords and pistols, and Hicksey came down like Zazel through the netting, and the net got mixed up with the pistols and the Boh and Hicksey, and they all rolled on the floor together. I laughed till I couldn’t stand, and Hicksey was cursing me for not helping him; so I left him to fight it out and went into the village. Our men were slashing about and firing, and so were the dacoits, and in the thick of the mess some ass set fire to a house, and we all had to clear out. I froze on to the nearest daku and ran to the palisade, shoving him in front of me. He wriggled loose, and bounded over the other side. I came after him; but when I had one leg one side and one leg the other of the palisade, I saw that the daku had fallen flat on Dennis’s head. That man had never moved from where I left him. They rolled on the ground together, and Dennis’s carbine went off and nearly shot me. The daku picked himself up and ran, and Dennis buzzed his carbine after him, and it caught him on the back of his head, and knocked him silly. You never saw anything so funny in your life. I doubled up on the top of the palisade and hung there, yelling with laughter. But Dennis began to weep like anything. “Oh, I’ve killed a man,” he said. “I’ve killed a man, and I shall never know another peaceful hour in my life! Is he dead? Oh, is he dead? Good Lord, I’ve killed a man!” I came down and said, “Don’t be a fool;” but he kept on shouting, “Is he dead?” till I could have kicked him. The daku was only knocked out of time with the carbine. He came to after a bit, and I said, “Are you hurt much?” He groaned and said “No.” His chest was all cut with scrambling over the palisade. “The white man’s gun didn’t do that,” he said, “I did that, and I knocked the white man over.” Just like a Burman, wasn’t it? But Dennis wouldn’t be happy at any price. He said: “Tie up his wounds. He’ll bleed to death. Oh, he’ll bleed to death!” “Tie ’em up yourself,” I said, “if you’re so anxious.” “I can’t touch him,” said Dennis, “but here’s my shirt.” He took off his shirt, and fixed the braces again over his bare shoulders. I ripped the shirt up, and bandaged the dacoit quite professionally. He was grinning at Dennis all the time; and Dennis’s haversack was lying on the ground, bursting full of sandwiches. Greedy hog! I took some, and offered some to Dennis. “How can I eat?” he said. “How can you ask me to eat? His very blood is on your hands now, and you’re eating my sandwiches!” “All right,” I said; “I’ll give ’em to the daku.” So I did, and the little chap was quite pleased, and wolfed ’em down like one o’clock.’

Cleever brought his hand down on the table with a thump that made the empty glasses dance. ‘That’s Art!’ he said. ‘Flat, flagrant mechanism! Don’t tell me that happened on the spot!’

The pupils of the Infant’s eyes contracted to two pin-points. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, slowly and stiffly, ‘but I am telling this thing as it happened.’

Cleever looked at him a moment. ‘My fault entirely,’ said he; ‘I should have known. Please go on.’

‘Hicksey came out of what was left of the village with his prisoners and captives, all neatly tied up. Boh Na-ghee was first, and one of the villagers, as soon as he found the old ruffian helpless, began kicking him quietly. The Boh stood it as long as he could, and then groaned, and we saw what was going on. Hicksey tied the villager up, and gave him a half-a-dozen, good, with a bamboo, to remind him to leave a prisoner alone. You should have seen the old Boh grin. Oh! but Hicksey was in a furious rage with everybody. He’d got a wipe over the elbow that had tickled up his funnybone, and he was rabid with me for not having helped him with the Boh and the mosquito-net. I had to explain that I couldn’t do anything. If you’d seen ’em both tangled up together on the floor in one kicking cocoon, you’d have laughed for a week. Hicksey
swore that the only decent man of his acquaintance was the Boh, and all the way to camp Hicksey was talking to the Boh, and the Boh was complaining about the soreness of his bones. When we got back, and had had a bath, the Boh wanted to know when he was going to be hanged. Hicksey said he couldn’t oblige him on the spot, but had to send him to Rangoon. The Boh went down on his knees, and reeled off a catalogue of his crimes—he ought to have been hanged seventeen times over, by his own confession—and implored Hicksey to settle the business out of hand. “If I’m sent to Rangoon,” said he, ‘they’ll keep me in, jail all my life, and that is a death every time the sun gets up or the wind blows.” But we had to send him to Rangoon, and, of course, he was let off down there, and given penal servitude for life. When I came to Rangoon I went over the jail—I had helped to fill it, y’ know—and the old Boh was there, and he spotted me at once. He begged for some opium first, and I tried to get him some, but that was against the rules. Then he asked me to have his sentence changed to death, because he was afraid of being sent to the Andamans. I couldn’t do that either, but I tried to cheer him, and told him how things were going up-country, and the last thing he said was—“Give my compliments to the fat white man who jumped on me. If I’d been awake I’d have killed him.” I wrote that to Hicksey next mail, and—and that’s all. I’m ’fraid I’ve been gassing awf’ly, sir.’

page 5

Cleever said nothing for a long time. The Infant looked uncomfortable. He feared that, misled by enthusiasm, he had filled up the novelist’s time with unprofitable recital of trivial anecdotes.

Then said Cleever, ‘I can’t understand. Why should you have seen and done all these things before you have cut your wisdom-teeth?’

‘Don’t know,’ said The Infant apologetically. ‘I haven’t seen much—only Burmese jungle.’

‘And dead men, and war, and power, and responsibility,’ said Cleever, under his breath. ‘You won’t have any sensations left at thirty, if you go on as you have done. But I want to hear more tales—more tales!’ He seemed to forget that even subalterns might have engagements of their own.

‘We’re thinking of dining out somewhere—the lot of us—and going on to the Empire afterwards,’ said Nevin, with hesitation. He did not like to ask Cleever to come too. The invitation might be regarded as perilously near to ‘cheek.’ And Cleever, anxious not to wag a gray beard unbidden among boys at large, said nothing on his side.

Boileau solved the little difficulty by blurting out: ‘Won’t you come too, sir?’

Cleever almost shouted ‘Yes,’ and while he was being helped into his coat, continued to murmur ‘Good heavens!’ at intervals in a way that the boys could not understand.

‘I don’t think I’ve been to the Empire in my life,’ said he; ‘but—what is my life after all? Let us go.’

They went out with Eustace Cleever, and I sulked at home because they had come to see me
but had gone over to the better man; which was humiliating. They packed him into a cab with utmost reverence, for was he not the author of As it was in the Beginning, and a person in whose company it was an honour to go abroad? From all I gathered later, he had taken less interest in the performance before him than in their conversations, and they protested with emphasis that he was ‘as good a man as they make. ’Knew what a man was driving at almost before he said it; and yet he’s so damned simple about things any man knows.’ That was one of many comments.

At midnight they returned, announcing that they were ‘highly respectable gondoliers,’ and that oysters and stout were what they chiefly needed. The eminent novelist was still with them, and I think he was calling them by their shorter names. I am certain that he said he had been moving in worlds not realised, and that they had shown him the Empire in a new light.

Still sore at recent neglect, I answered shortly, ‘Thank heaven we have within the land ten thousand as good as they,’ and when he departed, asked him what he thought of things generally.

He replied with another quotation, to the effect that though singing was a remarkably fine performance, I was to be quite sure that few lips would be moved to song if they could find a sufficiency of kissing.

Whereby I understood that Eustace Cleever, decorator and colourman in words, was blaspheming his own Art, and would be sorry for this in the morning.

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LONG and long ago, when Devadatta was King of Benares, I wrote some tales concerning Strickland of the Punjab Police (who married Miss Youghal), and Adam, his son. Strickland has finished his Indian Service, and lives now at a place in England called Weston-super-Mare, where his wife plays the organ in one of the churches. Semi-occasionally he comes up to London, and occasionally his wife makes him visit his friends. Otherwise he plays golf and follows the harriers for his figure’s sake.If you remember that Infant who told a tale to Eustace Cleever the novelist, you will remember that he became a baronet with a vast estate. He has, owing to cookery, a little lost his figure, but he never loses his friends. I have found a wing of his house turned into a hospital for sick men, and there I once spent a week in the company of two dismal nurses and a specialist in “Sprue.” Another time the place was full of schoolboys—sons of Anglo-Indians whom the Infant had collected for the holidays, and they nearly broke his keeper’s heart.

But my last visit was better. The Infant called me up by wire, and I fell into the arms of a friend of mine, Colonel A.L. Corkran, so that the years departed from us, and we praised Allah, who had not yet terminated the Delights, nor separated the Companions.

Said Corkran, when he had explained how it felt to command a native Infantry regiment on the border: “The Stricks are coming for to-night-with their boy.”

“I remember him. The little fellow I wrote a story about,” I said. “Is he in the Service?”

“No. Strick got him into the Centro-Euro-Africa Protectorate. He’s Assistant-Commissioner at Dupe—wherever that is. Somaliland, ain’t it, Stalky?” asked the Infant.

Stalky puffed out his nostrils scornfully. “You’re only three thousand miles out. Look at the atlas.”

“Anyhow, he’s as rotten full of fever as the rest of you,” said the Infant, at length on the big divan. “And he’s bringing a native servant with him. Stalky be an athlete, and tell Ipps to put him in the stable room.”

“Why? Is he a Yao—like the fellow Wade brought here—when your housekeeper had fits?” Stalky often visits the Infant, and has seen some odd things.

“No. He’s one of old Strickland’s Punjabi policemen—and quite European—I believe.”

“Hooray! Haven’t talked Punjabi for three months—and a Punjabi from Central Africa ought to be amusin’.”

We heard the chuff of the motor in the porch, and the first to enter was Agnes Strickland, whom the Infant makes no secret of adoring.

He is devoted, in a fat man’s placid way, to at least eight designing women; but she nursed him once through a bad bout of Peshawur fever, and when she is in the house, it is more than all hers.

“You didn’t send rugs enough,” she began. “Adam might have taken a chill.”

“It’s quite warm in the tonneau. Why did you let him ride in front? “

“Because he wanted to,” she replied, with the mother’s smile, and we were introduced to the shadow of a young man leaning heavily on the shoulder of a bearded Punjabi Mohammedan.

“That is all that came home of him,” said his father to me. There was nothing in it of the child with whom I had journeyed to Dalhousie centuries since.”

“And what is this uniform?” Stalky asked of Imam Din, the servant, who came to attention on the marble floor.

“The uniform of the Protectorate troops, Sahib. Though I am the Little Sahib’s body-servant, it is not seemly for us white men to be attended by folk dressed altogether as servants.”

“And—and you white men wait at table on horseback?” Stalky pointed to the man’s spurs.

“These I added for the sake of honour when I came to England,” said Imam Din Adam smiled the ghost of a little smile that I began to remember, and we put him on the big couch for refreshments. Stalky asked him how much leave he had, and he said “Six months.”

“But he’ll take another six on medical certificate,” said Agnes anxiously. Adam knit his brows.

“You don’t want to—eh? I know. Wonder what my second in command is doing.” Stalky tugged his moustache, and fell to thinking of his Sikhs.

“Ah!” said the Infant. “I’ve only a few thousand pheasants to look after. Come along and dress for dinner. We’re just ourselves. What flower is your honour’s ladyship commanding for the table?”

“Just ourselves?” she said, looking at the crotons in the great hall. “Then let’s have marigolds the little cemetery ones.”

So it was ordered.

Now, marigolds to us mean hot weather, discomfort, parting, and death. That smell in our nostrils, and Adam’s servant in waiting, we naturally fell back more and more on the old slang, recalling at each glass those who had gone before. We did not sit at the big table, but in the bay window overlooking the park, where they were carting the last of the hay. When twilight fell we would not have candles, but waited for the moon, and continued our talk in the dusk that makes one remember.

Young Adam was not interested in our past except where it had touched his future. I think his mother held his hand beneath the table. Imam Din—shoeless, out of respect to the floors—brought him his medicine, poured it drop by drop, and asked for orders.

“Wait to take him to his cot when he grows weary,” said his mother, and Imam Din retired into the shadow by the ancestral portraits.

“Now what d’you expect to get out of your country?” the Infant asked, when—our India laid aside we talked Adam’s Africa. It roused him at once.

“Rubber—nuts—gums—and so on,” he said. “But our real future is cotton. I grew fifty acres of it last year in my District.”

page 2

“My District!” said his father. “Hear him, Mummy!”

“I did though! I wish I could show you the sample. Some Manchester chaps said it was as good as any Sea Island cotton on the market.”

“But what made you a cotton-planter, my son?” she asked.

“My Chief said every man ought to have a shouk (a hobby) of sorts, and he took the trouble to ride a day out of his way to show me a belt of black soil that was just the thing for cotton.”

“Ah! What was your Chief like?” Stalky asked, in his silkiest tones.

“The best man alive—absolutely. He lets you blow your own nose yourself. The people call him”—Adam jerked out some heathen phrase—“that means the Man with the Stone Eyes, you know.”

