Supernatural – The Kipling Society https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk Promoting the works of Rudyard Kipling Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:50:10 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 199627863 A Madonna of the Trenches https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/a-madonna-of-the-trenches.htm Sun, 09 May 2021 09:26:55 +0000 https://ks-demo3.web/tale/a-madonna-of-the-trenches/ WW1 TRENCH WARFARE page 1 of 5 SEEING how many unstable ex-soldiers came to the Lodge of Instruction (attached to Faith and Works E.C. 5837*) in the years after the war, ... Read more]]> ••WW1 TRENCH WARFARE

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SEEING how many unstable ex-soldiers came to the Lodge of Instruction (attached to Faith and Works E.C. 5837*) in the years after the war, the wonder is there was not more trouble from Brethren whom sudden meetings with old comrades jerked back into their still raw past. But our round, torpedo-bearded local Doctor—Brother Keede, Senior Warden—always stood ready to deal with hysteria before it got out of hand; and when I examined Brethren unknown or imperfectly vouched for on the Masonic side, I passed on to him anything that seemed doubtful. He had had his experience as medical officer of a South London Battalion, during the last two years of the war; and, naturally, often found friends and acquaintances among the visitors.Brother C. Strangwick, a young, tallish, new-made Brother, hailed from some South London Lodge. His papers and his answers were above suspicion, but his red-rimmed eyes had a puzzled glare that might mean nerves. So I introduced him particularly to Keede, who discovered in him a Headquarters Orderly of his old Battalion, congratulated him on his return to fitness—he had been discharged for some infirmity or other—and plunged at once into Somme memories. ‘I hope I did right, Keede,’ I said when we were robing before Lodge.

‘Oh, quite. He reminded me that I had him under my hands at Sampoux in ’Eighteen, when he went to bits. He was a Runner.’

‘Was it shock?’ I asked.

‘Of sorts—but not what he wanted me to think it was. No, he wasn’t shamming. He had jumps to the limit—but he played up to mislead me about the reason of ’em . . . . Well, if we could stop patients from lying, medicine would be too easy, I suppose.’

I noticed that, after Lodge-working, Keede gave him a seat a couple of rows in front of us, that he might enjoy a lecture on the Orientation of King Solomon’s Temple, which an earnest Brother thought would be a nice interlude between Labour and the high tea that we called our ‘Banquet.’ Even helped by tobacco it was a dreary performance. About half-way through, Strangwick, who had been fidgeting and twitching for some minutes, rose, drove back his chair grinding across the tesselated floor, and yelped ‘Oh, My Aunt! I can’t stand this any longer.’ Under cover of a general laugh of assent he brushed past us and stumbled towards the door.

‘I thought so!’ Keede whispered to me. ‘Come along!’ We overtook him in the passage, crowing hysterically and wringing his hands. Keede led him into the Tyler’s Room, a small office where we stored odds and ends of regalia and furniture, and locked the door.

‘I’m—I’m all right,’ the boy began, piteously.

‘’Course you are.’ Keede opened a small cupboard which I had seen called upon before, mixed sal volatile and water in a graduated glass, and, as Strangwick drank, pushed him gently on to an old sofa. ‘There,’ he went on. ‘It’s nothing to write home about. I’ve seen you ten times worse. I expect our talk has brought things back.’

He hooked up a chair behind him with one foot, held the patient’s hands in his own, and sat down. The chair creaked.

‘Don’t!’ Strangwick squealed. ‘I can’t stand it! There’s nothing on earth creaks like they do! And—and when it thaws we—we’ve got to slap ’em back with a spa-ade ! ’Remember those Frenchmen’s little boots under the duckboards? . . . What’ll I do? What’ll I do about it?’

Some one knocked at the door, to know if all were well.

‘Oh, quite, thanks!’ said Keede over his shoulder. ‘But I shall need this room awhile. Draw the curtains, please.’

We heard the rings of the hangings that drape the passage from Lodge to Banquet Room click along their poles, and what sound there had been, of feet and voices, was shut off.

Strangwick, retching impotently, complained of the frozen dead who creak in the frost.

‘He’s playing up still,’ Keede whispered. ‘That’s not his real trouble—any more than ’twas last time.’

‘But surely,’ I replied, ‘men get those things on the brain pretty badly. ‘Remember in October——’

‘This chap hasn’t, though. I wonder what’s really helling him. What are you thinking of?’ said Keede peremptorily.

‘French End an’ Butcher’s Row,’ Strangwick muttered.

‘Yes, there were a few there. But suppose we face Bogey instead of giving him best every time.’ Keede turned towards me with a hint in his eye that I was to play up to his leads.

‘What was the trouble with French End?’ I opened at a venture.

‘It was a bit by Sampoux, that we had taken over from the French. They’re tough, but you wouldn’t call ’em tidy as a nation. They had faced both sides of it with dead to keep the mud back. All those trenches were like gruel in a thaw. Our people had to do the same sort of thing—elsewhere; but Butcher’s Row in French End was the—er—show-piece. Luckily, we pinched a salient from Jerry just then, an’ straightened things out—so we didn’t need to use the Row after November. You remember, Strangwick?’

‘My God, yes! When the Buckboard-slats were missin’ you’d tread on ’em, an’ they’d creak.’

‘They’re bound to. Like leather,’ said Keede. ‘It gets on one’s nerves a bit, but——’

‘Nerves? It’s real! It’s real!’ Strangwick gulped.

‘But at your time of life, it’ll all fall behind you in a year or so. I’ll give you another sip of—paregoric, an’ we’ll face it quietly. Shall we?’

Keede opened his cupboard again and administered a carefully dropped dark dose of something that was not sal volatile. ‘This’ll settle you in a few minutes,’ he explained. ‘Lie still, an’ don’t talk unless you feel like it.’

He faced me, fingering his beard.

‘Ye-es. Butcher’s Row wasn’t pretty,’ he volunteered. ‘Seeing Strangwick here, has brought it all back to me again. ’Funny thing! We had a Platoon Sergeant of Number Two—what the deuce was his name?—an elderly bird who must have lied like a patriot to get out to the front at his age; but he was a first-class Non-Com., and the last person, you’d think, to make mistakes. Well, he was due for a fortnight’s home leave in January, ’Eighteen. You were at B.H.Q. then, Strangwick, weren’t you?’

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‘Yes. I was Orderly. It was January twenty-first’; Strangwick spoke with a thickish tongue, and his eyes burned. Whatever drug it was, had taken hold.

‘About then,’ Keede said. ‘Well, this Sergeant, instead of coming down from the trenches the regular way an’ joinin’ Battalion Details after dark, an’ takin’ that funny little train for Arras, thinks he’ll warm himself first. So he gets into a dug-out, in Butcher’s Row, that used to be an old French dressing-station, and fugs up between a couple of braziers of pure charcoal! As luck ’ud have it, that was the only dug-out with an inside door opening inwards—some French anti-gas fitting, I expect—and, by what we could make out, the door must have swung to while he was warming. Anyhow, he didn’t turn up at the train. There was a search at once. We couldn’t afford to waste Platoon Sergeants. We found him in the morning. He’d got his gas all right. A machine-gunner reported him, didn’t he, Strangwick?’

‘No, Sir. Corporal Grant—o’ the Trench Mortars.’

‘So it was. Yes, Grant—the man with that little wen on his neck. ’Nothing wrong with your memory, at any rate. What was the Sergeant’s name?’

‘Godsoe—John Godsoe,’ Strangwick answered.

‘Yes, that was it. I had to see him next mornin’—frozen stiff between the two braziers—and not a scrap of private papers on him. That was the only thing that made me think it mightn’t have been—quite an accident.’

Strangwick’s relaxing face set, and he threw back at once to the Orderly Room manner.

‘I give my evidence—at the time—to you, sir. He passed—overtook me, I should say—comin’ down from supports, after I’d warned him for leaf. I thought he was goin’ through Parrot Trench as usual; but ’e must ’ave turned off into French End where the old bombed barricade was.’

‘Yes. I remember now. You were the last man to see him alive. That was on the twenty-first of January, you say? Now, when was it that Dearlove and Billings brought you to me—clean out of your head?’ . . . Keede dropped his hand, in the style of magazine detectives, on Strangwick’s shoulder. The boy looked at him with cloudy wonder, and muttered: ‘I was took to you on the evenin’ of the twenty-fourth of January. But you don’t think I did him in, do you?’

I could not help smiling at Keede’s discomfiture; but he recovered himself. ‘Then what the dickens was on your mind that evening—before I gave you the hypodermic?’

‘The—the things in Butcher’s Row. They kept on comin’ over me. You’ve seen me like this before, sir.’

‘But I knew that it was a lie. You’d no more got stiffs on the brain then than you have now. You’ve got something, but you’re hiding it.’

‘’Ow do you know, Doctor?’ Strangwick whimpered.

‘D’you remember what you said to me, when Dearlove and Billings were holding you down that evening?’

‘About the things in Butcher’s Row?’

‘Oh, no! You spun me a lot of stuff about corpses creaking; but you let yourself go in the middle of it—when you pushed that telegram at me. What did you mean, f’rinstance, by asking what advantage it was for you to fight beasts of officers if the dead didn’t rise?’

‘Did I say “Beasts of Officers”?’

‘You did. It’s out of the Burial Service.’

‘I suppose, then, I must have heard it. As a matter of fact, I ’ave.’ Strangwick shuddered extravagantly.

‘Probably. And there’s another thing—that hymn you were shouting till I put you under. It was something about Mercy and Love. ’Remember it?’

‘I’ll try,’ said the boy obediently, and began to paraphrase, as nearly as possible thus: ‘“Whatever a man may say in his heart unto the Lord, yea, verily I say unto you—Gawd hath shown man, again and again, marvellous mercy an’—an’ somethin’ or other love.”’ He screwed up his eyes and shook.

‘Now where did you get that from?’ Keede insisted.

‘From Godsoe—on the twenty-first Jan . . . . ’Ow could I tell what ’e meant to do?’ he burst out in a high, unnatural key—‘Any more than I knew she was dead.’

‘Who was dead?’ said Keede.

‘Me Auntie Armine.’

‘The one the telegram came to you about, at Sampoux, that you wanted me to explain—the one that you were talking of in the passage out here just now when you began: “O Auntie,” and changed it to “O Gawd,” when I collared you?’

‘That’s her! I haven’t a chance with you, Doctor. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with those braziers. How could I? We’re always usin’ ’em. Honest to God, I thought at first go-off he might wish to warm himself before the leaf-train. I—I didn’t know Uncle John meant to start—’ouse-keepin’.’ He laughed horribly, and then the dry tears came.

Keede waited for them to pass in sobs and hiccoughs before he continued: ‘Why? Was Godsoe your Uncle?’

‘No,’ said Strangwick, his head between his hands. ‘Only we’d known him ever since we were born. Dad ’ad known him before that. He lived almost next street to us. Him an’ Dad an’ Ma an’—an’ the rest had always been friends. So we called him Uncle—like children do.’

‘What sort of man was he?’

‘One o’ the best, sir. ’Pensioned Sergeant with a little money left him—quite independent—and very superior. They had a sittin’-room full o’ Indian curios that him and his wife used to let sister an’ me see when we’d been good.’

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‘Wasn’t he rather old to join up?’

‘That made no odds to him. He joined up as Sergeant Instructor at the first go-off, an’ when the Battalion was ready he got ’imself sent along. He wangled me into ’is Platoon when I went out—early in ’Seventeen. Because Ma wanted it, I suppose.’

‘I’d no notion you knew him that well,’ was Keede’s comment.

‘Oh, it made no odds to him. He ’ad no pets in the Platoon, but ’e’d write ’ome to Ma about me an’ all the doin’s. You see’—Strangwick stirred uneasily on the sofa—‘we’d known him all our lives—lived in the next street an’ all . . . . An’ him well over fifty. Oh dear me! Oh dear me! What a bloody mix-up things are, when one’s as young as me!’ he wailed of a sudden.

But Keede held him to the point. ‘He wrote to your Mother about you?’

‘Yes. Ma’s eyes had gone bad followin’ on air-raids. ’Blood-vessels broke behind ’em from sittin’ in cellars an’ bein’ sick. She had to ’ave ’er letters read to her by Auntie. Now I think of it, that was the only thing that you might have called anything at all——’

‘Was that the Aunt that died, and that you got the wire about?’ Keede drove on.

‘Yes—Auntie Armine—Ma’s younger sister, an’ she nearer fifty than forty. What a mix-up! An’ if I’d been asked any time about it, I’d ’ave sworn there wasn’t a single sol’tary item concernin’ her that everybody didn’t know an’ hadn’t known all along. No more conceal to her doin’s than—than so much shop-front. She’d looked after sister an’ me, when needful—whoopin’ cough an’ measles just the same as Ma. We was in an’ out of her house like rabbits. You see, Uncle Armine is a cabinet-maker, an’ second-’and furniture, an’ we liked playin’ with the things. She ’ad no children, and when the war came, she said she was glad of it. But she never talked much of her feelin’s. She kept herself to herself, you understand.’ He stared most earnestly at us to help out our understandings.

‘What was she like?’ Keede inquired.

‘A biggish woman, an’ had been ’andsome, I believe, but, bein’ used to her, we two didn’t notice much—except, per’aps, for one thing. Ma called her ’er proper name, which was Bella; but Sis an’ me always called ’er Auntie Armine. See?’

‘What for?’

‘We thought it sounded more like her—like somethin’ movin’ slow, in armour.’

‘Oh! And she read your letters to your mother, did she?’

‘Every time the post came in she’d slip across the road from opposite an’ read ’em. An’—an’ I’ll go bail for it that that was all there was to it for as far back as I remember. Was I to swing to-morrow, I’d go bail for that! ’Tisn’t fair of ’em to ’ave unloaded it all on me, because—because—if the dead do rise, why, what in ’ell becomes of me an’ all I’ve believed all me life? I want to know that! I—I——’

But Keede would not be put off. ‘Did the Sergeant give you away at all in his letters?’ he demanded, very quietly.

‘There was nothin’ to give away—we was too busy—but his letters about me were a great comfort to Ma. I’m no good at writin’. I saved it all up for my leafs. I got me fourteen days every six months an’ one over . . . . I was luckier than most, that way.’

‘And when you came home, used you to bring ’em news about the Sergeant?’ said Keede.

‘I expect I must have; but I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was took up with me own affairs—naturally. Uncle John always wrote to me once each leaf, tellin’ me what was doin’ an’ what I was li’ble to expect on return, an’ Ma ’ud ’ave that read to her. Then o’ course I had to slip over to his wife an’ pass her the news. An’ then there was the young lady that I’d thought of marryin’ if I came through. We’d got as far as pricin’ things in the windows together.’

‘And you didn’t marry her—after all?’

Another tremor shook the boy. ‘No!’ he cried. ‘’Fore it ended, I knew what reel things reelly mean! I—I never dreamed such things could be! . . . An’ she nearer fifty than forty an’ me own Aunt! . . . But there wasn’t a sign nor a hint from first to last, so ’ow could I tell? Don’t you see it? All she said to me after me Christmas leaf in’ ’18, when I come to say good-bye—all Auntie Armine said to me was: “You’ll be seein’ Mister Godsoe soon?” “Too soon for my likings,” I says. “ Well then, tell ’im from me,” she says, “ that I expect to be through with my little trouble by the twenty-first of next month, an’ I’m dyin’ to see him as soon as possible after that date.”’

‘What sort of trouble was it?’ Keede turned professional at once.

‘She’d ’ad a bit of a gatherin’ in ’er breast, I believe. But she never talked of ’er body much to any one.’

‘’ see,’ said Keede. ‘And she said to you?’

Strangwick repeated: ‘“Tell Uncle John I hope to be finished of my drawback by the twenty-first, an’ I’m dying to see ’im as soon as ’e can after that date.” An’ then she says, laughin’: “But you’ve a head like a sieve. I’ll write it down, an’ you can give it him when you see ’im.” So she wrote it on a bit o’ paper an’ I kissed ’er good-bye—I was always her favourite, you see—an’ I went back to Sampoux. The thing hardly stayed in my mind at all, d’you see. But the next time I was up in the front line—I was a Runner, d’ye see—our platoon was in North Bay Trench an’ I was up with a message to the Trench Mortar there that Corporal Grant was in charge of. Followin’ on receipt of it, he borrowed a couple of men off the platoon, to slue ’er round or somethin’. I give Uncle John Auntie Armine’s paper, an’ I give Grant a fag, an’ we warmed up a bit over a brazier. Then Grant says to me: “I don’t like it”; an’ he jerks ’is thumb at Uncle John in the bay studyin’ Auntie’s message. Well, you know, sir, you had to speak to Grant about ’is way of prophesyin’ things—after Rankine shot himself with the Very light.’

‘I did,’ said Keede, and he explained to me ‘Grant had the Second Sight—confound him! It upset the men. I was glad when he got pipped. What happened after that, Strangwick?’

‘Grant whispers to me: “Look, you damned Englishman. ’E’s for it.” Uncle John was leanin’ up against the bay, an’ hummin’ that hymn I was tryin’ to tell you just now. He looked different all of a sudden—as if ’e’d got shaved. I don’t know anything of these things, but I cautioned Grant as to his style of speakin’, if an officer ’ad ’eard him, an’ I went on. Passin’ Uncle John in the bay, ’e nods an’ smiles, which he didn’t often, an’ he says, pocketin’ the paper “This suits me. I’m for leaf on the twenty-first, too.”’

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‘He said that to you, did he?’ said Keede.

‘Precisely the same as passin’ the time o’ day. O’ course I returned the agreeable about hopin’ he’d get it, an’ in due course I returned to ’Eadquarters. The thing ’ardly stayed in my mind a minute. That was the eleventh January—three days after I’d come back from leaf. You remember, sir, there wasn’t anythin’ doin’ either side round Sampoux the first part o’ the month. Jerry was gettin’ ready for his March Push, an’ as long as he kept quiet, we didn’t want to poke ’im up.’

‘I remember that,’ said Keede. ‘But what about the Sergeant?’

‘I must have met him, on an’ off, I expect, goin’ up an’ down, through the ensuin’ days, but it didn’t stay in me mind. Why needed it? And on the twenty-first Jan., his name was on the leaf-paper when I went up to warn the leaf-men. I noticed that, o’ course. Now that very afternoon Jerry ’ad been tryin’ a new trench-mortar, an’ before our ’Eavies could out it, he’d got a stinker into a bay an’ mopped up ’alf a dozen. They were bringin’ ’em down when I went up to the supports, an’ that blocked Little Parrot, same as it always did. You remember, sir?’

‘Rather! And there was that big machine-gun behind the Half-House waiting for you if you got out,’ said Keede.

‘I remembered that too. But it was just on dark an’ the fog was comin’ off the Canal, so I hopped out of Little Parrot an’ cut across the open to where those four dead Warwicks are heaped up. But the fog turned me round, an’ the next thing I knew I was knee-over in that old ’alf-trench that runs west o’ Little Parrot into French End. I dropped into it—almost atop o’ the machine-gun platform by the side o’ the old sugar boiler an’ the two Zoo-ave skel’tons. That gave me my bearin’s, an’ so I went through French End, all up those missin’ Buckboards, into Butcher’s Row where the poy-looz was laid in six deep each side, an’ stuffed under the Buckboards. It had froze tight, an’ the drippin’s had stopped, an’ the creakin’s had begun.’

‘Did that really worry you at the time?’ Keede asked.

‘No,’ said the boy with professional scorn. ‘If a Runner starts noticin’ such things he’d better chuck. In the middle of the Row, just before the old dressin’-station you referred to, sir, it come over me that somethin’ ahead on the Buckboards was just like Auntie Armine, waitin’ beside the door; an’ I thought to meself ’ow truly comic it would be if she could be dumped where I was then. In ’alf a second I saw it was only the dark an’ some rags o’ gas-screen, ’angin’ on a bit of board, ’ad played me the trick. So I went on up to the supports an’ warned the leaf-men there, includin’ Uncle John. Then I went up Rake Alley to warn ’em in the front line. I didn’t hurry because I didn’t want to get there till Jerry ’ad quieted down a bit. Well, then a Company Relief dropped in—an’ the officer got the wind up over some lights on the flank, an’ tied ’em into knots, an’ I ’ad to hunt up me leaf-men all over the blinkin’ shop. What with one thing an’ another, it must ’ave been ’alf-past eight before I got back to the supports. There I run across Uncle John, scrapm’ mud off himself, havin’ shaved—quite the dandy. He asked about the Arras train, an’ I said, if Jerry was quiet, it might be ten o’clock. “Good!” says ’e. “I’ll come with you.” So we started back down the old trench that used to run across Halnaker, back of the support dug-outs. You know, sir.’

Keede nodded.

‘Then Uncle John says something to me about seein’ Ma an’ the rest of ’em in a few days, an’ had I any messages for ’em? Gawd knows what made me do it, but I told ’im to tell Auntie Armine I never expected to see anything like her up in our part of the world. And while I told him I laughed. That’s the last time I ’ave laughed.” Oh—you’ve seen ’er, ’ave you? says he, quite natural-like. Then I told ’im about the sand-bags an’ rags in the dark, playin’ the trick. “Very likely,” says he, brushin’ the mud off his putties. By this time, we’d got to the corner where the old barricade into French End was—before they bombed it down, sir. He turns right an’ climbs across it. “No, thanks,” says I. “I’ve been there once this evenin’.” But he wasn’t attendin’ to me. He felt behind the rubbish an’ bones just inside the barricade, an’ when he straightened up, he had a full brazier in each hand.

‘“Come on, Clem,” he says, an’ he very rarely give me me own name. “You aren’t afraid, are you?” he says. “It’s just as short, an’ if Jerry starts up again he won’t waste stuff here. He knows it’s abandoned.” “Who’s afraid now?” I says. “Me for one,” says he. “I don’t want my leaf spoiled at the last minute.” Then ’e wheels round an’ speaks that bit you said come out o’ the Burial Service.’

For some reason Keede repeated it in full, slowly: ‘If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not?’

‘That’s it,’ said Strangwick. ‘So we went down French End together—everything froze up an’ quiet, except for their creakin’s. I remember thinkin’——’ his eyes began to flicker.

‘Don’t think. Tell what happened,’ Keede ordered.

‘Oh! Beg y’ pardon! He went on with his braziers, hummin’ his hymn, down Butcher’s Row. Just before we got to the old dressin’station he stops and sets ’em down an’ says “Where did you say she was, Clem? Me eyes ain’t as good as they used to be.”

‘“In ’er bed at ’ome,” I says. “Come on down. It’s perishin’ cold, an’ I’m not due for leaf.”

‘“Well, I am,” ’e says. “I am. . . .” An’ then—’give you me word I didn’t recognise the voice—he stretches out ‘is neck a bit, in a way ’e ’ad, an’ he says: “Why, Bella!” ’e says. “Oh, Bella!” ’e says. “Thank Gawd!” ’e says. Just like that! An’ then I saw—I tell you I saw—Auntie Armine herself standin’ by the old dressin’station door where first I’d thought I’d seen her. He was lookin’ at ’er an’ she was lookin’ at him. I saw it, an’ me soul turned over inside me because—because it knocked out everything I’d believed in. I ’ad nothin’ to lay ’old of, d’ye see? An’ ’e was lookin’ at ’er as though he could ’ave et ’er, an’ she was lookin’ at ’im the same way, out of ’er eyes. Then he says: “Why, Bella,” ’e says, “this must be only the second time we’ve been alone together in all these years.” An’ I saw ’er half hold out her arms to ’im in that perishin’ cold. An’ she nearer fifty than forty an’ me own Aunt! You can shop me for a lunatic to-morrow, but I saw it—I saw ’er answerin’ to his spoken word . . . Then ’e made a snatch to unsling ’is rifle. Then ’e cuts ’is hand away saying: “No! Don’t tempt me, Bella. We’ve all Eternity ahead of us. An hour or two won’t make any odds.” Then he picks up the braziers an’ goes on to the dug-out door. He’d finished with me. He pours petrol on ’em, an’ lights it with a match, an’ carries ’em inside, flarin’. All that time Auntie Armine stood with ’er arms out—an’ a look in ’er face! I didn’t know such things was or could be! Then he comes out an’ says: “Come in, my dear”; an’ she stoops an’ goes into the dug-out with that look on her face—that look on her face! An’ then ’e shuts the door from inside an’ starts wedgin’ it up. So ’elp me Gawd, I saw an’ ’eard all these things with my own eyes an’ ears!’

He repeated his oath several times. After a long pause Keede asked him if he recalled what happened next.

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‘It was a bit of a mix-up, for me, from then on. I must have carried on—they told me I did, but—but I was—I felt a—a long way inside of meself, like—if you’ve ever had that feelin’. I wasn’t rightly on the spot at all. They woke me up sometime next morning, because ’e ’adn’t showed up at the train; an’ some one had seen him with me. I wasn’t ’alf cross-examined by all an’ sundry till dinner-time.

‘Then, I think, I volunteered for Dearlove, who ’ad a sore toe, for a front-line message. I had to keep movin’, you see, because I hadn’t anything to hold on to. Whilst up there, Grant informed me how he’d found Uncle John with the door wedged an’ sand-bags stuffed in the cracks. I hadn’t waited for that. The knockin’ when ’e wedged up was enough for me. ’Like Dad’s coffin.’

‘No one told me the door had been wedged.’ Keede spoke severely.

‘No need to black a dead man’s name, sir.’

‘What made Grant go to Butcher’s Row?’

‘Because he’d noticed Uncle John had been pinchin’ charcoal for a week past an’ layin’ it up behind the old barricade there. So when the ’unt began, he went that way straight as a string, an’ when he saw the door shut, he knew. He told me he picked the sand-bags out of the cracks an’ shoved ’is hand through and shifted the wedges before any one come along. It looked all right. You said yourself, sir, the door must ’ave blown to.’

‘Grant knew what Godsoe meant, then?’ Keede snapped.

‘Grant knew Godsoe was for it; an’ nothin’ earthly could ’elp or ’inder. He told me so.’

‘And then what did you do?’

‘I expect I must ’ave kept on carryin’ on, till Headquarters give me that wire from Ma—about Auntie Armine dyin’.’

‘When had your Aunt died?’

‘On the mornin’ of the twenty-first. The mornin’ of the 21st! That tore it, d’ye see? As long as I could think, I had kep’ tellin’ myself it was like those things you lectured about at Arras when we was billeted in the cellars—the Angels of Mons, and so on. But that wire tore it.’

‘Oh! Hallucinations! I remember. And that wire tore it?’ said Keede.

‘Yes! You see’—he half lifted himself off the sofa—‘there wasn’t a single gor-dam thing left abidin’ for me to take hold of, here or hereafter. If the dead do rise—and I saw ’em—why—why, anything can ’appen. Don’t you understand?’

He was on his feet now, gesticulating stiffly.

‘For I saw ’er,’ he repeated. ‘I saw ’im an’ ’er—she dead since mornin’ time, an’ he killin’ ’imself before my livin’ eyes so’s to carry on with ’er for all Eternity—an’ she ’oldin’ out ’er arms for it! I want to know where I’m at! Look ’ere, you two—why stand we in jeopardy every hour?’

‘God knows,’ said Keede to himself.

‘Hadn’t we better ring for some one?’ I suggested. ‘He’ll go off the handle in a second.’

‘No, he won’t. It’s the last kick-up before it takes hold. I know how the stuff works. Hul-lo!’

Strangwick, his hands behind his back and his eyes set, gave tongue in the strained, cracked voice of a boy reciting. ‘Not twice in the world shall the Gods do thus,’ he cried again and again.

‘And I’m damned if it’s goin’ to be even once for me!’ he went on with sudden insane fury. ‘I don’t care whether we ’ave been pricin’ things in the windows . . . . Let ’er sue if she likes! She don’t know what reel things mean. I do—I’ve ’ad occasion to notice ’em . . . . No, I tell you! I’ll ’ave ’em when I want ’em, an’ be done with ’em; but not till I see that look on a face . . . that look. . . . I’m not takin’ any. The reel thing’s life an’ death. It begins at death, d’ye see. She can’t understand . . . . Oh, go on an’ push off to Hell, you an’ your lawyers. I’m fed up with it—fed up!’

He stopped as abruptly as he had started, and the drawn face broke back to its natural irresolute lines. Keede, holding both his hands, led him back to the sofa, where he dropped like a wet towel, took out some flamboyant robe from a press, and drew it neatly over him.

‘Ye-es. That’s the real thing at last,’ said Keede. ‘Now he’s got it off his mind he’ll sleep. By the way, who introduced him?’

‘Shall I go and find out?’ I suggested.

‘Yes; and you might ask him to come here. There’s no need for us to stand to all night.’

So I went to the Banquet, which was in full swing, and was seized by an elderly, precise Brother from a South London Lodge, who followed me, concerned and apologetic. Keede soon put him at his ease.

‘The boy’s had trouble,’ our visitor explained. ‘I’m most mortified he should have performed his bad turn here. I thought he’d put it be’ind him.’

‘I expect talking about old days with me brought it all back,’ said Keede. ‘It does sometimes.’

‘Maybe! Maybe! But over and above that, Clem’s had post-war trouble, too.’

‘Can’t he get a job? He oughtn’t to let that weigh on him, at his time of life,’ said Keede cheerily.

‘’Tisn’t that—he’s provided for—but ’—he coughed confidentially behind his dry hand—‘as a matter of fact, Worshipful Sir, he’s—he’s implicated for the present in a little breach of promise action.’

‘Ah! That’s a different thing,’ said Keede.

‘Yes. That’s his reel trouble. No reason given, you understand. The young lady in every way suitable, an’ she’d make him a good little wife too, if I’m any judge. But he says she ain’t his ideel or something. ’No getting at what’s in young people’s minds these days, is there?’

‘I’m afraid there isn’t,’ said Keede. ‘But he’s all right now. He’ll sleep. You sit by him, and when he wakes, take him home quietly . . . . Oh, we’re used to men getting a little upset here. You’ve nothing to thank us for, Brother—Brother——’

‘Armine,’ said the old gentleman. ‘He’s my nephew by marriage.’

‘That’s all that’s wanted!’ said Keede.

Brother Armine looked a little puzzled. Keede hastened to explain. ‘As I was saying, all he wants now is to be kept quiet till he wakes.’

]]> 9248 At the End of the Passage https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/at-the-end-of-the-passage.htm Mon, 19 Apr 2021 21:00:57 +0000 https://ks-demo3.web/tale/at-the-end-of-the-passage/ page 1 of 7 FOUR men, each entitled to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’, sat at a table playing whist. The thermometer marked—for them—one hundred and one degrees of heat. The room ... Read more]]>

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FOUR men, each entitled to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’, sat at a table playing whist. The thermometer marked—for them—one hundred and one degrees of heat. The room was darkened till it was only just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and the very white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah of whitewashed calico was puddling the hot air and whining dolefully at each stroke. Outside lay gloom of a November day in London. There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon—nothing but a brown purple haze of heat. It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy.

From time to time clouds of tawny dust rose from the ground without wind or warning, flung themselves tablecloth-wise among the tops of the parched trees, and came down again. Then a-whirling dust-devil would scutter across the plain for a couple of miles, break, and fall outward, though there was nothing to check its flight save a long low line of piled railway-sleepers white with the dust, a cluster of huts made of mud, condemned rails, and canvas, and the one squat four-roomed bungalow that belonged to the assistant engineer in charge of a section of the Gaudhari State line then under construction.

The four, stripped to the thinnest of sleeping-suits, played whist crossly, with wranglings as to leads and returns. It was not the best kind of whist, but they had taken some trouble to arrive at it. Mottram of the Indian Survey had ridden thirty and railed one hundred miles from his lonely post in the desert since the night before; Lowndes of the Civil Service, on special duty in the political department, had come as far to escape for an instant the miserable intrigues of an impoverished native State whose king alternately fawned and blustered for more money from the pitiful revenues contributed by hard-wrung peasants and despairing camel-breeders; Spurstow, the doctor of the line, had left a cholera-stricken camp of coolies to look after itself for forty-eight hours while he associated with white men once more. Hummil, the assistant engineer, was the host. He stood fast and received his friends thus every Sunday if they could come in. When one of them failed to appear, he would send a telegram to his last address, in order that he might know whether the defaulter were dead or alive. There are very many places in the East where it is not good or kind to let your acquaintances drop out of sight even for one short week.

The players were not conscious of any special regard for each other. They squabbled whenever they met; but they ardently desired to meet, as men without water desire to drink. They were lonely folk who understood the dread meaning of loneliness. They were all under thirty years of age—which is too soon for any man to possess that knowledge.

‘Pilsener?’ said Spurstow, after the second rubber, mopping his forehead.

‘Beer’s out, I’m sorry to say, and there’s hardly enough soda-water for tonight,’ said Hummil.

‘What filthy bad management!’ Spurstow snarled.

‘Can’t help it. I’ve written and wired; but the trains don’t come through regularly yet. Last week the ice ran out—as Lowndes knows.’

‘Glad I didn’t come. I could ha’ sent you some if I had known, though. Phew! it’s too hot to go on playing bumblepuppy.’ This with a savage scowl at Lowndes, who only laughed. He was a hardened offender.

Mottram rose from the table and looked out of a chink in the shutters.

‘What a sweet day!’ said he.

The company yawned all together and betook themselves to an aimless investigation of all Hummil’s possessions—guns, tattered novels, saddlery, spurs, and the like. They had fingered them a score of times before, but there was really nothing else to do.

‘Got anything fresh?’ said Lowndes.

‘Last week’s Gazette of India, and a cutting from a home paper. My father sent it out. It’s rather amusing.’

‘One of those vestrymen that call ’emselves M.P.s again, is it?’ said Spurstow, who read his newspapers when he could get them.

‘Yes. Listen to this. It’s to your address, Lowndes. The man was making a speech to his constituents, and he piled it on. Here’s a sample, “And I assert unhesitatingly that the Civil Service in India is the preserve—the pet preserve—of the aristocracy of England. What does the democracy—what do the masses—get from that country, which we have step by step fraudulently annexed? I answer, nothing whatever. It is farmed with a single eye to their own interests by the scions of the aristocracy. They take good care to maintain their lavish scale of incomes, to avoid or stifle any inquiries into the nature and conduct of their administration, while they themselves force the unhappy peasant to pay with the sweat of his brow for all the luxuries in which they are lapped.” ’ Hummil waved the cutting above his head. ‘’Ear! ’ear!’ said his audience.

Then Lowndes, meditatively, ‘I’d give—I’d give three months’ pay to have that gentleman spend one month with me and see how the free and independent native prince works things. Old Timbersides’—this was his flippant title for an honoured and decorated feudatory prince—‘has been wearing my life out this week past for money. By Jove, his latest performance was to send me one of his women as a bribe!’

‘Good for you! Did you accept it?’ said Mottram.

‘No. I rather wish I had, now. She was a pretty little person, and she yarned away to me about the horrible destitution among the king’s women-folk. The darlings haven’t had any new clothes for nearly a month, and the old man wants to buy a new drag from Calcutta—solid silver railings and silver lamps, and trifles of that kind. I’ve tried to make him understand that he has played the deuce with the revenues for the last twenty years and must go slow. He can’t see it.’

‘But he has the ancestral treasure-vaults to draw on. There must be three millions at least in jewels and coin under his palace,’ said Hummil.

‘Catch a native king disturbing the family treasure! The priests forbid it except as the last resort. Old Timbersides has added something like a quarter of a million to the deposit in his reign.’

‘Where the mischief does it all come from?’ said Mottram.

‘The country. The state of the people is enough to make you sick. I’ve known the taxmen wait by a milch-camel till the foal was born and then hurry off the mother for arrears. And what can I do? I can’t get the court clerks to give me any accounts; I can’t raise anything more than a fat smile from the commander-in-chief when I find out the troops are three months in arrears; and old Timbersides begins to weep when I speak to him. He has taken to the King’s Peg heavily, liqueur brandy for whisky, and Heidsieck for soda-water.’

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‘That’s what the Rao of Jubela took to. Even a native can’t last long at that,’ said Spurstow. ‘He’ll go out.’

‘And a good thing, too. Then I suppose we’ll have a council of regency, and a tutor for the young prince, and hand him back his kingdom with ten years’ accumulations.’

‘Whereupon that young prince, having been taught all the vices of the English, will play ducks and drakes with the money and undo ten years’ work in eighteen months. I’ve seen that business before,’ said Spurstow. ‘I should tackle the king with a light hand if I were you, Lowndes. They’ll hate you quite enough under any circumstances.

‘That’s all very well. The man who looks on can talk about the light hand; but you can’t clean a pig-sty with a pen dipped in rose-water. I know my risks; but nothing has happened yet. My servant’s an old Pathan, and he cooks for me. They are hardly likely to bribe him, and I don’t accept food from my true friends, as they call themselves. Oh, but it’s weary work! I’d sooner be with you, Spurstow. There’s shooting near your camp.’

‘Would you? I don’t think it. About fifteen deaths a day don’t incite a man to shoot anything but himself. And the worst of it is that the poor devils look at you as though you ought to save them. Lord knows, I’ve tried everything. My last attempt was empirical, but it pulled an old man through. He was brought to me apparently past hope, and I gave him gin and Worcester sauce with cayenne. It cured him; but I don’t recommend it.’

‘How do the cases run generally?’ said Hummil.

‘Very simply indeed. Chlorodyne, opium pill, chlorodyne, collapse, nitre, bricks to the feet, and then—the burning-ghaut. The last seems to be the only thing that stops the trouble. It’s black cholera, you know. Poor devils! But, I will say, little Bunsee Lal, my apothecary, works like a demon. I’ve recommended him for promotion if he comes through it all alive.’

‘And what are your chances, old man?’ said Mottram.

‘Don’t know; don’t care much; but I’ve sent the letter in. What are you doing with yourself generally?’

‘Sitting under a table in the tent and spitting on the sextant to keep it cool,’ said the man of the survey. ‘Washing my eyes to avoid ophthalmia, which I shall certainly get, and trying to make a sub-surveyor understand that an error of five degrees in an angle isn’t quite so small as it looks. I’m altogether alone, y’ know, and shall be till the end of the hot weather.’

‘Hummil’s the lucky man,’ said Lowndes, flinging himself into a long chair. ‘He has an actual roof – torn as to the ceiling-cloth, but still a roof – over his head. He sees one train daily. He can get beer and soda-water and ice ’em when God is good. He has books, pictures—they were torn from the Graphic—and the society of the excellent sub-contractor Jevins, besides the pleasure of receiving us weekly.’

Hummil smiled grimly. ‘Yes, I’m the lucky man, I suppose. Jevins is luckier.’

‘How? Not——’

‘Yes. Went out. Last Monday.’

‘By his own hand?’ said Spurstow quickly, hinting the suspicion that was in everybody’s mind. There was no cholera near Hummil’s section. Even fever gives a man at least a week’s grace, and sudden death generally implied self-slaughter.

‘I judge no man this weather,’ said Hummil. ‘He had a touch of the sun, I fancy; for last week, after you fellows had left, he came into the verandah and told me that he was going home to see his wife, in Market Street, Liverpool, that evening.

‘I got the apothecary in to look at him, and we tried to make him lie down. After an hour or two he rubbed his eyes and said he believed he had had a fit, hoped he hadn’t said anything rude. Jevins had a great idea of bettering himself socially. He was very like Chucks in his language.’

‘Well?’

‘Then he went to his own bungalow and began cleaning a rifle. He told the servant that he was going to shoot buck in the morning. Naturally he fumbled with the trigger, and shot himself through the head—accidentally. The apothecary sent in a report to my chief; and Jevins is buried somewhere out there. I’d have wired to you, Spurstow, if you could have done anything.’

‘You’re a queer chap,’ said Mottram. ‘If you’d killed the man yourself you couldn’t have been more quiet about the business.’

‘Good Lord! what does it matter?’ said Hummil calmly. ‘I’ve got to do a lot of his overseeing work in addition to my own. I’m the only person that suffers. Jevins is out of it, by pure accident, of course, but out of it. The apothecary was going to write a long screed on suicide. Trust a babu to drivel when he gets the chance.’

‘Why didn’t you let it go in as suicide?’ said Lowndes.

‘No direct proof. A man hasn’t many privileges in his country, but he might at least be allowed to mishandle his own rifle. Besides, some day I may need a man to smother up an accident to myself. Live and let live. Die and let die.’

‘You take a pill,’ said Spurstow, who had been watching Hummil’s white face narrowly. ‘Take a pill, and don’t be an ass. That sort of talk is skittles. Anyhow, suicide is shirking your work. If I were Job ten times over, I should be so interested in what was going to happen next that I’d stay on and watch.’

‘Ah! I’ve lost that curiosity,’ said Hummil.

‘Liver out of order?’ said Lowndes feelingly.

‘No. Can’t sleep. That’s worse.’

‘By Jove, it is!’ said Mottram. ‘I’m that way every now and then, and the fit has to wear itself out. What do you take for it?’

‘Nothing. What’s the use? I haven’t had ten minutes’ sleep since Friday morning.’

‘Poor chap! Spurstow, you ought to attend to this,’ said Mottram. ‘Now you mention it, your eyes are rather gummy and swollen.’

Spurstow, still watching Hummil, laughed lightly. ‘I’ll patch him up, later on. Is it too hot, do you think, to go for a ride?’

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‘Where to?’ said Lowndes wearily. ‘We shall have to go away at eight, and there’ll be riding enough for us then. I hate a horse when I have to use him as a necessity. Oh, heavens! What is there to do?’

‘Begin whist again, at chick points [‘a chick’ is supposed to be eight shillings] and a gold mohur on the rub,’ said Spurstow promptly.

‘Poker. A month’s pay all round for the pool—no limit—and fifty-rupee raises. Somebody would be broken before we got up,’ said Lowndes.

‘Can’t say that it would give me any pleasure to break any man in this company,’ said Mottram. ‘There isn’t enough excitement in it, and it’s foolish.’ He crossed over to the worn and battered little camp-piano—wreckage of a married household that had once held the bungalow—and opened the case.