“I’m glad of that. Because I’ve heard from other quarters” Stalky’s sentence burned like a slow match, but the explosion was not long delayed. “Other quarters!” Adam threw out a thin hand. “Every dog has his fleas. If you listen to them, of course!” The shake of his head was as I remembered it among his father’s policemen twenty years before, and his mother’s eyes shining through the dusk called on me to adore it. I kicked Stalky on the shin. One must not mock a young man’s first love or loyalty.

A lump of raw cotton appeared on the table.

“I thought there might be a need. Therefore I packed it between our shirts,” said the voice of Imam Din.

“Does he know as much English as that?” cried the Infant, who had forgotten his East.

We all admired the cotton for Adam’s sake, and, indeed, it was very long and glossy.

“It’s—it’s only an experiment,” he said. “We’re such awful paupers we can’t even pay for a mailcart in my District. We use a biscuit-box on two bicycle wheels. I only got the money for that”—he patted the stuff—“by a pure fluke.”

“How much did it cost?” asked Strickland.

“With seed and machinery—about two hundred pounds. I had the labour done by cannibals.”

“That sounds promising.” Stalky reached for a fresh cigarette.

“No, thank you,” said Agnes. “I’ve been at Weston-super-Mare a little too long for cannibals. I’ll go to the music-room and try over next Sunday’s hymns.”

She lifted the boy’s hand lightly to her lips, and tripped across the acres of glimmering floor to the music-room that had been the Infant’s ancestors’ banqueting hall. Her grey and silver dress disappeared under the musicians’ gallery; two electrics broke out, and she stood backed against the lines of gilded pipes.

“There’s an abominable self-playing attachment here!” she called.

“Me!” the Infant answered, his napkin on his shoulder. “That’s how I play Parsifal.”

“I prefer the direct expression. Take it away, Ipps.”

We heard old Ipps skating obediently all over the floor.

“Now for the direct expression,” said Stalky, and moved on the Burgundy recommended by the faculty to enrich fever-thinned blood.

“It’s nothing much. Only the belt of cotton-soil my chief showed me ran right into the Sheshaheli country. We haven’t been able to prove cannibalism against that tribe in the courts; but when a Sheshaheli offers you four pounds of woman’s breast, tattoo marks and all, skewered up in a plantain leaf before breakfast, you—”

“Naturally burn the villages before lunch,” said Stalky.

Adam shook his head. “No troops,” he sighed. “I told my Chief about it, and he said we must wait till they chopped a white man. He advised me if ever I felt like it not to commit a—a barren felo de se, but to let the Sheshaheli do it. Then he could report, and then we could mop ’em up!”

“Most immoral! That’s how we got—” Stalky quoted the name of a province won by just such a sacrifice.

“Yes, but the beasts dominated one end of my cotton-belt like anything. They chivied me out of it when I went to take soil for analysis—me and Imam Din.”

“Sahib! Is there a need?” The voice came out of the darkness, and the eyes shone over Adam’s shoulder ere it ceased.

“None. The name was taken in talk.” Adam abolished him with a turn of the finger. “I couldn’t make a casus belli of it just then, because my Chief had taken all the troops to hammer a gang of slave kings up north. Did you ever hear of our war against Ibn Makarrah? He precious nearly lost us the Protectorate at one time, though he’s an ally of ours now.”

“Wasn’t he rather a pernicious brute, even as they go?” said Stalky. “Wade told me about him last year.”

“Well, his nickname all through the country was ‘The Merciful,’ and he didn’t get that for nothing. None of our people ever breathed his proper name. They said ‘He’ or ‘That One,’ and they didn’t say it aloud, either. He fought us for eight months.”

“I remember. There was a paragraph about it in one of the papers,” I said.

“We broke him, though. No—the slavers don’t come our way, because our men have the reputation of dying too much, the first month after they’re captured. That knocks down profits, you see.”

“What about your charming friends, the Sheshahelis?” said the Infant.

page 3

“There’s no market for Sheshaheli. People would as soon buy crocodiles. I believe, before we annexed the country, Ibn Makarrah dropped down on ’em once—to train his young men—and simply hewed ’em in pieces. The bulk of my people are agriculturists just the right stamp for cotton-growers. What’s Mother playing?—‘Once in royal’?”

The organ that had been crooning as happily as a woman over her babe restored, steadied to a tune.

“Magnificent! Oh, magnificent! “ said the Infant loyally. I had never heard him sing but once, and then, though it was early in the tolerant morning, his mess had rolled him into a lotus pond.

“How did you get your cannibals to work for you?” asked Strickland.

“They got converted to civilization after my Chief smashed Ibn Makarrah—just at the time I wanted ’em. You see my Chief had promised me in writing that if I could scrape up a surplus he would not bag it for his roads this time, but I might have it for my cotton game. I only needed two hundred pounds. Our revenues didn’t run to it.”

“What is your revenue?” Stalky asked in the vernacular.

“With hut-tax, traders’ game and mining licenses, not more than fourteen thousand rupees; every penny of it ear-marked months ahead.” Adam sighed.

“Also there is a fine for dogs straying in the Sahib’s camp. Last year it exceeded three rupees,” Imam Din said quietly.

“Well, I thought that was fair. They howled so. We were rather strict on fines. I worked up my native clerk—Bulaki Ram—to a ferocious pitch of enthusiasm. He used to calculate the profits of our cotton-scheme to three points of decimals, after office. I tell you I envied your magistrates here hauling money out of motorists every week I had managed to make our ordinary revenue and expenditure just about meet, and I was crazy to get the odd two hundred pounds for my cotton. That sort of thing grows on a chap when he’s alone—and talks aloud!”

“Hul-lo! Have you been there already?” the father said, and Adam nodded.

“Yes. Used to spout what I could remember of ‘Marmion’ to a tree, sir. Well then my luck turned. One evening an English-speaking nigger came in towing a corpse by the feet. (You get used to little things like that.) He said he’d found it, and please would I identify, because if it was one of Ibn Makarrah’s men there might be a reward. It was an old Mohammedan, with a strong dash of Arab—a smallboned, bald-headed chap, and I was just wondering how it had kept so well in our climate when it sneezed. You ought to have seen the nigger! He fetched a howl and bolted like—like the dog in ‘Tom Sawyer,’ when he sat on the what’s-its-name beetle. He yelped as he ran, and the corpse went on sneezing. I could see it had been sarkied. (That’s a sort of gum-poison, pater, which attacks the nerve centres. Our chief medical officer is writing a monograph about it.) So Imam Din and I emptied out the corpse one time, with my shaving soap and trade gunpowder, and hot water.

“I’d seen a case of sarkie before; so when the skin peeled off his feet, and he stopped sneezing, I knew he’d live. He was bad, though; lay like a log for a week while Imam Din and I massaged the paralysis out of him. Then he told us he was a Hajji—had been three times to Mecca—come in from French Africa, and that he’d met the nigger by the wayside—just like a case of thuggee, in India—and the nigger had poisoned him. That seemed reasonable enough by what I knew of Coast niggers.”

“You believed him?” said his father keenly.

“There was no reason I shouldn’t. The nigger never came back, and the old man stayed with me for two months,” Adam returned. “You know what the best type of a Mohammedan gentleman can be, pater? He was that.”

“None finer, none finer,” was the answer.

“Except a Sikh,” Stalky grunted.

“He’d been to Bombay; he knew French Africa inside out; he could quote poetry and the Koran all day long. He played chess—you don’t know what that meant to me—like a master. We used to talk about the regeneration of Turkey and the Sheik-ul-Islam between moves. Oh, everything under the sun we talked about! He was awfully open-minded. He believed in slavery, of course, but he quite saw that it would have to die out. That’s why he agreed with me about developing the resources of the district by cotton-growing, you know.”

“You talked of that too?” said Strickland.

“Rather. We discussed it for hours. You don’t know what it meant to me. A wonderful man. Imam Din, was not our Hajji marvellous?”

“Most marvellous! It was all through the Hajji that we found the money for our cotton-play.” Imam Din had moved, I fancy, behind Strickland’s chair.

“Yes. It must have been dead against his convictions too. He brought me news when I was down with fever at Dupe that one of Ibn Makarrah’s men was parading through my District with a bunch of slaves—in the Fork!”

“What’s the matter with the Fork, that you can’t abide it?” said Stalky. Adam’s voice had risen at the last word.

“Local etiquette, sir,” he replied, too earnest to notice Stalky’s atrocious pun. “If a slaver runs slaves through British territory he ought to pretend that they’re his servants. Hawkin’ ’em about in the Fork—the forked stick that you put round their necks, you know—is insolence—same as not backing your topsails in the old days. Besides, it unsettles the District.”

“I thought you said slavers didn’t come your way,” I put in.

“They don’t. But my Chief was smoking ’em out of the North all that season, and they were bolting into French territory any road they could find. My orders were to take no notice so long as they circulated, but open slave-dealing in the Fork, was too much. I couldn’t go myself, so I told a couple of our Makalali police and Imam Din to make talk with the gentleman one time. It was rather risky, and it might have been expensive, but it turned up trumps. They were back in a few days with the slaver (he didn’t show fight) and a whole crowd of witnesses, and we tried him in my bedroom, and fined him properly. Just to show you how demoralized the brute must have been (Arabs often go dotty after a defeat), he’d snapped up four or five utterly useless Sheshaheli, and was offering ’em to all and sundry along the road. Why, he offered ’em to you, didn’t he, Imam Din?”

“I was witness that he offered man-eaters’ for sale,” said Imam Din.

page 4

“Luckily for my cotton-scheme, that landed, him both ways. You see, he had slaved and exposed slaves for sale in British territory. That meant the double fine if I could get it out of him.”

“What was his defence?” said Strickland, late of the Punjab Police.

“As far as I remember—but I had a temperature of 104 degrees at the time—he’d mistaken the meridians of longitude. Thought he was in French territory. Said he’d never do it again, if we’d let him off with a fine. I could have shaken hands with the brute for that. He paid up cash like a motorist and went off one time.”

“Did you see him?”

“Ye-es. Didn’t I, Imam Din?”

“Assuredly the Sahib both saw and spoke to the slaver. And the Sahib also made a speech to the man-eaters when he freed them, and they swore to supply him with labour for all his cotton-play. The Sahib leaned on his own servant’s shoulder the while.”

“I remember something of that. I remember Bulaki Ram giving me the papers to sign, and I distinctly remember him locking up the money in the safe—two hundred and ten beautiful English sovereigns. You don’t know what that meant to me! I believe it cured my fever; and as soon as I could, I staggered off with the Hajji to interview the Sheshaheli about labour. Then I found out why they had been so keen to work! It wasn’t gratitude. Their big village had been hit by lightning and burned out a week or two before, and they lay flat in rows around me asking me for a job. I gave it ’em.”

“And so you were very happy?” His mother had stolen up behind us. “You liked your cotton, dear?” She tidied the lump away.

“By Jove, I was happy!” Adam yawned. “Now if any one,” he looked at the Infant, “cares to put a little money into the scheme, it’ll be the making of my District. I can’t give you figures, sir, but I assure—”

“You’ll take your arsenic, and Imam Din’ll take you up to bed, and I’ll come and tuck you in.”

Agnes leaned forward, her rounded elbows on his shoulders, hands joined across his dark hair, and “Isn’t he a darling?” she said to us, with just the same heart-rending lift to the left eyebrow and the same break of her voice as sent Strickland mad among the horses in the year ’84. We were quiet when they were gone. We waited till Imam Din returned to us from above and coughed at the door, as only dark-hearted Asia can.

“Now,” said Strickland, “tell us what truly befell, son of my servant.”

“All befell as our Sahib has said. Only—only there was an arrangement—a little arrangement on account of his cotton-play.”

“Tell! Sit! I beg your pardon, Infant,” said Strickland.

But the Infant had already made the sign, and we heard Imam Din hunker down on the floor: One gets little out of the East at attention.

“When the fever came on our Sahib in our roofed house at Dupe,” he began, “the Hajji listened intently to his talk. He expected the names of women; though I had already told him that Our virtue was beyond belief or compare, and that Our sole desire was this cotton-play. Being at last convinced, the Hajji breathed on our Sahib’s forehead, to sink into his brain news concerning a slave-dealer in his district who had made a mock of the law. Sahib,” Imam Din turned to Strickland, “our Sahib answered to those false words as a horse of blood answers to the spur. He sat up. He issued orders for the apprehension of the slave-dealer. Then he fell back. Then we left him.”

“Alone—servant of my son, and son of my servant?” said his father.

“There was an old woman which belonged to the Hajji. She had come in with the Hajji’s money-belt. The Hajji told her that if our Sahib died, she would die with him. And truly our Sahib had given me orders to depart.”