‘It’s used up long ago,’ said Hummil. ‘The servants have picked it to pieces.’

The piano was indeed hopelessly out of order, but Mottram managed to bring the rebellious notes into a sort of agreement, and there rose from the ragged keyboard something that might once have been the ghost of a popular music-hall song. The men in the long chairs turned with evident interest as Mottram banged the more lustily.

‘That’s good!’ said Lowndes. ‘By Jove! the last time I heard that song was in ’79, or thereabouts, just before I came out.’

‘Ah!’ said Spurstow with pride, ‘I was home in ‘80.’ And he mentioned a song of the streets popular at that date.

Mottram executed it roughly. Lowndes criticized and volunteered emendations. Mottram dashed into another ditty, not of the music-hall character, and made as if to rise.

‘Sit down,’ said Hummil. ‘I didn’t know that you had any music in your composition. Go on playing until you can’t think of anything more. I’ll have that piano tuned up before you come again. Play something festive.’

Very simple indeed were the tunes to which Mottram’s art and the limitations of the piano could give effect, but the men listened with pleasure, and in the pauses talked all together of what they had seen or heard when they were last at home. A dense dust-storm sprung up outside, and swept roaring over the house, enveloping it in the choking darkness of midnight, but Mottram continued unheeding, and the crazy tinkle reached the ears of the listeners above the flapping of the tattered ceiling-cloth.

In the silence after the storm he glided from the more directly personal songs of Scotland, half humming them as he played, into the Evening Hymn.

‘Sunday,’ said he, nodding his head.

‘Go on. Don’t apologize for it,’ said Spurstow.

Hummil laughed long and riotously. ‘Play it, by all means. You’re full of surprises today. I didn’t know you had such a gift of finished sarcasm. How does that thing go?’

Mottram took up the tune.

‘Too slow by half. You miss the note of gratitude,’ said Hummil. ‘It ought to go to the “Grasshopper’s Polka”—this way.’ And he chanted, prestissimo,

‘Glory to thee, my God, this night, For all the blessings of the light.—That shows we really feel our blessings. How does it go on?—If in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with sacred thoughts supply; May no ill dreams disturb my rest,—Quicker, Mottram!—Or powers of darkness me molest!’

‘Bah! what an old hypocrite you are!’

‘Don’t be an ass,’ said Lowndes. ‘You are at full liberty to make fun of anything else you like, but leave that hymn alone. It’s associated in my mind with the most sacred recollections——’

‘Summer evenings in the country, stained-glass window, light going out, and you and she jamming your heads together over one hymnbook,’ said Mottram.

‘Yes, and a fat old cockchafer hitting you in the eye when you walked home. Smell of hay, and a moon as big as a bandbox sitting on the top of a haycock; bats, roses, milk and midges,’ said Lowndes.

‘Also mothers. I can just recollect my mother singing me to sleep with that when I was a little chap,’ said Spurstow.

The darkness had fallen on the room. They could hear Hummil squirming in his chair.

‘Consequently,’ said he testily, ‘you sing it when you are seven fathom deep in Hell! It’s an insult to the intelligence of the Deity to pretend we’re anything but tortured rebels.’

‘Take two pills,’ said Spurstow; ‘that’s tortured liver.’

‘The usually placid Hummil is in a vile bad temper. I’m sorry for his coolies tomorrow,’ said Lowndes, as the servants brought in the lights and prepared the table for dinner.

As they were settling into their places about the miserable goat-chops, and the smoked tapioca pudding, Spurstow took occasion to whisper to Mottram, ‘Well done, David!’

‘Look after Saul, then,’ was the reply.

‘What are you two whispering about?’ said Hummil suspiciously.

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‘Only saying that you are a damned poor host. This fowl can’t be cut,’ returned Spurstow with a sweet smile. ‘Call this a dinner?’

‘I can’t help it. You don’t expect a banquet, do you?’

Throughout that meal Hummil contrived laboriously to insult directly and pointedly all his guests in succession, and at each insult Spurstow kicked the aggrieved person under the table; but he dared not exchange a glance of intelligence with either of them. Hummil’s face was white and pinched, while his eyes were unnaturally large. No man dreamed for a moment of resenting his savage personalities, but as soon as the meal was over they made haste to get away.

‘Don’t go. You’re just getting amusing, you fellows. I hope I haven’t said anything that annoyed you. You’re such touchy devils.’ Then, changing the note into one of almost abject entreaty, Hummil added, ‘I say, you surely aren’t going?’

‘In the language of the blessed Jorrocks, where I dines I sleeps,’ said Spurstow. ‘I want to have a look at your coolies tomorrow, if you don’t mind. You can give me a place to lie down in, I suppose?’

The others pleaded the urgency of their several duties next day, and, saddling up, departed together, Hummil begging them to come next Sunday. As they jogged off, Lowndes unbosomed himself to Mottram—

‘. . . And I never felt so like kicking a man at his own table in my life. He said I cheated at whist, and reminded me I was in debt! ’Told you you were as good as a liar to your face! You aren’t half indignant enough over it.’

‘Not I,’ said Mottram. ‘Poor devil! Did you ever know old Hummy behave like that before or within a hundred miles of it?’

‘That’s no excuse. Spurstow was hacking my shin all the time, so I kept a hand on myself. Else I should have—’

‘No, you wouldn’t. You’d have done as Hummy did about Jevins; judge no man this weather. By Jove! the buckle of my bridle is hot in my hand! Trot out a bit, and ‘ware rat-holes.’ Ten minutes’ trotting jerked out of Lowndes one very sage remark when he pulled up, sweating from every pore—

“Good thing Spurstow’s with him tonight.’

‘Ye-es. Good man, Spurstow. Our roads turn here. See you again next Sunday, if the sun doesn’t bowl me over.’

‘S’pose so, unless old Timbersides’ finance minister manages to dress some of my food. Goodnight, and—God bless you!’

‘What’s wrong now?’

‘Oh, nothing.’ Lowndes gathered up his whip, and, as he flicked Mottram’s mare on the flank, added, ‘You’re not a bad little chap, that’s all.’ And the mare bolted half a mile across the sand, on the word.

In the assistant engineer’s bungalow Spurstow and Hummil smoked the pipe of silence together, each narrowly watching the other. The capacity of a bachelor’s establishment is as elastic as its arrangements are simple. A servant cleared away the dining-room table, brought in a couple of rude native bedsteads made of tape strung on a light wood frame, flung a square of cool Calcutta matting over each, set them side by side, pinned two towels to the punkah so that their fringes should just sweep clear of the sleeper’s nose and mouth, and announced that the couches were ready.

The men flung themselves down, ordering the punkah-coolies by all the powers of Hell to pull. Every door and window was shut, for the outside air was that of an oven. The atmosphere within was only 104 degrees, as the thermometer bore witness, and heavy with the foul smell of badly-trimmed kerosene lamps; and this stench, combined with that of native tobacco, baked brick, and dried earth, sends the heart of many a strong man down to his boots, for it is the smell of the Great Indian Empire when she turns herself for six months into a house of torment. Spurstow packed his pillows craftily so that he reclined rather than lay, his head at a safe elevation above his feet. It is not good to sleep on a low pillow in the hot weather if you happen to be of thick-necked build, for you may pass with lively snores and gugglings from natural sleep into the deep slumber of heat-apoplexy.

‘Pack your pillows,’ said the doctor sharply, as he saw Hummil preparing to lie down at full length.

The night-light was trimmed; the shadow of the punkah wavered across the room, and the flick  of the punkah-towel and the soft whine of the rope through the wall-hole followed it. Then the punkah flagged, almost ceased. The sweat poured from Spurstow’s brow. Should he go out and harangue the coolie? It started forward again with a savage jerk, and a pin came out of the towels. When this was replaced, a tomtom in the coolie-lines began to beat with the steady throb of a swollen artery inside some brain-fevered skull. Spurstow turned on his side and swore gently. There was no movement on Hummil’s part. The man had composed himself as rigidly as a corpse, his hands clinched at his sides. The respiration was too hurried for any suspicion of sleep. Spurstow looked at the set face. The jaws were clinched, and there was a pucker round the quivering eyelids.

‘He’s holding himself as tightly as ever he can,’ thought Spurstow. ‘What in the world is the matter with him?—Hummil!’

‘Yes,’ in a thick constrained voice.

‘Can’t you get to sleep?’

‘No.’

‘Head hot? Throat feeling bulgy? or how?’

‘Neither, thanks. I don’t sleep much, you know.’

‘’Feel pretty bad?’

‘Pretty bad, thanks. There is a tomtom outside, isn’t there? I thought it was my head at first…. Oh, Spurstow, for pity’s sake give me something that will put me asleep, sound asleep, if it’s only for six hours!’ He sprang up, trembling from head to foot. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep naturally for days, and I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!’

‘Poor old chap!’

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‘That’s no use. Give me something to make me sleep. I tell you I’m nearly mad. I don’t know what I say half my time. For three weeks I’ve had to think and spell out every word that has come through my lips before I dared say it. Isn’t that enough to drive a man mad? I can’t see things correctly now, and I’ve lost my sense of touch. My skin aches—my skin aches! Make me sleep. Oh, Spurstow, for the love of God make me sleep sound. It isn’t enough merely to let me dream. Let me sleep!’

‘All right, old man, all right. Go slow; you aren’t half as bad as you think.’

The flood-gates of reserve once broken, Hummil was clinging to him like a frightened child. ‘You’re pinching my arm to pieces.’

‘I’ll break your neck if you don’t do something for me. No, I didn’t mean that. Don’t be angry, old fellow.’ He wiped the sweat off himself as he fought to regain composure. ‘I’m a bit restless and off my oats, and perhaps you could recommend some sort of sleeping mixture—bromide of potassium.’

‘Bromide of skittles! Why didn’t you tell me this before? Let go of my arm, and I’ll see if there’s anything in my cigarette-case to suit your complaint.’ Spurstow hunted among his day-clothes, turned up the lamp, opened a little silver cigarette-case, and advanced on the expectant Hummil with the daintiest of fairy squirts.

‘The last appeal of civilization,’ said he, ’and a thing I hate to use. Hold out your arm. Well, your sleeplessness hasn’t ruined your muscle; and what a thick hide it is! Might as well inject a buffalo subcutaneously. Now in a few minutes the morphia will begin working. Lie down and wait.’

A smile of unalloyed and idiotic delight began to creep over Hummil’s face. ‘I think,’ he whispered,—‘I think I’m going off now. Gad! it’s positively heavenly! Spurstow, you must give me that case to keep; you——’ The voice ceased as the head fell back.

‘Not for a good deal,’ said Spurstow to the unconscious form. ‘And now, my friend, sleeplessness of your kind being very apt to relax the moral fibre in little matters of life and death, I’ll just take the liberty of spiking your guns.’

He paddled into Hummil’s saddle-room in his bare feet and uncased a twelve-bore rifle, an express, and a revolver. Of the first he unscrewed the nipples and hid them in the bottom of a saddlery-case; of the second he abstracted the lever, kicking it behind a big wardrobe. The third he merely opened, and knocked the doll-head bolt of the grip up with the heel of a riding-boot.

‘That’s settled,’ he said, as he shook the sweat off his hands. ‘These little precautions will at least give you time to turn. You have too much sympathy with gun-room accidents.’

And as he rose from his knees, the thick muffled voice of Hummil cried in the doorway, ‘You fool!’

Such tones they use who speak in the lucid intervals of delirium to their friends a little before they die.

Spurstow started, dropping the pistol. Hummil stood in the doorway, rocking with helpless laughter.

‘That was awf’ly good of you, I’m sure,’ he said, very slowly, feeling for his words. ‘I don’t intend to go out by my own hand at present. I say, Spurstow, that stuff won’t work. What shall I do? What shall I do?’ And panic terror stood in his eyes.

‘Lie down and give it a chance. Lie down at once.’

‘I daren’t. It will only take me half-way again, and I shan’t be able to get away this time. Do you know it was all I could do to come out just now? Generally I am as quick as lightning; but you had clogged my feet. I was nearly caught.’

‘Oh yes, I understand. Go and lie down.’

‘No, it isn’t delirium; but it was an awfully mean trick to play on me. Do you know I might have died?’

As a sponge rubs a slate clean, so some power unknown to Spurstow had wiped out of Hummil’s face all that stamped it for the face of a man, and he stood at the doorway in the expression of his lost innocence. He had slept back into terrified childhood.

‘Is he going to die on the spot?’ thought Spurstow. Then, aloud, ‘All right, my son. Come back to bed, and tell me all about it. You couldn’t sleep; but what was all the rest of the nonsense?’

‘A place, a place down there,’ said Hummil, with simple sincerity. The drug was acting on him by waves, and he was flung from the fear of a strong man to the fright of a child as his nerves gathered sense or were dulled.

‘Good God! I’ve been afraid of it for months past, Spurstow. It has made every night hell to me; and yet I’m not conscious of having done anything wrong.’

‘Be still, and I’ll give you another dose. We’ll stop your nightmares, you unutterable idiot!’

‘Yes, but you must give me so much that I can’t get away. You must make me quite sleepy, not just a little sleepy. It’s so hard to run then.’

‘I know it; I know it. I’ve felt it myself. The symptoms are exactly as you describe.’

‘Oh, don’t laugh at me, confound you! Before this awful sleeplessness came to me I’ve tried to rest on my elbow and put a spur in the bed to sting me when I fell back. Look!’

‘By Jove! the man has been rowelled like a horse! Ridden by the nightmare with a vengeance! And we all thought him sensible enough. Heaven send us understanding! You like to talk, don’t you?’

‘Yes, sometimes. Not when I’m frightened. Then I want to run. Don’t you?’

‘Always. Before I give you your second dose try to tell me exactly what your trouble is.’

Hummil spoke in broken whispers for nearly ten minutes, whilst Spurstow looked into the pupils of his eyes and passed his hand before them once or twice.

At the end of the narrative the silver cigarette-case was produced, and the last words that Hummil said as he fell back for the second time were, ‘Put me quite to sleep; for if I’m caught I die, I die!’

page 6

‘Yes, yes; we all do that sooner or later, thank Heaven who has set a term to our miseries,’ said Spurstow, settling the cushions under the head. ‘It occurs to me that unless I drink something I shall go out before my time. I’ve stopped sweating, and—I wear a seventeen-inch collar.’ He brewed himself scalding hot tea, which is an excellent remedy against heat-apoplexy if you take three or four cups of it in time. Then he watched the sleeper.

‘A blind face that cries and can’t wipe its eyes, a blind face that chases him down corridors! H’m! Decidedly, Hummil ought to go on leave as soon as possible; and, sane or otherwise, he undoubtedly did rowel himself most cruelly. Well, Heaven send us understanding!’

At mid-day Hummil rose, with an evil taste in his mouth, but an unclouded eye and a joyful heart.

‘I was pretty bad last night, wasn’t I?’ said he.

‘I have seen healthier men. You must have had a touch of the sun. Look here: if I write you a swinging medical certificate, will you apply for leave on the spot?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? You want it.’

‘Yes, but I can hold on till the weather’s a little cooler.’

‘Why should you, if you can get relieved on the spot?’

‘Burkett is the only man who could be sent; and he’s a born fool.’

‘Oh, never mind about the line. You aren’t so important as all that. Wire for leave, if necessary.’

Hummil looked very uncomfortable.

‘I can hold on till the Rains,’ he said evasively.

‘You can’t. Wire to headquarters for Burkett.’

‘I won’t. If you want to know why, particularly, Burkett is married, and his wife’s just had a kid, and she’s up at Simla, in the cool, and Burkett has a very nice billet that takes him into Simla from Saturday to Monday. That little woman isn’t at all well. If Burkett was transferred she’d try to follow him. If she left the baby behind she’d fret herself to death. If she came—and Burkett’s one of those selfish little beasts who are always talking about a wife’s place being with her husband—she’d die. It’s murder to bring a woman here just now. Burkett hasn’t the physique of a rat. If he came here he’d go out; and I know she hasn’t any money, and I’m pretty sure she’d go out too. I’m salted in a sort of way, and I’m not married. Wait till the Rains, and then Burkett can get thin down here. It’ll do him heaps of good.’

‘Do you mean to say that you intend to face—what you have faced, till the Rains break?’

‘Oh, it won’t be so bad, now you’ve shown me a way out of it. I can always wire to you. Besides, now I’ve once got into the way of sleeping, it’ll be all right. Anyhow, I shan’t put in for leave. That’s the long and the short of it.’

‘My great Scott! I thought all that sort of thing was dead and done with.’

‘Bosh! You’d do the same yourself. I feel a new man, thanks to that cigarette-case. You’re going over to camp now, aren’t you?’

‘Yes; but I’ll try to look you up every other day, if I can.’

‘I’m not bad enough for that. I don’t want you to bother. Give the coolies gin and ketchup.’

‘Then you feel all right?’

‘Fit to fight for my life, but not to stand out in the sun talking to you. Go along, old man, and bless you!’

Hummil turned on his heel to face the echoing desolation of his bungalow, and the first thing he saw standing in the verandah was the figure of himself. He had met a similar apparition once before, when he was suffering from overwork and the strain of the hot weather.

‘This is bad—already,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘If the thing slides away from me all in one piece, like a ghost, I shall know it is only my eyes and stomach that are out of order. If it walks—my head is going.’

He approached the figure, which naturally kept at an unvarying distance from him, as is the use of all spectres that are born of overwork. It slid through the house and dissolved into swimming specks within the eyeball as soon as it reached the burning light of the garden. Hummil went about his business till even. When he came in to dinner he found himself sitting at the table. The vision rose and walked out hastily. Except that it cast no shadow it was in all respects real.

No living man knows what that week held for Hummil. An increase of the epidemic kept Spurstow in camp among the coolies, and all he could do was to telegraph to Mottram, bidding him go to the bungalow and sleep there. But Mottram was forty miles away from the nearest telegraph, and knew nothing of anything save the needs of the survey till he met, early on Sunday morning, Lowndes and Spurstow heading towards Hummil’s for the weekly gathering.

‘Hope the poor chap’s in a better temper,’ said the former, swinging himself off his horse at the door. ‘I suppose he isn’t up yet.’

‘I’ll just have a look at him,’ said the doctor. ‘If he’s asleep there’s no need to wake him.’

And an instant later, by the tone of Spurstow’s voice calling upon them to enter, the men knew what had happened. There was no need to wake him.

The punkah was still being pulled over the bed, but Hummil had departed this life at least three hours.

The body lay on its back, hands clinched by the side, as Spurstow had seen it lying seven nights previously. In the staring eyes was written terror beyond the expression of any pen.

Mottram, who had entered behind Lowndes, bent over the dead and touched the forehead lightly with his lips. ‘Oh, you lucky, lucky devil!’ he whispered.

But Lowndes had seen the eyes, and withdrew shuddering to the other side of the room.

page 7

‘Poor chap! poor old chap! And the last time I met him I was angry. Spurstow, we should have watched him. Has he——?’

Deftly Spurstow continued his investigations, ending by a search round the room.

‘No, he hasn’t,’ he snapped. ‘There’s no trace of anything. Call the servants.’

They came, eight or ten of them, whispering and peering over each other’s shoulders.

‘When did your Sahib go to bed?’ said Spurstow.

‘At eleven or ten, we think,’ said Hummil’s personal servant.

‘He was well then? But how should you know?’

‘He was not ill, as far as our comprehension extended. But he had slept very little for three nights. This I know, because I saw him walking much, and specially in the heart of the night.’

As Spurstow was arranging the sheet, a big straight-necked hunting-spur tumbled on the ground. The doctor groaned. The personal servant peeped at the body.

‘What do you think, Chuma?’ said Spurstow, catching the look on the dark face.

‘Heaven-born, in my poor opinion, this that was my master has descended into the Dark Places, and there has been caught because he was not able to escape with sufficient speed. We have the spur for evidence that he fought with Fear. Thus have I seen men of my race do with thorns when a spell was laid upon them to overtake them in their sleeping hours and they dared not sleep.’

‘Chuma, you’re a mud-head. Go out and prepare seals to be set on the Sahib’s property.’

‘God has made the Heaven-born. God has made me. Who are we, to enquire into the dispensations of God? I will bid the other servants hold aloof while you are reckoning the tale of the Sahib’s property. They are all thieves, and would steal.’

‘As far as I can make out, he died from—oh, anything; stoppage of the heart’s action, heat-apoplexy, or some other visitation,’ said Spurstow to his companions. ‘We must make an inventory of his effects, and so on.’

‘He was scared to death,’ insisted Lowndes. ‘Look at those eyes! For pity’s sake don’t let him be buried with them open!’

‘Whatever it was, he’s clear of all the trouble now,’ said Mottram softly.

Spurstow was peering into the open eyes.

‘Come here,’ said he. ‘Can you see anything there?’

‘I can’t face it!’ whimpered Lowndes. ‘Cover up the face! Is there any fear on earth that can turn a man into that likeness? It’s ghastly. Oh, Spurstow, cover it up!’

‘No fear—on earth,’ said Spurstow. Mottram leaned over his shoulder and looked intently.