“Being mad with fever—eh?”

“What could we do, Sahib? This cotton-play was his heart’s desire. He talked of it in his fever. Therefore it was his heart’s desire that the Hajji went to fetch. Doubtless the Hajji could have given him money enough out of hand for ten cottonplays; but in this respect also our Sahib’s virtue was beyond belief or compare. Great Ones do not exchange moneys. Therefore the Hajji said—and I helped with my counsel—that we must make arrangements to get the money in all respects conformable with the English Law. It was great trouble to us, but—the Law is the Law. And the Hajji showed the old woman the knife by which she would die if our Sahib died. So I accompanied the Hajji.”

“Knowing who he was?” said Strickland.

“No! Fearing the man. A virtue went out from him overbearing the virtue of lesser persons. The Hajji told Bulaki Ram the clerk to occupy the seat of government at Dupe till our return. Bulaki Ram feared the Hajji, because the Hajji had often gloatingly appraised his skill in figures at five thousand rupees upon any slave-block. The Hajji then said to me: ‘Come, and we will make the man-eaters play the cotton-game for my delight’s delight’ The Hajji loved our Sahib with the love of a father for his son, of a saved for his saviour, of a Great One for a Great One. But I said: ‘We cannot go to that Sheshaheli place without a hundred rifles. We have here five.’ The Hajji said: ‘I have untied as knot in my head-handkerchief which will be more to us than a thousand.’ I saw that he had so loosed it that it lay flagwise on his shoulder. Then I knew that he was a Great One with virtue in him.

“We came to the highlands of the Sheshaheli on the dawn of the second day—about the time of the stirring of the cold wind. The Hajji walked delicately across the open place where their filth is, and scratched upon the gate which was shut. When it opened I saw the man-eaters lying on their cots under the eaves of the huts. They rolled off: they rose up, one behind the other the length of the street, and the fear on their faces was as leaves whitening to a breeze. The Hajji stood in the gate guarding his skirts from defilement. The Hajji said: ‘I am here once again. Give me six and yoke up.’ They zealously then pushed to us with poles six, and yoked them with a heavy tree. The Hajji then said: “Fetch fire from the morning hearth, and come to windward.’ The wind is strong on those headlands at sunrise, so when each had emptied his crock of fire in front of that which was before him, the broadside of the town roared into flame, and all went. The Hajji then said: ‘At the end of a time there will come here the white man ye once chased for sport. He will demand labour to plant such and such stuff. Ye are that labour, and your spawn after you.’ They said, lifting their heads a very little from the edge of the ashes: ‘ We are that labour, and our spawn after us.’ The Hajji said: ‘What is also my name?’ They said: ‘Thy name is also The Merciful’ The Hajji said: ‘Praise then my mercy’; and while they did this, the Hajji walked away, I following.”

page 5

The Infant made some noise in his throat, and reached for more Burgundy.

“About noon one of our six fell dead. Fright only frights Sahib! None had—none could—touch him. Since they were in pairs, and the other of the Fork was mad and sang foolishly, we waited for some heathen to do what was needful. There came at last Angari men with goats. The Hajji said: ‘What do ye see? They said: ‘Oh, our Lord, we neither see nor hear.’ The Hajji said: ‘But I command ye to see and to hear and to say.’ They said: ‘Oh, our Lord, it is to our commanded eyes as though slaves stood in a Fork.’ The Hajji said: ‘So testify before the officer who waits you in the town of Dupe.’ They said: ‘What shall come to us after?’ The Hajji said: ‘The just reward for the informer. But if ye do not testify, then a punishment which shall cause birds, to fall from the trees in terror and monkeys to scream for pity.’ Hearing this, the Angari men hastened to Dupe. The Hajji then said to me: ‘Are those things sufficient to establish our case, or must I drive in a village full?’ I said that three witnesses amply established any case, but as yet, I said, the Hajji had not offered his slaves for sale. It is true, as our Sahib said just now, there is one fine for catching slaves, and yet another for making to sell them. And it was the double fine that we needed, Sahib, for our Sahib’s cotton-play. We had fore-arranged all this with Bulaki Ram, who knows the English Law, and, I thought the Hajji remembered, but he grew angry, and cried out: ‘O God, Refuge of the Afflicted, must I, who am what I am, peddle this’ dog’s meat by the roadside to gain his delight for my heart’s delight?” None the less, he admitted it was the English Law, and so he offered me the six—five—in a small voice, with an averted head. The Sheshaheli do not smell of sour milk as heathen should. They smell like leopards, Sahib. This is because they eat men.”

“Maybe,” said Strickland. “But where were thy wits? One witness is not sufficient to establish the fact of a sale.”

“What could we do, Sahib? There was the Hajji’s reputation to consider. We could not have called in a heathen witness for such a thing. And, moreover, the Sahib forgets that the defendant himself was making this case. He would not contest his own evidence. Otherwise, I know the law of evidence well enough.

“So then we went to Dupe, and while Bulaki Ram waited among the Angari men, ‘I ran to see our Sahib in bed. His eyes were very bright, and his mouth was full of upside-down orders, but the old woman had not loosened her hair for death. The Hajji said: ‘Be quick with my trial. I am not Job!’ The Hajji was a learned man. We made the trial swiftly to a sound of soothing voices round the bed. Yet—yet, because no man can be sure whether a Sahib of that blood sees, or does not see, we made it strictly in the manner of the forms of the English Law. Only the witnesses and the slaves and the prisoner we kept without for his nose’s sake.”

“Then he did not see the prisoner?” said Strickland.

“I stood by to shackle up an Angari in case he should demand it, but by God’s favour he was too far fevered to ask for one. It is quite true he signed the papers. It is quite true he saw the money put away in the safe—two hundred and ten English pounds and it is quite true that the gold wrought on him as a strong cure. But as to his seeing the prisoner, and having speech with the man-eaters—the Hajji breathed all that on his forehead to sink into his sick brain. A little, as ye have heard, has remained . . . . Ah, but when the fever broke, and our Sahib called for the fine-book, and the thin little picture-books from Europe with the pictures of ploughs and hoes, and cotton mills—ah, then he laughed as he used to laugh, Sahib. It was his heart’s desire, this cotton-play. The Hajji loved him, as who does not? It was a little, little arrangement, Sahib, of which—is it necessary to tell all the world?”

“And when didst thou know who the Hajji was?” said Strickland.

“Not for a certainty till he and our Sahib had returned from their visit to the Sheshaheli country. It is quite true as our Sahib says, the man-eaters lay, flat around his feet, and asked for spades to cultivate cotton. That very night, when I was cooking the dinner, the Hajji said to me: ‘I go to my own place, though God knows whether the Man with the Stone Eyes have left me an ox, a slave, or a woman.’ I said: ‘Thou art then That One?’ The Hajji said: ‘I am ten thousand rupees reward into thy hand. Shall we make another law-case and get more cotton machines for the boy?’ I said: ‘What dog am I to do this? May God prolong thy life a thousand years!’ The Hajji said: ‘Who has seen to-morrow? God has given me as it were a son in my old age, and I praise Him. See that the breed is not lost!’

“He walked then from the cooking-place to our Sahib’s office-table under the tree, where our Sahib held in his hand a blue envelope of Service newly come in by runner from the North. At this, fearing evil news for the Hajji, I would have restrained him, but he said: ‘We be both Great Ones. Neither of us will fail.’ Our Sahib looked up to invite the Hajji to approach before he opened the letter, but the Hajji stood off till our Sahib had well opened and well read the letter. Then the Hajji said: ‘Is it permitted to say farewell?’ Our Sahib stabbed the letter on the file with a deep and joyful breath and cried a welcome. The Hajji said: ‘I go to my own place,’ and he loosed from his neck a chained heart of ambergris set in soft gold and held it forth. Our Sahib snatched it swiftly in the closed fist, down turned, and said ‘If thy name be written hereon, it is needless, for a name is already engraved on my heart.’ The Hajji said: ‘And on mine also is a name engraved; but there is no name on the amulet.’ The Hajji stooped to our Sahib’s feet, but our Sahib raised and embraced him, and the Hajji covered his mouth with his shoulder-cloth, because it worked, and so he went away.”

“And what order was in the Service letter?” Stalky murmured.

“Only an order for our Sahib to write a report on some new cattle sickness. But all orders come in the same make of envelope. We could not tell what order it might have been.”

“When he opened the letter—my son—made he no sign? A cough? An oath?” Strickland asked.

“None, Sahib. I watched his hands. They did not shake. Afterward he wiped his face, but he was sweating before from the heat.”

“Did he know? Did he know who the Hajji was?” said the Infant in English.

“I am a poor man. Who can say what a Sahib of that get knows or does not know? But the Hajji is right. The breed should not be lost. It is not very hot for little children in Dupe, and as regards nurses, my sister’s cousin at Jull—”

“H’m! That is the boy’s own concern. I wonder if his Chief ever knew?” said Strickland.

“Assuredly,” said Imam Din. “On the night before our Sahib went down to the sea, the Great Sahib—the Man with the Stone Eyes—dined with him in his camp, I being in charge of the table. They talked a long while and the Great Sahib said: ‘What didst thou think of That One?’ (We do not say Ibn Makarrah yonder.) Our Sahib said: ‘Which one?’ The Great Sahib said: ‘That One which taught thy man-eaters to grow cotton for thee. He was in thy District three months to my certain knowledge, and I looked by every runner that thou wouldst send me in his head.’ Our Sahib said: ‘If his head had been needed, another man should have been appointed to govern my District, for he was my friend.’ The Great Sahib laughed and said: ‘If I had needed a lesser man in thy place be sure I would have sent him, as, if I had needed the head of That One, be sure I would have sent men to bring it to me. But tell me now, by what means didst thou twist him to thy use and our profit in this cotton-play?’ Our Sahib said: ‘By God, I did not use that man in any fashion whatever. He was my friend.’ The Great Sahib said: ‘ ’Toh Vac! (Bosh!) Tell!’ Our Sahib shook his head as he does—as he did when a child—and they looked at each other like sword-play men in the ring at a fair. The Great Sahib dropped his eyes first and he said: ‘So be it. I should perhaps have answered thus in my youth. No matter. I have made treaty with That One as an ally of the State. Some day he shall tell me the tale.’ Then I brought in fresh coffee, and they ceased. But I do not think That One will tell the Great Sahib more than our Sahib told him.”

“Wherefore?” I asked.

“Because they are both Great Ones, and I have observed in my life that Great Ones employ words very little between each other in their dealings; still less when they speak to a third concerning those dealings. Also they profit by silence . . . . Now I think that the mother has come down from the room, and I will go rub his feet till he sleeps.”

His ears had caught Agnes’s step at the stair-head and presently she passed us on her way to the music room humming the Magnificat.

[a short tale]

TWO awful catastrophes have occurred. One Englishman in London is dead, and I have scandalised about twenty of his nearest and dearest friends. He was a man nearly seventy years old, engaged in the business of an architect, and immensely respected. That was all I knew about him till I began to circulate among his friends in these parts, trying to cheer them up and make them forget the fog.

“Hush!” said a man and his wife. “Don’t you know he died yesterday of a sudden attack of pneumonia? Isn’t it shocking?”

“Yes,” said I vaguely. “Aw’fly shocking. Has he left his wife provided for?”

“Oh, he’s very well off indeed, and his wife is quite old. But just think—it was only in the next street it happened!” Then I saw that their grief was not for Strangeways, deceased, but for themselves.

“How old was he?” I said.

“Nearly seventy, or maybe a little over.”

“About time for a man to rationally expect such a thing as death,” I thought, and went away to another house, where a young married couple lived.

“Isn’t it perfectly ghastly?” said the wife. “Mr. Strangeways died last night.”

“So I heard,” said I. “Well, he had lived his life.”

“Yes, but it was such a shockingly short illness. Why, only three weeks ago he was walking about the street.” And she looked nervously at her husband, as though she expected him to give up the ghost at any minute.

Then I gathered, with the knowledge of the length of his sickness, that her grief was not for the late Mr. Strangeways, and went away thinking over men and women I had known who would have given a thousand years in Purgatory for even a week wherein to arrange their affairs, and who were anything but well off.

I passed on to a third house full of children, and the shadow of death hung over their heads, for father and mother were talking of Mr. Strangeway’s “end.” “Most shocking,” said they. “It seems that his wife was in the next room when he was dying, and his only son called her, so she just had time to take him in her arms before he died. He was unconscious at the last. Wasn’t it awful?”

When I went away from that house I thought of men and women without a week wherein to arrange their affairs, and without any money, who were anything but unconscious at the last, and who would have given a thousand years in Purgatory for one glimpse at their mothers, their wives or their husbands. I reflected how these people died tended by hirelings and strangers, and I was not in the least ashamed to say that I laughed over Mr. Strangeways’ death as I entered the house of a brother in his craft.