‘I see nothing except some grey blurs in the pupil. There can be nothing there, you know.’

‘Even so. Well, let’s think. It’ll take half a day to knock up any sort of coffin; and he must have died at midnight. Lowndes, old man, go out and tell the coolies to break ground next to Jevins’s grave. Mottram, go round the house with Chuma and see that the seals are put on things. Send a couple of men to me here, and I’ll arrange.’

The strong-armed servants when they returned to their own kind told a strange story of the doctor Sahib vainly trying to call their master back to life by magic arts—to wit, the holding of a little green box that clicked to each of the dead man’s eyes, and of a bewildered muttering on the part of the doctor Sahib, who took the little green box away with him.

The resonant hammering of a coffin-lid is no pleasant thing to hear, but those who have experience maintain that much more terrible is the soft swish of the bed-linen, the reeving and unreeving of the bed-tapes, when he who has fallen by the roadside is apparelled for burial, sinking gradually as the tapes are tied over, till the swaddled shape touches the floor and there is no protest against the indignity of hasty disposal.

At the last moment Lowndes was seized with scruples of conscience. ‘Ought you to read the service, from beginning to end?’ said he to Spurstow.

‘I intend to. You’re my senior as a civilian. You can take it if you like.’

‘I didn’t mean that for a moment. I only thought if we could get a chaplain from somewhere, I’m willing to ride anywhere, and give poor Hummil a better chance. That’s all.’

‘Bosh!’ said Spurstow, as he framed his lips to the tremendous words that stand at the head of the burial service.

After breakfast they smoked a pipe in silence to the memory of the dead. Then Spurstow said absently—

‘Tisn’t medical science.’

‘What?’

‘Things in a dead man’s eye.’

‘For goodness’ sake leave that horror alone!’ said Lowndes. ‘I’ve seen a native die of pure fright when a tiger chivied him. I know what killed Hummil.’

‘The deuce you do! I’m going to try to see.’ And the doctor retreated into the bathroom with a Kodak camera. After a few minutes there was the sound of something being hammered to pieces, and he emerged, very white indeed.

‘Have you got a picture?’ said Mottram. ‘What does the thing look like?’

‘It was impossible, of course. You needn’t look, Mottram. I’ve torn up the films. There was nothing there. It was impossible.’

‘That,’ said Lowndes, very distinctly, watching the shaking hand striving to relight the pipe, ‘is a damned lie.’

Mottram laughed uneasily. ‘Spurstow’s right,’ he said. ‘We’re all in such a state now that we’d believe anything. For pity’s sake let’s try to be rational.’

There was no further speech for a long time. The hot wind whistled without, and the dry trees sobbed. Presently the daily train, winking brass, burnished steel, and spouting steam, pulled up panting in the intense glare. ‘We’d better go on that,’ said Spurstow. ‘Go back to work. I’ve written my certificate. We can’t do any more good here, and work’ll keep our wits together. Come on.’

No one moved. It is not pleasant to face railway journeys at mid-day in June. Spurstow gathered up his hat and whip, and, turning in the doorway, said—

‘There may be Heaven—there must be Hell. Meantime, there is our life here. We-ell?’

Neither Mottram nor Lowndes had any answer to the question.

]]> 9327 By Word of Mouth https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/by-word-of-mouth.htm Thu, 22 Apr 2021 10:46:28 +0000 https://ks-demo3.web/tale/by-word-of-mouth/ (a short tale) Not though you die to-night, O Sweet, and wail, A spectre at my door, Shall mortal Fear make Love immortal fail— I shall but love you more, Who, from Death’s house returning, ... Read more]]>

(a short tale)

Not though you die to-night, O Sweet, and wail,
A spectre at my door,
Shall mortal Fear make Love immortal fail—
I shall but love you more,
Who, from Death’s house returning, give me still
One moment’s comfort in my matchless ill.
(Shadow Houses)

THIS tale may be explained by those who know how souls are made, and where the bounds of the Possible are put down. I have lived long enough in this India to know that it is best to know nothing, and can only write the story as it happened.

Dumoise was our Civil Surgeon at Meridki, and we called him ‘Dormouse,’ because he was a round little, sleepy little man. He was a good Doctor and never quarrelled with any one, not even with our Deputy Commissioner who had the manners of a bargee and the tact of a horse. He married a girl as round and as sleepy-looking as himself. She was a Miss Hillardyce, daughter of ‘Squash’ Hillardyce of the Berars, who married his Chief’s daughter by mistake. But that is another story.

A honeymoon in India is seldom more than a week long; but there is nothing to hinder a couple from extending it over two or three years. India is a delightful country for married folk who are wrapped up in one another. They can live absolutely alone and without interruption just as the Dormice did. Those two little people retired from the world after their marriage, and were very happy. They were forced, of course, to give occasional dinners, but they made no friends thereby, and the Station went its own way and forgot them; only saying, occasionally, that Dormouse was the best of good fellows though dull. A Civil Surgeon who never quarrels is a rarity, appreciated as such.

Few people can afford to play Robinson Crusoe anywhere—least of all in India, where we are few in the land and very much dependent on each other’s kind offices. Dumoise was wrong in shutting himself from the world for a year, and he discovered his mistake when an epidemic of typhoid broke out in the Station in the heart of the cold weather, and his wife went down. He was a shy little man, and five days were wasted before he realised that Mrs. Dumoise was burning with something worse than simple fever, and three days more passed before he ventured to call on Mrs. Shute, the Engineer’s wife, and timidly speak about his trouble. Nearly every household in India knows that Doctors are very helpless in typhoid. The battle must be fought out between Death and the Nurses minute by minute and degree by degree. Mrs. Shute almost boxed Dumoise’s ears for what she called his ‘criminal delay,’ and went off at once to look after the poor girl. We had seven cases of typhoid in the Station that winter and, as the average of death is about one in every five cases, we felt certain that we should have to lose somebody. But all did their best. The women sat up nursing the women, and the men turned to and tended the bachelors who were down, and we wrestled with those typhoid cases for fifty-six days, and brought them through the Valley of the Shadow in triumph. But, just when we thought all was over, and were going to give a dance to celebrate the victory, little Mrs. Dumoise got a relapse and died in a week, and the Station went to the funeral. Dumoise broke down utterly at the brink of the grave, and had to be taken away.

After the death Dumoise crept into his own house and refused to be comforted. He did his duties perfectly, but we all felt that he should go on leave, and the other men of his own Service told him so. Dumoise was very thankful for the suggestion—he was thankful for anything in those days—and went to Chini on a walking-tour. Chini is some twenty marches from Simla, in the heart of the Hills, and the scenery is good if you are in trouble. You pass through big, still deodar forests, and under big, still cliffs, and over big, still grass-downs swelling like a woman’s breasts; and the wind across the grass, and the rain among the deodars say–‘Hush-hush-hush.’ So little Dumoise was packed off to Chini, to wear down his grief with a full-plate camera and a rifle. He took also a useless bearer, because the man had been his wife’s favourite servant. He was idle and a thief, but Dumoise trusted everything to him.

On his way back from Chini, Dumoise turned aside to Bagi, through the Forest Reserve which is on the spur of Mount Huttoo. Some men who have travelled more than a little say that the march from Kotegarh to Bagi is one of the finest in creation. It runs through dark wet forest, and ends suddenly in bleak, nipped hillside and black rocks. Bagi dâk-bungalow is open to all the winds and is bitterly cold. Few people go to Bagi. Perhaps that was the reason why Dumoise went there. He halted at seven in the evening, and his bearer went down the hillside to the village to engage coolies for the next day’s march. The sun had set, and the night-winds were beginning to croon among the rocks. Dumoise leaned on the railing of the verandah, waiting for his bearer to return. The man came back almost immediately after he had disappeared, and at such a rate that Dumoise fancied he must have crossed a bear. He was running as hard as he could up the face of the hill.

But there was no bear to account for his terror. He raced to the verandah and fell down, the blood spurting from his nose and his face iron-gray. Then he gurgled—‘I have seen the Memsahib! I have seen the Memsahib!’

‘Where?’ said Dumoise.

‘Down there, walking on the road to the village. She was in a blue dress, and she lifted the veil of her bonnet and said—“Ram Dass, give my salaams to the Sahib, and tell him that I shall meet him next month at Nuddea.” Then I ran away, because I was afraid.’

What Dumoise said or did I do not know. Ram Dass declares that he said nothing, but walked up and down the verandah all the cold night, waiting for the Memsahib to come up the hill, and stretching out his arms into the dark like a madman. But no Memsahib came, and, next day, he went on to Simla cross-questioning the bearer every hour.

Ram Dass could only say that he had met Mrs. Dumoise, and that she had lifted up her veil and given him the message which he had faithfully repeated to Dumoise. To this statement Ram Dass adhered. He did not know where Nuddea was, had no friends at Nuddea, and would most certainly never go to Nuddea, even though his pay were doubled.

Nuddea is in Bengal, and has nothing whatever to do with a Doctor serving in the Punjab. It must be more than twelve hundred miles south of Meridki.

Dumoise went through Simla without halting, and returned to Meridki, there to take over charge from the man who had been officiating for him during his tour. There were some Dispensary accounts to be explained, and some recent orders of the Surgeon-General to be noted, and, altogether, the taking-over was a full day’s work. In the evening Dumoise told his locum tenens, who was an old friend of his bachelor days, what had happened at Bagi; and the man said that Ram Dass might as well have chosen Tuticorin while he was about it.

At that moment a telegraph-peon came in with a telegram from Simla, ordering Dumoise not to take over charge at Meridki, but to go at once to Nuddea on special duty. There was a nasty outbreak of cholera at Nuddea, and the Bengal Government being shorthanded, as usual, had borrowed a Surgeon from the Punjab.

Dumoise threw the telegram across the table and said—‘Well?’

The other Doctor said nothing. It was all that he could say.

Then he remembered that Dumoise had passed through Simla on his way from Bagi; and thus might, possibly, have heard first news of the impending transfer.

He tried to put the question and the implied suspicion into words, but Dumoise stopped him with—‘If I had desired that, I should never have come back from Chini. I was shooting there. I wish to live, for I have things to do . . . but I shall not be sorry.’

The other man bowed his head, and helped, in the twilight, to pack up Dumoise’s just opened trunks. Ram Dass entered with the lamps.

‘Where is the Sahib going?’ he asked.

‘To Nuddea,’ said Dumoise softly.

Ram Dass clawed Dumoise’s knees and boots and begged him not to go. Ram Dass wept and howled till he was turned out of the room. Then he wrapped up all his belongings and came back to ask for a character. He was not going to Nuddea to see his Sahib die and, perhaps, to die himself.

So Dumoise gave the man his wages and went down to Nuddea alone, the other Doctor bidding him good-bye as one under sentence of death.

Eleven days later he had joined his Memsahib; and the Bengal Government had to borrow a fresh Doctor to cope with that epidemic at Nuddea. The first importation lay dead in Chooadanga Dâk-Bungalow.

 

]]> 9147 Cold Iron https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/cold-iron.htm Thu, 27 May 2021 09:22:44 +0000 https://ks-demo3.web/tale/cold-iron/ page 1 of 5 WHEN Dan and Una had arranged to go out before breakfast, they did not remember that it was Midsummer Morning. They only wanted to see the otter which, old Hobden ... Read more]]>

page 1 of 5

WHEN Dan and Una had arranged to go out before breakfast, they did not remember that it was Midsummer Morning. They only wanted to see the otter which, old Hobden said, had been fishing their brook for weeks; and early morning was the time to surprise him. As they tiptoed out of the house into the wonderful stillness, the church clock struck five. Dan took a few steps across the dew-blobbed lawn, and looked at his black footprints.

‘I think we ought to be kind to our poor boots,’ he said. ‘They’ll get horrid wet.’

It was their first summer in boots, and they hated them, so they took them off, and slung them round their necks, and paddled joyfully over the dripping turf where the shadows lay the wrong way, like evening in the East. The sun was well up and warm, but by the brook the last of the night mist still fumed off the water. They picked up the chain of otter’s footprints on the mud, and followed it from the bank, between the weeds and the drenched mowing, while the birds shouted with surprise. Then the track left the brook and became a smear, as though a log had been dragged along.

They traced it into Three Cows meadow, over the mill-sluice to the Forge, round Hobden’s garden, and then up the slope till it ran out on the short turf and fern of Pook’s Hill, and they heard the cock-pheasants crowing in the woods behind them.

‘No use!’ said Dan, questing like a puzzled hound. ‘The dew’s drying off, and old Hobden says otters’ll travel for miles.’

‘I’m sure we’ve travelled miles.’ Una fanned herself with her hat. ‘How still it is! It’s going to be a regular roaster.’ She looked down the valley, where no chimney yet smoked.

‘Hobden’s up!’ Dan pointed to the open door of the Forge cottage. ‘What d’you suppose he has for breakfast?’

‘One of them. He says they eat good all times of the year,’ Una jerked her head at some stately pheasants going down to the brook for a drink.

A few steps farther on a fox broke almost under their bare feet, yapped, and trotted off.

‘Ah, Mus’ Reynolds—Mus’ Reynolds’—Dan was quoting from old Hobden,—‘if I knowed all you knowed, I’d know something.’ [See ‘The Winged Hats’ in Puck of Pook’s Hill.]

‘I say,’—Una lowered her voice—‘you know that funny feeling of things having happened before. I felt it when you said “Mus’ Reynolds.”’

‘So did I,’ Dan began. ‘What is it?’

They faced each other, stammering with excitement.

‘Wait a shake! I’ll remember in a minute. Wasn’t it something about a fox—last year? Oh, I nearly had it then!’ Dan cried.

‘Be quiet!’ said Una, prancing excitedly. ‘There was something happened before we met the fox last year. Hills! Broken Hills—the play at the theatre—see what you see—’

‘I remember now,’ Dan shouted. ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face—Pook’s Hill—Puck’s Hill—Puck!’

‘I remember, too,’ said Una. ‘And it’s Midsummer Day again!’ The young fern on a knoll rustled, and Puck walked out, chewing a green-topped rush.

‘Good Midsummer Morning to you! Here’s a happy meeting,’ said he. They shook hands all round, and asked questions.

‘You’ve wintered well,’ he said after a while, and looked them up and down. ‘Nothing much wrong with you, seemingly.’

‘They’ve put us into boots,’ said Una. ‘Look at my feet—they’re all pale white, and my toes are squidged together awfully.’

‘Yes—boots make a difference.’ Puck wriggled his brown, square, hairy foot, and cropped a dandelion flower between the big toe and the next.

‘I could do that—last year,’ Dan said dismally, as he tried and failed. ‘And boots simply ruin one’s climbing.’

‘There must be some advantage to them, I suppose,’ said Puck, ‘or folk wouldn’t wear them. Shall we come this way?’ They sauntered along side by side till they reached the gate at the far end of the hillside. Here they halted just like cattle, and let the sun warm their backs while they listened to the flies in the wood.

‘Little Lindens is awake,’ said Una, as she hung with her chin on the top rail. ‘See the chimney smoke?’

‘Today’s Thursday, isn’t it?’ Puck turned to look at the old pink farmhouse across the little valley. ‘Mrs Vincey’s baking day. Bread should rise well this weather.’ He yawned, and that set them both yawning.

The bracken about rustled and ticked and shook in every direction. They felt that little crowds were stealing past.

‘Doesn’t that sound like—er—the People of the Hills?’ said Una.

‘It’s the birds and wild things drawing up to the woods before people get about,’ said Puck, as though he were Ridley the keeper.

‘Oh, we know that. I only said it sounded like.’

‘As I remember ’em, the People of the Hills used to make more noise. They’d settle down for the day rather like small birds settling down for the night. But that was in the days when they carried the high hand. Oh, me! The deeds that I’ve had act and part in, you’d scarcely believe!’

‘I like that!’ said Dan. ‘After all you told us last year, too!’

‘Only, the minute you went away, you made us forget everything,’ said Una.

Puck laughed and shook his head. ‘I shall this year, too. I’ve given you seizin’ of Old England, and I’ve taken away your Doubt and Fear, but your memory and remembrance between whiles I’ll keep where old Billy Trott kept his night-lines—and that’s where he could draw ’em up and hide ’em at need. Does that suit?’ He twinkled mischievously.

‘It’s got to suit,’ said Una, and laughed. ‘We can’t magic back at you.’ She folded her arms and leaned against the gate. ‘Suppose, now, you wanted to magic me into something—an otter? Could you?’

page 2

‘Not with those boots round your neck.’

‘I’ll take them off.’ She threw them on the turf. Dan’s followed immediately. ‘Now!’ she said.

‘Less than ever now you’ve trusted me. Where there’s true faith, there’s no call for magic.’ Puck’s slow smile broadened all over his face.

‘But what have boots to do with it?’ said Una, perching on the gate.

‘There’s Cold Iron in them,’ said Puck, and settled beside her. ‘Nails in the soles, I mean. It makes a difference.’

‘How?’

‘Can’t you feel it does? You wouldn’t like to go back to bare feet again, same as last year, would you? Not really?’

‘No-o. I suppose I shouldn’t—not for always. I’m growing up, you know,’ said Una.

‘But you told us last year, in the Long Slip—at the theatre—that you didn’t mind Cold Iron,’ said Dan.

‘I don’t; but folks in housen, as the People of the Hills call them, must be ruled by Cold Iron. Folk in housen are born on the near side of Cold Iron—there’s iron in every man’s house, isn’t there? They handle Cold Iron every day of their lives, and their fortune’s made or spoilt by Cold Iron in some shape or other. That’s how it goes with Flesh and Blood, and one can’t prevent it.’

‘I don’t quite see. How do you mean?’ said Dan.

‘It would take me some time to tell you.’

‘Oh, it’s ever so long to breakfast,’ said Dan. ‘We looked in the larder before we came out.’ He unpocketed one big hunk of bread and Una another, which they shared with Puck.

‘That’s Little Lindens’ baking,’ he said, as his white teeth sunk in it. ‘I know Mrs Vincey’s hand.’ He ate with a slow sideways thrust and grind, just like old Hobden, and, like Hobden, hardly dropped a crumb. The sun flashed on Little Lindens’ windows, and the cloudless sky grew stiller and hotter in the valley.

‘Ah—Cold Iron,’ he said at last to the impatient children. ‘Folk in housen, as the People of the Hills say, grow careless about Cold Iron. They’ll nail the Horseshoe over the front door, and forget to put it over the back. Then, some time or other, the People of the Hills slip in, find the cradle-babe in the corner, and—’

‘Oh, I know. Steal it and leave a changeling,’ Una cried.

‘No,’ said Puck firmly. ‘All that talk of changelings is people’s excuse for their own neglect. Never believe ’em. I’d whip ’em at the cart-tail through three parishes if I had my way.’

‘But they don’t do it now,’ said Una.

‘Whip, or neglect children? Umm! Some folks and some fields never alter. But the People of the Hills didn’t work any changeling tricks. They’d tiptoe in and whisper and weave round the cradle-babe in the chimney-corner—a fag-end of a charm here, or half a spell there—like kettles singing; but when the babe’s mind came to bud out afterwards, it would act differently from other people in its station. That’s no advantage to man or maid. So I wouldn’t allow it with my folks’ babies here. I told Sir Huon so once.’

‘Who was Sir Huon?’ Dan asked, and Puck turned on him in quiet astonishment.

‘Sir Huon of Bordeaux—he succeeded King Oberon. He had been a bold knight once, but he was lost on the road to Babylon, a long while back. Have you ever heard “How many miles to Babylon?”?’

‘Of course,’ said Dan, flushing.

‘Well, Sir Huon was young when that song was new. But about tricks on mortal babies. I said to Sir Huon in the fern here, on just such a morning as this: “If you crave to act and influence on folk in housen, which I know is your desire, why don’t you take some human cradle-babe by fair dealing, and bring him up among yourselves on the far side of Cold Iron—as Oberon did in time past? Then you could make him a splendid fortune, and send him out into the world.”’

‘“Time past is past time,” says Sir Huon. “I doubt if we could do it. For one thing, the babe would have to be taken without wronging man, woman, or child. For another, he’d have to be born on the far side of Cold Iron—in some house where no Cold Iron ever stood; and for yet the third, he’d have to be kept from Cold Iron all his days till we let him find his fortune. No, it’s not easy,” he said, and he rode off, thinking. You see, Sir Huon had been a man once. ‘I happened to attend Lewes Market next Woden’s Day even, and watched the slaves being sold there—same as pigs are sold at Robertsbridge Market nowadays. Only, the pigs have rings on their noses, and the slaves had rings round their necks.’

‘What sort of rings?’ said Dan.

‘A ring of Cold Iron, four fingers wide, and a thumb thick, just like a quoit, but with a snap to it for to snap round the slave’s neck. They used to do a big trade in slave-rings at the Forge here, and ship them to all parts of Old England, packed in oak sawdust. But, as I was saying, there was a farmer out of the Weald who had bought a woman with a babe in her arms, and he didn’t want any encumbrances to her driving his beasts home for him.’

‘Beast himself!’ said Una, and kicked her bare heel on the gate.