“Heard of Strangeways’ death?” said he. “Most hideous thing. Why, he had only a few days before got news of his designs being accepted by the Burgoyne Cathedral. If he had lived he would have been working out the deails now—with me.” And I saw that this man’s fear also was not on account of Mr. Strangeways. And I thought of men and women who had died in the midst of wrecked work; then I sought a company of young men and heard them talk of the dead. “That’s the second death among people I know within the year,” said one. “Yes, the second death,” said another.

I smiled a very large smile.

“And you know,” said a third, who was the oldest of the party, “they’ve opened the new road by the head of Tresillion Road, and the wind blows straight across that level square from the Parks. Everything is changing about us.”

“He was an old man,” I said.

“Ye-es. More than middle-aged,” said they.

“And he outlived his reputation?”

“Oh, no, or how would he have taken the designs for the Burgoyne Cathedral? Why, the very day he died . . . ”

“Yes,” said I. “He died at the end of a completed work—his design finished, his prize awarded?”

“Yes; but he didn’t live to . . . ”

“And his illness lasted seventeen days, of twenty-four hours each?”

“Yes.”

“And he was tended by his own kith and Mn, dying with his head on his wife’s breast, his hand in his only son’s hand, without any thought of their possible poverty to vex him. Are these things so?”

“Ye-es,” said they. “Wasn’t it shocking?”

“Shocking?” I said. “Get out of this place. Go forth, run about and see what death really means. You have described such dying as a god might envy and a king might pay half his ransom to make certain of. Wait till you have seen men—strong men of thirty-five, with little children, die at two days’ notice, penniless and alone, and seen it not once, but twenty times; wait till you have seen the young girl die within a fortnight of the wedding; or the lover within three days of his marriage; or the mother—sixty little minutes—before her son can come to her side; wait till you hesitate before handling your daily newspaper for fear of reading of the death of some young man that you have dined with, drank with, shot with, lent money to and borrowed money from, and tested to the uttermost—till you dare not hope for the death of an old man, but, when you are strongest, count up the tale of your acquaintances and friends, wondering how many will be alive six months hence. Wait till you have heard men calling in the death hour on kin that cannot come; till you have dined with a man one night and seen him buried on the next. Then you can begin to whimper about loneliness and change and desolation.” Here I foamed at the mouth.

“And do you mean to say,” drawled a young gentleman, “that there is any society in which that sort of holocaust goes on?”

“I do,” said I. “It’s not society; it’s Life,” And they laughed.

But this is the old tale of Pharaoh’s chariot-wheel and flying-fish.

If I tell them yarns, they say: “How true! How true!” If I try to present the truth, they say: “What superb imagination!”

“But you understand, don’t you?’

[a short tale]

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

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

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

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

Pleasant it is for the Little Tin Gods
When great Jove nods;
But Little Tin Gods make their little mistakes
In missing the hour when great Jove wakes.

[a short tale]

AS a general rule, it is inexpedient to meddle with questions of State in a land where men are highly paid to work them out for you. This tale is a justifiable exception.

Once in every five years, as you know, we indent for a new Viceroy; and each Viceroy imports, with the rest of his baggage, a Private Secretary, who may or may not be the real Viceroy, just as Fate ordains. Fate looks after the Indian Empire because it is so big and so helpless.

There was a Viceroy once who brought out with him a turbulent Private Secretary—a hard man with a soft manner and a morbid passion for work. This Secretary was called Wonder—John Fennil Wonder. The Viceroy possessed no name—nothing but a string of counties and two-thirds of the alphabet after them. He said, in confidence, that he was the electro-plated figure head of a golden administration, and he watched in a dreamy, amused way Wonder’s attempts to draw matters which were entirely outside his province into his own hands. ‘When we are all cherubim together,’ said His Excellency once, ‘my dear, good friend Wonder will head the conspiracy for plucking out Gabriel’s tailfeathers or stealing Peter’s keys. Then I shall report him.’

But, though the Viceroy did nothing to check Wonder’s officiousness, other people said unpleasant things. May be the Members of Council began it; but, finally, all Simla agreed that there was ‘too much Wonder and too little Viceroy’ in that rule. Wonder was always quoting ‘His Excellency.’ It was ‘His Excellency this,’ ‘His Excellency that,’ ‘In the opinion of His Excellency,’ and so on. The Viceroy smiled; but he did not heed. He said that, so long as his old men squabbled with his ‘dear, good Wonder,’ they might be induced to leave the Immemorial East in peace.

‘No wise man has a Policy,’ said the Viceroy. ‘A Policy is the blackmail levied on the Fool by the Unforeseen. I am not the former, and I do not believe in the latter.’

I do not quite see what this means, unless it refers to an Insurance Policy. Perhaps it was the Viceroy’s way of saying, ‘Lie low.’

That season came up to Simla one of those crazy people with only a single idea. These are the men who make things move; but they are not nice to talk to. This man’s name was Mellish, and he had lived for fifteen years on land of his own, in Lower Bengal, studying cholera. He held that cholera was a germ that propagated itself as it flew through a muggy atmosphere; and stuck in the branches of trees like a wool-flake. The germ could be rendered sterile, he said, by ‘Mellish’s Own Invincible Fumigatory’—a heavy violet-black powder—, ‘the result of fifteen years’ scientific investigation, Sir!’

Inventors seem very much alike as a caste. They talk loudly, especially about ‘conspiracies of monopolists;’ they beat upon the table with their fists; and they secrete fragments of their inventions about their persons.

Mellish said that there was a Medical ‘Ring’ at Simla, headed by the Surgeon-General, who was in league, apparently, with all the Hospital Assistants in the Empire. I forget exactly how he proved it, but it had something to do with ‘skulking up to the Hills’; and what Mellish wanted was the independent evidence of the Viceroy—‘Steward of our Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, Sir.’ So Mellish went up to Simla, with eighty-four pounds of Fumigatory in his trunk, to speak to the Viceroy and to show him the merits of the invention.

But it is easier to see a Viceroy than to talk to him, unless you chance to be as important as Mellishe of Madras. He was a six-thousand-rupee man, so great that his daughters never married.‘They I contracted alliances.’ He himself was not paid. He ‘received emoluments,’ and his journeys about the country were ‘tours of observation.’ His business was to stir up the people in Madras with a long pole—as you stir up tench in a pond—and the people had to come up out of their comfortable old ways and gasp—‘This is Enlightenment and Progress. Isn’t it fine !’ Then they gave Mellishe statues and jasmine garlands, in the hope of getting rid of him.

Mellishe came up to Simla ‘to confer with the Viceroy.’ That was one of his perquisites. The Viceroy knew nothing of Mellishe except that he was ‘one of those middle-class deities who seem necessary to the spiritual comfort of this Paradise of the Middle-classes,’ and that, in all probability, he had ‘suggested, designed, founded, and endowed all the public institutions in Madras.’ Which proves that His Excellency, though dreamy, had experience of the ways of six-thousandrupee men.

Mellishe’s name was E. Mellishe, and Mellish’s was E. S. Mellish, and they were both staying at the same hotel, and the Fate that looks after the Indian Empire ordained that Wonder should blunder and drop the final ‘e’ ; that the Chaprassi should help him, and that the note which ran

should be given to Mellish with the Fumigatory. He nearly wept with pride and delight, and at the appointed hour cantered to Peterhof, a big paper bag full of the Fumigatory in his coat-tail pockets. He had his chance, and he meant to make the most of it. Mellishe of Madras had been so portentously solemn about his ‘conference’ that Wonder had arranged for a private tiffin,—no A.-D.-C.’s, no Wonder, no one but the Viceroy, who said plaintively that he feared being left alone with unmuzzled autocrats like the great Mellishe of Madras.

But his guest did not bore the Viceroy. On the contrary, he amused him. Mellish was nervously anxious to go straight to his Fumigatory, and talked at random until tiffin was over and His Excellency asked him to smoke. The Viceroy was pleased with Mellish because he did not talk ‘shop.’

As soon as the cheroots were lit, Mellish spoke like a man; beginning with his cholera-theory, reviewing his fifteen years’ ‘scientific labours,’ the machinations of the ‘Simla Ring,’ and the excellence of his Fumigatory, while the Viceroy watched him between half-shut eyes and thought—, ‘Evidently this is the wrong tiger; but it is an original animal.’ Mellish’s hair was standing on end with excitement, and he stammered. He began groping in his coat-tails and, before the Viceroy knew what was about to happen, he had tipped a bagful of his powder into the big silver ash-tray.

‘J-j-judge for yourself, Sir,’ said Mellish. ‘Y’ Excellency shall judge for yourself! Absolutely infallible, on my honour.’

He plunged the lighted end of his cigar into the powder, which began to smoke like a volcano, and send up fat, greasy wreaths of copper-coloured smoke. In five seconds the room was filled with a most pungent and sickening stench—a reek that took fierce hold of the trap of your windpipe and shut it. The powder hissed and fizzed, and sent out blue and green sparks, and the smoke rose till you could neither see, nor breathe, nor gasp. Mellish, however, was used to it.

‘Nitrate of strontia,’ he shouted; ‘baryta, bone-meal, etcetera! Thousand cubic feet smoke per cubic inch. Not a germ could live—not a germ, Y’ Excellency!’

But His Excellency had fled, and was coughing at the foot of the stairs, while all Peterhof hummed like a hive. Red Lancers came in, and the head Chaprassi who speaks English came in, and mace-bearers came in, and ladies ran downstairs screaming, ‘Fire’; for the smoke was drifting through the house and oozing out of the windows, and bellying along the verandahs, and wreathing and writhing across the gardens. No one could enter the room where Mellish was lecturing on his Fumigatory till that unspeakable powder had burned itself out.

Then an Aide-de-Camp, who desired the V.C., rushed through the rolling clouds and hauled Mellish into the hall. The Viceroy was prostrate with laughter, and could only waggle his hands feebly at Mellish, who was shaking a fresh bagful of powder at him.

‘Glorious! Glorious!’ sobbed His Excellency. ‘Not a germ, as you justly observe, could exist! I can swear it. A magnificent success!’

Then he laughed till the tears came, and Wonder, who had caught the real Mellishe snorting on the Mall, entered and was deeply shocked at the scene. But the Viceroy was delighted, because he saw that Wonder would presently depart. Mellish with the Fumigatory was also pleased, for he felt that he had smashed the Simla Medical ‘Ring.’

Few men could tell a story like His Excellency when he took the trouble, and his account of ‘my dear, good Wonder’s friend with the powder’ went the round of Simla, and flippant folk made Wonder unhappy by their remarks.

But His Excellency told the tale once too often—for Wonder. As he meant to do. It was at a Seepee Picnic. Wonder was sitting just behind the Viceroy.

‘And I really thought for a moment,’ wound up His Excellency, ‘that my dear, good Wonder had hired an assassin to clear his way to the throne!’

Every one laughed; but there was a delicate sub-tinkle in the Viceroy’s tone which Wonder understood. He found that his health was giving way; and the Viceroy allowed him to go, and presented him with a flaming ‘character’ for use at Home among big people.

‘My fault entirely,’ said His Excellency, in after seasons, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘My inconsistency must always have been distasteful to such a masterly man.’

Shall I not one day remember thy Bower—
One day when all days are one day to me?
Thinking I stirred not and yet had the power,
Yearning—ah, God, if again it might be!
—The Song of the Bower.

 
THIS is a base betrayal of confidence, but the sin is Mrs. Hauksbee’s and not mine.
If you remember a certain foolish tale called “The Education of Otis Yeere,” you will not forget that Mrs. Mallowe laughed at the wrong time, which was a single, and at Mrs. Hauksbee, which was a double, offence. An experiment had gone wrong, and it seems that Mrs. Mallowe had said some quaint things about the experimentrix.

“I am not angry,” said Mrs. Hauksbee, “and I admire Polly in spite of her evil counsels to me. But I shall wait—I shall wait, like the frog footman in Alice in Wonderland, and Providence will deliver Polly into my hands. It always does if you wait.” And she departed to vex the soul of the “Hawley boy,” who says that she is singularly “uninstruite and childlike.” He got that first word out of a Ouida novel. I do not know what it means, but am prepared to make an affidavit before the Collector that it does not mean Mrs. Hauksbee.

Mrs. Hauksbee’s ideas of waiting are very liberal. She told the “Hawley boy” that he dared not tell Mrs. Reiver that “she was an intellectual woman with a gift for attracting men,” and she offered another man two waltzes if he would repeat the same thing in the same ears. But he said: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” which means “Mistrust all waltzes except those you get for legitimate asking.”

The “Hawley boy” did as he was told because he believes in Mrs. Hauksbee. He was the instrument in the hand of a Higher Power, and he wore jharun coats, like “the scoriac rivers that roll their sulphurous torrents down Yahek, in the realms of the Boreal Pole,” that made your temples throb when seen early in the morning. I will introduce him to you some day if all goes well. He is worth knowing.

Unpleasant things have already been written about Mrs. Reiver in other places.

She was a person without invention. She used to get her ideas from the men she captured, and this led to some eccentric changes of character. For a month or two she would act à la Madonna, and try Theo for a change if she fancied Theo’s ways suited her beauty. Then she would attempt the dark and fiery Lilith, and so and so on, exactly as she had absorbed the new notion. But there was always Mrs. Reiver—hard, selfish, stupid Mrs. Reiver—at the back of each transformation. Mrs. Hauksbee christened her the Magic Lantern on account of this borrowed mutability. “It just depends upon the slide,” said Mrs. Hauksbee. “The case is the only permanent thing in the exhibition. But that, thank Heaven, is getting old,”

There was a Fancy Ball at Government House and Mrs. Reiver came attired in some sort of ’98 costume, with her hair pulled up to the top of her head, showing the clear outline on the back of the neck like the Récamier engravings. Mrs. Hauksbee had chosen to be loud, not to say vulgar, that evening, and went as The Black Death—a curious arrangement of barred velvet, black domino and flame-coloured satin puffery coming up to the neck and the wrists, with one of those shrieking keel-backed cicalas in the hair. The scream of the creature made people jump. It sounded so unearthly in a ballroom.

I heard her say to some one: “Let me introduce you to Madame Récamier,” and I saw a man dressed as Autolycus bowing to Mrs. Reiver, while The Black Death looked more than usually saintly. It was a very pleasant evening, and Autolycus and Madame Recamier—I heard her ask Autolycus who Madame Récamier was, by the way—danced together ever so much. Mrs. Hauksbee was in a meditative mood, but she laughed once or twice in the back of her throat, and that meant trouble.

Autolycus was Trewinnard, the man whom Mrs. Mallowe had told Mrs. Hauksbee about—the Platonic Paragon, as Mrs. Hauksbee called him. He was amiable, but his moustache hid his mouth, and so he did not explain himself all at once. If you stared at him, he turned his eyes away, and through the rest of the dinner kept looking at you to see whether you were looking again. He took stares as a tribute to his merits, which were generally known and recognised. When he played billiards he apologised at length between each bad stroke, and explained what would have happened if the red had been somewhere else, or the bearer had trimmed the third lamp, or the wind hadn’t made the door bang. Also he wriggled in his chair more than was becoming to one of his inches. Little men may wriggle and fidget without attracting notice. It doesn’t suit big-framed men. He was the Main Girder Boom of the Kutcha, Pukka, Bimdobust and Benaoti Department and corresponded direct with the Three Taped Bashaw. Every one knows what that means. The men in his own office said that where anything was to be gained, even temporarily, he would never hesitate for a moment over handing up a subordinate to be hanged and drawn and quartered. He didn’t back up his underlings, and for that reason they dreaded taking responsibility on their shoulders, and the strength of the Department was crippled.

A weak Department can, and often does, do a power of good work simply because its chief sees it through thick and thin. Mistakes may be bom of this policy, but it is safe and sounder than giving orders which may be read in two ways and reserving to yourself the right of interpretation according to subsequent failure or success. Offices prefer administration to diplomacy. They are very like Empires.

Hatchett of the Almirah and Thannicutch—a vicious little three-cornered Department that was always stamping on the toes of the Elect—had the fairest estimate of Trewinnard, when he said: “I don’t believe he is as good as he is.” They always quoted that verdict as an instance of the blind jealousy of the Uncovenanted, but Hatchett was quite right. Trewinnard was just as good and no better than Mrs. Mallowe could make him; and she had been engaged on the work for three years. Hatchett has a narrow-minded partiality for the more than naked—the anatomised Truth—but he can gauge a man.

Trewinnard had been spoilt by over-much petting, and the devil of vanity that rides nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand made him behave as he did. He had been too long one woman’s property; and that belief will sometimes drive a man to throw the best things in the world behind him, from rank perversity. Perhaps che only meant to stray temporarily and then return, but in arranging for this excursion he misimderstood both Mrs. Mallowe and Mrs. Reiver. The one made no sign, she would have died first; and the other—well, the high-falutin mindsome lay was her craze for the time being. She had never tried it before and several men had hinted that it would eminently become her. Trewinnard was in himself pleasant, with the great merit of belonging to somebody else. He was what they call “intellectual,” and vain to the marrow. Mrs. Reiver returned his lead in the first, and hopelessly out-trumped him in the second suit. Put down all that comes after this to Providence or The Black Death.

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Trewimiard never realised how far he had fallen from his allegiance till Mrs. Reiver referred to some official matter that he had been telling her about as “ours.” He remembered then how that word had been sacred to Mrs. Mallowe and how she had asked his permission to use it. Opium is intoxicating, and so is whisky, but more intoxicating than either to a certain build of mind is the first occasion on which a woman—especially if she have asked leave for the “honour”—identifies herself with a man’s work. The second time is not so pleasant. The answer has been given before, and the treachery comes to the top and tastes coppery in the mouth.

Trewinnard swallowed the shame—he felt dimly that he was not doing Mrs. Reiver any great wrong by untruth—and told and told and continued to tell, for the snare of this form of open-heartedness is that no man, unless he be a consmnmate liar, knows where to stop. The office door of all others must be either open wide or shut tight with a shaprassi to keep off callers.

Mrs. Mallowe made no sign to show that she felt Trewinnard’s desertion till a piece of information that could only have come from one quarter ran about Simla like quicksilver. She met Trewinnard at a dinner. “Choose your confidantes better, Harold,” she whispered as she passed him in the drawing-room. He turned salmon-colour, and swore very hard to himself that Babu Durga Charan Laha must go—must go—must go. He almost believed in that grey-headed old oyster’s guilt.

And so another of those upside-down tragedies that we call a Simla Season wore through to the end—from the Birthday Ball to the “tripping” to Naldera and Kotghar. And fools gave feasts and wise men ate them, and they were bidden to the wedding and sat down to bake, and those who had nuts had no teeth and they staked the substance for the shadow, and carried coals to Newcastle, and in the dark all cats were grey, as it was in the days of the great Curé of Meudon.

Late in the year there developed itself a battle-royal between the K.P.B. and B. Department and the Almirah and Thannicutch. Three columns of this paper would be needed to supply you with the outlines of the difficulty; and then you would not be grateful. Hatchett snuffed the fray from afar and went into it with his teeth bared to the gums, while his Department stood behind him solid to a man. They believed in him, and their answer to the fury of men who detested him was: “Ah! But you’ll admit he’s d—d right in what he says.”

“The head of Trewinnard in a Government Resolution,” said Hatchett, and he told the daftri to put a new pad on his blotter, and smiled a bleak smile as he spread out his notes. Hatchett is a Thug in his systematic way of butchering a man’s reputation.

“What are you going to do?” asked Trewinnard’s Department. “Sit tight,” said Trewinnard, which was tantamount to saying “Lord knows.” The Department groaned and said: “Which of us poor beggars is to be Jonahed this time?” They knew Trewinnard’s vice.

The dispute was essentially not one for the K.P.B. and B. under its then direction to fight out. It should have been compromised, or at the worst sent up to the Supreme Government with a private and confidential note directing justice into the proper paths.

Some people say that the Supreme Government is the Devil. It is more like the Deep Sea. Anything that you throw into it disappears for weeks, and comes to light hacked and furred at the edges, crusted with weeds and shells and almost unrecognisable. The bold man who would dare to give it a file of love-letters would be amply rewarded. It would overlay them with original comments and marginal notes, and work them piecemeal into D. O. dockets. Few things, from a setter or a whirlpool to a sausage-machine or a hatching hen, are more interesting and peculiar than the Supreme Government.

“What shall we do?” said Trewinnard, who had fallen from grace into sin. “Fight,” said Mrs. Reiver, or words to that effect; and no one can say how far aimless desire to test her powers, and how far belief in the man she had brought to her feet prompted the judgment. Of the merits of the case she knew just as much as any ayah.

Then Mrs. Mallowe, upon an evil word that went through Simla, put on her visiting-garb and attired herself for the sacrifice, and went to call—to call upon Mrs. Reiver, knowing what the torture would be. From half-past twelve till twenty-five minutes to two she sat, her hand upon her cardcase, and let Mrs. Reiver stab at her, all for the sake of the information. Mrs. Reiver double-acted her part, but she played into Mrs. Mallowe’s hand by this defect. The assumptions of ownership, the little intentional slips, were overdone, and so also was the pretence of intimate knowledge. Mrs. Mallowe never winced. She repeated to herself: “And he has trusted this—this Thing. She knows nothing and she cares nothing, and she has digged this trap for him.” The main feature of the case was abundantly clear. Trewinnard, whose capacities Mrs. Mallowe knew to the utmost farthing, to whom public and departmental petting were as the breath of his delicately-cut nostrils—Trewinnard, with his nervous dread of dispraise, was to be pitted against the Paul de Cassagnac of the Almirah and Thannicutch—the unspeakable Hatchett, who fought with the venom of a woman and the skill of a Red Indian. Unless his cause was triply just, Trewinnard was already under the guiotine. and if he had been under this “Thing’s” dominance, small hope for the justice of his case. “Oh, why did I let him go without putting out a hand to fetch him back?” said Mrs. Mallowe, as she got into her ’rickshaw.

Now, Tim, her fox-terrier, is the only person who knows what Mrs. Mallowe did that afternoon, and as I found him loafing on the Mall in a very disconsolate condition and as he recognised me effusively and suggested going for a monkey-hunt—a thing he had never done before—my impression is that Mrs. Mallowe stayed at home till the light fell and thought. If she did this, it is of course hopeless to account for her actions. So you must fill in the gap for yourself.

That evening it rained heavily, and horses mired their riders. But not one of all the habits was so plastered with mud as the habit of Mrs. Mallowe when she pulled up under the scrub oaks and sent in her name by the astounded bearer to Trewinnard. “Folly! downright folly!” she said as she sat in the steam of the dripping horse. “But it’s all a horrible jumble together.”

It may be as well to mention that ladies do not usually call upon bachelors at their houses. Bachelors would scream and run away. Trewinnard came into the light of the verandah with a nervous, undecided smile upon his lips, and he wished—in the bottomless bottom of his bad heart—he wished that Mrs. Reiver was there to see. A minute later he was profoundly glad that he was alone, for Mrs. Mallowe was standing in his office room and calling him names that reflected no credit on his intellect. “What have you done? What have you said?’ she asked. “Be quick! Be quick! And have the horse led round to the back. Can you speak? What have you written? Show me!”

She had interrupted him in the middle of what he was pleased to call his reply; for Hatchett’s first shell had already fallen in the camp. He stood back and offered her the seat at the duftar table. Her elbow left a great wet stain on the baize, for she was soaked through and through.

“Say exactly how the matter stands,” she said, and laughed a weak little laugh, which emboldened Trewinnard to say loftily: “Pardon me, Mrs. Mallowe, but I hardly recognise your——’

“Idiot! Will you show me the papers, will you speak, and will you be quick?”

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Her most reverent admirers would hardly have recognised the soft-spoken, slow-gestured, quiet-eyed Mrs. Mallowe in the indignant woman who was drununing on Trewinnard’s desk. He submitted to the voice of authority, as he had submitted in the old times, and explained as quickly as might be the cause of the war between the two Departments. In conclusion he handed over the rough sheets of his reply. As she read he watched her with the expectant sickly half-smile of the unaccustomed writer who is doubtful of the success of his work. And another smile followed, but died away as he saw Mrs. Mallowe read his production. All the old phrases out of which she had so carefully drilled him had returned; the unpruned fluency of diction was there, the more luxuriant for being so long cut back; the reckless riotousness of assertion that sacrificed all—even the vital truth that Hatchett would be so sure to take advantage of—for the sake of scoring a point, was there; and through and between every line ran the weak, wilful vanity of the man. Mrs. Mallowe’s mouth hardened.

“And you wrote this!” she said. Then to herself: “He wrote this!”

Trewinnard stepped forward with a gesture habitual to him when he wished to explain. Mrs. Reiver had never asked for explanations. She had told him that all his ways were perfect. Therefore he loved her.

Mrs. Mallowe tore up the papers one by one, saying as she did so: “You were going to cross swords with Hatchett. Do you know your own strength? Oh, Harold, Harold, it is too pitiable! I thought—I thought——” Then the great anger that had been growing in her broke out, and she cried: “Oh, you fool! You blind, blind, blind, trumpery fool! Why do I help you? Why do I have anything to do with you? You miserable man! Sit down and write as I dictate. Quickly! And I had chosen you out of a hundred other men! Write! It is a terrible thing to be found out by a mere unseeing male—Thackeray has said it. It is worse, far worse, to be found out by a woman, and in that hour after long years to discover her worth. For ten minutes Trewinnard’s pen scratched across the paper, and Mrs. Mallowe spoke. “And that is all,” she said bitterly. “As you value yourself—your noble, honourable, modest self—keep within that.”