‘So he blamed the auctioneer. “It’s none o’ my baby,” the wench puts in. “I took it off a woman in our gang who died on Terrible Down yesterday.” “I’ll take it off to the church then,” says the farmer. “Mother Church’ll make a monk of it, and we’ll step along home.”

‘It was dusk then. He slipped down to St Pancras’ Church, and laid the babe at the cold chapel door. I breathed on the back of his stooping neck—and—I’ve heard he never could be warm at any fire afterwards. I should have been surprised if he could! Then I whipped up the babe, and came flying home here like a bat to his belfry.

‘On the dewy break of morning of Thor’s own day—just such a day as this—I laid the babe outside the Hill here, and the People flocked up and wondered at the sight.

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‘“You’ve brought him, then?” Sir Huon said, staring like any mortal man.

‘“Yes, and he’s brought his mouth with him, too,” I said. The babe was crying loud for his breakfast.

‘“What is he?” says Sir Huon, when the womenfolk had drawn him under to feed him.

‘“Full Moon and Morning Star may know,” I says. “I don’t. By what I could make out of him in the moonlight, he’s without brand or blemish. I’ll answer for it that he’s born on the far side of Cold Iron, for he was born under a shaw on Terrible Down, and I’ve wronged neither man, woman, nor child in taking him, for he is the son of a dead slave-woman.

‘“All to the good, Robin,” Sir Huon said. “He’ll be the less anxious to leave us. Oh, we’ll give him a splendid fortune, and we shall act and influence on folk in housen as we have always craved.” His Lady came up then, and drew him under to watch the babe’s wonderful doings.’ ‘Who was his Lady?’ said Dan. ‘The Lady Esclairmonde. She had been a woman once, till she followed Sir Huon across the fern, as we say. Babies are no special treat to me—I’ve watched too many of them—so I stayed on the Hill. Presently I heard hammering down at the Forge there.’ Puck pointed towards Hobden’s cottage. ‘It was too early for any workmen, but it passed through my mind that the breaking day was Thor’s own day. A slow north-east wind blew up and set the oaks sawing and fretting in a way I remembered; so I slipped over to see what I could see.’

‘And what did you see?’

‘A smith forging something or other out of Cold Iron. When it was finished, he weighed it in his hand (his back was towards me), and tossed it from him a longish quoit-throw down the valley. I saw Cold Iron flash in the sun, but I couldn’t quite make out where it fell. That didn’t trouble me. I knew it would be found sooner or later by someone.’

‘How did you know?’ Dan went on.

‘Because I knew the Smith that made it,’ said Puck quietly.

‘Wayland Smith?’ Una suggested. [See ‘Weland’s Sword’ in Puck of Pook’s Hill.]

‘No. I should have passed the time o’ day with Wayland Smith, of course. This other was different. So’—Puck made a queer crescent in the air with his finger—‘I counted the blades of grass under my nose till the wind dropped and he had gone—he and his Hammer.’

‘Was it Thor then?’ Una murmured under her breath.

‘Who else? It was Thor’s own day.’ Puck repeated the sign. ‘I didn’t tell Sir Huon or his Lady what I’d seen. Borrow trouble for yourself if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbours. Moreover, I might have been mistaken about the Smith’s work. He might have been making things for mere amusement, though it wasn’t like him, or he might have thrown away an old piece of made iron. One can never be sure. So I held my tongue and enjoyed the babe. He was a wonderful child—and the People of the Hills were so set on him, they wouldn’t have believed me. He took to me wonderfully. As soon as he could walk he’d putter forth with me all about my Hill here. Fern makes soft falling! He knew when day broke on earth above, for he’d thump, thump, thump, like an old buck-rabbit in a bury, and I’d hear him say “Opy!” till some one who knew the Charm let him out, and then it would be “Robin! Robin!” all round Robin Hood’s barn, as we say, till he’d found me.’

‘The dear!’ said Una. ‘I’d like to have seen him!’ ‘Yes, he was a boy. And when it came to learning his words—spells and such-like—he’d sit on the Hill in the long shadows, worrying out bits of charms to try on passers-by. And when the bird flew to him, or the tree bowed to him for pure love’s sake (like everything else on my Hill), he’d shout, “Robin! Look—see! Look, see, Robin!” and sputter out some spell or other that they had taught him, all wrong end first, till I hadn’t the heart to tell him it was his own dear self and not the words that worked the wonder. When he got more abreast of his words, and could cast spells for sure, as we say, he took more and more notice of things and people in the world. People, of course, always drew him, for he was mortal all through.

‘Seeing that he was free to move among folk in housen, under or over Cold Iron, I used to take him along with me, night-walking, where he could watch folk, and I could keep him from touching Cold Iron. That wasn’t so difficult as it sounds, because there are plenty of things besides Cold Iron in housen to catch a boy’s fancy. He was a handful, though! I shan’t forget when I took him to Little Lindens—his first night under a roof. The smell of the rushlights and the bacon on the beams—they were stuffing a feather-bed too, and it was a drizzling warm night—got into his head. Before I could stop him—we were hiding in the bakehouse—he’d whipped up a storm of wildfire, with flashlights and voices, which sent the folk shrieking into the garden, and a girl overset a hive there, and—of course he didn’t know till then such things could touch him—he got badly stung, and came home with his face looking like kidney potatoes! ‘You can imagine how angry Sir Huon and Lady Esclairmonde were with poor Robin! They said the Boy was never to be trusted with me night-walking any more—and he took about as much notice of their order as he did of the bee-stings. Night after night, as soon as it was dark, I’d pick up his whistle in the wet fern, and off we’d flit together among folk in housen till break of day—he asking questions, and I answering according to my knowledge. Then we fell into mischief again!’ Puck shook till the gate rattled.

‘We came across a man up at Brightling who was beating his wife with a bat in the garden. I was just going to toss the man over his own woodlump when the Boy jumped the hedge and ran at him. Of course the woman took her husband’s part, and while the man beat him, the woman scratted his face. It wasn’t till I danced among the cabbages like Brightling Beacon all ablaze that they gave up and ran indoors. The Boy’s fine green-and-gold clothes were torn all to pieces, and he had been welted in twenty places with the man’s bat, and scratted by the woman’s nails to pieces. He looked like a Robertsbridge hopper on a Monday morning.

‘“Robin,” said he, while I was trying to clean him down with a bunch of hay, “I don’t quite understand folk in housen. I went to help that old woman, and she hit me, Robin!”

‘“What else did you expect?” I said. “That was the one time when you might have worked one of your charms, instead of running into three times your weight.”

‘“I didn’t think,” he says. “But I caught the man one on the head that was as good as any charm. Did you see it work, Robin?”

‘“Mind your nose,” I said. “Bleed it on a dockleaf—not your sleeve, for pity’s sake.” I knew what the Lady Esclairmonde would say.

‘He didn’t care. He was as happy as a gipsy with a stolen pony, and the front part of his gold coat, all blood and grass stains, looked like ancient sacrifices.

‘Of course the People of the Hills laid the blame on me. The Boy could do nothing wrong, in their eyes.

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‘“You are bringing him up to act and influence on folk in housen, when you’re ready to let him go,” I said. “Now he’s begun to do it, why do you cry shame on me? That’s no shame. It’s his nature drawing him to his kind.”

‘“But we don’t want him to begin that way,” the Lady Esclairmonde said. “We intend a splendid fortune for him—not your flitter-by-night, hedge-jumping, gipsy-work.”

‘“I don’t blame you, Robin,” says Sir Huon, “but I do think you might look after the Boy more closely.”

‘“I’ve kept him away from Cold Iron these sixteen years ,” I said. “You know as well as I do, the first time he touches Cold Iron he’ll find his own fortune, in spite of everything you intend for him. You owe me something for that.”

‘Sir Huon, having been a man, was going to allow me the right of it, but the Lady Esclairmonde, being the Mother of all Mothers, over-persuaded him.

‘“We’re very grateful,” Sir Huon said, “but we think that just for the present you are about too much with him on the Hill.”

‘“Though you have said it,” I said, “I will give you a second chance.” I did not like being called to account for my doings on my own Hill. I wouldn’t have stood it even that far except I loved the Boy.

‘“No! No!” says the Lady Esclairmonde. “He’s never any trouble when he’s left to me and himself. It’s your fault.”

‘“You have said it,” I answered. “Hear me! From now on till the Boy has found his fortune, whatever that may be, I vow to you all on my Hill, by Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, and by the Hammer of Asa Thor”—again Puck made that curious double-cut in the air—‘“that you may leave me out of all your counts and reckonings.” Then I went out’—he snapped his fingers—‘like the puff of a candle, and though they called and cried, they made nothing by it. I didn’t promise not to keep an eye on the Boy, though. I watched him close—close—close!

‘When he found what his people had forced me to do, he gave them a piece of his mind, but they all kissed and cried round him, and being only a boy, he came over to their way of thinking (I don’t blame him), and called himself unkind and ungrateful; and it all ended in fresh shows and plays, and magics to distract him from folk in housen. Dear heart alive! How he used to call and call on me, and I couldn’t answer, or even let him know that I was near!’

‘Not even once?’ said Una. ‘If he was very lonely?’

‘No, he couldn’t,’ said Dan, who had been thinking. ‘Didn’t you swear by the Hammer of Thor that you wouldn’t, Puck?’

‘By that Hammer!’ was the deep rumbled reply. Then he came back to his soft speaking voice. ‘And the Boy was lonely, when he couldn’t see me any more. He began to try to learn all learning (he had good teachers), but I saw him lift his eyes from the big black books towards folk in housen all the time. He studied song-making (good teachers he had too!), but he sang those songs with his back toward the Hill, and his face toward folk. I know! I have sat and grieved over him grieving within a rabbit’s jump of him. Then he studied the High, Low, and Middle Magic. He had promised the Lady Esclairmonde he would never go near folk in housen; so he had to make shows and shadows for his mind to chew on.’

‘What sort of shows?’ said Dan.

‘Just boy’s Magic as we say. I’ll show you some, some time. It pleased him for the while, and it didn’t hurt any one in particular except a few men coming home late from the taverns. But I knew what it was a sign of, and I followed him like a weasel follows a rabbit. As good a boy as ever lived! I’ve seen him with Sir Huon and the Lady Esclairmonde stepping just as they stepped to avoid the track of Cold Iron in a furrow, or walking wide of some old ash-tot because a man had left his swop-hook or spade there; and all his heart aching to go straightforward among folk in housen all the time. Oh, a good boy! They always intended a fine fortune for him—but they could never find it in their heart to let him begin. I’ve heard that many warned them, but they wouldn’t be warned. So it happened as it happened.

‘One hot night I saw the Boy roving about here wrapped in his flaming discontents. There was flash on flash against the clouds, and rush on rush of shadows down the valley till the shaws were full of his hounds giving tongue, and the woodways were packed with his knights in armour riding down into the water-mists—all his own Magic, of course. Behind them you could see great castles lifting slow and splendid on arches of moonshine, with maidens waving their hands at the windows, which all turned into roaring rivers; and then would come the darkness of his own young heart wiping out the whole slateful. But boy’s Magic doesn’t trouble me—or Merlin’s either for that matter. I followed the Boy by the flashes and the whirling wildfire of his discontent, and oh, but I grieved for him! Oh, but I grieved for him! He pounded back and forth like a bullock in a strange pasture—sometimes alone—sometimes waist-deep among his shadow-hounds—sometimes leading his shadow-knights on a hawk-winged horse to rescue his shadow-girls. I never guessed he had such Magic at his command; but it’s often that way with boys.

‘Just when the owl comes home for the second time, I saw Sir Huon and the Lady ride down my Hill, where there’s not much Magic allowed except mine. They were very pleased at the Boy’s Magic—the valley flared with it—and I heard them settling his splendid fortune when they should find it in their hearts to let him go to act and influence among folk in housen. Sir Huon was for making him a great King somewhere or other, and the Lady was for making him a marvellous wise man whom all should praise for his skill and kindness. She was very kind-hearted.

‘Of a sudden we saw the flashes of his discontents turned back on the clouds, and his shadow-hounds stopped baying.

‘“There’s Magic fighting Magic over yonder,” the Lady Esclairmonde cried, reigning up. “Who is against him?”

‘I could have told her, but I did not count it any of my business to speak of Asa Thor’s comings and goings.

‘How did you know?’said Una.

‘A slow North-East wind blew up, sawing and fretting through the oaks in a way I remembered. The wildfire roared up, one last time in one sheet, and snuffed out like a rushlight, and a bucketful of stinging hail fell. We heard the Boy walking in the Long Slip – where I first met you.

‘“Here, oh, come here!” said the Lady Esclairmonde, and stretched out her arms in the dark.

‘He was coming slowly, but he stumbled in the footpath, being, of course, mortal man.

‘“Why, what’s this?” he said to himself. We three heard him.

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‘“Hold, lad, hold! ’Ware Cold Iron!” said Sir Huon, and they two swept down like nightjars, crying as they rode.

‘I ran at their stirrups, but it was too late. We felt that the Boy had touched Cold Iron somewhere in the dark, for the Horses of the Hill shied off, and whipped round, snorting.

‘Then I judged it was time for me to show myself in my own shape; so I did.

‘“Whatever it is,” I said, “he has taken hold of it. Now we must find out whatever it is that he has taken hold of, for that will be his fortune.”

‘“Come here, Robin,” the Boy shouted, as soon as he heard my voice. “I don’t know what I’ve hold of.”

‘“It is in your hands,” I called back. “Tell us if it is hard and cold, with jewels atop. For that will be a King’s Sceptre. “

‘“Not by a furrow-long,” he said, and stooped and tugged in the dark. We heard him.

‘“Has it a handle and two cutting edges?” I called. “For that’ll be a Knight’s Sword.”

‘“No, it hasn’t,” he says. “It’s neither ploughshare, whittle, hook, nor crook, nor aught I’ve yet seen men handle.” By this time he was scratting in the dirt to prise it up.

‘“Whatever it is, you know who put it there, Robin,” said Sir Huon to me, “or you would not ask those questions. You should have told me as soon as you knew.”

‘“What could you or I have done against the Smith that made it and laid it for him to find?” I said, and I whispered Sir Huon what I had seen at the Forge on Thor’s Day, when the babe was first brought to the Hill.

‘“Oh, good-bye, our dreams!” said Sir Huon. “It’s neither sceptre, sword, nor plough! Maybe yet it’s a bookful of learning, bound with iron clasps. There’s a chance for a splendid fortune in that sometimes.”

‘But we knew we were only speaking to comfort ourselves, and the Lady Esclairmonde, having been a woman, said so.

‘“Thur aie! Thor help us!” the Boy called. “It is round, without end, Cold Iron, four fingers wide and a thumb thick, and there is writing on the breadth of it.”

‘“Read the writing if you have the learning,” I called. The darkness had lifted by then, and the owl was out over the fern again.

‘He called back, reading the runes on the iron:

“Few can see Further forth Than when the child Meets the Cold Iron.”

And there he stood, in clear starlight, with a new, heavy, shining slave-ring round his proud neck.

‘“Is this how it goes?” he asked, while the Lady Esclairmonde cried.

‘“That is how it goes,” I said. He hadn’t snapped the catch home yet, though.

‘“What fortune does it mean for him?” said Sir Huon, while the Boy fingered the ring. “You who walk under Cold Iron, you must tell us and teach us.”

‘“Tell I can, but teach I cannot,” I said. “The virtue of the Ring is only that he must go among folk in housen henceforward, doing what they want done, or what he knows they need, all Old England over. Never will he be his own master, nor yet ever any man’s. He will get half he gives, and give twice what he gets, till his life’s last breath; and if he lays aside his load before he draws that last breath, all his work will go for naught.”

‘“Oh, cruel, wicked Thor!” cried the Lady Esclairmonde. “Ah, look see, all of you! The catch is still open! He hasn’t locked it. He can still take it off. He can still come back. Come back!” She went as near as she dared, but she could not lay hands on Cold Iron. The Boy could have taken it off, yes. We waited to see if he would, but he put up his hand, and the snap locked home.

‘“What else could I have done?” said he.

‘“Surely, then, you will do,” I said. “Morning’s coming, and if you three have any farewells to make, make them now, for, after sunrise, Cold Iron must be your master.” ‘So the three sat down, cheek by wet cheek, telling over their farewells till morning light. As good a boy as ever lived, he was.’

‘And what happened to him?’ asked Dan.

‘When morning came, Cold Iron was master of him and his fortune, and he went to work among folk in housen. Presently he came across a maid like-minded with himself, and they were wedded, and had bushels of children, as the saying is. Perhaps you’ll meet some of his breed, this year.’

‘Thank you,’ said Una. ‘But what did the poor Lady Esclairmonde do?’

‘What can you do when Asa Thor lays the Cold Iron in a lad’s path? She and Sir Huon were comforted to think they had given the Boy good store of learning to act and influence on folk in housen. For he was a good boy! Isn’t it getting on for breakfast-time? I’ll walk with you a piece.’

When they were well in the centre of the bone-dry fern, Dan nudged Una, who stopped and put on a boot as quickly as she could. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘you can’t get any Oak, Ash, and Thorn leaves from here, and’—she balanced wildly on one leg—‘I’m standing on Cold Iron. What’ll you do if we don’t go away?’

‘E-eh? Of all mortal impudence!’ said Puck, as Dan, also in one boot, grabbed his sister’s hand to steady himself. He walked round them, shaking with delight. ‘You think I can only work with a handful of dead leaves? This comes of taking away your Doubt and Fear! I’ll show you!’

A minute later they charged into old Hobden at his simple breakfast of cold roast pheasant, shouting that there was a wasps’ nest in the fern which they had nearly stepped on, and asking him to come and smoke it out. ‘It’s too early for wops-nests, an’ I don’t go diggin’ in the Hill, not for shillin’s,’ said the old man placidly. ‘You’ve a thorn in your foot, Miss Una. Sit down, and put on your t’other boot. You’re too old to be caperin’ barefoot on an empty stomach. Stay it with this chicken o’ mine.’

]]> 9357 Dymchurch Flit https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/dymchurch-flit.htm Fri, 23 Apr 2021 14:47:47 +0000 https://ks-demo3.web/tale/dymchurch-flit/ page 1 of 4 JUST at dusk, a soft September rain began to fall on the hop-pickers. The mothers wheeled the bouncing perambulators out of the gardens; bins were put away, and tally-books made ... Read more]]>
credit: H.R.Millar 1906

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JUST at dusk, a soft September rain began to fall on the hop-pickers. The mothers wheeled the bouncing perambulators out of the gardens; bins were put away, and tally-books made up. The young couples strolled home, two to each umbrella, and the single men walked behind them laughing. Dan and Una, who had been picking after their lessons, marched off to roast potatoes at the oast-house, where old Hobden, with Blue-eyed Bess, his lurcher dog, lived all the month through, drying the hops.They settled themselves, as usual, on the sack-strewn cot in front of the fires, and, when Hobden drew up the shutter, stared, as usual, at the flameless bed of coals spouting its heat up the dark well of the old-fashioned roundel. Slowly he cracked off a few fresh pieces of coal, packed them, with fingers that never flinched, exactly where they would do most good; slowly he reached behind him till Dan tilted the potatoes into his iron scoop of a hand; carefully he arranged them round the fire, and then stood for a moment, black against the glare. As he closed the shutter, the oast-house seemed dark before the day’s end, and he lit the candle in the lanthorn. The children liked all these things because they knew them so well.

The Bee Boy, Hobden’s son, who is not quite right in his head, though he can do anything with bees, slipped in like a shadow. They only guessed it when Bess’s stump-tail wagged against them.

‘Old Mother Laidinwool had nigh twelve months been dead,
She heard the hops were doing well, and then popped up her head.’

‘There can’t be two people made to holler like that!’ cried old Hobden, wheeling round.

‘For, says she, “The boys I’ve picked with when I was young and fair,
They’re bound to be at hoppin’, and I’m——”’

A man showed at the doorway.

‘Well, well! They do say hoppin’ll draw the very deadest, and now I belieft ’em. You, Tom? Tom Shoesmith!’ Hobden lowered his lanthorn.

‘You’re a hem of a time makin’ your mind to it, Ralph!’ The stranger strode in—three full inches taller than Hobden, a grey-whiskered, brown-faced giant with clear blue eyes. They shook hands, and the children could hear the hard palms rasp together.

‘You ain’t lost none o’ your grip,’ said Hobden. ‘Was it thirty or forty year back you broke my head at Peasmarsh Fair?’

‘Only thirty an’ no odds ’tween us regardin’ heads, neither. You had it back at me with a hop-pole. How did we get home that night? Swimmin’?’

‘Same way the pheasant come into Gubbs’s pocket—by a little luck an’ a deal o’ conjurin’.’ Old Hobden laughed in his deep chest.

‘I see you’ve not forgot your way about the woods. D’ye do any o’ this still?’ The stranger pretended to look along a gun.

Hobden answered with a quick movement of the hand as though he were pegging down a rabbit-wire.

‘No. That’s all that’s left me now. Age she must as Age she can. An’ what’s your news since all these years?’