But that was not all—by any means. At least as far as Trewinnard was concerned.

He rose from his chair and delivered his soul of many mad and futile thoughts—such things as a man babbles when he is deserted of the gods, has missed his hold upon the latch-door of Opportunity—and cannot see that the ways are shut. Mrs. Mallowe bore with him to the end, and he stood before her—no enviable creature to look upon.

“A cur as well as a fool!” she said. “Will you be good enough to tell them to bring my horse? I do not trust to your honour—you have none—but I believe that your sense of shame will keep you from speaking of my visit.”

So he was left in the verandah crying “Come back” like a distracted guinea-fowl.

.     .     .     .     .

“He’s done us in the eye,” grunted Hatchett as he perused the K.P.B. and B. reply. “Look at the cunning of the brute in shifting the issue on to India in that carneying, blarneying way! Only wait until I can get my knife into him again. I’ll stop every bolt-hole before the hunt begins.”

.     .     .     .     .

Oh, I believe I have forgotten to mention the success of Mrs. Hauksbee’s revenge. It was so brilliant and overwhelming that she had to cry in Mrs. Mallowe’s arms for the better part of half an hour; and Mrs. Mallowe was just as bad, though she thanked Mrs. Hauksbee several times in the course of the interview, and Mrs. Hauksbee said that she would repent and reform, and Mrs. Mallowe said: “Hush, dear, hushl I don’t think either of us had anything to be proud of.” And Mrs. Hauksbee said: “Oh, but I didn’t mean it, Polly, I didn’t mean itl” And I stood with my hat in my hand trying to make two very indignant ladies imderstand that the bearer really had given me “salaam bolta.”

That was an evil quarter minute.

WE WERE BORN, with many others, in the Black Week of ’99; and the story of our adventures would fill a book. It is enough for the world to know that the Marquis, the Squire, and the Farmer gave us leave to lay out a thousand-yard range over their broad Downs; that the Range was made and passed to National Rifle Association specification; that we number, perhaps, sixty working members, and hope to become fair shots. You may see us, any weekend, strolling down by ones and twos to the little loft where the Lee-Enfields live, under the eye of the Sergeant-Instructor. Six months ago we should have handled a rifle as a bachelor handles a baby, but now we know the vices and virtues of all our twelve. Gorman, of the Electric Light Works, picks out Number Nine (a free-thinking old lady, near-sighted, and hard-mouthed) with a disparaging grunt. Number Seven of the light pull is his favourite, but Andrews the carpenter has just taken her. ‘Never mind,’ says Hawkins the gardener, lengthening the sling of Number Two, ‘you can change on the ground with Andrews.’ ‘M’ yes,’ says Gorman, ‘after Andrews has gone and got her fouled. She throws up like a pump when she’s fouled — Seven does.’

Last autumn, we would marvellously tie ourselves up in our slings; but skirmishing-drill once, and range-work twice at least a week, has wonted us to the heft and balance of the long rifles. The accepted fashion is to sling our gun across our back, shove both hands into our pockets, and progress at ease. The range is not fifteen minutes’ walk from the village. Hawkins hurries on ahead. He has carnations to pot this afternoon, but is taking advantage of a spare minute to get off half his allowance (each man has ten rounds free a week) at two hundred. Our time, of course, is not all our own; but the Sergeant knows our business engagements pretty closely and takes urgent cases first. ‘Jimmy the Crack’ (he that won the prize rifle at the spring competition) passes us with the cheerful news that the new regulation Bisley target is in use — a seven-inch bull at two hundred. We do not need to be told that there is also a roaring north-easter on the Downs. It catches us as a razor catches a rough face; purring and scraping over the thyme-studded turf the moment we leave the village street. A mile away, very clear in the sun-glare, the lathy youngsters of the local training-stable are dancing in their body-cloths as they file towards Windy Height Barn. The trainer’s son, on a hot three-year-old who gallops alone, comes sidling and frisking behind us. He is a very good shot in process of being made. The three-year-old (also being made) bucks at the sight of the rifles, which he has not seen more than twenty times and makes pretence of flight. The boy catches him neatly on the first bound and laughs. ‘Comin’ down this evenin’?’ somebody calls out. He nods. ‘Bad for your hand, if he pulls much, isn’t it?’ ‘Ye-es, but he won’t pull.’ He turns his youngster on to the dry turf and gets off at a stretching canter. ‘Don’t wonder we don’t hit ’em when they’re ridin’ away—the Boers-much,’ says a bad shot meditatively, as horse and rider grow small across the green. We discuss this point as we breast the slope above the Squire’s kennels, and just below East Hill. Some one delivers himself of the final argument. ‘Young Carroll, he told us that at long range it don’t matter about hittin’ ’em so much. The thing is, he said, to pick up the range of the next ridge quick enough, and to keep on sprayin’ it down near enough an’ long enough to make ’em lie quiet.’

‘Young Carroll’ was a farmer’s son who served a year in the South African Light Horse, returned to his native village, en route for the Argentine, and out of his extended experience—for he had over a dozen big affairs to his credit—gave us valuable tips. Our Downs are precisely like the veldt, in that so soon as you have crowned one ridge you are deadlily commanded by the next. For instance, here we are on the top of East Hill, and all the range is spread below us. A thousand yards to the east, at the bottom of the three-hundred-foot hummock that Nature has so kindly built for a stop-butt, the windmill-targets flicker and wheel against their dun sod-backing; a line of gorse in bloom marks the Two-hundred range; a black tarred shed where we keep our oddments the Five-hundred firing-point. Behind that, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine rise one above the other step-fashion from the smooth turf. They command every inch of the ground, and except at the Two-hundred all shooting is a little downhill. It looks big enough in all conscience, this treeless, roadless, fenceless cup of green on the edge of the English Channel. And yet from the hill behind the butts, where the red flag streams to where we stand, cannot be more than fifteen hundred yards; and that would mean most open order if bullets were coming the other way. Young Carroll and two or three other warriors have taught us to consider these things. Already we have learned to look at the scattered furze-patches among the sheep-walks with an eye to more than rabbits, and to think over the value of little dimples and wrinkles in what to a stranger would show for level ground.

At the Two-hundred we find our much-advertised Bisley bull, not more conspicuous than the head of a bonnet-pin. Hawkins and Yeo the chemist are hammering at it. The tricky wind, focused in the bottom of the valley, playfully pats and twitches their rifles, as a kitten pats a cork. We, waiting to get our hand steady after the run down, chuckle while shot after shot drives right and right again. ‘You won’t laugh in a minute/ says the Sergeant grimly. ‘Try your last three from the shoulder, Mr. Yeo.’ That is Yeo’s strong point. He jumps up relievedly and pumps in a bull and two magpies. Hawkins, after five shots, returns to his carnations. The business of gardening teaches one to wait on the weather. Hawkins, will further ‘pot’ that bull to-morrow when it may not be so gusty. Gorman and Number Nine get down alongside of young Nutley, that was a gardener’s boy, but is now becoming a man and a shot. ‘This wind’ll about suit her,’ says Andrews with a wink, as Gorman’s cheek cuddles the stock. ‘Hold!’ cries the Sergeant, and there is a roar of laughter. We are rather a doggy community. Billy, Babette, and Tim are lying down beside their owners, but the markers have taken Flossie into the trench, and that impudent little beast has escaped and is sitting precisely under the bull’s-eye. The breech-bolts clack as Gorman and Nutley rise to their knees; our red flag goes up and the Sergeant’s whistle cuts across the wind. Out crawls a marker, but Flossie has disappeared behind the sod-banks. The marker cannot see what we would be at, for our voices are carried away by the gale, and so re-signals the last shot. ‘Oh, get up and tell him, Ted,’ says Gorman. Young Nutley uncoils himself and flings his long arms abroad. He is the star of our signalling class which the Coastguard were teaching all last winter. He semaphores Dog’ twice. Flossie is caught and dragged down; the red flag falls, and Number Nine rewards Gorman with a magpie, — perfect elevation too. She must be feeling well to-day, — the old beast!

To Gorman succeeds Lauder of the Coastguard, — trim, alert, and brown. He gets in his five rounds Navy-fashion: fitting the rough ground as though he were poured into it. He and Purvis are full members of the Club. They can make or mend anything from a new wind-flag to an old target; and their uniforms give us a pleasant air of official responsibility. The Admiralty decree that Coastguards shall fire so many rounds a year, but do not supply a range. They serve out tins stuffed with cordite chips, which they call ‘reduced charge’ cartridges. A rude target is then painted on the cliffs, and our Coastguards blaze off at two hundred yards; using the seven-hundred-yard sight! (If this should meet the eye of the Admiralty, they may be interested to know that — for a consideration — we should be most happy to open the range to neighbouring Coastguards.) For the next hour or so we cut in and out like men at whist. Lauder gives place to Scott, the baker’s son; Scott is followed by Keeley, son of a farmer; then comes Fane, the black-smith’s assistant; Anderson, the butcher; a mechanic or two; a member from Brighton (he has cycled over five miles in the teeth of this wind, but shoots none the less closely); and half-a-dozen others. A man from Burma on sick leave, his fingers itching for the feel of the trigger again; the Vicar, an Australian, and a schoolmaster make up the gallery.

‘No more for the Bisley bull?’ says the Sergeant. ‘Then go back to six hundred. The wind’s dropping! Up flags! Quick!’ ‘Please, Sergeant, mayn’t I try a shot at six hundred?’ says a man newly emancipated from the Morris tube. We do not allow men to begin even at two hundred till they are dismissed their tube-course in thevillagedrill-shed. ‘Not yet,’ is the answer. ‘We’ll give you another turn at the Two-hundred first. You had beginner’s luck to-day.’ The man obeys without protest (you are not encouraged to argue with our Sergeant), but follows up the range, for the sight and the talk of the game lay strong hold upon him. Even our substitute postman (our permanent man is at the Front), who has not yet fired twenty shots with the Morris tube, spends his rare leisure here, listening and looking and learning. One can pick up knowledge for the asking, when the light is good, and the experts come down and lie down and demonstrate.

Over the hill, his rifle cased, walks Vansittart, a man of leisure, with a dozen years’ experience of shooting, — all at the service of the Club. He attends our days as though it were his one business in life, and his advice to the colts is invaluable. He drops beside young Dixon, who has just slipped away from the frieze of huge farm-horses filing home against the skyline to the left. We have hopes of Dixon the farm-hand, for he has good knowledge of the lights and shadows tinder which he spends most of his life. He has never missed a drill or a shoot, or spoken an unnecessary word, since the Club began. The wind at the firing-point has fallen, but it still trickles up and down the valley in heart-breaking fashion. Vansittart’s eye is on the wind-flag, which we others are apt to regard as mere ornament, and he follows the changes with some seventh sense denied to beginners. Then he falls back with young Keeley and two or three others, to whom the mystery of wind-allowance is not so black as it once was, — and they work it all out together at ease on the turf. The Sergeant checks each shot, explains, suggests, and, on occasion, casts himself down alongside to show by example. Hear his wisdom: — ‘It wasn’t the rifle’s fault; give her to me. There you are! The direction’s perfect, but you’ve been dropping your muzzle.’ It is absurdly easy to get a bull when you have mastered the Sergeant’s secret. He tells it to one concerned in these very words: — ‘You hang too long, and when you hang you wobble. Never mind when she’s going off,—keep your eye on the aim. Don’t drop your muzzle, and don’t pull at her. Press her! Press her!’ Or thus: — ‘Left again! Oh, you drive — that’s what it is. Your left’s your master-hand. Try not to give that near-side jerk when you loose off. She’ll throw to the near on her own account.’ This is to Maxwell, our local flyman, who, with the trainer’s son, has hurried up in the garments of his calling. The box-cloth gaiters twitch uneasily as he strives to overcome a professional instinct to pull to the near. Oddly enough, the trainer’s son, though his hands are yet red from the reins (the three-year-old did pull after all!), shoots as straight as a die. Then Jimmy the Crack lies down to fight it off with Gorman, who, having unloaded Number Nine on an innocent friend, has been lying low for Jimmy all the afternoon. Jimmy comes to us from the high veldt so to speak, — from a little lonely village in the Downs, where there may have been rabbits. At any rate he can shoot. He said the other day before some twenty of us: — ‘If a man smokes or drinks he is no good at this game.’ Then he turned on his belly and drave home bulls to clinch the sermon. A thousand tracts could not have taught us more. But Gorman in the blue jean overalls has the level eye and the steady hand of the mechanician, and in a few weeks there should not be much to choose between him and Jimmy.

Last of all — he has business in London all the week, and comes down specially early on Saturdays to do his turn — young Foster, son of the local innkeeper, bicycles over the hill. Vansittart snaps his sight down and turns to watch. This is important, for Foster, Gorman, and Jimmy may represent us if ever we dare to enter for the Spectator’s prize at Bisley. The light softens as the day and the wind go down together, the Channel recovers its unbroken blue, and the young thyme gives out the first true smell of summer. We are all quiet now, except Tim, the terrier, digging a field-mouse with squeakings somewhere on the edge of a wheatfield. ‘Get back from behind the sights!’ The Sergeant raises a warning hand. We tiptoe backwards and squat like partridges. They are proudstomached men, these three cracks. They are not grateful, as some others, for a chance-won magpie. If they get an inner, even, they scowl and the Sergeant scowls, and they ask why they ‘dropped’ so badly. ‘Bull, Gorman! Foster, bull—five! Jimmy—high—oh, high! Inner, high, right! Gorman, inner! Hold a minute till I get my glasses. That was bad, Gorman. Remember the light’s changing every minute. Foster—bull again! Good! Now, Jimmy, your last!’ . . . It is a hang-fire — a bad one, too — and you can hear our quick indrawn ‘Ah!’ of sympathy as Jimmy’s last goes away to the right. This ends the regular work, and the Club sits on the faulty cartridge, giving its opinion of Dum-dums and Service ammunition with entire lucidity. A member hands in a new rifle — his very own — to be shot for sighting; and while the Sergeant puts her through her paces, and a couple of us gamble for cartridges (five shots at six hundred; loser to pay for the whole packet), the Committee, cleaning out its rifles, discusses the terms of a challenge that has come in from the Newhaven Volunteer Engineers. We know nothing of their record — though we have all taken to reading the scores of local clubs, a fact which country editors should note — but we fear the worst. ‘Oh, take ’em on,’ says the Vicar. ‘They won’t do more than beat us. What do you think, Sergeant?’ The Sergeant smiles, but guarantees nothing. He led us to victory against an Essex Volunteer team. He will see to it that we turn out the best eight we have, and the rest is with Allah’s wind and sun and cloud. ‘Ye-es, take ’em on,’ says the Sergeant, and packs away the spare ammunition. The red flag slides down behind the butts, and we stroll home by twos and threes through the everlasting English twilight, explaining, arguing, chaffing, and reshooting every shot. This game has enlarged the skirts of our understanding. Whether we like it or not, we must, when we black our sights, for instance, learn a little neat-handedness; when we meet a visiting team we must entertain them as men of the world: when we use the verniers we must think with an approach to precision and when we wish to describe what is the matter with our shooting we must speak to the point and quickly. Our mistakes are all our own, — pitilessly signalled from the trenches on the echo of each shot. If we lose our tempers, the target will not answer back; we cannot impress the unseen markers by our rank, wealth, or achievement in the world without. They will credit us precisely with what we make, — neither more nor less; and our companions at the firing-point, who now know us very well, will do the same. We cannot patronise any one except a rank duffer fresh from the Morris tube (and he may beat our head off in a month), we dare not tell or act a lie; and if we have a weakness for excess in any shape, the score-book will check us off as scientifically as a German penologist. Unlike cricket, football, lawn-tennis, or fives, any man can play the game; for here, no more than on the high veldt, will the discreet bullet tell its billet whether the despatcher was old, unlovely, poor, weak, or ill-clad.

There are those who say: ‘Ah, but wait till this war-fever dies down, and then the men will get tired of coming down to fire off a gun.’ One hears very little of war-fever on the range, and the wonder (infinitely pathetic in grown men) of being allowed to fire and handle a real live rifle departed long ago. We are enjoying the game for its own sake; because it is sane, and healthy, and quiet (infinitely quieter than a cricket-match), does not knock our daily work to pieces, or necessitate drinks before, during, and after; because it wakes up in us powers whose existence we never dreamed of till now; and because it opens to us a happy new world of interests and ideas, — things that men need as urgently as inland cattle need salt. But if only the range could be open on Sundays!

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OF ALL things in the world there is nothing, always excepting a good mother, so worthy of honour as a good school. Our School was created for the sons of officers in the Army and Navy, and filled with boys who meant to follow their father’s calling. It stood within two miles of Amyas Leigh’s house at Northam, overlooking the Burroughs and the Pebble-ridge, and the mouth of the Torridge whence the Rose sailed in search of Don Guzmán. From the front dormitory windows, across the long rollers of the Atlantic, you could see Lundy Island and the Shutter Rock, where the Santa Catherina galleon cheated Amyas out of his vengeance by going ashore. If you have ever read Kingsley’s Westward Ho! you will remember how all these things happened.

Inland lay the rich Devonshire lanes and the fat orchards, and to the west the gorse and the turf ran along the tops of the cliffs in combe after combe till you come to Clovelly and the Hobby and Gallantry Bower, and the homes of the Devonshire people that were old when the Armada was new.

The Burrows, lying between the school and the sea, was a waste of bent rush and grass running out into hundreds of acres of fascinating sandhills called the Bunkers, where a few old people played golf. In the early days of the School there was a small Club-house for golfers close to the Pebble-ridge, but, one wild winter night, the sea got up and drove the Pebble-ridge clean through the Club basement, and the walls fell out, and we rejoiced, for even then golfers wore red coats and did not like us to use the links. We played as a matter of course and thought nothing of it.

Now there is a new Club-house, and cars take the old, red, excited men to and from their game and all the great bunkers are known and written about; but we were there first, long before golf became a fashion or a disease, and we turned out one of the earliest champion amateur golfers of all England.

It was a good place for a school, and that School considered itself the finest in the world, excepting perhaps Haileybury, because it was modelled on Haileybury lines and our caps were Haileybury colours; and there was a legend that, in the old days when the School was new, half the boys had been Haileyburians.

Our Head-master had been Head of the Modern Side at Haileybury, and, talking it over with boys from other public schools afterwards, I think that one secret of his great hold over us was that he was not a clergyman, as so many headmasters are. As soon as a boy begins to think in the misty way that boys do, he is suspicious of a man who punishes him one day and preaches at him the next. But the Head was different, and in our different ways we loved him.

Through all of five years I never saw him lose his temper, nor among two hundred boys did any one at any time say or hint that he had his favourites. If you went to him with any trouble you were heard out to the end, and answered without being talked at or about or around, but always to. So we trusted him absolutely, and when it came to the choice of the various ways of entering the Army, what he said was so.

He knew boys naturally better than their fathers knew them, and considerably better than they knew themselves. When the time came to read for the Final Army Examinations, he knew the temper and powers of each boy, the amount of training each would stand and the stimulus or restraint that each needed, and handled them accordingly till they had come through the big race that led into the English Army. Looking back on it all, one can see the perfect judgment, knowledge of boys, patience, and above all, power, that the Head must have had.

Some of the masters, particularly on the classical side, vowed that Army examinations were making education no more than mark-hunting; but there are a great many kinds of education, and I think the Head knew it, for he taught us hosts of things that we never found out we knew till afterwards. And surely it must be better to turn out men who do real work than men who write about what they think about what other people have done or ought to do.

A scholar may, as the Latin masters said, get more pleasure out of his life than an Army officer, but only little children believe that a man’s life is given him to decorate with pretty little things, as though it were a girl’s room or a picture-screen. Besides, scholars are apt, all their lives, to judge from one point of view only, and by the time that an Army officer has knocked about the world for a few years he comes to look at men and things “by and large,” as the sailors say. No books in the world will teach that knack.

So we trusted the Head at school, and afterwards trusted him more.

There was a boy in the Canadian Mounted Police, I think, who stumbled into a fortune—he was the only one of us who ever did—and as he had never drawn more than seven shillings a day, he very properly wrote to the Head from out of his North-Western wilds and explained his situation, proposing that the Head should take charge of and look after all his wealth till he could attend to it; and was a little impatient when the Head pointed out that executors and trustees and that sort of bird wouldn’t hand over cash in that casual way. The Head was worth trusting—he saved a boy’s life from diphtheria once at much greater risk than being shot at, and nobody knew anything about it till years afterwards.

But I come back to the School that he made and put his mark upon. The boys said that those with whom Cheltenham could do nothing, whom Sherbourne found too tough, and whom even Marlborough had politely asked to leave, had been sent to the School at the beginning of things and turned into men. They were, perhaps, a shade rough sometimes. One very curious detail, which I have never seen or heard of in any school before or since, was that the Army Class, which meant the Prefects, and was generally made up of boys from seventeen and a half to nineteen or thereabouts, was allowed to smoke pipes (cigarettes were then reckoned the direct invention of the Evil One) in the country outside the College. One result of this was that, though these great men talked a good deal about the grain of their pipes, the beauty of their pouches, and the flavour of their tobacco, they did not smoke to any ferocious extent. The other, which concerned me more directly, was that it went much harder with a junior whom they caught smoking than if he had been caught by a master, because the action was flagrant invasion of their privilege, and, therefore, rank insolence—to be punished as such. Years later, the Head admitted that he thought something of this kind would happen when he gave the permission. If any Head-master is anxious to put down smoking nowadays, he might do worse than give this scheme a trial.

The School motto was, “Fear God, Honour the King “; and so the men she made went out to Boerland and Zululand and India and Burma and Cyprus and Hongkong, and lived or died as gentlemen and officers.

Even the most notorious bully, for whom an awful ending was prophesied, went to Canada and was mixed up in Riel’s rebellion, and came out of it with a fascinating reputation of having led a forlorn hope and behaved like a hero.

All these matters were noted by the older boys, and when their fathers, the grey-whiskered colonels and generals, came down to see them, or the directors, who were K.C.B.’s and had been officers in their time, made a tour of inspection, it was reported that the School tone was “healthy.”

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Sometimes an old boy who had blossomed into a Subaltern of the Queen would come down for a last few words with the Head-master, before sailing with the regiment for foreign parts; and the lower-school boys were distracted with envy, and the prefects of the Sixth Form pretended not to be proud when he walked with one of their number and talked about “my men, you know,” till life became unendurable.

There was an unwritten law by which an old boy, when he came back to pay his respects to the School, was entitled to a night in his old dormitory. The boys expected it and sat up half the night listening to the tales of a subaltern that the boy brought with him—stories about riots in Ireland and camps at Aldershot, and all his first steps in the wonderful world.

Sometimes news came in that a boy had died with his men fighting, and the school said, “Killed in action, of course,” as though that were an honour reserved for it alone, and wondered when its own chance would come.

It was a curiously quiet School in many ways. When a boy was fourteen or fifteen he was generally taken in hand for the Army Preliminary Examination, and when that was past he was put down to “grind” for the entrance into Sandhurst or Woolwich; for it was our pride that we passed direct from the School to the Army, without troubling the “crammers.” We spoke of “the Shop,” which means Woolwich, as though we owned it. Sandhurst was our private reserve; and the old boys came back from foreign parts and told us that India was only Westward Ho! spread thin.

On account of this incessant getting ready for examinations there was hardly time for us (but we made it) to gather the beautiful Devonshire apples, or to ferret rabbits in the sand-hills by the golf-links, and saloon-pistols were forbidden because boys got to duelling-parties with dust-shot, and were careless about guarding their eyes.

Nor were we encouraged to lower each other over the cliffs with a box-rope and take the young hawks and jackdaws from their nests above the sea. Once a rope broke, or else the boys above grew tired of holding it, and a boy dropped thirty feet on to the boulders below. But as he fell on his head nothing happened, except punishment at the other end for all concerned.

In summer there was almost unlimited bathing from the Pebble-ridge, a whale-backed bank four miles long of rounded grey boulders, where you were taught to ride on the rollers as they came in, to avoid the under-tow, and to watch your time for getting back to the beach.

There was a big sea bath, too, in which all boys, had to qualify for open bathing by swimming a quarter of a mile, at least; and it was a matter of honour among the school-houses not to let the summer end with a single boy who could not “do his quarter,” at any rate.

Boating was impossible off that coast, but sometimes a fishing-boat would be wrecked on Braunton Bar, and we could see the lifeboat and the rocket at work; and once just after chapel there was a cry that the herring were in. The School ran down to the beach in, their Sunday clothes and fished them out with umbrellas. They were cooked by hand afterwards in all the studies and form-rooms till you could have smelt us at Exeter.