‘Oh, I’ve bin to Plymouth, I’ve bin to Dover—
I’ve bin ramblin’, boys, the wide world over,’

the man answered cheerily. ‘I reckon I know as much of Old England as most.’ He turned towards the children and winked boldly.

‘I lay they told you a sight o’ lies, then. I’ve been into England fur as Wiltsheer once. I was cheated proper over a pair of hedging-gloves,’ said Hobden.

‘There’s fancy-talkin’ everywhere. You’ve cleaved to your own parts pretty middlin’ close, Ralph.’

‘Can’t shift an old tree ’thout it dyin’,’ Hobden chuckled. ‘An’ I be no more anxious to die than you look to be to help me with my hops to-night.’

The great man leaned against the brick-work of the roundel, and swung his arms abroad. ‘Hire me!’ was all he said, and they stumped upstairs laughing.

The children heard their shovels rasp on the cloth where the yellow hops lie drying above the fires, and all the oasthouse filled with the sweet, sleepy smell as they were turned.

‘Who is it?’ Una whispered to the Bee Boy.

‘Dunno, no more’n you—if you dunno,’ said he, and smiled.

The voices on the drying-floor talked and chuckled together, and the heavy footsteps moved back and forth. Presently a hop-pocket dropped through the press-hole overhead, and stiffened and fattened as they shovelled it full. ‘Clank!’ went the press, and rammed the loose stuff into tight cake.

‘Gently!’ they heard Hobden cry. ‘You’ll bust her crop if you lay on so. You be as careless as Gleason’s bull, Tom. Come an’ sit by the fires. She’ll do now.’

They came down, and as Hobden opened the shutter to see if the potatoes were done Tom Shoesmith said to the children, ‘Put a plenty salt on ’em. That’ll show you the sort o’ man I be.’ Again he winked, and again the Bee Boy laughed and Una stared at Dan.

‘I know what sort o’ man you be,’ old Hobden grunted, groping for the potatoes round the fire.

‘Do ye?’ Tom went on behind his back. ‘Some of us can’t abide Horseshoes, or Church Bells, or Running Water; an’, talkin’ o’ runnin’ water’—he turned to Hobden, who was backing out of the roundel—‘d’you mind the great floods at Robertsbridge, when the miller’s man was drowned in the street?’

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‘Middlin’ well.’ Old Hobden let himself down on the coals by the fire-door. ‘I was courtin’ my woman on the Marsh that year. Carter to Mus’ Plum I was, gettin’ ten shillin’s week. Mine was a Marsh woman.’

‘Won’erful odd-gates place—Romney Marsh,’ said Tom Shoesmith. ‘I’ve heard say the world’s divided like into Europe, Ashy, Afriky, Ameriky, Australy, an’ Romney Marsh.’

‘The Marsh folk think so,’ said Hobden. ‘I had a hem o’ trouble to get my woman to leave it.’

‘Where did she come out of? I’ve forgot, Ralph.’

‘Dymchurch under the Wall,’ Hobden answered, a potato in his hand.

‘Then she’d be a Pett—or a Whitgift, would she?’

‘Whitgift.’ Hobden broke open the potato and ate it with the curious neatness of men who make most of their meals in the blowy open. ‘She growed to be quite reasonable-like after livin’ in the Weald awhile, but our first twenty year or two she was odd-fashioned, no bounds. And she was a won’erful hand with bees.’ He cut away a little piece of potato and threw it out to the door.

‘Ah! I’ve heard say the Whitgifts could see further through a millstone than most,’ said Shoesmith. ‘Did she, now?’

‘She was honest-innocent of any nigro-mancin’,’ said Hobden. ‘Only she’d read signs and sinnifications out o’ birds flyin’, stars fallin’, bees hivin’, and such. An’ she’d lie awake listenin—for calls, she said.’

‘That don’t prove naught,’ said Tom. ‘All Marsh folk has been smugglers since time everlastin’. ’Twould be in her blood to listen out o’ nights.’

‘Nature-ally,’ old Hobden replied, smiling. ‘I mind when there was smugglin’ a sight nearer us than the Marsh be. But that wasn’t my woman’s trouble. ’Twas a passel o’ no-sense talk’—he dropped his voice—‘about Pharisees.’

‘Yes. I’ve heard Marsh men belieft in ’em.’ Tom looked straight at the wide-eyed children beside Bess.

‘Pharisees,’ cried Una. ’Fairies? Oh, I see!’

‘People o’ the Hills,’ said the Bee Boy, throwing half of his potato towards the door.

‘There you be!’ said Hobden, pointing at him. ‘My boy, he has her eyes and her out-gate senses. That’s what she called ’em!’

‘And what did you think of it all?’

‘Um—um,’ Hobden rumbled. ‘A man that uses fields an’ shaws after dark as much as I’ve done, he don’t go out of his road excep’ for keepers.’

‘But settin’ that aside?’ said Tom, coaxingly. ‘I saw ye throw the Good Piece out-at-doors just now. Do ye believe or—do ye?’

‘There was a great black eye to that tater,’ said Hobden, indignantly.

‘My liddle eye didn’t see un, then. It looked as if you meant it for—for Any One that might need it. But settin’ that aside. D’ye believe or—do ye?’

‘I ain’t sayin’ nothin’, because I’ve heard naught, an’ I’ve seen naught. But if you was to say there was more things after dark in the shaws than men, or fur, or feather, or fin, I dunno as I’d go far about to call you a liar. Now turnagain, Tom. What’s your say?’

‘I’m like you. I say nothin’. But I’ll tell you a tale, an’ you can fit it as how you please.’

‘Passel o’ no-sense stuff,’ growled Hobden, but he filled his pipe.

‘The Marsh men they call it Dymchurch Flit,’ Tom went on slowly. ’Hap you have heard it?’

‘My woman. she’ve told it me scores o’ times. Dunno as I didn’t end by belieftin’ it—sometimes.’

Hobden crossed over as he spoke, and sucked with his pipe at the yellow lanthorn flame. Tom rested one great elbow on one great knee, where he sat among the coal.

‘Have you ever bin in the Marsh?’ he said to Dan.

‘Only as far as Rye, once,’ Dan answered.

‘Ah, that’s but the edge. Back behind of her there’s steeples settin’ beside churches, an’ wise women settin’ beside their doors, an’ the sea settin’ above the land, an’ ducks herdin’ wild in the diks’ (he meant ditches). ‘The Marsh is justabout riddled with diks an’ sluices, an’ tidegates an’ water-lets. You can hear ’em bubblin’ an’ grummelin’ when the tide works in ’em, an’ then you hear the sea rangin’ left and right-handed all up along the Wall. You’ve seen how flat she is—the Marsh? You’d think nothin’ easier than to walk eend-on acrost her? Ah, but the diks an’ the water-lets, they twists the roads about as ravelly as witch-yarn on the spindles. So ye get all turned round in broad daylight.’

‘That’s because they’ve dreened the waters into the diks,’ said Hobden. ‘When I courted my woman the rushes was green—Eh me! the rushes was green—an’ the Bailiff o’ the Marshes, he rode up and down as free as the fog.’

‘Who was he?’ said Dan.

‘Why, the Marsh fever an’ ague. He’ve clapped me on the shoulder once or twice till I shook proper. But now the dreenin’ off of the waters have done away with the fevers; so they make a joke, like, that the Bailiff o’ the Marshes broke his neck in a dik. A won’erful place for bees an’ ducks ’tis too.’

‘An’ old,’ Tom went on. ‘Flesh an’ Blood have been there since Time Everlastin’ Beyond. Well, now, speakin’ among themselves, the Marshmen say that from Time Everlastin’ Beyond, the Pharisees favoured the Marsh above the rest of Old England. I lay the Marsh men ought to know. They’ve been out after dark, father an’ son, smugglin’ some one thing or t’other, since ever wool grew to sheep’s backs. They say there was always a middlin’ few Pharisees to be seen on the Marsh. Impident as rabbits, they was. They’d dance on the nakid roads in the nakid daytime; they’d flash their liddle green lights along the diks, comin’ an’ goin’, like honest smugglers. Yes, an’ times they’d lock the church doors against parson an’ clerk of Sundays.’

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‘That ’ud be smugglers layin’ in the lace or the brandy till they could run it out o’ the Marsh. I’ve told my woman so,’ said Hobden.

‘I’ll lay she didn’t belieft it, then—not if she was a Whitgift. A won’erful choice place for Pharisees, the Marsh, by all accounts, till Queen Bess’s father he come in with his Reformatories.’

‘Would that be a Act o’ Parliament like?’ Hobden asked.

‘Sure-ly. ’Can’t do nothing in Old England without Act, Warrant, an’ Summons. He got his Act allowed him, an’, they say, Queen Bess’s father he used the parish churches something shameful. Justabout tore the gizzards out of I dunnamany. Some folk in England they held with ’en; but some they saw it different, an’ it eended in ’em takin’ sides an’ burnin’ each other no bounds, accordin’ which side was top, time bein’. That tarrified the Pharisees: for Goodwill among Flesh an’ Blood is meat an’ drink to ’em, an’ ill-will is poison.’

‘Same as bees,’ said the Bee Boy. ‘Bees won’t stay by a house where there’s hating.’

‘True,’ said Tom. ‘This Reformatories tarrified the Pharisees same as the reaper goin’ round a last stand o’ wheat tarrifies rabbits. They packed into the Marsh from all parts, and they says, “Fair or foul, we must flit out o’ this, for Merry England’s done with, an’ we’re reckoned among the Images.”’

‘Did they all see it that way?’ said Hobden.

‘All but one that was called Robin—if you’ve heard of him. What are you laughing at?’ Tom turned to Dan. ‘The Pharisees’s trouble didn’t tech Robin, because he’d cleaved middlin’ close to people like. No more he never meant to go out of Old England—not he; so he was sent messagin’ for help among Flesh an’ Blood. But Flesh an’ Blood must always think of their own concerns, an’ Robin couldn’t get through at ’em, ye see. They thought it was tide-echoes off the Marsh.’

‘What did you—what did the fai—Pharisees want?’ Una asked.

‘A boat, to be sure. Their liddle wings could no more cross Channel than so many tired butterflies. A boat an’ a crew they desired to sail ’em over to France, where yet awhile folks hadn’t tore down the Images. They couldn’t abide cruel Canterbury Bells ringin’ to Bulverhithe for more pore men an’ women to be burnded, nor the King’s proud messenger ridin’ through the land givin’ orders to tear down the Images. They couldn’t abide it no shape. Nor yet they couldn’t get their boat an’ crew to flit by without Leave an’ Good-will from Flesh an’ Blood; an’ Flesh an’ Blood came an’ went about its own business the while the Marsh was swarvin’ up, an’ swarvin’ up with Pharisees from all England over, striving all means to get through at Flesh an’ Blood to tell ’em their sore need . . . . I don’t know as you’ve ever heard say Pharisees are like chickens?’

‘My woman used to say that too,’ said Hobden, folding his brown arms.

‘They be. You run too many chickens together, an’ the ground sickens like, an’ you get a squat, an’ your chickens die. ’Same way, you
crowd Pharisees all in one place—they don’t die, but Flesh an’ Blood walkin’ among ’em is apt to sick up an’ pine off: They don’t mean it, an’ Flesh an’ Blood don’t know it, but that’s the truth-—as I’ve heard. The Pharisees through bein’ all stenched up an’ frighted, an’ tryin’ to come through with their supplications, they nature-ally changed the thin airs and humours in Flesh an’ Blood. It lay on the Marsh like thunder. Men saw their churches ablaze with the wildfire in the windows after dark; they saw their cattle scatterin’ and no man scarin’; their sheep flockin’ and no man drivin’; their horses latherin’ an’ no man leadin’; they saw the liddle low green lights more than ever in the dik-sides; they heard the liddle feet patterin’ more than ever round the houses; an’ night an’ day, day an’ night, ’twas all as though they were bein’ creeped up on, and hinted at by Some One or other that couldn’t rightly shape their trouble. Oh, I lay they sweated! Man an’ maid, woman an’ child, their nature done ’em no service all the weeks while the Marsh was swarvin’ up with Pharisees. But they was Flesh an’ Blood, an’ Marsh men before all. They reckoned the signs sinnified trouble for the Marsh. Or that the sea ’ud rear up against Dymchurch Wall an’ they’d be drownded like Old Winchelsea; or that the Plague was comin’. So they looked for the meanin’ in the sea or in the clouds—far an’ high up. They never thought to look near an’ kneehigh, where they could see naught.

‘Now there was a poor widow at Dymchurch under the Wall, which, lacking man or property, she had the more time for feeling; and she come to feel there was a Trouble outside her doorstep bigger an’ heavier than aught she’d ever carried over it. She had two sons—one born blind, and t’other struck dumb through fallin’ off the Wall when he was liddle. They was men grown, but not wage-earnin’, an’ she worked for ’em, keepin’ bees and answerin’ Questions.’

‘What sort of questions?’ said Dan.

‘Like where lost things might be found, an’ what to put about a crooked baby’s neck, an’ how to join parted sweethearts. She felt the Trouble on the Marsh same as eels feel thunder. She was a wise woman.’

‘My woman was won’erful weather-tender, too,’ said Hobden. ‘I’ve seen her brish sparks like off an anvil out of her hair in thunderstorms. But she never laid out to answer Questions.’

‘This woman was a Seeker like, an’ Seekers they sometimes find. One night, while she lay abed, hot an’ aching, there come a Dream an’ tapped at her window, and “Widow Whitgift,” it said, “Widow Whitgift!”

‘First, by the wings an’ the whistling, she thought it was peewits, but last she arose an’ dressed herself, an’ opened her door to the Marsh, an’ she felt the Trouble an’ the Groaning all about her, strong as fever an’ ague, an’ she calls: “What is it? Oh, what is it?”

‘Then ’twas all like the frogs in the diks peeping: then ’twas all like the reeds in the diks clip-clapping; an’ then the great Tide-wave rummelled along the Wall, an’ she couldn’t hear proper.

‘Three times she called, an’ three times the Tide-wave did her down. But she catched the quiet between, an’ she cries out, “What is the Trouble on the Marsh that’s been lying down with my heart an’ arising with my body this month gone?” She felt a liddle hand lay hold on her gown-hem, an’ she stooped to the pull o’ that liddle hand.’

Tom Shoesmith spread his huge fist before the fire and smiled at it.

‘“Will the sea drown the Marsh?” she says. She was a Marsh-woman first an’ foremost.

‘“No,” says the liddle voice. “Sleep sound for all o’ that.”

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‘“Is the Plague comin’ to the Marsh?” she says. Them was all the ills she knowed.

‘“No. Sleep sound for all o’ that,” says Robin.

‘She turned about, half mindful to go in, but the liddle voices grieved that shrill an’ sorrowful she turns back, an’ she cries: “If it is not a Trouble of Flesh an’ Blood, what can I do?”

‘The Pharisees cried out upon her from all round to fetch them a boat to sail to France, an’ come back no more.

‘“There’s a boat on the Wall,” she says, “but I can’t push it down to the sea, nor sail it when ’tis there.”

‘“Lend us your sons,” says all the Pharisees. “Give ’em Leave an’ Good-will to sail it for us, Mother—O Mother!”

‘“One’s dumb, an’ t’other’s blind,” she says. “But all the dearer me for that; and you’ll lose them in the big sea.” The voices justabout pierced through her; an’ there was childern’s voices too. She stood out all she could, but she couldn’t rightly stand against that. So she says: “If you can draw my sons for your job, I’ll not hinder ’em. You can’t ask no more of a Mother.”

S‘he saw them liddle green lights dance an’ cross till she was dizzy; she heard them liddle feet patterin’ by the thousand; she heard cruel Canterbury Bells ringing to Bulverhithe, an’ she heard the great Tide-wave ranging along the Wall. That was while the Pharisees was workin’ a Dream to wake her two sons asleep: an’ while she bit on her fingers she saw them two she’d bore come out an’ pass her with never a word. She followed ’em, cryin’ pitiful, to the old boat on the Wall, an’ that they took an’ runned down to the Sea.

‘When they’d stepped mast an’ sail the blind son speaks: “Mother, we’re waitin’ your Leave an’ Good-will to take Them over.”’

Tom Shoesmith threw back his head and half shut his eyes.

‘Eh, me!’ he said. ‘She was a fine, valiant woman, the Widow Whitgift. She stood twistin’ the eends of her long hair over her fingers, an’ she shook like a poplar, makin’ up her mind. The Pharisees all about they hushed their children from cryin’ an’ they waited dumb-still. She was all their dependence. ’Thout her Leave an’ Good-will they could not pass; for she was the Mother. So she shook like a aps-tree makin’ up her mind. ’Last she drives the word past her teeth, an “Go!” she says. “Go with my Leave an’ Goodwill.”

‘Then I saw—then, they say, she had to brace back same as if she was wadin’ in tide-water; for the Pharisees just about flowed past her—down the beach to the boat, I dunnamany of ’em—with their wives an’ children an’ valooables, all escapin’ out of cruel Old England. Silver you could hear clinkin’, an’ liddle bundles hove down dunt on the bottom-boards, an’ passels o’ liddle swords an’ shields raklin’, an’ liddle fingers an’ toes scratchin’ on the boatside to board her when the two sons pushed her off. That boat she sunk lower an’ lower, but all the Widow could see in it was her boys movin’ hampered-like to get at the tackle. Up sail they did, an’ away they went, deep as a Rye barge, away into the offshore mistes, an’ the Widow Whitgift she sat down and eased her grief till mornin’ light.’

‘I never heard she was all alone,’ said Hobden.

‘I remember now. The one called Robin he stayed with her, they tell. She was all too grievious to listen to his promises.’

‘Ah! She should ha’ made her bargain beforehand. I allus told my woman so!’ Hobden cried.

‘No. She loaned her sons for a pure love-loan, bein’ as she sensed the Trouble on the Marshes, an’ was simple good-willing to ease it.’ Tom laughed softly. ‘She done that. Yes, she done that! From Hithe to Bulverhithe, fretty man an’ petty maid, ailin’ woman an’ wailin’ child, they took the advantage of the change in the thin airs just about as soon as the Pharisees flitted. Folks come out fresh an’ shining all over the Marsh like snails after wet. An’ that while the Widow Whitgift sat grievin’ on the Wall. She might have belieft us—she might have trusted her sons would be sent back! She fussed, no bounds, when their boat come in after three days.’

‘And, of course, the sons were both quite cured?’ said Una.

‘No-o. That would have been out o’ Nature. She got ’em back as she sent ’em. The blind man he hadn’t seen naught of anything, an’ the dumb man nature-ally, he couldn’t say aught of what he’d seen. I reckon that was why the Pharisees pitched on ’em for the ferrying job.’

‘But what did you—what did Robin promise the Widow?’ said Dan.

‘What did he promise, now?’ Tom pretended to think. ‘Wasn’t your woman a Whitgift, Ralph? Didn’t she ever say?’

‘She told me a passel o’ no-sense stuff when he was born.’ Hobden pointed at his son. ‘There was always to be one of ’em that could see further into a millstone than most.’

‘Me! That’s me!’ said the Bee Boy so suddenly that they all laughed.

‘I’ve got it now!’ cried Tom, slapping his knee. ‘So long as Whitgift blood lasted, Robin promised there would allers be one o’ her stock that—that no Trouble ’ud lie on, no Maid ’ud sigh on, no Night could frighten, no Fright could harm, no Harm could make sin, an’ no Woman could make a fool of.’

‘Well, ain’t that just me?’ said the Bee Boy, where he sat in the silver square of the great September moon that was staring into the oasthouse door.

‘They was the exact words she told me when we first found he wasn’t like others. But it beats me how you known ’em,’ said Hobden.

‘Aha! There’s more under my hat besides hair!’ Tom laughed and stretched himself. ‘When I’ve seen these two young folk home, we’ll make a night of old days, Ralph, with passin’ old tales—eh? An’ where might you live?’ he said, gravely, to Dan. ‘An’ do you think your Pa ’ud give me a drink for takin’ you there, Missy?’

They giggled so at this that they had to run out. Tom picked them both up, set one on each broad shoulder, and tramped across the ferny pasture where the cows puffed milky puffs at them in the moonlight.

‘Oh, Puck! Puck! I guessed you right from when you talked about the salt. How could you ever do it?’ Una cried, swinging along delighted.

‘Do what?’ he said, and climbed the stile by the pollard oak.

‘Pretend to be Tom Shoesmith,’ said Dan, and they ducked to avoid the two little ashes that grow by the bridge over the brook. Tom was almost running.

‘Yes. That’s my name, Mus’ Dan,’ he said, hurrying over the silent shining lawn, where a rabbit sat by the big white-thorn near the croquet ground. ‘Here you be.’ He strode into the old kitchen yard, and slid them down as Ellen came to ask questions.

‘I’m helping in Mus’ Spray’s oast-house,’ he said to her. ‘No, I’m no foreigner. I knowed this country ’fore your Mother was born; an’—yes, it’s dry work oasting, Miss. Thank you.’

Ellen went to get a jug, and the children went in—magicked once more by Oak, Ash, and Thorn !