But the game of the School, setting aside golf, which every one could play if he had patience, was foot-ball. Both cricket and foot-ball were compulsory. That is to say, unless a boy could show a doctor’s certificate that he was physically unfit to stand up to the wicket or go into the scrimmage, he had to play a certain number of afternoons at the game of the season. If he had engagements elsewhere—we called it “shirking”—he was reasonably sure of three cuts with a ground-ash, from the Captain of the Games, delivered cold in the evening. A good player, of course, could get leave off on any fair excuse, but it was a beautiful rule for fat boys and loafers. The only unfairness was that a Master could load you with an imposition to be shown up at a certain hour, which, of course, prevented you from playing and so secured you a licking in addition to the imposition. But the, Head always told us that there was not much justice in the world, and that we had better accustom ourselves to the lack of it early.

Curiously enough, the one thing that the School did not understand was an attempt to drill it in companies with rifles, by way of making a volunteer cadet corps. We took our lickings for not attending that cheerfully, because we considered it “playing at soldiers,” and boys reading for the Army are apt to be very particular on these points.

We were weak at cricket, but our foot-ball team (Rugby Union) at its best devastated the country from Blundell’s—we always respected Blundell’s because “Great John Ridd” had been educated there—to Exeter, whose team were grown men. Yet we, who had been taught to play together, once drove them back over the November mud, back to their own goal-posts, till the ball was hacked through and touched down, and you could hear the long-drawn yell of “Schoo-ool! Schoo-ool!” as far as Appledore.

When the enemy would not come to us our team went to the enemy, and if victorious, would return late at night in a three-horse brake, chanting:

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

Then the boys would flock to the dormitory windows, and wave towels and join in the “Hip-hip-hip-hurrah” of the chorus, and the winning team would swagger through the dormitories and show the beautiful blue marks on their shins, and the little boys would be allowed to get the sponges and hot water.

Very few things that the world can offer make up for having missed a place in the First Fifteen, with its black jersey and white—snow-white—knickerbockers, and the velvet skull-cap with the gold tassel—the cap that you leave out in the rain and accidentally step upon to make it look as old as if you had been in the First Fifteen for years..

The other outward sign of the First Fifteen that the happy boy generally wore through a hard season was the “jersey-mark”—a raw, red scrape on ear and jawbone where the skin had been fretted by the rough jerseys in either side in the steady drive of many scrimmages. We were trained to put our heads down, pack in the shape of a wedge and shove, and it was in that shape that the First Fifteen stood up to a team of trained men for two and twenty counted minutes. We got the ball through in the end.

At the close of the winter term, when there were no more foot-ball teams to squander and the Christmas holidays were coming, the School set itself to the regular yearly theatricals—a farce and a three-act play all complete. Sometimes it was The Rivals, or sometimes an attempt at a Shakespearean play; but the farces were the most popular.

All ended with the School-Saga, the “Vive la Compagnie!” in which the Senior boy of the School chanted the story of the School for the past twelve months. It was very long and very difficult to make up, though all the poets of all the forms had been at work on it for weeks; and the School gave the chorus at the top of its voice.

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On the last Sunday of the term the last hymn in chapel was “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” We did not know what it meant then, and we did not care, but we stood up and sang it till the music was swamped in the rush. The big verse, like the “tug-of-war” verse in Mrs. Ewing’s Story of a Short Life, was:

We are not divided,
All one body we,
One in faith and doctrine,
One in charity.

Then the organ would give a hurricane of joyful roars, and try to get us in hand before the refrain. Later on, meeting our men all the world over, the meaning of that hymn became much too plain.

Except for this outbreak we were not very pious. There was a boy who had to tell stories night after night in the Dormitory, and when his stock ran out he fell back on a book called Eric, or Little by Little, as comic literature, and read it till the gas was turned off. The boys laughed abominably, and there was some attempt to give selections from it at the meeting of the Reading Society. That was quashed by authority because it was against discipline.

There were no public-houses near us except tap-rooms that sold cider; and raw Devonshire cider can only be drunk after a long and very hot paper-chase. We hardly ever saw, and certainly never spoke to, anything in the nature of a woman from one year’s end to the other; for our masters were all unmarried. Later on, a little colony of mothers came down to live near the School, but their sons were day-boys who couldn’t do this and mustn’t do that, and there was a great deal too much dressing up on week-days and going out to tea, and things of that kind, which, whatever people say nowadays, are not helpful for boys at work.

Our masters, luckily, were never gushing. They did not call us Dickie or Johnnie or Tommy, but Smith or Thompson; and when we were undoubtedly bad we were actually and painfully beaten with an indubitable cane on a veritable back till we wept unfeigned tears. Nobody seemed to think that it brutalized our finer feelings, but everybody was relieved when the trouble was over.

Canes, especially when they are brought down with a drawing stroke, sting like hornets; but they are a sound cure for certain offences; and a cut or two, given with no malice, but as a reminder, can correct and keep corrected a false quantity or a wandering mind, more completely than any amount of explanation.

There was one boy, however, to whom every Latin quantity was an arbitrary mystery, and he wound up his crimes by suggesting that he could do better if Latin verse rhymed as decent verse should. He was given an afternoon’s reflection to purge himself of his contempt; and feeling certain that he was in for something rather warm, he turned “Donec gratus eram” into pure Devonshire dialect, rhymed, and showed it up as his contribution to the study of Horace.

He was let off, and his master gave him the run of a big library, where he found as much verse and prose as he wanted; but that ruined his Latin verses and made him write verses of his own. There he found all the English poets from Chaucer to Matthew Arnold, and a book called Imaginary Conversations which he did not understand, but it seemed to be a good thing to imitate. So he imitated and was handed up to the Head, who said that he had better learn Russian under his own eye, so that if ever he were sent to Siberia for lampooning the authorities he might be able to ask for things.

That meant the run of another library—English Dramatists this time; hundreds of old plays; as well as thick brown books of voyages told in language like the ringing of bells. And the Head would sometimes tell him about the manners and customs of the Russians, and sometimes about his own early days at college, when several people who afterwards became great, were all young, and the Head was young with them, and they wrote wonderful things in college magazines.

It was beautiful and cheap—dirt cheap, at the price of a permanent load of impositions, for neglecting mathematics and algebra.

The School started a Natural History Society, which took the birds and plants of North Devon under its charge, reporting first flowerings and first arrivals and new discoveries to learned societies in London, and naturally attracting to itself every boy in the School who had the poaching instinct.

Some of us made membership an excuse for stealing apples and pheasant eggs and geese from farmers’ orchards and gentlemen’s estates, and we were turned out with disgrace. So we spoke scornfully of the Society ever afterwards. None the less, some of us had our first introduction to gunpowder in the shape of a charge of salt which stings like bees, fired at our legs by angry game-keepers.

The institution that caused some more excitement was the School paper. Three of the boys, who had moved up the School side by side for four years and were allies in all things, started the notion as soon as they came to the dignity of a study of their own with a door that would lock. The other two told the third boy what to write, and held the staircase against invaders.

It was a real printed paper of eight pages, and at first the printer was more thoroughly ignorant of type-setting, and the Editor was more completely ignorant of proof-reading, than any printer and any Editor that ever was. It was printed off by a gas engine; and even the engine despised its work, for one day it fell through the floor of the shop, and crashed—still working furiously—into the cellar.

The paper came out at odd times and seasons, but every time it came out there was sure to be trouble, because the Editor was learning for the first time how sweet and good and profitable it is—and how nice it looks on the page—to make fun of people in actual print.

For instance, there was friction among the study-fags once, and the Editor wrote a descriptive account of the Lower School,—the classes whence the fags were drawn,—their manners and customs, their ways of cooking half-plucked sparrows and imperfectly cleaned blackbirds at the gas jets on a rusty nib, and their fights over sloe-jam made in a gallipot. It was an absolutely truthful article, but the Lower School knew nothing about truth, and would not even consider it as literature.

It is less safe to write a study of an entire class than to discuss individuals one by one; but apart from the fact that boys throw books and inkpots with a straighter eye, there is very little difference between the behaviour of grown-up people and that of children.

In those days the Editor had not learned this; so when the study below the Editorial study threw coal at the Editorial legs and kicked in the panels of the door, because of personal paragraphs in the last number, the Editorial Staff—and there never was so loyal and hard-fighting a staff—fried fat bacon till there was half an inch of grease in the pan, and let the greasy chunks down at the end of a string to bob against and defile the lower study windows.

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When that lower study—and there never was a public so low and unsympathetic as that lower study—looked out to see what was frosting their window-panes, the Editorial Staff emptied the hot fat on their heads, and it stayed in their hair for days and days, wearing shiny to the very last.

The boy who suggested this sort of warfare was then reading a sort of magazine, called Fors Clavigera, which he did not in the least understand,—it was not exactly a boy’s paper,—and when the lower study had scraped some of the fat off their heads and were thundering with knobby pokers on the door-lock, this boy began to chant pieces of the Fors as a war-song, and to show that his mind was free from low distractions. He was an extraordinary person, and the only boy in the School who had a genuine contempt for his masters. There was no affectation in his quiet insolence. He honestly did despise them; and threats that made us all wince only caused him to put his head a little on one side and watch the master as a sort of natural curiosity.

The worst of this was that his allies had to take their share of his punishments, for they lived as communists and socialists hope to live one day, when everybody is good. They were bad, as bad as they dared to be, but their possessions were in common, absolutely. And when “the Study” was out of funds they took the most respectable clothes in possession of the Syndicate, and leaving the owner one Sunday and one week day suit, sold the rest in Bideford town. Later, when there was another crisis, it was not the respectable one’s watch that was taken by force for the good of the Study and pawned, and never redeemed.

Later still, money came into the Syndicate honestly, for a London paper that did not know with whom it was dealing, published and paid a whole guinea for some verses that one of the boys had written and sent up under a nom de plume, and the Study caroused on chocolate and condensed milk and pilchards and Devonshire cream, and voted poetry a much sounder business than it looks.

So things went on very happily till the three were seriously warned that they must work in earnest, and stop giving amateur performances of Aladdin and writing librettos of comic operas which never came off, and worrying their housemasters into grey hairs.

Then they all grew very good, and one of them got into the Army; and another—the Irish one—became an engineer, and the third one found himself on a daily paper half a world away from the Pebble Ridge and the sea-beach. The three swore eternal friendship before they parted, and from time to time they met boys of their year in India, and magnified the honour of the old School.

The boys are scattered all over the world, one to each degree of land east and west, as their fathers were before them, doing much the same kind of work; and it is curious to notice how little the character of the man differs from that of the boy of sixteen or seventeen.

The general and commander-in-chief of the Study, he who suggested selling the clothes, never lost his head even when he and his friends were hemmed round by the enemy—the Drill Sergeant—far out of bounds and learning to smoke under a hedge. He was sick and dizzy, but he rose to the occasion, took command of his forces, and by strategic manœuvres along dry ditches and crawlings through tall grass, outflanked the enemy and got into safe ground without losing one man of the three.

A little later, when he was a subaltern in India, he was bitten by a mad dog, went to France to be treated by Pasteur, and came out again in the heat of the hot weather to find himself almost alone in charge of six hundred soldiers, and his Drill Sergeant dead and his office clerk run away, leaving the Regimental books in the most ghastly confusion. Then we happened to meet; and as he was telling his story there was just the same happy look on his face as when he steered us down the lanes with the certainty of a superior thrashing if we were caught.

And there were others who went abroad with their men, and when they got into tight places behaved very much as they had behaved at football.

The boy who used to take flying jumps on to the ball and roll over and over with it, because he was big and fat and could not run, took a flying jump on to a Burmese dacoit whom he had surprised by night in a stockade; but he forgot that he was much heavier than he had been at School, and by the time he rolled off his victim the little dacoit was stone dead.

And there was a boy who was always being led astray by bad advice, and begging off punishment on that account. He got into some little scrape when he grew up, and we who knew him knew, before he was reprimanded by his commanding officer, exactly what his excuse would be. It came out almost word for word as he was used to whimper it at School. He was cured, though, by being sent off on a small expedition here he alone would be responsible for any advice that was going, as well as for fifty soldiers.

And the best boy of them all—who could have become anything—was wounded in the thigh as he was leading his men up the ramp of a fortress. All he said was, “Put me up against that tree and take my men on”; and when his men came back he was dead.

Ages and ages ago, when Queen Victoria was shot at by a man in the street, the School paper made some verses about it that ended like this:

One school of many, made to make
Men who shall hold it dearest right
To battle for their ruler’s sake,
And stake their being in the fight,
Sends greeting, humble and sincere,
Though verse be rude and poor and mean,
To you, the greatest as most dear,
Victoria, by God’s Grace, our Queen!
Such greetings as should come from those
Whose fathers faced the Sepoy hordes,
Or served you in the Russian snows
And dying, left their sons their swords.
For we are bred to do your will
By land and sea, wherever flies
The Flag to fight and follow still,
And work your empire’s destinies.
Once more we greet you, though unseen
Our greetings be, and coming slow.
Trust us, if need arise, O Queen!
We shall not tarry with the blow.

And there are one or two places in the world that can bear witness how the School kept its word.