]]> 9330 For One Night Only https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/for-one-night-only.htm Wed, 28 Apr 2021 15:53:06 +0000 https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/?post_type=tale&p=29852 THE STORY OF THEATRE page 1 of 3 AND Mrs. Skittleworth told the tale at a place called the Arts and Crafts, which, when you think of it, was unnecessary; Mrs. ... Read more]]> ••THE STORY OF THEATRE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who came?”

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

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

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

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

“You won’t believe what I tell you.”

“You are speaking.”

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

“Never without a motive.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then you could hear?”

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

“And what happened?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And the others?”

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

“Was there a ghost, then?”

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

“And the others?”

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

“Poor Mrs. Dormil!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Poor Mrs. Dormil!”

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

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

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

]]> 29852 Haunted Subalterns https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/haunted.htm Sat, 01 May 2021 10:24:12 +0000 https://ks-demo3.web/tale/haunted-subalterns/ [a short tale] SO long as the ‘Inextinguishables’ confined themselves to running picnics, gymkhanas, flirtations and innocences of that kind, no one said anything. But when they ran ghosts, people put up their eyebrows. ‘Man ... Read more]]> [a short tale]

SO long as the ‘Inextinguishables’ confined themselves to running picnics, gymkhanas, flirtations and innocences of that kind, no one said anything. But when they ran ghosts, people put up their eyebrows. ‘Man can’t feel comfy with a regiment that entertains ghosts on its establishment. It is against General Orders. The ‘Inextinguishables’ said that the ghosts were private and not Regimental property. They referred you to Tesser for particulars; and Tesser told you to go to the hottest cantonment of all. He said that it was bad enough to have men making hay of his bedding and breaking his banjo-strings when he was out, without being chaffed afterwards; and he would thank you to keep your remarks on ghosts to yourself. This was before the ‘Inextinguishables’ had sworn by their several lady-loves that they were innocent of any intrusion into Tesser’s quarters. Then Horrocks mentioned casually at Mess, that a couple of white figures had been bounding about his room the night before, and he didn’t approve of it. The ‘Inextinguishables’ denied, energetically, that they had had any hand in the manifestations, and advised Horrocks to consult Tesser.

I don’t suppose that a Subaltern believes in anything except his chances of a Company; but Horrocks and Tesser were exceptions. They came to believe in their ghosts. They had reason.

Horrocks used to find himself, at about three o’clock in the morning, staring wide-awake, watching two white Things hopping about his room and jumping up to the ceiling. Horrocks was of a placid turn of mind. After a week or so spent in watching his servants, and lying in wait for strangers, and trying to keep awake all night, he came to the conclusion that he was haunted, and that, consequently, he need not bother. He wasn’t going to encourage these ghosts by being frightened of them. Therefore, when he woke — as usual with a start — and saw these Things jumping like kangaroos, he only murmured: ‘Go on! Don’t mind me!’ and went to sleep again.

Tesser said: ‘It’s all very well for you to make fun of your show. You can see your ghosts. Now I can’t see mine, and I don’t half like it.’

Tesser used to come into his room of nights, and find the whole of his bedding neatly stripped, as if it had been done with one sweep of the hand, from the top right-hand corner of the charpoy to the bottom left-hand corner. Also his lamp used to lie weltering on the floor, and generally his pet screw-head, inlaid, nickel-plated banjo was lying on the charpoy, with all its strings broken. Tesser took away the strings, on the occasion of the third manifestation, and the next night a man complimented him on his playing the best music ever got out of a banjo, for half an hour.

‘Which half hour?’ said Tesser.

‘Between nine and ten,’ said the man. Tesser had gone out to dinner at 7:30, and had returned at midnight.

He talked to his bearer and threatened him with unspeakable things. The bearer was gray with fear: ‘I’m a poor man,’ said he. ‘If the Sahib is haunted by a Devil, what can I do?’

‘Who says I’m haunted by a Devil?’ howled Tesser, for he was angry.

‘I have seen It,’ said the bearer, ‘at night, walking round and round your bed; and that is why everything is ulta-pulta in your room. I am a poor man, but I never go into your room alone. The bhisti comes with me.’

Tesser was thoroughly savage at this, and he spoke to Horrocks, and the two laid traps to catch that Devil, and threatened their servants with dog-whips if any more’shaitan-ke-hanky-panky’ took place. But the servants were soaked with fear, and it was no use adding to their tortures. When Tesser went out at night, four of his men, as a rule, slept in the verandah of his quarters, until the banjo without the strings struck up, and then they fled.

One day, Tesser had to put in a month at a Fort with a detachment of ‘Inextinguishables.’ The Fort might have been Govindghar, Jumrood, or Phillour; but it wasn’t. He left Cantonments rejoicing, for his Devil was preying on his mind; and with him went another Subaltern, a junior. But the Devil came too. After Tesser had been in the Fort about ten days he went out to dinner. When he came back he found his Subaltern doing sentry on a banquette across the Fort Ditch, as far removed as might be from the Officers’ Quarters.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Tesser.

The Subaltern said, ‘Listen!’ and the two, standing under the stars, heard from the Officers’ Quarters, high up in the wall of the Fort, the ‘strumty tumty tumty’ of the banjo; which seemed to have an oratorio on hand.

‘That performance,’ said the Subaltern, ‘has been going on for three mortal hours. I never wished to desert before, but I do now. I say, Tesser, old man, you are the best of good fellows, I’m sure, but… I say… look here, now, you are quite unfit to live with. ‘Tisn’t in my Commission, you know, that I’m to serve under a… a… man with Devils.’

‘Isn’t it?’ said Tesser. ‘If you make an ass of yourself I’ll put you under arrest… and in my room!’

‘You can put me where you please, but I’m not going to assist at these infernal concerts. ‘Tisn’t right. ‘Tisn’t natural. Look here, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but — try to think now – haven’t you done something — committed some murder that has slipped your memory — or forged something…?’

‘Well! For an all-round, double-shotted, half-baked fool you are the…’

‘I dare say I am,’ said the Subaltern. ‘But you don’t expect me to keep my wits with that row going on, do you?’

The banjo was rattling away as if it had twenty strings. Tesser sent up a stone, and a shower of broken window-pane fell into the Fort Ditch; but the banjo kept on. Tesser hauled the other Subaltern up to the quarters, and found his room in frightful confusion — lamp upset, bedding all over the floor, chairs overturned, and table tilted sideways. He took stock of the wreck and said despairing: ‘Oh, this is lovely!’

The Subaltern was peeping in at the door.

‘I’m glad you think so,’ he said. ”Tisn’t lovely enough for me. I locked up your room directly after you had gone out. See here, I think you had better apply for Horrocks to come out in my place. He’s troubled with your complaint, and this business will make me a jabbering idiot if it goes on.’

Tesser went to bed amid the wreckage, very angry, and next morning he rode into Cantonments and asked Horrocks to arrange to relieve ‘that fool with me now.’

‘You’ve got ’em again, have you?’ said Horrocks. ‘So’ve I. Three white figures this time. We’ll worry through the entertainment together.’

So Horrocks and Tesser settled down in the Fort together, and the ‘Inextinguishables’ said pleasant things about ‘seven other Devils.’ Tesser didn’t see where the joke came in. His room was thrown upside-down three nights out of seven. Horrocks was not troubled in any way, so his ghosts must have been purely local ones. Tesser, on the other hand, was personally haunted; for his Devil had moved with him from Cantonments to the Fort. Those two boys spent three parts of their time trying to find out who was responsible for the riot in Tesser’s rooms. At the end of a fortnight they tried to find out what was responsible; and seven days later they gave it up as a bad job. Whatever It was, It refused to be caught; even when Tesser went out of the Fort ostentatiously, and Horrocks lay under Tesser’s charpoy with a revolver. The servants were afraid — more afraid than ever — and all the evidence showed that they had been playing no tricks. As Tesser said to Horrocks: ‘A haunted Subaltern is a joke, but s’pose this keeps on. Just think what a haunted Colonel would be! And look here — s’pose I marry! D’you s’pose a girl would live a week with me and this Devil?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Horrocks. ‘I haven’t married often; but I knew a woman once who lived with her husband when he had D.T. He’s dead now, and I dare say she would marry you if you asked her. She isn’t exactly a girl though, but she has a large experience of the other devils — the blue variety. She’s a Government pensioner now, and you might write, y’know. Personally, if I hadn’t suffered from ghosts of my own, I should rather avoid you.’

‘That’s just the point,’ said Tesser. ‘This Devil thing will end in getting me budnamed, and you know I’ve lived on lemon-squashes and gone to bed at ten for weeks past.’

”Tisn’t that sort of Devil,’ said Horrocks. ‘It’s either a first-class fraud for which some one ought to be killed, or else you’ve offended one of these Indian Devils. It stands to reason that such a beastly country should be full of fiends of all sorts.’

‘But why should the creature fix on me,’ said Tesser, and why won’t he show himself and have it out like a — like a Devil?’

They were talking outside the Mess after dark, and, even as they spoke, they heard the banjo begin to play in Tesser’s room, about twenty yards off.

Horrocks ran to his own quarters for a shot-gun and a revolver, and Tesser and he crept up quietly, the banjo still playing, to Tesser’s door.

‘Now we’ve got It!’ said Horrocks, as he threw the door open and let fly with the twelve-bore; Tesser squibbing off all six barrels into the dark, as hard as he could pull trigger.

The furniture was ruined, and the whole Fort was awake; but that was all. No one had been killed, and the banjo was lying on the dishevelled bed-clothes as usual.

Then Tesser sat down in the verandah, and used language that would have qualified him for the companionship of unlimited Devils. Horrocks said things too; but Tesser said the worst.

When the month in the Fort came to an end, both Horrocks and Tesser were glad. They held a final council of war, but came to no conclusion.

”Seems to me, your best plan would be to make your Devil stretch himself. Go down to Bombay with the ‘time-expired men,’ said Horrocks. ‘If he really is a Devil, he’ll come in the train with you.’

”Tisn’t good enough,’ said Tesser. ‘Bombay’s no fit place to live in at this time of the year. But I’ll put in for Depot duty at the Hills.’ And he did.

Now here the tale rests. The Devil stayed below, and Tesser went up and was free. If I had invented this story, I should have put in a satisfactory ending — explained the manifestations as somebody’s practical joke. My business being to keep to facts, I can only say what I have said. The Devil may have been a hoax. If so, it was one of the best ever arranged. If it was not a hoax… but you must settle that for yourselves.

RUDYARD KIPLING.

]]> 9399 His Brother’s Keeper https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/his-brothers-keeper.htm Thu, 19 Nov 2020 15:36:08 +0000 https://ks-demo3.web/tale/his-brothers-keeper/ page 1 of 3 “WHIST?” “Can’t make up a four?” “Poker, then?” “Never again with you, Robin. ’Tisn’t good enough, old man.” “Seeking what he may devour,” murmured a third voice from behind a ... Read more]]>

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“WHIST?”

“Can’t make up a four?”

“Poker, then?”

“Never again with you, Robin. ’Tisn’t good enough, old man.”

“Seeking what he may devour,” murmured a third voice from behind a newspaper. “Stop the punkah, and make him go away.”

“Don’t talk of it on a night like this. It’s enough to give a man fits. You’ve no enterprise. Here I’ve taken the trouble to come over after dinner——”

“On the off-chance of skinning some one. I don’t believe you ever crossed a horse for pleasure.”

“That’s true, I never did—and there are only two Johnnies in the Club.”

“They’ve all gone off to the Gaff.”

“Wah! Wah! They must be pretty hard up for amusement. Help me to a split.”

“Split in this weather! Hi, bearer, do burra — burra whiskey-peg lao, and just put all the barf into them that you can find.”

The newspaper came down with a rustle, as the reader said:

“How the deuce d’you expect a man to improve his mind when you two are bukking about drinks? Qui hai! Mera wasti bhi.”

“Oh! you’re alive, are you? I thought pegs would fetch you out of that. Game for a little poker?”

“Poker—poker—red-hot poker! Saveloy, you’re too generous. Can’t you let a man die in peace?”

“Who’s going to die?”

“I am, please the pigs, if it gets much hotter and that bearer doesn’t bring the peg quickly.”

“All right. Die away, mon ami. Only don’t do it in the Club, that’s all. Can’t have it littered up with dead members. Houligan would object.”

“By Jove! I think I can imagine old Houligan doing it. ‘Member dead in the ante-room? Good Gud! Bless my soul! Impossible to run a Club this way. Call the Babu and see if his last month’s bill is paid. Not paid! Good Gud! Bless my soul! Impossible to run a Club this way. Babu, attach that body till the bill is paid.’ Revel, you might just hurry up your dying once in a way to give us the pleasure of seeing Houligan perform.”

“I’ll die legitimately,” said Revel. “I’m not going to create a fresh scandal in the station. I’ll wait for heat-apoplexy, or whatever is going, to come and fetch me.”

“This is pukka hot-weather talk,” said Saveloy. “I come over for a little honest poker, and find two moderately sensible men, Revel and Dallston, talking tombs. I’m sorry I’ve thrown away my valuable evening.”

“D’you expect us to talk about buttercups and daisies, then?” said Dallston.

“No, but there’s some sort of medium between those and Sudden Death.”

“There isn’t. I haven’t seen a daisy for seven years, and now I want to die,” said Revel, plunging luxuriously into his peg.

“I knew a Johnnie on the Frontier once who did,” began Dallston meditatively.

“Half a minute. Bearer, cherut lao! Tobacco soothes the nerves when a man is expecting to hear a whacker. We know what your Frontier stories are, Martha.”

Dallston had once, in a misguided moment, taken the part of Martha in the burlesque of Faust, and the nickname stuck.

“’Tisn’t a whacker, it’s a fact. He told me so himself.”

“They always do, Martha. I’ve noticed that before. But what did he tell you?”

“He told me that he had died.”

“Was that all? Explain him.”

“It was this way. The man went down with a bad go of fever and was off his head. About the second day it struck him in the middle of the night.”

“Steady the Buffs! Martha, you aren’t an Irishman yet.”

“Never mind. It’s too hot to put it correctly. In the middle of the night he woke up quite calm, and it struck him that it would be a good thing to die—just as it might ha’ struck him that it would be a good thing to put ice on his head. He lay on his bed and thought it over, and the more he thought about it, the better sort of bundobust it seemed to be. He was quite calm, you know, and he said that he could have sworn that he had no fever on him.”

“Well, what happened?”

“Oh, he got up and loaded his revolver—he remembers all this—and let fly, with the muzzle to his temple. The thing didn’t go off, so he turned it up and found he’d forgot to load one chamber.”

“Better stop the tale there. We can guess what’s coming.”

“Hang it! It’s a true yam. Well, he jammed the thing to his head again, and it missed fire, and he said that he felt ready to cry with rage, he was so disgusted. So he took it by the muzzle and hit himself on the head with it.”

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“Good man! Didn’t it go off then?”

“No, but the blow knocked him silly, and he thought he was dead. He was awfully pleased, for he had been fiddling over the show for nearly half an hour. He dropped down and died. When he got his wits again, he was shaking with the fever worse than ever, but he had sense enough to go and knock up the doctor and give himself into his charge as a lunatic. Then he went clean off his head till the fever wore out.”

“That’s a good story,” said Revel critically. “I didn’t think you had it in you at this season of the year.”

“I can believe it,” said the man they called Saveloy. “Fever makes one do all sorts of queer things. I suppose your friend was mad with it when he discovered it would be so healthy to die.”

“S’pose so. The fever must have been so bad that he felt all right—same way that a man who is nearly mad with drink gets to look sober. Well, anyhow, there was a man who died.”

“Did he tell you what it felt like?”

“He said that he was awfully happy until his fever came back and shook him up. Then he was sick with fear. I don’t wonder. He’d had rather a narrow escape.”

“That’s nothing,” said Saveloy. “I know a man who lived.”

“So do I,” said Revel. “Lots of ’em, confound ’em.”

“Now, this takes Martha’s story, and it’s quite true.”

“They always are,” said Martha. “I’ve noticed that before.”

“Never mind, I’ll forgive you. But this happened to me. Since you are talking tombs, I’ll assist at the seance. It was in ’82 or ’88, I have forgotten which. Anyhow, it was when I was on the Utamamula Canal Headworks, and I was chumming with a man called Stovey. You’ve never met him because he belongs to the Bombay side, and if he isn’t really dead by this he ought to be somewhere there now. He was a pukka sweep, and I hated him. We divided the Canal bimgalow between us, and we kept strictly to our own side of the buildings.”

“Hold on! I call. What was Stovey to look at?” said Revel.

“Living picture of the King of Spades—a blackish, greasy sort of ruffian who hadn’t any pretence of manners or form. He used to dine in the kit he had been messing about the Canal in all day, and I don’t believe he ever washed. He had the embankments to look after, and I was in charge of the headworks, but he was always contriving to fall foul of me if he possibly could.”

“I know that sort of man. Mullane of Ghoridasah’s built that way.”

“Don’t know Mullane, but Stovey was a sweep. Canal work isn’t exactly cheering, and it doesn’t take you into much society. We were like a couple of rats in a burrow, grubbing and scooping all day and turning in at night into the barn of a bungalow. Well, this man Stovey didn’t get fever. He was so coated with dirt that I don’t believe the fever could have got at him. He just began to go mad.”

“Cheerful! What were the symptoms?”

“Well, his naturally vile temper grew infamous. It was really unsafe to speak to him, and he always seemed anxious to murder a coolie or two. With me, of course, he restrained himself a little, but he sulked like a bear for days and days together. As he was the only European society within sixty miles, you can imagine how nice it was for me. He’d sit at table and sulk and stare at the opposite wall by the hour—instead of doing his work. When I pointed out that the Government didn’t send us into these cheerful places to twiddle our thimibs, he glared like a beast. Oh, he was a thorough hog! He had a lot of other endearing tricks, but the worst was when he began to pray.”

“Began to—how much?”

“Pray. He’d got hold of an old copy of the War Cry and used to read it at meals; and I suppose that that, on the top of tough goat, disordered his intellect. One night I heard him in his room groaning and talking at a fearful rate. Next morning I asked him if he’d been taken worse. ‘I’ve been engaged in prayer,’ he said, looking as black as thunder. ‘A man’s spiritual concerns are his own property.’ One night—he’d kept up these spiritual exercises for about ten days, growing queerer and queerer every day—he said ‘ Good-night’ after dinner, and got up and shook hands with me.”

“Bad sign, that,” said Revel, sucking industriously at his cheroot.

“At first I couldn’t make out what the man wanted. No fellow shakes hands with a fellow he’s living with—least of all such a beast as Stovey. However, I was civil, but the minute after he’d left the room it struck me what he was going to do. If he hadn’t shaken hands I’d have taken no notice, I suppose. This unusual effusion put me on my guard.”

“Curious thing! You can nearly always tell when a Johnnie means pegging out. He gives himself away by some softening. It’s human nature. What did you do?”

“Called him back, and asked him what the this and that he meant by interfering with my coolies in the day. He was generally hampering my men, but I had never taken any notice of his vagaries till then. In another minute we were arguing away, hammer and tongs. If it had been any other man I’d ’a’ simply thrown the lamp at his head. He was calling me all the mean names under the sum, accusing me of misusing my authority and goodness only knows what all. When he had talked himself down one stretch, I had only to say a few words to start him off again, as fresh as a daisy. On my word, this jabbering went on for nearly three hours.”

“Why didn’t you get coolies and have him tied up, if you thought he was mad?” asked Revel.

“Not a safe business, believe me. Wrongful restraint on your own responsibility of a man nearly your own standing looks ugly. Well, Stovey went on bullying me and complaining about everything I’d ever said or done since I came on the Canal, till—he went fast asleep.”

“Wha-at?”

page 3

“Went off dead asleep, just as if he’d been drugged. I thought the brute had had a fit at first, but there he was, with his head hanging a little on one side and his mouth open. I knocked up his bearer and told him to take the man to bed. We carried him off and shoved him on his charpoy. He was still asleep, and I didn’t think it worth while to undress him. The fit, whatever it was, had worked itself out, and he was limp and used up. But as I was going to leave the room, and went to turn the lamp down, I looked in the glass and saw that he was watching me between his eyelids. When I spun round he seemed asleep. ‘That’s your game, is it?’ I thought, and I stood over him long enough to see that he was shamming. Then I cast an eye roumd the room and saw his Martini in the comer. We were all bullumteers on the Canal works. I couldn’t find the cartridges, so to make all serene I knocked the breech-pin out with the cleaning-rod and went to my own room. I didn’t go to sleep for some time. About one o’clock—our rooms were only divided by a door of sorts, and my bed was close to it—I heard my friend open a chest of drawers. Then he went for the Martini. Of course, the breechblock came out with a rattle. Then he went back to bed again, and I nearly laughed.

“Next morning he was doing the genial, hail-fellow-well-met trick. Said he was afraid he’d lost his temper overnight, and apologised for it. About half way through breakfast—he was talking thickly about everything and anything—he said he’d come to the conclusion that a beard was a beastly nuisance and made one stuffy. He was going to shave his. Would I lend him my razors? ‘Oh, you’re a crafty beast, you are,’ I said to myself. I told him that I was of the other opinion, and finding my razors nearly worn out had chucked them into the Canal only the night before. He gave me one look under his eyebrows and went on with his breakfast. I was in a stew lest the man should cut his throat with one of the breakfast knives, so I kept one eye on him most of the time.

“Before I left the bungalow I caught old Jeewun Singh, one of the mistries on the gates, and gave him strict orders that he was to keep in sight of the Sahib wherever he went and whatever he did; and if he did or tried to do anything foolish, such as jumping down the well, Jeewim Singh was to stop him. The old man tumbled at once, and I was easier in my mind when I saw how he was shadowing Stovey up and down the works. Then I sat down and wrote a letter to old Baggs, the Civil Surgeon at Chemanghath, about sixty miles off, telling him how we stood. The runner left about three o’clock. Jeewun Singh turned up at the end of the day and gave a full, true and particular account of Stovey’s doings. D’you know what the brute had done?”

“Spare us the agony. Kill him straight off, Saveloy!”

“He’d stopped the runner, opened the bag, read my letter and torn it up! There were only two letters in the bag, both of which I’d written. I was pretty average angry, but I lay low. At dinner he said he’d got a touch of dysentery and wanted some chlorodyne. For a man anxious to depart this life he was about as badly equipped as you could wish. Hadn’t even a medicine-chest to play with. He was no more suffering from dysentery than I, but I said I’d give him the chlorodyne, and so I did—fifteen drops, mixed in a wine-glass, and when he asked for the bottle I said that I hadn’t any more.

“That night he began praying again, and I just lay in bed and shuddered. He was invoking the most blasphemous curses on my head—all in a whisper, for fear of waking me up—for frustrating what he called his ‘great and holy purpose.’ You never heard anything like it. But as long as he was praying I knew he was alive, and he ran his praying half through the night.

“Well, for the next ten days he was apparently quite rational; but I watched him and told Jeewun Singh to watch him like a cat. I suppose he wanted to throw me off my guard, but I wasn’t to be thrown. I grew thin watching him. Baggs wrote in to say he had gone on tour and couldn’t be found anywhere in paiticular for another six weeks. It was a ghastly time.

“One day& old Jeewun Singh turned up with a bit of paper that Storey had given to one of the lohars as a naksha. I thought it was mean work spying into another man’s very plans, but when I saw what was on the paper I gave old Jeewun Singh a rupee. It was a be-autiful little breech-pin. The one-idead idiot had gone back to Martini! I never dreamt of such persistence. ‘Tell me when the lohar gives it to the Sahib,’ I said, and I felt more comfy for a few days. Even if Jeewun Singh hadn’t split I would have known when the new breechpin was made. The brute came in to dinner with a dashed confident, triumphant air, as if he’d done me in the eye at last; and all through dinner he was fiddling in his waistcoat pocket. He went to bed early. I went, too, and I put my head against the door and listened like a woman. I must have been shivering in my pyjamas for about two hours before my friend went for the dismantled Martin! He could not get the breech-pin to fit at first. He rummaged about, and then I heard a file go. That seemed to make too much noise to suit his fancy, so he opened the door and went out into the compound, and I heard him, about fifty yards off, filing in the dark at that breech-pin as if he had been possessed. Well, he was you know. Then he came back to the light, cursing me for keeping him out of his rest and the peace of Abraham’s bosom. As soon as I heard him taking up the Martini, I ran round to his door and tried to enter gaily, as the stage directions say. ‘Lend me your gun, old man, if you’re awake,’ I said. ‘There’s a howling big brute of a pariah in my room, and I want to get a shot at it.’ I pretended not to notice that he was standing over the gun, but just pranced up and caught hold of it. He turned round with a jump and said: ‘I’m sick of this. I’ll see that dog, and if it’s another of your lies I’ll ——’ You know I’m not a moral man.”

“Hear! hearl” drowsily from Martha.

“But I simply daren’t repeat what he said. ‘All right!’ I said, still hanging on to the gun.

‘Come along and we’ll bowl him over.’ He followed me into my room with a face like a fiend in torment And, as truly as I’m yarning here, there was a huge brindled beast of a pariah sitting on my bed!”

“Tall, sir, tall. But go on. The audience is now awake.”

“Hang it! Could I have invented that pariah? Stovey dropped of the gun and flopped down in a comer and yowled. I went ‘ee ki ri ki re!’ like a woman in hysterics, pitched the gun forward and loosed off through a window.”

“And the pariah?”

“He quitted for the time being. Stovey was in an awful state. He swore the animal hadn’t been there when I called him. That was true enough. I firmly believe Providence put it there to save me from being killed by the infuriated Stovey.”

“You’ve too lively a belief in Providence altogether. What happened?”

“Stovey tried to recover himself and pass it all over, but he let me keep the gun and went to bed. About two days afterwards old Baggs turned up on tour, and I told him Stovey wanted watching—more than I could give him. I don’t know whether Baggs or the pi did it, but he didn’t throw any more suicidal splints. I was transferred a little while afterwards.”

“Ever meet the man again?”

“Yes; once at Sheik Katan dâk bungalow— trailing the big brindle pi after him.”

“Oh, it was real, then. I thought it was arranged for the occasion.”

“Not a bit. It was a pukka pi. Stovey seemed to remember me in the same way that a horse seems to remember. I fancy his brain was a little cloudy. We tiffined together— after the pi had been fed, if you please—and Stovey said to me: ‘See that dog? He saved my life once. Oh, by the way, I believe you were there, too, weren’t you?’ I shouldn’t care to work with Stovey again.”

.     .     .     .     .

There was a holy pause in the smoking-room of the Toopare Club.

“What I like about Saveloy’s play,” said Martha, looking at the ceiling, “is the beautifully artistic way in which he follows up a flush with a full. Go to bed, old man!’

]]> 9272 In the House of Suddhoo https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/in-the-house-of-suddhoo.htm Mon, 03 May 2021 12:34:27 +0000 https://ks-demo3.web/tale/in-the-house-of-suddhoo/ A stone’s throw out on either hand From that well-ordered road we tread, And all the world is wild and strange: Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite Shall bear us company to-night, For we ... Read more]]> 
A stone’s throw out on either hand
From that well-ordered road we tread,
And all the world is wild and strange:
Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
Shall bear us company to-night,
For we have reached the Oldest Land
Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.
 (From the Dusk to the Dawn)

[a short tale]

THE HOUSE of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storied, with four carved windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognise it by five red hand-prints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash between the upper windows. Bhagwan Dass the grocer and a man who says he gets his living by seal-cutting live in the lower story with a troop of wives, servants, friends, and retainers. The two upper rooms used to be occupied by Janoo and Azizun, and a little black-and-tan terrier that was stolen from an Englishman’s house and given to Janoo by a soldier. Today, only Janoo lives in the upper rooms. Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the street. He used to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son who sells curiosities near the Edwardes’ Gate, and then he slept under a real mud roof. Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my recommendation, the post of head-messenger to a big firm in the Station. Suddhoo says that God will make me a Lieutenant-Governor one of these days. I daresay his prophecy will come true. He is very, very old, with white hair and no teeth worth showing, and he has outlived his wits—outlived nearly everything except his fondness for his son at Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are Kashmiris, Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancient and more or less honourable profession; but Azizun has since married a medical student from the North-West and has settled down to a most respectable life somewhere near Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an extortioner and an adulterator. He is very rich. The man who is supposed to get his living by seal-cutting pretends to be very poor. This lets you know as much as is necessary of the four principal tenants in the house of Suddhoo. Then there is Me of course; but I am only the chorus that comes in at the end to explain things. So I do not count.

Suddhoo was not clever. The man who pretended to cut seals was the cleverest of them all—Bhagwan Dass only knew how to lie—except Janoo. She was also beautiful, but that was her own affair.

Suddhoo’s son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, and old Suddhoo was troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo’s anxiety and made capital out of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend in Peshawar to telegraph daily accounts of the son’s health. And here the story begins.

Suddhoo’s cousin’s son told me, one evening, that Suddhoo wanted to see me; that he was too old and feeble to come personally, and that I should be conferring an everlasting honour on the House of Suddhoo if I went to him. I went; but I think, seeing how well off Suddhoo was then, that he might have sent something better than an ekka, which jolted fearfully, to haul out a future Lieutenant-Governor to the City on a muggy April evening. The ekka did not run quickly. It was full dark when we pulled up opposite the door of Ranjit Singh’s Tomb near the main gate of the Fort. Here was Suddhoo, and he said that by reason of my condescension, it was absolutely certain that I should become a Lieutenant-Governor while my hair was yet black. Then we talked about the weather and the state of my health, and the wheat crops, for fifteen minutes, in the Huzuri Bagh, under the stars.

Suddhoo came to the point at last. He said that Janoo had told him that there was an order of the Sirkar against magic, because it was feared that magic might one day kill the Empress of India. I didn’t know anything about the state of the law; but I fancied that something interesting was going to happen. I said that so far from magic being discouraged by the Government it was highly commended. The greatest officials of the State practised it themselves. (If the Financial Statement isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.) Then, to encourage him further, I said that, if there was any jadoo afoot, I had not the least objection to giving it my countenance and sanction, and to seeing that it was clean jadoo—white magic, as distinguished from the unclean jadoo which kills folk. It took a long time before Suddhoo admitted that this was just what he had asked me to come for. Then he told me, in jerks and quavers, that the man who said he cut seals was a sorcerer of the cleanest kind; that every day he gave Suddhoo news of the sick son in Peshawar more quickly than the lightning could fly, and that this news was always corroborated by the letters. Further, that he had told Suddhoo how a great danger was threatening his son, which could be removed by clean jadoo; and, of course, heavy payment. I began to see exactly how the land lay, and told Suddhoo that I also understood a little jadoo in the Western line, and would go to his house to see that everything was done decently and in order. We set off together; and on the way Suddhoo told me that he had paid the seal-cutter between one hundred and two hundred rupees already; and the jadoo of that night would cost two hundred more. Which was cheap, he said, considering the greatness of his son’s danger; but I do not think he meant it.

The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived. I could hear awful noises from behind the seal-cutter’s shop-front, as if some one were groaning his soul out. Suddhoo shook all over, and while we groped our way upstairs told me that the jadoo had begun. Janoo and Azizun met us at the stair-head, and told us that the jadoo-work was coming off in their rooms, because there was more space there. Janoo is a lady of a free-thinking turn of mind. She whispered that the jadoo was an invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that the seal-cutter would go to a hot place when he died. Suddhoo was nearly crying with fear and old age. He kept walking up and down the room in the half-light, repeating his son’s name over and over again, and asking Azizun if the seal-cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of his own landlord. Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the carved bow-windows. The boards were up, and the rooms were only lit by one tiny oillamp. There was no chance of my being seen if I stayed still.

Presently, the groans below ceased, and we heard steps on the staircase. That was the seal-cutter. He stopped outside the door as the terrier barked and Azizun fumbled at the chain, and he told Suddhoo to blow out the lamp. This left the place in jet darkness, except for the red glow from the two huqas that belonged to Janoo and Azizun. The seal-cutter came in, and I heard Suddhoo throw himself down on the floor and groan. Azizun caught her breath, and Janoo backed on to one of the beds with a shudder. There was a clink of something metallic, and then shot up a pale bluegreen flame near the ground. The light was just enough to show Azizun, pressed against one corner of the room with the terrier between her knees; Janoo, with her hands clasped, leaning forward as she sat on the bed; Suddhoo, face down, quivering, and the seal-cutter.

I hope I may never see another man like that seal-cutter. He was stripped to the waist, with a wreath of white jasmine as thick as my wrist round his forehead, a salmon coloured loin-cloth round his middle, and a steel bangle on each ankle. This was not awe-inspiring. It was the face of the man that turned me cold. It was blue-gray in the first place. In the second, the eyes were rolled back till you could only see the whites of them; and, in the third, the face was the face of a demon—a ghoul—anything you please except of the sleek, oily old ruffian who sat in the daytime over his turning-lathe downstairs. He was lying on his stomach with his arms turned and crossed behind him, as if he had been thrown down pinioned. His head and neck were the only parts of him off the floor. They were nearly at right angles to the body, like the head of a cobra at spring. It was ghastly. In the centre of the room, on the bare earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass basin, with a pale blue-green light floating in the centre like a night-light. Round that basin the man on the floor wriggled himself three times. How he did it I do not know. I could see the muscles ripple along his spine and fall smooth again; but I could not see any other motion. The head seemed the only thing alive about him, except that slow curl and uncurl of the labouring backmuscles. Janoo from the bed was breathing seventy to the minute; Azizun held her hands before her eyes; and old Suddhoo, fingering at the dirt that had got into his white beard, was crying to himself. The horror of it was that the creeping, crawly thing made no sound—only crawled! And, remember, this lasted for ten minutes, while the terrier whined, and Azizun shuddered, and Janoo gasped, and Suddhoo cried.

I felt the hair lift at the back of my head, and my heart thump like a thermantidote paddle. Luckily, the seal-cutter betrayed himself by his most impressive trick and made me calm again. After he had finished that unspeakable triple crawl, he stretched his head away from the floor as high as he could, and sent out a jet of fire from his nostrils. Now I knew how fire-spouting is done—I can do it myself—so I felt at ease. The business was a fraud. If he had only kept to that crawl without trying to raise the effect, goodness knows what I might not have thought. Both the girls shrieked at the jet of fire and the head dropped, chin-down on the floor, with a thud; the whole body lying there like a corpse with its arms trussed. There was a pause of five full minutes after this, and the blue-green flame died down. Janoo stooped to settle one of her anklets, while Azizun turned her face to the wall and took the terrier in her arms. Suddhoo put out an arm mechanically to Janoo’s huqa, and she slid it across the floor with her foot. Directly above the body and on the wall were a couple of flaming portraits, in stamped-paper frames, of the Queen and the Prince of Wales. They looked down on the performance, and to my thinking, seemed to heighten the grotesqueness of it all.

Just when the silence was getting unendurable, the body turned over and rolled away from the basin to the side of the room, where it lay stomach-up. There was a faint ‘plop’ from the basin—exactly like the noise a fish makes when it takes a fly—and the green light in the centre revived.

I looked at the basin, and saw, bobbing in the water, the dried, shrivelled, black head of a native baby—open eyes, open mouth, and shaved scalp. It was worse, being so very sudden, than the crawling exhibition. We had no time to say anything before it began to speak.

Read Poe’s account of the voice that came from the mesmerised dying man, and you will realise less than one-half of the horror of that head’s voice.

There was an interval of a second or two between each word, and a sort of ‘ring, ring, ring,’ in the note of the voice, like the timbre of a bell. It pealed slowly, as if talking to itself, for several minutes before I got rid of my cold sweat. Then the blessed solution struck me. I looked at the body lying near the doorway, and saw, just where the hollow of the throat joins on the shoulders, a muscle that had nothing to do with any man’s regular breathing twitching away steadily. The whole thing was a careful reproduction of the Egyptian teraphim that one reads about sometimes; and the voice was as clever and as appalling a piece of ventriloquism as one could wish to hear. All this time the head was ‘lip-lip-lapping’ against the side of the basin, and speaking. It told Suddhoo, on his face again whining, of his son’s illness and of the state of the illness up to the evening of that very night. I always shall respect the seal-cutter for keeping so faithfully to the time of the Peshawar telegrams. It went on to say that skilled doctors were night and day watching over the man’s life; and that he would eventually recover if the fee to the potent sorcerer, whose servant was the head in the basin, were doubled.

Here the mistake from the artistic point of view came in. To ask for twice your stipulated fee in a voice that Lazarus might have used when he rose from the dead, is absurd. Janoo, who is really a woman of masculine intellect, saw this as quickly as I did. I heard her say ‘Asli nahin! Fareib!’ scornfully under her breath; and just as she said so the light in the basin died out, the head stopped talking, and we heard the room door creak on its hinges. Then Janoo struck a match, lit the lamp, and we saw that head, basin, and seal-cutter were gone. Suddhoo was wringing his hands, and explaining to any one who cared to listen, that, if his chances of eternal salvation depended on it, he could not raise another two hundred rupees. Azizun was nearly in hysterics in the corner; while Janoo sat down composedly on one of the beds to discuss the probabilities of the whole thing being a bunao, or ‘makeup.’

I explained as much as I knew of the seal cutter’s way of jadoo; but her argument was much more simple—‘The magic that is always demanding gifts is no true magic,’ said she. ‘My mother told me that the only potent love-spells are those which are told you for love. This seal-cutter man is a liar and a devil. I dare not tell, do anything, or get anything done, because I am in debt to Bhagwan Dass the bunnia for two gold rings and a heavy anklet. I must get my food from his shop. The seal-cutter is the friend of Bhagwan Dass, and he would poison my food. A fool’s jadoo has been going on for ten days, and has cost Suddhoo many rupees each night. The seal-cutter used black hens and lemons and mantras before. He never showed us anything like this till to-night. Azizun is a fool, and will be a purdahnashin soon. Suddhoo has lost his strength and his wits. See now! I had hoped to get from Suddhoo many rupees while he lived, and many more after his death; and behold, he is spending everything on that offspring of a devil and a she-ass, the seal-cutter!’

Here I said, ‘But what induced Suddhoo to drag me into the business? Of course I can speak to the seal-cutter, and he shall refund. The whole thing is child’s talk—shame—and senseless.’

‘Suddhoo is an old child,’ said Janoo. ‘He has lived on the roofs these seventy years and is as senseless as a milch-goat. He brought you here to assure himself that he was not breaking any law of the Sirkar, whose salt he ate many years ago. He worships the dust off the feet of the seal-cutter, and that cow-devourer has forbidden him to go and see his son. What does Suddhoo know of your laws or the lightning-post? I have to watch his money going day by day to that lying beast below.’

Janoo stamped her foot on the floor and nearly cried with vexation; while Suddhoo was whimpering under a blanket in the corner, and Azizun was trying to guide the pipe-stem to his foolish old mouth.

.     .     .   .     .

Now, the case stands thus. Unthinkingly, I have laid myself open to the charge of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money under false pretences, which is forbidden by Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code. I am helpless in the matter for these reasons. I cannot inform the Police. What witnesses would support my statements? Janoo refuses flatly, and Azizun is a veiled woman somewhere near Bareilly—lost in this big India of ours. I dare not again take the law into my own hands, and speak to the seal-cutter; for certain am I that, not only would Suddhoo disbelieve me, but this step would end in the poisoning of Janoo, who is bound hand and foot by her debt to the bunnia. Suddhoo is an old dotard; and whenever we meet mumbles my idiotic joke that the Sirkar rather patronises the Black Art than otherwise. His son is well now; but Suddhoo is completely under the influence of the seal-cutter, by whose advice he regulates the affairs of his life. Janoo watches daily the money that she hoped to wheedle out of Suddhoo taken by the seal-cutter, and becomes daily more furious and sullen.

She will never tell, because she dare not; but, unless something happens to prevent her, I am afraid that the seal-cutter will die of cholera—the white arsenic kind—about the middle of May. And thus I shall be privy to a murder in the House of Suddhoo.

]]> 9186 In the Same Boat https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/tale/in-the-same-boat.htm Mon, 03 May 2021 16:34:43 +0000 https://ks-demo3.web/tale/in-the-same-boat/ page 1 of 9 ‘A THROBBING vein,’ said Dr. Gilbert soothingly, ‘is the mother of delusion.’ ‘Then how do you account for my knowing when the thing is due?’ Conroy’s voice rose almost to ... Read more]]>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘DEAR MR. CONROY—If your plan of a night’s trip on the 17th still holds good, and you have no particular destination in view, you could do me a kindness. A Miss Henschil, in whom I am interested, goes down to the West by the 10.8 from Waterloo (Number 3 platform) on that night. She is not exactly an invalid, but, like so many of us, a little shaken in her nerves. Her maid, of course, accompanies her, but if I knew you were in the same train it would be an additional source of strength. Will you please write and let me know whether the 10.8 from Waterloo, Number 3 platform, on the 17th, suits you, and I will meet you there? Don’t forget my caution, and keep up the tonic.—Yours sincerely,

L. RUTHERFORD GILBERT.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You? Are you so far gone as that?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She laid her large hand on his shoulder very firmly.

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

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

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

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

‘I’ve travelled too,’ she said.

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

Again she nodded.

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

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

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

‘I ought to. Go on.’

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

‘So that is your night?’ she said.

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

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

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

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

‘Just men? Do they speak?’

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

‘Yes. Like my two hoots. I know.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But the cold feeling is beginning.’

‘Lend it me, then.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Then we ought to say our prayers.’

‘What nonsense! Some one will see us.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She went out quietly, and Conroy reddened.

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

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

‘Nursey?’ Miss Henschil insinuated, and flushed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’ll come back, though.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She wheeled and cantered toward him.

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

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

They swept off together down the ride.

‘Your beast pulls,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Don’t remind me,’ he cried.

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

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

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

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

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

‘No. Was he there? I didn’t notice.’

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

‘Toots ought to envy me,’ said Conroy.

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

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

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

‘The piano? You play, then?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It is. Lucky Toots!’ said Conroy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.     .     .     .     .

page 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nurse Blaber purred audibly.

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

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

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